Speaker 1: A zone media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. On
Speaker 3: this show, we end up talking a lot about the
Speaker 3: various ways of politicians, media personalities, and lobbying groups are
Speaker 3: constantly trying to make life a living hell for trans people,
Speaker 3: between restricting medical care, access to public spaces, as well
Speaker 3: as banning and literally burning queer art. Basically a lot
Speaker 3: of depressing stuff that's designed to make us trans people
Speaker 3: go mad. We live in a transphobic society. All it
Speaker 3: takes is one bet day for an aspiring comedian to
Speaker 3: fall into a vat of estrogenizing chemicals and emerge a
Speaker 3: jokerfied harlequin. Filmmaker Vera Dru's new movie, A Multimedia Queer
Speaker 3: Fever Dream titled The People's Joker, takes this premise and
Speaker 3: depicts what it's like trying to make a living as
Speaker 3: an irony poisoned trans person in a Gotham city where
Speaker 3: comedy has been made illegal. This isn't just an unauthorized
Speaker 3: transgender parody of DC comics, though it is that as well.
Speaker 3: The film is a wholly unique collaboration of dozens of
Speaker 3: queer artists utilizing fair use to tell a trans coming
Speaker 3: of age story with the gothic, queer coded imagery of Batman.
Speaker 3: If you know anything about my tastes, you probably know
Speaker 3: that this is incredibly up my alley. So in a
Speaker 3: departure from this show's usual doom and gloom, I'm putting
Speaker 3: together a few episodes on what it means to be
Speaker 3: a queer artist in today's political climate. More episodes will
Speaker 3: come out next week, but I wanted to get this
Speaker 3: one out right now, in time for listeners to catch
Speaker 3: the theatrical run of The People's Joker, hopefully in a
Speaker 3: theater near you, right now or in the near future.
Speaker 3: Last week, I was lucky enough to chat with the
Speaker 3: clown Princess of Crime herself, Vera Drew, about the making
Speaker 3: of the People's Joker.
Speaker 4: My name is Via Drew. I'm the writer, director, and
Speaker 4: I also star in the People's Joker. I also did
Speaker 4: some of the visual effects too. You can get tickets
Speaker 4: online at the People's Joker dot com.
Speaker 3: I would like to just start with the origin of
Speaker 3: the People's Joker project. Why is there a transgender Joker
Speaker 3: and why does that make so much sense?
Speaker 4: I'm glad you feel like it makes sense. I mean,
Speaker 4: it kind of really started just because Todd Phillips was
Speaker 4: like in the news talking about like woke culture and
Speaker 4: how like it was too hard to make comedy now
Speaker 4: and stuff, which is really funny coming from a director
Speaker 4: who's made millions and millions of dollars making comedy and
Speaker 4: like also like made Joker like the year prior, and
Speaker 4: that is a comedy. Like it's a dark comedy, but
Speaker 4: it's totally a comedy and it made a billion dollars.
Speaker 4: But yeah, he was complaining about woke culture, as is
Speaker 4: his right. But in my co writer, the person who
Speaker 4: ended up becoming my co writer, bri LeRose, actually just
Speaker 4: kind of jokingly commissioned me on Twitter to re edit
Speaker 4: Todd phillips Joker and actually venmowed me twelve dollars, and yeah,
Speaker 4: I started doing it. Like in earnest, I started like
Speaker 4: actually re editing the movie. And I had worked at
Speaker 4: Absolutely Productions for years as an editor and had kind
Speaker 4: of come up as an alternative comedy editor, so you know,
Speaker 4: at that point it was probably just going to be
Speaker 4: like a lot of bart sound effects and woosh noises
Speaker 4: and slips and slide whistles. But as I was working
Speaker 4: on it and kind of just making this like big
Speaker 4: piece of bound footage video art, like a narrative kind
Speaker 4: of just like fell into place and it kind of
Speaker 4: just came in an instant and I was just like, oh, okay,
Speaker 4: I think I actually want to make like a coming
Speaker 4: of age film, but I want to make like a
Speaker 4: parody of The Joker, like in that process and kind
Speaker 4: of just like tell like a really earnest and super
Speaker 4: personal autobiographical story about my life and growing up in
Speaker 4: the Midwest and coming out as trans and comedy and
Speaker 4: you know, my relationship with my mom and toxic relationship
Speaker 4: I was in and stuff, but kind of process and
Speaker 4: mythologize all of that through through Batman characters. So that's
Speaker 4: kind of the origin of the movie. Guess I had
Speaker 4: also kind of been kicking around an idea for like
Speaker 4: a body horror, like a trans body horror movie before
Speaker 4: that that was basically like about a drag queen who
Speaker 4: was physically addicted to irony and like couldn't like survive
Speaker 4: without it, but it was also like destroying her from
Speaker 4: the inside out. The two ideas kind of like merged
Speaker 4: together into this sort of I guess.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that definitely comes through. One of my favorite parts
Speaker 3: of this movie is that it gets to talk about
Speaker 3: so many intimate aspects of trans experience, like trans misogyny,
Speaker 3: the intersection of transphobia and misogyny that gets targeted against
Speaker 3: transfems in particular, as well as trans for trans relationships
Speaker 3: or T four T, and lots of other little things.
Speaker 3: It's using the visual language of Batman as a shorthand
Speaker 3: to get textualize parts of queerness that just don't often
Speaker 3: appear in mass media. I showed my co host Mia
Speaker 3: the film last week to get her thoughts on the
Speaker 3: movie as a piece of queer art, since her and
Speaker 3: my own tastes often greatly differ. What did you think
Speaker 3: of the transgender clown.
Speaker 5: It rips one of the things that was the most
Speaker 5: interesting to me about it is like, so I'd read
Speaker 5: some reviews of it, and because it's you know, because
Speaker 5: it's sort of the sub media works, most of the
Speaker 5: reviews are by those people. And it's really fun to
Speaker 5: see a movie where you're reading it and you you
Speaker 5: look at this and you're going, oh, these people didn't
Speaker 5: get it. They how much. But they do not know
Speaker 5: about T boy swag. They do not know about like
Speaker 5: all of this stuff that's happening in this And yeah,
Speaker 5: I mean, I think that's the thing about it that's
Speaker 5: really interesting, because you know, transcoming of age story is
Speaker 5: like one of the few kind of stories you're sort
Speaker 5: of allowed to tell if you're trans, less so in film,
Speaker 5: more so like in writing your stuff, allowed to do
Speaker 5: this specifically. Yeah, Yeah, And it's really interesting the way
Speaker 5: that this movie starts with a you know, for the
Speaker 5: first maybe ten minutes, it's okay, this is like a
Speaker 5: pretty standard coming of age story, and then it hits
Speaker 5: the real shit in a way that doesn't ever show
Speaker 5: up on this stuff.
Speaker 3: Like I first saw this movie a year ago, and
Speaker 3: I was shocked at the depiction of like T for
Speaker 3: TA relationships, which you like never you never see so
Speaker 3: being able to look at like emotional abuse within a
Speaker 3: T for T relationship being depicted this way, You're like,
Speaker 3: oh my god, it's like actually like showing something that
Speaker 3: is literally never talked about like openly, like this is
Speaker 3: something that we like people have experiences of, but it's
Speaker 3: never really like shown or discussed. I found that to
Speaker 3: be incredibly resonant and very like tastefully done.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean I was just like weeping watching parts
Speaker 5: of it. Absolutely. There's a line in there that is
Speaker 5: I have never ever like one of the sort of
Speaker 5: most real things that like you as a transwoman experience
Speaker 5: is someone who's trans misogyny exempt saying they don't feel
Speaker 5: safe around you. Yeah, and that being how they kick you,
Speaker 5: like how you get ran out, how you get abused.
Speaker 5: That the fact that that's in that's in film, and
Speaker 5: you can see all of the people, like you can
Speaker 5: see sis people like not getting it, like they just
Speaker 5: they don't they don't understand what's going on. And that's
Speaker 5: really incredibly powerful in a lot of ways.
Speaker 3: All while in like Jared Letter Joker makeups, ye, Like
Speaker 3: it's amazing, They're like getting into all of this like
Speaker 3: extremely intense stuff. The gas landing scene was fucking phenomenal,
Speaker 3: But it all looks like this, fucking like copy pasted
Speaker 3: comic art spliced in with like Speed Racer and Return
Speaker 3: from Oz. And it is with all of these like
Speaker 3: adult swim asthetics, because ver Drew has been an editor
Speaker 3: on a lot of like starting with like Tim and
Speaker 3: Eric stuff to like Nathan Fielder to Tim Robinson, very
Speaker 3: entrenched in this like layered allage like adult swim style.
Speaker 3: So that's present all throughout the movie. It's extremely visually unique.
Speaker 3: It's it's kind of like like it like an It
Speaker 3: really is like an Internet meme, like brought to life
Speaker 3: and like puppeteered by like an uncanny unseen hand. I
Speaker 3: think it really embraces the aesthetics of like an ill
Speaker 3: fitting Halloween Harley Quinn cosplay costume. It's like taking that
Speaker 3: and like deeply interrogating what that visually represents and looks
Speaker 3: like and why someone would wear an ill fitting Harley
Speaker 3: Quinn costume. It deeply understands all of like the aesthetics
Speaker 3: sensibilities behind an image like that. Extremely extremely fun. I
Speaker 3: think it's worth talking about, at least in brief. The
Speaker 3: trajectory of this movie's release because it is a very
Speaker 3: comic book. Joker fied story from the idea of this
Speaker 3: film to its premiere at a film festival, to all
Speaker 3: of the uncertainty and legal chaos that came along the way.
Speaker 3: So an earlier cut of this movie was originally set
Speaker 3: to premiere at TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival back
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty two. Right before the first showing, Warner
Speaker 3: Brothers sent a vaguely worded but threatening letter which resulted
Speaker 3: in the People's Joker being pulled from the festival save
Speaker 3: for one late night screening that got rave reviews. With
Speaker 3: its legal status uncertain, the movie kind of went into limbo.
Speaker 3: Here's Vera drew on what happened after the first Tiff showing.
Speaker 4: I really put all I had into this movie, you know,
Speaker 4: like I really I cashed in every favor I had
Speaker 4: ever accumulated in Hollywood financially, Like I took out a
Speaker 4: huge loan to finish it. And it was just this big,
Speaker 4: deep personal thing that I had made that originally really
Speaker 4: was just for me and my friends. Like it was
Speaker 4: just kind of a thing that I had just made.
Speaker 4: You know, maybe I would have shown it to like
Speaker 4: my Patreon or something, but like it was, uh, you know,
Speaker 4: after a certain point like it, you know, once we
Speaker 4: had that like premiere, it was just like I need
Speaker 4: to like I can't just post this to YouTube. I
Speaker 4: can't like just dump it somewhere or like shelve it.
Speaker 4: And what felt right really was like taking the movie
Speaker 4: out just to festivals and kind of doing like a
Speaker 4: secret screening tour, which is what we did, and that
Speaker 4: was really exciting and kind of like a jokerfied way
Speaker 4: of sort of getting this this movie out there. And
Speaker 4: I was just surrounded by other filmmakers and the genre
Speaker 4: community and you know who would see the movie at
Speaker 4: this festival and be like you need to just wait.
Speaker 4: The person who's gonna help you is gonna come.
Speaker 3: So for a while the film was making surprise secret
Speaker 3: screenings at film festivals across the US in Canada, and
Speaker 3: now almost two years later, the queer distribution company Altered
Speaker 3: Innocence picked up the film and it's now in movie
Speaker 3: theaters and nationwide.
Speaker 5: The thing that's I think is really interesting about this
Speaker 5: is sort of the timing of it, because this originally
Speaker 5: comes out in twenty twenty two right, sure it does
Speaker 5: and then gets on came out by pushed back into
Speaker 5: the closet by the corporate.
Speaker 3: Ghouls of this discovery pushes the people's choker back into
Speaker 3: the closet.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: But what I think is.
Speaker 5: Really interesting about it is is its position in this
Speaker 5: sort of arc of queer media.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 5: I mean when I was a kid, there was nothing.
Speaker 5: It was like, like the first queer thing I ever
Speaker 5: saw in a show was the Cora Sami kiss at
Speaker 5: the end of Legend of Korra. Like there was nothing,
Speaker 5: and then suddenly it's funny. I just watched last night,
Speaker 5: like three of the old Law and Order SVU trans episodes.
Speaker 5: Oh god, oh boy, oh boy, do they have some
Speaker 5: extremely extremely interesting moments.
Speaker 3: I will leave it up to the viewer's imagination.
Speaker 5: Yeah. But and what's interesting about the race is you
Speaker 5: get this moment that I kind of recognize from you
Speaker 5: have this sort of Asian American media too, where like
Speaker 5: there was this you know it was if you go
Speaker 5: back and watch something from two thousand and four that
Speaker 5: has an Asian person in it, it is it is
Speaker 5: like like there are people right now in the US
Speaker 5: who will physically attack you for being Asian. And who
Speaker 5: will say shit and who's whose level of verbal racism
Speaker 5: will be less than the racism that's just in this
Speaker 5: movie as a gag. Sure, and you know, and so
Speaker 5: you get and eventually, like throughout the twenty tens, we
Speaker 5: sort of got like, oh, there's like Asian Americans and
Speaker 5: movies now, and that was kind of happening with with
Speaker 5: with sort of you know and prickoling cartoons, things like
Speaker 5: owl House. That was kind of happening in media with
Speaker 5: queer people. And then there was the sort of the
Speaker 5: twenty twenties backlash, and that's like you you can you
Speaker 5: know it's it's in the same way the Huntress. Thompson
Speaker 5: has this line about like you can see exactly where
Speaker 5: the standing in Vegas. You can see the line where
Speaker 5: the sixties receded, Like you can see the line where
Speaker 5: all of the queer stuff just is like gone. And
Speaker 5: this forces everyone. You know, you if you have two options, right,
Speaker 5: you can fucking go back into the closet and you
Speaker 5: can fucking work on whatever dog shit show that's just
Speaker 5: going to be completely sisse hat now, or you can
Speaker 5: just you can make the people's choker. Just to say,
Speaker 5: you can just make you're just you can just go
Speaker 5: and do it and you can make something. And I
Speaker 5: think there's something that's very different than a lot than
Speaker 5: the sort of wave that have come before. It is
Speaker 5: it like this is this is the transmedia that is
Speaker 5: made by trans people for trans people. And there's some
Speaker 5: like trapping stuff for SIS people to sort of like
Speaker 5: walk them along a little tiny bit, but.
Speaker 3: Like it uses the language of DC comics to handhold
Speaker 3: other audiences to understand what's going on.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but but at its core, you know, and like
Speaker 5: obviously like the yeah, there's you know, mix of plicks
Speaker 5: like I'm butchering his name.
Speaker 3: No, no one knows how to say That's that's the
Speaker 3: whole bit, is that no one knows how to say it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, like you know, so like there's like
Speaker 5: there's like kind of deep cut like comic stuff in
Speaker 5: there too, because you know, this is by people who, like,
Speaker 5: unlike everyone who makes these fucking movies these days, people
Speaker 5: who actually genuinely, like deeply love the source material that
Speaker 5: they're pulling from, yes, and thus are willing to just
Speaker 5: go off the walls with it and have like Jason
Speaker 5: Todd t boy Swag emotional abuser Joker.
Speaker 3: Who has any many such cases like so.
Speaker 5: Much more interesting than any iteration of the Joker I've seen,
Speaker 5: absolutely well.
Speaker 3: And it also it also pulls on like the very
Speaker 3: long history of the Joker being queer coded. Yeah, I
Speaker 3: mean like if you go to like Grant Morrison's Joker,
Speaker 3: extremely queer, the sixties Batman show is all very queer,
Speaker 3: but like, the Joker has always been seen as this
Speaker 3: kind of this like having this queer deviant element despite
Speaker 3: really only having like heterosexual pairings, but even still in
Speaker 3: his relation to Batman, it's always been a very queer
Speaker 3: heavy thing. And that's something that DC Comics has definitely
Speaker 3: shied away from intentionally and having something that so blatantly
Speaker 3: embraces that well, not not just like does it for
Speaker 3: like fun representation, like actually interrogates like queer relationships through that,
Speaker 3: through that extremely like troubling power dynamic is really really fascinating.
Speaker 5: There is no fucking CIS man, Like, there is no
Speaker 5: white CIS dude who has gone through enough shit to
Speaker 5: make them cruited to the Joker like come odd, It's like,
Speaker 5: oh damn, I couldn't get on a comedy show, so
Speaker 5: I became the Joker like wait, wait, wait, no, no,
Speaker 5: this is insufficient. The Joker, Afi Mia. All it takes
Speaker 5: is one bad day. I you know, I mean, I guess,
Speaker 5: I guess.
Speaker 3: I guess that is like, do you want to know
Speaker 3: how I got these emotional scars.
Speaker 5: It's really like like every cisman is okay enough with
Speaker 5: violence that they think that they're one bad day for
Speaker 5: just murdering everyone around them, and sometimes they snap and
Speaker 5: it's like true, you know, but also come on, like
Speaker 5: you want a fucker.
Speaker 1: It's seen. Shit.
Speaker 3: We've had a very like in cell embrace of the
Speaker 3: Joker ever since he ledger, of course with the Joaquin
Speaker 3: Phoenix movie, very in cell coded, both in conversation with that,
Speaker 3: because this piece was made as a direct reaction to
Speaker 3: Tom Phillips's The Joker Movie, but this is always it's
Speaker 3: in conversation with that, while highlighting the actual like like
Speaker 3: very very uh inherent queerness to this man who dresses
Speaker 3: up like a clown to play with another man who
Speaker 3: dresses up like a bat. I was lucky enough to
Speaker 3: catch an earlier cut of the People's Joker at a
Speaker 3: Canadian film festival last year, dressed in one of my
Speaker 3: many Harley Quinn costumes. Again, if you know anything about me,
Speaker 3: you know I love Batman on Gotham City. I do
Speaker 3: my yearly queer Batman returns watch parties where I dress
Speaker 3: up like Michelle Feiver's Catwoman. But the social groups I'm
Speaker 3: often in can sometimes be a little bit weird about
Speaker 3: Batman stuff, because he's like a fascist or whatever. But
Speaker 3: I've always thought that Gotham City is really queer as
Speaker 3: a concept, and I love that someone else appeared to
Speaker 3: share that opinion and decided to explore Gotham City as
Speaker 3: an aesthetic zone to operate in as a queer artist.
Speaker 3: Here's Vera Drew talking about the connection between her queerness
Speaker 3: and Batman.
Speaker 4: I really am like a lifelong Batman comic fan, and
Speaker 4: I've been working on this movie for four years and
Speaker 4: I'm somehow still not sick of Batman, which is crazy
Speaker 4: to me. Yeah, I mean, I think like the lore
Speaker 4: has just kind of always been there in my life,
Speaker 4: and it's always just felt very queer to me. I mean,
Speaker 4: I guess most in like a subtext way, but you
Speaker 4: just think back to like all the iterations, Like, I mean,
Speaker 4: my my entry point into Batman was Joel Schumacher Batman
Speaker 4: like I saw Batman forever when I was six and
Speaker 4: I it was like, literally one of the first times
Speaker 4: I realized I was trans was that moment was just
Speaker 4: seeing Nicole Kidman. I wanted to look like her. I
Speaker 4: wanted to be perceived how she was being perceived. I
Speaker 4: wanted someone to look at me the way Batman looks
Speaker 4: at her. And that was all very confusing for a
Speaker 4: six year old, you know who up until that point
Speaker 4: was pretty sure they were a boy. I grew up
Speaker 4: in the nineties, so I didn't really have like my
Speaker 4: representation was the Jerry Springer Show and Howard Stern. That's
Speaker 4: where I saw trans people, and I think like comics
Speaker 4: were just this space where I could I don't know,
Speaker 4: it just feels very queer like and it's it's not
Speaker 4: j subtext. I mean there is, there's a lot of
Speaker 4: subtext obviously in like the Schumacher Batman's like his his
Speaker 4: Gotham City just is a like gay Neon nightmare of beauty.
Speaker 4: We're definitely like taking that aesthetic kind of in the
Speaker 4: People's Joker like that was always kind of my vision
Speaker 4: for Gotham. But even the sixties Batman, despite how absolutely yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: you know, it's it's super conservative, but like it's it's
Speaker 4: so colorful and like it's.
Speaker 5: Very gay, it's extremely gay.
Speaker 4: It's and it's like, I because somebody actually described it
Speaker 4: to me the other day as like you have like
Speaker 4: a character like Riddler and like he's just surrounded by
Speaker 4: like hot women. Like it's just everybody feels like kind
Speaker 4: of like a weird, poly annoying person, you know, which
Speaker 4: is me and my friends.
Speaker 3: So I feel like Adam West is definitely playing like
Speaker 3: a closeted gay man in that show as well, totally
Speaker 3: who's like surrounded by much more like flamboyant queers and
Speaker 3: he like doesn't know how to deal with it.
Speaker 4: That's totally fair.
Speaker 3: I really appreciated, like there's so many Batman Forever jokes
Speaker 3: in this, Like you even use the Batman Forever font
Speaker 3: like constantly throughout the film. There's so many like little bits.
Speaker 3: I really appreciated all of the Alexander Knox jokes throughout
Speaker 3: the film. I think feel like that's one of the
Speaker 3: most underrated characters from the Tim Burton movies. And then
Speaker 3: all of like the Grant Morrison super sanity bits also,
Speaker 3: I found incredibly funny. When I was watching it, I
Speaker 3: felt like a big strong sense I felt was like,
Speaker 3: this is what a piece of art would look like
Speaker 3: if it was made like within the DC universe. It
Speaker 3: feels like something that comes like from that point and
Speaker 3: is like somehow like emanated into our world.
Speaker 4: Wow, thank you.
Speaker 5: It was wonderful.
Speaker 3: There's definitely some like speed racer elements, a little bit
Speaker 3: of like David Lynch's Dune, especially like the Mister Mixelplex
Speaker 3: scenes felt very much like all of like like the
Speaker 3: Weird Spice visions. It was great seeing this progress from
Speaker 3: the cut last year to this one. It flows a lot.
Speaker 3: When I was talking with my co host Mia about
Speaker 3: the film, we both pointed out how this movie doesn't
Speaker 3: just feel like a movie with gay people in it itself,
Speaker 3: feels like a piece of queer art, like the art
Speaker 3: itself has a sense of inherent queerness. I think there's
Speaker 3: a lot of reasons for that, the fact that it's
Speaker 3: a collaborative project from dozens of queer artists sending in
Speaker 3: background pieces, characters, voice acting, music, set design. It all
Speaker 3: creates a very like DIY queer zine kind of feel,
Speaker 3: but in a moving picture. So I wanted to talk
Speaker 3: a little bit more about this difference between just queer
Speaker 3: representation and queer art. You kind of touch on something
Speaker 3: previously where like the difference between queer representation and like
Speaker 3: art that is that the is queer. These are like
Speaker 3: two very different things, and the movie actually is in
Speaker 3: conversation with this as well, being like the difference between
Speaker 3: hiring a trans person to be on the SNL cast
Speaker 3: versus a trans person doing their own comedy show, right,
Speaker 3: and how those are two very different things with very
Speaker 3: different politics. And I think this movie is a large
Speaker 3: statement against that assimilation is to drive that a lot
Speaker 3: of people kind of fall back on for like self
Speaker 3: preservation reasons, self coping reasons, and like financial reasons. Sure,
Speaker 3: it is extremely critical of that notion and reifiz like
Speaker 3: this like diy approach towards queer people making our own art.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And that's something I've been thinking about a lot, because,
Speaker 5: like you know, like Asian Americans have like we got there, right,
Speaker 5: like sis as and Americans, we we got our representation,
Speaker 5: Like what is a representation? It's like, well, they found
Speaker 5: a way to make like being East Asian the thing
Speaker 5: you can sell to white people. By having it be
Speaker 5: about food and selling the version of like a slightly
Speaker 5: different version of the traditional family, and I you know
Speaker 5: and like and you can you can sort of ask
Speaker 5: what good has this done for Asian American people? And
Speaker 5: mostly what it's done is that Asian American cinema there's
Speaker 5: it's a wasteland, right like, and you know, and you
Speaker 5: could see like there's a there's a version of sort
Speaker 5: of of where the twenty twenties go that's different where
Speaker 5: the assimilationist drive kicks in and we don't. And this
Speaker 5: happens to Quimbidia where it's just this yeah, nothing, it's
Speaker 5: just this void of sort of formless content that gets
Speaker 5: sold to the sist people.
Speaker 3: I mean, and I think you could even look at
Speaker 3: that from a lot of like twenty sixteen to twenty
Speaker 3: twenty stylings of queer media that does come off as
Speaker 3: very similationist. And now I feel like we are entering
Speaker 3: this new age of trans cinema where we have a
Speaker 3: lot of people either working with more independent production houses.
Speaker 3: I mc fairy excited for I saw the TV Glow
Speaker 3: coming out next month, but we have a lot of
Speaker 3: other independent trends filmmakers starting out quite young getting into
Speaker 3: filmmaking also not quite young, like into their thirties, who
Speaker 3: are working to actually produce films and media that don't
Speaker 3: just get thrown up on YouTube. That producing art that
Speaker 3: does not just become another transgender video essay that floods
Speaker 3: the site. Right, it's finding other ways to actually engage
Speaker 3: artistically besides the very comfortable ways that we've gotten used to,
Speaker 3: whether that's like, you know, what your average trans DJ
Speaker 3: trans like electronic music or a trans video essay, which
Speaker 3: feels like, really the only two ways to make art
Speaker 3: is a trans person reliably are making YouTube videos making music,
Speaker 3: both of which can be very good. Absolutely, there's of
Speaker 3: some fantastic trans musicians. There's a lot of great video
Speaker 3: essays out there, but the artistic landscape is so much
Speaker 3: bigger than that. And being able to watch people realize
Speaker 3: that this YouTube thing is so self limiting and trying
Speaker 3: to grow past that is incredibly cool to see. I
Speaker 3: know there's stuff like Nebula, just like this streaming service
Speaker 3: kind of built on YouTube but trying to do more
Speaker 3: of its own things. That's been interesting to watch grow.
Speaker 3: But also a lot of people attempting just to actually
Speaker 3: like take movies to film festivals and actually like engage
Speaker 3: with this as like art and like having it be
Speaker 3: recognized as arts. Like it would have been so easy
Speaker 3: to turn the people's choker into like a YouTube fan film, right, yeah,
Speaker 3: fucking thousands of fucking Batman fan films on YouTube.
Speaker 5: That would have been so easy.
Speaker 3: But the insistents are like, no, I'm actually gonna actually
Speaker 3: going to use like fair use law, gonna actually do
Speaker 3: like a legal parody and push this through film festivals,
Speaker 3: get it in actual movie theaters. We are seeing a
Speaker 3: lot more transfilms at film festivals. We are seeing this
Speaker 3: start happening, and I'm very excited to watch this grow.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I think what's ultimately happening here is that
Speaker 5: there's a combination of two things. One is that we
Speaker 5: were getting spat out by the traditional media machine, and two,
Speaker 5: the traditional media machine is rotting from the inside, right,
Speaker 5: And it's not good that either of these things are
Speaker 5: really happening. But simultaneously, it also means that we're in
Speaker 5: this position where, having been spat out, we can go
Speaker 5: make the giant media monster. Yeah, we can go stab
Speaker 5: it and force a bunch of these like random CIS
Speaker 5: critics to be like to try to figure out a
Speaker 5: tea for tea relationship, but just blow it.
Speaker 3: Something like this would have never been made by Warner Brothers.
Speaker 3: That's just like impossible. This art could have never never
Speaker 3: been made under Warner Brothers, Right, that's just impossible, and
Speaker 3: being able to say no, I'm going to use these
Speaker 3: cultural iconography that we keep being told endlessly that this
Speaker 3: is this is our culture's version of mythology, of which
Speaker 3: is fucking people talk about superheroes like that all the
Speaker 3: fucking time, like this, this is our Greek gods, this
Speaker 3: is our blah bla blah blah blah. Yet it's just
Speaker 3: owned by like two companies who control everything about it
Speaker 3: and don't allow the public to actually engage with these
Speaker 3: as cultural thinkers and say no, we actually are going
Speaker 3: to find a way to use these characters in relation
Speaker 3: to someone's own life as an artist and using it
Speaker 3: to talk about queerness and comedy and working in the
Speaker 3: comedy industry as a queer person to create a very
Speaker 3: unique piece that yeah, literally could have there's no way
Speaker 3: wouldever be made. So this is this is this is
Speaker 3: a piece of art that could have never happened any
Speaker 3: other way. And now we have it playing in a
Speaker 3: local theater near you, and I think that's very cool.
Speaker 3: Here's Vera Drew again talking about the theatrical run.
Speaker 4: We're playing a lot of cities. We keep adding more.
Speaker 4: If you don't see your city, bother the theater in
Speaker 4: your town and tell them you want them to play it,
Speaker 4: and you know, show them one of the many articles
Speaker 4: about this film and maybe they maybe they'll do it,
Speaker 4: or reach out to us and let us know. The
Speaker 4: People's Joker dot com and you can follow me at
Speaker 4: Vera Drew twenty two on Twitter, Instagram and now TikTok.
Speaker 4: Don't know how to use it, but we're going to
Speaker 4: figure it out together.
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening again. You can check out The People's
Speaker 3: Joker at the People's Joker dot Com look for tickets
Speaker 3: and showtimes. Hopefully they'll be one in your area. Next week,
Speaker 3: there'll be more episodes talking about the making of this movie,
Speaker 3: as well as a few other transcomedian art projects that
Speaker 3: are currently ongoing. See you on the other side.
Speaker 6: Welcome to Grappen Here, I'm Andrew Sage to future channel Andreism.
Speaker 5: I'm joined by Mia Wong. Did not miss your que
Speaker 5: this time? This will not make any sense to you
Speaker 5: unless you've heard the previous episode in which I missed
Speaker 5: by you.
Speaker 6: But hello, indeed, indeed welcome, did missic you? So recently
Speaker 6: I read Born a Crime by Trevoranoah. It was his
Speaker 6: memoir of his childhood in South Africa and politics society.
Speaker 6: Is a decent comedian and had me laughing out loud
Speaker 6: and thinking a lot as well, and it really reignited
Speaker 6: my long pass and interest in South African history because
Speaker 6: he's given a lot of context when sharing his stories.
Speaker 6: So I decided to look into the history of anarchism
Speaker 6: in South Africa and that's what we will be exploring today.
Speaker 6: Much of the information I gathered is thanks to the
Speaker 6: scholarship of Lucian van der Walt, a South African anarchist
Speaker 6: and professor of sociology. Particularly, I'll be looking at the
Speaker 6: work on anarchism and Cynicalism Southern Africa from the International
Speaker 6: Encyclopedia Revolution and Protest and Anarchism and Cynicalism in the
Speaker 6: colonial and post colonial world. Without getting into the lengthy
Speaker 6: and storied history of the region, I do need to
Speaker 6: provide some context, so we'll start in the mid nineteenth century,
Speaker 6: where the region that became South Africa was considered marginal
Speaker 6: to the world economy. You had the poet of the
Speaker 6: Cape of Good Hope and Port Elizabeth, which handled me
Speaker 6: in the agricultural exports. And this was during the second
Speaker 6: period of the British Cape Colony's existence, after it had
Speaker 6: briefly fallen into the hands of the Batavia and Republic
Speaker 6: during the Napoleonic Wars. None of that is particularly necessary
Speaker 6: to know for our sake, but you know a little
Speaker 6: fun fact. At this point, once again, under the British,
Speaker 6: the land was broadly agrarian, and Britain's farms were worked
Speaker 6: by colored and African workers. The neighboring Natal Colony, also
Speaker 6: under British rule, had its plantations worked by indentured Indians.
Speaker 6: The rest of the interior was under various Africana republics
Speaker 6: and African kingdoms. For those not in the know, so
Speaker 6: African in this context refers to obviously Africans, Black Africans
Speaker 6: to be specific, Indians referring to the indentured laborers from
Speaker 6: the Indian subcontinent, Africanas referring to the Afrikaans or Dutch
Speaker 6: speaking white South Africans, and then we have, of course
Speaker 6: the British, which are you know, white British people, and
Speaker 6: the colored as a designation as a group as a
Speaker 6: self identified ethnic group referred to the people of mixed
Speaker 6: European and African heritage that had begun to develop their
Speaker 6: own identity in their own community. Because the settlement of
Speaker 6: South Africa had started centuries before, so other than the
Speaker 6: agricultural export and ports providing a respite for trade between
Speaker 6: the West and the East, the Southern African colonies weren't
Speaker 6: particularly high up on anyone's list of priorities. But then
Speaker 6: the economic landscape of the region transformed with the discovery
Speaker 6: of diamonds in Kimberley in eighteen sixty seven and gold
Speaker 6: in Woodwater surround in eighteen eighty six. To make a
Speaker 6: very long story short, this led to the rapid centralization
Speaker 6: of mining activities and the growth of towns like Johannesburg,
Speaker 6: one of the most well known towns in South Africa.
Speaker 6: Imperial interests intensified, resultant in the British Wars and Africans
Speaker 6: and Africanas and the lablishment of the Union of South
Speaker 6: Africa in nineteen ten. An extremely diverse and polygoth society
Speaker 6: under British rule. By nineteen thirteen, almost half of the
Speaker 6: world's gold output came from with waters Round area and
Speaker 6: with Watersrand Minds employed one hundred and ninety five thousand
Speaker 6: Africans and twenty two thousand white workers. The working class
Speaker 6: clearly faced many racial and ethnic divisions. It was primarily
Speaker 6: composed of various Africans, which had their own divisions between them,
Speaker 6: and there were also divisions between the largely skilled white
Speaker 6: immigrants from Europe and the largely unskilled local white africaners.
Speaker 6: The marginalized African and colored middle classes that began to
Speaker 6: form from the few free laborers involved in various grown
Speaker 6: industries would come to lead early nationalist movements while grappling
Speaker 6: with segregation, discrimination, and linguistic challenges. As van der Wald said,
Speaker 6: and they lived in a situation where a cheap African
Speaker 6: labor formed the bedrock of the mines as well as
Speaker 6: state industry and the crowing commercial farming and manufacturing sectors,
Speaker 6: and where the cheapness of African labor was primarily a
Speaker 6: function of the black's historic incorporation into the country as
Speaker 6: a subject to people. In this sense, local capitalist relations
Speaker 6: of exploitation were constructed upon colonial relations of domination. Fast
Speaker 6: forward to the eve of apartheid in nineteen forty eight,
Speaker 6: when African and nationalists took power and extended the segregation
Speaker 6: policies in the first four decades of the Union even further,
Speaker 6: you get two responses to the national question preceding the
Speaker 6: development of apartheid from the organized labor crowd at the time.
Speaker 6: The first response, known as white labourism, was associated with
Speaker 6: the mainstream white labor movement leading back to the nineteenth century.
Speaker 6: The South African Labor Party and South African Industrial Federation
Speaker 6: were key proponents of white labourism, and both organizations were
Speaker 6: born from the exclusiveness of early craft unions that later
Speaker 6: evolved into more pronounced racial exclusiveness. This white laborism approach
Speaker 6: combined social democracy with segregation, promoting job reservation and preferential
Speaker 6: employment for whites, urban segregation and Asian repatriation white power
Speaker 6: for white workers. Basically, the other races can figure out
Speaker 6: their own deal, of course, on the reservations that we
Speaker 6: put them in. So it's no surprise that the apartheid
Speaker 6: government in part mainstreamed this white laborism movement, but the
Speaker 6: second response to the national question was linked to the
Speaker 6: Communist Party of South Africa the CPSA from nineteen twenty eight,
Speaker 6: when it adopted the Native Republic thesis under pressure from
Speaker 6: the Communist International. This approach advocated for the establishment of
Speaker 6: an independent South Africa Native Republic as a precursor to
Speaker 6: the Workers and Peasants Republic, separating national liberation specifically in
Speaker 6: the fourth of nationalism and then socialism into distinct stages.
Speaker 6: The CPSA initially considered leading both of these stages, but
Speaker 6: later abandoned this idea and opted for a united front
Speaker 6: with the African National Congress, aiming for a unitary, democratic,
Speaker 6: and capitalist state with land reform and partial nationalization. But
Speaker 6: there's a hidden history that goes unnoticed prior to the
Speaker 6: rise of apartheid and the CPSA. All the way back
Speaker 6: in the eighteen eighties, Henry Glass played a pivotal role
Speaker 6: in establishing the local anarchist tradition in South Africa. He
Speaker 6: was an Englishman born in India with a background in
Speaker 6: radical London circles. He moved to Port Elizabeth in the
Speaker 6: eighteen eighties and engaged in various jobs, including working on
Speaker 6: the Witwatersrand minds among African people. He contributed to the
Speaker 6: Cape Labor Press, translated key works by Kropotkin into English,
Speaker 6: and distributed anarchist materials through various organizations. Glass seems to
Speaker 6: have taken a good look at clonalism, saw how Africans
Speaker 6: were treated, and didn't shy away from calling it out
Speaker 6: now self. His writing did idealize pre capitalist cultures, for example,
Speaker 6: pointing out in a letter to Kropotkin that you can
Speaker 6: still find amongst them the principle of communism, but his
Speaker 6: main focus was on pointing fingers at an order that
Speaker 6: treated Africans like second class citizens, and going even further
Speaker 6: to champion the idea of a working class movement that
Speaker 6: bridged racial divides. He understood the foolishness of white workers
Speaker 6: to try and pursue their liberation alone while sidelining their
Speaker 6: colored comrades, and though Glass spent his time agitating in
Speaker 6: Port Elizabeth, this was also a perspective shared by the
Speaker 6: Social Democratic Federation or SDF, based in Cape Town, which
Speaker 6: despite its name, was all about pushing anarchism and syndicalism. Actually,
Speaker 6: maybe more precise there was a dominant wing within the
Speaker 6: SDF of Cape Town that emphasized anarchism and syndicalism. There
Speaker 6: will also moderate and status elements in the SDF as well.
Speaker 6: Cape Town was quite different at that time from Port Elizabeth.
Speaker 6: Port Elizabeth was mostly African and white, but Cape Town
Speaker 6: had a significant colored population, which created a situation where
Speaker 6: much of Cape Town's working class was free labor rather
Speaker 6: than bound to some form of slavery or dangure. Coloreds
Speaker 6: were facing growing official segregation and popular discrimination from the
Speaker 6: late nineteenth century onwards, though, so there was a growing
Speaker 6: discontent as the working class fractured even further. But there
Speaker 6: was a key figure in the Cape Town SDF that
Speaker 6: pushed anarchism and syndicalism, and that was Wilfred Harrison, another
Speaker 6: friend of Kopotkin, a carpenter, a trade unionist, and an
Speaker 6: ex soldier. He was known as a very dynamic speaker
Speaker 6: and a staunch anarchist communist who pushed for a future
Speaker 6: where workers owned and controlled everything. With Harrison at the Helm,
Speaker 6: the SDF set up shop in Adelaide Street, where they
Speaker 6: were organized in talks, events, and even standing in elections
Speaker 6: for propaganda purposes. The sdf's events attracted thousands, creating truly
Speaker 6: uniquely integrated public spheres that would bring Colors, white and
Speaker 6: Africans in some of the same spaces. They were holding
Speaker 6: speeches in Afrikaans, which was the most popular language of
Speaker 6: the colors, and in eastingt Closer, the language of the
Speaker 6: Mooser people. They had bookshops, reading rooms, refreshment bars, beach trips, choirs,
Speaker 6: and even a few socialist christ Nets. At the various
Speaker 6: talks they welcomed controversial figures, including a young Gandhi. Harrison's
Speaker 6: wing of the SDF further sought to remove union color bars,
Speaker 6: unionize colors, secure equal pay, and build unions that would
Speaker 6: unite all workers, regardless of race. In the early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 6: socialists and with Waters Round launched the Weekly Voice of Labor,
Speaker 6: led by Archie Crawford and Mary Fitzgerald. The paper saved
Speaker 6: to connect socialists across cities from Duban to Kimberley, to
Speaker 6: Cape Town to Johannesburg. Archie Crawford was a staunch anti segregationist,
Speaker 6: pushing back against the South African Labor Party for its
Speaker 6: policies and organized in the neglected colored workers. In nineteen ten,
Speaker 6: the SDF hosted British synicolist Tom Mann, whose tours the
Speaker 6: region would inspire the founding of the Socialist Labor Party
Speaker 6: or SLP. In Johannesburg. They adopted the ideas of Daniel
Speaker 6: de Leon, the American leader of the International Workers of
Speaker 6: the World, and were followed by the Industrial Workers Union,
Speaker 6: which linked with the IWW in Chicago. The IWW's ideas
Speaker 6: spread to Duban and Pretoria, but it was Johannesburg where
Speaker 6: they flexed their muscles with successful strikes and challenges to
Speaker 6: labor laws. The IWW's position carried the same as its forebears,
Speaker 6: fight the class war with the aid of all workers
Speaker 6: to whether efficient or an efficient, skilled or unskilled, white
Speaker 6: or black. IWW organizer Jock Campbell would be the first
Speaker 6: to specifically make propaganda amongst the African workers in which
Speaker 6: waters Rand. But don't get me wrong, these efforts do
Speaker 6: not mean that they necessarily succeeded. The IWW and SLP's
Speaker 6: struggle to recruit to cross racial lines semms not primarily
Speaker 6: from prejudice, but from their overall weakness as union organizers
Speaker 6: outside the tram sector, where they saw the most successes,
Speaker 6: and of course, the practical challenges of organizing the predominantly
Speaker 6: unfree African workforce underwit Water's Rand. So they talked a
Speaker 6: good talk about reaching across racial lines, but not a
Speaker 6: massive success because they didn't have a strategy in place
Speaker 6: to actually establish those actions between Africans, colored and Indian
Speaker 6: workers in this regard. Actually, the SDF in Cape Town
Speaker 6: was a lot more successful. However, something did happen in
Speaker 6: witwaters Rand. In May nineteen thirteen, a significant general strike
Speaker 6: erupted on the witwaters Rand, initiated by white miners and
Speaker 6: quickly spread in across industries. The strike was marked by
Speaker 6: riots and gun battles and escalating on what's called Black Saturday,
Speaker 6: July fifth, resulting in twenty five deaths at the hands
Speaker 6: of the imperial troops. Subsequent strikes by African miners and
Speaker 6: Indian passive resistance campaigns further intensified the social unrest, with
Speaker 6: the failure of a compromise in the aftermath of the
Speaker 6: nineteen thirteen strike led to a second general strike in
Speaker 6: January nineteen fourteen. The state responded swiftly, declaring martial law,
Speaker 6: mobilizing forces and suppressing the unions, resulting the arrest and
Speaker 6: deportation of key activists, including Archie Crawford. Then World War
Speaker 6: One further disrupted things, with the country joining the British side.
Speaker 6: While some organizations suspended activities to support the war efforts,
Speaker 6: hardline African and nationalists launched an armed rebellion, leading to
Speaker 6: split within the SDF and the South African Labor Party.
Speaker 6: Although anarchism synicalism played a role in these turbulent events,
Speaker 6: the actual syndicalist movement on the Witwaterstrand was weak and
Speaker 6: divided by nineteen thirteen, despite attempts to forge unity through
Speaker 6: the United Socialist Party the USP, it fell apart due
Speaker 6: to existing divisions and ideological differences among the constituent groups.
Speaker 6: While organized syndicalism struggled to lead the strikes, syndicalist ideas
Speaker 6: and slogans gained considerable traction in labor circles. The strikes
Speaker 6: and war issues reinvigorated existing anarchists and syndicalists, radicalized new activists,
Speaker 6: and sparked widespread interest in radical ideas which would lead
Speaker 6: to an new development. In September nineteen fifteen, the Industrial
Speaker 6: Socialist League the ISSL emerged as a prominent syndicalist formation,
Speaker 6: comprising of the syndicalist veterans and anti war South African
Speaker 6: Labor Party activists. The ISL quickly became the largest left
Speaker 6: political group before the Communist Party of South Africa. The
Speaker 6: ISL rooted in the ISWW tradition, advocated for the organization
Speaker 6: of workers on industrial alliance irrespective of race, and envisioned
Speaker 6: in an integrated revolutionary one big union for national liberation
Speaker 6: and class struggle. The ISL criticized whitecraft unions for the
Speaker 6: divisive practices and advocated of industrial unions to confront the
Speaker 6: challenges posed by giant corporations and trusts. Racial prejudice, according
Speaker 6: to the ISSL, served the ruling class's interests insuring a
Speaker 6: study supply of cheap, unorganized African labor at the same
Speaker 6: time that the ISL was actively opposing discriminatory laws. The
Speaker 6: ISL also doubted the efficacy of African nationalist programs in
Speaker 6: genuinely emancipating the black masses. It contended that national oppression
Speaker 6: was rooted in capitalism, making national liberation unlikely under the
Speaker 6: prevalance system. The ISL aimed to reform white unions, but
Speaker 6: while leading efforts to organize people of color, they faced challenges,
Speaker 6: of course, in the form of opposition from white workers,
Speaker 6: electoral defeats, and hostility from established unions. They were evicted
Speaker 6: from Trades Hall in nineteen seventeen for resistant discriminatory policies,
Speaker 6: but continued the activities cultivating links with people of color,
Speaker 6: particularly through its passionately anti Zionist Yiddish speaking branch. The
Speaker 6: ISL played a pivotal role in establishing unions among people
Speaker 6: of color, launching the Indian Workers Industrial Union in Durban
Speaker 6: in nineteen seventeen and later through night schools for Africans,
Speaker 6: initiating the Industrial Workers off in the same year, both
Speaker 6: of which would be led by their own constituents. In
Speaker 6: July nineteen eighteen, there would be another general strike, this
Speaker 6: time primarily by Africans. Earlier that year, one hundred and
Speaker 6: fifty two African municipal workers were sentenced to hard labor
Speaker 6: for striking, leading to protests organized by the Industrial Workers
Speaker 6: of Africa, the International Socialist League and the South African
Speaker 6: Native National Congress and the South Africa Native National Congress
Speaker 6: the SANNC, which was the precursor to the currently ruled
Speaker 6: In African National Congress the ANC. The Joint Action Committee
Speaker 6: proposed a general strike on the Witwatersrand for the release
Speaker 6: of the sentenced workers and better pay for African workers.
Speaker 6: Although the strike was canceled last minute, several thousand African
Speaker 6: miners participated anyway, resulting in arrests for incitement to public violence.
Speaker 6: The rested individuals included ISL members and a member of
Speaker 6: both the Industrial Workers of Africa and the ESSAYNNC. A
Speaker 6: year later, in March nineteen nineteen, ISL members played a
Speaker 6: role in their civil disobedience campaign against pass lords, which
Speaker 6: required non whites in South Africa to carry documents authorizing
Speaker 6: their presence in restricted white areas. That resistance campaign led
Speaker 6: to nearly seven hundred arrests. That same year, in Kimberley,
Speaker 6: the ISL established syndicalist unions among colored workers, such as
Speaker 6: the Clothing Workers Industrial Union and the Horse Drivers Union.
Speaker 6: These unions achieved significant successes, including wage increases in Cape Town.
Speaker 6: ISL members City Way and KREI aimed to organize the
Speaker 6: Industrial Workers of Africa on the docks. They collaborated with
Speaker 6: the Industrial Socialist League the ind SL, a syndicalist breakaway
Speaker 6: from the SDF, and played a role in the major
Speaker 6: strike on the docks in December nineteen nineteen. Now the
Speaker 6: strike ultimately disintegrated, but it's still mar significant event. All
Speaker 6: in all, the ISL, heavily influenced by syndicalism, would play
Speaker 6: a major role in the strikes of the late nineteen tenths.
Speaker 6: The ISL's influence extended to the formation of the Communist
Speaker 6: Party of South Africa CPS, alongside the SDF and the
Speaker 6: INDSCEL and a few other groups in the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 6: That party would go underground after the Anti Communist Act
Speaker 6: of the fifties and re emerge as the South African
Speaker 6: Communist Party the SAACP. For most of its history, it
Speaker 6: has been explicitly Marxist Leninist, heavily influenced by the Bolsheviks. However,
Speaker 6: when it first started, syndicalist concepts still lingered within the
Speaker 6: party for many years before was eventually excised. The internationalist
Speaker 6: and multi racial vision of the syndicalist movement was later
Speaker 6: taken over by the two stage strategy of the cpsa
Speaker 6: slash SACP, which sought to establish an independent, democratic capitalist
Speaker 6: republic as a precursor to a socialist order. This, of course,
Speaker 6: diverges from the earlier anarchist and syndicalist strategy, which viewed
Speaker 6: the anti colonial independence and class struggles as interconnected and
Speaker 6: didn't see national liberation as solely the purview of nationalism,
Speaker 6: a view which to me is more sophisticated and revolutionary
Speaker 6: than this one track status view that Marxist tend to
Speaker 6: adopt contrary to the organizing efforts of actual working class people. Interestingly,
Speaker 6: Van der Walt argues that while CPSA undeniably contributed to
Speaker 6: working class struggles since the nineteen forties, a critical look
Speaker 6: reveals that they made consistent cricketures of the pre CPSA left.
Speaker 6: They sort of established themselves as the true vanguard in
Speaker 6: the fight for South Africa's liberation. So they portrayed the
Speaker 6: pre CPSA left in two main currents, the Proto Bolsheviks
Speaker 6: considered true socialists and everyone else The pre CPSA left
Speaker 6: was deemed a failure, with the Proto Bolsheviks credited for
Speaker 6: pioneer and socialist work among black workers. According to their narrative,
Speaker 6: it was only in the late nineteen twenties the CPSAS
Speaker 6: adoption of the Native republic thesis and Marxist Leninist ideas
Speaker 6: that the national question was adequately addressed. Anarchism and syndicalism
Speaker 6: are portrayed as marginal and bothersome predominantly white movements that
Speaker 6: at best underestimated the significance of national oppression were at
Speaker 6: worst endorsed white supremacy and segregation. This interpretation, of course,
Speaker 6: positions a CPSA slash SACP as the sole bearers of
Speaker 6: revolutionary socialist solutions the national question, while ironically erasing the
Speaker 6: history of early African socialist and syndicalist radicalism. So wrapping
Speaker 6: up a bit here, we delved into the intricate history
Speaker 6: of anarchism and syndicalism in South Africa, uncovering a movement
Speaker 6: that played a significant role in Southern Africa from the
Speaker 6: eighteen eighties to the nineteen twenties and consistently grappled with
Speaker 6: the complexities of the national question. We've seen a multi
Speaker 6: racial and internationalist movement marked by a steadfast opposition to
Speaker 6: racial discrimination and a commitment to interracial labor organization and
Speaker 6: the unity of the Wigan class. They had a vision
Speaker 6: of a society rooted in class solidarity, of an industrial
Speaker 6: republic distinct from the conventional nation state and in lockstep
Speaker 6: with an international industrial republic. Now, despite the decline of
Speaker 6: anarchism and cynicalism in the years following the founding of
Speaker 6: the CPSA slash sacp Anarchism is still alive today in
Speaker 6: South Africa. The Zaba Laza Anarchist Communist Front or ZACF
Speaker 6: is a specific anarchist political organization based in Johannesburg, South
Speaker 6: Africa and founded on May Day in two thousand and three.
Speaker 6: The organization operates on an individual membership basis by invitation only,
Speaker 6: emphasising theoretical and strategic unity among members. The Zaba Lazas,
Speaker 6: a line with the anarchist communist Platformists and a specifistic
Speaker 6: traditions within anarchism, subscribe in to the idea of an
Speaker 6: active minority pushing anarchist ideas within larger movements. In fact,
Speaker 6: unlike the anarchisynicalists, the Zablazas don't aim to build mass
Speaker 6: anarchist movements, but rather to participate in existing social movements,
Speaker 6: spreading anarchist principles within heterogeneous organizations. Zablaza advocates for direct democracy,
Speaker 6: mutual aid, horizontalism, class combativeness, direct action, and class independence.
Speaker 6: It emerged during a time of political closure within trade
Speaker 6: unions which were controlled by the African National Congress government.
Speaker 6: It oriented itself towards emerging social movements such as the
Speaker 6: Anti Privatization Forum and the Landless People's Movement, aim into
Speaker 6: advance anarchist principles within these movements. Sablas's work includes popular
Speaker 6: political education, combatant reformists and authoritarians, tendencies, an advocation for
Speaker 6: the independence of social movements from political parties and electoral politics.
Speaker 6: So that's the story the history of anarchism and cynicalism
Speaker 6: and South Africa. Obviously this is a summary, but it
Speaker 6: goes to show the influence that these movements have had
Speaker 6: in shape and the history of that often forgotten region
Speaker 6: of the world. Thanks for joining me once again, or
Speaker 6: Powell to all the people.
Speaker 5: Yes, welcome to it could happen here a podcast that
Speaker 5: much of the chagrin of my upstairs neighbors is being
Speaker 5: recorded at almost three in the morning. Is being recorded
Speaker 5: at three in the morning instead of at any normal
Speaker 5: time because a bunch of protests broke out across college
Speaker 5: campuses against the genocide and Palestine. We will cover that
Speaker 5: at some point very soon. However, Comma, there is this
Speaker 5: episode to be done. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and
Speaker 5: this episode is something a little different. So there's an
Speaker 5: element of Trump's Agenda forty seven that we didn't really
Speaker 5: talk about in our episodes. That's actually a pretty significant
Speaker 5: amount of the material, and that's Trump's trade policy. And
Speaker 5: this is sort of surprisingly a very large part of
Speaker 5: his pitch. The sort of gist of it is that
Speaker 5: Trump's appeal to like the white working class TM is Okay,
Speaker 5: we're going to do a bunch of protectionist terrorists. This
Speaker 5: is going to bring jobs back to the US by
Speaker 5: imposing costs and manufacturing in other countries, etc. Et cetera.
Speaker 5: This will bring jobs back to America and it will
Speaker 5: make America greater or some shit. Now, the center piece
Speaker 5: of this is what's called the Reciprocal Tariff Bill, and
Speaker 5: it's not that complicated. Basically, what it says is if
Speaker 5: a country imposes a tariff on an American good, the
Speaker 5: US imposes an identical tariff on that tariff. It's designed
Speaker 5: to basically automatically start trade wars. Now, the reason we
Speaker 5: didn't cover this in the original Legenda forty seven slate
Speaker 5: of episodes is that even in the worst case scenario
Speaker 5: where Trump takes power like a coup, and you know,
Speaker 5: the sort of power of anyone to oppose the magnificantly curtailed.
Speaker 5: I don't think you can get this one passed. And
Speaker 5: the reason I don't think you can get this one
Speaker 5: passed is because, you know, as it turns out, this
Speaker 5: package and we're going to sort of explore this a
Speaker 5: little bit. Actually seriously, messing with tariffs is something that
Speaker 5: is really really going to piss off a lot of
Speaker 5: corporations that actually matter. Now, Okay, So like I could
Speaker 5: have just done the episode anyways, led with that and
Speaker 5: just given a sort of you know, just given the
Speaker 5: disclaimer that like it's probably not gonna happen. But I
Speaker 5: think there's a more interesting story here that hasn't really
Speaker 5: been talked about about the origin of basically the framework
Speaker 5: of modern American politics, both on the right and on
Speaker 5: the left, because they both emerge I think from a
Speaker 5: series of arguments about trade that has been kind of
Speaker 5: broadly forgotten. I think that's to our detriment. And the
Speaker 5: product of this is that there's been a sort of
Speaker 5: raft of arguments and I've seen this as much from
Speaker 5: the leftist from the right, that Trump's support for tariffs
Speaker 5: and particularly the sort of trade spat he got in
Speaker 5: with China from twenty eighteen to twenty nineteen marks the
Speaker 5: end of the sort of like neoliberal free trade regime
Speaker 5: and the emergence of like new nationalist protections against free trade.
Speaker 5: That's like the neo economic system that's replaced neoliberalism. And
Speaker 5: I am very skeptical of this. And the reason why
Speaker 5: I'm very skeptical of this is because I, like when
Speaker 5: I was coming up as a leftist, I spent a
Speaker 5: bunch of time seriously became involved in like irl left
Speaker 5: organizing around twenty seventeen. I'd done some stuff in like
Speaker 5: twenty thirteen before then, but that meant that, you know,
Speaker 5: a lot of the stuff I was reading was accounts
Speaker 5: of what was called the global justice movements, which was
Speaker 5: alter globalization, anti globalization. There's like it has it has
Speaker 5: a million names, but it was it was a series
Speaker 5: of mass protest movements against the sort of raft of
Speaker 5: free trade agreements coming out of the nineties. So and
Speaker 5: you get a very very different picture of the history
Speaker 5: of free trade that is sort of broader and more
Speaker 5: expansive in the history of the resistance to it. Then
Speaker 5: you get if you just sort of like, you know,
Speaker 5: assume neoliberalism has been the same always and Trump is
Speaker 5: the sort of aberration to it. Now, Trump's status as
Speaker 5: an aberration something that I question. I mean, you know,
Speaker 5: the trade war that he got into is something, you know,
Speaker 5: it's it's it is different. But I think there's a
Speaker 5: lot of there's a lot of sort of hype around
Speaker 5: Trump's like opposition to free trade. And like one of
Speaker 5: the big things you know that Trump ran on was
Speaker 5: pulling out of NAFTA, and he did. He did pull
Speaker 5: out of DAFTA. However, COMA he then set up a
Speaker 5: new trade NAFTA. By the way, it's a North American
Speaker 5: Free Trade Agreement. It's really shit. We're going to talk
Speaker 5: a bit more about what exactly it did later, but
Speaker 5: you know, it's broadly seen, I think rightly as something
Speaker 5: that smashed both huge portions of what was left of
Speaker 5: the American manufacturing economy and you know, the parts of
Speaker 5: the economy that had been rebuilt in the eighties and
Speaker 5: also just absolutely annihilating the mechicangy cultural industry. For reasons
Speaker 5: that we will we will explain it a bit. It's
Speaker 5: now becoming extremely deeply unpopular because unbelievable numbers of workers
Speaker 5: lost their and you know, the the jobs that they
Speaker 5: got afterwards had shittier wages. You know, entire communities are ravage,
Speaker 5: et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So Trump, you know,
Speaker 5: famously campaigns I'm pulling out of this deal, but he
Speaker 5: replaces it with something called USMCA. Now here's the thing
Speaker 5: about this deal. This is basically just NAFTA with slightly
Speaker 5: stronger carve outs for the auto industry about like what
Speaker 5: percentage of the parts of vehicles had to be produced
Speaker 5: in the US and some like slightly stronger labored like protections,
Speaker 5: which is like fine, but it's it's basically the same deal, right,
Speaker 5: So you know you have to take this whole sort
Speaker 5: of like a Trump is like the anti free trade
Speaker 5: thing with a grain of salt. And look at again
Speaker 5: this deal they negotiated, which is just NAFTA. It is literally,
Speaker 5: after all of the hype of him pulling out of NAFTA,
Speaker 5: he did NAFTA again. Now this something very interesting that
Speaker 5: I don't think people remember. Obaba also opposed NAFTA, and
Speaker 5: they came into office and then nothing ever fucking happened.
Speaker 5: The NAFTA, So, you know, the sort of like the
Speaker 5: rumors of naftas Dubais have been greatly exaggerated. But Comma,
Speaker 5: the story of the building of opposition to NAFTA is
Speaker 5: very very interesting. So something I don't think most people
Speaker 5: understand is that the modern American left is descended from
Speaker 5: the Zapatistas. Very specifically. We're gonna one day cover the
Speaker 5: Sapatista uprising in some detail, but the sort of cliff
Speaker 5: nosed version is that on January first, nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 5: the Zapatistas, who are you named after the great Mexican
Speaker 5: revolutionary hero Melio Zapata, staged in uprising in Mexico. They
Speaker 5: seized a bunch of cities very quickly. They were sort
Speaker 5: of driven out of those cities, but eventually they took
Speaker 5: control of a decent part of the territory of the
Speaker 5: Mexican state of Chiapas. The Zapatisa stage is uprising for
Speaker 5: a number of reasons. The most famous of them is
Speaker 5: that January first, nineteen ninety four is the year the
Speaker 5: NATHA took effect. One of the things about this free
Speaker 5: trade agreement is that it in order to ratify it,
Speaker 5: the Mexican governments changed the constitution, and the part of
Speaker 5: the constitution they eliminated was the part that had secured
Speaker 5: collective ownership of a bunch of land for indigenous people,
Speaker 5: and this would allow corporations to seize and control the season,
Speaker 5: controlled the indigenous lands, exploit for resources, kicked the people
Speaker 5: off of it, and kill them. Now, this obviously was
Speaker 5: unacceptable to the Zapatistas. They go into revolt. What I
Speaker 5: think people don't realize is the zapatisis what the Zapatisis
Speaker 5: did next, which is holding these a series of these
Speaker 5: things called encuentros like encounters. Sorry, my Spanish is not
Speaker 5: as good as it once was, and it was never great,
Speaker 5: but you know, in which they invited you know, sort
Speaker 5: of leftist activists from all over the world to get together.
Speaker 5: And this is the thing that re built the left
Speaker 5: after the absolute catastrophe of the death of the old
Speaker 5: left around the collapse of the Soviet Union, which sort
Speaker 5: of annihilated like the sort of old left like communist
Speaker 5: political parties and you know Usherton, like the pure era
Speaker 5: of the march and neoliberalism, and the activists that came
Speaker 5: out of these encounters go back to you know, go
Speaker 5: back to their respective countries and they start and you know,
Speaker 5: they're they're organizing against these trade against you know, these
Speaker 5: series of free trade deals, and they start doing what's
Speaker 5: becalled what's become known as summit hopping. I think the
Speaker 5: most famous of these in America is what's become known
Speaker 5: as the Battle of Seattle, the nineteen ninety nine giant
Speaker 5: protest against the World Trade Organization summit. Yeah, and this
Speaker 5: sort of you know, and this starts from about nineteen
Speaker 5: ninety nine to nine to eleven. There's a huge wave
Speaker 5: of these well, I mean it goes on after nine eleven,
Speaker 5: but nine to eleven really damages it. But there's this
Speaker 5: massive it's like really the first sort of real like
Speaker 5: mass mobilizations and social movements like in the US sense,
Speaker 5: like there's a stuff in the anti nuclear whom of
Speaker 5: the eighties, but this is this is the first really
Speaker 5: big sort of like resurrection of the left. And I
Speaker 5: think importantly for us, like the people who people who
Speaker 5: found occupy like David Graeber for example, is someone who
Speaker 5: starts doing politics like during this period dream alter globalization,
Speaker 5: during these sort of protests, and those people, those are
Speaker 5: the people who build occupy, and you know, occupy for
Speaker 5: whatever whatever else you can say about it, Occupy is
Speaker 5: the single event that brought that like drag the American
Speaker 5: left kicking and screaming out of irrelevance and all of
Speaker 5: that shit. Everything, you know, every all of the sort
Speaker 5: of organizational tenets of occupy, all of its sort of ideology.
Speaker 5: That stuff is all stuff from multi globalization, right, and
Speaker 5: you know, the sort of tenants of like direct democracy,
Speaker 5: of the sort of like the sort of economic egalitarianism,
Speaker 5: this opposition to free trade. This you know, this whole
Speaker 5: thing about the way that the World Trade Organization and
Speaker 5: the World Bank, you know, use sort of economic structuring
Speaker 5: deals to devastate economies and like turn entire nations into
Speaker 5: sort of debt peons. This is all ault globalization stuff.
Speaker 5: And this movement is very, very powerful and very successful.
Speaker 5: Even the sort of arch like you know, by by
Speaker 5: by by the time you hit twenty sixteen, right, this
Speaker 5: has reshaped politics in the US to the extent that
Speaker 5: like arch neoliberal Hillary Clinton says she's openly in fa
Speaker 5: like openly says she's in favor of renegotiating NAFTA and
Speaker 5: opposes her own trans Pacific Partnership, which is the last
Speaker 5: of the sort of giant free trade deals that would
Speaker 5: eventually like die and go up and smoke with Trump. Right,
Speaker 5: I'm going to read a passage from David Graver's piece
Speaker 5: to Shock of Victory about what actually happened UH dreamed
Speaker 5: this movement. This is section about free trade agreements. All
Speaker 5: the ambitious free trade treaties planned since nineteen ninety eight
Speaker 5: have failed. The MIIA was routed the FTAA the focus
Speaker 5: of the actions in Quebec, and Miami stopped that in
Speaker 5: its tracks. Most of us remember the two thousand and
Speaker 5: three FTAA, some mainly for introducing the quote unquote Miami
Speaker 5: model of extreme police respression against even obviously nonviolent civil resistance.
Speaker 5: It was that, but we forget that this was more
Speaker 5: than anything, the enraged flailings of a pack of extremely
Speaker 5: sore losers. Miami was the meeting where the FTAA was
Speaker 5: definitively killed. Now no one is even talking about broad,
Speaker 5: ambitious treaties on that scale. The US is reduced to
Speaker 5: pushing from minor country to country trade packs with additional
Speaker 5: allies like South Korea and Peru, or at best deals
Speaker 5: like caf TA uniting its remaining client states in Central America.
Speaker 5: And it's not even clear we'll manage to pull that off.
Speaker 5: And this is what we've seen from you know, sort
Speaker 5: of projecting forward from the future, from the two thousands
Speaker 5: when this is written. Free trade was not killed by
Speaker 5: Trump or shijianping. These free trade agreements, if anyone, was
Speaker 5: killed by the Zappatistas and the global justice and the
Speaker 5: global justice movement. That the that, you know, the sort
Speaker 5: of like in contros and the Zappatista is built.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 5: One things that Appatistas did not build is the producting
Speaker 5: services that support this podcast. And we are we are
Speaker 5: back from products and servicing, products and servicing. That is
Speaker 5: slightly ominous. Now, the modern left isn't the only thing
Speaker 5: that sort of descended from the backlash to free trade right.
Speaker 5: We've we've you know, we we've gone over the extent
Speaker 5: to which the left is built off of this stuff.
Speaker 5: But much of the modern right is descended from the
Speaker 5: sort of ross perrot like right wing nationalists backlash to
Speaker 5: the same stuff. I think probably the most the most
Speaker 5: famous link between that era and this era is Alex Jones.
Speaker 5: This is the reason that like Alex Jones, and people
Speaker 5: like him screaming about like scream constantly about globalists, right,
Speaker 5: because you know, the global justice movement has two kind
Speaker 5: of wings. There's or you know what was called anti globalizition.
Speaker 5: It's two wings. One wing is a sort is a
Speaker 5: leftist wing, which is like, okay, we actually support like
Speaker 5: the we know, we support the global like movement of
Speaker 5: ideas and people, but we but you know what, what
Speaker 5: what globalization and free trade actually means is locking people
Speaker 5: down in their countries with militarized borders while capital boost
Speaker 5: freely between them. And we think that's fucking bad. There
Speaker 5: was also another you know, there was also the right
Speaker 5: ring reaction, which is this incredibly right ring nationalist reaction,
Speaker 5: which is that like, ah, like these these like rootless
Speaker 5: cosmopolitan globalists are uh are like like you know, taking
Speaker 5: all of our jobs and moving them to like Mexico,
Speaker 5: and you know they've like sold they're like sold out
Speaker 5: the American people. And you know, like obviously this stuff
Speaker 5: is just it starts anti it starts like as anti
Speaker 5: semitic dog whistles and just gets I mean like like okay,
Speaker 5: these are like the loudest dog whistles of all time. Right,
Speaker 5: But you know, they get increasingly anti semitic, and this
Speaker 5: is the kind of stuff you know that Alex Jones
Speaker 5: is doing. And this is the kind of sort of
Speaker 5: writing politics that winds out over so sort of like
Speaker 5: neo conservatisms more like sort of hoorah free trade. We're
Speaker 5: going to use like the might of the American empire
Speaker 5: to like you know, spread sort of like this very
Speaker 5: specific model of capitalism to other countries. And you get
Speaker 5: the sort of Trump style like fuck every other country,
Speaker 5: We're gonna kind of do tariffs and stuff. Now, what
Speaker 5: I think is very interesting. So what Trump eventually sort
Speaker 5: of winds up, you know, producing as a discourse, I
Speaker 5: guess you could say, is is this is this image
Speaker 5: of Okay, so, like the thing that's holding back the
Speaker 5: American worker is China because all of our jobs are
Speaker 5: being sent to China, and so if we just put
Speaker 5: more tariffs on China and we defeat China geopolitically, everything
Speaker 5: will sort of like be great in the American nation.
Speaker 5: Like you the white worker are going to have jobs again,
Speaker 5: Like everything's going to go back to the way they were.
Speaker 5: And what's fascinating about this is that, you know, as
Speaker 5: the trade war's intensifying, and then mid Light twenty tens
Speaker 5: in China, there is a parallel discourse which is almost identical,
Speaker 5: where Chinese nationalists will do this thing where they talk
Speaker 5: about like breaking through the Great Ming as a solution
Speaker 5: to evolution. We talked about involution on the show before.
Speaker 5: Is this concept that's very popular in China right now,
Speaker 5: where you know, it's becoming increasingly clear that like a
Speaker 5: working hard is not going to actually get you any
Speaker 5: more money than you're getting now, Like you're not going
Speaker 5: to get ahead in life. You're just sort of stuck.
Speaker 5: And so you're stuck in this condition of putting more
Speaker 5: and more effort into nothing. And the Chinese nationalist argument
Speaker 5: is that if you, if you can geopolitically dif feed
Speaker 5: the US, China will sort of like break out of
Speaker 5: its wage stagnation and economic stagnation. And so you know,
Speaker 5: what you have is this very very dangerous collision of
Speaker 5: these two sort of like right wing nationalisms that are
Speaker 5: like offering these really sort of categorically false assertions that
Speaker 5: if you just follow their sort of nationalists geopolitical agenda,
Speaker 5: then all of the sort of class issues that everyone's
Speaker 5: dealing with will suddenly magically work themselves out. Now contra
Speaker 5: this and contra I think the argument that even that
Speaker 5: sort of just you know, the argument that I was
Speaker 5: talking about before, that like Trump and the sort of
Speaker 5: nationalists like economic policy and discourse from China like represents
Speaker 5: something you know, seismic, like a seismic change, and like
Speaker 5: trade policy, that signals the end of neoliberalism. I want
Speaker 5: to come back to the point of will Trump actually
Speaker 5: be able to implement any of the stuff even if
Speaker 5: he had sort of near dictatorial power, And I think
Speaker 5: the answer to that is no. The reason I think
Speaker 5: the answer to that is no is that, you know,
Speaker 5: one of the old observations about quote unquote free trade
Speaker 5: from the global just movement is that, Okay, if you
Speaker 5: look at what quote unquote trade is, right, international trade,
Speaker 5: huge amount of it is literally the same company moving
Speaker 5: its own resources from one place to another. Now, the
Speaker 5: problem is the more expensive it is for corporation to
Speaker 5: do this, the more pissed off they get. Right, and
Speaker 5: this means that this kind of like tariff war bullshit,
Speaker 5: And this happened through the Trump administration that pissed off
Speaker 5: a lot of people. And if if you know, and
Speaker 5: Trump is you know, his intention is to start an
Speaker 5: even larger and more powerful series of trade wars. This
Speaker 5: is going to piss off a lot of people who
Speaker 5: actually matter in the sort of in the American political system,
Speaker 5: which is to say, a lot of shareholders and a
Speaker 5: lot of CEOs, and you know. And so I think
Speaker 5: the fairly obvious inclusion is that what actually happens here
Speaker 5: is you get exactly the same kind of shit that
Speaker 5: happened with Trump's like quote unquote pull out of NAFTA,
Speaker 5: where he makes like one or two symbolic gestures and
Speaker 5: then everything continues as normal and he declares victory. Now,
Speaker 5: the second problem I have with people looking at this
Speaker 5: as a sort of new regime is the way that
Speaker 5: they're thinking about this sort of like tiff and subsidy
Speaker 5: regime as something that's that's not a part of neoliberalism, right,
Speaker 5: Like the sort of theoretical ideal of neoliberalism is countries
Speaker 5: aren't supposed to do tarriffs. Countries aren't supposed to be
Speaker 5: able to do like quote unquote protectionism. So we're not
Speaker 5: supposed to give subsis and manufacturers and everyone's supposed to
Speaker 5: like compete on a free and equal trade playing field.
Speaker 5: This has never been true and in fact, what free
Speaker 5: trade has meant in practice, and this has been true
Speaker 5: since the founding of the World Trade Organization. What it
Speaker 5: means is that Western countries get to impose terriffs and
Speaker 5: manufacturing subsidies and non Western countries don't. Right, even in
Speaker 5: the WTO, there's a bunch of random carve outs for
Speaker 5: like fucking like random workers in Germany and stuff. This
Speaker 5: is also a part of like literally a part of
Speaker 5: what start of the Zapatista uprising. I mean we talked about,
Speaker 5: you know, the primary cause, like the elimination of collective
Speaker 5: ownership from Mexican constitution. But another huge problem is what
Speaker 5: what NAFTA was going to do is force a bunch
Speaker 5: of Mexican corn farmers to compete with American corn farmers. Now, okay,
Speaker 5: if it was literally just corn farmers from these two
Speaker 5: countries competing, like Mexican corn farmers probably eventually cauld out
Speaker 5: compete American corn farmers because Americans are fucking dogshit at farming.
Speaker 5: But under the terms of NAFTA, and this is again
Speaker 5: the thing that's been true of free trade this whole time,
Speaker 5: they have to compete with subsidized American corn. This is impossible.
Speaker 5: Mexican farmers got fucking annihilated. All of their land was
Speaker 5: seized by corporations, and you know, it has brought sort
Speaker 5: of devastation and ruined to the Mexican economy ever since.
Speaker 5: This has been absolutely great for the ruling class because
Speaker 5: all of these farmers who suddenly like you know, can't
Speaker 5: afford to keep their farms anymore, were forced into sort
Speaker 5: of like labor and a bunch of shitty sweatshops that
Speaker 5: were set up from NAFTA. So this worked great from
Speaker 5: the perspective of American capital. But again, if you look
Speaker 5: at what actually happened here, right, all of the sort
Speaker 5: of like rhetorica of free trade, you know, like sort
Speaker 5: of like fades into myst and face of the reality
Speaker 5: of one of the great industrial policy programs in the
Speaker 5: in the history of world economies, which is the American
Speaker 5: subsidization of its own fucking agriculture. And you know, this
Speaker 5: isn't considered in the quote unquote industrial policy or like
Speaker 5: industrial like government planning or whatever, like largely because people
Speaker 5: have this weird bias when they talk about government planning
Speaker 5: that it only is supposed to apply to like, oh,
Speaker 5: government planning means when like someone like plans steel outputs
Speaker 5: or some shit, but like, no, like the actual large
Speaker 5: scale economic plan that goes on the US is the
Speaker 5: unfat like billions and billions of billions and billions of
Speaker 5: dollars will be pour into the agricultural industry every year. So,
Speaker 5: you know, if if you look at the stuff that
Speaker 5: everyone's claiming of these sort of new innovations that are
Speaker 5: like the end of neoliberalism, right, it's like, oh my god.
Speaker 5: Other countries are putting up like protectionists subsidy things, Like
Speaker 5: they're having their you know, people are like trying to
Speaker 5: make microchips and they're having like state sponsored programs to
Speaker 5: do microshrips. It's like, well, they're just doing with microchips
Speaker 5: what the US has been doing with cord this entire time. Right.
Speaker 5: What's really changing to some extent is that, you know,
Speaker 5: the deal had always been that Western countries get to
Speaker 5: impost Harris and AD manufacturing subsidies and non Western countries don't.
Speaker 5: And I think part of what's weighing people out is that, like,
Speaker 5: you know, China has actually been kind of attempting to
Speaker 5: break the West monopoly on being able to do with
Speaker 5: industrial policy, and this has caused a bunch of people
Speaker 5: to really severely overestimate the extent to which like this
Speaker 5: is an actual break from previous regimes of trade and capital. Now,
Speaker 5: another point that I want to make that I I've
Speaker 5: talked about this before on the show, but I want
Speaker 5: to kind of briefly touch on it again because I
Speaker 5: think it's really important and it's really badly understood. Is
Speaker 5: that for all of the sort of discourse about how
Speaker 5: like a China's like entering into economic competition with the West,
Speaker 5: and it's like increasingly using the party to like pursue
Speaker 5: nationalist aims instead of like following the market, if you
Speaker 5: look at what's actually going on in China, despite all
Speaker 5: the hype about like China and the US are decoupling
Speaker 5: their economies, or like China is trying to make its
Speaker 5: own domestic silicon industry, the actual tendency in Chinese economic
Speaker 5: policy is towards further integration and increasing foreign otoship. China
Speaker 5: has a lot of provisions about foreign companies needing to
Speaker 5: be in partnership with Chinese companies in order to operate
Speaker 5: in China. There's always been massive restrictions on how much
Speaker 5: stock a foreign company can own in Chinese companies, and
Speaker 5: these restrictions in sector, sector after sector after sector are
Speaker 5: being lifted, and so you have to sort of look
Speaker 5: at this, you know, the sort of like surface level
Speaker 5: nationalist narratives about like, ah, we're entering an era of
Speaker 5: like warring like like warring mutually exclusive economic trading series,
Speaker 5: with the reality of China being like, no, please foreign capital,
Speaker 5: like you can operate here without us. It's going to
Speaker 5: be great just to keep keep keep pumping more capital
Speaker 5: in if we all, if we all work together, all
Speaker 5: of the sort of porgeows you will keep making money together.
Speaker 5: And I think all of this leads to something the
Speaker 5: last thing I want touch on, which is what's actually
Speaker 5: happening here and the thing that's actually happening here and
Speaker 5: the problem, the thing that's actually causing all of these
Speaker 5: sort of like all like the sort of focus on
Speaker 5: trade itself and the sort of Trumpian nationalists, we can
Speaker 5: solve all your problems by trade competition. What's happening is
Speaker 5: that after about the nineteen sixties, because of sort of
Speaker 5: structural manufacturing of a capacity under consumption production, you know,
Speaker 5: industrial production is zero sum, right, you can't increase production
Speaker 5: rates in a country without that, you know, without that
Speaker 5: production coming at the cost of another country. And this
Speaker 5: is this is because and wow, stop me if you
Speaker 5: heard this one before. This is because of fucking capitalism
Speaker 5: and what Trump is trying to do and what you know,
Speaker 5: to a lesser extent sort of xihiping, and what to
Speaker 5: you know, these sort of Chinese nationalists are trying to
Speaker 5: do is turn you know, they're trying to stand on
Speaker 5: a beach and order the tide to recede in order
Speaker 5: to stop the coming class war. They are trying to say, no,
Speaker 5: we can go back to the era where production wasn't
Speaker 5: zero s. We can do this as sort of terrorists.
Speaker 5: We can go back to the golden age of both
Speaker 5: corporations and unions making moor corporations and workers like making
Speaker 5: money together and the sort of like national collaborationist project.
Speaker 5: And they're doing this in large parts because they are
Speaker 5: watching the same thing that you and I are watching,
Speaker 5: the same thing. That's the reason this episode is being
Speaker 5: recorded at fucking three in the morning, is at of
Speaker 5: a normal time, which is that all across the US,
Speaker 5: and you know, increasingly all across the world. You can
Speaker 5: fucking see the working class starting to organize again. You
Speaker 5: can see it starting to wake up, you can see
Speaker 5: it starting to mobilize. And this whole fucking thing, all
Speaker 5: of Trump, right, this entire sort of racist, senophobic nationalist project,
Speaker 5: is just utter dread that Ferguson and the Black Revolution
Speaker 5: put into the fucking hearts of these people. And if
Speaker 5: we fight hard enough, we fight smart enough, and we
Speaker 5: fight organized enough in Shilah, we will see the fucking
Speaker 5: day when these people's nightmare comes true and we never
Speaker 5: have to hear another word from these fuckers again. It
Speaker 5: says been it could happen here. Hi.
Speaker 8: Everyone, welcome to the podcast. It's me today and I'm
Speaker 8: joined by Meghan Burdett, who is the director of research
Speaker 8: at the Kurdish Peace Institute.
Speaker 9: Hi, Meghan, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 8: Yeah, thanks for joining us. So what we wanted to
Speaker 8: talk about today was these local elections that have been
Speaker 8: happening in Turkey in the last week or so. We're
Speaker 8: recording in very early aprils that it happened I think
Speaker 8: towards the end of.
Speaker 9: March, right, yeah, March thirty first.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So can you explain to listeners First of all,
Speaker 8: like I mean, I've heard about these Turkish local elections
Speaker 8: almost constantly for the past several months, because I hear
Speaker 8: about them from Kurdish migrants leaving Turkey. Almost every time
Speaker 8: I'm at the border, I meet people and they tell me,
Speaker 8: can you explain sort of the context of these elections,
Speaker 8: the concerns going into them.
Speaker 9: Yeah, of course. So first off, these are the first
Speaker 9: elections in Turkey following the presidential and parla mentory vote
Speaker 9: last year that was seen as a huge disappointment for
Speaker 9: the opposition and also for a couple of separate reasons
Speaker 9: and a couple of similar reasons for the pro Kurdish
Speaker 9: political movement as well. The Opposition underperformed last year. They
Speaker 9: were not able to defeat Erdowan as the polling and
Speaker 9: the sentiment in the country had suggested that they would,
Speaker 9: and the pro Kurdish political movement also underperformed as well.
Speaker 9: They did not win as many seats or as many
Speaker 9: votes as they usually do, and a lot of that
Speaker 9: was attributed to the very complex Alliance decisions they made,
Speaker 9: choosing not to run their own presidential candidate and instead
Speaker 9: ask their voters to vote for the CHP, which is
Speaker 9: the main opposition party that has a history of being
Speaker 9: very nationalist and violent and exclusionary towards Kurds. Though things
Speaker 9: have changed in these past twenty years, voters didn't understand
Speaker 9: that a lot of voters weren't happy with that. And
Speaker 9: then there were some local level issues with selections of
Speaker 9: candidates as well, and then of course the climate of
Speaker 9: very severe political repression, and had the opposition one there
Speaker 9: was a lot of hope that it would have started
Speaker 9: to change things on the Kurdish issue in Turkey. You know,
Speaker 9: from what I'd been hearing from people, there were prospects
Speaker 9: of political prisoners being released, of contact between the state
Speaker 9: and of delah Ojalon being re established, which could have
Speaker 9: been the opening of a new peace process if you
Speaker 9: follow this. You know, the PKK declared a ceasefire prior
Speaker 9: to the elections. They initially said that it was following
Speaker 9: the earthquake in order to not allow the conflict to
Speaker 9: intervene with humanitarian efforts, but they did very explicitly extend
Speaker 9: it through the elections. And the discussions around that that
Speaker 9: I heard in Iraqi, Kurdistan, in Northeast Syria and in
Speaker 9: Europe made it very clear that that was an opening
Speaker 9: to hopefully be able to leverage it into a larger
Speaker 9: piece process were there to be a political change happen.
Speaker 9: So for Kurds, the situation did not improve. Ardwan continued
Speaker 9: his crackdown and his military aggression against Kurds in Iraq
Speaker 9: and Syria, and for democracy in Turkey, for the condition
Speaker 9: of the opposition, for the condition of all the groups
Speaker 9: that pressed under Aerdowan's regime, whether that's women, whether that's workers,
Speaker 9: whether that's the earthquake victims that have been left behind,
Speaker 9: things didn't get better. So these elections were an opportunity
Speaker 9: for people to register their disapproval in a way that
Speaker 9: I think many might have wished that they could have
Speaker 9: a year ago. And that disapproval was registered for the
Speaker 9: first time. Air Dowon's party, the Justice and Development Party
Speaker 9: or the AKP, was not the first place party in Turkey.
Speaker 9: The main opposition CHP actually overtook them the pro Kurdish
Speaker 9: People's Equality and Democracy Party or the DEM Party, which
Speaker 9: used to be the HDP, So if I call it
Speaker 9: the HDP, I'm sorry. Went Actually their results were much
Speaker 9: more in line with what they had done in the past.
Speaker 9: They performed you know, right on standard, they actually won
Speaker 9: more municipalities than they did in twenty nineteen, and there
Speaker 9: was a lot of enthusiasm for change among Kurds, among
Speaker 9: supporters of the opposition, you know, among people who I
Speaker 9: think had wanted to see things start to move in
Speaker 9: a more democratic direction last year. So that was a
Speaker 9: very big deal for that reason. And it also shows
Speaker 9: the fact that Airedowan is not necessarily as invincible in
Speaker 9: twenty twenty eight as people feared he would be.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So talking of invincibility, I think that's a good
Speaker 8: kind of key into our next topic, which is that
Speaker 8: the elections weren't exactly like a smooth kind of I
Speaker 8: guess concession by Idowan and by his party. Right, can
Speaker 8: you explain to people who aren't familiar with this what happened?
Speaker 9: Yeah, So, to start, before the elections, over seventy five
Speaker 9: of voters who supported successful pro Kurdish mayoral candidates had
Speaker 9: their elected representation taken away from them. The government removed
Speaker 9: and imprisoned elected mayors and replaced them with regime loyalist
Speaker 9: trustees who essentially ruled these municipalities on direct orders from
Speaker 9: Erdowan in Ankarap. So this was on an unfair playing
Speaker 9: field for the Kurdish political movement to begin with, very
Speaker 9: unfair playing field for the main opposition as well. At
Speaker 9: Kreme Mamoluh's the very popular mayor of Istanbul, who just
Speaker 9: won reelection by a very large margin, as a criminal
Speaker 9: case against him that could have him banned from politics,
Speaker 9: So this was very difficult in the Kurdish regions. There
Speaker 9: were many many irregularities on election day. One that a
Speaker 9: lot of people were discussing were these so called mobile
Speaker 9: voters where the government actually sent members of these security
Speaker 9: forces predominantly from Western Turkey into Kurdish cities to vote
Speaker 9: in large groups for ruling Akap. You know, there's a
Speaker 9: lot of videos taken by local media, local politicians and
Speaker 9: activists challenging these people, asking them where they're from, and
Speaker 9: then videos of them all crowding into the airports and
Speaker 9: back on their buses flying back to Western Turkey the
Speaker 9: next day, so you know, they're not even making a
Speaker 9: pretense of being local voters. That shifted the results in
Speaker 9: some districts. In Chernock, which is a very heavily militarized
Speaker 9: province where the government bases a lot of its military campaigns.
Speaker 9: You know, into the occupied regions of Iraq and Syria
Speaker 9: from the pro Kurdish political movement alleges that these voters
Speaker 9: shifted the outcome. So you had that kind of outright
Speaker 9: attempts at theft in addition to the context of repression.
Speaker 9: And then most brazenly, just one day after the election,
Speaker 9: the local provincial election board denied a mandate of victory,
Speaker 9: you know, essentially the documents certifying that a candidate has
Speaker 9: won the elections and will be allowed to assume office
Speaker 9: to the pro Kurdish candidate of Billa Zaidon in the
Speaker 9: province of Vaughan, which is a heavily Kurdish province where
Speaker 9: the dem Party won all fourteen district municipalities and the
Speaker 9: metropolitan municipality as well. So the local election authority essentially said, no,
Speaker 9: you can't run. There's been a last minute legal finding
Speaker 9: that you're unfit to run for office, as there always is, right,
Speaker 9: and then they tried to give the municipality to the
Speaker 9: candidate from Erdowon's party, the AKP, who got less than
Speaker 9: half of the number of votes.
Speaker 8: Right yeah, so kind of yeah, and validating the results.
Speaker 8: We're going to break briefly for an advert here and
Speaker 8: then we'll be back, right, We're back. So when they
Speaker 8: tried to invalidate these results right into install representatives, I
Speaker 8: guess you could call them that who didn't win the
Speaker 8: popular vote. There was like a significant street response to that, right,
Speaker 8: can you talk us through that? And then the repression
Speaker 8: of it and the results of it.
Speaker 9: Absolutely so. There were mass demonstrations in Vaughan in other
Speaker 9: Kurdish provinces, and these are people coming out who not
Speaker 9: ten years ago saw the military raising their cities to
Speaker 9: the ground, killing civilians in the streets. This is a
Speaker 9: very costly endeavor for Kurdish people in these provinces to
Speaker 9: go protest. That's why you haven't seen it to such
Speaker 9: a degree as was seen in the nineties, in the
Speaker 9: early two thousands, since the collapse of the peace process
Speaker 9: and that violent military campaign in the cities. But last
Speaker 9: night they were out in full force, and very notably,
Speaker 9: they weren't alone. There were protests in Istanbul and solidarity
Speaker 9: as well, you know, carried out by Kurds living there,
Speaker 9: but also by leftist parties, by feminists, by Kurdish religious organizations,
Speaker 9: by all the segments of civil society that have sort
Speaker 9: of oriented around the pro Kurdish political movement, and there
Speaker 9: was also a pretty significant reaction from the main opposition CHP,
Speaker 9: which is not known for radicalism. You had the CHP
Speaker 9: party leader Osgara Ozel saying that it was illegitimate for
Speaker 9: the government to deny a candidate a mandate, and then
Speaker 9: you had Imamulu in Istanbul also criticizing the decision, saying
Speaker 9: it was illegitimate and calling on the government to respect
Speaker 9: the popular will. So at the same time you had
Speaker 9: this outcry across the Turkish political spectrum, you had tens
Speaker 9: of thousands of people out protesting, braving police violence. You know,
Speaker 9: there were armed pro government vigilantes caught on video shooting
Speaker 9: into crowds. There was very, very harrowing videos of beatings
Speaker 9: and torture of civilians. Journalists were attacked and prevented from
Speaker 9: covering the protests. This was a very difficult situation to watch,
Speaker 9: and a lot of people that I was speaking to
Speaker 9: were worrying about a return to the level of violence
Speaker 9: that seen in twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen. Were things
Speaker 9: to escalate, But you know, sometimes there's good news in
Speaker 9: Turkey and Kurdistan. Not always, but sometimes you know, in
Speaker 9: Turkish you'd say da dyne kaslan Achaz will win by resisting,
Speaker 9: and in Kurdish you'd say behludan Jiana resistance is life
Speaker 9: and that sort of Those are very famous protest slogans
Speaker 9: that proved really accurate last night, because today Turkey's Supreme
Speaker 9: Electoral Council actually reversed the attempt to give the election
Speaker 9: to the losing pro government candidate and gave the Dun
Speaker 9: party candidate his mandate back. So they've said that he
Speaker 9: will be allowed to assume office, and I think they
Speaker 9: looked at this huge street protest, they looked at this
Speaker 9: opposition coming from not only the pro Kurdish political movement
Speaker 9: but many different political forces in Turkey, and the state
Speaker 9: decided to back down. They decided not to pick this
Speaker 9: fight now. And you know, that's not to say that
Speaker 9: voter suppression in other provinces wasn't an issue. That's not
Speaker 9: to say that there are still outcomes that are being contested.
Speaker 9: You know, the government's doing a lot of very unfair
Speaker 9: things right now to try to take districts from the
Speaker 9: CHP and from the pro Kurdish political movement. But what
Speaker 9: this does show is that when people insist on a
Speaker 9: democratic outcome and when they are willing to stand up
Speaker 9: for it in large numbers and face the consequences the
Speaker 9: difficulty of doing that that even regimes like air dons,
Speaker 9: these very you know, autocratic, far right governments have a
Speaker 9: point at which they will back down. And I think
Speaker 9: that that display of resistance and solidarity getting a government
Speaker 9: like that to back down is something that can be
Speaker 9: very hopeful for people around the world right now.
Speaker 8: Yeah, definitely. I mean we've seen like just to the
Speaker 8: stuff we've cold or obviously the United States, but also
Speaker 8: in Mianma, like increasingly it's harder and harder for states
Speaker 8: to deny people's right to be represented or to be heard,
Speaker 8: and like that's a good thing Germany for democracy.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: I wanted to ask about you spoken a little bit
Speaker 8: about the Turkish military's incursions into northern Assyria and into
Speaker 8: like Iraqi, Curtistan, Curtis Donal, a potonomous region. Can you
Speaker 8: explain that there's a lot of like I think Turkey
Speaker 8: is pretty clearly like telegraphed plants for increased military activity
Speaker 8: in that region. So can you explain what's what's being
Speaker 8: proposed and what that means.
Speaker 9: So, I think because they have gone into this election
Speaker 9: and found themselves weakened. This is something that could make
Speaker 9: Airdon very dangerous. One thing that the government has always
Speaker 9: done when it's found itself weak is try to polarize
Speaker 9: society by attacking the Kurds both domestically and internationally in Iraqi,
Speaker 9: Kurdistan and in North East Syria. Of course, you have
Speaker 9: the AKP government loss of its majority in the twenty
Speaker 9: fifteen elections during the peace process becoming the reason for
Speaker 9: the government's abandonment of the peace process itself. Then in
Speaker 9: twenty nineteen after the local elections where the government lost
Speaker 9: control of Istanbul and Ankara for the first time. That
Speaker 9: was very quickly followed with the appointment of state trustees
Speaker 9: to Kurdish municipalities, and then the invasion of North and
Speaker 9: East Syria following Ardwan's agreement with Donald Trump about that.
Speaker 9: And so this does look like the kind of context
Speaker 9: in which he has lashed out against Kurds in Iraq
Speaker 9: and Syria before, and given these threats that you mentioned
Speaker 9: that he has been making. The diplomatic traffic between Turkey
Speaker 9: and Iraq, Turkey and Iran, Turkey and the US and Europe.
Speaker 9: They do appear to be preparing for something now. I
Speaker 9: was just on the ground in North and East Syria
Speaker 9: and in Iraqi Kurdistan, and I heard from many people
Speaker 9: that they're concerned. The threats that the government has been
Speaker 9: making appear to suggest that they might try to go
Speaker 9: for a geographically larger military operation this time. There's a
Speaker 9: chance that instead of only conducting their typical spring offensive
Speaker 9: into Iraqi Kurdistan, which usually gets them nowhere, they might
Speaker 9: also attempt to invade northern Syria as well. Of course,
Speaker 9: that's very internationally contingent. They would need a green light
Speaker 9: from the Americans and from the Russians to be able
Speaker 9: to violate those cease fires and go in there. But
Speaker 9: the threats very real. It's something that people are very
Speaker 9: concerned about on the ground, and I think that it's
Speaker 9: worth paying attention to, and particularly for those of US
Speaker 9: and countries that are allied with the Turkish government making
Speaker 9: noise about, you know, opposing trying to get onto the
Speaker 9: agenda so that permission is not given here and they're
Speaker 9: not incentivized to do this.
Speaker 8: Yeah. I think that's a very good point, because, like
Speaker 8: Curtish issues are ones that don't come up very much
Speaker 8: in the press in the United States for the most part,
Speaker 8: and people and their representatives don't hear about them very much.
Speaker 8: But this is one of those like be right to
Speaker 8: your your rep things like that, that doesn't a lot
Speaker 8: of shit isn't going to get changed with an email
Speaker 8: to your elected officials, but especially like certain officials who
Speaker 8: are on you know, foreign relations, to committees or something,
Speaker 8: as well as as like other forms of political activism
Speaker 8: could help here, right like, especially in an election year
Speaker 8: like that. That's a way to stop that.
Speaker 9: Now, this is something that needs to be made into
Speaker 9: an issue. And one thing I hear time and time again,
Speaker 9: whether I'm speaking to people from the Autonomous Administration, the
Speaker 9: YPG and the YPG or pro Kurdish politicians in Turkey
Speaker 9: is they know, you know, the weapons that are being
Speaker 9: used against them, the tear gas canisters, you know, the
Speaker 9: drone parts, the bombs, the equipment, the military training that
Speaker 9: these personnel get. It all comes from Europe, the United States,
Speaker 9: NATO countries that are allied with Turkey. There's a lot
Speaker 9: of leverage and you know, pushing to end that military
Speaker 9: support is something that could be done right now, that
Speaker 9: could be very important. And really, you know, this is
Speaker 9: something where one feels almost when one makes these calls,
Speaker 9: like once constantly asking you know, you should do this
Speaker 9: for these people because they're being oppressed and your government
Speaker 9: has a say in it. But we really benefit from
Speaker 9: this too, Right if you look at what the Kurdish
Speaker 9: people and their allies in Turkey have done and standing
Speaker 9: up for democracy in getting the government to reverse this
Speaker 9: attempt to steal an election, you know, that's one small
Speaker 9: example of the very powerful democratic tradition that they have.
Speaker 9: That is something that we can learn from, you know,
Speaker 9: whether you're in the US or in Europe, in many
Speaker 9: different countries around the world right now, the threat of
Speaker 9: authoritarianism and the sort of far right politics of which
Speaker 9: Airedwan is an example, it's an international threat, and you know,
Speaker 9: standing with the people who've been able to resist it
Speaker 9: is something that you know can benefit us all around
Speaker 9: the world as well.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and like it presents a vision for a future
Speaker 8: in which we all stand united against state violence around
Speaker 8: the world, rather than being isolated and gradually destroyed by
Speaker 8: various states and violent actors. Talking I guess of violent actors.
Speaker 8: The one more thing I wanted to cover with we're
Speaker 8: jumping around a little bit was but like I think
Speaker 8: people will probably have seen at least maybe their social
Speaker 8: media timelines are different than mine, But there was a
Speaker 8: lot of violence against Kurdish people in Northern Europe recently,
Speaker 8: right in Belgium, I think, I think maybe in Germany
Speaker 8: as well. Explain a little bit of that. Like it's
Speaker 8: we get into a little bit of like like Turkish
Speaker 8: fascist politics as well, but can you explain what was
Speaker 8: going on there?
Speaker 9: So this all began when some far right Turkish nationalists
Speaker 9: started threatening a Kurdish family after returning from nol Rose
Speaker 9: or Kurdish New Year celebrations, and escalated into you know,
Speaker 9: essentially these far right vigilantes prowling the streets looking for
Speaker 9: Kurds and Kurdish businesses to attack. And this is not
Speaker 9: something new at all. The Turkish government has invested a
Speaker 9: great deal in allowing these structures to operate in Europe.
Speaker 9: You have the Gray Wolves, which are a fascist paramilitary
Speaker 9: actually the paramilitary wing of the party with which Airdwan
Speaker 9: is currently allied and with which he has a majority
Speaker 9: in parliament, the National Action Party or the MHP. You know,
Speaker 9: this is a group that's been responsible for murders and
Speaker 9: assassinations and all kinds of attacks on Kurds, other minorities, dissidents,
Speaker 9: and has been responsible for violence in Europe as well.
Speaker 9: You have the government encouraging religious fundamentalism through its network
Speaker 9: of religious institutions in Europe and trying to make that
Speaker 9: very extreme and very politically instrumentalized vision of religion popular
Speaker 9: amongst the Turkish community. And then you have you know,
Speaker 9: Turkish intelligence assets able to freely operate and conduct all
Speaker 9: kinds of attacks on Kurdish dissidents, you know, within the
Speaker 9: very center of Europe.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 9: We all remember in twenty thirteen the assass nation of
Speaker 9: Sakinah Johnson's in front of the Kurdish Community Center in Paris.
Speaker 9: That murder was never solved. The perpetrator, who they caught
Speaker 9: very conveniently died in prison before he was set to
Speaker 9: go to trial. Turkish responsibility has never been proven in court,
Speaker 9: I think, because there are a lot of people who
Speaker 9: don't want a full investigation of a case like that
Speaker 9: to come out. And then, just I believe yesterday or
Speaker 9: maybe the day before, it came out that a Belgian
Speaker 9: court found alleged Turkish operatives responsible for planning attacks on
Speaker 9: two very senior Kurdish diplomats in Belgium who are members
Speaker 9: of the Kurdistan National Congress, which is sort of like
Speaker 9: the de facto foreign ministry of the Kurdish diaspora in Europe.
Speaker 9: You know, these individuals had been spying on the Kurdistan
Speaker 9: National Congress building, They'd been in contact with Turkish officials,
Speaker 9: They'd been planning assassinations very senior politicians. This is a
Speaker 9: real problem. You know, these groups and the state itself
Speaker 9: are able to freely attack civilians, plot murders and do
Speaker 9: violence and really cause chaos. And that's something that's very dangerous,
Speaker 9: not only for the Kurdish community, but for really anybody
Speaker 9: living in their way.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and there are a lot of people who would
Speaker 8: rightly want that to stop. I think, so, like, what's
Speaker 8: the current situation is a number of people were like beaten.
Speaker 8: Was somebody kidnapped? Did I see or was that? I
Speaker 8: didn't see any further reporting on that than one photo.
Speaker 9: It was very serious. I mean, there were people were attacked.
Speaker 9: I'm not exactly certain of the extent of kidnappings or
Speaker 9: other instances like that, but this was some very serious
Speaker 9: violence and we know what these groups are capable of.
Speaker 9: They have killed people and they have essentially gotten away
Speaker 9: with it. So it may have died down for now,
Speaker 9: which is certainly good. And obviously, you know, we saw
Speaker 9: a lot of calls for a restraint, you know, from
Speaker 9: the Kurdish community, a lot of calls for or these
Speaker 9: European governments essentially to do their job and prevent these
Speaker 9: groups from you know, importing their nationalist campaigns against a
Speaker 9: persecuted minority to a place where you know, these cords
Speaker 9: have fled to be free from that sort of thing.
Speaker 9: So it's stopped for now, but it's very much not over,
Speaker 9: you know. I when you see the Kurdish community in
Speaker 9: Europe and spend time with them and look at the
Speaker 9: security precautions that they have to take just to hold
Speaker 9: conferences and cultural festivals, Yeah, it's really quite disheartening.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, especially like you say, in northern Europe, like
Speaker 8: they're not in Turkey. Left Turkey to avoid that stuff.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: We'll take a second outbreak here and then we'll be
Speaker 8: back to finish up. So for the last part, do
Speaker 8: you have anything you want to add that we haven't
Speaker 8: got to yet.
Speaker 9: I think that you know, overall, looking at the situation
Speaker 9: in Turkey following these elections, looking at the situation in Europe,
Speaker 9: we're seeing that the Turkish government continues to be an
Speaker 9: example of the danger of these kinds of far right, nationalist,
Speaker 9: religious fundamentalist regimes that are on the rise everywhere. These
Speaker 9: are political trends that are growing around the world, and
Speaker 9: Airdowan and his current Turkish government are a very clear
Speaker 9: example of the danger that that causes, not to just
Speaker 9: the population of a country, but to neighboring countries, to
Speaker 9: diaspora communities that have left, that have gone elsewhere, that
Speaker 9: maintain their culture and maintain their interest in political organizing.
Speaker 9: So these are threats that people are going to be
Speaker 9: looking at around the world, and I think it's very
Speaker 9: important to be following the situation in Turkey for that reason.
Speaker 9: But at the same time, looking at how the Kurdish
Speaker 9: people and their allies in Turkey, you know, on the left,
Speaker 9: in workers' movements, in feminist movements, in all of these
Speaker 9: sort of grews that have also been victimized by Erdowan's regime,
Speaker 9: we're seeing that resistance is possible, that people can stand
Speaker 9: up for democracy and they can win and that look right,
Speaker 9: nobody's giving up on their work. You know, the KMK
Speaker 9: doesn't stop advocating for Kurdish interests in a diplomatic capacity
Speaker 9: because their members face threats. You know, these people go
Speaker 9: to work every single day, you know, in Wilsheva, in
Speaker 9: North and Eastsyria, in Iraqi, Kurdistan, Kurdish groups, you know,
Speaker 9: Kurdish political organizations, Kurdish politicians and activists, they continue building
Speaker 9: up their project. You know, I said, I was just
Speaker 9: in northern Syria. It's extremely difficult right now. People don't
Speaker 9: have electricity, people don't have water because Turkey bombed all
Speaker 9: the infrastructure. But still they're celebrating now Rose. You know,
Speaker 9: they're talking about their upcoming local elections that they want
Speaker 9: to hold and how to hold them in the best way.
Speaker 9: You know, they're talking about their new social contract and
Speaker 9: how they can implement it. They're moving forward constantly despite
Speaker 9: the threats that they're facing. And I think that you know,
Speaker 9: many of you listening to this are people who are
Speaker 9: probably looking to improve and change the society that you
Speaker 9: live in. And so when we look at what's going
Speaker 9: on in Turkey and in Kurdistan, we can see both
Speaker 9: very clear examples of what it is that people who
Speaker 9: want change are up against, but also what they can
Speaker 9: accomplish even under those conditions.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think like one of the things I took
Speaker 8: from going to Kurdistan was like how invested, like how
Speaker 8: genuine the solidarity that those people have with other like
Speaker 8: oppressed groups. It's like I spent as much time answering
Speaker 8: questions about me and ma as I did like asking
Speaker 8: questions about Kurdistan, which was surprising to me, but obviously
Speaker 8: happy to do it. But like it would be nice
Speaker 8: to see some of that solidarity come back from the US, right,
Speaker 8: So are they're like, I mean, I guess you can
Speaker 8: come down to the border and help Kurdish people literally
Speaker 8: any day of the week if you'd like to do
Speaker 8: that all the time. But what concrete actions people take,
Speaker 8: especially with regard to like helping their self administration in
Speaker 8: North and East Syria, right, Like they're facing constant attacks,
Speaker 8: power stations get bombed, Like all my friends there are
Speaker 8: always struggling to have power, internet or even like electricity,
Speaker 8: and they got flooded recently on top of all that. Yeah,
Speaker 8: so like their concrete actions people can take to help
Speaker 8: to be in solidarity Oh absolutely.
Speaker 9: I mean, I think one thing, if you have expertise
Speaker 9: on anything to do with, you know, power grids that
Speaker 9: are resilient to these kinds of attacks, on alternative clean
Speaker 9: energy sources, anything that could possibly help people in a
Speaker 9: situation like this live. They want expertise. There's a lot
Speaker 9: of problems that they're facing that they simply because of
Speaker 9: the war, don't have the capacity not only to solve,
Speaker 9: but even to start thinking about how it is that
Speaker 9: one solves a problem like this because there just aren't
Speaker 9: that many societies in the world going through it. So
Speaker 9: any kind of in addressing energy issues, environmental issues, these
Speaker 9: kinds of problems, the second and third order effects of
Speaker 9: the attacks on infrastructure, on oil and gas, on power facilities,
Speaker 9: that would be very important. They really do need that,
Speaker 9: and that's something you know, you can write to us
Speaker 9: at the Kurdish Piece Institute. We can connect you with people.
Speaker 9: If you have contacts on the ground there, you can
Speaker 9: talk to them. That's one thing. Then at the end
Speaker 9: of the day, you know, they have these elections coming
Speaker 9: up that is a big step for them. They've just
Speaker 9: put out a new social contract. They're really trying to
Speaker 9: listen to some of the internal criticisms that they get
Speaker 9: and really build up the civil, social political side of
Speaker 9: their system. You know, there's a belief among many people
Speaker 9: there that I've talked to that because of the existential
Speaker 9: nature of these wars that they're fighting, they haven't been
Speaker 9: able to really pursue the political elements of their revolution
Speaker 9: to the degree that they want to. And they're trying
Speaker 9: to do that now. They have this new social Contract.
Speaker 9: It's an incredible document. You can read it. They're going
Speaker 9: to hold municipal elections on May thirtieth, I believe is
Speaker 9: the date that was announced. So any if you know
Speaker 9: a lot about electoral systems, if you have done election
Speaker 9: observation before, if you want to help them do that
Speaker 9: right and get international attention for what it is that
Speaker 9: they're doing. That's another way that people have been telling
Speaker 9: me that you can help. And then finally, you know,
Speaker 9: if you're here listening in the US, Airdwan is coming
Speaker 9: to the White House on May ninth. According to reports
Speaker 9: from Turkish and international media, there is going to be
Speaker 9: a demonstration. There will probably be a lot of campaigns
Speaker 9: around that demonstration as well, on things like conditioning and
Speaker 9: ending arm sales and security assistants on calls for peace,
Speaker 9: on calls for the US to end its support for
Speaker 9: and enablement of Turkey's occupation of Iraq and Syria. It's
Speaker 9: repression of its Kurdish people at home, and so anything
Speaker 9: that you can do to join those actions in those
Speaker 9: campaigns would be very helpful. You know, this is going
Speaker 9: to be an opportunity to let both Airdowan and the
Speaker 9: White House hear what the American people think about US
Speaker 9: support for what the Turkish government is doing. So be there,
Speaker 9: get involved. That's one way that we can, you know,
Speaker 9: make our voices heard and try to push for a
Speaker 9: change in policy.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think it's great. I think people should like
Speaker 8: if you want an example of I guess the US complicity.
Speaker 8: Like while I was in Kurdistan, there was a bombing
Speaker 8: that killed thirty nine SIH like internal security forces, and
Speaker 8: that was like a plane that your tax dolars if
Speaker 8: you live in the US, developed, right, like an F
Speaker 8: sixteen with munitions, so you probably sold to them, and
Speaker 8: the US is selling has sold more F sixteen since then, right, yes, Yeah,
Speaker 8: So like that is a thing that we could stop,
Speaker 8: and that would concretely stop. Like I spoke to a
Speaker 8: mother who lost her son. He was a little I
Speaker 8: think it was like fourteen fifteen, a little football player.
Speaker 8: They had pictures of him all over the house, right, Like,
Speaker 8: it was really heartbreaking stuff. And I know that this
Speaker 8: happens a lot in other parts of the world. I'm
Speaker 8: not saying that's not important too, but yeah, it's it's
Speaker 8: always hard to talk to parents who have lost their kids,
Speaker 8: and you can stop that happening. Like, if we don't
Speaker 8: sell them the f sixteens that do that, then they
Speaker 8: don't have the ability to do it, at least not
Speaker 8: as much.
Speaker 9: And this is one way that we can connect struggles
Speaker 9: and causes as well, because it's all the same companies
Speaker 9: that are providing equipment to all of these states that
Speaker 9: are doing this. You know, the targets are the same
Speaker 9: for these kinds of campaigns. And look, you know, all
Speaker 9: of these governments, all of these corporations, they know that
Speaker 9: they're on the same side. We don't always know that
Speaker 9: we're on the same side too, And so I think
Speaker 9: that getting together and pointing out the patterns and standing
Speaker 9: against you know, these arm sales and security assistants in
Speaker 9: the context of Kurdistan, alongside many other contexts where they're
Speaker 9: also very destructive is an important way that we can
Speaker 9: sort of amplify our efforts to do that.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, I think that's a very good, very good point.
Speaker 8: Like I live in San Diego. Almost every single bomb
Speaker 8: that has fallen on Palestine and many of the water
Speaker 8: full on Kurdistan. Have you know the company that sold
Speaker 8: that has an office here, Like if they're the places
Speaker 8: where you can apply pressure in places where you can
Speaker 8: hopefully make a change, Megan, where can people you mentioned
Speaker 8: like emailing you? Where can people find you? How can
Speaker 8: people keep up to date with what's happening in Kurdistan?
Speaker 9: Yeah, of course. So you can go to Kurdishpeace dot org.
Speaker 9: That's the website of our institute. If you go to
Speaker 9: our about page, my contact is on there. You can
Speaker 9: always reach out to me whether you have a question
Speaker 9: about Kurdistan, you want to read our research and analysis.
Speaker 9: You know you're a journalist or an analyst and you
Speaker 9: want to submit something yourself. We can help you there.
Speaker 9: We're also on Twitter at Kurdish Peace Org. And yeah,
Speaker 9: that's a great way for you to follow. In the
Speaker 9: English language. If you're looking for resources on the ground,
Speaker 9: you can follow North Press Agency which publishes in English,
Speaker 9: the Rojeva Information Center, which publishes in English. And then
Speaker 9: you know, get involved with your local Kurdish community in
Speaker 9: a lot of major cities in the US. If you're
Speaker 9: in New York, if you're in Boston, if you're in
Speaker 9: the DMV area, if you're in California, like you know,
Speaker 9: there are active Kurdish communities, and you know, go to
Speaker 9: a cultural event, go to a demonstration, you'll find both
Speaker 9: great ways to get connected and really get plugged into
Speaker 9: solidarity efforts. But also you know, a wonderful community and
Speaker 9: a wonderful culture that I think, you know, anyone would be.
Speaker 9: I've certainly been, you know, very happy to have experienced.
Speaker 8: So yeah, likewise, yeah, great, Thank you so much, Megan,
Speaker 8: that was great.
Speaker 9: Thank you.
Speaker 5: Welcome to Dick It Happen Here, a podcast coming to
Speaker 5: you from a week where decades are happening. I'm your host.
Speaker 5: Nia Long with me is James Stout.
Speaker 8: Hi, man, I'm great to be here.
Speaker 5: And also with us as Talia Jane an independent journalist
Speaker 5: covering social movements and protests who is currently covering the
Speaker 5: Gazza solidarity encampments at Columbia University. Talia welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Thanks for having me, guys.
Speaker 8: Yay, thanks for doing us.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: So I'm excited. I'm excited to talk about the Columbia occupation.
Speaker 5: I also want to briefly mention that there are a
Speaker 5: lot of there's been a wave of occupations of campuses
Speaker 5: across the country just right now. This is being recorded
Speaker 5: on Wednesday night. By the time this goes up on
Speaker 5: like Friday, a lot of the stuff we're going to
Speaker 5: be saying is probably going to be at a date
Speaker 5: because everything's moving really quickly. But I mean there's occupations obviously,
Speaker 5: like Columbia. There's like CSU, Humblet, University of Texas at Austin,
Speaker 5: Ohio State, Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, some university in Italy, Emerson, Tuft's, MIT,
Speaker 5: NYU City, University of New York, the New Schools, University
Speaker 5: of Rochester, University of Pittsburgh, USC, University of Minnesota, University
Speaker 5: of Michigan, Vanderbilt, UNC, Chapel Hill. I mean, there's so
Speaker 5: many of these. By the time that this goes up,
Speaker 5: there will be more of them. Yeah, it's been wild,
Speaker 5: there's been a lot of I mean at Humboldt, there
Speaker 5: was a lot of very intense fighting with the police.
Speaker 5: A bunch of kids occupied a building. They beat the
Speaker 5: shit while Okay, that's going a bit too far, but
Speaker 5: they barricaded it, kept the cops from coming in, cops
Speaker 5: ran off of campus. So, lots of incredibly wild stuff happening. Yeah,
Speaker 5: which I guess brings us to the Gauza. The I
Speaker 5: guess the original one, the first one. They got a
Speaker 5: lot of media attention, the Gauza Solidarity acampment at Columbia.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So, Telly, I wanted to ask you, so, how did
Speaker 5: this sort of start and what's kind of been making
Speaker 5: it different from the really pretty large number of other
Speaker 5: free Palestine anti genocide protests that have been on campuses
Speaker 5: and off campuses for the past like time, Yeah, six
Speaker 5: seven months.
Speaker 10: Yeah, Well, I think the genesis of this was that
Speaker 10: Columbia University, as we've seen in universities across the country,
Speaker 10: suspended a number of pro Palestine advocacy student groups. They
Speaker 10: were very slow to move their feet about targeted attacks
Speaker 10: against students who were demonstrating for Palestine, including an incident
Speaker 10: where someone was allegedly sprayed with a chemical irritant or
Speaker 10: people were sprayed with a chemical irritant by former IOF
Speaker 10: soldiers who are also students here, and just this, you know,
Speaker 10: building tension of there is a actual genocide occurring, and
Speaker 10: universities are being forced to and towards the people committing
Speaker 10: the genocide instead of standing on the right side of history,
Speaker 10: or they're actively choosing to do that too, because their
Speaker 10: whole thing is not about actually educating people and preparing
Speaker 10: them to be tomorrow's leaders and managers or baristas, but
Speaker 10: to get people, you know, to give them money to
Speaker 10: fill their coffers and portray this image of you know,
Speaker 10: exceptionalism and elitism and whatnot.
Speaker 1: So that was the genesis.
Speaker 10: And then on Tuesday night I got a text at
Speaker 10: like eleven pm, I want to say, asking me if
Speaker 10: I wanted to come cover a late night slash early
Speaker 10: morning de occupation demo. And this was from someone I'd
Speaker 10: never talked to before. I had no idea who it was,
Speaker 10: but they said it was a Columbia and they said
Speaker 10: it was late night, early morning. I thought I'd be
Speaker 10: out of here at you know, ten am the next day,
Speaker 10: and then you know, standing there witnessing it all unfold,
Speaker 10: it became pretty evident that that was not the case.
Speaker 10: And I think the reason why this stands out is
Speaker 10: because this is an elite university where you can't say, oh, well,
Speaker 10: these are just dumb TikTok kids. These are kids who
Speaker 10: have like the these are like adults who have you know,
Speaker 10: they have incredible resumes, really high academic excellence. They got
Speaker 10: into an extremely difficult school to get into, and they
Speaker 10: are joining the ranks of the you know, frazzled fringe,
Speaker 10: stinky anarchists and the silly kids who are being brainwashed
Speaker 10: by TikTok. And they said like, no, those people are right,
Speaker 10: like this is bad and you need to disclose and
Speaker 10: divest and we're not going to stop until you do.
Speaker 10: And I think that that stance from a position of
Speaker 10: privilege really shook things up. What followed also set a
Speaker 10: tone of the university deciding to call the police and
Speaker 10: claiming that this encampment was it posed a clear and
Speaker 10: present danger to the safety of students on campus, which,
Speaker 10: you know, anyone who has spent any length of time
Speaker 10: in or around the encampment can plainly see that that
Speaker 10: is nonsensical.
Speaker 1: It's absurd.
Speaker 10: These are kids that are studying on a lawn, but
Speaker 10: that choice of bringing the NYPD in and having one
Speaker 10: hundred and eight students arrested by the NYPD Strategic Response Group,
Speaker 10: which is their you know, counter terrorism goon squad that
Speaker 10: violently represses protests pretty consistently, to have them arrest one
Speaker 10: hundred nate people, including carrying them out from by their
Speaker 10: arms and lengths and arresting legal observers.
Speaker 1: You know that that was like.
Speaker 10: This is that it was an outsized response for something
Speaker 10: that was pretty straightforward.
Speaker 1: There hanging out on a lawn.
Speaker 10: They have everything set up to sustain within that space.
Speaker 10: They are not going out and roaming around and you know,
Speaker 10: breaking things or assaulting people or anything like that. And
Speaker 10: they're just using this to call attention to their cause,
Speaker 10: which is divestment from genocide and from you know, war profiteering,
Speaker 10: and to and the school's gentrification of Harlem, and to
Speaker 10: you know, at institute, an academic boycott of Israel and
Speaker 10: Israeli campuses that are in community with Colombia, like their
Speaker 10: satellite schools that bring the IOF soldiers to Colombia to
Speaker 10: commit harm against students here. And you know, so these
Speaker 10: are these are very basic asks and they were met
Speaker 10: with state force signed off by the president of the school,
Speaker 10: and seeing that, I think is what provoked a lot
Speaker 10: of other schools of like, well, if Columbia's doing it,
Speaker 10: than we definitely got to because you have a major
Speaker 10: elite institution taking this step, making clear that this is
Speaker 10: not just a cause that you know, the scrappy little
Speaker 10: weirdos at the bottom like me care about, you know.
Speaker 10: And so I think that's what set it off. And
Speaker 10: the fact that they returned they just took over the
Speaker 10: other lawn while while their classmates were being processed after
Speaker 10: being arrested. They just took over the other lawn and
Speaker 10: they're like, all right, we're going to set it up
Speaker 10: here was such a hilariously like based move that it
Speaker 10: was like the defiance and the determination was undeniable. And
Speaker 10: when you see a group like with the students at Humboldt,
Speaker 10: where the cops with the riot shields are trying to
Speaker 10: barge in and they're pushing them back and they're screaming
Speaker 10: get the fuck out, and they're bonking them over the
Speaker 10: head with the empty water jug, when you see things
Speaker 10: like that, Yeah, when you see things like that, it's
Speaker 10: very like there is an energy to this that has
Speaker 10: always been there, but that has not been very easily
Speaker 10: seen by the masses, and we're now seeing it show
Speaker 10: its head of like, no, we're not fucking around, like
Speaker 10: you need to listen to us.
Speaker 1: We're tired of the song and.
Speaker 10: Dance game that you're doing, dismissing all of our valid concerns,
Speaker 10: because we know concretely and statistically that we are on
Speaker 10: the right side of history, and we're going to make
Speaker 10: you listen and trust that if you beat us up,
Speaker 10: we're coming back, like we're not going away. It doesn't
Speaker 10: scare us, which is what the kids at a UT
Speaker 10: Austin were chanting I think when they brought the horses
Speaker 10: in the state troopers in.
Speaker 1: It's like, we're not scared of you.
Speaker 10: And that tone has permeated throughout the demonstrations for Palaestinian
Speaker 10: liberation since in prior to October. But if you don't
Speaker 10: follow the protests, or if you only go by what
Speaker 10: the major news outlets are saying about them, you don't
Speaker 10: see that tone. So this, for me is not surprising.
Speaker 10: This is a continuation of an energy that has not
Speaker 10: ceased for upwards of six months. I think it's the
Speaker 10: two hundred and first day of the genocide. So it's
Speaker 10: not surprising for people who've paid attention. It's a relief
Speaker 10: for kids who are here and who have been involved,
Speaker 10: and who have been silenced and ignored and written off
Speaker 10: this whole time.
Speaker 1: It's a very long answer.
Speaker 5: I now that's a.
Speaker 8: Good one, though. I think it's a It's great to
Speaker 8: have your perspective if someone who's been on the ground.
Speaker 8: One thing I wanted to ask is, like, obviously this
Speaker 8: is a protest that its core is about state violence,
Speaker 8: and it has predictably enough been responded to with state violence.
Speaker 8: And like you said that people were generally not weighed
Speaker 8: by that. I wonder if you've seen people who kind
Speaker 8: of had the opposite reaction, Like I kind of remember
Speaker 8: the student protests that I had been involved in. I'm
Speaker 8: just going to say that, and I can remember like
Speaker 8: the reaction by students when seeing that fellow students being
Speaker 8: assaulted by the police was like, Okay, fuck this, Like
Speaker 8: you know, like Georgio Wah has this thing about like
Speaker 8: when I see a real flesh and blud worker of
Speaker 8: fighting is natural. Letting me the policeman. I don't have
Speaker 8: to ask myself what side I'm on, did you find
Speaker 8: the same thing with students where they were like, okay,
Speaker 8: I wasn't out here, And now I've seen the way
Speaker 8: the university and the cops have responded to this, and
Speaker 8: now I'm coming out because it's not okay.
Speaker 10: The encampment went up Wednesday and it was forcibly removed
Speaker 10: with arrests on Thursday, I think, or was it Friday.
Speaker 1: I don't remember. It was a long time ago. For me.
Speaker 8: It's fine, But.
Speaker 10: Prior to the encampment being taken down, the possibility of
Speaker 10: it provoked a significant response from the student body here
Speaker 10: at Columbia to show up and rally around the encampment
Speaker 10: all night. They did this march, this daisy chain where
Speaker 10: they were chanting. The more you try to silence us,
Speaker 10: the louder we will be and disclose, divest, We will
Speaker 10: not stop. We will not rest all night around the
Speaker 10: encampment to keep it safe and to show that they
Speaker 10: had larger support beyond the students who chose to stay
Speaker 10: on the lawn at risk of being arrested. After they
Speaker 10: were arrested, more students came onto the other lawn and
Speaker 10: have continued to occupy that second lawn so absolutely it
Speaker 10: was a strissand effect.
Speaker 1: They tried to shut.
Speaker 10: It down, and it made people feel very strongly that
Speaker 10: they need to show up and put themselves on the
Speaker 10: line as well. And they also I think they saw
Speaker 10: what I think it also showed them what the state
Speaker 10: does and what the university does, and seeing it firsthand
Speaker 10: eliminates a lot of the mystery that, you know, the
Speaker 10: fear that can circulate of like the uncertainty of it.
Speaker 1: Seeing what it looks.
Speaker 10: Like, they're like, oh whatever, And now they're seeing, you know,
Speaker 10: videos of protesters being brutalized on other campuses, and like
Speaker 10: I heard so much told me last night they said
Speaker 10: that they overheard someone like talking to another student on
Speaker 10: the lawn and they were like, oh, so you a
Speaker 10: jail support, Like, yes, you're there, Like it's it's this
Speaker 10: sort of they're gonna they're gonna do what they're gonna do.
Speaker 10: We don't care, like because these are the threat of violence.
Speaker 10: Physical harm is a threat to cease whatever it is
Speaker 10: that you're doing, of academic harm. These are things that
Speaker 10: are trying to get you to stop doing what you're doing.
Speaker 10: And when you know that they are being deployed as
Speaker 10: tools and tactics. You're not gonna stop because they're not
Speaker 10: scary to you.
Speaker 1: Well, what are you gonna do?
Speaker 10: You're gonna suspend me for joining in a historic protest?
Speaker 1: Okay, see if I care. You know, I think that's
Speaker 1: the energy for a lot of students.
Speaker 5: Yeah, unfortunately we need to go to ads for a second,
Speaker 5: but I don't know, skip them and we'll be back
Speaker 5: in however long it takes you to press the forward
Speaker 5: button like six times and we are back. So, something
Speaker 5: I wanted to ask about. I've been seeing a lot
Speaker 5: of stuff floating around about the negotiations that are happening
Speaker 5: between the university and the students, and I want to
Speaker 5: know what have you actually heard about these because the
Speaker 5: statements that have been coming out don't seem to really
Speaker 5: be matching anything else I've seen going on on the ground.
Speaker 5: Do you know what's happening?
Speaker 10: So the university has taken a stance of this is
Speaker 10: a clearing present day, it is disruptive, it is harmful,
Speaker 10: et cetera. That's because it's impeding with them building stairs
Speaker 10: and stadium seating for the commencement that's happening in a
Speaker 10: couple of weeks. So you know, It's like that's that's
Speaker 10: the clear and present danger is that it's costly for
Speaker 10: them to have to wait to complete this this setup.
Speaker 10: But my understanding is that the students are very much
Speaker 10: holding their ground, very firm, and their their demands are
Speaker 10: very reasonable. It's saying like, tell us where your money
Speaker 10: comes from, so we can look into it and see
Speaker 10: that you're keeping your nose clean. This isn't a difficult
Speaker 10: to ask. I think if you ask to see my receipts,
Speaker 10: I could jump to you. Although I'm not an elite university,
Speaker 10: but I'm also not you know, profiting off of weapons manufacturing.
Speaker 10: And so the university's stance is very much trying to
Speaker 10: kind of spook them into quitting. And there was a
Speaker 10: statement released by the president last night at four am
Speaker 10: saying that the students made some concessions, two of which
Speaker 10: were things that they're already doing. One of which was
Speaker 10: an easy adjustment that's not a concession, which was just
Speaker 10: making the camp more ada accessible and in compliance with
Speaker 10: FDN Y regulations for fire safety, which I think would
Speaker 10: be crazy if a fire broke out at this camp. Anyway,
Speaker 10: I was a tangent. And then there was a thing
Speaker 10: saying that they're going to be ending negotiations in forty
Speaker 10: eight hours, and with the students reported out from those
Speaker 10: negotiations at the time was at the university at around
Speaker 10: midnight threatened to call in the National Guard and to
Speaker 10: call in the NYPD, and that shut down negotiations. And
Speaker 10: it was only after they put out these widespread calls
Speaker 10: and thousands of people gathered on the lawn in support
Speaker 10: of the encampment that that was changed and the university
Speaker 10: agreed in writing to not call the YPD and to
Speaker 10: not mobilized National Guard, which I don't think they have
Speaker 10: the authority to do regardless, but it was this written
Speaker 10: concession from the university, and their perspective of it was
Speaker 10: that the students provided concessions. And I think it's kind
Speaker 10: of it speaks to who each side is speaking to.
Speaker 10: The students are speaking to the movement that they have
Speaker 10: kind of shepherded into existence, and the university is speaking
Speaker 10: to their donors and their trustees and the right wingers
Speaker 10: who are having nuclear meltdowns on Twitter.
Speaker 5: That's something else I wanted to sort of ask about
Speaker 5: because I it's kind of hard for me to a
Speaker 5: sense of it, like, Okay, so Speaker of the House
Speaker 5: Bike Johnson, who is a utterly deranged session Zionist.
Speaker 7: Yeah, like you mean the new Churchill mea godly real weirdo,
Speaker 7: like anti evolution guy he's been, he said, He said that.
Speaker 5: Like he's going to go to Congress and call for
Speaker 5: the National Guard deplay, which also doesn't make any sense
Speaker 5: because Congress. I don't can't do it either. But I
Speaker 5: think you're trying to get like the governor, but like,
Speaker 5: what what do you think of the actual odds of
Speaker 5: a National Guard to point? Because I've heard a lot
Speaker 5: of talk about it and I can't gauge it at all.
Speaker 1: So Hochel has said.
Speaker 10: That that's not on the table, I believe, And there's
Speaker 10: no interest from what I can tell of the actual
Speaker 10: elected reps in calling in the National Guard. There's interest
Speaker 10: from Eric Adams, who is a former cop and basically
Speaker 10: still a cop, to use the NYPD, and the NYPD
Speaker 10: has been very allergic to when the National Guard comes
Speaker 10: out here because they want to be the ones skulls
Speaker 10: and being in charge of brutalizing New Yorkers, and they
Speaker 10: take a great offense when someone else comes in and
Speaker 10: does it for them. So they wouldn't really be on
Speaker 10: board with the National Guard mobilizing here either. The school
Speaker 10: doesn't have the authority to do that. It's only the governor.
Speaker 10: The governor hasn't made any indication, and Mike Johnson is
Speaker 10: doing conservative stunt work. He was joined by Elie Staphonic,
Speaker 10: who is a conservative, and you know she regularly disseminates
Speaker 10: disinformation and inflammatory propaganda to demonize unhoused people, migrants, queer people,
Speaker 10: so it's no surprise that they're you know, banging this drum,
Speaker 10: which was also pushed by Shy davidy or however he
Speaker 10: pronounce his name, who was an assistant professor here who
Speaker 10: attempted to hold a rally in the center of the
Speaker 10: Cause of Solidarity encampment with a slew of Zionists and
Speaker 10: his ID card was deactivated and he found out in
Speaker 10: real time in front of a bunch of cameras that
Speaker 10: he called to come watch him. It was It's one
Speaker 10: of those things that you witness in real time that
Speaker 10: you feel like you're you're living in a movie. But
Speaker 10: it was great, and he had a nuclear tantrum and
Speaker 10: claimed that it was because he wasn't safe on campus
Speaker 10: when he was told that his protest was not safe
Speaker 10: for their students. So, you know, I think it's we're
Speaker 10: seeing a lot of rhetoric and a lot of saber
Speaker 10: rattling from the far right, from conservatives, from people who
Speaker 10: have never had any kind of support for Palestinians or
Speaker 10: for the cause of Palestinian liberation. You know, Mike Johnson
Speaker 10: makes he receives over a quarter million dollars from APAC.
Speaker 10: You know, these are these are not people whose statements
Speaker 10: should be taken seriously in the context of what is possible,
Speaker 10: what is reasonable, and what is you know, reality.
Speaker 1: To put it.
Speaker 8: Nicely, Yeah, yeah, I think a reason it's fascinating, like,
Speaker 8: at least to me, Like I went to a fancy university,
Speaker 8: you know, and engaged in plenty of including pro Palestine
Speaker 8: actions when I was there. But a thing that I see,
Speaker 8: like as a journalist now, is that the right wing
Speaker 8: and wealthy folks generally seem to see that ivy league universities,
Speaker 8: particularly in the US, is like their safe space. And
Speaker 8: I think the reason that they're so mad at this
Speaker 8: is that they feel like it's not just that it's happening,
Speaker 8: it's where it's happening, and like that that's called them
Speaker 8: to have these massive tantrums like you've reported on.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean, there's, there's, there's it's it's all hypocrisy
Speaker 10: for them because on the one hand, these are liberal
Speaker 10: universities who are ushering in an era of DEI and
Speaker 10: purple hair and queer kids. And then on the other side,
Speaker 10: these are sacred spaces of learning and higher education that
Speaker 10: no one should have access to unless they're you know,
Speaker 10: grandparents are in the Arian Brotherhood. So it's it's one
Speaker 10: of those things where it kind of depends on the
Speaker 10: day about how they feel about really elite campuses of
Speaker 10: higher learning.
Speaker 1: But it doesn't matter either way. They don't care. They
Speaker 1: don't actually care.
Speaker 10: They just hate the cause and will do anything they
Speaker 10: can to bring it to a halt. But the DNA
Speaker 10: of this cause is to keep going regardless of the
Speaker 10: efforts to stop it.
Speaker 8: Right, And it wasn't so long ago that everyone was
Speaker 8: up in arms, when I say everyone on the road
Speaker 8: was up and arms about campus free speech, which is
Speaker 8: something that seems have likely been forgotten in the last
Speaker 8: couple of weeks. It's like that we've all seen videos
Speaker 8: in Texas today right of the DPS and state troopers
Speaker 8: and horses and bikes that live to misuse bikes. But yeah,
Speaker 8: it's as I guess, the hypocoty is kind of the
Speaker 8: point with those people.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean, like Mike Johnson made his speech today
Speaker 10: on the steps of the Low Library. He was talking
Speaker 10: about how you know there was a repression of free
Speaker 10: speech on campus, but then in the same breath he
Speaker 10: said that and that's why I want to call in
Speaker 10: the National Guard to eliminate this protest. Their argument is
Speaker 10: that this protest is inherently anti Semitic because it rejects
Speaker 10: the state of Israel and the genocide and apartheid that
Speaker 10: the state has been doing since its inception and prior
Speaker 10: to its inception of the Palestinian people. And in the IHR,
Speaker 10: in the IHR definition of anti semitism, it is any
Speaker 10: criticism of the State of Israel, which would include people
Speaker 10: who are living in Israel criticizing their own government, would
Speaker 10: be labeled as anti Semitic. And they're trying to redefine
Speaker 10: reality in real time by claiming that these students who
Speaker 10: just don't want for mass death to be occurring and
Speaker 10: they don't want their university to be responsible in facilitating
Speaker 10: that are somehow anti Semitic. Meanwhile, a large number of
Speaker 10: them are Jews themselves. Who you know they held satter
Speaker 10: at the start of Passover.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think, uh and maybe do you know bing one,
Speaker 8: a photojournalist, Yeah, withual friend being being took this photo
Speaker 8: which went viral on Twitter. I source in the New
Speaker 8: York Times of a Jewish graduate student just like sitting
Speaker 8: on a folding chat being like, now I'm fine, I
Speaker 8: don't feel unsafe here.
Speaker 10: Oh yeah, I mean that's like, that's the thing is
Speaker 10: that the people who feel quote unquote unsafe are also
Speaker 10: the people who are known antagonizers of pro Palestine demonstrations.
Speaker 10: These are the kids that bought like fart spray from
Speaker 10: Amazon to spray on students who were demonstrating peacefully. These
Speaker 10: are students who show up with giant flags outside of
Speaker 10: Columbia University to antagonize people. They brought thick wooden poles
Speaker 10: with flags fixed to them to a demonstration on Wall
Speaker 10: Street the week prior to this encampment launching, and they
Speaker 10: were antagonizing people. They were getting in, they were trying to,
Speaker 10: you know, instigate arguments with people, and you know, they
Speaker 10: were just kind of trying to incite, and then they
Speaker 10: claim to be victims when people respond to their inciting behavior,
Speaker 10: and it's very much like an abusive mentality that they have.
Speaker 10: But in terms of like actual anti Semitism, all of that,
Speaker 10: all of that rhetoric ends up being a distraction from
Speaker 10: actual instances of anti Semitism. And the more that you
Speaker 10: try to fuse the political ideology of Zionism with the
Speaker 10: prejudice against Jewish people for being Jewish, the more you
Speaker 10: try to fuse those together as one thing, like, you know,
Speaker 10: fusing Jewish identity to Zionism, the more you see instances
Speaker 10: of anti Semitism actually anti Semitism. So if anything, like
Speaker 10: the students who are coming in cheering on Israel and
Speaker 10: boasting about the murderers of you know, tens of thousands
Speaker 10: of children, the starvations, and the displacements of millions of people,
Speaker 10: the more that they do that, the more that that
Speaker 10: teaches people like, oh, maybe all Jews are like that,
Speaker 10: maybe all Jews are bad.
Speaker 1: And then I.
Speaker 10: End up getting DMS from people photoshopping my face into
Speaker 10: an oven calling for my death when you know, I
Speaker 10: don't give a fuck about the state of Israel. I
Speaker 10: don't give a fuck about any states, you know, So
Speaker 10: it's just it's one of those things like this is
Speaker 10: like they are they are planting toxic seeds and then
Speaker 10: flipping out when they sprout.
Speaker 8: Talking of toxic seeds, now is the time for some
Speaker 8: marketing professionals to plant some toxic seeds in your mind
Speaker 8: as we take our second advertising break. All right, well
Speaker 8: we're back, hopefully. I haven't bought anything since we last spoke, Tylia.
Speaker 8: I wanted to talk a little bit about a thing
Speaker 8: that we've seen a lot. It's like this idea of
Speaker 8: like the universe, and this happens at every protest movement
Speaker 8: right like the state, the university, whatever, will seek to
Speaker 8: appoint people leaders and allow them to negotiate on behalf
Speaker 8: of everyone, even if those people have not consented to
Speaker 8: be negotiated for, and then they'll use that to corupt
Speaker 8: the movement, offer concessions that these particular people might want,
Speaker 8: and in doing so kind of defang the original sort
Speaker 8: of protest. Is that something that you've seen happening or
Speaker 8: the university's tried to do to like divide people or
Speaker 8: to kind of pull people out and appoint them as leaders.
Speaker 10: They've suspended the people that they believe to be primary
Speaker 10: student organizers, but in terms of other divisions, they have
Speaker 10: not been successful. These are students organizing with their classmates.
Speaker 10: It's not possible for some outside group to infiltrate that
Speaker 10: space because they are not students at this university. You know,
Speaker 10: there's SJP chapters that students are members of in their schools,
Speaker 10: but they are ultimately making the choices of what their
Speaker 10: SJP chapter is doing, and you know a lot of
Speaker 10: those SJP chapters have been suspended. So, you know, I
Speaker 10: think in terms of the possibility of the university having
Speaker 10: any sort of in to build some sort.
Speaker 1: Of op is very low.
Speaker 10: The solidarity that we're seeing is I don't think I've
Speaker 10: seen levels of people on the same page and able
Speaker 10: to organize. The literacy of it is just phenomenal. You know,
Speaker 10: there's people who are just they're all very like clearly
Speaker 10: knowledgeable about what it is that they're organizing for, what
Speaker 10: the risks are, what the history of the movement is,
Speaker 10: and they've spent a lot of time learning those things
Speaker 10: to make sure that when they decide to take a
Speaker 10: step forward, that they are doing so fully informed and
Speaker 10: fully empowered and trying to break that down is something
Speaker 10: that has not been successful. And we've seen that, you know,
Speaker 10: time and time again. They have this chance. The more
Speaker 10: you try to silence us, the louder we will be.
Speaker 10: And it's true, and these institutions should probably start believing
Speaker 10: it because it would save them a lot of trouble
Speaker 10: by you know, trying to write this off is something
Speaker 10: that you know, people don't know what they're doing or
Speaker 10: you know, whatever it is, because they are they know everything,
Speaker 10: They know everything. These are kids that all they do
Speaker 10: is study, you know, like you're talking about huge nerds
Speaker 10: joining into a massive, you know, decades long social movement.
Speaker 1: They've done the reading.
Speaker 8: Yeah, talking people who's done the reading. I wanted to
Speaker 8: talk about like faculty because I know a lot of
Speaker 8: people who are faculty at university's listened to this podcast,
Speaker 8: and I'm sure they're interested in, like how faculty have
Speaker 8: been in solidarity with students there, how they can be
Speaker 8: in solidarity with their own students. So have you seen that?
Speaker 8: Have you seen faculty up?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 10: Oh yeah, there was a massive faculty walk out the
Speaker 10: other day between Barnard and Columbia faculty members. The schools
Speaker 10: are kind of related. They're right across the street from
Speaker 10: each other, and they have a lot of overlap. Barnard's
Speaker 10: kind of under slightly under the university the Columbia umbrella,
Speaker 10: but still has the un president and things like that.
Speaker 10: And there was a huge faculty walk out from both
Speaker 10: campuses that gathered on the Low the steps of the
Speaker 10: Low Library, and it was easily hundreds I would say,
Speaker 10: maybe like five hundred people and.
Speaker 1: That was it. That was it Columbia.
Speaker 10: And then at NYU, the students set up an encampment
Speaker 10: and they were surrounded by faculty who had linked arms
Speaker 10: as a as a dazy chain around the encampment to
Speaker 10: protect the students. So we're seeing a very real, you know,
Speaker 10: multi layer of solidarity emerging in these spaces. And I
Speaker 10: think it's you know, even if the even if professors
Speaker 10: and faculty don't necessarily wholly or wholly understand they're not
Speaker 10: fully on the same wavelength as the student organizers, necessarily,
Speaker 10: they're still showing up on the basis of like, these
Speaker 10: students of the right to express their opinions and they
Speaker 10: should not be getting met with severe academic or state
Speaker 10: discipline for doing so. Because we've seen these same campuses
Speaker 10: open their doors to people like Charlie Charlie Kirk and
Speaker 10: Gavin McGinnis, and you know, like white supremacists and white
Speaker 10: nationalists who are able to go on their campuses and
Speaker 10: spread hate and you know, right going disinformation and try
Speaker 10: and recruit people through their you know, young Republican school chapters.
Speaker 10: Those chapters aren't being disbanded. You know, there's there isn't
Speaker 10: an urgent rush to prevent the hosting of white nationalists
Speaker 10: and white supremacists, and you know, people who are actually
Speaker 10: politically and intense anti Semitic to an extreme, they're not
Speaker 10: doing anything to actually like prevent those people from appearing
Speaker 10: on campus. So I think that there's there's a lot
Speaker 10: of layers to it, but there is a very strong
Speaker 10: surge of faculty saying like, hey, this is this is
Speaker 10: fucked up, and we're not We're not going to let
Speaker 10: you think that this is just kids that you're picking on,
Speaker 10: Like you're also attacking your own staff, who you know,
Speaker 10: has a longer relationship to the university, has a you know,
Speaker 10: as hard as it is as it is for these
Speaker 10: kids to get into the school, it's harder to get
Speaker 10: hired to work.
Speaker 1: Here, and so you know, we're seeing a lot of that.
Speaker 10: There's also security people who were put in charge of
Speaker 10: evicting students from their rooms at Barnard.
Speaker 9: Because Barnard has chosen that students at Barnard.
Speaker 10: Participated in this demo, they weren't only going to be
Speaker 10: suspended temporarily, but evicted from their housing, banned from campus,
Speaker 10: unable to access any food or meal plans, whereas the
Speaker 10: Columbia students have been suspended are still able to access
Speaker 10: housing and meal plans, but they aren't allowed to go
Speaker 10: to class or any campus events, which is fine because
Speaker 10: the only one that's happening right now is the encampment.
Speaker 10: But you know, there was there was a security person
Speaker 10: who sent an email to the school at Barnard saying,
Speaker 10: like I quit, Like this is this is inhumane, this
Speaker 10: is undignified, this is crazy. You're giving these students fifteen
Speaker 10: minutes to uproot themselves from their rooms. They might not
Speaker 10: have another place to go. These you know, these might
Speaker 10: be students who don't have a family's house.
Speaker 1: Nearby, or you know, or the funds or the.
Speaker 10: Means to live somewhere else and not worry about the
Speaker 10: cost you're you know, destabilizing people's lives in a very
Speaker 10: severe way. And this this you know, security person resigned.
Speaker 10: They're like this is nuts. So I think there's there's
Speaker 10: the fact that just the the overall what is of
Speaker 10: how these universities responding has provided a type of solidarity.
Speaker 10: And then there's also the fact that a lot of
Speaker 10: people just generally understand that genocide is bad, and it's
Speaker 10: gotten to a point where there's a lot of rhetoric
Speaker 10: trying to obscure that and obfuskate like what is genocide?
Speaker 10: And you know, Israel isroid truxs and all this other
Speaker 10: like bullshit like propaganda and disinformation and you know, fear
Speaker 10: mongering and all these things.
Speaker 1: And people can see very clearly what the game is.
Speaker 10: And so we're kind of at a pivotal moment for
Speaker 10: just common reality and critical thinking.
Speaker 1: And I think that we're seeing a.
Speaker 10: Lot of people show that the efforts to alter what
Speaker 10: our established common reality is is not working.
Speaker 5: And the Springs means is the thing I wanted to
Speaker 5: close on, which is where do you see this going?
Speaker 10: Oh, I'm an need a minute on that one. I mean,
Speaker 10: you know, we're at a very pivotal moment in history.
Speaker 10: There's a lot of comparisons being made to protests against
Speaker 10: the Vietnam War, and in those protests there was a
Speaker 10: lot of state violence, a lot of state repression, but
Speaker 10: there was also a lot of people willing to throw.
Speaker 1: Down in a very intense way. And you know, we're
Speaker 1: already seeing.
Speaker 10: Levels to that that have very very strong parallels, you know,
Speaker 10: with Lake Aaron Bushnell, which is also a story that
Speaker 10: I ended up breaking, And you know, like, so this
Speaker 10: is this is big, and I think that right now,
Speaker 10: in the midst of it, it's hard to guess what's
Speaker 10: going to happen two weeks from now or six months
Speaker 10: from now. But I guarantee you we all know what's
Speaker 10: going to happen fifty years from now. We're all going
Speaker 10: to look at this fifty years from now and be like, Wow,
Speaker 10: stay was on some dumb shit. Those protesters were right,
Speaker 10: and it's good that they didn't stop totally.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think that's a great place to end, Talia.
Speaker 8: I wonder if you would like to let people know
Speaker 8: where they can find you, where they can read your work,
Speaker 8: how they can support your work.
Speaker 10: Sure, so I mostly report live on Twitter talia otg
Speaker 10: as in on the ground, and you can support me
Speaker 10: by signing up on Patreon for hopefully more than five
Speaker 10: dollars a month. Those those small donations cover the entirety
Speaker 10: of my living and survival and allow for me to
Speaker 10: do this work for the past four years. So I'm
Speaker 10: like incredibly grateful. You know, people can support on Patreon.
Speaker 10: They can also if you just want to do like
Speaker 10: a one time heard you on the pod loved it.
Speaker 10: I have like a PayPal and a Venmo and all
Speaker 10: that other shit on my Twitter account if people want
Speaker 10: to send a couple couple bucks that way, and you know,
Speaker 10: another way to support is send me tips if you
Speaker 10: if you decide that you're gonna do something, feel free
Speaker 10: to you know, email and bio.
Speaker 1: I always, I always want.
Speaker 8: To know send all your all your tips, especially if
Speaker 8: you're at Columbia University. Anything else do you want to
Speaker 8: plug or me or anything else need to do before
Speaker 8: we go.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry that my voice sounds really like this.
Speaker 10: It's I don't think I've I haven't gotten a lot
Speaker 10: of sleep, and I hope that everything I said was coherent,
Speaker 10: even though I was just giving you essay after essay
Speaker 10: after essay.
Speaker 8: It was fantastic. Thank you so much, Shatie.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much, and thank you guys. It's something
Speaker 5: I could say from everyone. I could happen here, from
Speaker 5: the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Fuck him,
Speaker 5: fuck him up, keep.
Speaker 8: Yeah, fucking get him.
Speaker 1: Hey.
Speaker 2: We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
Speaker 2: now until we heat Death of the Universe.
Speaker 11: It could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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