Speaker 1: Al 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
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Speaker 3: Welcome, Dick.
Speaker 4: It happened here a podcast where we're bringing shitty Mayor
Speaker 4: Monday back to celebrate an incredibly special occasion, which is
Speaker 4: the unbelievably funny federal indictment of what New York Mayor
Speaker 4: Eric Adams with me to talk about. This is Garrison Davis,
Speaker 4: is James Stout and and we have a New York expert,
Speaker 4: our fellow trade unionist, Yeah, Joey pat who works on
Speaker 4: what we Love an Afterlives.
Speaker 3: Joey. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 5: Hey, thank you for having me. Excited to be here.
Speaker 6: I hope I can I can provide some insight to
Speaker 6: New York City and everything that's been happening lately.
Speaker 5: The Eric Adams news really is kind of the most
Speaker 5: positive piece of deuce that we've had the past month.
Speaker 5: It's been a really bad it's keeping me going, Yeah,
Speaker 5: I feel like I gotta say.
Speaker 6: I found out the news of the indictment. I was
Speaker 6: at like a gay bar near me, like at a
Speaker 6: like queer Pool event, and like everybody got the news
Speaker 6: at the same time, and it was one of the
Speaker 6: funniest ways to learn that Eric Adams has been a Yeah.
Speaker 6: That was that was the like the most joy I've
Speaker 6: seen from a from a group of New Yorkers in
Speaker 6: a while.
Speaker 5: What a beauty.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Okay, So I want to I want to open
Speaker 4: the floor up to Eric Adams stories, but first I
Speaker 4: need to complain about the fact that so I have
Speaker 4: I have long as a proud Chicago Wan who has
Speaker 4: now fled Chicago for Portland. I have long made fun
Speaker 4: of New York for being a tier two Chinese city
Speaker 4: that thinks that it's the greatest city in the world.
Speaker 4: And then I learned they didn't have trash cans, which
Speaker 4: pushed this at like this is not even like a
Speaker 4: two or five. This is a level of trash collection
Speaker 4: that you see in like rural Hoobe, Like what the fuck?
Speaker 3: Britain the United Kingdom where we got ready to trash
Speaker 3: cans too.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, that's not true though, because luckily Eric
Speaker 5: Adams didn't make the trash can.
Speaker 3: Just what is going on.
Speaker 6: The first American city to ever think of this idea
Speaker 6: for contacts. I am also in a unique position here
Speaker 6: because I'm from Chicago, and yeah, oftentimes get my friends
Speaker 6: and family that still live in Chicago confused as to
Speaker 6: why I live out here.
Speaker 5: I do love New York. It is a great detity
Speaker 5: to live in. But these are the kind.
Speaker 6: Of moments we have where I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: I can't. I can't.
Speaker 4: I don't know, I honestly. And then I think about
Speaker 4: this Eric Adams stuff too. It's like the stuff he's so,
Speaker 4: there's gonna be a second federal indict with more people
Speaker 4: in it, but the first one it's kind of brush
Speaker 4: league ship by Chicago standards.
Speaker 3: Like like if you compare this.
Speaker 4: To like like Rob Lagoyevitch trying to sell off, like
Speaker 4: trying to sell Obama's Senate seat, It's like, okay, yeah,
Speaker 4: I've been saying New York.
Speaker 5: Wants to be Chicago.
Speaker 6: They're starting a second city here too. No, No, there's
Speaker 6: been adds in the subway, and every time like takes
Speaker 6: away a part of my soul. Like, I'm like, you
Speaker 6: cannot claim that that is us.
Speaker 5: It just means there's going to be even more insufferable people.
Speaker 5: That sucks.
Speaker 4: Yeah, a second second city has hit the Towers.
Speaker 5: Another great Ragadom's moment with Eric Adams hit the Towers. No, no,
Speaker 5: but he had he had this great interview where he
Speaker 5: was asked to summarize, like what makes New York great
Speaker 5: in one word? And he gave the answer new York,
Speaker 5: which is two words, and that explained it's because it's
Speaker 5: the only city where you can wake up and have
Speaker 5: nine eleven happen and also open up a small business.
Speaker 5: It's one of the one of the funniest Eric Adams
Speaker 5: moments I've ever seen till until he was indicted, which
Speaker 5: is now the new funniest Rogats moment, which we should
Speaker 5: probably get to because this is not a short indictment.
Speaker 3: Wait are we're doing all Eric adams favorite moments yet?
Speaker 3: Because I have a family, we got to run that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I've already done mine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, do you want to hit this with you? As Jerry?
Speaker 5: Mine's definitely.
Speaker 6: I think the ongoing saga of just whether or not
Speaker 6: he's a vegan, and the fact that he repeatedly claims
Speaker 6: he's a vegan and thinks that vegan.
Speaker 3: I didn't know this. Yeah, he's a vegan.
Speaker 6: He talks a lot about how he's a vegan and
Speaker 6: all the health benefits and how it's he has a
Speaker 6: lot of weird like beliefs about health and stuff that
Speaker 6: have come out over his you know, mayr Oll run.
Speaker 6: But apparently he's not actually a vegan because he's been
Speaker 6: seen like eating chicken on camera and like that weird
Speaker 6: video of his apartment when he was running. That was
Speaker 6: the Brooklyn apartment that he may or may not live in,
Speaker 6: Like there was like some sort of meat.
Speaker 5: Product in the fridge or something. There's been a whole.
Speaker 6: Thing about how like he maybe and he's like admitted
Speaker 6: that he's like eaten meat sometimes, like he's like, oh, well,
Speaker 6: you know, I'll just have like a little nibble, like
Speaker 6: it's it's it doesn't count.
Speaker 5: Chicken isn't beacon What do you mean he identifies as
Speaker 5: a vacant.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's like some kind of like like sixteenth century
Speaker 3: Catholic you know, where they have all these weird exceptions
Speaker 3: for fish.
Speaker 6: And like right right, that's the repent and then whatever
Speaker 6: to confass and and then he's getting he gets as
Speaker 6: we get a card back.
Speaker 5: That's a good one. That's a good one.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Joe's Jewey's kind of mentioned mine. But the fact
Speaker 4: that he definitely is from New Jersey, which I think
Speaker 4: is what allowed him to use a trash can, Like
Speaker 4: she definitely does not live in New York.
Speaker 3: There's there's no way. Like my favorite also relates to
Speaker 3: him not living in New York, which is when Curb
Speaker 3: staked out his New York apartment and he came back
Speaker 3: once parked illegally and then caused a traffic jam. I
Speaker 3: parking illegally so that he couldn't put out of the pocket.
Speaker 3: He wasn't in a pocket space. He was in someone's driveway.
Speaker 3: So then he proceeded to drive along the sidewalk and
Speaker 3: they like filmed him doing this, and he confessed to
Speaker 3: doing it and was like it was a terrible mistake,
Speaker 3: just an incredible sequence of events.
Speaker 6: I mean, maybe that is like a New York mayor
Speaker 6: who can't drive, Like I guess that makes sense.
Speaker 3: Like yet refuses to use mass transit Oh.
Speaker 5: God, that's true. That's true. He does hate public transportation. God,
Speaker 5: you can just send more cops in the subway. That'll
Speaker 5: fix it, all right.
Speaker 3: Oh god, let's uh yeah, let me, let's let's get
Speaker 3: into this. Get start. So okay.
Speaker 4: So the things here is being indicted for are effectively okay.
Speaker 4: So he took a bunch of different bribes in different ways.
Speaker 4: So he took I guess there's two broad categories of
Speaker 4: bribes that he took, which is the bribes that are
Speaker 4: campaign donations that he funneled through straw donors, which is
Speaker 4: the thing where you like there's like limits on how
Speaker 4: much money you could donate to someone, right, So what
Speaker 4: you do is you find like ten people and you
Speaker 4: give them all two thousand dollars so they can still
Speaker 4: donate it even though it's the Moodey's from you. This
Speaker 4: is unbelievably illegal. And the second type is him just
Speaker 4: accepting unbelievable amounts of like gifts and stuff from a
Speaker 4: Turkish airliner. Now, the interesting thing about this is that
Speaker 4: you would expect this is the thing that started when
Speaker 4: he was a mayor, but like, no, he was so
Speaker 4: he was he was the borough president of Brooklyn for
Speaker 4: a bunch of years before he became mayor, And this
Speaker 4: is like as Burro President is when he like really
Speaker 4: started doing all of this random, weird corruption stuff.
Speaker 5: He's been doing this for like almost like ten years.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I kind of love this too, because the like
Speaker 6: Brooklyn Borough president, it's kind of a fake job, like
Speaker 6: you don't really do anything.
Speaker 5: And I love the fact that.
Speaker 6: He still managed to find ways to be corrupt in
Speaker 6: his like fake job that he adds.
Speaker 4: It's stunning because I'm going to read starting with the
Speaker 4: indictment a bit. By smuggling their contributions to Adams through
Speaker 4: US based straw donors, Adams oversees contributors defeated federal laws
Speaker 4: that serve to prevent for an influence on US elections.
Speaker 4: Both the individuals evaded laws designed to limit their power
Speaker 4: over elected officials by restricting the amount of money one
Speaker 4: person could donate to a candidate, and businesses circumvented New
Speaker 4: York City's ban on corporate contributions by fundeling the donations
Speaker 4: through multiple employees, frustrating a law that sees reduced corporate
Speaker 4: power in politics. Adams increases fundraising by accepting these concealed
Speaker 4: illegal donations at the cost of giving his secret patients
Speaker 4: undue influence over him that the law tries to prevent.
Speaker 4: So this is really funny because so there's three different
Speaker 4: illegal like things that he's done, like through these straw donors.
Speaker 4: So like there's like there's three kinds of campaign contributions.
Speaker 3: You can't do. It's like corporations.
Speaker 4: One person, there's like limits on how men watch an
Speaker 4: individual person can donate and you can't get you can't
Speaker 4: get donations from like people not from the US. And
Speaker 4: he managed to both individually and in the same scheme
Speaker 4: violate every single one of these laws.
Speaker 3: It's it's genuinely incredible.
Speaker 5: I guess I would like to learn more. I mean
Speaker 5: at some point, and I'm sure we'll get into it
Speaker 5: as how like explicit this whole like Turkish funding really
Speaker 5: is like extremely.
Speaker 3: About it. Yeah yet will I'm sure we'll get to this.
Speaker 3: It's when they're like, hey, Eric, you're not going to
Speaker 3: say anything about the Median genocide. Arue that Tony didn't happen, bro,
Speaker 3: don't mention the genocide. Oh yeah, we'll get to that.
Speaker 4: So Eric Adams, a defendant, also saw and received other
Speaker 4: improper benefits from some of the same co conspirators who
Speaker 4: funded shra altonations to his campaign, In particular, a senior
Speaker 4: official in the Turkish diplomatic establishments henceforth Turkish official who
Speaker 4: facilitated many Charlton nations to Adams, also arranged for Adams
Speaker 4: and his companions to receive free or discount to travel
Speaker 4: on Turkey's national airline, quote the Turkish Airline, which is
Speaker 4: owned a significant part by the Turkish governments. Nations including France, China,
Speaker 4: Sri Lanka, India, Hungary and Turkey itself. The Turkish officials
Speaker 4: and other Turkish nationals further arranged for Adams and his
Speaker 4: companions to receive, among other things, free rooms at opulent hotels,
Speaker 4: free meals a high end restaurants, and free luxurious entertainment
Speaker 4: while in Turkey. So this is all very very explicit.
Speaker 5: He's got wanderlust. You know, he was supposed to be
Speaker 5: like a travel.
Speaker 6: Blogger like Girley, like doing tiktoks, and you know, unfortunately
Speaker 6: he had to become mayor.
Speaker 3: So, yeah, a bunt of log forster.
Speaker 5: Mayor starting to do the job he wants to.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's very tragic. Okay, So actually the first thing
Speaker 4: Turkish influence thing that he did. I actually, this is
Speaker 4: weirdly the one part of this I don't have a
Speaker 4: problem with. One of the big things he was trying
Speaker 4: to get was there's a giant like newke Turkish consulate
Speaker 4: building that they opened kind of recently, and a big
Speaker 4: part of this was getting permission to open the Turkish
Speaker 4: consulate without a fire inspection, so that aired one could
Speaker 4: visit for like the opening of the consulate and look, okay,
Speaker 4: we already can't fly to Turkey because of republic support
Speaker 4: for the Curtis Free movement. So like, I'm just gonna
Speaker 4: say this, I am entirely okay with this. I am
Speaker 4: I don't I don't give a shit if they don't
Speaker 4: do fire inspections.
Speaker 5: I'm okay with her to one being in a non
Speaker 5: fire safe building.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, like fuck them.
Speaker 4: Like if the guy who burned one hundred and fifty
Speaker 4: people alive and Cindy wants to fucking burn a death
Speaker 4: in his own consulate, then let him. Like I Jennie
Speaker 4: Whitely don't give a shit about this. She did threaten
Speaker 4: the job of like the New York Fire Department's fire inspector,
Speaker 4: which kind of sucks, but like if everyone wants to
Speaker 4: burn a death in his death trap, let him do that.
Speaker 3: This is one of the.
Speaker 6: Text conversations that then was was uh, I don't know
Speaker 6: if leaked is the right word, but yeah, like because
Speaker 6: it was. It was they were like there was something
Speaker 6: they said to where they were like, we've done a
Speaker 6: lot for you, now it's time for you to do
Speaker 6: something for the Republic of Turkey.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we'll get we'll get to that.
Speaker 4: This is yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good.
Speaker 3: Ex tolown shit.
Speaker 5: That like all right.
Speaker 4: After Eric Adams, a defendant, first travel to Turkey in
Speaker 4: twenty fifteen, the Turkish official introduced Adams to Turkish Airlines
Speaker 4: general manager in New York City area in twenty sixteen
Speaker 4: and twice in twenty seventeen. Again, this is all before
Speaker 4: he's mayor. Adams solicited and accepted free and heavily discounted
Speaker 4: luxury air travel from Turkish Airlines as part of Turkish officials'
Speaker 4: efforts to gain influence over Adams on three separate trips.
Speaker 4: Basically like he's getting first class tickets from all of
Speaker 4: these people.
Speaker 3: It's so much money worth of stuff, like just like
Speaker 3: thousands of dollars.
Speaker 4: The exact totals, like all of the gifts he took
Speaker 4: from Turkish Airlines, it's like one hundred and it's like
Speaker 4: one hundred and thirty thousand something dollars.
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ. Yeah damn.
Speaker 4: So, like any time I read a paragraph of this,
Speaker 4: just assume that in between, like whatever paragraph I'm reading
Speaker 4: and the stuff I didn't read before it, he's taken
Speaker 4: another ten thousand dollars of free like first class rides
Speaker 4: to Turkish airline.
Speaker 3: It is a blessing in disguise. I will say that
Speaker 3: I will never see Eric Adams on a flight because
Speaker 3: I cannot fly. It was Turkish Airlines.
Speaker 4: That's true. There's a very funny line about this, because
Speaker 4: the Turkish airline provided free travel benefits were tens of
Speaker 4: thousands of dollars to Eric Adams, the defendants. He flew
Speaker 4: the Turkish airline even when doing so was otherwise inconvenience.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is fucking correct.
Speaker 4: For example, for example, dreamed the July and August twenty
Speaker 4: seventeen trip. Adam's partner was surprised to learn that Adams
Speaker 4: was in Turkey when she had understood him to be
Speaker 4: flying from New York to France. Adams responded in a
Speaker 4: text message quote transferring here, you know first stop is
Speaker 4: always an istanbul spelled very wrong and lowercase is true rather.
Speaker 4: When adams partner later inquired about planning a trip to
Speaker 4: the eastern island Chile, Adams repeatedly asked her whether Turkish
Speaker 4: airlines could be used for these flights, requesting her to
Speaker 4: call Turkish Airlines to confirm they did not have roots
Speaker 4: between New York and Chile.
Speaker 5: Why wouldn't you have a flight from New York?
Speaker 3: Oh my god, it Spit's part of the greater Ottoman Empire.
Speaker 5: You know, I would take bribes from Eric Canada. But
Speaker 5: I'm also not running for mayor.
Speaker 3: So yeah, well you could run for a Bira president.
Speaker 5: That's true. That's true. I could. I could become elected
Speaker 5: the mayor of South Fulton. That is very doable. Every Similarly,
Speaker 5: lots of the mayors of South Fulton have had very
Speaker 5: odd kind of controversies. So what I'm saying is South
Speaker 5: Fulton is basically Georgia's version of New York.
Speaker 3: New York is a South Fulton of America. Have you
Speaker 3: have you guys seen a video clip of him? Every
Speaker 3: city he goes to. He says, like New York is
Speaker 3: the city of America.
Speaker 6: It's crazy, It's crazy, it standbul of America.
Speaker 3: So this is all very funny.
Speaker 4: But this is all happening all of the the tens
Speaker 4: of thousands of dollars at this point of money that
Speaker 4: he's taking from Turkey, it's all happening in a period where
Speaker 4: Turkey is butchering curds across the Middle East, like his
Speaker 4: first trip there. And this is all again well before
Speaker 4: his mayor while he's like Brooklyn Borough president is four
Speaker 4: months before the fire bombing of the city that I
Speaker 4: talked about where they were again, they burned one hundred
Speaker 4: and fifty civilians alive in a fucking building. If I'm
Speaker 4: remembering correctly, I'm pretty sure they killed. I'm pretty sure
Speaker 4: they burned the city council alive. That's just the stuff
Speaker 4: in Turkey. And like we have covered extensively on this show,
Speaker 4: Turkey's like drone warfare program. There's the whole thing of it.
Speaker 4: Has been long suspected that the Turkish government was aiding
Speaker 4: Isis during the period because they were like using basically
Speaker 4: using them as a proxy to fight like Kurtish Freedom
Speaker 4: movement forces in Syria.
Speaker 3: I think you could definitely say that, like former ISIS
Speaker 3: fighters are now fighting for the Turkish against the Kurds
Speaker 3: in the Rocky Curtis done. Yeah, I've said that before.
Speaker 3: The Kurds will tell you that.
Speaker 4: For I know, David Graebrin anthropologists, you spent actually who
Speaker 4: smuggled a bunch of drone parts. You had a story
Speaker 4: about how we talking people like yeah, they would like
Speaker 4: they would pick up ISIS fighters and they would look
Speaker 4: at their possessions and they every single one of them
Speaker 4: as Turkish passports. They all have like Turkish id shit.
Speaker 4: It's like, hmm, I wonder where these people came from.
Speaker 3: Even like I'll just say I have spoken to some
Speaker 3: people who were part of the fight against ISIS who
Speaker 3: discovered blank Turkish passports. Uh when taking like ISIS buildings
Speaker 3: and ISIS strongholds.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so there's there's I mean, just this is a
Speaker 4: period of even by the standards of Turkey, like unbelievable
Speaker 4: Turkish violence. This is their their invasion of Syria, and
Speaker 4: you know this is this is the period in which
Speaker 4: Eric Adams decides that he's going to become an Asian
Speaker 4: to the Turkish State, and so obviously like he lies
Speaker 4: about this to the governments, because again you're not allowed
Speaker 4: to do this. There's a bunch of very funny schemes
Speaker 4: that he does. As Brooklyn Borough President, Adams employed a
Speaker 4: scheduler henceforth known as the Adams Scheduler, who pointed it
Speaker 4: who managed appointments, meetings, and other official events. Despite her
Speaker 4: status as a New York City employee, the Adams scheduler
Speaker 4: was used by Adams to perform personal tax for him,
Speaker 4: such as collecting rent at a Brooklyn property he owned.
Speaker 4: Adams also assigned the scheduler to pay various expenses for him,
Speaker 4: after which Adams would reimburse the scheduler in cash.
Speaker 3: In twenty seventeen, Adams sent.
Speaker 4: A series of emails to the scheduler directing the scheduler
Speaker 4: to pay for the free twenty seventeen flights that he
Speaker 4: and his companions had already taken on the Turkish Airline,
Speaker 4: but the emails provided inconsistent explanations. In some Adams suggested
Speaker 4: that the Adams schedulers should pay using Adam's credit card,
Speaker 4: while on others, Adams claimed to have left cash in
Speaker 4: an envelope for the Adams scheduler to send to the
Speaker 4: Turkish airline.
Speaker 3: Ah, it's that's how you pay. It's how I pay
Speaker 3: for all my fights. Cash it an envido.
Speaker 4: This is how he tried to cover up for the
Speaker 4: fact that he's not paying for these flights. And he'll
Speaker 4: pay like six hundred dollars for a theater dollar ticket.
Speaker 3: But he's like.
Speaker 4: Sending envelopes to his scheduler to hand to the Turkish
Speaker 4: air line.
Speaker 3: A man who was a call doing an absolutely terrible
Speaker 3: job of covering his own ass.
Speaker 4: You know who else is taking bribes from the turkeysh government.
Speaker 4: It's not our products and services. It's it's someone else's
Speaker 4: products and services. Ours are all fine, we are back.
Speaker 4: So there's actually another paragraph of that part. For example,
Speaker 4: on November twenty fifth, twenty seventeen, Adam sent an email
Speaker 4: to the scheduler saying that, with respects to the July
Speaker 4: trip quote, I left you the money for the international
Speaker 4: airline and an envelope and your top gest drawer, please send.
Speaker 3: It to them.
Speaker 4: So the funny one about this, right, So he's supposed
Speaker 4: to have this like cash dead drop to pay for
Speaker 4: the airline tickets, then he just like never does it
Speaker 4: because the tickets are free.
Speaker 3: So he just like stops covering his tracks. Yeah amazing
Speaker 3: and doesn't use signal. Yeah it's it's it really is
Speaker 3: sounding Okay. So what is Turkish government getting from this
Speaker 3: in return for travel benefits? The Turkish official provided or range.
Speaker 3: In about twenty fifteen or twenty sixteen, Eric Adams, the defendant,
Speaker 3: granted a political request from the Turkish official prior to
Speaker 3: adams twenty fifteen travel to Turkey, which Adams knew and
Speaker 3: disclosed to the One of the monitoring agencies have been
Speaker 3: funded by, among other entities, the Turkish Consulate, the Turkish
Speaker 3: Airline in three separate municipalities in Turkey. Adams maintained a
Speaker 3: relationship with a Turkish community center in Brooklyn. In or
Speaker 3: about twenty sixteen, the Turkish official told Adams that the
Speaker 3: community center was affiliated with a Turkish movement that was
Speaker 3: hostile to Turkey's government, and that if Adams wished to
Speaker 3: continue receiving support from the Turkish government, Adams could no
Speaker 3: longer associate with the community center. Adam zach Wies Scott,
Speaker 3: I wonder who it was, see, Okay, so I looked
Speaker 3: into this.
Speaker 4: No one that I've seen doing reporting on this seems
Speaker 4: to know which center this was. But but this has
Speaker 4: to be a Gulinist thing. Yeah, So to people who
Speaker 4: didn't spend all of their childhoodmired in the of Turkish politics,
Speaker 4: everyone's the current rule of Turkey.
Speaker 3: Gulm was like one.
Speaker 4: Of his old old allies, but they had this giant
Speaker 4: falling out and a huge part of what everyone was
Speaker 4: doing in the twenty tens was like trying to purge
Speaker 4: all of the Gulanists from everywhere. Like there was this
Speaker 4: whole scheme running I think through Michael Flynn where Turkey
Speaker 4: was trying to get Trump to like the Gulan's like
Speaker 4: in like a compound and I think Virginia or something,
Speaker 4: and Turkey was trying to get Trump to like raid
Speaker 4: the compound and send them to Turkey, which didn't happen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that line's up with the coup they did twenty
Speaker 3: sixteen coup, right, yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So, you know, it's always been unclear to me
Speaker 4: exactly how much influences people have. But the one thing
Speaker 4: I will say is that so I had a classmate
Speaker 4: in college who was in Turkey for a long time,
Speaker 4: and their line about it was like, yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 4: like how much of this sort of Guladist deep state
Speaker 4: shit is true. But also there were like gulanest people
Speaker 4: who you could go to who had like all the
Speaker 4: answers to like state exams.
Speaker 3: So if you want to be willing to get in bed,
Speaker 3: whether they would just give.
Speaker 4: Him all the answers. So, like you know, they were
Speaker 4: not a part of this. And I'm pretty sure what
Speaker 4: happened here was that Adams was like cutting off all
Speaker 4: contact with these people because this is part of the
Speaker 4: gool and is split. I'm not one hundred percent sure
Speaker 4: because there are multiple community centers in Brookly in Brooklyn,
Speaker 4: like Turchi Media centers in Brooklyn, but I'm about eighty
Speaker 4: percent sure that's what happens. So that's like one of
Speaker 4: the first direct influence things. Okay, so he's doing the
Speaker 4: influence peddling stuff, right, He's doing his partially through the airlines.
Speaker 4: And then also he's just taking a bunch of legal
Speaker 4: fundraising money.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 4: On July twenty second, twenty eighteen, the same day as
Speaker 4: this fundraising event, the Adam staffer and the promoter discussed
Speaker 4: by text message a possible trip by Adams the Turkey.
Speaker 4: The promoter stated, in part, fundraising Turkey is not legal,
Speaker 4: but I think I can raise money for your campaign
Speaker 4: off the record. The Adam Stafford inquired, how will Adams
Speaker 4: declare that money? The promoter responded, he won't declare it
Speaker 4: or will make the do do an American citizen in
Speaker 4: the US a Turk. I'll give cash to him in Turkey.
Speaker 4: We'll I'll send it to an American he will make
Speaker 4: the donation to you. The Adam Stafford replied, I think
Speaker 4: he won't get involved in such games. That might cause
Speaker 4: a stink later on, but I'll ask anyways. The Adam
Speaker 4: Stafford then asked how much do you think would come
Speaker 4: from you. The promoter responded, max one hundred k. The
Speaker 4: Adam Stafford wrote, one hundred k. Do you have a
Speaker 4: chance to transfer that here? We can't do it while
Speaker 4: Eric is in Turkey, to which your promoter replied, let's think.
Speaker 4: After the conversation, the Adam Stafford asked Adams whether that
Speaker 4: Adam Stafford should pursue the unlawful for contributions offered by
Speaker 4: the promoter, and contrary to the staffers expectations, Adams directed
Speaker 4: the staffer to pursue the promoter's illegal scheme.
Speaker 3: That's crazy.
Speaker 4: I feel like you should know who you're working for
Speaker 4: well enough to be like, hey, this guy is offering
Speaker 4: a completely illegal fundraising scheme that we know is illegal,
Speaker 4: and I don't think my boss will take it.
Speaker 3: And then the boss turns around to be he's.
Speaker 5: Like, yeah, fuck it raised, buddy, it might cause a
Speaker 5: big stink later on. You don't say, yeah, that's wild.
Speaker 3: To be fair, it did.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's so explicit, and I do want to get
Speaker 5: to some some of the other text messages sooner or later,
Speaker 5: because it really just shows how like aware everyone involved
Speaker 5: is of over like what's going on?
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're doing crimes.
Speaker 6: It's literally just hey, what should I do with the
Speaker 6: crime money?
Speaker 5: The illegal crime? By the way, have we mentioned this illegal?
Speaker 4: So partially this is being run through Turkish airlines, Partially
Speaker 4: this is being run through Turkish university, and partially this
Speaker 4: is being run through just a bunch of businessmen, some
Speaker 4: of whom are Turkish, some of them aren't. So here's
Speaker 4: like the next thing I was gonna read. Although Adams
Speaker 4: knew that businessman one was a Turkish national who could
Speaker 4: not lawfully contribute to US elections, Adams directed the staffer
Speaker 4: to obtain the illegal contributions offered by Businessman one. Following
Speaker 4: up on this directive, Adams wrote to the staffer that
Speaker 4: business or one quote is ready to help. I don't
Speaker 4: want his help to be wasted. So they are just
Speaker 4: like unbelievably directly being like, yeah, we know this guy
Speaker 4: can't do this, but we're just gonna tell them to
Speaker 4: send this money anyways.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's insane how slapstick they are about this. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and like you know, they're kind of trying to come
Speaker 3: from tretch. I think that this part of it is
Speaker 3: one of the things that I think, like was one
Speaker 3: of the things that kind of went viral over this.
Speaker 3: So Adams is trying to arrange another like fifty thousand
Speaker 3: dollars contribution from a third Turkish businessman.
Speaker 4: And in the middle of this, he's saying to the
Speaker 4: staffer quote to be on the safe side, Please delete
Speaker 4: capital P, capital D. Please delete all messages you send me,
Speaker 4: Adams responded, always do. Now, we don't for a fact
Speaker 4: that a bunch of these messages were simply not deleted,
Speaker 4: because I have considering.
Speaker 5: That you just read.
Speaker 3: Though.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I do also think It was worth noting that
Speaker 5: some of these efforts certainly started to ramp up around
Speaker 5: his mayoral campaign, because some of these Turkish officials thought
Speaker 5: that if Adams becomes a more like prominent member in politics,
Speaker 5: never like runs for president, and if they can gain
Speaker 5: influence over him from like pretty early on, that would
Speaker 5: be really useful for the Turkish government. That is some
Speaker 5: of like the reasoning behind this like decades long campaign. Yeah,
Speaker 5: like puppet Eric Adams.
Speaker 3: Maybe the Turkish government had seen Nate Silver's now infamous
Speaker 3: tweet how it will be the.
Speaker 5: Next Yeah, I mean it's all many such cases.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Snate Silver who got them to chase us around
Speaker 3: with drones last last October.
Speaker 5: He keeps getting more businessman to donate tens of thousands
Speaker 5: of dollars.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, it's so funny.
Speaker 5: It's like repeatedly, he just keeps getting more and more
Speaker 5: and more.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And the funniest part is that like by like guy
Speaker 4: number four he's doing this with he's like telling the
Speaker 4: guy how to do straw donations where he's like, yeah, no,
Speaker 4: you can't donate ten thousand dollars to give two thousand
Speaker 4: dollars to.
Speaker 3: Each of your employees and they'll do it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he's doing like instructions for each of these guys,
Speaker 5: and it's like at a certain point, like some of
Speaker 5: the early airline stuff is yes, a llegal sketchy, but
Speaker 5: like you know, it's it's just getting some nice plane
Speaker 5: tickets by like twenty twenty one. He's just teaching them
Speaker 5: how to do like super illegal like campaign fraud. Yeah,
Speaker 5: you've like committed so much that you're just like into deep,
Speaker 5: like you can't like what's there to do?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 3: You know who else is in too deep?
Speaker 4: It's the products and services who controlled this podcast, this
Speaker 4: podcast support that one.
Speaker 8: Yeah, oh wow, wow, so much to say by the
Speaker 8: Reagan coin people.
Speaker 3: It's ump.
Speaker 5: They have a very little editorial control.
Speaker 6: Are you supposed to delete those tags?
Speaker 3: There are so many funny ones.
Speaker 4: He also he also is taking money from this construction
Speaker 4: guy where he takes a bunch of buddy that it
Speaker 4: like shows up at this like New York's big Pride
Speaker 4: event to give a speech because he took money from
Speaker 4: this like antruction guy.
Speaker 3: Did he say New York isse s Hee Wasbekistan of America?
Speaker 5: Honestly, he probably has said that. That's like, yeah, he's.
Speaker 4: Probably said Kazakhstan by accident because he always says the
Speaker 4: wrong count giving his speech like that.
Speaker 6: My favorite moment was the video of him speaking to
Speaker 6: like the Indian group that he kept saying Pakistani, Oh god, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: oh dear yeah.
Speaker 3: I think that went down like a chocolate tipa. He
Speaker 3: did it like twice too. They corrected him that he
Speaker 3: kept doing.
Speaker 5: It well, they were only yelling over him, and.
Speaker 3: He said, stout God.
Speaker 4: So there's another kind of funny one where he's he's
Speaker 4: getting a bunch of money from this university and he
Speaker 4: actually returns the money because his campaign is like his
Speaker 4: Mayora campaign is over, but he's still going to go
Speaker 4: to prison for it because he lied to the government
Speaker 4: at where he got the money even though he gave
Speaker 4: it away. Okay, So I want to start reading some
Speaker 4: of these texts so we can get into like how
Speaker 4: explicit the stuff is. On July twenty second, twenty twenty one, Adams,
Speaker 4: through the staffer, requested that the airline manager book flights
Speaker 4: to Istabul for Adams in order to conceal the favorable treatment.
Speaker 4: The Adam stafford requested the airline manager charge Adams what
Speaker 4: would appear to be a real price, Adam Stafford, how
Speaker 4: much does he owe? Please let them make a call
Speaker 4: and now will make the payments. Airline manager. It is
Speaker 4: very expensive because it is last minute. I am working
Speaker 4: on a discount, Adam Stafford. Okay, thank you, airline manager.
Speaker 4: I am going to charge fifty dollars, Adam Stafford. No,
Speaker 4: airline manager. That wouldn't work, wouldn't it, Adam Stafford, No, dear,
Speaker 4: fifty dollars? What quote a proper price? How much should
Speaker 4: I charge? A smiley face emoji, Adam Stafford. His every
Speaker 4: step is being watched right now. One thousand dollars or so,
Speaker 4: let it be somewhat real. We don't want them to
Speaker 4: say that he is flying for free. At the moment,
Speaker 4: the media's attention is on Eric.
Speaker 3: Amazing stuff.
Speaker 6: The smiley faith of the tax is really throwing off.
Speaker 5: It's so good. So he paid about like one one
Speaker 5: hundred dollars for these round trip tickets, and he was
Speaker 5: upgraded to business classes. Suck at him, and in actuality
Speaker 5: these tickets would would again be like fifteen thousand dollars.
Speaker 5: And this is like the same type of stuff he
Speaker 5: was doing like eight years ago, except this time he
Speaker 5: actually is paying some money, whereas last time he did
Speaker 5: not actually fill up those envelopes with cash. Yeah, but
Speaker 5: still he's about he's about fourteen thousand short.
Speaker 4: He also was this a great one where like the
Speaker 4: staffers like, do you have recommendations of where he can
Speaker 4: go to Turkey?
Speaker 3: At the airline manager?
Speaker 4: Four season staffer, it's too expensive airline manager, why does
Speaker 4: he care? He's not going to fake his name, will
Speaker 4: not be at anything either, Adam stafford super super.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's all so super illegal.
Speaker 6: I want to meet the person who's sending these taxs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so bad. It's so funny.
Speaker 6: Why is this like the cadence with which they're speaking
Speaker 6: and these tacks, that's just insane.
Speaker 4: It's incredible stuff. There's some great ones. I gotta read
Speaker 4: this one. On the day the Adams fundraiser was scheduled
Speaker 4: to depart Istanbul, Adams created a message thread between himself
Speaker 4: and the Adams fundraiser and the airline manager quote, he
Speaker 4: will try to help with the issue with the form
Speaker 4: he can see about a hotel or business class lounge.
Speaker 4: The manager then arranged for the Adams fundraiser, who was
Speaker 4: otherwise flying on an economy ticket, to have access to
Speaker 4: not only the Turkish Airlines business lounge, but also an
Speaker 4: exclusive private suite inside the lounge, complete with a bed
Speaker 4: and free food. The Turkish airline manager explained, this is
Speaker 4: our suite for VIPs and we want you to feel yourself.
Speaker 4: Two words yourself sick VIP, smiley face emoji.
Speaker 3: Fail yourself VIP. That's what we will want.
Speaker 4: At another point in the exchange, Adams wrote, quote, thanks
Speaker 4: a million airline manager, my brother. Which airline managers wanted anytime?
Speaker 3: Brother?
Speaker 7: Oh?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 4: This on the day he won the election, Like the
Speaker 4: day after, the airline manager sent the following text message, brother, congratulations.
Speaker 3: Adams responded, cannot thank you enough.
Speaker 5: So true, so true. That is good, although it's not
Speaker 5: as good as kind of the next thing when in
Speaker 5: December twenty one he was putting together his like mayoral
Speaker 5: like team for like policy advisors and his transition team,
Speaker 5: and he did not have like people from Turkey on
Speaker 5: this list, so this air manager said, didn't. It's it's
Speaker 5: not quite blackmail, but it is certainly like bribery, saying like, hey,
Speaker 5: maybe you should put me on like your senior on
Speaker 5: your senior advisory team. And if you don't, then you're
Speaker 5: not going to get free tickets anymore.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I want to read the exact line because it's
Speaker 3: so funny.
Speaker 4: The staffer sense of the airline manager list, and the
Speaker 4: airline manager responded, it would suit me well to be
Speaker 4: lead or senior advisor. Two days later, the airline manager
Speaker 4: sent a message reiterating, lead please plz please smiley face,
Speaker 4: otherwise fifty two is empty on the way back.
Speaker 3: Seat.
Speaker 5: Oh god, oh my god, Lead, please, you don't make
Speaker 5: me a lead advisor. We're not going to give you
Speaker 5: free free airplane tickets anymore. Oh my god, it's so funny.
Speaker 3: Winky face.
Speaker 5: And then uh, I believe he did add someone onto
Speaker 5: onto his team.
Speaker 3: Yep, yep, yeah.
Speaker 4: He was added to the Infrastructure, Climate and Sustainability Committee
Speaker 4: transition team Jesus Christ, which the whole Sustainability Commission is
Speaker 4: just like a slush. There's another thing later where like
Speaker 4: he's like a secret meeting of like these Turkish donors,
Speaker 4: and he calls it like a sustainability transition meetings, so
Speaker 4: no one will know that he's having this meeting.
Speaker 5: Man, you should read what the airline manager wrote after
Speaker 5: he was added to the Climate and Sustainability and Infrastructure
Speaker 5: Committee yeah.
Speaker 7: So.
Speaker 4: On December twenty twenty one, the senior Turkish government official
Speaker 4: set the airline manager a series of texts noting the
Speaker 4: airline manager's membership on Adam's Infrastructure Climate Sustainability can be
Speaker 4: and sending.
Speaker 3: Applause about you. Oh no.
Speaker 4: The airline manager responded that his membership on the Tradition
Speaker 4: Committee was in service of Turkey. Quote, thank you, brother.
Speaker 4: We are doing our best to server country adequately. Your
Speaker 4: support gives us strength here.
Speaker 3: Thank you. You were always there for us, and we're
Speaker 3: trying to be loyal.
Speaker 5: It's amazing.
Speaker 6: Oh wait is it. We're trying to be worthy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're trying to be worthy. Yeah, we're trying.
Speaker 5: To be worthy. Yeah. That is so sorry. I'm trying
Speaker 5: to be worthy of you. Thank you so much for
Speaker 5: being there.
Speaker 3: Please be so good.
Speaker 5: I just like want to be worthy of you. Ericata.
Speaker 4: So by this point I total that the Turkish airline bribes,
Speaker 4: specifically that all the benefits total one hundred and twenty
Speaker 4: three thousand.
Speaker 3: Dollars seats general.
Speaker 5: Life, which is also just a small fraction of like
Speaker 5: the total amount of money he received to be fat.
Speaker 3: That's probably like the face prices of business class tickets
Speaker 3: and lounge access which no one actually pays for. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because like beyond the actual airline stuff because of
Speaker 5: like the campaign like match like policy deals, like he
Speaker 5: he received in the end like like ten million dollars
Speaker 5: right from from like all of this whole ordeal.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So, so so the match funding thing basically is like
Speaker 4: there's public matching funds for like private donations for for
Speaker 4: mayoral candidates.
Speaker 3: There's like some things you have to go through.
Speaker 4: But in order to get that money right, you have
Speaker 4: to abide by campaign finance law and all of the
Speaker 4: So all of these like straw donor bribe donations that
Speaker 4: he's getting are being are also I think it's like
Speaker 4: eight to one or something like matching funds are being matched.
Speaker 3: By the paid government. Say you got like ten million
Speaker 3: dollars matching funds.
Speaker 5: He's not only like doing like campaign fraud by getting
Speaker 5: this like foreign influence amount of money. He's also just
Speaker 5: like stealing from from everyone else too by having all
Speaker 5: of these illegal contributions matched.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So in the end, I think he's like he's like
Speaker 5: charged with like like basically ten million dollars.
Speaker 3: Yeah, of like fraud.
Speaker 4: The other thing is like this is this is how
Speaker 4: he won the election, Like he won the election by
Speaker 4: spending an unbelievable amount of money and like that money,
Speaker 4: who's like this like stuff that he defrauded the government for.
Speaker 3: And it's ironic that like the campaign funding matching is
Speaker 3: designed to like amplify the donations made by regular New
Speaker 3: Yorkers and not make it all like a super Pac game. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Eric Adams thought he they made an end run around that.
Speaker 5: Like I did not realize just because I had been
Speaker 5: keeping up with like Eric Adams news previous to this,
Speaker 5: I did not realize how often his house was getting
Speaker 5: rated by the FBI.
Speaker 4: There were so many There's been so many, Like this
Speaker 4: is all just one angle on the like thirty five,
Speaker 4: because there's there's so much other corruption he was doing,
Speaker 4: Like this is just the stuff they gone specifically around
Speaker 4: him for. But like basic everyone in the circle around
Speaker 4: him is like also going to prison. Like to the
Speaker 4: point where remember I was talking about the Uzbek construction
Speaker 4: guy that he donated money to, Yeah, that guy also
Speaker 4: paid off like the guy who's going to become mayor
Speaker 4: when Adams gets arrested, So like the deputy mayor like
Speaker 4: also took money for that guy.
Speaker 3: Amazing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so one of the worst parts of this. On
Speaker 4: April twenty first, twenty two, the Turkish official messaged the
Speaker 4: Adam Stafford noting that our Median Genocide Remembrance Day was
Speaker 4: approaching and repeatedly asking the Adam Stafford for assurances that
Speaker 4: Adams would not make any statements about their Armedian genocide.
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 4: The Adam Stafford confirmed that Adams did not make a
Speaker 4: statement about the Armenian genocide.
Speaker 3: Adams did not make such a statement New York, not
Speaker 3: the Yerevan of America.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so he just straight up took money from the
Speaker 4: Turkish government. Did genocide's nile for them. Yeah, so that's great,
Speaker 4: that's incredible stuff.
Speaker 3: To be fair.
Speaker 5: That is that is a mainstay of current American politics.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah yeah, and it's the best fund of old
Speaker 3: genocide denials.
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, Well, this Raganams guy doesn't seem like a
Speaker 5: doesn't seem too good. It is just fascinating to me
Speaker 5: that out of all the cities, New York is just
Speaker 5: the one city that you cannot have a normal mayor,
Speaker 5: just like every single mayor is is weird and fucked
Speaker 5: up in like a different way. Like it's just impossible.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: There was like an onion onion headline on Time that was,
Speaker 6: it's like the mayor de Blasio like, well, well, well
Speaker 6: it's it's not so easy to have a not fucked
Speaker 6: up mayor or something.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think the exact line was, well, well, well, not
Speaker 4: so easy to find a mayor he doesn't suck ship down.
Speaker 5: Exactly. The Erganta was one hits so much harder because
Speaker 5: he's like the law and order mayor. Like he's like,
Speaker 5: you know, like like former cop blah blah blah. He's
Speaker 5: he's the one making New York worse through all of
Speaker 5: like the fucked up police stuff. Meanwhile, he's just been
Speaker 5: doing like major crimes and having his house rated by
Speaker 5: the FBI like every other month, also having like his
Speaker 5: friend's house is rated by the FBI having was it
Speaker 5: like a police chief or a police commissioner who was
Speaker 5: just rated.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then the interim police commissioner they put in
Speaker 3: often the first one.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's wild stuff.
Speaker 3: We got to talk about his phone password before we finish. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So the's why I want to close on is
Speaker 4: like before he goes under, like all of his staffers
Speaker 4: are getting visited by the FBI, and A you could
Speaker 4: tell they're all cops and are dumb at shit because
Speaker 4: they all they all agreed to talk to the FBI
Speaker 4: and like lied to this so funny, and then we're
Speaker 4: trying to like coordinate destroying the messages which the FBI
Speaker 4: got all the data from. On October sixth, twenty twenty three,
Speaker 4: FBI agents executed a search warrant for the electronic devices
Speaker 4: used by Eric Adams, a defendant. So Adams was carrying
Speaker 4: several electronic devices, including two cell phones. He was not
Speaker 4: carrying his personal cell phone, which is a device he
Speaker 4: used to communicate about the conduct described in this indictment.
Speaker 4: When Adams produced his personal cell phone the next day
Speaker 4: in response to a subpoena, it was locked, such as
Speaker 4: the device required a password to open. Adams claimed that
Speaker 4: after he learned the investigation into his contact he learned
Speaker 4: about the investigation, he changed the password the day before
Speaker 4: and increased the complexity of his password from four to
Speaker 4: six digits. Adams had done this, he claimed, to prevent
Speaker 4: members of his staff from intently You're intentionally deleting the
Speaker 4: contents of his phone. According to Adams, he wished to
Speaker 4: preserve the context of his phone due to the investigation,
Speaker 4: But Adams further claimed he'd forgotten the password he just
Speaker 4: said and was unable to provide the NBA with the
Speaker 4: password that can unlock.
Speaker 3: The phone if they tried his birthday.
Speaker 5: It's the funniest argument. Yeah, yeah, they like, no, no, no,
Speaker 5: I changed. I changed the password so that the information
Speaker 5: was safe and wouldn't be deleted. Also, I forgot the password.
Speaker 4: Okay, so like presumably this is encrypted, right, but like
Speaker 4: I cannot Like, what the fuck is the FBI doing that?
Speaker 3: They can't just break into this phone?
Speaker 5: Like, I mean, some phones are hard to break into,
Speaker 5: like it it is it is true.
Speaker 3: Yeah, have struggled with iPhones for what Yes, but this
Speaker 3: is but this is Eric Adams.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, I mean yeah it might.
Speaker 3: Be zero zero zero zero, like they ought to give
Speaker 3: it the cat. It's try to be honest.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like they've got to have some fucking like spook
Speaker 4: from the NSA that they can illegally send this phone
Speaker 4: over to.
Speaker 5: Like I'm sure they've tried Celebright. I'm sure they've tried
Speaker 5: a whole bunch of stuff. It just doesn't always work.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like I don't know it makes you feel wildly
Speaker 4: better about phone security. Oh, by the way, this is
Speaker 4: a message about this public safety announcement. If you use
Speaker 4: a face print or a fingerprint to lock your phone,
Speaker 4: the cops can just use your face or your fingerprint
Speaker 4: worlock it, or they can get it with a warrant.
Speaker 4: But if it's like an actual number, like they can't
Speaker 4: put a gun to your head and say open it,
Speaker 4: which is the way that this would normally sort of work. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so yeah, basic security thing. So in all, Adams is
Speaker 4: being charged with simultaneously conspiracy to commit wire fraud Federal
Speaker 4: program Brian and to receive campaign contributions by foreign national.
Speaker 3: There's a kind of wire fraud.
Speaker 4: There's another count of solicitation of a contribution by foreign national.
Speaker 4: There's subsequently, the fourth is the same as a third count.
Speaker 4: It's it's solicitation of a contribution by forig national and
Speaker 4: the fifth count is bribery. So he's like probably going down,
Speaker 4: going down.
Speaker 5: He sounds pretty fucked. I mean, it has been interesting
Speaker 5: how much the federal government has been cracking down on
Speaker 5: foreign influence before the selection, both with like tennant media,
Speaker 5: like a Russian foreign influence stuff like this there's been
Speaker 5: like some of like Jimmy Dore or like orbiters that
Speaker 5: have I know, have have been getting looked into by
Speaker 5: the FEDS for like Russian foreign influence.
Speaker 3: Dude.
Speaker 5: And this is not a show where we regularly praise
Speaker 5: the actions of the fedral government. But it's always funny
Speaker 5: to see my enemies having a hard time. Yeah, And
Speaker 5: I'm pray I'm praying for that Jackson Hinkle one, which
Speaker 5: is fea yeah, because it's so it's so obvious, so
Speaker 5: obvious that he's he's absolutely getting paid by some by
Speaker 5: some foreign government.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Wonda which one?
Speaker 4: This one is air to one versus the FBI, which
Speaker 4: I'm just like just chomping down popcorn and clapping like
Speaker 4: a seal watching most hated rifles finding yes.
Speaker 3: Yes, destroy each other no matter what happens.
Speaker 5: I'm okay with it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Wow.
Speaker 3: I will repeat my position here at the end of
Speaker 3: the show that I am prepared to vote for Joe
Speaker 3: Biden on the condition that he immediately begins trading Eric
Speaker 3: Adams for Abdullajan, who does not belong to jail unlike
Speaker 3: Eric Adams. It's free Ajulan week this week, and so yeah,
Speaker 3: he shouldn't be in prison. Let him out.
Speaker 5: How do you feel about your mayor, Joey?
Speaker 6: You know, it sounds like he's he's broken on some shit.
Speaker 6: He's got to figure out if he really wants you know, see.
Speaker 6: This is the thing too, is it's like, do I
Speaker 6: want to be like, Wow, congrats to the FBI on
Speaker 6: this investigation. No, that being said, it is really funny
Speaker 6: to see this all go down. I think also just
Speaker 6: the amount of bullshit that he has done while he's
Speaker 6: in office.
Speaker 5: But both legally and over the.
Speaker 6: Table and under the table, and it's kind of funny
Speaker 6: to see like this meet.
Speaker 3: The thing that but takes him down. Yeah. Got other.
Speaker 6: One of my favorite tweets about all this was somebody
Speaker 6: was like, I'm sure Eric Adams all of a sudden
Speaker 6: it's going to be uh really pro a prison reform
Speaker 6: all of a sudden, But I.
Speaker 5: Hope so, you know that would be a crazy It's like, Alista.
Speaker 6: I'm getting flashbacks person abolition arts. I'm getting flashbacks when
Speaker 6: a when a oh god, what's the same the Blasio, Uh,
Speaker 6: the governor, the governor, oh my god, former governor. Well
Speaker 6: like what he was having all of the ship come
Speaker 6: out and like the last thing he did in office
Speaker 6: was the legalized weed, and it was like such a
Speaker 6: like last ditch, like fine.
Speaker 5: Here, you guys go like you want, like are we
Speaker 5: going to get something like that?
Speaker 3: Are we gonna get?
Speaker 7: Well?
Speaker 6: I guess he tried with the trash cans and people
Speaker 6: rejected that. But uh, it's been an experience. I hope
Speaker 6: for the sake of the city that uh, you know,
Speaker 6: he faces consequences for this and it's never.
Speaker 5: Back in New York politics. But I guess we'll see
Speaker 5: what happens. No, I'm not going to cheer on the FBI,
Speaker 5: but I am pro cop on cop of violence. That's true,
Speaker 5: and that's true, and that's all this is. That's all
Speaker 5: this is. So that's fine.
Speaker 6: I'm pro irony. I'm pro like like you're getting got
Speaker 6: by the same like people your bros.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I am interested in what the next New York mayoral
Speaker 5: election will look like. We're bringing in Lori Lightfoot, let's go,
Speaker 5: and the small possibility that, depending on how this next
Speaker 5: election goes, we could have a Trump versus Clinton mayoral
Speaker 5: race in New York, which I would love to watch.
Speaker 3: Maybe Hillary Clinton will finally make her film about the
Speaker 3: Syrian democratic forces she's been promising to make for years.
Speaker 4: I want to close on a kind of slightly more
Speaker 4: serious struggles are connected note because the thing about Eric
Speaker 4: Adams is that he was the guy who was brought
Speaker 4: in black cop like very specifically brought in and his
Speaker 4: thing was basically to contain the twenty twenty uprising, right
Speaker 4: he was he was the guy whose thing was we're
Speaker 4: bringing in the kind of revolution. We're stomping all of
Speaker 4: this stuff out, like all of the sort of like
Speaker 4: gains of anti police stuff that you'd made, all the
Speaker 4: sort of ideological games have been made, We're going to
Speaker 4: wipe all that out. And I think it is really
Speaker 4: significant that the government who is funding him is is
Speaker 4: a Turkish government because if you look at the last cycle,
Speaker 4: right when so Eric Adams is starting to do this
Speaker 4: in twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, what's what's happening in Turkey
Speaker 4: in that time is that Turkey have been one of
Speaker 4: the big sites of huge uprisings. In twenty thirteen, they
Speaker 4: have one of the biggest, like of that cycle of protests.
Speaker 4: So twenty thirteen is the second of the of the
Speaker 4: waves from like the Occupy twenty eleven waves. Right, there's
Speaker 4: a big wave in twenty eleven, and then twenty thirteen
Speaker 4: to the second one. One of the biggest one is
Speaker 4: in Turkey. And Turkey's eventual solution to this is basically
Speaker 4: just the wholesale slaughter of the Curtish revolution that was happening.
Speaker 4: And you know, literally in twenty fourteen, at the same
Speaker 4: time twenty fourteen twenty at the same time as the
Speaker 4: Michael Brown uprising is going on, and then Baltimore goes up,
Speaker 4: right at the same time that's happening, There's like, these
Speaker 4: are these Kurdish uprisings in Turkey, That's where all the
Speaker 4: fire bombing happens. Right, These these these things are very,
Speaker 4: very intimately connected. There's a reason why other than just
Speaker 4: sort of country his corruption stuff, that these that these
Speaker 4: forces are aligned with each other because the same the
Speaker 4: same people behind the American prison state are also the
Speaker 4: same people who are fucking backing this Turkish extermination as
Speaker 4: movement against the Kurds. And we're going to either win
Speaker 4: our freedom together or we're going to have a thousand
Speaker 4: more fucking Eric Adams.
Speaker 5: Is exactly yeah.
Speaker 6: And I mean, I think going back to what I
Speaker 6: was saying before like the craziest thing about all this,
Speaker 6: and like this is definitely something that I've kind of
Speaker 6: had to like step back and be like, all right,
Speaker 6: Like I obviously am existing within like a specific community,
Speaker 6: like New York is a huge city.
Speaker 5: It's the lowerest city in.
Speaker 6: The US, and there's lots of different smaller communities, and
Speaker 6: I was like, I feel like everybody that I know
Speaker 6: and everybody I interact with hate Sarah Adams, how like
Speaker 6: their own list of reasons why, like he has done X,
Speaker 6: Y Z thing and they're like whether it's like my
Speaker 6: friends that are teachers or like work for or just
Speaker 6: use public libraries that he has like really decided to
Speaker 6: attack and like defund for various reasons, or like friends
Speaker 6: that have had to deal with like the prison system
Speaker 6: or whatever. Or last year, I'd been working on an
Speaker 6: investigative show that was looking into a lot of the
Speaker 6: the situation at Rikers, and you know, Rikers is supposed
Speaker 6: to be closed in twenty twenty seven at a RK.
Speaker 6: Adams has really tried to push back against that, despite
Speaker 6: the fact that it's like there's a federal invested investigation
Speaker 6: into the situation there and it's not like the conditions
Speaker 6: are not good. It is an unpopular solution, you know,
Speaker 6: like most New Yorkers agree that there needs to be
Speaker 6: some other alternative than rikers and just sending people to
Speaker 6: like literally an island. That being said, like he won
Speaker 6: the election. He won his mayoral election it which sort
Speaker 6: of like surprising. He was kind of the underdog. There
Speaker 6: were other candidates that I think people had kind of
Speaker 6: been expecting to win. And yeah, he was the law
Speaker 6: and order guy. He was coming in is supposed to
Speaker 6: be this like alternative to like the twenty twenty uprising
Speaker 6: to what was seen as this like chaos. And again, yeah,
Speaker 6: it's the irony of him getting got by its own system,
Speaker 6: getting got by the fact that like he just keeps
Speaker 6: doing crimes. He loves doing crimes, favorite thing. And then
Speaker 6: at the same time, it's like he's caused all this
Speaker 6: damage to like individual like specific programs in the city,
Speaker 6: specific systems that were really helping people. He has spread
Speaker 6: like misinformation about migrants that have been in New York.
Speaker 6: He has been like there's just a laundry list of
Speaker 6: things that he has done that has been like insanely
Speaker 6: harmful for like various reasons. And you know what, if
Speaker 6: this is going to be the thing that's gonna got
Speaker 6: on at the end of the day. This and Sabrina
Speaker 6: Carpenter apparently that also those of you who don't know,
Speaker 6: the Sabrina car Feather music video apparently was a big
Speaker 6: part of the Eric Adams indictment from kind of the
Speaker 6: more local side involving the church that she was filming
Speaker 6: at h and the I'm not sure what his official
Speaker 6: position is, but like the priest who had kind of
Speaker 6: allowed her to come in and film, and then it
Speaker 6: ended up that he was demoted because if you've listened
Speaker 6: to a Sabrina Carpenter song, you can see why the
Speaker 6: Catholic Church might not be super excited about that. And
Speaker 6: then he decided to cooperate with the investigation since the
Speaker 6: church wasn't super happy with him.
Speaker 5: This whole thing is just there's something.
Speaker 6: It's like, there's so many aspects of this that are
Speaker 6: so crazy.
Speaker 5: This is gonna be like that gets him.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, So someone's gonna do like a thirty part
Speaker 4: podcast series about this something. I'm gonna listen to every
Speaker 4: single ex.
Speaker 5: Episode and there's gonna be so much more stuff that's
Speaker 5: gonna come out.
Speaker 3: That's yeah.
Speaker 5: Speaking of podcasts, Joey, do you want to plug your
Speaker 5: work for sure? Yeah.
Speaker 6: So, I'm right now producing a show called that We Loved,
Speaker 6: which just on Iheart's network.
Speaker 5: It's part of our Outspoken Network, which.
Speaker 6: Is our LGBTQ plus kind of focus shows, and you
Speaker 6: can find that on Spotify, Apple Music, iHeartMedia, app whatever,
Speaker 6: all the places. I also previously had worked on a
Speaker 6: show called Afterlives. If you are interested in learning more
Speaker 6: about wrikers and particularly some of the policy that you know,
Speaker 6: Eric Adams himself has worked to either stop.
Speaker 5: From being effective or stop.
Speaker 6: From making the reforms it's supposed to be happening regards
Speaker 6: the whole riker situation, you should check out that show.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's that's where I met.
Speaker 6: You can also follow me on Twitter and Instagram at
Speaker 6: pat not Pratt.
Speaker 5: That's p A T T n O T p R
Speaker 5: A T T. People get my last.
Speaker 3: Name wrong a lot, we'll put them in the description.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Joey, thank you for coming on.
Speaker 4: And fuck I hope I hope we all get rid
Speaker 4: of our fucking Beyers because Jesus Christ God.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Future the Democratic Party Lightbook Airic.
Speaker 5: Adams twenty twenty eight.
Speaker 3: Let's go.
Speaker 9: Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast
Speaker 9: about things falling apart and how people work to put
Speaker 9: them back together again, because it's the Humpty Dumpty of podcasts,
Speaker 9: except Humpty Dumpty couldn't be put back together in the
Speaker 9: end because there was a bunch of state actors who
Speaker 9: were trying and really that's not how you usually get
Speaker 9: things done. I'm your guest host today, Martyr Kiljoy, and
Speaker 9: with me as my regular host today is James Hi.
Speaker 3: James Hi, Margaret, thank you for having me on the
Speaker 3: podcast that I work for.
Speaker 9: I'm glad to have you on your podcast. So this
Speaker 9: episode is about what I learned about prepping by going
Speaker 9: down to western North Carolina in the immediate wake of
Speaker 9: the flooding caused by two storms, one of which was
Speaker 9: Hurricane Helen. And there's a few things I like an
Speaker 9: awful lot. One of them is prepping. Another one of
Speaker 9: them is Ashville, North Carolina, where I lived longer than
Speaker 9: I have lived anywhere else in my adult life, which
Speaker 9: isn't actually saying that much because I lived there for
Speaker 9: about six years.
Speaker 3: But it's a decent amount of time. You know a place. Yeah.
Speaker 9: Before that, I was fully vagabondie. This is a story
Speaker 9: about prepping in Asheville, North Carolina, and so I thought
Speaker 9: i'd bring on another it could happen here prepper James.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's me someone who has been to Ashville, North Carolina.
Speaker 3: But oh yeah, still lives in San Diego. Yeah. Nice,
Speaker 3: nice pace to go outside normally.
Speaker 9: Okay, but have you ever heard that song though, like
Speaker 9: I've been everywhere man song, I've been everywhere.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I don't think I'm allowed to sing things on this podcast.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 9: I started liking that song because like, yeah, I've been everywhere.
Speaker 9: That man starts listening where he's been, and I'm like, no,
Speaker 9: I haven't been. I ain't been shit, I have never
Speaker 9: been anywhere in my life.
Speaker 3: I've not made it. Yeah. Yeah. It is one of
Speaker 3: the nice things about my job that people get to
Speaker 3: go places and meet people. Yeah. Yeah, that is fun.
Speaker 9: So, as I assume listeners are aware, about two weeks ago,
Speaker 9: Hurricane Helene dumped an enormous quantity of water onto the
Speaker 9: mountains of western North Carolina, which would have been bad
Speaker 9: no matter what, but another unnamed storm had already been
Speaker 9: dropping unconscious able unconscious not good amounts of water on
Speaker 9: the area for a day or so. The two storms
Speaker 9: together caused the worst natural disaster and recorded history for
Speaker 9: the region. The only thing that came close was the
Speaker 9: nineteen sixteen flood, which was again like a regular storm,
Speaker 9: and then I think a coastal tropical storm hitting at
Speaker 9: the same time. So the way to have everything fail
Speaker 9: is to have two storms at once. In case anyone's
Speaker 9: curious how to have bad things happen, do two storms anyway.
Speaker 9: I drove down in a vanful of supplies because my
Speaker 9: friends were the eron they needed the supplies more than
Speaker 9: my basement did, and because I had enough cash on
Speaker 9: hand to hit up a bunch of stores to get
Speaker 9: more stuff to bring to them to I also drove
Speaker 9: down there as a journalist, figuring i'd talk to people
Speaker 9: about mutual aid and about preparedness. This week on my
Speaker 9: own podcast, Cool People Did Cool Stuff, I talk about
Speaker 9: my experiences there, what I saw, with an emphasis on
Speaker 9: the mutual aid side, on the enormous amount of grassroots
Speaker 9: and informal disaster response. But this is it could happen here,
Speaker 9: and I wanted to talk about preparedness. I want to
Speaker 9: talk about what worked and what didn't, what lessons we
Speaker 9: can draw anywhere we are listening to this from what
Speaker 9: people experienced there in Asheville, North Carolina, or at least
Speaker 9: what lessons I was able to pick up on. And
Speaker 9: we're going to talk about.
Speaker 3: Like stuff and specific things in a second good.
Speaker 9: But first, when I talk about preparedness, which I do
Speaker 9: a lot, I talk about how I'm interested in both
Speaker 9: the individual and community as two different types of preparedness.
Speaker 9: And I had some hypotheses that these were deeply related
Speaker 9: and reliant on each other in fact, and that you
Speaker 9: do one better by doing the other better. But now
Speaker 9: that I've seen those hypotheses tested, I was right. That's
Speaker 9: that's my answer.
Speaker 3: It's in fact to approven hypotheses. Yeah exactly.
Speaker 9: I mean, you know, I don't want to run more tests,
Speaker 9: but yeah, we probably will.
Speaker 3: Yeah exactly, because we ain't doing shit to stop being alas. No, No,
Speaker 3: we're mostly doing things to make it worse. Hm hm cool.
Speaker 9: Basically, we need both individual and community preparedness, and we
Speaker 9: should stop seeing them as opposing forces. There might be
Speaker 9: no single false dichotomy that has more wrecked our imaginations
Speaker 9: than the idea that the individual and the community are
Speaker 9: two opposing forces that they must be balanced against one
Speaker 9: another instead of interwoven. Instead of allowing what's best about
Speaker 9: both things to reinforce the other. I would argue the
Speaker 9: twentieth century did us dirty?
Speaker 3: The Cold War? Did us dirty? In the US?
Speaker 9: I grew up presented with the idea that the USSR
Speaker 9: represented community in that side, and that meant being a
Speaker 9: cog in the machine, devoid of individuality in thrall to
Speaker 9: an authoritarian state. If I cared about the individual and
Speaker 9: individual freedom and liberty, I had to accept capitalism and
Speaker 9: competition and to see myself in a war against everyone else.
Speaker 9: I don't know how you feel. I don't want to
Speaker 9: be a cargon machine, and I also don't want to
Speaker 9: be in a war against everyone else.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is the This is the sort of false
Speaker 3: dichultion media were presented with. It's like I'll tell an
Speaker 3: anecdote here. When I was writing my dissertation, I would
Speaker 3: describe my politics as left libertarian, and I would describe
Speaker 3: the politics of the many different types of anarchists in
Speaker 3: an arcosyndicalis in Spain similarly, because it accurately describes the perspective, right,
Speaker 3: and I was forbidden from doing so. The probably fair
Speaker 3: enough objection that Americans could not comprehend the idea of
Speaker 3: libertarianism without individualism.
Speaker 9: Yeah, which is annoying because oh is it Rathbard. Someone
Speaker 9: consciously stole that word from us. You used to not
Speaker 9: have to say left libertarian because if you said libertarian
Speaker 9: you meant left libertarian.
Speaker 3: Yeah. This was the pre date to Rothbud. It is
Speaker 3: something I've written about on my patreon. Wow. But yeah,
Speaker 3: libertarian began to be used by French anarchists to avoid
Speaker 3: censorship and persecution of anarchists for being anarchists. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: then it came to America, where, like many things in America,
Speaker 3: it was stolen from its original original creators and custodians
Speaker 3: and fucking ruined by chuds. Yeah, which is a shame.
Speaker 3: But yeah, there is in fact an option where you
Speaker 3: don't have to pick one or the other. Yeah.
Speaker 9: What is good for me as an individual is to
Speaker 9: be able to express the full range of my possibilities, right,
Speaker 9: And I'm more able to do that in a supportive
Speaker 9: community than like alone in the woods somewhere, cut off
Speaker 9: from everyone else, chasing rabbits with a hatchet and dying
Speaker 9: of easily preventable infections, Like, it's.
Speaker 3: The American dream. Ug, what are you talking about.
Speaker 9: I used to joke that I was going to start
Speaker 9: a YouTube channel called how to Survive alone in the
Speaker 9: woods of the hatchet eating squirrels that you kill with
Speaker 9: the aforementioned hatchet.
Speaker 3: But unfortunately you died of tetanus before.
Speaker 9: Yeah, exactly. The existence of society makes me more free,
Speaker 9: It makes me more capable of doing what I want
Speaker 9: to do. I really like I don't remember which old
Speaker 9: theorist came up with it, but I really like the
Speaker 9: idea of understanding freedom as a relationship between people, not
Speaker 9: a like static state. It is something that we offer
Speaker 9: each other and that we like work to maximize with
Speaker 9: each other.
Speaker 3: Yeah. On the other side of things, what's good for
Speaker 3: communities is not to be rigidly top down controlled, but
Speaker 3: instead to allow people free expression, develop new ideas, try
Speaker 3: new things, to have communities grow organically. We are not
Speaker 3: actually factory cogs. We do better as a garden. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And that's been my working theory with preparedness. It's been similar.
Speaker 3: On one side, are these deals, these goods and services,
Speaker 3: the ads that interrupt things. Yeah, magnificent, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3: I live to do this. Here's the ads, and we're
Speaker 3: back on one side.
Speaker 9: I saw preppers as being kind of a primarily an
Speaker 9: individualistic bunch of folks obsessed with what I've called the
Speaker 9: bunker mentality, the hole up and guns and shoot anyone
Speaker 9: who comes to close mentality that I've got, mind fuck
Speaker 9: you mentality you've ever seen on like older prepper Reddit
Speaker 9: and stuff like that, where people like kind of get
Speaker 9: sad when they realize they're all planning to shoot each other,
Speaker 9: all their friends after the apocalypse.
Speaker 3: Yeah that like, anyone who's able to has more than
Speaker 3: two weeks of food storges, it's inherently going to kill
Speaker 3: anyone else. Yeah, who has more than two? Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: great when they all come around to educationally.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and they're like, wait, but I like this community
Speaker 9: I've built.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're also the only friends because they've alienated everyone
Speaker 3: else with their weird obsessions. Yeah, fallout.
Speaker 9: This is not a good mentality to have. I would
Speaker 9: argue it's behind a lot of what's happening on the
Speaker 9: border right now. Actually, I think that the right wing
Speaker 9: actually does believe in climate change and is not willing
Speaker 9: to just say it publicly because it doesn't play to
Speaker 9: their base. But they they're like, we've got ours, fuck you,
Speaker 9: and want to close down the borders as best as
Speaker 9: they can in the global North.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we'll move the borders as far from your
Speaker 3: eyesight as possible. That's what I saw in Panama was
Speaker 3: oh yeah, listeners will know I was in the daddy
Speaker 3: and gap. But like Panama without funding you and me,
Speaker 3: Margaret Home, we pay our taxes, we pay for families
Speaker 3: to be split out. Hell yeah, deportations to happen, fences
Speaker 3: to be built in Panama because that makes it further
Speaker 3: from our site and from our mind. Right. That's what
Speaker 3: liberty means. Yep.
Speaker 9: Liberty is the ability to interfere in other countries' families.
Speaker 3: Yeap, domestic politics in other countries by fire hose of money.
Speaker 9: I mean, it's funny because it's the same like justification.
Speaker 9: Every now and then you meet the people who genuinely
Speaker 9: think Russia is like allowed to invade Ukraine because border
Speaker 9: security because Ukraine's too close to it.
Speaker 3: You're like, amazing, Yeah, Ukraine bad, therefore fuck it. Why not?
Speaker 3: Like it's yeah, yeah, it's like the Monroe doctrine. But
Speaker 3: for Russia, like this is my hemisphere. Don't fuck with me.
Speaker 9: Yeah, burn down your neighbor's house because you're just like, nah,
Speaker 9: you're living too close to me.
Speaker 3: Don't like it. Yeah, senior yard sign. They've got one
Speaker 3: of those in this house signs. Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: which they've all taken down now because it's no human
Speaker 3: beings legal and they no longer believe that. Yeah.
Speaker 7: Cool.
Speaker 9: Well, I would argue this is a fundamentally right wing
Speaker 9: individualistic mentality, whether it's coming from ostensibly left as tankies
Speaker 9: or ostensibly center left Democrats, or they admit their right
Speaker 9: wing individualistic preppers. Yeah, And this was dominant in prepping
Speaker 9: circles before around twenty twenty, when an awful lot more
Speaker 9: people with different ideas came into the space. But the
Speaker 9: older school preppers focused on individual preparedness or family level
Speaker 9: household level preparedness, and they have an awful lot of
Speaker 9: really good ideas around some of these things, around storing
Speaker 9: food and water, around maintaining communications, around all sorts of
Speaker 9: things to help the individual or family during crisis to
Speaker 9: be prepared. On the other end of things, there are
Speaker 9: mutual aid groups and other community organizations that do community preparedness.
Speaker 9: They build organizational communication and logistical networks, and they're fantastic
Speaker 9: and their overall what's been left out of preparedness conversations,
Speaker 9: but until more recently I haven't seen as many of
Speaker 9: those places is the people who are doing those things
Speaker 9: also concerned themselves with individual preparedness.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I've been operating under the assumption for years that
Speaker 9: the two can work really well in tandem with each other.
Speaker 9: If you are self sufficient, you're in a better place
Speaker 9: to help others. That was my hypothesis. This is really
Speaker 9: just the Margaret was Right episode of it could happen.
Speaker 3: Here, the victory lap Yeah.
Speaker 9: Oh wait, it's a victory wrap around bodies. I don't
Speaker 9: like it anymore. Well, it's people who did do these
Speaker 9: things getting to have not thrived but did not died.
Speaker 9: I don't know how to say this.
Speaker 3: It's a tricky subject getting credit for being right and
Speaker 3: putting in the work.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and a lot of people were and a lot
Speaker 9: of people had done that, and it showed really well in.
Speaker 3: The disaster response in Ashville, because.
Speaker 9: When I went down to Ashville, one of the things
Speaker 9: that I asked most of the people I talked to
Speaker 9: is what they prepared, what they wished they'd prepared, and
Speaker 9: what lessons they were taking away from all this about preparedness.
Speaker 9: And one of my friends is old Punk, and he
Speaker 9: was one of the first old He's like my age whatever,
Speaker 9: it might be a few years older than me.
Speaker 3: I don't know. Margaret crushed by moment of reflection live
Speaker 3: on Podcasts.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I'm jealous because I don't have enough gray hair.
Speaker 3: They keep falling out of my head.
Speaker 9: But one of my friends who does have very nice
Speaker 9: gray hair, Old Punk, is one of the first people
Speaker 9: who was out.
Speaker 3: On the street cooking food to give away.
Speaker 9: He told me that he was able to do that
Speaker 9: because he knew he was fine by and large during
Speaker 9: this particular crisis. Every crisis is going to be real
Speaker 9: different if your house wasn't in the actual floodplain, and
Speaker 9: since it was in the mountains, that was not most houses. Instead,
Speaker 9: it was like most roads and some houses. You know, Yeah,
Speaker 9: the big problems you were dealing with was lack of food,
Speaker 9: lack of water, lack of cell service. And he had
Speaker 9: plenty of water and food stored, and at one point
Speaker 9: someone had even kind of come up to him, been
Speaker 9: like are you no, You're fine, aren't you? And he
Speaker 9: was like, yeah, no, I'm fine.
Speaker 3: So just being like getting off prepared vibes, I guess yeah, No.
Speaker 3: I was real proud.
Speaker 9: Like once I was doing this community defense thing and
Speaker 9: we were like, oh, we need a flashlight. Does anyone hey, Margaret,
Speaker 9: you're a flashlight right, And I was like, yeah, with.
Speaker 3: Any want Yeah, being the flashlight person, Yeah, it's a
Speaker 3: huge win the moment you get to deploy that flashlight
Speaker 3: you've been toting around. Yeah.
Speaker 9: Well, And that's actually part of my like core argument
Speaker 9: that I make in the other podcasts I recorded today
Speaker 9: that's going to come out some sign around now, is
Speaker 9: that like people want to help people. Oh yeah, like
Speaker 9: the average pickup truck guy. We even kind of see.
Speaker 9: I mean, I'm a pickup truck girl, but like we
Speaker 9: see the average pickup truck guy is the like, ah,
Speaker 9: good out of my way, limberal, guns, dogs, whatever, you know.
Speaker 3: And I like pickup trucks and guns and dogs and
Speaker 3: as I don't really like.
Speaker 9: But one of the main things you want to make
Speaker 9: a man with a pickup truck happy. Get your car
Speaker 9: stuck in a ditch.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, there are a whole groups where people love
Speaker 3: to pull other people out of stupid situations they've got
Speaker 3: themselves into off road. Yeah it is fun for them.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Like because then the fact that you've been doing
Speaker 9: this thing had a purpose. I carry a flashlight and
Speaker 9: a knife every single moment in my life, So when
Speaker 9: someone needs a flashlight or a knife, I'm like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 9: I am fucking the reincarnation of the goddess. Like, no
Speaker 9: one is better than me. Yeah, you're the all powerful
Speaker 9: light carrier.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly exactly when all other lights go out for me,
Speaker 3: it's the moment I get to deploy. Like obviously this
Speaker 3: has been an audio podcast, but I have a leatherman
Speaker 3: that I like to carry around. Yeah, like where someone
Speaker 3: needs pliers or wire cutting, you have that capability.
Speaker 9: Yeah, you're just like Chad, You're a superhero, You're a mutant,
Speaker 9: you know. Like yeah, so yeah, this friend of mine
Speaker 9: had plenty of water and food stored, and you can
Speaker 9: usually go a couple of days without communication if you
Speaker 9: don't have any immediate crisis, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: He told me that what most people did or needed
Speaker 9: to do, was first they needed to make sure to
Speaker 9: meet their own needs, you know, like thele to fix
Speaker 9: your own oxygen mask before helping your seat mate. So
Speaker 9: it was the people who were the most resilient, the
Speaker 9: most prepared, who were out driving around in their trucks
Speaker 9: or cars whatever, giving away food, or were working to
Speaker 9: coordinate meetings most immediately. And the other part of it
Speaker 9: was that people who had community preparedness skills were also
Speaker 9: among the first people getting stuff done on the ground
Speaker 9: because mutual aid it's organic, and it's chaotic and it's spontaneous, right,
Speaker 9: but it is organized. It is a developed skill about
Speaker 9: how to organically organize. The more people who were experienced
Speaker 9: with chaotic, decentralized organizing, the better a community was able
Speaker 9: to weather the immediate aftermath of the storm because people
Speaker 9: knew how to set up distribution hubs and connect people
Speaker 9: and so basically like a solid church or an anarchist group,
Speaker 9: and your rural town was in a much better spot. Yeah,
Speaker 9: that makes sense, And this is one of the main
Speaker 9: places in the country where you're going to find entire
Speaker 9: anarchist groups in random rural small towns. Having been one
Speaker 9: of those people in one of those small towns, I
Speaker 9: keep saying I lived in Nashville, I lived in Sandy Mush.
Speaker 3: Where Sandy Mush is. I don't bother saying it because
Speaker 3: no one knows where it is. Hell of a name
Speaker 3: though I know it's almost British and it's weirdness. I
Speaker 3: was like two fem for baseball caps back then, and
Speaker 3: all my landmates were the Cama baseball caps from the
Speaker 3: local store that says Sandy.
Speaker 5: Mush, you know.
Speaker 9: And I'm really sad that I didn't get one, especially
Speaker 9: now because now I have one and I'm wearing it
Speaker 9: now that has the name of the town I live in.
Speaker 9: But I can't wear it anywhere because it doses me.
Speaker 7: Ah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, see that's a fun yea. If you had a
Speaker 3: Sandy Mush one, you'd be Yeah. Someone send Margaret a
Speaker 3: baseball cap, yeah, from Sandy Mush, Yeah with Camma.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Oh, I probably won't wear it otherwise I'll be real
Speaker 9: because I still got to be fem and somehow that
Speaker 9: is how things work in my subculture. So you need
Speaker 9: individual preparedness so that you're free enough to help people,
Speaker 9: and you need community preparedness so you.
Speaker 3: Know what to do.
Speaker 9: And then you also have all of these people with
Speaker 9: really specialized skills and tools and these are the kinds
Speaker 9: of things that I can't say that every prepper needs
Speaker 9: to go out and do. But like ATVs have been
Speaker 9: crucial to disaster relief efforts, that doesn't mean that everyone
Speaker 9: should run out and buy an ATV to keep around
Speaker 9: in the case of flooding. This is a note for
Speaker 9: me because I don't quite live on enough land to
Speaker 9: justify an ATV, and I really want one.
Speaker 3: But yeah, scared one of those little ones. Yeah, there's
Speaker 3: little children ones.
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 3: I'm just a drive around a circle.
Speaker 9: I'd like mostly live in the woods and so there's
Speaker 9: like just not a lot of ATVs. Are great when
Speaker 9: you got like twelve acres with horses on them, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah you're going out, you can get a sheep dog
Speaker 3: on the back. Very practical for that kind of thing. Yeah,
Speaker 3: rifle case.
Speaker 9: But that said, A dirt bike friend of mine, who
Speaker 9: was a quite prepared person, immediately went out and spent
Speaker 9: days going into hard to reach areas to connect with
Speaker 9: people and bring them supplies. Yeah, so maybe I can.
Speaker 3: Just fight a dirt bike. Yeah, dirt bike, E bike,
Speaker 3: E dirt bike. Then you can run off solar power,
Speaker 3: don't need gas, store it sideways.
Speaker 9: Okay, we're gonna talk about electronics versus gas later in
Speaker 9: the episode.
Speaker 3: I got a whole part about it. Yeaheah, okay, good.
Speaker 9: But first, what we really need for the apocalypse is
Speaker 9: whatever comes next in the ads. That is what will
Speaker 9: save you in the apocalypse. If it's a podcast, yeap
Speaker 9: that is the podcast that will give you the secret
Speaker 9: to surviving the apocalypse.
Speaker 3: Hopefully it's the Reagan gold coins, which will become the
Speaker 3: currency as soon as the state collapses. I bet it's gambling,
Speaker 3: and if you go gamble, you're guaranteed to win. That's
Speaker 3: how I think we legally cannot say that. Oh well
Speaker 3: then yeah, yeah, I wonder if we can get away
Speaker 3: with saying don't gamble, it's a bad idea. Yeah. No,
Speaker 3: I think we actually can't say that. Okay, great, don't
Speaker 3: gamble it's a bad idea.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 9: And Rebecca, the we're all lesson was that some stuff
Speaker 9: is and was useful for everyone to have.
Speaker 3: We're going to talk about some of.
Speaker 9: That stuff, while other certain specialized tools and skill sets
Speaker 9: only made sense for some people to have. Not everyone
Speaker 9: needs to know how to repair a chainsaw or even
Speaker 9: own a chainsaw, but it sure proved to be a
Speaker 9: handy skill in this particular crisis. Ashville is easily an
Speaker 9: image of the climate crisis future. I think you and
Speaker 9: Robert got into that in the episode you did about this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we spoke a little bit about how like this
Speaker 3: is a vision it was coming from a lot of us.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I'm basically doing a like me too. I couldn't
Speaker 9: be on the call because I was busy. That's what
Speaker 9: this episode is.
Speaker 3: No, we Robert and I have not been there. My
Speaker 3: house was when I was younger, but yeah, we were
Speaker 3: not at this time.
Speaker 9: Ashville is not okay. It is a somewhat remote part
Speaker 9: of the country in terms of its raw geography. You're
Speaker 9: not getting into that city without taking steep, curving freeways
Speaker 9: or flying into a regional airport. But culturally, and because
Speaker 9: of the level of infrastructure the United States provides, it
Speaker 9: is not an isolated city. It is a very much
Speaker 9: a modern and hip city with about I think one
Speaker 9: hundred thousand people had I think about eighty thousand when
Speaker 9: I left a couple of years ago, but it's been growing. Yeah,
Speaker 9: partly because lots of Silicon Valley folks moved there to
Speaker 9: work remote much to the sorrow of locals.
Speaker 3: Like everywhere else a people moved, I know.
Speaker 9: And then I'm also like I work remote and lived
Speaker 9: I actually can't throw the stones here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I have lived here since I didn't work remote. Yeah,
Speaker 3: fair enough. I'll take my stern throwing opportunity.
Speaker 9: Asheville is a very climate stable area. All of Appalachia is,
Speaker 9: and it's nowhere near the coast. There's not a lot
Speaker 9: of earthquakes. There are far fewer forest fires than there
Speaker 9: are out west. There were some forest fires that were
Speaker 9: there one of the years that I lived there, but
Speaker 9: you know, they didn't. It didn't impact my life the
Speaker 9: way it impacts my friends' lives.
Speaker 3: To live out west.
Speaker 9: Yeah, there are industrial accidents and there's occasional flooding, but
Speaker 9: no one had any reason to expect anything like this,
Speaker 9: except that all of us have every reason to exp
Speaker 9: something like this. Areas hit more regularly by climate disasters
Speaker 9: have protocols in place for those sorts of things. People
Speaker 9: in California pay attention to the fires during that fire season.
Speaker 9: People on the Gulf Coast track the hurricanes. And not
Speaker 9: that these disasters aren't disastrous, but they're expected. They're part
Speaker 9: of living where you live Ashville. What happened there could
Speaker 9: be any of us at any time, So what was
Speaker 9: useful for them for prepping seems like it might be
Speaker 9: really useful for all of us. And most of that,
Speaker 9: most of what was useful is the basics. People I
Speaker 9: talked to were either real happy that they stored water
Speaker 9: or real sad that they hadn't stored water. With the
Speaker 9: storm coming, people filled up their bath tubs. One friend
Speaker 9: cut the down spouts on his house to direct them
Speaker 9: into trash cans, and now a week later, they still
Speaker 9: have water.
Speaker 3: To flush the toilet. Yeah.
Speaker 9: And you know, if you're like super ahead of it,
Speaker 9: you've got your little rain collectors all the time, right,
Speaker 9: but yeah, worst case scenario, cut your down spout and
Speaker 9: throw a trash can there, yep, or anything else that's
Speaker 9: food safe. Yeah, well, in this case is mostly water flushing.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But it's funny just as you mentioned this, Like I
Speaker 3: was in the village I stayed in last week didn't
Speaker 3: have rain water electricity, and that's exactly what they did.
Speaker 3: They had a person I stayed with had like a
Speaker 3: normal toilet, but they don't have plumbed in water, so
Speaker 3: they just collect rainwater and use that every time they
Speaker 3: want to flush it. Yeah, every time.
Speaker 9: I've lived off gread and dot a busy access running
Speaker 9: water instead of bucket flushing.
Speaker 3: I'm shit in a bucket with sawdust. Yeah yeah, they
Speaker 3: I think, like there's a hole underneath. I'm interesting, but
Speaker 3: you have to flush it to get it in. I
Speaker 3: think this was like a status upgrade to have the
Speaker 3: physical toilet. Yeah yeah, yeah, no, that actually makes a
Speaker 3: lot of sense. Yeah.
Speaker 9: Some of the first water distribution centers that came online
Speaker 9: after the storm in Ashville didn't have water containers, and
Speaker 9: this is actually still the case as of recording, so
Speaker 9: people had to bring their own. One friend only had
Speaker 9: those big clear water drugs, the kind that you put
Speaker 9: into like a water cooler and like get refilled at
Speaker 9: the grocery store, you know. Yeah, and these don't have
Speaker 9: good caps and you can't really bicycle with them while
Speaker 9: they're full.
Speaker 3: I've bicycled with one when it was full. But yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: it's not a fun, not a fun. This is where
Speaker 3: you need a long tail cargo bike, the ultimate prep
Speaker 3: of vehicle. Fair enough, I would argue, Jerry cans, that's
Speaker 3: my pitch instead of yeah, yeah, you can also get
Speaker 3: jerry kNs or like the like big opaque water jugs
Speaker 3: for storing water. But yeah, or even bags, what are
Speaker 3: bags like the like MSI drown bags? Okay, ifew says before,
Speaker 3: there's a pretty robust I've only seen little ones that
Speaker 3: it makes sense of those big ones too. Yeah, big
Speaker 3: ones expedition stuff.
Speaker 9: I would argue that if you're thinking about getting the stuff,
Speaker 9: opaque water containers with good lids are more useful than
Speaker 9: the blue clear ones. But if you have access to
Speaker 9: the blue clear ones and that's what you got, go
Speaker 9: get them.
Speaker 7: Yea.
Speaker 9: And many people lacked any containers at all, so the
Speaker 9: water distribution site was not as directly useful as it
Speaker 9: could have otherwise been.
Speaker 3: That's tough.
Speaker 9: One friend during the storm pulled out all the recycling
Speaker 9: and filled every jug with water and put it in
Speaker 9: the fridge, which did two things. One it gave you
Speaker 9: slightly orange tasting water to drink for a while, and
Speaker 9: two it added thermal mass to keep the fridge cool longer.
Speaker 9: And of course, you know story, more water always good.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: For the most part, most water people had access to
Speaker 9: had a boil advisory on it before it went out completely.
Speaker 9: Oh you're a water filter expert. I want to talk
Speaker 9: to you about this.
Speaker 3: I was about to fucking dive into that shit. I
Speaker 3: was so I was ready to go. Okay, hold on,
Speaker 3: all right.
Speaker 9: Yeah, floodwater itself is generally an awe, or at least
Speaker 9: it is in this case too toxic to use a
Speaker 9: simple filter or boil at home. Things like pesticides are
Speaker 9: incredibly hard to get out of water. Yeah, and lightweight
Speaker 9: backpacking type filters, which overall are what I recommend for
Speaker 9: most things like sawyers and life straws. They don't really
Speaker 9: cut it as from what I understand. From what I understand,
Speaker 9: and the two methods that can work are the like
Speaker 9: fairly slow and like intense charcoal filters, activated charcoal filters,
Speaker 9: and then in home style reverse osmosis filters, which normally
Speaker 9: I don't like, but for this it seems like they might.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you have enough power for an arrow filter. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's a nice touch. Also, if you get one, then
Speaker 3: your home appliance did if you'd have in a hard
Speaker 3: water area, which is a lot of the West, won't
Speaker 3: get fucked up by the classification so much.
Speaker 9: Oh that makes sense. I use a water softener AM
Speaker 9: I well, similar approach, but I like reverse osmosis seems
Speaker 9: like it has some advantages. Maybe I never like reverse
Speaker 9: osmosis because when I first was looking into it, I
Speaker 9: lived off grid and reverse osmosis creates a lot of
Speaker 9: waste water.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I was just like, all of this water
Speaker 3: was hard to come by. Fuck that. There are some
Speaker 3: filters that have an activated charchole element, specifically the pesticide
Speaker 3: runoff and like industrial guitaminates is something I have been
Speaker 3: really worried about in a couple of places I've been
Speaker 3: for work. You know. Actually I was somewhat concerned about
Speaker 3: that on a recent trip, the one, the one in Panama.
Speaker 3: But it's not so much pesticides. There's human waste and
Speaker 3: decaying human remains, which is pretty rough. But in the
Speaker 3: end my that was a big concern for we went there.
Speaker 3: The MSI Guardian I think has an activated charkhole element,
Speaker 3: and so does the camelback in line filter. Oh interest
Speaker 3: kind of a small one. Yeah, that And what's really
Speaker 3: cool about that is a lot of them you can't
Speaker 3: replace because the activated charcol is you can't backflush it
Speaker 3: in the same way that you can BackFlash a filter,
Speaker 3: right Camelback will sell you just the actual activated charkhole
Speaker 3: element that you can then replace. I've got a few
Speaker 3: of them in a cupboard behind. Yeah, but that would
Speaker 3: be what to look for if you're but yeah, don't
Speaker 3: be just boiling it or just filtering it. And those
Speaker 3: are for like something like a soayer. They're great for rainwater.
Speaker 3: But if you're filtering water, you wann't a fast flowing
Speaker 3: clear not a herbid or a stagnant water source or
Speaker 3: industrially bllluted water source. A fast flowing clear mountain stream great,
Speaker 3: but like turbid, stagnant water with industrial pollutants not so good.
Speaker 3: That makes sense.
Speaker 9: And so if you're listening as a Nashville or elsewhere,
Speaker 9: I'm like, I'm trying to think of what I'm like.
Speaker 9: I'll probably I have some activated charcoal stuff, but I
Speaker 9: don't like it as much because I don't like I
Speaker 9: don't like disposable things.
Speaker 3: I'm like, yeah, but I yeah, things that you can
Speaker 3: reuse or always better.
Speaker 9: Yeah, but for certain threat models, especially if you don't
Speaker 9: have the power for reversus messus.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's not that expensive. Yeah, the MSR ones
Speaker 3: actually the that's what the US military issues to some
Speaker 3: of it's like I guess more special people sottimes. They
Speaker 3: pop up on the surplus market, pretty cheap, okay, and
Speaker 3: they have a bomber warranty. You could trash it and
Speaker 3: they'll replace it.
Speaker 9: Oh hell yeah, I like that. A lot of outdoors
Speaker 9: gear is like pretty like they'll stand by their product.
Speaker 9: Yeah I would.
Speaker 3: I keep wanting trying to pitch his story Italy, but yeah,
Speaker 3: like I have an MSR quilt. This is not like
Speaker 3: an MSR sponsored episode, but I've used that shit on
Speaker 3: It's a very small, very light with like an ultralight quill.
Speaker 3: I've used I think literally on almost every continent in
Speaker 3: the world. Well, and just through like it's down and
Speaker 3: through like my body's greasiness, my inherent oiliness gradually down
Speaker 3: even if you take really good care of it, right,
Speaker 3: the down gets packed in and there. Yeah, I had
Speaker 3: it for probably six years. I was like, fuck it,
Speaker 3: this isn't working anymore. Let me see if they'll do
Speaker 3: me a discount of a new one, put in a
Speaker 3: warranty claim, send it back to them. Okay, here's a
Speaker 3: new one. Just just sent me one.
Speaker 9: That's cool. Yeah, yeah, no, I like that more outdoor stuff.
Speaker 9: I like people who stand by the shit they do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they also fixed stuff, which is cool, Like
Speaker 3: I like that, and they will ship you the part
Speaker 3: to fix it well, which is I feel less wasteful
Speaker 3: when that happens. Yeah. So with food, this one's real simple.
Speaker 3: People are either glad they stockpiled food or they were
Speaker 3: sad that they hadn't a stockpiled food. Yeah, that's an
Speaker 3: easy one.
Speaker 9: One friend immediately took about half a stash of freeze
Speaker 9: dried foods to distribute out to friends and strangers. Most
Speaker 9: people I talked to did not have any real amount
Speaker 9: of backup power available to them. On any given street,
Speaker 9: I would pass only a few houses with generators running,
Speaker 9: which also, of course, takes gas or propane. Propane has
Speaker 9: the advantage of storing indefinitely, it has the disadvantage of
Speaker 9: being substantially more expensive per like kill abot hour or
Speaker 9: whatever of power.
Speaker 3: M h yeah, probably more bulky too to store right,
Speaker 3: like per energy unit totally.
Speaker 9: When I was off grid, I used a dual fuel
Speaker 9: gener I actually I took it down and I no
Speaker 9: longer have the generator and gave.
Speaker 3: It to some folks.
Speaker 9: But I had a gas propane generator, and I ran
Speaker 9: it off of propane because it also is like cleaner
Speaker 9: on the engines.
Speaker 3: You have to do less maintenance.
Speaker 9: Yeah, but you know, if I needed it all the time,
Speaker 9: it was a backup to my solar. If I had
Speaker 9: to run it all the time, I would have used
Speaker 9: gas because it Yeah. Anyway, I talked with one homeowner
Speaker 9: with solar on his roof about how he hadn't sprung
Speaker 9: for the house battery because after all, power in the
Speaker 9: area never really went out for.
Speaker 3: More than a day at a time, right.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I personally delivered two solar generators, which just means
Speaker 9: like big ol' lithium batteries with inputs and outputs built in,
Speaker 9: And those would be my personal primary recommendation for people
Speaker 9: who want to run lights and charge phones and things.
Speaker 3: Like that during power outages for a while.
Speaker 9: Yeah, while gas or propane generators more useful for keeping
Speaker 9: heavy duty appliances going like fridges.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: I also passed out a couple different like portable or
Speaker 9: luggable solar panel setups that can charge phones or other devices.
Speaker 9: And there were some mutual aid folks going around and
Speaker 9: helping people with their solar setups. But overall, I didn't
Speaker 9: see as much of it as I expected.
Speaker 3: I expected to show up and they'll just be like
Speaker 3: outside the mutual aid stations, a big old foldable solar
Speaker 3: panel with a power brick. I think fewer people had
Speaker 3: that the night.
Speaker 7: Wow.
Speaker 3: So what are you doing to go buy?
Speaker 8: Oh?
Speaker 3: Right, because money is hard to come by, that's the reason. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you haven't made them self save a little bit, uh
Speaker 3: that way, but be careful with big blocks of cells
Speaker 3: and shit.
Speaker 9: Yeah, And like I'm always trying to price out the
Speaker 9: difference between like I build my own solar setups. Yeah,
Speaker 9: but I also like just get these solar generators. Sometimes,
Speaker 9: until you're looking at like big systems, the price difference
Speaker 9: is not as dramatic as you want, you.
Speaker 3: Know, because yeah, actually putting in a lot of time
Speaker 3: and or.
Speaker 9: Even like an inverter costs a fair amount of money.
Speaker 9: And so if you're building a big system, the inverter
Speaker 9: is like worth the expense, right, But if it's a
Speaker 9: little system, the little thing that has a built an
Speaker 9: inverter and be cheaper, right.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And like the charge controller edge controller, Yeah, I was
Speaker 3: recently building one out for leaving out for migrants. Yeah,
Speaker 3: or having in the bed of my truck so when
Speaker 3: I run into people and need to charge their phones,
Speaker 3: they can just do that without my truck being gone.
Speaker 3: Yeah and yeah, I ended up shoving a bunch of
Speaker 3: twelve fort batter reason that ammocan and hooking it up
Speaker 3: to a bunch of USB boards on the outside of
Speaker 3: the amacan and then just bringing them home at charging
Speaker 3: them make other than doing a charge controller, And yeah,
Speaker 3: it's not worth it. No, that makes sense.
Speaker 9: And honestly, like my van's off grid setup is I
Speaker 9: have the equipment to run it off my alternator or
Speaker 9: solar panels on the roof, I just have a fuck
Speaker 9: ton of batteries in my van, so I just plug
Speaker 9: it in every couple of weeks and it's fine, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you end up doing I've tried a bunch
Speaker 3: of the different solar panels I use them when I'm
Speaker 3: this company called Pale Blue that I used a decent amount.
Speaker 3: I left it with someone on a work trip because
Speaker 3: they needed it more than me. Yeah, it's alsouly useful,
Speaker 3: But like, if you're really trying to run anything big,
Speaker 3: you need a lot more solar panel then you're probably
Speaker 3: gonna you know, carry around on your backpack.
Speaker 9: That's what I think people don't quite recognize is that,
Speaker 9: like I used to have a pretty large array of
Speaker 9: twelve hundred watts, and you know, I had to go
Speaker 9: run hundreds of feet of cable to put that in
Speaker 9: a field and build like a whole structure to hold
Speaker 9: it and get it to the right angle and things
Speaker 9: like that. Yeah, and even then in the winter I
Speaker 9: ran the generator. And this is to keep my laptop
Speaker 9: and a little tiny super efficient fridge going right and
Speaker 9: some other stuff right. But like, solar is not space efficient.
Speaker 9: It's not going to do what you think it does
Speaker 9: because it's not gonna do what it's advertised to do.
Speaker 9: But it'll keep your cell phone alive, yeah.
Speaker 3: Which is important. Or if you use a satellite communicator
Speaker 3: or something, then you can keep that charged. Yeah.
Speaker 9: With gas, one friend usually keeps her car half full
Speaker 9: of gas, but forgot that week because you've been driving
Speaker 9: so much and started the crisis with only an eighth
Speaker 9: of a tank and was extra stuck. You need to
Speaker 9: have a gas can if you want to drive out
Speaker 9: of the city and get as much gas as possible.
Speaker 9: Of course, you can store gas in a good container
Speaker 9: for a while, but it goes bad after three to
Speaker 9: six months. You store gas that way, So you should
Speaker 9: set an alarm for yourself. This is kind of telling myself.
Speaker 9: I have like gas cans where I was like, oh,
Speaker 9: I should store some gas, and then I'm like, oh, wait,
Speaker 9: how long has that one been there?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Crap? Now am I dealing with it? Yeah? You
Speaker 3: have to take it to real specialized places to deal
Speaker 3: with it. Yeah, it's hard to get rid of it
Speaker 3: once you Yeah, let it go bad.
Speaker 9: And so an empty gas can actually would have done
Speaker 9: people in Ashville a lot of good. A full gas
Speaker 9: can even better, right, But honestly, full tank of gas
Speaker 9: in your car better in a full gas can, empty
Speaker 9: gas can allow people to leave and go get gas
Speaker 9: because they were not. Civilization didn't end. Civilization ended a
Speaker 9: ninety minute radius, you know. Yeah, So you can set
Speaker 9: an alarm for yourself if.
Speaker 3: You're going to keep full gas and then you put
Speaker 3: it in your gas tank and then you go refill
Speaker 3: it again, and then you get annoyed about doing this,
Speaker 3: and then you stop doing it, and then an apocalypse happens,
Speaker 3: and then you're really annoyed that you forgot. Don't ask
Speaker 3: me how I know. Just if you have the money
Speaker 3: to not let your vehicle get below half full, you'll
Speaker 3: probably be fine. You can get a long way in
Speaker 3: a tank.
Speaker 9: Well, it's about when you have the money is an
Speaker 9: important part. But at the end of the day, it
Speaker 9: does not cost you more money to keep your gas
Speaker 9: tank at half full.
Speaker 3: Right, No, it doesn't because you're and unless you're driving
Speaker 3: a long way to get the gas, but like you're
Speaker 3: still driving the same amount, you're just stopping off a
Speaker 3: little more.
Speaker 9: Yeah, empty gas can ended up crucial, and people who
Speaker 9: stored them were glad, and a lot of them were
Speaker 9: donated immediately. Volunteers collected gas cans and drove the three
Speaker 9: hour round trip to fill them up with gas several
Speaker 9: times a day. You should learn the range of your vehicle.
Speaker 9: Newer cars will tell you automatically, but if not, it's
Speaker 9: not super hard to figure out your gas mileage. You
Speaker 9: have to like look at your mileage when you fill
Speaker 9: it up and do some division and shit and find
Speaker 9: out the size of your fuel tank and your gas mileage,
Speaker 9: and you'll know whether or not you have enough gas
Speaker 9: to reach an area, especially if you're doing disaster relief.
Speaker 9: You never want to do disaster relief if you can't
Speaker 9: get out of the situation yourself, because then you're a
Speaker 9: fucking asshole, because then you are just actually another person
Speaker 9: who needs relief. Communications, as this show covered last week,
Speaker 9: were one of the hardest hit areas of preparedness in
Speaker 9: this crisis. There were Ham radio operators doing stuff, but
Speaker 9: a lot of my activist and anarchist friends with Bao fangs,
Speaker 9: which are these cheap Ham radios, struggle to get them
Speaker 9: to work well during the storm due to the mountains,
Speaker 9: water in the air, lack of repeaters, and frankly that
Speaker 9: Ham radios are really goddamn complicated. Everyone has fully up
Speaker 9: on exactly how it works at that moment, right yeah,
Speaker 9: and this has put a fire under them to get
Speaker 9: better at it. But especially in the mountains, repeaters need
Speaker 9: to be a part of a radio communications plan. People
Speaker 9: with satellite phones were some of the only people in
Speaker 9: communication at the beginning. I was curious about and did
Speaker 9: not find any information about whether or not the new
Speaker 9: iPhone satellite texting.
Speaker 3: I wanted to ask about that. I didn't find anyone
Speaker 3: who used it. Okay, I found it to be less
Speaker 3: reliable than what I have is Garment in Reach. I
Speaker 3: pay for it, yeah, and it works real well. Used
Speaker 3: it in the dairy and gap. I've used it again
Speaker 3: every continent part from Antarctica. So you would say that
Speaker 3: the iPhone doesn't replace the garment in Reach in terms
Speaker 3: of well the iPhone works in North America. So for me,
Speaker 3: my model has been absolutely not Like it didn't work
Speaker 3: in Panama, Central America, I guess, so yeah, no, for me,
Speaker 3: the in Reach has been faster. It's also another device
Speaker 3: that's not yourself. Yeah, and like sometimes you know the
Speaker 3: device that you're playing Angry Birds on and then you
Speaker 3: run out of battery or whatever. You know, Like, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's useful to have a device which is only for
Speaker 3: emergencies which lasts for two weeks if you charged it up. Yeah, one,
Speaker 3: I leave mine off and so yeah yeah yeah, I
Speaker 3: mean if you're getting one for that purpose, I would
Speaker 3: say that, like the bigger in Reach is better. There's
Speaker 3: in Reach Mini and Mini two. Again. I used the
Speaker 3: Mini for about eight years I think, eventually destroyed it
Speaker 3: and got it warranty replace with a Mini too. The
Speaker 3: bigger one allows you to type on the device, the
Speaker 3: Mini too, sending any kind of message without a cell
Speaker 3: phone to do the input is a real bastard. But this, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's just like remember when you used to do predictive
Speaker 3: texts and you do like one was ABC two. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's like that.
Speaker 9: Okay, Yeah, I have the in reach too, and I've
Speaker 9: only proof of concept of that. I'm often driving around
Speaker 9: replaces where I could break our down the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 9: Actually I broke down yesterday about free my from where
Speaker 9: I lose cell service in the mountains that I live in.
Speaker 3: Oh, that could have been rough. I know. I also
Speaker 3: broke down in an auto mechanic shop.
Speaker 9: I got real lucky with what was otherwise a real
Speaker 9: bad situation.
Speaker 3: If you're getting it in reach Mini, this is my soapbox.
Speaker 3: Don't trust the crappy little caribiner it comes with by
Speaker 3: a small locking DMM makes a tiny locking carabiner. It's
Speaker 3: an important thing to lose it because you didn't want
Speaker 3: to spend ten bucks on a carabiner. Would be a
Speaker 3: bad day you mentioned this. I'll end up doing this
Speaker 3: because I trust you, because your user is more than mine.
Speaker 3: Mine just is like clip to my hiking bag, but
Speaker 3: it hasn't. Yeah, inherently and unlocking and unlocking caribine. You
Speaker 3: want to be using a locker for something that's like
Speaker 3: an essential safety. Now that makes sense. Threadlock the little Yeah,
Speaker 3: it uses I think a talks or an Alan threadlock
Speaker 3: that bad boy in. Okay, you're good to go.
Speaker 9: I know that starlink doesn't work very well during storms.
Speaker 9: There's this method of internet called starlink that's owned by
Speaker 9: someone who I don't like and wouldn't like me because
Speaker 9: I'm a transperson. But starlink is not incredibly reliable during storms.
Speaker 9: I know that because I live remote and you starlink.
Speaker 9: I'm on talking on starlink right now. It does not
Speaker 9: work great during storms. But after the storm passed and
Speaker 9: when cell service was still out, a restaurant with starlink
Speaker 9: was where many people first were able to reach their
Speaker 9: loved ones. That's cool, and so that is a thing
Speaker 9: to know. It is a fairly reliable service.
Speaker 3: Frankly, same deal in the Darien. Actually, that's how migrants
Speaker 3: are first able to contact their loved ones and let
Speaker 3: them know that they're safe. Yeah, it's an indigenous village
Speaker 3: where someone has a starlink, unless you personally piss off
Speaker 3: a particular billionaire, in which case he will personally turn
Speaker 3: it off for you. Yeah. Great.
Speaker 9: Everyone I talked to had a regular like AMFM weather
Speaker 9: blah blah blah radio at home, which is great. Yeah,
Speaker 9: people should have radios in their homes. Radio is the
Speaker 9: main mechanism that the city used to broadcast information about
Speaker 9: various threats, like evacuations of regions threatened by the destruction
Speaker 9: of dams or the can tamination in the water. However,
Speaker 9: how you charge them is you know, I fortunately had
Speaker 9: some d batteries in my van to give to someone because.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, that soul school. Yeah.
Speaker 9: No, yeah, some of my stuff I brought like in
Speaker 9: case someone I knew needed and some stuff I just
Speaker 9: like brought to give away. Yeah, and my like stash
Speaker 9: of batteries was just like came with me in case
Speaker 9: anyone needed you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can get wind up weather radios. I have one. Yeah, no, totally.
Speaker 9: That's actually I dislike most all in one gadgets for survival,
Speaker 9: but the wind up radio with the little shitty solar
Speaker 9: panel is one of the ones that I'm like, no,
Speaker 9: that's they're thirty to fifty bucks and they work. Yeah,
Speaker 9: and you don't need much power to listen to a radio,
Speaker 9: you know.
Speaker 3: No, they are a whole potst of world where wind
Speaker 3: up weather radios or how people get their information.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it makes sense for travel. Most people still got
Speaker 9: around by vehicle, just with limited gas, though I saw
Speaker 9: more than the usual number of people walking or biking,
Speaker 9: pulling trailers or wagons. As a general rule, consider floodwaters
Speaker 9: to be impassable and do not attempt to drive through them. Interestingly,
Speaker 9: electric cars do better in floods than gas engines because
Speaker 9: if water gets into the air intake of a gas engine,
Speaker 9: the engine will stall. And usually it's people with giant
Speaker 9: pickup trucks who overestimate the capabilities of their vehicles.
Speaker 3: Who go out and do this. Yeah.
Speaker 9: When I got my truck and I was like, I'm
Speaker 9: a prepper, I'm going to get those like bullbars or
Speaker 9: the front cage things or whatever.
Speaker 3: Grown. Yeah, and I looked into it and I read
Speaker 3: about it, and they just murder people. Yeah, as someone
Speaker 3: who rides a bicycle a lot, those things do.
Speaker 9: Not like it's already bad that pickup trucks are so gigantic,
Speaker 9: but the if you add one of those things to
Speaker 9: the front of your car, front of your truck, you're
Speaker 9: just gonna and you have to think about it. Are
Speaker 9: you more likely to need to push broken down cars
Speaker 9: during the end of the world or accidentally hit a
Speaker 9: pedestrian with your vehicle that is taller than a child. Yeah,
Speaker 9: and I would guess for most people, including me, I
Speaker 9: am more likely to accidentally hit a pedestrian. So I
Speaker 9: ran that through my cost benefit analysis, and I do
Speaker 9: not have one of those things on my truck. I
Speaker 9: could imagine a world is like low, low low on
Speaker 9: my list of priorities, Like one day I'm going to
Speaker 9: get one and I'm going to keep it in my garage,
Speaker 9: and then it's like, yeah, and the world has ended,
Speaker 9: and I'm gonna put it on my truck in case
Speaker 9: I need to push cars out of the way.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: With the three hundred and fifty miles, I can drive
Speaker 9: my truck before it's useless.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, using all that gas stooled Yeah, yeah, exactly. That
Speaker 9: totally lasts a long time anyway. One of the problems
Speaker 9: electric vehicles with flooding that I think we're starting to see.
Speaker 9: I think these videos were from Ashville, but I'm not certain,
Speaker 9: is that electric vehicles if they are underwater for long enough,
Speaker 9: especially with salt water. This is less of a North
Speaker 9: Carolina and more of a coastal thing. Yeah, the salt
Speaker 9: water can cause fires if it hits the battery long enough.
Speaker 9: Don't drive through flood water, and floods in the mountains
Speaker 9: are particularly fast moving as compared to like coastal area
Speaker 9: floods where the water might be still and staying around.
Speaker 3: Yeah. On the other hand, moving floodwater goes away faster
Speaker 3: and on its own.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So yeah, with gravity, don't cycle through it. I've cycled
Speaker 3: through a couple of rivers once in Iceland. It just
Speaker 3: picked up the bike from underneath me, and it like
Speaker 3: not an optimal situation actually, to be swimming down a
Speaker 3: river chasing after your bicycle in Iceland. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 3: want to do that. Yeah. Avoid famously warm place Iceland. Yeah. Hm,
Speaker 3: only one hundred kilometers from the nearest place I could
Speaker 3: re warm myself. It's a great day.
Speaker 9: Roads were washed away in many places, while many many
Speaker 9: more were blocked by downtrees. Improper chainsaw use is one
Speaker 9: of the leading causes of injuries and disasters.
Speaker 3: Oh I bet.
Speaker 9: Proper use of chainsaws has been absolutely essential. Although there
Speaker 9: were reports of people who self rescued with hand saws. Yeah,
Speaker 9: and you know, yeah, you got time and people and
Speaker 9: you got a handsaw, and there's a tree in your way,
Speaker 9: you can get through it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, don't be like the guy maybe Margaret's so there's
Speaker 3: some like homesteader on. Oh god, that's dot com who
Speaker 3: I've started war with. Yeah, because he's he's lying, He's
Speaker 3: not like I'm sorry this guy is. Don't braid their hair.
Speaker 3: Both of them have long hair and they don't braid it.
Speaker 3: I do not believe that they work outside regularly if
Speaker 3: they don't braid their hair. Yeah, your hair will get
Speaker 3: caught and shit and it'll just tangle. It is not
Speaker 3: worth it. The reason rural people with long hair wear
Speaker 3: their hair and braids, Yeah, it's it keeps it out
Speaker 3: the way.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say that if you have a saw,
Speaker 3: keep it, you know, keep it in a reasonable condition.
Speaker 3: The old sword has been kicking around your shed and
Speaker 3: it's rusty and blunt. Yeah, likewise the old chainsaw, So
Speaker 3: don't be dragging that out. Yeah, you haven't used it
Speaker 3: for a while.
Speaker 9: That said one of the things I was expecting but
Speaker 9: wasn't true, because I brought down a generator that I
Speaker 9: didn't know if worked right, And I was like, what
Speaker 9: a jerk move, because if I was going down to
Speaker 9: like there's like ten people and I'm like, don't worry,
Speaker 9: I'm here to rescue you.
Speaker 3: I've got a generator. I don't know if works. That's
Speaker 3: not so great.
Speaker 9: Yeah, right, there's one hundred thousand people who live in Asheville.
Speaker 9: There was the Asheville Tool Library and the Western North
Speaker 9: Carolina Pair Cafe hold up outside the Anarchist Bookstore fixing
Speaker 9: generators and chainsaws. Oh listen, yeah, hero shit, and it
Speaker 9: was great.
Speaker 3: Of all the various generators people brought, I was like,
Speaker 3: I don't know if this one works, and they added
Speaker 3: gas and it worked, and so I was like I
Speaker 3: brought the best shitty generator, you know. Yeah, but no,
Speaker 3: Sometimes things can be handy, and knowing how to fix
Speaker 3: things is always useful.
Speaker 9: And there are people around with more specialized skills. You
Speaker 9: don't have to learn to do everything. For example, chainsawing
Speaker 9: is a specialized skill. I own a bunch of devices
Speaker 9: that are scary and dangerous, and some of them are guns,
Speaker 9: and one of them is a table saw, and the
Speaker 9: chainsaw is the most likely to hurt me. Yeah, for sure,
Speaker 9: and I've been to a chainsaw class. I'm very glad.
Speaker 9: Cutting a downed tree is an entirely different skill than
Speaker 9: cutting a live tree or a standing tree because of
Speaker 9: the way that tension works. And I cannot teach you
Speaker 9: this over Well, you might already know it, but don't
Speaker 9: listen to a podcast. Learn how to go to a class.
Speaker 3: Yeah, pay someone to teach you and get the right
Speaker 3: protective stuff like, yeah, absolutely proper detective trousers and things. Yeah.
Speaker 9: Also, never cut up trees woven with power lines without
Speaker 9: ascertaining that the power line is dead. As for how
Speaker 9: to ascertain it, I asked someone who was on a
Speaker 9: chainsaw crew how to ascertain it, and he didn't know.
Speaker 9: So they just avoid those ones. Yeah, I mean mains
Speaker 9: power is not a joke.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: People have been reaching the more isolated communities out there
Speaker 9: by hiking, by ATV, by dirt bike, by helicopter, and
Speaker 9: most famously, by a string of pack mules. There are
Speaker 9: a lot of ways that people have been getting help
Speaker 9: to people. This doesn't mean you need to go out
Speaker 9: and buy a helicopter, Like, just get a mule. You
Speaker 9: don't even need to google how much a helicopter is, Margaret,
Speaker 9: I wonder how much a helicopter is anyway. And then
Speaker 9: there was one tool and tool set that a lot
Speaker 9: of my friends have that as of yet, has had
Speaker 9: more or less no use in responding to this crisis,
Speaker 9: and that is guns.
Speaker 3: I asked. I figured it might be.
Speaker 9: This is interesting for a few reasons. One is that
Speaker 9: North Carolina is a pretty gun friendly state. It's also
Speaker 9: a pretty culture war ass state.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Where I live in West Virginia, people don't I mean, yeah,
Speaker 9: you see the punisher skull every now and then or whatever,
Speaker 9: but like overall, people are like, I don't know, We're
Speaker 9: all just trying to live, you know. Yeah, in western
Speaker 9: North Carolina you have intense tensions between strong pockets of
Speaker 9: blue and red right and a lot of people on
Speaker 9: both sides that are armed. I have a North Carolina
Speaker 9: concealed carry permit myself. I'm not anti gun, but it
Speaker 9: was not what was wanted or needed. Yeah, if food
Speaker 9: stays scarce long enough down there, I would expect some
Speaker 9: people might be doing some out of season survival hunting.
Speaker 9: But I haven't even heard rumors of that yet. Yeah,
Speaker 9: there have been occasional rumors of robberies and the occasional
Speaker 9: rumors of Nazi activity in the areas, and I believe
Speaker 9: both have happened, Yeah, but there's been nothing widespread, and
Speaker 9: so far there hasn't even been a need for community
Speaker 9: defense organizations. By and large, the culture war is on pause,
Speaker 9: and I'm grateful. I like getting along with people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, it's much more fun they' shooting at them. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9: Like talk about shared interests like guns, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've had some positive discussions of people who don't pose. Yeah,
Speaker 3: probably aligned with me because we both enjoy all guns.
Speaker 9: And this is not to say the firearms are not
Speaker 9: a useful skill set for different threat models within the apocalypse,
Speaker 9: but it hasn't proved particularly useful so far in this
Speaker 9: particular crisis. And I think overall, I would put this
Speaker 9: at an overrated skill and an overrated tool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and definitely an overage way to spend a shit
Speaker 3: ton of money. Oh my god. Yeah. No.
Speaker 9: One magazine of bullets is a movie that you can
Speaker 9: go see at the theater. Yeah, yeah, like a dinner.
Speaker 9: And I'm saying this, yeah, I'm looking.
Speaker 3: At like what that one, two, three, four, like maybe
Speaker 3: twelve ammunition? Canful of ammunition mainly I buy the I
Speaker 3: like to go shoot clay pigeons and the targets and stuff,
Speaker 3: and I buy and it is cheap. But also, if
Speaker 3: you have a gun, you should know how to use
Speaker 3: it otherwise you're dangerous. Yeah. Yeah, like, don't don't be
Speaker 3: buying a gun and then loading it and storing it
Speaker 3: and not knowing how to use it than your liability. Yeah,
Speaker 3: But like I also have a bunch of lentils, and like,
Speaker 3: just in terms of preparedness, by the lentils first.
Speaker 9: Totally more useful, way more useful in the circumstance. And
Speaker 9: this circumstance is more likely the most and one thing
Speaker 9: almost everyone I talked to was happy about. No one
Speaker 9: was sad about just this came up. Everyone was happy
Speaker 9: that they had extra to share. A random woman who
Speaker 9: showed up to get water at the Anarchist bookstore saw
Speaker 9: what was happening and turned and told me, like, oh,
Speaker 9: I have a chainsaw. I don't really you should I
Speaker 9: bring it here? And the answer is yes, And everyone
Speaker 9: is happy when we give things to each other. That's
Speaker 9: the That's the these of the other podcast episode I
Speaker 9: did this week, is that when you give stuff to someone.
Speaker 3: It's good for both of you. You just literally are
Speaker 3: both happier, Yeah, without a doubt. And like, I remember
Speaker 3: when my house flood. I think I was seventeen eighteen
Speaker 3: something like that. My little sister and I were at home,
Speaker 3: and I remember at first being like, oh no, back
Speaker 3: in the daily you know, we had a TV that
Speaker 3: was relatively flat. It's probably six inches thick still, you know,
Speaker 3: but we thought it was shit, and then being like,
Speaker 3: oh no, this TV that was so cool, it's being destroyed.
Speaker 3: H And then immediately being like, my neighbors were in
Speaker 3: their eighties and fucked the TV. Yeah, Like, and we
Speaker 3: got our neighbors and there was one house in our
Speaker 3: village that was on the hill. Everyone in our village
Speaker 3: went to the house on the hill. We had a
Speaker 3: great time. Yeah, Like we hung out and everyone was
Speaker 3: so much happier not having to go through that shit alone. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and they would have been sitting in the house watching
Speaker 3: all their stuff wash you we. Yeah, we stayed there
Speaker 3: a couple of days and then we went home and
Speaker 3: it was fine. Well that's what I got.
Speaker 9: I thought it was going to be thirty minutes and
Speaker 9: then I forgot I was going to talk about gear
Speaker 9: with my friend James, where we both separately off Mike
Speaker 9: often do this for hours of the time. Yeah, and
Speaker 9: so go out and get yourself three days to three
Speaker 9: weeks worth of food and water. Slowly build it up.
Speaker 9: Go out and talk to your neighbors, figure who they are,
Speaker 9: and uh, is it gonna be okay?
Speaker 3: The main reason's gonna be okay? Is we all die
Speaker 3: eventually anyway, But like that's gonna be okay. Yeah, We're
Speaker 3: gonna take care of each other as best we can. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's what we do. Anything you want to plug, I
Speaker 3: guess this is your podcast. Yeah, I mean participant in
Speaker 3: mutual aid anyway, because then you have the structures to
Speaker 3: help yourself and know other people when you need them. Yes,
Speaker 3: Like if things went shit here tomorrow, I could communicate
Speaker 3: with my border friends because we use ham radios, and
Speaker 3: we could help one another because we already engage in
Speaker 3: the helping of people, and we organize horizontally because it
Speaker 3: is better and that way, it doesn't matter if the
Speaker 3: person who is quote unquote in charge isn't here, because
Speaker 3: no one's in charge.
Speaker 9: Yep, totally, So do anarchism if you want to support
Speaker 9: Asheville and the relief efforts there and the surrounding areas. Financially,
Speaker 9: there's a million different small organizations that could absolutely ease
Speaker 9: your help. But the two that I think we've been
Speaker 9: shouting out a lot on the show, and I can
Speaker 9: personally vouch for it very strongly is Appalachian Medical Solidarity
Speaker 9: and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. And both of those are
Speaker 9: volunteer organizations. Every all the little money, all the money
Speaker 9: you send is going to buy people's stuff. And if
Speaker 9: you are within a day's drive of western North Carolina,
Speaker 9: there might be a hub collecting things. Don't bring them
Speaker 9: your old sweaters, bring them stuff that people want.
Speaker 3: You could ask them and they'll tell you, yeah, And
Speaker 3: that's what I got. That's what I got to plug.
Speaker 3: I will talk to you all some other times on
Speaker 3: It could happen he.
Speaker 4: Welcome to It could happen to hear a podcast about
Speaker 4: ice training guest squads. I guess I'm your host via Wong.
Speaker 4: I guess I don't know if formerly or better is
Speaker 4: the correct word, but sometimes also not. As the ice
Speaker 4: was be destroyed, girl, So I'm mad about this one
Speaker 4: with me? Is someone else's extremely bad about the existence
Speaker 4: of ICE, which is James Yep.
Speaker 3: I'm here, I'm mad as a waste. I guess just
Speaker 3: another Monday. Yeah, this shit sucks, This does suck. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, I had this realization.
Speaker 4: I get this on Twitter a lot, where I realized
Speaker 4: that there are people who don't know what ICE is
Speaker 4: because they're like, they're not from the US, or they're like, yeah,
Speaker 4: so ICE is immigrations and customs enforcements. The shortest description
Speaker 4: of what they are is that they are one of
Speaker 4: the like four American border gestapos.
Speaker 3: Yeah. The number of agencies under DHS is fucking baffling,
Speaker 3: constantly rebranding every time they have a scandal or they
Speaker 3: kill too many people. That yeah, ICE is kind of
Speaker 3: their flagship evil program.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and they like they do raids on fucking houses,
Speaker 4: they do raised on businesses.
Speaker 3: They suck.
Speaker 4: Like if you vaguely remember, there was a whole bunch
Speaker 4: of protests in like twenty eighteen over this stuff, and
Speaker 4: that was mostly anti ICE stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if someone's getting deported, it's ICE for the most
Speaker 3: part doing it. Like, Yeah, they also run detention centers
Speaker 3: where people go, you know, they work with Jeff Bezos
Speaker 3: on deporting people.
Speaker 4: Oh my fucking god. Okay, I just remembered a story
Speaker 4: I had. I had a flashback to standing in a protest,
Speaker 4: a very very large protest in twenty eighteen. This is
Speaker 4: one of like the big pro immigrant rallies. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: in this fucking protest, I saw a thing for this
Speaker 4: group called Heartland Alliance. Now PROBA people who probably don't
Speaker 4: outside of Chicago probably don't know what this is. The
Speaker 4: Heartland Alliance runs like fucking child prison facilities, like for
Speaker 4: ICE school, and they were at this protest against ICE.
Speaker 4: Fucking it was the worst. That shit was terrible. You know,
Speaker 4: this whole thing is all extremely bad. But what we've
Speaker 4: been learning more details about recently is this program called
Speaker 4: Citizens Academies, which is run by ICE's Homeland Security Investigations.
Speaker 3: I didn't think HSI was under ICE. I thought HSI
Speaker 3: was a different branch of dhs I might be wrong,
Speaker 3: but they used to be under ICE as far as
Speaker 3: I know, and then they became HSI.
Speaker 4: Okay, I might be wrong about that, because the stuff
Speaker 4: that I was reading was saying that they are still
Speaker 4: part of ICE, but they might not be. It's also
Speaker 4: possible that it's literally has gone back and forward multiple times.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is merecrareck. Things fucking suck.
Speaker 4: But HSI also does, like a lot of the times,
Speaker 4: there's some of the people who like do like physically
Speaker 4: the people on the ground doing a raid will be HSI, like.
Speaker 3: Fucking stormtroopers or whatever. Yeah, they do arrests. Yeah, often
Speaker 3: they appear in like these Joint counter Terrorism Task task forces,
Speaker 3: like when they especially when they're doing stuff with like
Speaker 3: drugs and that kind of thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the civilian academies are I think really the only
Speaker 4: way you could describe them, even though this is not
Speaker 4: how it's being described really is that they're treating random
Speaker 4: people to like become desk what.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's what's interesting is like the protest that you
Speaker 3: talked about seem to have been the sort of reason
Speaker 3: that they started this program, right, Yeah.
Speaker 4: We need to rewind this a little bit because they
Speaker 4: started in the US as a reaction to those protests,
Speaker 4: like specifically as like a pr thing. But the original
Speaker 4: version of these programs started in Puerto Rico under Obama.
Speaker 3: Look, we don't give Obama or anything like enough shit, right,
Speaker 3: Like fucking Obama just like in terms of killing people,
Speaker 3: in terms of deporting people, fucked up. Human being.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he was the deporter in chief and like, yeah,
Speaker 4: part of part of what's sort of brutal about the
Speaker 4: mom administration is like a lot of his support had
Speaker 4: been from like the huge undocumented that could have like
Speaker 4: peaked in like two thousand and six, and he comes
Speaker 4: in on this and they just fucking deports everyone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, as Democrats too every time. Yeah, we're seeing it
Speaker 3: again with Biden.
Speaker 4: Right, It's like it's the same sort of process and
Speaker 4: and under under Obama, these these programs start. There's specifically
Speaker 4: as you're talking about, there's specifically supposed to be these
Speaker 4: like training programs are supposed to be for community out Well, okay,
Speaker 4: so this is and this is one of these things.
Speaker 4: Was like, this is what they say that it's for.
Speaker 4: And given what they're doing, I don't know how much
Speaker 4: I believe them what they're what they say that it's for.
Speaker 4: Is it's because there's been all of these anti ice things,
Speaker 4: Like I mean, there's lots of people who now are
Speaker 4: like don't say shit about ice, who like like AOC
Speaker 4: hasn't fucking said anything about abolishing ICE in like half
Speaker 4: a decade, right, and she ran on that. Yeah, because
Speaker 4: of how powerful those social movements were. I mean, there's
Speaker 4: like Sean mcguey, whatever the fuck guy whose whole thing
Speaker 4: was abolish ice and then he became a Democratic staffer
Speaker 4: and now it never talks about it again, and he's
Speaker 4: like my absolute wordal nemesis, like I will face at
Speaker 4: the end of days. Yeah, I will destroy hiss fucking
Speaker 4: traders ass and yeah, many, many, many such cases. But yeah,
Speaker 4: like and I think probably peak like anti ice sentiment
Speaker 4: was in the Trump era, right when people, Yeah, people
Speaker 4: started to look at immigration as the way that like
Speaker 4: people have immigrant communities and diasporas, see it, right, which
Speaker 4: is this thing that tears families apart, that destroys communities,
Speaker 4: that rich children from their parents, and people obviously recognized
Speaker 4: it was bad. And then Biden got in and the
Speaker 4: Democrats had to do this like kind of cover your
Speaker 4: eyes and turn away thing where they continue to do
Speaker 4: the same shit. Kids and cages are good now, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: in cages great Democratic kids and cage is incredible.
Speaker 3: What if no cage is what do we just leave
Speaker 3: them out in the fucking mountains and James's friend have
Speaker 3: to feed them beans or wind?
Speaker 4: Yeah, but the thing is in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen.
Speaker 4: It's not entirely clear that the Democrats are going to
Speaker 4: swing that way. No, And so you get these programs
Speaker 4: and what's interesting about them, and so a lot of
Speaker 4: this is coming from that. There's a very very good
Speaker 4: piece by Barrizio Guerrero indocumented, who got a bunch of
Speaker 4: Foya documents about this program and what they were actually doing. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and one of the things that he discovers about this
Speaker 4: is that it's like a lot of rich guys. Like
Speaker 4: it's some of them are like really rich. It's also
Speaker 4: it's a lot of like bank employees.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was a funny almost, I guess kind of
Speaker 3: it got through that little social circle or whatever.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and like there's this sort of feed in program
Speaker 4: that sends people into this. And I actually I realized
Speaker 4: I had vaguely known about these but didn't quite understand
Speaker 4: how bad it was because he didn't have a bunch
Speaker 4: of the documents we have now. But this was a
Speaker 4: big thing in Chicago in twenty twenty one, where there
Speaker 4: was proposed to open one of these things. It's like
Speaker 4: these like training centers for these like fucking people. Oh yeah,
Speaker 4: and you know twenty twenty one was still in Chicago.
Speaker 4: There was still like like there's some protest stuff going on,
Speaker 4: because I mean there's you know, like twenty twenty hadn't
Speaker 4: quite faded yet. And there was also like our cops
Speaker 4: We've talked about this a couple times on the show,
Speaker 4: but like shot a fucking fourteen year old, like yeah,
Speaker 4: it's fucking bmurdered him cold blood. And the protests were
Speaker 4: bad enough that like even lower Lightfoot was like like
Speaker 4: fuck this, like this is this Trump ice stuff.
Speaker 3: We can't let them do it.
Speaker 4: This was back with the when like these people like
Speaker 4: the Democrats were started pretending that they didn't like all
Speaker 4: of these like federal deportation machine things. But the things
Speaker 4: that we have now are we have the actual This
Speaker 4: is like I think with the public most valuable part
Speaker 4: of this whole thing is that we actually have a
Speaker 4: bunch of the documents now of what they were showing people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'd love to see the fucking Foyer fight for this,
Speaker 3: because I have foyed the Department of Homeland Security a
Speaker 3: lot and getting any like I have a fire out
Speaker 3: right now regarding the CBP one and the fact that
Speaker 3: it doesn't work on non Apple phones, and they very
Speaker 3: clearly know this, right, Like if I know it, they
Speaker 3: know it. And I would love to know if that
Speaker 3: was from the outset that they knew and they just
Speaker 3: didn't give a fuck, Like I would like to see
Speaker 3: those emails regarding it doesn't work on Samsung. I think
Speaker 3: I think they got it from a court order. Oh okay,
Speaker 3: so they went to court to get Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: every like people, Freedom Information Act is great, it only
Speaker 3: works if you have a lawyer who's prepared to sue
Speaker 3: over it. Like that is the especially with DHS. You're
Speaker 3: just not like, yeah, I've got stuff, so I found
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty. They'll just kick it down, kick can
Speaker 3: down the road, like yep, I'm not going to get it,
Speaker 3: but yeah, kudos to them for doing it. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: so hard if you are a First Amendment lawyer. Hit
Speaker 3: me up.
Speaker 4: But okay, So the shit that's in this one of
Speaker 4: these things. The first page of this is maybe the
Speaker 4: most deranged chart I have ever seen in anything, which
Speaker 4: is it is It is a picture of a naked
Speaker 4: human body. Is the fronds and back of it, right,
Speaker 4: And they've labeled all of the parts of the body
Speaker 4: by and they've been. So we only have a black
Speaker 4: and white version of this, but they've they've been they've
Speaker 4: been labeled by how effective it is to hit someone
Speaker 4: there with the baton.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and they're like green in the in the
Speaker 3: actual document, they're green, yellow, and red. I guess, uh.
Speaker 3: And then it says like reasoning for the red one,
Speaker 3: I'll just read it highest level of resultant trauma injury
Speaker 3: tends to range from serious to lung lasting rather than temporary,
Speaker 3: and may include unconsciousness, serious body injury, shock, or death.
Speaker 3: So I guess like it's saying like, don't hit them
Speaker 3: in the in the in the red area. No, that's
Speaker 3: the thing. That's the thing. They're not saying that. They're
Speaker 3: just saying, these are your options.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Is so part of this is supposed to be part
Speaker 4: of like a force escal thing. But the point of
Speaker 4: this is that it is actually like they're trying to
Speaker 4: explain force escalation. And the thing is that like, yeah,
Speaker 4: you actually can do this, but you can only do
Speaker 4: this if you're in like the highest level of force.
Speaker 3: Escalation or whatever.
Speaker 4: Okay, and if any of you have ever been around
Speaker 4: a cop, you know, but those people jump to the
Speaker 4: highest level of force escalation at like, yeah, a fucking again,
Speaker 4: we have literally seen an acorn drop and it can't
Speaker 4: be able to do this, right, and so and so
Speaker 4: what they're what they're teaching these people, And this is
Speaker 4: like I think, like Genny widely horrifying. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 4: they are teaching these people like the specific technical details
Speaker 4: of how you like fucking maim someone with a baton.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I meant to reading the force escalation this is.
Speaker 3: And they actually did physical training right, like I think
Speaker 3: they did weapons training. I think they did a bunch
Speaker 3: of a bunch of simulation kind of exercises. And then
Speaker 3: if you if you scroll down, this is like a
Speaker 3: PowerPoint for those listening at home. They gave an overview
Speaker 3: of like use of force to include a bunch of
Speaker 3: Supreme Court cases. I think Supreme Court cases is certainly, yeah,
Speaker 3: Supreme Court cases about use of force. None of these
Speaker 3: apply to you as a civilian, and you know, like
Speaker 3: unless you're a sworn law enforcement officer, I guess I'm
Speaker 3: not entirely sure like what the use case for civilian
Speaker 3: baton training is aside from like, well, I mean my guess,
Speaker 3: and this is the way I've been like sort of
Speaker 3: looking at this program is that this is the thing
Speaker 3: partially being designed for PR, but it's partially also being
Speaker 3: designed to create parabilitaries that if you're in a situation
Speaker 3: like twenty twenty but about the border, for example, you
Speaker 3: suddenly have all of these people that you could just
Speaker 3: fucking call up because like part of what's going on
Speaker 3: with this too record you remember, like actually, I guess
Speaker 3: it is funnily enough, like we are we are the
Speaker 3: only two of the four hosts who didn't end up
Speaker 3: having to deal with fucking Bortak getting deployed in Portland
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty. But Bortak is border patrols like swat teams.
Speaker 4: Yeah, basically, yeah, there are stated reason is like oh
Speaker 4: so this is this is how you unders and what
Speaker 4: it's like to like be one of these people, how
Speaker 4: hot it is to be a cop, and well, like
Speaker 4: I think the actual reason again is so that you
Speaker 4: could you're training a bunch of people who you can
Speaker 4: just sort of call up and be like, we need
Speaker 4: a bunch of people to come like fucking obliterate a
Speaker 4: bunch of like protesters or whatever, help them do mass deportations. Yeah,
Speaker 4: which is another thing because like part of what this
Speaker 4: is too, is they're teaching them to do like raids
Speaker 4: on houses, right, and like how do how do like
Speaker 4: physically fucking deport people?
Speaker 3: So this is yeah, like like Trump era ICE, which
Speaker 3: were where there were open discussions of how many people
Speaker 3: can we deport, how much will it cost, how easy
Speaker 3: will it be?
Speaker 4: Yeah, and like right now, like Trump is like his
Speaker 4: big one of his big things is mass deportations. But
Speaker 4: I think people don't realize that the only reason that
Speaker 4: this stuff didn't happen under Trump was that pushback to
Speaker 4: it was so enormous. Yeah, that like like there are
Speaker 4: Democrats now who are screaming about the border who in
Speaker 4: like twenty eighteen were like sanctuary cities, ICE can't do
Speaker 4: raids here and sometimes that which sure, sometimes that was yeah,
Speaker 4: but like there was real systemic pushback to this, and
Speaker 4: I think like we're heading to a place where there
Speaker 4: isn't a kind of reaction to this anymore, where this
Speaker 4: can get really really scary really quickly. And these are
Speaker 4: the kinds of programs that you would need in order
Speaker 4: to just do actual mass deportations. Is that like, yeah,
Speaker 4: like ICE doesn't have enough people, Like they have a
Speaker 4: lot of people, but they don't have enough people to
Speaker 4: deport like several million people.
Speaker 3: You need people like this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and the scale of this program is kind of small,
Speaker 4: but this is something that can be scaled up right, Yeah.
Speaker 5: To try and extremely large numbers of people, like fairly quickly.
Speaker 3: Yeah. You know what it reminds me of Maya products
Speaker 3: and services and support this podcast does. Yeah, all right,
Speaker 3: I hope you enjoyed this. Products and sev suits way back.
Speaker 5: Well, let's go do like the other thing they were
Speaker 5: fucking doing.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, it's more Jesus wept. So I want to
Speaker 3: quote from the article. Yeah. Quote.
Speaker 4: Documents also contain presentations on how to shoot a gun,
Speaker 4: point at targets, and stand in position to fire. The
Speaker 4: shooting practices include military style of rifles. Likewise, A training
Speaker 4: in Atlanta organized drills to shoot at human like manikers
Speaker 4: and fires M four assault rifles employed exclusively with the military.
Speaker 3: The training.
Speaker 4: Also included isis guidelines for use of force encompassing deadly force.
Speaker 4: One presentation suggests yelling drop the gun as potential cover
Speaker 4: when employing lethal force against someone. So they're telling it
Speaker 4: and this is definitely supposed to be thinking like, oh
Speaker 4: if you're in playing clothes, like you fucking yell police
Speaker 4: and yell drop your gun and then you shoot them
Speaker 4: and this is how you get away with it. So
Speaker 4: like they are straight up teaching people how to murder people,
Speaker 4: like how to get away with murder.
Speaker 3: That's what's happening here. Yeah, wild yeah, Like the government's
Speaker 3: offered firearms trading for civilians, like that's kind of what
Speaker 3: the NRA wasn't a government initiative, but like, yeah, this
Speaker 3: is not that. This is not like, No, I would
Speaker 3: broadly be in favor of the government funding free gun
Speaker 3: safety classes for people, because I've seen some shit with
Speaker 3: you know, like that would be one of the useful things.
Speaker 3: But this is not that.
Speaker 4: No, And like and like the reason those specific classes
Speaker 4: like don't look like that anymore is because, and I've
Speaker 4: talked about this in some of the episodes on them
Speaker 4: Okay assassination, it's like, well, yeah, when the government taught
Speaker 4: a bunch of people how to use rifles, those people
Speaker 4: use those rifles to like fight the cops in the streets.
Speaker 4: Yeah right yeah, and now they're all this insane shit
Speaker 4: that's like teaching people how to get away with murder
Speaker 4: of their cop or like, I want to read a
Speaker 4: PowerPoint slide from that from that thing, because it's it's
Speaker 4: the most deranged thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 3: Have you read the Graham versus Connor one, because it's
Speaker 3: one of the more powerful uses of passive voice I've
Speaker 3: ever seen. Oh no, I haven't seen that yet. Let
Speaker 3: me read that while you look for yours. This one
Speaker 3: is just incredible instance of cops speak. Graham Comma diabetic.
Speaker 3: Comma asks friend to drive him to convenience store for juice.
Speaker 3: Good like cop sentences here, ran in and out of store.
Speaker 3: Comma also observed the suspicious activity. What suspicious activity, dear listener,
Speaker 3: I don't know. We left to imagine. Investigative stopped made
Speaker 3: and Graham was handcuffed by whom doesn't say weird. Graham
Speaker 3: received multiple injuries during the encounter with police, Like someone
Speaker 3: gave him the fucking injuries? Was it the cop?
Speaker 4: It's just an incredible use of passive voice here throughout. Yeah,
Speaker 4: there's this great tweet that was like, the US has
Speaker 4: a passive voice, in an active voice and a special
Speaker 4: exonerative voice.
Speaker 3: It's only used for.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, Israel gets the exerative voice.
Speaker 3: It rails in the Greater cop Nation.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and like also one of the things that I
Speaker 4: don't think people understand on the Streme Court is like
Speaker 4: if you think that like Supreme Court rulings about abortions
Speaker 4: are bad, like then they are right. But like, if
Speaker 4: you think those things are bad, look up the Supreme
Speaker 4: Court cases about police use of force. You will get
Speaker 4: will get nine no decisions with like all of like
Speaker 4: fucking like like fucking Thurgood Marshall will be signing on
Speaker 4: to like a nine O thing where he says that
Speaker 4: cops have the right to just like shoot you in
Speaker 4: the back of the head because they couldn't shoot you
Speaker 4: in the back of the head like that the police
Speaker 4: couldn't function. It's it's fucking dranged, like the kind of
Speaker 4: shit they have. Okay, I want to read I want
Speaker 4: to read the slide because it's it's amazing. It's just
Speaker 4: a giant letters. It says survival and then there's like
Speaker 4: bullet points and the bullet points are never give up,
Speaker 4: never concede defeat. I will not die this way. I
Speaker 4: must go home to my family. How you trade is
Speaker 4: how you will fight.
Speaker 3: Just imagining that the you know, the person who I
Speaker 3: go to at the bank when I need to take
Speaker 3: out large amounts of cash to go on one of
Speaker 3: my work trips, learning that I will not die this way.
Speaker 4: Okay, So that that that's basically what I have about
Speaker 4: this program, other than the bleak note that on on
Speaker 4: a pr level, these people one right.
Speaker 3: They didn't They didn't win because of anything they did.
Speaker 4: They won because the Democrats decided that they fucking hated immigrants,
Speaker 4: and because views of integration are largely driven by by
Speaker 4: party politics, are driven by what your party tells you
Speaker 4: about immigrants, Like, yeah, all the support that had been
Speaker 4: built in the late twenty tens has evaporated, and yeah, even.
Speaker 3: Like I did a thing for my Patreon yesterday then
Speaker 3: made me think of this, Like I was trying to
Speaker 3: just do a sort of listing of Joe Biden's immigration
Speaker 3: policies right from twenty twenty one to present, and like
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, I was selling stories
Speaker 3: to NBC, to Slate, to the nation right about Haitian migration,
Speaker 3: about Title forty two, about remain in Mexico, about especial
Speaker 3: immigrant visas for Afghans, and after twenty twenty two, you
Speaker 3: don't even get a response to your email. You know,
Speaker 3: the same shit keeps having. Twenty twenty three is the
Speaker 3: end of title forty two. Right, So when we see
Speaker 3: the beginning of out door detention, arguably the most heinous
Speaker 3: shit that the Biden administration has done, and it's sounds
Speaker 3: some pretty heanish it. I mean, genocide is worse, evidently,
Speaker 3: but on the on the border, this is the worst. Yeah,
Speaker 3: some of its worst domestic policy. And you just can't
Speaker 3: tell stories. Literally, every time I post about this on Twitter,
Speaker 3: people will be like, what the fuck? Why didn't I
Speaker 3: read about this? Because an editor made a choice that
Speaker 3: they didn't matter, that the people out there in the
Speaker 3: cold and the wind at the rain didn't matter, and
Speaker 3: that they don't have rights because AOC or Joe Biden
Speaker 3: Orkamala Harris decided that that was how it was going
Speaker 3: to be, And apparently every corporate media outlet just kind
Speaker 3: of stepped in line and went, yeah, fucking we don't
Speaker 3: care anymore. Yeah, it's pretty bad.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they've achieved their stated aim and they're not moving
Speaker 4: on to their unstated aim, which is mass deportations. All right,
Speaker 4: we're back everything I know about the program that you
Speaker 4: were about to talk about comes from you, and that
Speaker 4: is oh.
Speaker 3: Boy, it's not good. All right. So I'm going to
Speaker 3: read you a small story here, and then we're going
Speaker 3: to talk about whether or not it's a good idea
Speaker 3: for the Border Patrol to have programs for children, Okay,
Speaker 3: And then I gave a content warning for sexual assault
Speaker 3: of children. I'm just in kiitch. You don't want to
Speaker 3: listen to this. In August of this year, Aaron Mitchell,
Speaker 3: a former CBP agent, was found guilty of a federal
Speaker 3: civil rights violation and also kidnapping. On April the fifth,
Speaker 3: twenty twenty two, in Douglas, Arizona, Mitchell found a fifteen
Speaker 3: year old girl waiting for school to begin, and for
Speaker 3: this next part, I'm just going to read directly from
Speaker 3: the Department of Justice presser. He introduced himself as the
Speaker 3: law enforcement officer and asked for her papers. Next, after
Speaker 3: flashing his police badge and credentials, Mitchell ordered the child
Speaker 3: into his car and explained that he was taking her
Speaker 3: to the police station. Instead, Mitchell drove the car miles
Speaker 3: away from her school, pulled over, and restrained her hands
Speaker 3: and feet with two pairs of handcuffs. The victim testified
Speaker 3: that after being handcuffs, the defendant told her to do
Speaker 3: every I think he said because he didn't want to
Speaker 3: have to hurt her. I'm not going to describe the
Speaker 3: next by in detail. He repeatedly sexually assaulted this young
Speaker 3: women fucking christ in his apartment, then returned her to
Speaker 3: the middle school where he had abducted her, and reminded
Speaker 3: her not to tell anyone. Fortunately, she immediately reported the
Speaker 3: abduction to her friends, family members, and multiple law enforcement agencies.
Speaker 3: During an interview with the police, a defendant exclaim exclaimed
Speaker 3: that the victim had better hope I don't get out
Speaker 3: of here, which is an insane thing to say when
Speaker 3: you're being interviewed by the police. Yeah. He also googled
Speaker 3: several times for how long does it take to smug someone?
Speaker 3: And he googled a lot about sexual assault, how to
Speaker 3: stop someone from screaming. It's some of the darkest shit
Speaker 3: fuck you're ever going to read. Yeah, oh my god.
Speaker 3: This is one of the relatively few instances of a
Speaker 3: Border Patrol agent actually being convicted of sexual assault. Sexual
Speaker 3: assault is a massive fucking problem in the Border Patrol,
Speaker 3: and the fact that it's such a big problem and
Speaker 3: people get away with it is why we get shit
Speaker 3: that is horrific, Like the incident that I've just related
Speaker 3: to you right in twenty nineteen. I don't know if
Speaker 3: you remember this, but there was a pro publicer thing
Speaker 3: about this Facebook group which had nine five hundred agents
Speaker 3: in it. The Facebook group they proted videos of migrant desks,
Speaker 3: their children, and rape fantasies, as well as doctored images,
Speaker 3: including ghost images of AFC. At the time Karla provoked,
Speaker 3: the Border Patrol chief condemned the group as inappropriate. Shortly thereafter,
Speaker 3: the intercept reveal that she had been a member of
Speaker 3: it for years. Yep, just classics, dove right. Border Patrol
Speaker 3: has consistently failed to hold its offices to account for rape.
Speaker 3: Like if you want to read more about this, Jen Bud,
Speaker 3: She's been on the show before, is the person to
Speaker 3: go to about this. I'm also going to include in
Speaker 3: the show notes links to a story about a Border
Speaker 3: Ptrol agent who was sexually assaulted at the academy, which
Speaker 3: I know is a thing that is not unique to her.
Speaker 3: This is this is a problem. Border Patrol is ninety
Speaker 3: five percent male at this point. They call the women
Speaker 3: the Fierce five percent. But it's like it's probably the
Speaker 3: most like gender biased of the federal agencies, Like Border
Speaker 3: patrol agents by and large, like do not do well
Speaker 3: around women. This is something I've observed, this is something
Speaker 3: other volunteers have observed, Like it's such a like masculine agency,
Speaker 3: I guess, and they just don't encounter women in a
Speaker 3: professional capacity very often. So I think with this in mind,
Speaker 3: I want to talk about the Border Patrol Explorers, Right.
Speaker 3: It's a youth program that teaches kids the skills of
Speaker 3: a patrol agent from as young as forty fucking crust. Yeah,
Speaker 3: what's really weird. There's been very little coverage. The two
Speaker 3: places I would send people these will be in the notes,
Speaker 3: would be Morley Music write a really good piece in
Speaker 3: the Nation, and Todd Miller's book Border Patrol Nation, which
Speaker 3: is a book that everyone should read. I think really
Speaker 3: like details the beginning of how Border patrol became what
Speaker 3: it is today. Those are really two of the very
Speaker 3: few places you'd read about it. The training that they
Speaker 3: do is insane. They'll learn firearms drills, they learn to
Speaker 3: do checkpoints, they learned to make arrests. I'm going to
Speaker 3: read from an interview from Monie Music's piece, Fabian explained
Speaker 3: why his posts would practice shooting sometimes and then this
Speaker 3: is like parentheses. Undocumented migrants are not compliant when we
Speaker 3: find them. He said, they paid all this money to
Speaker 3: get here to start another life. They're just not going
Speaker 3: to give up when they see us. Some would fight back,
Speaker 3: some would be compliant. Maybe they tried to kill you
Speaker 3: or threaten you. Sometimes they pick up an element a
Speaker 3: rock lying around anything, and that could be used to
Speaker 3: kill you. This is not the stuff that fourteen year
Speaker 3: olds should be reckoning with, right. Yeah.
Speaker 4: This is also like I know people have done the
Speaker 4: like connect the border to Palestine things so much that
Speaker 4: it's like hackneyed, but like that is straight up that
Speaker 4: could be lifted from a press release, like from the
Speaker 4: idea Yeah, yeah, about why they shot someone. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: it's like, yeah, I mean, you shouldn't be teaching anyone this.
Speaker 4: You especially shouldn't be eating fourteen year olds. Yeah, that
Speaker 4: someone might throw a rock at them and that's a
Speaker 4: reasonable way people had gone and shoot them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like if you back that into your mind at fourteen,
Speaker 3: I would argue that makes you very unsuitable to carry
Speaker 3: a gun in public. Later in life. Kids start out
Speaker 3: by doing this kind of boot camp style academy, and
Speaker 3: then they pretty much begin doing stuff like drill PT
Speaker 3: they practice, conducting vehicle stops and tracking Border Patrol. On
Speaker 3: their website, they claim to have more than seven hundred Explorers,
Speaker 3: but over twenty eight posts around the country, it's very
Speaker 3: hard to find anything about them. Like, it's not something
Speaker 3: that they talk about a great deal. You have to
Speaker 3: sort of apply. I looked at how one would apply.
Speaker 3: It's one in Santa Sedra, Right. You sort of fill
Speaker 3: out this form and you get some kind of clearance
Speaker 3: and then I'm guessing they're checking that people are eligible
Speaker 3: to be hired by Border Patrol.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 3: But if there is data on how many of these
Speaker 3: kids go on to hired by BP, I haven't found it,
Speaker 3: but I did find one. I think this is again
Speaker 3: from Morley Music's piece when extremely amusing incident the Douglas
Speaker 3: Arizona chapters. The Explorers teamed up with a local high
Speaker 3: school drama club and they had the kids play migrantsios. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ, many of these people will themselves be like
Speaker 3: first generation or like a.
Speaker 4: Wild anyway, the country cannot be allowed to continue imagine, like,
Speaker 4: what are we doing at school today?
Speaker 3: The theater kids are going to get arrested by the
Speaker 3: border patrol kids. Jesus Christ. Some of the theater kids
Speaker 3: got really into character. One of them cried, I guess
Speaker 3: several of them managed to avoid arrest and give the
Speaker 3: young agents the slip, and then they got told by
Speaker 3: the agents overseeing the exercise that they've done it wrong
Speaker 3: because they outsmarted the junior gobs.
Speaker 4: There's a story I can't remember what fucking town it
Speaker 4: was in like the fifties, that the Army was running
Speaker 4: these like infiltration drills where they would like have a
Speaker 4: town and they talk to people to town. They'd be like, Okay,
Speaker 4: we're gonna like unleash like a communist diversive agent into
Speaker 4: the town and then you're gonna help the army capture them.
Speaker 4: And it said, what happens, everyone has hit the agent
Speaker 4: because I just had a great time like stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is the American spirit. It's it's the people
Speaker 3: of Dugs Arizona. We salute you. One of the things
Speaker 3: I found really interesting in in the morning music piece
Speaker 3: was this idea of like defensive asylum only being for criminals,
Speaker 3: so it seems like the students learned this very binary
Speaker 3: immigration law. Where defensive asylum, which is when you claim
Speaker 3: asylum as a defense against being deported. Yeah, it's only
Speaker 3: for people who are criminals versus affirmative asylum. It's for
Speaker 3: the people who like really needed or whatever, we fast
Speaker 3: forward making an affirmative asylum claim. It's extreme seemly difficult
Speaker 3: right now. Yeah, you know, I spoke to one hundred
Speaker 3: people who wanted to come to this country in the Darien.
Speaker 3: Every single one of those people told me that they
Speaker 3: wanted to use CBP one, that they wanted to do
Speaker 3: it the correct way, that they wanted to wait their
Speaker 3: turn and do an interview. But like every single one
Speaker 3: of those people is now reckoning with the fact that
Speaker 3: if they can make CVP want work on their phone,
Speaker 3: they will wake eight or nine months in Mexico. That
Speaker 3: is not a safe place if you're a woman on
Speaker 3: your own, God forbid, if you're a trans woman or
Speaker 3: a gay person like aside from like within certain communities,
Speaker 3: it's not a safe place. I think Mexico is the
Speaker 3: second highest rate of killings of trans people anywhere in
Speaker 3: the world. Yeah, I think Brazil is maybe more. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I think is the highest. I don't know if that's
Speaker 3: like raw numbers because Brazil is a bigger country, or
Speaker 3: if it's like stags the population. Yeah, my memory is
Speaker 3: that it's the rate, but I'm not harm so sure
Speaker 3: either way. That people who are coming to be safe
Speaker 3: or not to be in a place where they're in danger,
Speaker 3: and that is what they right. And so undoubtedly some
Speaker 3: of those people who wanted to come the right way
Speaker 3: will cross between ports of entry, they will surrender themselves
Speaker 3: to border patrol and if they get a chance to
Speaker 3: file for asylum at all, because it's it's a shout
Speaker 3: test now. But there are numerous incidents that I've seen
Speaker 3: described in court cases of people doing what sounds to
Speaker 3: me like asserting an asylum claim and not having a
Speaker 3: chance to then make their case. If they do at all,
Speaker 3: it'll be defensive asylum, right. And these are the people
Speaker 3: who are like textbook asylum places, you know, like I
Speaker 3: am a trans person in a place where that might
Speaker 3: well be punishable by death, the facto of du jure right,
Speaker 3: I am a political dissident in a country where my
Speaker 3: political views would be a reason to kill me. I
Speaker 3: am a woman from Iran, who doesn't wear hijab, nicab whatever,
Speaker 3: you know, Like these are like why asylum exists. There
Speaker 3: are lots of people who deserve a help who are
Speaker 3: not covered by these little buckets that we put people
Speaker 3: in to asylum. But even people who are who falls
Speaker 3: but slap in the middle of what your average Midwestern
Speaker 3: liberal dad would be like, Yeah, that's an asylum case.
Speaker 3: We should help that person. Yeah they have to come
Speaker 3: and they fare the defense of asylum, and like that's
Speaker 3: what we're teaching. I guess these border patrol kids that
Speaker 3: these are these are the quite unquite bad guys and
Speaker 3: they're not and yeah, they they're doing this sort of
Speaker 3: twenty eight posts. It's just one. I read a terrible
Speaker 3: account of a young woman who was sexually abused by
Speaker 3: a cop in a police Explorer program. Like these Explorer
Speaker 3: programs go all across law enforcement. They are administered by
Speaker 3: the Boy Scouts of America. They have a serious problem
Speaker 3: with abuse of young people as serious problem, and it
Speaker 3: seems like it's not getting I mean, it does get
Speaker 3: some coverage like this, this piece about the agent in
Speaker 3: Douglas got some coverage, right, the piece about this this cop.
Speaker 3: But like, I mean, look at this country. We still
Speaker 3: have the Catholic Church. Just because people abuse kids doesn't
Speaker 3: mean they get shut down. But like, yeah, I don't, don't,
Speaker 3: don't send your kids. I guess you're listening to this.
Speaker 3: You're quite unlikely to send your kids to be junior cops.
Speaker 3: But like, I get young people living in small towns
Speaker 3: on the border who don't have many economic opportunities. I
Speaker 3: know those towns. I spend a lot of time in
Speaker 3: those towns, And I get that the guys who joined
Speaker 3: Border Patrol, they have big trucks, they have nice houses,
Speaker 3: right that it's one of the few areas of economic opportunity.
Speaker 3: I get that none of that is worth having your
Speaker 3: kid abused. And like I'm not saying that, of course
Speaker 3: all of these programs resulting child abuse, they don't, but
Speaker 3: like law enforcement explorer programs absolutely have a problem with
Speaker 3: child abuse.
Speaker 4: And yeah, yeah, there was a whole thing in like
Speaker 4: the last couple of years about this happening in tousion
Speaker 4: facilities in Chicago, or in facilities things that were supposed
Speaker 4: to be like now figurant housing, and that got reported. Yeah, Weirdly, Weirdly,
Speaker 4: the Chicago proces has actually been pretty good on immigration stuff.
Speaker 4: But it's literally solely because they hate Brandon Johnson, and
Speaker 4: Brandon Johnson's the one running it. Because of this, we've
Speaker 4: actually gotten a bunch of good good reporting that accident.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, in many such cases. But yeah, like the
Speaker 4: culture of border patrol is not one.
Speaker 3: That you want to be introducing your child too. Yeah,
Speaker 3: absolutely not. You know, I would really encourage people to
Speaker 3: read Todd's book Border Patrol Nation, like he talks about
Speaker 3: this use of They invented a new slur, which you
Speaker 3: know is cool. Good for them for expanding the English language.
Speaker 3: I guess they call people tonks. Oh yeah, yeah, some
Speaker 3: noise that makes when you hit someone on the head
Speaker 3: with your torch, your flashlight.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, just really great stuff. Some of the worst
Speaker 4: people who've ever lived.
Speaker 3: Yeah, don't don't volunteer to be a cop. Don't do
Speaker 3: it for money either. Like that's what I got for you.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, I think I think that's all we've got
Speaker 4: for today.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Shit fucking sucks. I don't know.
Speaker 4: We gave you, we gave you some less depressing episodes.
Speaker 4: But yeah, now we're back, we're in your week. Actually,
Speaker 4: I could promise I could promise tomorrow's episode is going
Speaker 4: to be a lot brighter for this one. Yeah, come
Speaker 4: back tomorrow to be less worribly depressed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I got nothing good for you coming up for
Speaker 3: the near future. To be honest, I'm rite I think
Speaker 3: about the Darien Gap and having to take little walks outside. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: dire for a walk.
Speaker 8: There's nothing wrong with your podcast feed. This is prop
Speaker 8: and I am invading that it can happen here podcasts.
Speaker 8: To the four or five of y'all in the subreddit
Speaker 8: that can't stand my voice and say I'm the most
Speaker 8: annoying person in the Cool Zone extended universe, I apologize.
Speaker 10: My mama used to say, be who you is, because
Speaker 10: who you ain't a who he is.
Speaker 8: We're gonna talk about some things, specifically coffee and how
Speaker 8: your children will probably never be able to drink the
Speaker 8: coffee that you have drank because climate change bounds. But
Speaker 8: before we do, I'm also realizing how many singers in
Speaker 8: the eighties was singing the teenagers to children.
Speaker 10: You know the absolute banger of a song If I.
Speaker 11: Could fly, I pick you up, I take you into
Speaker 11: the night, great song right and show you love that
Speaker 11: you live.
Speaker 3: See do you.
Speaker 10: Know what The first lyric in that song is she's.
Speaker 8: Only sixteen years old, leave her alone? Unless he wasn't
Speaker 8: a teenager just openly singing, what was we thinking?
Speaker 3: Freaking bel biv devout.
Speaker 8: In dude may babe backstage, underage, gotta leggat.
Speaker 10: I fly, I like to do the wild thing.
Speaker 3: Oh you're.
Speaker 8: We were just openly singing the kids. Let me get
Speaker 8: back on topic, because not only could.
Speaker 1: It happen here, it is happening here.
Speaker 3: So you may or may not know me.
Speaker 8: I am Los Angeles born and raised our host politics
Speaker 8: with Prop Coules on media team, and I am your
Speaker 8: resident coffee nerd, and a lot of that grew out
Speaker 8: of just a natural passion for coffee, which you will
Speaker 8: hear me gush about later. But I think I'm going
Speaker 8: to back into this topic with back that thing up
Speaker 8: with the story from a few years back.
Speaker 3: See a few years back, I had.
Speaker 8: A chance to put out a poetry book called Terrorform,
Speaker 8: building a Liverpool World, and Terrorform also had four musical
Speaker 8: EP seven song EPs called the Sky, the Soil, the People,
Speaker 8: and the Possibility. And while I was working on the Soil,
Speaker 8: I had a chance to partner with one of the
Speaker 8: I mean really it's like, I don't know if there's
Speaker 8: a better roaster in America called Onyx believe it.
Speaker 10: Or not, in Northwest Arkansas.
Speaker 8: And in a collab sort of coffee release we were
Speaker 8: doing in partnership with Mirror, which is a drinkwaar company
Speaker 8: I'm also an ambassador for. We had a chance to
Speaker 8: go to Colombia and if you've if you've been to
Speaker 8: South America or anywhere close to the equator, it's I mean,
Speaker 8: you're walking into the Avatar, you know, minus the aliens.
Speaker 8: It's this raw sort of earth that us in the
Speaker 8: northern hemisphere. It's just colors of green that you just
Speaker 8: can't imagine that, Like our pantones have yet to match
Speaker 8: the type of green in a forest that has to
Speaker 8: be a certain amount of miles above sea level for
Speaker 8: it to grow coffee.
Speaker 10: So we fly into Bogata.
Speaker 8: We go about an hour and a half outside of
Speaker 8: the city, which normally when you go to Origin it's
Speaker 8: like you have to like take a rickety a helicopter
Speaker 8: or traverse twelve hours into you know, an African jungle,
Speaker 8: which is like not the most plush riding, but it's
Speaker 8: just it's this beautiful South American you know, Colombian road,
Speaker 8: and then you go up this small sort of windy
Speaker 8: road and while it's sunny, beautiful, I don't know what
Speaker 8: the combination of indigenous African European settlers that just made
Speaker 8: whatever combination of human made these Colombians so beautiful. But
Speaker 8: there's not I mean, everyone's beautiful. It is the most
Speaker 8: off putting, how gorgeous every human is there along with
Speaker 8: this plush green you come over this hill and because
Speaker 8: of the way that this farmer going to is set
Speaker 8: inside in between the small valley that's about four to
Speaker 8: five thousand feet above sea level, there's this beautiful fog
Speaker 8: that lays over the top of this just gorgeous, gorgeous rainforest. Right,
Speaker 8: there's grape vineyards, there's a few of those, there's allvocados,
Speaker 8: there's all these just beautiful multi instead of a monoculture,
Speaker 8: monoculture is a form of just one thing.
Speaker 10: This is a multi.
Speaker 8: Culture place that this crew called La pama Eltua kan
Speaker 8: That's who I was with. And all this beauty and
Speaker 8: vegetation that I'm describing, apparently twelve years ago was not
Speaker 8: a thing. This place was the textbook like cartoonish level
Speaker 8: example of deforestation where all of this natural beauty was
Speaker 8: cleared out for cattle raising.
Speaker 3: And the land was dead.
Speaker 8: But you would never guess, you would never guess that
Speaker 8: this was ever an issue, because what I'm looking at
Speaker 8: is Narnia. So this group of local born and raised
Speaker 8: brothers came up with a business plan and started restoring
Speaker 8: this land. I can't overstate the before and after picture,
Speaker 8: like the land was dying them with their reginative, like
Speaker 8: you know, farming practices made this a rainforest again that
Speaker 8: is now growing some of the best coffee on earth.
Speaker 8: So anyway we come in there, it's beautiful. Just there
Speaker 8: are no words to express how beautiful this is. I
Speaker 8: have a song called the Soil Is Sacred that I
Speaker 8: shot the video at that farm. So if you want
Speaker 8: to just go ahead and peep that, peep that to
Speaker 8: understand this place, this place is not only just a
Speaker 8: coffee farm, it's also a bike trail adventure place.
Speaker 3: It's a whole tell.
Speaker 8: You stay in these bungalows that are like up on sticks,
Speaker 8: and then the shower is outdoors, just covered around bamboo
Speaker 8: sticks that like hei the thing, and it's got like
Speaker 8: the what we like to call the anti black shower heads.
Speaker 10: You know that those are the I don't.
Speaker 8: Know if y'all notice, because Black people don't always like
Speaker 8: to wet our hair in the shower.
Speaker 10: We wash our hair much less than y'all do.
Speaker 8: But if you got that waterfall shower head, then that
Speaker 8: means we got to tilt our heads back a little bit,
Speaker 8: or make sure we got a shower cap. Because I
Speaker 8: don't know if you know any black women, but you don't.
Speaker 8: Don't wet my hair in the shower anyway. But you're
Speaker 8: showering out there, and it's just beautiful. You're in the rainforest.
Speaker 8: You can hear the animals and it's just this gentle
Speaker 8: breeze is blowing. And then around eleven thirty the fog
Speaker 8: kind of clears out.
Speaker 10: You get to sit down.
Speaker 8: You're having some breakfasts that's just chopped up papaya and
Speaker 8: mango that they grew right there right. I can see
Speaker 8: the mango tree, it's right there. Then the fry up
Speaker 8: some plantain from the plantain tree right there, scrambling up
Speaker 8: with some eggs from the chicken nest right there right.
Speaker 3: Just it's a dream.
Speaker 8: And as we're talking, as we're moving through this thing,
Speaker 8: the man that runs it, who like I wish I
Speaker 8: could have his baby. It was just the most gorgeous
Speaker 8: human I've ever seen, just flowing, flowing, quaft hair, speaking
Speaker 8: English and Spanish. The guy could play seven instruments. At
Speaker 8: some point where we're cutting coffee, the dude breaks into
Speaker 8: a bachata and then some Cumbia and he's just singing
Speaker 8: these Colombian folklore songs while flipping over a bucket and
Speaker 8: playing drums. It's just like you, guys, you're in a movie.
Speaker 8: You're in a movie. And then he casually drops, yeah,
Speaker 8: we only got twenty seven more of those. I was like,
Speaker 8: twenty seven more? What he goes, Oh yeah, part of
Speaker 8: the mission of this farm is if we don't do
Speaker 8: something thing, there is twenty seven harvests left.
Speaker 10: I was like, of what he goes of.
Speaker 8: Top soil, Coffee's going to go extinct in twenty seven years.
Speaker 8: Sam to talk about the possibility of a world without coffee,
Speaker 8: how we got here, and what people are doing to
Speaker 8: hopefully save the glorious being. All right, I feel like
Speaker 8: coffee is like the perfect analogy, the perfect one to
Speaker 8: one ratio for the ways for which the global North
Speaker 8: has treated the global South, specifically black people, but by
Speaker 8: and large just it's the perfect metaphor for the raping
Speaker 8: and pillaging of resources, including people, that has happened across
Speaker 8: the world. So coffee originates solely from Ethiopia. Okay, so
Speaker 8: it's already it's it's black. This is the early fifteen
Speaker 8: huns undreds. Legend is that some sheep farmers saw that
Speaker 8: their sheeps were going crazy, like just mad, mad energy
Speaker 8: after they had ate a particular cherry. Because again, coffee
Speaker 8: is a cherry, which is actually a very delicious cherry,
Speaker 8: you know, and the bean inside is not the bean,
Speaker 8: it's the pit or the seed that's inside of the
Speaker 8: coffee cherry. So yeah, legend is like that's how they
Speaker 8: figured it out, Like dang, they eat these these cherries
Speaker 8: and then they go crazy, like I wonder if that's
Speaker 8: going to give us strength to you know. So it's
Speaker 8: originally discovered in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is the only natural place
Speaker 8: that coffee grows, and every other coffee bean across the
Speaker 8: world was propagated from the Ethiopian one. It only grows
Speaker 8: between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn along
Speaker 8: the equator that is the only place that it naturally grows.
Speaker 8: But because of climate change and because of you know,
Speaker 8: GMO and genetically modifying and all these different things that
Speaker 8: we've done with cross breeding and stuff like, you know,
Speaker 8: we've been able to grow it in in regions that
Speaker 8: aren't naturally the temperature and elevation that they naturally grow in.
Speaker 8: There are many different varieties of what we call that's
Speaker 8: what they're called varietals of this particular cherry or plant.
Speaker 8: But overall, you can break the species of coffee plant
Speaker 8: into three types. So you have typica, which most people
Speaker 8: don't drink unless like if you have a coffee farm
Speaker 8: that you actually export from, like a lot of times,
Speaker 8: the typical stuff is just the stuff that you keep
Speaker 8: for yourself, Like most coffee farmers have never actually tasted
Speaker 8: their best coffee because you ship that off to the
Speaker 8: rest of the world to make your money. Then there's robustica,
Speaker 8: which is like what most of the like instant coffee
Speaker 8: is made from. Really a lot of the world actually
Speaker 8: drinks that, but it's an acquired taste, like when you
Speaker 8: go through South America, like I know when I went
Speaker 8: to my grandmother in last house, like she you know,
Speaker 8: she boil the water with the canela the cinnamon sticks
Speaker 8: and poured instant coffee in it, and like as much
Speaker 8: of a coffee snob as I am, I'm like, that's
Speaker 8: the best.
Speaker 10: That's one of the best cups of cofee ive ever
Speaker 10: had in my life.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 8: People always ask me, what's what's the best cup of
Speaker 8: coffee ever had, and I'm like, honestly, it's the one
Speaker 8: in your hand.
Speaker 1: That's the best cup.
Speaker 8: I feel like there's like a bell curve where it's like, yeah,
Speaker 8: you discover it, then you hit this level of snob
Speaker 8: at then you become like a like a new Christian
Speaker 8: about it and you're just like one of the evangelize
Speaker 8: and tell everybody. And then you become just like a
Speaker 8: theological snob and you're just like, uh, are you putting
Speaker 8: cream like full extraction or die death over decaf? Like
Speaker 8: you become that dude, and then you just come over
Speaker 8: the other end of that hump and you're just like, dude,
Speaker 8: it's just coffee, man.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 8: So yeah, so that's Robusticut, which, like I said, most
Speaker 8: of the world actually drinks that. And then the specialty level,
Speaker 8: the one that most of us are used to drinking
Speaker 8: now is called a rabica, and it's kind of like
Speaker 8: it's the top tier based on and whatever subjective scale
Speaker 8: we use to say.
Speaker 10: What is the best coffee.
Speaker 8: But the fertile band, as what we call it around
Speaker 8: the coffee industry, is this span that kind of belts
Speaker 8: around the equator. So that's why in Central and South America,
Speaker 8: in certain parts of Africa and in Asia, coffee can
Speaker 8: naturally be grown. It takes a particular elevation, right, And
Speaker 8: you can even follow the transatlantic slave trade. You could
Speaker 8: follow the transit Lantic slave trade by following the distribution
Speaker 8: of coffee. How coffee got to the America's transatlantic slave trade. Anyway,
Speaker 8: there used to be this beef between Ethiopia and Yemen
Speaker 8: as to like who made coffee first, because without getting
Speaker 8: too much in a nerdery, I want to stay in
Speaker 8: the narrative here, but coffee first from Ethiopia went to Yemen.
Speaker 8: And the argument with the yemen ease is that they
Speaker 8: were the ones that grounded it and made it into
Speaker 8: a hot drink. So that's their argument that the Ethiopians
Speaker 8: didn't do that first.
Speaker 10: But anybody that really knows it's it's like.
Speaker 1: Dude, it originates in Africa.
Speaker 8: I'd be willing to bet too that if you kind
Speaker 8: of have developed somewhat of a palette for like a
Speaker 8: good clean cup of coffee, you would probably feel like
Speaker 8: Ethiopian beans are the best. And mostly it's just because, like, well,
Speaker 8: that's where it's from, and they have like at least
Speaker 8: one hundred year head start in cultivating how to make
Speaker 8: a bomb. Being as a fun aside, if you get
Speaker 8: your hand on a Yemenese bean, it's a flavor profile
Speaker 8: you've probably never had in your life. That's why if
Speaker 8: you ever go to a place and they have like
Speaker 8: a Yemenese geisha, it costs so much because Yemen has
Speaker 8: been with the Huthis and such like that have been
Speaker 8: locked into this civil war funded by America, Saudi Arabia,
Speaker 8: and Iran. You know, let's tie it all together, guys,
Speaker 8: That's what I'm saying. It's a metaphor for everything why
Speaker 8: coffee can't get exported out of Yemen. It is because
Speaker 8: of this sil war. It cost so much to get
Speaker 8: coffee out of Yemen because of these you know, wars
Speaker 8: funded by Western countries.
Speaker 10: Anyway, So from Yemen it got to Turkey.
Speaker 8: You know, this is around the time of like when
Speaker 8: the Islamic world was really the superpower of the planet.
Speaker 8: You know, with people like Avaroez. You could do your
Speaker 8: little history on that, and just all of the most
Speaker 8: beautiful library science, history, algebra, math, philosophy was all coming
Speaker 8: from the Muslim world. And it was through the Muslim
Speaker 8: world that coffee got to Europe. So at first Europe
Speaker 8: wouldn't drink coffee because they thought it was Muslim. That's
Speaker 8: what the dirty little brown folks is doing, right until
Speaker 8: it got to Belgium, which is one of the funnest
Speaker 8: stories to me again as coffee remaining this metaphor for
Speaker 8: the suffering of people of color everywhere. So anyway, remember
Speaker 8: Europe is a place for tea, but you know they
Speaker 8: got day tea from India. Anyway, So one of the
Speaker 8: archbishops in Belgium was presented this coffee thing, and because
Speaker 8: it was brought to Europe by the Muslims, the people
Speaker 8: there thought they couldn't drink it.
Speaker 3: So this bishop was like, I don't know, let me
Speaker 3: try it. So I this might be folklore.
Speaker 8: But he drinks this coffee and he says, now I'm
Speaker 8: not gonna quote him direct. This is the part that
Speaker 8: I think is folks, this happened, but this is the
Speaker 8: part that says folklore. He was like, uh, if this
Speaker 8: is evil, let's baptize it.
Speaker 3: Because we can make it for good. He was like,
Speaker 3: this is too delicious to let go.
Speaker 8: Watching the devil get all the good drinks. Yo, I'm said,
Speaker 8: I'm trying to drink good too. We could drink unto
Speaker 8: the land. All things was made for his glory, including
Speaker 8: this coffee. There used to be it is argument over
Speaker 8: which one was better for you, coffee your tea. They
Speaker 8: even did this test with these prisoners where they gave
Speaker 8: one of them all coffee the other one all tea
Speaker 8: to see who would live longer. And of course, since
Speaker 8: that is like the least scientific thing you could do possible,
Speaker 8: you do. Even if the guy that coffee live longer,
Speaker 8: it don't matter because it's not real science. Anyway, I
Speaker 8: personally am very thankful that coffee got to Europe because again,
Speaker 8: something that was discovered and came from black people for
Speaker 8: which we're willing to share freely, Like our music, like
Speaker 8: our slang, like our style address, You're welcome, you know
Speaker 8: what I'm saying, but don't act like this your house.
Speaker 8: You could put your flavor on it and we could
Speaker 8: all enjoy. Because it was the Scandinavian countries that figured
Speaker 8: out light roasting and a lot of the nerdery for
Speaker 8: like the third wave specialty coffee that you that you
Speaker 8: see now that you're right, that's from Europe. Italy did
Speaker 8: not discover coffee. Italy did espresso. I'm thankful for that.
Speaker 8: But they were only able to do espresso because of
Speaker 8: the labor of people of color in the global cum.
Speaker 8: You're following my metaphor here. Coffee got to the Americas
Speaker 8: via the slave trade. But if you can just look
Speaker 8: at a map, the jungles in Angola and the jungles
Speaker 8: of Brazil are the same jungle.
Speaker 10: There's just the ocean in between it.
Speaker 8: So of course when the Africans got there, they would
Speaker 8: recognize the soil and be able to grow the same things.
Speaker 10: Are y'all following me.
Speaker 8: We're talking about an industry that makes four hundred and
Speaker 8: sixty billion dollars globally every year and less than one
Speaker 8: percent goes back to Africa.
Speaker 3: Less than one percent.
Speaker 8: Actually goes to those that actually grow the product. You
Speaker 8: are you following me on this metaphor. Coffee has its
Speaker 8: own stock market because it's a commodity. It's called the
Speaker 8: c market like it fluctuates like that, you know when
Speaker 8: you look on a bag and it says fair trade
Speaker 8: and direct trade.
Speaker 10: Let me tell you what that means.
Speaker 8: The price per pound for coffee per pellet is set
Speaker 8: at what they call a fair trade price. So there's
Speaker 8: a coffee commission that sets what is a fair amount
Speaker 8: for that coffee. So you're supposed to it's like a
Speaker 8: fair market value for a house. You know, who sets that? Germany.
Speaker 8: Here's the problem with that. Germany can't grow coffee. How
Speaker 8: are y'all setting up for a farm to be considered
Speaker 8: organic or meeting specialty?
Speaker 3: Called somebody a farmer in Kenya? Oh they die.
Speaker 8: Gotta fly somebody from Germany down today farm for them
Speaker 8: to test their soil to tell them that they soil
Speaker 8: is healthy enough to tell these people from Germany it
Speaker 8: can't grow coffee. This was so that's fair trade is
Speaker 8: if Germany says that this price is right. Direct trade
Speaker 8: is when me, the American buyer, goes to the farmer
Speaker 8: themselves and I ask the farmer how much is it
Speaker 8: direct traded with them. The farmer tells us, Now, why
Speaker 8: I partnered with Onyx and all the other people that
Speaker 8: you see me partnering with, first of all is because
Speaker 8: whatever that price is, what ONYX does is they'll pay
Speaker 8: thirty percent more.
Speaker 3: So that's to guarantee.
Speaker 8: Not only is this a price that the farmer said,
Speaker 8: we're gonna pay you even more than that. There's an
Speaker 8: understanding of value in the fact that we don't have
Speaker 8: an industry without you. And sometimes I work at this
Speaker 8: other crew crawled BECKX three sixty, which I'm gonna talk
Speaker 8: about a little later at the end of this, I'm saying,
Speaker 8: these are ways for you to be able to say.
Speaker 10: Because everyone should be able to drink coffee.
Speaker 8: These are ways for which you could say, I am
Speaker 8: not being a part of the problem.
Speaker 10: In these ways, I could be part of the solution.
Speaker 8: But yes, a billion dollar industry created on the backs
Speaker 8: of brown folk, controlled by white folks.
Speaker 3: I'm just saying it's a metaphor billion dollar industry.
Speaker 8: When's the last time you walked into a coffee shop
Speaker 8: and thought, Wow, this is something invented, harvested, and nurtured
Speaker 8: by people of color. No, you don't think that. People
Speaker 8: think Italy. It's such a metaphor. And now because of
Speaker 8: harsh conditions, irrosive top soil, and abusive practices, we only
Speaker 8: got twenty seven harvests left.
Speaker 10: Now, let's get to the science and things we can do.
Speaker 8: All right, let's go to some sort of ad break, Right,
Speaker 8: how do y'all do them at?
Speaker 10: It could have been here?
Speaker 8: Am I supposed to do some sort of like speaking
Speaker 8: of situation?
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 8: So I think the best way to get into the
Speaker 8: science of it all is to maybe think about it
Speaker 8: through just the supply chain period. For centuries, the coffee
Speaker 8: plant or even farm have been just local, indigenous, this
Speaker 8: rainforest living families. It's your grandma, And I know this
Speaker 8: from my own experience. This is like your grandparents' house.
Speaker 8: Like you inherit this farm, you know, or you inherit
Speaker 8: this plot of land, and you got a couple of
Speaker 8: coffee plants in the back. Now, us being, you know,
Speaker 8: in a neoliberal, globally connected, late stage capitalistic society, how
Speaker 8: do you get that commodity if we're not growing them
Speaker 8: in the heartland of America.
Speaker 10: Well, because we can't.
Speaker 8: Number one, we have to create a supply chain, and
Speaker 8: the supply chain is just as industrial as every other
Speaker 8: thing is. So from the origin, you have a green buyer,
Speaker 8: and the green buyer is essentially the middle person. So
Speaker 8: that person has all the relationships with the farms.
Speaker 10: So they create these relationship with these farms.
Speaker 8: Usually depending on your relationship with that green buyers, you
Speaker 8: take orders from them that sometimes depending on how big
Speaker 8: or small that green buyer is. Some of those are
Speaker 8: like multi state, multi country, like big old corporations that
Speaker 8: you know, go across the world and they swoop up
Speaker 8: in a Walmart of it all and like just like
Speaker 8: buy up all these small farms. Now some of these places,
Speaker 8: some of these green buyers own the farms because they've
Speaker 8: bought them from the indigenous populations, and others are like, no,
Speaker 8: we just have relationships and we pay. I got to
Speaker 8: explained before fair market value, fair trade. And then I
Speaker 8: on the other end, like let's just say I'm you know,
Speaker 8: I will use my own company terror form. This isn't
Speaker 8: the process I use, but this is just the supply chain.
Speaker 8: So I would approach that green buyer, I'd go to
Speaker 8: their website and say, hey, I want to roast a
Speaker 8: Kenyon heirloom that would be the varietal, like I want
Speaker 8: to that's a type of being.
Speaker 10: I want a Kenyon airloom.
Speaker 8: And I go, oh, dope, they got it at I'm
Speaker 8: making up this number eighteen cents a pound. It's not
Speaker 8: like that. It's much more, but okay, dope. So they
Speaker 8: get the order. On the other end, they see what
Speaker 8: they got in stock or they got to go to origin, right,
Speaker 8: So they go to origin, they get the thing, and
Speaker 8: then some countries make you buy an entire shipping container
Speaker 8: because it's just not worth it. If you're you know,
Speaker 8: you're in Costa Rica, you're a farmer in Costa Rica,
Speaker 8: it doesn't make any financial sense to try to ship
Speaker 8: out just like one burlap bag.
Speaker 3: Like the cost is too high.
Speaker 8: So it's like, yo, you got to buy a palette
Speaker 8: or not a pal you gotta buy a shipping container.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 8: So what most small like micro roasters do is they
Speaker 8: buddy up with other people that are like, yo, let's
Speaker 8: all do this.
Speaker 10: We'll kind of go in on this shipping container.
Speaker 8: So you have the farmer, you have the green buyer,
Speaker 8: and then the green buyer makes the deal with the
Speaker 8: shipment team. The shipping container gets filled, then you got
Speaker 8: to pay the nation's tariff. So then that's where the
Speaker 8: country comes in. Now, why some coffees cost more than others,
Speaker 8: some of it has to do with the tariffs. It's
Speaker 8: like Ethiopia charges some like fifty nine percent tariff, as
Speaker 8: they should because they tired of being raped by white people,
Speaker 8: just like everybody else is from there. Once it hits land,
Speaker 8: us as the roasters, we would go give you up
Speaker 8: the funds. We've already paid them, and then you go
Speaker 8: to your roasting facility. Now, if you a big boy,
Speaker 8: you got your own roasting facility. But most of the time,
Speaker 8: you know, a person may have one machine in the
Speaker 8: back of their coffee shop, or if they don't even
Speaker 8: have that, then they share a facility where they roast
Speaker 8: a bunch of different roasters roasted that one place. Once
Speaker 8: it's roast, getting in a bag and into your cup.
Speaker 8: Now this is the like specialty coffee way. Now, if
Speaker 8: we talk at Starbucks, Starbucks walks over there and they say, hey,
Speaker 8: let me buy this city, and they got their own
Speaker 8: shipping people in their own situation, and then they roast
Speaker 8: in like something the size of a mountain. Now what
Speaker 8: I'm talking about is third wave coffee. What that means
Speaker 8: is there is a lot of nerdy stuff. That means
Speaker 8: it's first wave coffee is like the coffee that your
Speaker 8: grandpa drank in World War Two.
Speaker 10: It's just you know mud, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 8: Even the term Americano was because when the American gis
Speaker 8: were in Europe and they wanted a cup of CoFe,
Speaker 8: because in Europe day drankon espresso. The Americans was like,
Speaker 8: this is disgusting, what is this? So they just add
Speaker 8: water to it. So they called that an Americano because
Speaker 8: that's the type the Americans like anyway.
Speaker 10: So that's first wave coffee.
Speaker 8: Second wave coffee is like Starbucks or the coffee spots
Speaker 8: that like have the ton of syrups in the back
Speaker 8: and the name of their shop is probably some sort
Speaker 8: of pun like in Friends, the Central Perk, Java Chip.
Speaker 8: Those are the ones that, like the big suburban churches
Speaker 8: would have their own coffee shops like corn and Nia
Speaker 8: House Hebrews, just some sort of corny that's second where
Speaker 8: it's like, you know, that's your triple machiato, you know,
Speaker 8: with's double pump all of the sweet fruitfru stuff that's
Speaker 8: second wave, and then third wave is what we call
Speaker 8: specialty coffee, and that's where the big bucks come in
Speaker 8: because you can sell them at a higher premium. Now,
Speaker 8: for it to be considered specialty coffee on a scale
Speaker 8: of one nine hundred, you have to grade that bean
Speaker 8: at an eighty or a bus Now, coffees that are
Speaker 8: graded in the nineties, unless you've been to Dubai or Qatar,
Speaker 8: you've never drank it. Those go there because American we
Speaker 8: can't afford it, so the farmer don't even show.
Speaker 3: It to it.
Speaker 8: But the most of the like if you go to
Speaker 8: like a good coffee shop, you're drinking about an eighty
Speaker 8: three to a eighty five. But it's not like their
Speaker 8: whole crop is that. Most farmers are just small plots.
Speaker 8: So what do you do with the rest of it? Well,
Speaker 8: the rest of it, which is the most of your harvest.
Speaker 8: To make the numbers round, Let's just say you have
Speaker 8: one hundred coffee trees. Maybe ten of them produced an
Speaker 8: eighty five, right, so that's ten percent. So you've spent
Speaker 8: all year fighting drought, fighting climate change, fighting excessive heat,
Speaker 8: fighting all that only for of your whole plantation, only
Speaker 8: to get ten percent of it to be actually be
Speaker 8: available to sell. The rest of it, it just goes
Speaker 8: to the stock market and you just hope and pray
Speaker 8: that you're able to sell it. But you have that
Speaker 8: three weeks to try to make your year's salary. So
Speaker 8: what happens is since you can only sell ten percent,
Speaker 8: only ten percent of it is even available to sell,
Speaker 8: right I'm talking specialty cofee is where we are now.
Speaker 8: If in fact, somebody comes in here and pays it,
Speaker 8: and then they only pay fair trade rather than direct
Speaker 8: trade price, you're getting a price set by Germany is
Speaker 8: not even enough to pay the little kids that just
Speaker 8: miss school to be able to pick your farm, because
Speaker 8: that's who actually picks the cherries. This is daywork, just
Speaker 8: kids from the farming community that come in there. They
Speaker 8: try to make a day's wage to pick their things.
Speaker 8: So what happens is to be able to survive. This
Speaker 8: is how it is in Honduras. To be able to survive,
Speaker 8: you go get a loan from the government to be
Speaker 8: able to make your money for the year, and then
Speaker 8: hopefully off that harvest, you can pay that loan back
Speaker 8: and make enough for the next year, so you don't
Speaker 8: have to get a loan. The problem is they're charging
Speaker 8: these farmers thirty percent interests, so they're locked into this
Speaker 8: situation that says, I can't even afford to even keep
Speaker 8: my family plot because I'm just staying in debt. So
Speaker 8: then what are you do? Governinate dumb, They'll re up
Speaker 8: your loan. So they're like, oh cool, no problem, We'll
Speaker 8: just we'll reup your loan. These so these farmers end
Speaker 8: up being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and
Speaker 8: it's adding every year because they can never catch up,
Speaker 8: which is bonkers. Considering how much coffee we drink across
Speaker 8: the world, one would think they would be fine.
Speaker 10: So I mean, what's your option. You sell the land
Speaker 10: or just.
Speaker 8: Remove the coffee, just yo, get some cows, sell beef
Speaker 8: right the forests, I mean there's money to make there,
Speaker 8: or you sell it to a big conglomerate. And what
Speaker 8: does the big conglomerate do burn down all of the
Speaker 8: forests and create a monoculture? Right, and a monoculture are
Speaker 8: like what you would pitch what we do in America
Speaker 8: for corn or all through the Amazon rainforest.
Speaker 10: And if you know, obviously you've seen.
Speaker 8: A force monoculture ain't how earth works, right, The diversity
Speaker 8: of plants becomes its own fertilizer. But if you don't
Speaker 8: have that, if you don't have chickens that survive off
Speaker 8: the avocados, and and you know, I'm pulling things out
Speaker 8: of nowhere. But like the point I'm trying to make
Speaker 8: is when you create a monoculture, you have to also
Speaker 8: create a way to sustain that. And the only way
Speaker 8: to sustain it is destructive. One cup of coffee in
Speaker 8: this way releases was it eighty grams of co two?
Speaker 8: I mean it's like driving half a mile, Like your
Speaker 8: cup of coffee is a half a mile full of poison.
Speaker 8: If done the way that most of the bigger names
Speaker 8: in the industry do it, which is now rising our
Speaker 8: carbon right. And if you're going to do that, then
Speaker 8: that means you need a gang of fertilizer, right, which
Speaker 8: is bad for the soil. And then you also need
Speaker 8: to use way more water than naturally required. Matter of fact,
Speaker 8: according to the UN, one cup of coffee uses one
Speaker 8: hundred and thirty liters of water. If you're doing this
Speaker 8: like monoculture style, right, that looks like farming the way
Speaker 8: we do it here one cup of coffee, one hundred
Speaker 8: and thirty liters of water, which is a bathtub. That's
Speaker 8: like a bathtub for of water to create this one cup,
Speaker 8: so obviously multiply that times a billion. Not only is
Speaker 8: this practice like everything else in this neo capitalistic world,
Speaker 8: the demand was so big and the desire to get
Speaker 8: the most amount of money with the least amount of
Speaker 8: price is destroying the very thing that makes the product possible. Now,
Speaker 8: the rest of the world isn't stupid. We understand that
Speaker 8: this process is not sustainable.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 10: We're killing the soil, We're killing the land. Everybody knows that.
Speaker 8: So the EU passed this law that says if you're
Speaker 8: going to import any sort of commodity, including coffee, you
Speaker 8: have to prove that it didn't come from deforestation. Right,
Speaker 8: So this is them trying to do their best. The
Speaker 8: only problem is if I'm an indigenous farmer on a
Speaker 8: small plot, I don't even have access to deforestation. But
Speaker 8: the only way for me to prove that is, like
Speaker 8: I said before, with the fair trade, I have to
Speaker 8: fly somebody down.
Speaker 10: It's on my own dime.
Speaker 8: It's because the e who doesn't understand regenative practices because
Speaker 8: they don't know any indigenous people, right, So this is
Speaker 8: now adding a double burden to the farmers that are
Speaker 8: actually doing it right, who can't possibly do the volume
Speaker 8: of the people that are doing it wrong. So the
Speaker 8: first problem is like the system is not even financially sustainable,
Speaker 8: Like I haven't even got to the specifics of the
Speaker 8: deforestation and all those things that have caused this problem. Now,
Speaker 8: according to Bloomberg, there's a twenty twenty two study of
Speaker 8: tropical cash crops included Arabica as well as avocado and
Speaker 8: cashew are probably the most vulnerable to climate change because
Speaker 8: the regions that are suitable for this production continue to
Speaker 8: shrink because of why heat. It's too hot, which means
Speaker 8: that Arabica won't be able to grow. So we'll probably
Speaker 8: have to start drinking robusticut.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 8: It's estimated that in thirty years from now, basically fifty
Speaker 8: percent of lands that can grow coffee will not be
Speaker 8: able to grow coffee anymore if we don't do anything
Speaker 8: fifty percent. You think they're making fun of you for
Speaker 8: your twelve dollars cup of coffee is crazy, now listen.
Speaker 8: Nestley reports that there are more than six thousand cups
Speaker 8: of neskfe coffee drink every second? Are y'all following me
Speaker 8: every second? That's how much coffee we drink. Now, granted
Speaker 8: that coffee is not a rabica, it's robustica. Robustica is
Speaker 8: what really most of the rest of the world drinks.
Speaker 8: It's us again, being a part of the northern hemisphere,
Speaker 8: being a part of the global north that like the
Speaker 8: pristine kind of good, shiny type.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 8: The problem is our insatiable desire to consume things as
Speaker 8: fast as we can. And I don't want to blame
Speaker 8: I'm not blaming the victim here, I'm just saying it's
Speaker 8: impossible to do the volume is the argument. How do
Speaker 8: you do this volume that we all want on in
Speaker 8: this global supply chain and the waight for which we've
Speaker 8: set this up. How do you do this volume and
Speaker 8: still keep the price where the price is? And you
Speaker 8: know what the solution has always been, You just rip
Speaker 8: off the farmer and destroy the earth. So deforestation given
Speaker 8: us too much carbon, which has made the weather erratic,
Speaker 8: which means that some years the crop is flooded and
Speaker 8: it doesn't grow right because it's too much rain. Other
Speaker 8: years it's complete drought, and you have to dig even
Speaker 8: further into the ground to try to get the amount
Speaker 8: of water that had we not raised the temperature one
Speaker 8: point five degrees celsius, had we done some changes, the
Speaker 8: earth would be the same. So Brazil is the biggest
Speaker 8: coffee producer in the world right and this year, this
Speaker 8: year was the worst drought they've had in seven decades,
Speaker 8: with above average temperatures, and one of the biggest producers
Speaker 8: out there. Associated Press interviewed him, Silvio Almita, and that
Speaker 8: fool's coffee plantation. The AP just reported this was expected
Speaker 8: to harvest one hundred and twenty sacks of coffee beans,
Speaker 8: but they only got one hundred and then their quoted saying,
Speaker 8: given the conditions here in twenty twenty five, crop is
Speaker 8: already affected, he told Associated Press, pointing out that part
Speaker 8: of his plantation where flower buds have already died before blooming.
Speaker 3: I won't say it's.
Speaker 8: Doomed, because God can do anything, but based on the situation,
Speaker 8: it's already compromised. What these people are saying is like
Speaker 8: next year's crops already did this. Where we are, y'all,
Speaker 8: are y'all hearing what I'm saying. He's saying, we ain't
Speaker 8: gonna have no coffee next year. It's already dead, y'all.
Speaker 8: Remember when Robert read off his little book, you know,
Speaker 8: the hole started off the whole. It could happen here
Speaker 8: thing and in one of them places. After the civil
Speaker 8: ward have went down, coffee was something you had to
Speaker 8: smuggle into the country like a drug. This is what
Speaker 8: he talking about. Dan ain't gonna be no coffee, y'all.
Speaker 8: I was at an event two years ago. It's called
Speaker 8: the Color of Coffee Collective. It was for black people
Speaker 8: in the coffee industry. And of course this is stretched
Speaker 8: to the whole diaspora. So you know, Central and South
Speaker 8: American just ultimately people of color in the coffee industry connect,
Speaker 8: you know, plot strategize, have some transparency in our supply
Speaker 8: chains because a lot of us in America in the
Speaker 8: West screen you know, pro black, pro black, be for
Speaker 8: the culture, we for the people, and like to put
Speaker 8: you know, the faces of our farmers on our bags
Speaker 8: in you know, part of the marketing. But most people
Speaker 8: who are in the coffee just have never gone to
Speaker 8: the source, so you don't know it'ally. You know what
Speaker 8: I'm saying, you don't know Tabby who like is actually
Speaker 8: like growing your coffee?
Speaker 10: You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 8: It's just a name on a spreadsheet, brought into you
Speaker 8: from an importer.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 8: Anyway, So there was a panel discussion about about climate
Speaker 8: change and about ways for which we can do better.
Speaker 10: So they had a bunch of farmers. I remember it
Speaker 10: was a farmer from Kenya.
Speaker 8: Who gave us these just heaters, just these heat rocks,
Speaker 8: these bars during this panel discussion. And after I show
Speaker 8: you these bars, I'm gonna go for a break, and
Speaker 8: then I'm gonna tell you about people that are doing
Speaker 8: things better in ways for which we can maybe save
Speaker 8: our soil so that your kids can possibly enjoy coffee. Also,
Speaker 8: so someone asked, I believe it was a roaster from
Speaker 8: Puerto Rico, was like, hey, so what are some of
Speaker 8: the ways that you're adapting and hoping to mitigate climate change?
Speaker 8: Like how are y'all dealing with climate change? So he
Speaker 8: was asking this Kenyan farmer like what's he doing for
Speaker 8: climate change? And his answer was, I mean, you tell
Speaker 8: me we're at source. He's like, we're a third world country.
Speaker 8: We didn't cause climate change.
Speaker 3: You did. What are you doing.
Speaker 8: We're the ones suffering, and not only are we suffering
Speaker 8: from the effects of climate change in our own life,
Speaker 8: because of your greediness, you created the climate change that
Speaker 8: is causing the problems in the very crop that you're
Speaker 8: trying to get from us. So because of your problems,
Speaker 8: this is why he's explaining it. I now can't grow
Speaker 8: something that we've grown for hundreds and hundreds of years,
Speaker 8: and you asking me what I'm doing for about it?
Speaker 7: Now?
Speaker 10: What are you doing about it? Ouch?
Speaker 8: So here's some things that are being done next.
Speaker 3: All right, we're back now.
Speaker 8: The wildest thing about how complicated any of these solutions are,
Speaker 8: which are you going to take many, many decades to
Speaker 8: actually see the difference in the actual top soil. The
Speaker 8: most bonkers part is the fact that, like the solutions
Speaker 8: by and large are kind of.
Speaker 10: The same across any world problem.
Speaker 8: It's mutual aid, it's collective, communal, collaborative work among every
Speaker 8: part of the supply chain. It's so in some senses,
Speaker 8: it's so beautiful that like, really the solution is us.
Speaker 8: I say that to not grossly oversimplify, but I say
Speaker 8: that to say that there's hope. So I'm going to
Speaker 8: introduce you to a couple programs and a couple of
Speaker 8: farms and sort of some things to look for in
Speaker 8: your coffee purchasing.
Speaker 1: Because you guys want to see the world be better.
Speaker 8: Also, first thing is farms, going back to indigenous practices.
Speaker 8: Now two I know personally, and one I'm going to
Speaker 8: tell you about from Ecuador. There's a whole documentary on
Speaker 8: it if you look up on YouTube, it's called How
Speaker 8: Climate Change Threatened Coffee Production by DW Documentaries.
Speaker 10: And I mean right like pretty on the nose.
Speaker 8: So a coffee collective in Ecuador called Viilakory.
Speaker 10: It's their Kichua language.
Speaker 8: It means green gold and their indigenous language, and they're
Speaker 8: doing something very similar to my friends in Honduras called
Speaker 8: Kadacha coffee.
Speaker 3: Now, what they.
Speaker 8: Are are cooperatives on the business side.
Speaker 3: So I'm so excited.
Speaker 8: I'm going to get to the business cooperative side after
Speaker 8: I explain to you the indigenous practices.
Speaker 10: Even though all of these things are related.
Speaker 8: So what they do is something that's so obvious, which
Speaker 8: is like, you got to stop doing monocultures. First of all,
Speaker 8: it makes sense financially because now you're diversifying your commodities,
Speaker 8: So you have your coffee plants. If you see a
Speaker 8: coffee plant, coffee plants are pretty short, like, they don't
Speaker 8: grow taller than six foot normally. So since the climate
Speaker 8: is so hot, what is the natural way to shade them? Well,
Speaker 8: the natural way to shave them is trees. So if
Speaker 8: you plant them among trees. The types of trees that
Speaker 8: first of all naturally fertilize the soil. Number two, they
Speaker 8: produce fruit. Number three, they produce raw materials. Right, so
Speaker 8: these people have planted trees that are indigenous to the area.
Speaker 8: So a lot of times in coffee places, like there
Speaker 8: are certain species of beans that really only grow in
Speaker 8: particular regions. But the only reason they grow in those
Speaker 8: particular regions is because of the mineral the way that
Speaker 8: the minerals are in the ground in that area. So
Speaker 8: if you can mimic those minerals, if you bring those
Speaker 8: minerals to this place, you could grow that bean. So
Speaker 8: technically speaking, if I have the my minerals, I can
Speaker 8: be in Costa Rica and grow a Rwandan coffee because
Speaker 8: it's just the Rwandan soil in Costa Rica. And you
Speaker 8: could still argue that it is this is some of
Speaker 8: the future of like if it do ever get so bad.
Speaker 8: Right when they grow in coffee in Sacramento, you know
Speaker 8: what I'm saying in Vancouver in some sort of building,
Speaker 8: it's because we just gather the minerals that we've destroyed
Speaker 8: and put them in a that's not good for the earth.
Speaker 8: That's that's an invasive not only invasive pieces, an invasive mineral.
Speaker 8: So you're completely changing the biosphere of that land just
Speaker 8: to grow that one crop.
Speaker 10: That's absurd. The land already does what it needs to do.
Speaker 8: So what these guys do in Ecuador is the same
Speaker 8: thing they do in Colombia in Zipa Coln that was
Speaker 8: the name of the city that they were in. Also,
Speaker 8: what's happening on doors is like you just let the
Speaker 8: land do what it does. What I learned on one
Speaker 8: of these farms is like the quickest way to know
Speaker 8: a place is not organic is there's no insects. Like,
Speaker 8: if there's no ants, that means the ground's poisonous.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 8: The ants come out, they eat whatever waste is on
Speaker 8: the ground, whatever like natural waste is on the ground.
Speaker 8: They come back in, they go back into the soil.
Speaker 8: They're irrigating them soils themselves. You don't need lawnmowers if
Speaker 8: you have chickens, right, the chickens eat the thing. The
Speaker 8: shade of the trees keeps the temperature down. It produces
Speaker 8: fruits like avocado, papaya, like I said before, for mongos, plantains.
Speaker 8: These trees that naturally grow in this area keep the
Speaker 8: soil rich and the coffee strong.
Speaker 3: So you're keeping the temperature down.
Speaker 8: The land does what it absolutely does, so now you
Speaker 8: don't need pesticides. You also need less water because when
Speaker 8: the temperature being shaded and brought down, the water's not
Speaker 8: evaporating as fast. Whoa, and then the quality of the
Speaker 8: bean is higher. Now here's where the indigenous practices move
Speaker 8: from just the ground to also the community. Rather than
Speaker 8: having one hundred small farms compete against each other, they
Speaker 8: just work as a community. So rather than waiting for
Speaker 8: Johnny European to come down and say buy my beans, no,
Speaker 8: by byes, by my means, they're like.
Speaker 3: No, by our beans.
Speaker 8: They pull all the beans together, bring all of their
Speaker 8: crops together, and they say, yeah, maybe I can't produce
Speaker 8: whatever kilos that this person needs by themselves, but we
Speaker 8: can produce that.
Speaker 3: So that way if there's a.
Speaker 8: Farm over here that's got a smaller crop because maybe
Speaker 8: you know, mother in law got sick so they weren't
Speaker 8: able to work as hard as they can for those beans.
Speaker 8: Or maybe collectively, again heat dome was too high, there
Speaker 8: was too much of a drought. We really couldn't grow
Speaker 8: that much on our own. Together though we could meet
Speaker 8: this order. You follow me and when that happens, because again,
Speaker 8: who usually picks the beans are the community's kids. Now,
Speaker 8: if we can collectively fill the order, right after we
Speaker 8: cup and we say collectively our coffees are good enough.
Speaker 8: And there's different types of species, like you know what
Speaker 8: I'm saying, Like this is a I don't want to
Speaker 8: get too much into a nerdery, but each each bean
Speaker 8: in each tree is a particular species. Maybe when we cup,
Speaker 8: we say, hey, listen, this is the same thing that
Speaker 8: happened on Doris. It's like, you know, we sit around
Speaker 8: and we're tasting, basically doing a taste test these different
Speaker 8: batches of beans. I don't know which farm they came from.
Speaker 8: I know they're all a part of this collective. But
Speaker 8: if I say, yo, I want these, then when we pay,
Speaker 8: since it's not a middleman, and it's a community.
Speaker 3: Now, the main load goes.
Speaker 8: To the particular farm that it was ordered from, but
Speaker 8: the rest of it goes and it's spread across the
Speaker 8: entire community.
Speaker 3: Following me.
Speaker 10: Okay, now back to the soil situation.
Speaker 8: I feel like I'm all over the place, but you
Speaker 8: have to understand because the problem's all over the place,
Speaker 8: and a lot of these places are connected.
Speaker 3: So in Colombia they kind of did the same thing.
Speaker 8: So Lapamel tu Acon is the place that everybody comes
Speaker 8: into and since every individual farmer does not have connections
Speaker 8: across the world with bringing buyers in and there's no
Speaker 8: promise that they won't be taking advantage of and ain't
Speaker 8: gonna be able to sell but maybe five ten percent
Speaker 8: of the crop. The rest of it either goes to
Speaker 8: the trash or goes to the sea market. It's just
Speaker 8: the open stock market. You just hope somebody buys your beans.
Speaker 8: It's just no way to live. As I explained before,
Speaker 8: what Lapama ends up doing is this is they say, okay,
Speaker 8: we'll check this out.
Speaker 10: We'll buy your coffee, all of it.
Speaker 8: And not only will we buy your coffee, because we
Speaker 8: know you need soil. We're gonna set you up with
Speaker 8: a business so that not only can you sell your
Speaker 8: coffee to us, you can also sell your fertilizer to us.
Speaker 8: And the fertilizer that you're creating, we're going to build
Speaker 8: that business for you. And how they do this is
Speaker 8: this thing called biochar. Now it makes so much sense.
Speaker 8: If you have donkeys and other places at, pigs and
Speaker 8: other animals that have waste, you can make fertilizer.
Speaker 3: Duh, right, So what they do is this.
Speaker 8: They have these composts, these big old flat things that
Speaker 8: they build in front of you.
Speaker 3: They basically they build it for you.
Speaker 8: They went to all the local farms and they were like,
Speaker 8: we'll build this for you, right, and then we'll buy
Speaker 8: the product from you. So they build these flatbed things
Speaker 8: where you could take all the stuff that you would
Speaker 8: compost anyway and put it in this flatbed, cover it,
Speaker 8: and then we're going to give you this stuff called biochar,
Speaker 8: which is some of the dope. It's like Mother Nature
Speaker 8: showing off. So basically it's made from like you heat
Speaker 8: wood right at the highest of temperature with no oxygen,
Speaker 8: so once it becomes carbon, it doesn't turn to ash.
Speaker 8: You know what, I mean it's almost like you know
Speaker 8: when you like after you light a fire, when you
Speaker 8: hold the charred pieces, like how it crumbles away this
Speaker 8: one because you heat it at the highest of temperature
Speaker 8: without letting oxygen in, so like it doesn't become like
Speaker 8: a like a red fire, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 8: And then you mix that into your compost and it
Speaker 8: just makes this pristine soil. So now guess what. These
Speaker 8: farmers don't have to pay for soil. They don't have
Speaker 8: to pay for nutrient wrench soil. Matter of fact, they
Speaker 8: can sell off the excess. Their crops already been sold.
Speaker 8: So you don't have to go get a loan from
Speaker 8: the state. You would need that loan to be able
Speaker 8: to set up your like your washing stations. Like how
Speaker 8: you get the coffee from a cherry to the roast
Speaker 8: or to the green bean. Is like it's a long process.
Speaker 8: It could be very expensive. It's all good. The homies
Speaker 8: down Narrow do that for you. We'll put you in
Speaker 8: this system and we're gonna pay you even if your
Speaker 8: particular crop, your particular bean isn't sold, because we'll sell
Speaker 8: it somehow, like if it doesn't sell on the high
Speaker 8: end eighty percent Arabica specialty coffee thing.
Speaker 10: We'll figure out a way to sell it. You're still
Speaker 10: getting paid anyway.
Speaker 8: We're buying your whole crop rather than the ten percent
Speaker 8: that would happen, Like I said before, if your beans
Speaker 8: aren't as good as they're supposed to be. These programs
Speaker 8: by one hundred percent from these farmers. So these farmers
Speaker 8: are able to sustain themselves. Right, and now you can
Speaker 8: pass these farms down to your children, right because we're
Speaker 8: doing this collectively. Since we're doing this collectively, especially it's
Speaker 8: what happens in Honduras, a third of the money goes
Speaker 8: to the community itself. I've wrapped at a school that
Speaker 8: was built by them selling the coffee like this, there's
Speaker 8: now a medical clinic because a lot of times these
Speaker 8: farms are hundreds of miles away from the city.
Speaker 10: You have to get lifted as something's wrong.
Speaker 8: And since these are indigenous communities, they're the most forgotten
Speaker 8: oftentimes in these areas. So purchasing these coffees really at
Speaker 8: a high price, which is what we're supposed to do,
Speaker 8: guarantees that the individual farmers paid, the community is paid.
Speaker 8: It's done in a way that's tied much more to
Speaker 8: the indigenous practices and now collectively, because we're buying from
Speaker 8: responsible places that are locally grown, now we can afford
Speaker 8: to bring the EU people down here to prove that
Speaker 8: this is not a process of deforestation because they're moving
Speaker 8: collectively for real. It's just like fast fashion. It's like
Speaker 8: that T shirt only three dollars because the sweatshop. You
Speaker 8: truly do get what you pay for in a lot
Speaker 8: of way. And finally, I'm gonna tell you where tech
Speaker 8: is actually helping, and it's this program called Bext three sixty.
Speaker 8: Could use a little help on the marketing, but it's
Speaker 8: essentially they're using blockchain to create transparency and it's probably
Speaker 8: the dopest thing I've ever seen. And I saw it
Speaker 8: from wanted of the supply chain to the other. So
Speaker 8: in this program, these local farmers right who had just
Speaker 8: have these small home plots, who have been running these
Speaker 8: plots for centuries. Is their grandfather's land they you know,
Speaker 8: they grandmama's land that.
Speaker 10: They got it.
Speaker 8: Who don't have access to American and worldwide coffee buyers
Speaker 8: meet up with this collective, right, the Karacha collective. That's
Speaker 8: one of them that I'm that I'm specifically talking about.
Speaker 8: And Karacha signed up with this thing called bext. And
Speaker 8: what happens in bext is if you've ever been to
Speaker 8: developing countries, not everybody ain't got a smartphone. So in
Speaker 8: this thing, once the farmer harvest is alls beans, washes
Speaker 8: them and says, hey, I got these many kilos of
Speaker 8: this type of being. Click, opens his bext app on
Speaker 8: his smartphone, takes a picture of it and puts the
Speaker 8: weights and the numbers so that we know everybody and
Speaker 8: everybody in the supply chain can see this. There's a
Speaker 8: QR code even on the bag. Once you buy the
Speaker 8: bag in Sacramento, there's a QR code on it, so
Speaker 8: you could see all this. So the kid from the
Speaker 8: farm snaps the thing. It goes to the exporter, which
Speaker 8: who just lives down the street. It's not like some
Speaker 8: you multi conglomerate company from the North.
Speaker 10: No, this lady lives down the street. She's born and
Speaker 10: raised here.
Speaker 8: She opens it up and she says to us who
Speaker 8: flew in from America to be like, yo, we want
Speaker 8: to try some coffee. Opens the app and says, hey,
Speaker 8: this is the farmer, this where it is this how
Speaker 8: much he wants this, how much he asking for it?
Speaker 8: Here's our price. But I'm looking at the app that's
Speaker 8: what he's charging. And then I know she's adding a
Speaker 8: third of that price because the other third of what
Speaker 8: she's asking for is literally paying for the hospital that's
Speaker 8: across the street. So it makes perfect sense to me.
Speaker 8: And I'm looking at it and I'm like, Okay, cool,
Speaker 8: I know how much the shipping container costs because I'm
Speaker 8: seeing it.
Speaker 3: Of course I got to pay for shipping. What did
Speaker 3: you talking about?
Speaker 8: So it's all transparent, it all makes sense, and it's
Speaker 8: all regentitive financially in climate wise. Once we buy it,
Speaker 8: I can see if she paid the farmer, because that's
Speaker 8: also in the app. So once the farmer gets his money,
Speaker 8: takes a picture, got the money, screenshot received, and then
Speaker 8: a portion of that money is given in cash so
Speaker 8: that you could pay the kids that picked your farm.
Speaker 3: Click saw that. That's in the app. Right as that.
Speaker 8: Stuff is shipped across the country or across the ocean,
Speaker 8: you can put in all of the roasting notes, which
Speaker 8: are kind of lame if you're not really into stuff
Speaker 8: like that. And then finally the sealed bag that says
Speaker 8: here's one from Denver, Queen City Collective Coffee right that. Hey, look,
Speaker 8: this is a Honduras being. We bought it this price,
Speaker 8: and then when you pay it's called a third cost.
Speaker 8: When you buy the bag, there's an extra dollar added
Speaker 8: to the cost of the bag, and that extra dollar
Speaker 8: does not go to the roaster.
Speaker 10: It goes back to the farmer.
Speaker 3: You know how.
Speaker 8: I know because there's a QR code. You could check
Speaker 8: it and the farmer can confirm if they got they money.
Speaker 8: It's transparency. It's us taking care of us. So obviously,
Speaker 8: because the world works the way it works. If this
Speaker 8: continues to be financially viable, here's some of the things
Speaker 8: we could do. One is we could start drinking more
Speaker 8: robustica like everybody else, and it's actually delicious if you
Speaker 8: could find a good roaster. And Tabby is a great
Speaker 8: roaster New Yen Supply. She's amazing. She does cold brew
Speaker 8: and like Vietnamese coffee, it's robustica. But then there's other
Speaker 8: spots across the world. It's going to cost a little more,
Speaker 8: but I'm telling you why it costs a little more
Speaker 8: because they come from a multiculture land that uses indigenous practices.
Speaker 8: That has lowered its car and footprint, that is direct
Speaker 8: traded and has transparency.
Speaker 10: This is not a list of everybody doing this.
Speaker 8: These are the listed of people that I know personally
Speaker 8: and people that have researched.
Speaker 10: So in North Caak and South Cak you got Black.
Speaker 8: And White Roasters, and you got Bridge City Roasters Denver.
Speaker 8: There's Queen City Collective up in Sacramento. There's Old Soul Coffee, Onyx,
Speaker 8: Coffee Lab, Coffee Black that's there in Memphis. All these
Speaker 8: people you could order their coffee is online don Cavo
Speaker 8: Hall in New York. The transparency is there and is
Speaker 8: doing its best to make sure that this being stays
Speaker 8: on this planet. So I'll link in the show notes
Speaker 8: all of the data that I'm pulling this from and
Speaker 8: ways for which you can connect with like very socially
Speaker 8: responsible and climate responsible coffee roasters Geez only sixteen years old.
Speaker 3: Boy, I tell you that's the first lyric.
Speaker 10: Yes, all.
Speaker 3: Its it could happen here. It's the podcast.
Speaker 4: I didn't write an intro for this because everything, everything
Speaker 4: incredibly sucks. This is the podcast where bad things happened.
Speaker 4: I'm your host with me as Garrison.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's been a lot of bad things the past week,
Speaker 5: past year, but the past week and a half it's
Speaker 5: been pretty bad.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And one of the things that's been very bad
Speaker 4: is literally everything Israel has been up to, like I mean,
Speaker 4: since it was founded, but the last three four weeks,
Speaker 4: somehow things have gotten worse, which is a sort of
Speaker 4: unbelievable thing to say about a genocide, but it's expanding.
Speaker 4: So yeah, there is at the end of this one
Speaker 4: of the most bizarre trunk quotes I've ever seen. So
Speaker 4: that's why I promise to you to stick with this.
Speaker 4: But oh boy, everything is very, very bad. So we
Speaker 4: now have I guess I don't even know if France
Speaker 4: is the right way to talk about this. But what
Speaker 4: we have in Gaza, which is where the main Israeli
Speaker 4: offensive is going right now, well we'll get into that.
Speaker 4: There's a bunch of stuff in Lebanon too, where they're
Speaker 4: pulling troops to, but in Gaza, everything just continues to
Speaker 4: get worse, even though so these Raelis have pulled out
Speaker 4: some troops from Gaza, but they're also still making another
Speaker 4: offensive into northern Gaza. And the thing about the way
Speaker 4: that the Israelis make offensive into places is that the
Speaker 4: thing that the Israelis do is they just immediately start
Speaker 4: shooting at hospitals.
Speaker 3: So that's been a big part of what's happening.
Speaker 5: Something that used to be like controversial and like widely
Speaker 5: newsworthy a year ago attacks on hospitals now have become
Speaker 5: so normalized and he sensitized that it doesn't even make headlines,
Speaker 5: which that's been one of the most indicative factors that
Speaker 5: this has gone about as bad as it could have.
Speaker 5: I remember a year ago, we were like debating whether
Speaker 5: or not the Israeli military intentionally like struck a hospital,
Speaker 5: and this was like this was like a week's long
Speaker 5: debate trying to figure out what exactly happened. And now
Speaker 5: attacks on hospitals are just complete commonplace. It's like we've
Speaker 5: just totally lost.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I mean, you know, like it's not even
Speaker 4: just that that the Israelis are deliberately targeting hospitals, it's
Speaker 4: that the temporary facilities people have been trying to set
Speaker 4: up because the hospitals are being blown up are also being.
Speaker 5: Attacked, Yeah, which has also been going on for ages, Yeah,
Speaker 5: almost a year now, like almost immediately as soon as
Speaker 5: like humanitarian aid and like and like like impromptu medical
Speaker 5: tents were set up. Those were also the targets, and
Speaker 5: this is this is all discontinued.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think the thing that's you know, it's
Speaker 4: bleak about it, right is like I mean, I mean,
Speaker 4: it's not the thing. The thing that's bleak about it
Speaker 4: is that they're blowing up hospitals. But I mean, we've
Speaker 4: reached a point into this where it's not even newsory
Speaker 4: but be the Israelis don't even like attempt to justify
Speaker 4: it anymore. I mean, if you if you remember a
Speaker 4: year ago when they were doing this, it'd be all
Speaker 4: of the stuff about how, oh we found Homas tunnels
Speaker 4: under the hospitals, and there's just not event anymore. They're
Speaker 4: just they're just shooting at hospitals. Sometimes they give evacuation orders.
Speaker 4: They've been That's the other thing that's been happening periodically
Speaker 4: is the Israelis keep basically you know, in places in
Speaker 4: northern Gaza, they'll be like everyone has to leave now,
Speaker 4: and then they'll bomb it and they'll keep bombing it.
Speaker 4: Part of the thing about covering Gaza, right is all
Speaker 4: of the stuff that we're saying is stuff that was
Speaker 4: a major news story like six months ago, and is
Speaker 4: no longer a major news story because the slaughter has
Speaker 4: become just sort of so rutinized. But you know, so
Speaker 4: people are fleeing from northern Gaza into what's supposed to
Speaker 4: be the safe zone in central Gaza, except that Israelis
Speaker 4: keeps shooting at their refugee camps in central Gaza, so
Speaker 4: it's not actually there's there's not actually a place you
Speaker 4: can be in Gaza where you're not getting bombed. What
Speaker 4: there is is some places sometimes are less bombed than
Speaker 4: other places. And you know, I think there had been
Speaker 4: a tiny amount of hope that the only conceivable upside
Speaker 4: about the invasion of Lebanon was that there would be
Speaker 4: a pull out of troops and we'd see less offensive.
Speaker 4: But you know, they've just been escalating bombing campaigns and
Speaker 4: are doing some offensive anyways. So yeah, there's there's there's
Speaker 4: continuingly sort of Israeli attacks into into partial northern Gaza.
Speaker 4: The other big thing, and this is what most of
Speaker 4: this episode is going to be about, is a new front.
Speaker 4: After already having like having this entire thing in Gauza.
Speaker 4: There was also like an invasion of the West Bank,
Speaker 4: which again is like I don't know how to express
Speaker 4: how insane it is to have a war where you're
Speaker 4: nominally fighting against Hamas and then invade the West Bank,
Speaker 4: a place where there isn't Hamas. But they've done that too.
Speaker 4: There's been parts of the West Bank, there's been a
Speaker 4: bunch of really troops and you know, we know they've
Speaker 4: been fighting in Yemen as much bombings in Yemen, but
Speaker 4: also now they've just straight up invaded Lebanon, And this
Speaker 4: is the sort of chain of events of this was
Speaker 4: I don't know if kicked off is the right word,
Speaker 4: but it was. It was dramatically accelerated by the assassination
Speaker 4: of Hassan Nosraala, who is I think most people are
Speaker 4: aware that he's the head of Hesbalon has been the
Speaker 4: head of this BLAS since like nineteen ninety two, which
Speaker 4: is longer than anyone who's on this episode right now
Speaker 4: has been alive.
Speaker 5: Was this the one who was killed in those like
Speaker 5: apartment like carpet carpet bombings? Yeah, yeah, so, I mean yeah,
Speaker 5: even still, assassination is a strong word for uh or
Speaker 5: I guess a light word for just bombing. Like it
Speaker 5: was like what three large apartment complexes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they just obliterated a bunch of complexes with like
Speaker 4: something like eighty bunker busters.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So this is actually the second time that the Israelis
Speaker 4: have just straight up killed someone they were supposed to
Speaker 4: nominally be negotiating with. They killed the head of Hamas
Speaker 4: like in a ran. So you know, we talked about
Speaker 4: on this show the initial wave of attacks on Lebanon,
Speaker 4: which is the sort of the pager explosions, and the
Speaker 4: fallow up to the pager explosions was that they figured
Speaker 4: out what bunker that ISRAELA was in and they just
Speaker 4: killed him. This is extremely bad for a lot of reasons,
Speaker 4: one of which is that has blawed kind of hadn't
Speaker 4: really been on full war footing until this point. Like
Speaker 4: they've been doing a bunch of rocket attacks on northern Israel,
Speaker 4: right and they've been these sort of exchanges of rocket
Speaker 4: fire across the border, but they hadn't really escalated beyond that.
Speaker 4: And then the Israelis were like, well, just fuck it, okay,
Speaker 4: we want our invasion of Lebanon. Andraal was kind of like,
Speaker 4: I don't know if like moderating force is quite the
Speaker 4: right term here, but his policy wasn't that Hesbolah was
Speaker 4: going to fight a total war against Israel, and the
Speaker 4: Israelis just fucking murdered him anyways, So we should probably
Speaker 4: talk about who Nosrauala is. He's not from like the
Speaker 4: original Hesbela cadres, from from the original Lebanese of war
Speaker 4: when the emergenes in eighty two. He's not from that cadre.
Speaker 4: But he's a pretty old school Hesbola guy by this point.
Speaker 4: He's you know, I've talking about like he's been in
Speaker 4: charge of Hesbelog for fucking ever. Like I am not
Speaker 4: old enough to remember a time when he was not
Speaker 4: in charge of Hesblah because I wasn't born yet, I
Speaker 4: don't know he's he's one of the people who's seen
Speaker 4: Hesbelah's sort of expansion and also seen Hesbelod be able
Speaker 4: to be like the only of the sort of major
Speaker 4: Lebanese political parties who were in the negotiations to end
Speaker 4: the civil war kind of oversaw the process of Hesbela
Speaker 4: being like the only armed party like left in Lebanon
Speaker 4: other than like the regular army right. He was also
Speaker 4: very famously in charge of Hesbela's I don't know how
Speaker 4: exactly you wanted. I don't know, there's a whole bunch
Speaker 4: of stuff about how the war in two thousand and
Speaker 4: six started. But in two thousand and six, Israel made
Speaker 4: this attempt to sort of like do their big anti
Speaker 4: Hesbelah push.
Speaker 3: They invaded Lebanon, and Israel didn't do very well.
Speaker 4: They were expecting, and I think what most people were
Speaker 4: expecting Hesbla to fight like, you know, like a gorilla army,
Speaker 4: right doing hit a run attacks, doing doing the sort
Speaker 4: of like the whole sort of last century of gorilla
Speaker 4: hit and run campaigns.
Speaker 3: And they didn't do that.
Speaker 4: They basically they sat there and fought like a conventional
Speaker 4: army with a bunch of bunker networks. And the Israelis
Speaker 4: did extremely poorly in that war. And I think this
Speaker 4: is influenced a lot of the way that people were
Speaker 4: thinking about how this how this fight was going to work,
Speaker 4: and it hasn't.
Speaker 3: But you know the fact that Hesbla was able to
Speaker 3: sort of.
Speaker 4: Stave off the initial attack and then the Israelis spent
Speaker 4: like forty more days doing a bombing campaign and everyone
Speaker 4: just called it quits was absolutely huge for Hesbela as
Speaker 4: a political force. Unfortunately for them, I guess they burned
Speaker 4: an unbelievable amount of that political capital that they they'd
Speaker 4: gotten from being really the first people in a long
Speaker 4: time to like actually be able to viably claim that
Speaker 4: they defeated Israel. And I mean, it's obviously like both
Speaker 4: both sides of that declared victory, but Hesblood puts up
Speaker 4: a better fight against the Israelis and like it's like
Speaker 4: stops their ground advance in a way that like was
Speaker 4: almost unimaginable at that point, even though Hesbola had sort
Speaker 4: of fought pretty well during the Lebanies of the world,
Speaker 4: is better than most of the other sort of like
Speaker 4: anti Israeli factions that weren't a state, and even I
Speaker 4: mean even most of the states that a thought as
Speaker 4: you have done extremely poorly. We're going to go to
Speaker 4: ads and then when we come back, we're going to
Speaker 4: talk a bit about how has a Blot's position weakened
Speaker 4: and how the Israelis have just sort of decided that
Speaker 4: this is a moment they can just murder everyone in
Speaker 4: So we are back with more I guess very very
Speaker 4: short summary of what has Bust been up to over
Speaker 4: the last about thirty years. So part of the reason
Speaker 4: that things haven't been going enormously well for HESB Law
Speaker 4: is that a lot of their capacity was weakened by
Speaker 4: the fact that HESBA Law during Theuserian Civil War through
Speaker 4: their entire backing behind the SAD and this was like
Speaker 4: hideously unpopular for I think, I think reasons that are
Speaker 4: obvious most people listening. But one of the big ones
Speaker 4: is it's hitting unpopular in like in Palestine, I got
Speaker 4: I guess who ran the poll, but there so there's
Speaker 4: a fairy famous pole that was showing like the disapproval
Speaker 4: rating in paleside different world leaders. I mean they didn't
Speaker 4: pull in net Yahoo because obviously like is net Yahoo,
Speaker 4: but like the two highest ones that weren't in net
Speaker 4: in Yahoo were it was like Biden at eighty percent,
Speaker 4: and then slightly higher than Biden was Bashar al Assad
Speaker 4: because he is hideously unpopular, partially for a bunch of
Speaker 4: shit that he did in a very very large Palasinian
Speaker 4: refugee camp there that you know has been a lot
Speaker 4: fucking backed them for and so has well spent a
Speaker 4: lot of the last decade just sort of running around
Speaker 4: Syria backing the assaud rechime, and that I don't know Garrison.
Speaker 3: That doesn't make you.
Speaker 4: Popular anywhere other than like extremely weird sections of the
Speaker 4: American left.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I guess some of the American right.
Speaker 4: When you're backing a guy who is just like who
Speaker 4: was doing a thing the Israelis do, like obviously on
Speaker 4: a smaller scale, but like shooting up like palsi refugee cans.
Speaker 3: He's not going to be enormously popular.
Speaker 5: Whenever there's a guy who's like seriously maimed your family members, yeah,
Speaker 5: it's pretty pretty easy to dislike him.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and like whatever things that's going on in the
Speaker 4: story that like we need a fucking seventy part episode
Speaker 4: to talk about. But Syria occupied a bunch of Lebanon
Speaker 4: for a long time, and that also like hasn't made
Speaker 4: him enormously popular in the region. But you know, Heswal's
Speaker 4: position is that they like they have the slogan that
Speaker 4: goes the road to Jerusalem runs to Aleppo, which is
Speaker 4: just like just not how any of this has worked.
Speaker 4: It's been a complete fiasco. Has lost performance in Syria
Speaker 4: hasn't been very good. Can you explain what that phrase means? Yeah, yeah, So,
Speaker 4: so the point of this basically was that in order
Speaker 4: to defeat the Zionists through some incredibly murky logic, like
Speaker 4: the Asad regime had to be kept in power, and
Speaker 4: this was this was a sort of the justification that
Speaker 4: was used by Hesbela to just send a bunch of
Speaker 4: troops there to ornate with a bunch of other different
Speaker 4: groups there.
Speaker 3: And I mean, like it's.
Speaker 4: It's a really terrible decision, both on a moral and
Speaker 4: a strategic level, in the sense that like it caused
Speaker 4: a rift between what it's supposed to be the resistance
Speaker 4: factions in Palestine, and it just killed a bunch of people,
Speaker 4: and like the Iranians are sending I don't actually know
Speaker 4: how many people know about the story, but one of
Speaker 4: the like terrifying things that's happening in this is that
Speaker 4: that there's a bunch of refugees from Afghanistan, you flee
Speaker 4: to Iran, and the Iranians like basically conscrict a bunch
Speaker 4: of these people and send them into Syria with rifles.
Speaker 4: So it's like these people are like fighting alongside has
Speaker 4: blon Hesla. They don't do great because Hezeblah has always
Speaker 4: been good at fighting, like fairly obviously morally justified defensive
Speaker 4: wars inside of Lebanon and then they go off and
Speaker 4: fight basically like a semi imperial war in Syria.
Speaker 3: It's fucking shit show.
Speaker 4: And this has been extremely bad for their capacity, and
Speaker 4: it also really hurt has Blot politically because again it
Speaker 4: was also very very unpopular in Lebanon. And this kind
Speaker 4: of all leads us to the last few weeks of
Speaker 4: like terrible shit that's been happening, where yeah, the Israelis
Speaker 4: just fucking launched this hideous bombing campaign, I mean just
Speaker 4: really just all over Lebanon, right, you know, most of
Speaker 4: the most of the reporting has been about their attacks
Speaker 4: in the south, but like, they've bombed the capital, they've
Speaker 4: bombed Tripoli, they've killed I think so far it's one
Speaker 4: of these things where the death counts kind of have
Speaker 4: stopped updating, but in the last few days it looks
Speaker 4: like they've killed about two thousand people. It's not enormously clear,
Speaker 4: but yeah, it's things that things have gotten extremely unbelievably bad.
Speaker 4: And this has also really, I think been a kind
Speaker 4: of mask off moment for both the US and the Israelis,
Speaker 4: where all of the things that they've been pretending for
Speaker 4: the last year they're just straight up saying that they
Speaker 4: don't believe anymore. I think that the best indicator of
Speaker 4: this is there's a White House press conference and Matthew Miller,
Speaker 4: who's one of the White House spokesperson answered a question about, Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's just about the conflicts, and he said, quote, yes,
Speaker 4: we do support Israel launching these incursions to degrade has
Speaker 4: blaws infrastructure, which like kind of sounds like a standard
Speaker 4: like the US words is real thing. But if you
Speaker 4: actually read into what that's saying, he's saying, the US's
Speaker 4: official position is no longer ret there trying to get
Speaker 4: a ceasefire. Right, That's that's what he's saying. This is
Speaker 4: immediate and active support for the israelis not not only
Speaker 4: not attempting to end the war, but expanding it into Lebanon.
Speaker 4: And this is something that like hadn't been in an
Speaker 4: explicit like war goal for Israel sort of until this point.
Speaker 4: The line had always been that the point of this
Speaker 4: was to bring back the hostages. Right, But like there's
Speaker 4: no fucking hostages in Lebanon, Like there isn't there just aren't, right,
Speaker 4: That's that's not how any of this works. And at
Speaker 4: this point all of the sort of pretenses falling away
Speaker 4: and it just degrading into this pure slaughter. And when
Speaker 4: we come back from this ADS, we're gonna wrap up
Speaker 4: with more stuff that mostly sucks. And also Trump's latest
Speaker 4: thing on this, which is very weird.
Speaker 3: We are back.
Speaker 4: So as this has been going on in the past
Speaker 4: couple of days, net Niyahoo posted a I don't even
Speaker 4: know how to describe it, one of the weirdest videos
Speaker 4: I've seen since, like that insane Kevin Bacon won that's
Speaker 4: just him threatening Lebanon. He says, quote, you have an
Speaker 4: opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss
Speaker 4: of a long war that will lead to destruction and
Speaker 4: suffering like we see in Gaza. She's just straight up
Speaker 4: threatening Lebanon as Israeli troops are moving across the borders.
Speaker 4: She's for occupying a tempted occupied He's just straight up saying,
Speaker 4: like Lebanon needs to just throw out Hesbela somehow, even
Speaker 4: though it's just like a political party. They need to
Speaker 4: completely destroy Hesbela somehow. Otherwise Israel is going to do
Speaker 4: to Lebanon when they've done to Gaza. And that I
Speaker 4: don't know is a unbelievably hideous expansion of the war.
Speaker 5: Could you give some context for like why Israel is
Speaker 5: making moves into Lebanon. We know, like they're targeting has Beila,
Speaker 5: but there's also like a degree of territorial dispute over
Speaker 5: where Israel ends and Lebanon begins. Yeah, that Israel has
Speaker 5: been kind of like wanting to increase tensions over for
Speaker 5: a while, and it feels like they're just using the
Speaker 5: war in Gaza as a cover to also try to
Speaker 5: claim like territory of southern Lebanon.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I mean this gets into so I think
Speaker 4: there's three kind of reasons, and I think that are
Speaker 4: all overlapping factors for different groups of people, you know,
Speaker 4: because like dif different Israeli political factions, different sort of
Speaker 4: strategic like elements of the military set, et cetera, are
Speaker 4: doing things for sometimes overlapping sometimes different reasons. Like there's
Speaker 4: the obvious one, which is like, Okay, there's a dislike
Speaker 4: for has blawed, that's being that's been funneled because a
Speaker 4: bunch of people in settlements in northern Israel have been
Speaker 4: like have been evacuated because they keep getting bombed, right,
Speaker 4: and those people are unbelievably pissed off, and they've been
Speaker 4: pushing for this for a long time. There's the second one,
Speaker 4: which is I think the one that liberals use is
Speaker 4: like the excuse for the entire the entire genocide was wrong.
Speaker 4: But it is also true that net and Yahoo does
Speaker 4: like personally need this war to keep going because the
Speaker 4: moment the war.
Speaker 5: Stops, he's gonna be out of office. He's screwed.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So like that that's a personal extendent for net
Speaker 4: and Yahoo. There's also another one outside of the political
Speaker 4: pressure from from the northern settlers, and you know, the
Speaker 4: general idea has Bluffing and nen Yahoo personally, which is
Speaker 4: like Israeli sodas have always been, it's it's most extreme,
Speaker 4: like most sort of far right, most genocidal like political
Speaker 4: element right. But increasingly we're watching them get radicalized even
Speaker 4: further in real time, and we're watching them become increasingly powerful.
Speaker 4: And one of the things that those people want is
Speaker 4: they have this unbelievably deranged thing that I mean, I
Speaker 4: guess all nationalist movements eventually get to their greater whatever
Speaker 4: your country is thing, but they've entered the Greater Israel
Speaker 4: phase where they're talking about just like you're talking about
Speaker 4: Israel as this as a state that's supposed to like
Speaker 4: encompass like all of Lebanon, and like, I mean, I've
Speaker 4: seen so many different maps like encompassing a bunch of
Speaker 4: partial of Syria.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, and this is also what's influenced their
Speaker 5: continued attacks in the West Bank, specifically in the past
Speaker 5: few months, where they're similarly using what's going on in Gaza,
Speaker 5: like hiding behind their own atrocities in Gaza as a
Speaker 5: cover to like try to actually claim more territory in
Speaker 5: the West Bank, or at least at least push more
Speaker 5: of like the Palestinian people out of their homes to
Speaker 5: expand the Israeli settlements. So I think both of these
Speaker 5: are kind of happening for similar reasons. And Israel's trying
Speaker 5: to like just weaponize the actual atrocities that are going
Speaker 5: on in Gaza as like a big shield because those
Speaker 5: are getting so much more attention, trying to get away
Speaker 5: with this territorial expansion in other areas, not just the Strip.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I mean also I should say that there's
Speaker 4: a lot of a lot of the people on the
Speaker 4: ground are pretty convinced that the Israelis are trying to
Speaker 4: basically just like completely ethnically cleanse like parts of the
Speaker 4: strip so they can annex it. And I mean it's
Speaker 4: not something that we like have, like we don't have
Speaker 4: like a document from Israeli High command that says we're
Speaker 4: going to annex all of this stuff, but it's it's
Speaker 4: something that's very least consistent with everything they've been doing.
Speaker 4: And this is also like another sort of one of
Speaker 4: the cyclical factors here. This is a cyclical factor behind
Speaker 4: the settlements. We've talked about this back when we did
Speaker 4: episodes about the West Bank, is that the is really
Speaker 4: housing market is such a fucking disaster and this this
Speaker 4: is something that you know, like this kind of real
Speaker 4: estate speculation shit, and the same way that like George Washington,
Speaker 4: as a real estate speculator was was sort of like
Speaker 4: motivated to do more attacks on indigenous land in the
Speaker 4: US and this sort of like fueled westward expansions. All
Speaker 4: these land speculators, you know, moved out, and people who
Speaker 4: couldn't afford like houses in like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem
Speaker 4: where housing prices are really high, those people have become
Speaker 4: this political force to keep pushing this and this is
Speaker 4: you know, fueling the expansion of the Israeli occupation into
Speaker 4: more and more places. Yeah, so right now where we're
Speaker 4: at with Lebanon is that one point two million people
Speaker 4: have fled their homes, Which is I mean, even if
Speaker 4: like the Israelis had literally done nothing else in the
Speaker 4: entire time that this has been happening, right, forcing one
Speaker 4: point two million people to flee their homes, is it
Speaker 4: an unimaginable level of suffering. And this is like just
Speaker 4: effectively being reported as a footnote in the fact that
Speaker 4: they've fucking done all of this other shit.
Speaker 5: And just in the past week and a half, they've
Speaker 5: killed thirteen hundred people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's insane, Like that's.
Speaker 5: More than the number of people who ever were killed
Speaker 5: in Israel on October like seventh. Yeah, that just doesn't
Speaker 5: matter because of like all of the racialized aspects of
Speaker 5: how of how like israel genocide campaign has been able
Speaker 5: to operate, Like you're not going to see memorials in
Speaker 5: the States or the thirteen for the thirteen hundred people
Speaker 5: killed in Lebanon the same way that we will for
Speaker 5: October seventh.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you might get them on a college campus for
Speaker 4: the cops destroy it.
Speaker 5: But like, that's and that's just in one week.
Speaker 3: It's over.
Speaker 5: They've done over a thousand air strikes the past week.
Speaker 5: They've killed all these people, and that's I don't Yeah,
Speaker 5: I don't know what else to say.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm going to close by on a slightly lighter
Speaker 4: note from this one of the like even by Trump's standards,
Speaker 4: an extremely weird quote that he gave about Gaza.
Speaker 3: This is from the Guardian.
Speaker 4: Quote asked by Hewitt, which is a guy whose podcast
Speaker 4: he was on, if Gaza could be transformed into Monaco
Speaker 4: if properly rebuilt, Trump replied to quote, it could be
Speaker 4: better than Monaco. It has the best location in the
Speaker 4: Middle East, the best water, the best everything it's got.
Speaker 4: It's the best. I've said for years. I've been there,
Speaker 4: and it's rough. It's a rough place before all the
Speaker 4: attacks and back and forth it's happened over the last
Speaker 4: couple of years. He went on. I mean they have
Speaker 4: the back of a plant facing the ocean. You know,
Speaker 4: there was no ocean as far as that was concerned.
Speaker 4: They never took advantage of it. You know, as a developer,
Speaker 4: it could be the most beautiful place the weather, the water,
Speaker 4: the whole thing in the climate. It was so beautiful
Speaker 4: it could be the best thing in the Middle East.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean that's in line with stuff that Kushner
Speaker 5: has been saying for a long time yep. And how
Speaker 5: they are hoping to turn Gaza into a part of Israel,
Speaker 5: specifically to do real estate development, to turn it into
Speaker 5: like a resort, to turn it into a golf course,
Speaker 5: and they're willing to kill tens of thousands of people
Speaker 5: to do it. And that is like the primary driver
Speaker 5: at least like for them, for like Trump's team, for
Speaker 5: why they are They're very happy to seet Nyahuu just
Speaker 5: do whatever he wants.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And I think there's something else here too, which is
Speaker 4: that like a lot of the kind of Marxist analysis
Speaker 4: of this from like a very sort of kind of
Speaker 4: Marxist has been about how Palestine has been rendered as
Speaker 4: like surplus population. This is the population that has been
Speaker 4: kicked out of the circuit of like capital accumulation. They're
Speaker 4: not necessary for capital to reproduce itself to make more capital,
Speaker 4: and so no one cares if you kill them. And
Speaker 4: I think that's wrong. And I think this quote is
Speaker 4: actually evidence of why they're wrong like this. You know,
Speaker 4: these people think purely, and like people like Trump right
Speaker 4: think purely in terms of economic assets, and there are
Speaker 4: there's an unbelievable amount of economic assets, like in Palestine
Speaker 4: that a regime that is like maybe only thirty percent
Speaker 4: less like hideously cruel and murderous like could have turned
Speaker 4: into viable economic engines. But the Israelis don't want that.
Speaker 4: They have made a decision, like an actual conscious decision
Speaker 4: that instead of trying to expect people for labor, they'd
Speaker 4: rather just fucking killed them all and try to steal
Speaker 4: their land.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: They have decided that this fucking real estate speculation bullshit
Speaker 4: on a bunch of land that they're taking by just
Speaker 4: fucking slaughtering all of its inhabitants is more efficient for
Speaker 4: them than even doing fucking regular capitalism. And that's an
Speaker 4: absolutely fucking hideous note. And it's the kind of thing
Speaker 4: that Biden is saying okay to and Trump fucking loves
Speaker 4: because fundamentally, like Trump's fucking real estate brain is pro genocide,
Speaker 4: and Biden doesn't give a shit about stopping them, and
Speaker 4: he's also pro this. So yeah, the gears of genocide
Speaker 4: continue to grind. The Israelis are plotting their attack against
Speaker 4: Iran that they're going to do in response to Ron
Speaker 4: shooting missiles at them in response to them killing the
Speaker 4: leader of festival. I don't know by the time this
Speaker 4: comes out, it's possible that attack will have happened.
Speaker 3: They're going to do something. It's going to make everything worse.
Speaker 4: But yeah, until then, this has been an update on
Speaker 4: the genocide and Palestine and the new invasion of Lebanon.
Speaker 2: Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
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