Speaker 1: Zone Media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted
Speaker 1: to let you know this is a compilation episode. So
Speaker 1: every episode of the week that just happened is here
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Speaker 1: If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
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Speaker 2: Welcome to Krapan here, but you know, very few things
Speaker 2: actually happen. I'm adre Siege of the Ju Channel Anthraism. Now,
Speaker 2: indigenousity is a contentious topic, no more than ever, not
Speaker 2: when it comes to flora and fauna. Of course, as
Speaker 2: far as I know, it's a pretty simple amount of
Speaker 2: being considered indigenous to an ecosystem when they haven't been
Speaker 2: introduced through human intervention or manipulated by human cultivation. As
Speaker 2: over millions of the years, these living things have become
Speaker 2: well suited to their habitats carefully adopts the region's soil,
Speaker 2: climate and food web. When it comes to to people
Speaker 2: who're talking politics, they quick some confusion about what it
Speaker 2: means to be indigenous, especially when questions of land rights,
Speaker 2: autonomy and reparations, and the equation. Most people understand that
Speaker 2: Native American nations and Aboriginal Australians are indigenous, but they
Speaker 2: don't really know what that means. Some might then ask, well,
Speaker 2: if indigenous just means originating from a place they're on
Speaker 2: all Homo sapiens indigenous to Africa, why should one group's
Speaker 2: claim of indigenity take precedence over any other. Others may
Speaker 2: ask the question, if a group occupies a region for
Speaker 2: several generations, does that then make them indigenous? A White
Speaker 2: Americans indigenous if their family has been there since the
Speaker 2: founding of the US. A French fupial indigenous to France,
Speaker 2: and if so, does that somehow justify there's enophobia towards
Speaker 2: refugees When generations of martialized groups have been struggling to
Speaker 2: retain their social, cultural, economic, and political sovereignty and achieve justice, reparations,
Speaker 2: and liberation after centuries of oppression and attempting annihilation, we
Speaker 2: to stand in informed solidarity. Thus, it is vital for
Speaker 2: us to understand what it means to be indigenous from
Speaker 2: what I gather through my research, which was focused on
Speaker 2: the work of just a few North American indigenous scholars
Speaker 2: Taiyaki Alfred, Jeff cord to Cell, and Robin wild Chimera.
Speaker 2: Additionity can be interpreted as a matter of colonial relationship
Speaker 2: and or as a matter of a land relationship, a
Speaker 2: relationship to place. These two definitions are, of course, highly overlappened.
Speaker 2: You really can't get away from how colonization informed the
Speaker 2: land and vice versa. Let's start with the first interpretation
Speaker 2: of indignity. According to Taiyaki Alfred and Jeff Gordicell, indigenousness
Speaker 2: is an identity constructed, shaped, and lived in the politicized
Speaker 2: context of contemporary colonialism. It is an existence oppositional to
Speaker 2: colonial societies and states, and a consciousness of struggle against
Speaker 2: such forces of colonization. No two indigenous groups are exactly alike.
Speaker 2: Of course, there are significant diversity in their cultures, contexts,
Speaker 2: and relationships with colonial forces, but they do share that
Speaker 2: struggle to survive as distinct peoples in an environment hostile
Speaker 2: to their existence. Efforts to marginalize and eradicate indigenous peoples
Speaker 2: may not always be as avoid as they once will,
Speaker 2: with some noticeably overt exceptions, but the historic and ongoing
Speaker 2: dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the erasure of Indigenous histories, geographies,
Speaker 2: and languages, and the current situation of deprivation persist. Nonetheless,
Speaker 2: even so called reconciliation efforts are tainted by the reality
Speaker 2: that Indigenous peoples remain, as in earlier colonial eras fundamentally
Speaker 2: occupied and disempowered peoples, stripped of autonomy in their own
Speaker 2: homelands and pressured into surrender and cooperation with an inherently
Speaker 2: unjust colonial order just to ensure their basic physical survival.
Speaker 2: By this understanding of indigenoity, it can be set up
Speaker 2: without a colonizer, without systems in place and actions being
Speaker 2: taken to marginalize, disempower and destroy their societies in favor
Speaker 2: of a colonial replacement. There's no need for the concept
Speaker 2: of indigenous. Without colonialism, there will be no status of
Speaker 2: indigenous to be imposed upon the groups of people whose
Speaker 2: very existence and claim to the land is an obstacle.
Speaker 2: It is that colonial endeavor. The un work in group
Speaker 2: of Indigenous issues, drew partially from this understanding when attempting
Speaker 2: to define indigenous peoples in nineteen eighty six, quote Indigenous communities, peoples,
Speaker 2: and nations are those which have in a historical continuity
Speaker 2: with pre invasion and pre colonial societies that developed in
Speaker 2: their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors the societies
Speaker 2: now prevailing on those territories or parts of them. They
Speaker 2: form at present non dominant sectors of society and are
Speaker 2: determined to preserve, develop, and transmit to future generations the
Speaker 2: ancestral territories and the ethnic identity as the basis of
Speaker 2: their continued existems as peoples in accordance with their own
Speaker 2: cultural patterns, social institutions, and legal systems. By this definition,
Speaker 2: Amerindians in the Caribbean, Aboriginal Australians, Adivasis in India, Native
Speaker 2: North and South Americans, Siberians, Ainu, Goods, Syrians, Yazidi, Palestinians,
Speaker 2: amasaf Sami, Basque, Samei Basques, Hawaiians, Mari, san Guti, Papuans, Chams,
Speaker 2: and many more are all indigenous peoples. There are layers
Speaker 2: of nuance yet to be highlighted. The colonial situation is
Speaker 2: not a simple binary of indigenous and colonists. For example,
Speaker 2: in much of the Americas, Africans who were indigenous to
Speaker 2: their own homelands were displaced and enslaved under the colonial regime.
Speaker 2: They may not be indigenous to the Americas, but they
Speaker 2: weren't trivants attla colonial society either. In fact, someone slaved
Speaker 2: for inditionous people as well. At the same time, some
Speaker 2: members of the African diaspora would join existing indigenous societies
Speaker 2: and later create their own, such as the Garifuna of
Speaker 2: Saint Vincent, Honduras and Belize. Meanwhile, in modern day Africa,
Speaker 2: so all African ethnic groups can technically be considered indigenous
Speaker 2: to the continent. The concept of specific indigenous peoples within
Speaker 2: Africa refers to those groups whose traditional practices and land
Speaker 2: claims have been placed outside of the dominant state systems
Speaker 2: and exist in the conflict with the objectives and policies
Speaker 2: implemented by post colonial governments, companies, and the surrounding dominant societies.
Speaker 2: Such a definition can similarly be applied to modern day Asia,
Speaker 2: where governments like Indonesia, India, China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh have
Speaker 2: infamously refused to recognize the existence of indigenous peoples within
Speaker 2: their territories. These countries, like most countries in the world,
Speaker 2: did not ratify the International Labe Organization Convention one sixty
Speaker 2: nine in nineteen eighty nine, known as the Indigenous and
Speaker 2: Tribal People's Convention concerning the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The
Speaker 2: UN's Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples passed in
Speaker 2: two thousand and seven, would however, be voted on approvingly
Speaker 2: by most of the world, including the same countries that
Speaker 2: haven't recognized the Indigenous peoples within their borders. All four
Speaker 2: of the countries have rejected that particular resolution. Canada, America,
Speaker 2: Australia and New Zealand would later change their vote in
Speaker 2: favor of the declaration, of course, with their own tact
Speaker 2: on interpretations an emphasis on the declarations legally non binding nature,
Speaker 2: as is to be expected from settler colonial societies. There
Speaker 2: are approximately two hundred and fifty to six hundred million
Speaker 2: Indigenous peoples around the world today, each facing the reality
Speaker 2: of having their lands, cultures, and forms of organization attacked,
Speaker 2: co opted, commodified, and reconstructed by various states, regardless of
Speaker 2: their legal recognition. Inditionous peoples themselves have long understood that
Speaker 2: the endurances of people will continue to depend on their
Speaker 2: connection to land, culture, and community, which brings us to
Speaker 2: the second interpretation of indigenity, closely related to the first
Speaker 2: as an identity rooted in a relationship to place, whether
Speaker 2: that be physical as with land, social as with community,
Speaker 2: or cultural as with culture and justus. Relationship to land
Speaker 2: must be reciprocal, with give and take, based on a
Speaker 2: view of the land and water as a gift that
Speaker 2: must be cared for over generations. According to Hodenosuni mythology,
Speaker 2: as recounted by Robin waal Chimura in Breadain Sweet Grass,
Speaker 2: the mother goddess Skywoman came to the land as an
Speaker 2: immigrant from the heavens, but became indigenous by listening to
Speaker 2: the land, learn from other species to understand how to
Speaker 2: live on it, given as she received, and caring for
Speaker 2: the earth and its keepers for the sake of those
Speaker 2: who would inherit it when she passed on. In their view,
Speaker 2: the land is identity, It is ancestral connection, It is pharmacy.
Speaker 2: It is a library, and it is home, the source
Speaker 2: of all that sustains, and the sacred ground upon which
Speaker 2: those would observe their responsibility to the world. By this understanding,
Speaker 2: it can be said that indigenity is born out of
Speaker 2: land connection, established through observation and relationship. Indigenous peoples have
Speaker 2: historically been mobile, either by choice or by force, but
Speaker 2: regardless of where they might find themselves home land or not,
Speaker 2: even if there were other indigenous peoples in their new environments,
Speaker 2: as long as they observed the processes and ceremonies of
Speaker 2: generational relationship building based on mutual respect, understanding, and love
Speaker 2: for the land in common, they remained indigenous. So then
Speaker 2: the question might arise, why aren't settlers to place if
Speaker 2: their family has lived in land for generations. The answer
Speaker 2: lies in relationship. Settler society as a whole is based
Speaker 2: on an extractivist capitalist relationship with the land, focus on
Speaker 2: exploiting the land and its resources. Without a relationship with
Speaker 2: the land that extends reverence to a deeper understanding of
Speaker 2: its complex interdependence, settler society can never become indigenous to place.
Speaker 2: Of course, it goes without saying that every indigenous group
Speaker 2: or indigenous practice is perfectly sustainable. Some have been rather
Speaker 2: destructive and even speciocidal. But if we are to work
Speaker 2: with this definition, to conceive of being indigenous is something
Speaker 2: based on cultivating a long term relationship to place. That
Speaker 2: indigenity must be contingent on maintaining the health and longevity
Speaker 2: of that relationship. Without community, there cannot be indigenity, much
Speaker 2: like the trees in a forest are interconnected by subterranean
Speaker 2: networks of my curacy which enable them to share resources
Speaker 2: and survive as a whole. In order to be indigenous
Speaker 2: to place, community must exist to sustain that web of
Speaker 2: reciprocitude the land so that it all may flourish. Inditionity
Speaker 2: to place extends to culture as well, which is deeply
Speaker 2: tied to the land. It develops on cultural ceremonies. According
Speaker 2: to Chimera, focus attention, attention becomes intention. If you stand
Speaker 2: together and profess a thing before your community, it holds
Speaker 2: you accountable. Ceremonies transcend the boundaries of the individual and
Speaker 2: resonate beyond the human realm. Such practices should be reciprocal,
Speaker 2: as ceremonies create communities, and communities create ceremonies as well
Speaker 2: as organic, not appropriate and existing cultural celebrations or attending
Speaker 2: toward the commercial. Our social fabric has become withered and
Speaker 2: fragmented by the pace of modern life, leaving little room
Speaker 2: for ceremonies outside of religion or rights of personal transitions
Speaker 2: such as birthdays, weddings, and funerals. But ceremonies and the
Speaker 2: shared emotions they generate are part of what builds community.
Speaker 2: When we gather for graduations, for example, a sense of pride, relief, nostalgia,
Speaker 2: and excitement build in the social atmosphere, hopefully fuel in
Speaker 2: the conference and strength of those who are going on
Speaker 2: to pursue their passions. But Kimura wants us to imagine
Speaker 2: standing by a river flooded with those same feelings as
Speaker 2: the salmon margins the auditorium of their estuary. Being indigenous
Speaker 2: to place means cultivating cultural ceremonies that honor the land
Speaker 2: and all the cycles and seasons of life within it.
Speaker 2: Now that we have a clearer understanding of these two
Speaker 2: distinct yet related understandings of indigenity as both an identity
Speaker 2: formed as part of a cluar relationship and an identity
Speaker 2: rooted in a relationship to place, I believe that we
Speaker 2: should explore how this understanding can be applied to decolonization
Speaker 2: and social revolution. Decolonization is the process of unsettling clonial
Speaker 2: power structures, whether that be through overturning acts of inclosure
Speaker 2: by building new commons, overturning acts of possession by reclaiming
Speaker 2: our spaces and identities, or overturning acts of administration through
Speaker 2: social revolution. Social revolution is a complete transformation of our society, economy, culture, philosophy, technology,
Speaker 2: relationships and politics, an ongoing and heterogenous change in people's powers, tribes,
Speaker 2: and consciousness through practical education, as well as a progressive
Speaker 2: breakdown and transformation of existence, systems and institutions, punctuated by
Speaker 2: major ruptures and advances or with the aim of self liberation.
Speaker 2: It takes confrontation with the powers that be, non cooperation
Speaker 2: with the established order of things, and prefiguration of new
Speaker 2: social relations, institutions, and infrastructure and practices in the here
Speaker 2: and now. If we maintain the interpretation of additionality as
Speaker 2: based on one's position and including relationship, then the deco
Speaker 2: organization process will entail the abolition of that relationship as
Speaker 2: the premise of identity and therefore the abolition of indigeneity
Speaker 2: as a status. Colonial legacies have effectively left indigenous communities
Speaker 2: legally and politically compartmentalized and culturally, socially and spiritually weakened
Speaker 2: within the narrow parameters of the state, where they end
Speaker 2: up diverting the crucial energy necessary to confront state power
Speaker 2: and develop the process of the econization toward mimicking the
Speaker 2: practices the dominant non indigenous legal political institutions through for example,
Speaker 2: land claims and self government processes. What the deconalization movement needs,
Speaker 2: according to Maya Yucateco poet Fliciano Sanchez Chan, are zones
Speaker 2: of refuge, places where intitionous knowledge can be guarded, exercised,
Speaker 2: and sustained. In Mesoamerica, these zones of refuge represent safe
Speaker 2: spaces where the diverse cultural expressions of the region can
Speaker 2: persist in spite of state for us to create a
Speaker 2: homogenized Mexican national identity. The concept of zones of refuge
Speaker 2: is consistent of the traditional objectives of cultural preservation and
Speaker 2: autonomy or the social revolutionary aims of prefiguration, which seeks
Speaker 2: to sow the seeds of future relationships, institutions and practices
Speaker 2: in the here and now. To the expansion of zones
Speaker 2: of refuge and other institutions of resistance and autonomy, we
Speaker 2: can realize declonization in reality. But again, this idea of
Speaker 2: addigenerative econization is just one understanding of the term, waiting
Speaker 2: to explore another approach to the declonization one that recognizes
Speaker 2: the power and potential of indigenous relationships with the land. Globally,
Speaker 2: the UN recognizes that ADDITIONALUS people to protect eighty percent
Speaker 2: of the world's remaining in biodiversity, and scientists have shown
Speaker 2: that indigenous management practices in Brazil, Canada, and Australia provides
Speaker 2: the same level of ecosystem support and protection as any
Speaker 2: imposed protected area, which makes it abundantly. Theclonal approach of
Speaker 2: conservation via dispossession removes the very people who take care
Speaker 2: of our most important ecosystems. Over the course of Braid
Speaker 2: and Sweet Grass, Robin wall Chimer highlights the reciprocal relationship
Speaker 2: with the earth that many indigenous groups, including her Potwatomi culture,
Speaker 2: have cultivated over generations. The principles of the gift economy
Speaker 2: is an essential aspect of this relationship, which forms the
Speaker 2: basis of indigenity to place. The gift economy is a
Speaker 2: system of exchange where resources and services are shared without
Speaker 2: expectation of remuneration or quit broquo. The gift economy extends
Speaker 2: not just the people, but also our non human can
Speaker 2: caring and being cared for. In turn, if we want
Speaker 2: to restore that relationship, we can start by planting a garden.
Speaker 2: A garden could be a heathen for native flora, arrested
Speaker 2: in place for varius fauna, a feast for dangered pollinators,
Speaker 2: a sustainer of local water table, and a hub of
Speaker 2: thriving soil. Not only does it benefit both our health
Speaker 2: and the health of the planet, but is also anurstry
Speaker 2: for nurture in a connection that extends beyond that small
Speaker 2: patch of dute. I don't believe that merely building a
Speaker 2: connection of the land can make someone indigenous, but not
Speaker 2: being indigenous doesn't exclude us from aiding the renewal of
Speaker 2: the world. Kimer uses the example of the broad leaf
Speaker 2: planting or son as the white man's footprint. Despite not
Speaker 2: being indigenous to the Americas, it has become an honored
Speaker 2: member of the plant community because it thrives as a
Speaker 2: good neighbor instead of as a destructive invader, while other
Speaker 2: invasive species poison the soil or overrun the land. The
Speaker 2: white man's footprint to call a strategy of helpful co existence,
Speaker 2: even sharing some of its healing properties with those who
Speaker 2: ask of it. It is not indigenous, but it has
Speaker 2: become naturalized. Quote being naturalized to a place means to
Speaker 2: live as if this is the land that feeds you,
Speaker 2: as if these are the strains from which you to
Speaker 2: build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized
Speaker 2: is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Hey,
Speaker 2: you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To
Speaker 2: become naturalized is to live as if your children's future matters,
Speaker 2: To take care of the land as if our lives
Speaker 2: and the lives of all our relatives depend on it,
Speaker 2: because they do. Decononization requires to uproot invasive, irreverent and
Speaker 2: destructive individuals, capitalist settlers, societies in order to rebuild in
Speaker 2: a way that treats the land like the home that
Speaker 2: we share and are responsible for. It will require us to
Speaker 2: receive an honor the knowledge in the land, to care
Speaker 2: for its keepers and pass on that knowledge to the next generation.
Speaker 2: And it is crucial that we elevate indigenous voices, knowledges,
Speaker 2: and pedagogical approaches in pursuit of this aim or power
Speaker 2: to all the people. This has been a graper peace.
Speaker 3: Hello, welcome, this is it could happen here and I
Speaker 3: am shreen And today is another silly little episode. Well
Speaker 3: it's not silly well, it is silly, but I think
Speaker 3: it's actually also interesting, so maybe you will too. If not. Oops.
Speaker 3: But the point of this is I do not like
Speaker 3: being on my phone. I hate being on my phone.
Speaker 3: I've always hated being on my phone. I waited until
Speaker 3: the last possible moment I could, until I even got
Speaker 3: a smartphone, but I just hate it. I hate texting.
Speaker 3: I hate it all. And so especially the last several years,
Speaker 3: I've been trying to read more and it's been great,
Speaker 3: but sometimes my brain just needs a task for me
Speaker 3: to do, like with my hands. So I can trick
Speaker 3: myself to thinking I'm being productive just because I'm physically
Speaker 3: doing something, and recently that's something puzzles. And look, I
Speaker 3: like all puzzles. You can't show me a puzzle that
Speaker 3: I won't at least try physical jigsaw puzzles that can
Speaker 3: take hours or days to complete, like sign me Up.
Speaker 3: But ever since getting a cat, it feels a little
Speaker 3: too precarious to commit to one of these jigsaw puzzles
Speaker 3: for the fear of her prancing around on the pieces
Speaker 3: or knocking them over under furniture to ever be found again,
Speaker 3: or chewing on them or eating them, and so the
Speaker 3: puzzles I have been increasingly turning to recently, which I
Speaker 3: have always loved are word and number puzzles, Sudoku, can
Speaker 3: can classics, incredible crosswords, cryptograms, code breakers. I can do
Speaker 3: those for hours. I will say, though I do find
Speaker 3: word searches pretty tedious and boring, But if I was
Speaker 3: completely out of options, I would probably do those two.
Speaker 3: There's just something really satisfying about physically putting pen to
Speaker 3: paper and solving something. And yes, I always use pen
Speaker 3: because I live on the edge, and as I said,
Speaker 3: I do not like being on my phone. So I've
Speaker 3: been buying puzzle books so I can have a physical
Speaker 3: thing to write on. I've had puzzle books for years,
Speaker 3: but recently it's become a bit of a problem. I
Speaker 3: bought four different puzzle books in the span of like
Speaker 3: two weeks, and not because I completed all the puzzles
Speaker 3: in them per se, but because I just completed the
Speaker 3: ones I wanted to do, usually skipping the word searches
Speaker 3: or long riddles or whatever. And honestly, a much better
Speaker 3: use of my fricking time could go to something like
Speaker 3: learning literally anything else, like picking up a new skill,
Speaker 3: learning a new language. But no my smooth brain wants
Speaker 3: to do a fucking puzzle, so I do a puzzle,
Speaker 3: multiple puzzles.
Speaker 4: Usually.
Speaker 3: Maybe you have noticed a trend, dear listener, in my
Speaker 3: episodes that are not about Palestine or the so called
Speaker 3: Middle East. Most likely you haven't noticed, only because I
Speaker 3: think about myself far more than anybody else does. But
Speaker 3: in order to not want to jump off a cliff
Speaker 3: every day, I've realized I need to write and learn
Speaker 3: about things that I like. Wow, incredible discovery, But for real,
Speaker 3: I think we all need a balance of making sure
Speaker 3: we're informed about the world and connecting with our humanity,
Speaker 3: as well as doing things as human beings that allow
Speaker 3: us to continue to want to be informed about the
Speaker 3: world and connect with our humanity. So one day I
Speaker 3: won't need this big preamble before every episode that's not
Speaker 3: about Palestine. But today is not the day anyways, Because
Speaker 3: I love puzzles. I wanted to learn about puzzles. How
Speaker 3: long have humans been putting together word and number games
Speaker 3: for the sole purpose of exercising our minds or dare
Speaker 3: I say, have fun? I needed to know it's truly
Speaker 3: one of the most wholesome things this species has ever done.
Speaker 3: So I did some research. This episode is going to
Speaker 3: be about the crossword. That's where I wanted to start.
Speaker 3: Most of us would agree that the crossword is the
Speaker 3: most popular or well known word game or word puzzle.
Speaker 3: I will admit that every time I see a random
Speaker 3: newspaper in a cafe or hotel, lobby or something, I
Speaker 3: always steal the crossword and I ignore everything else because
Speaker 3: now is simply not the time. But how did the
Speaker 3: crossword come to be as this ubiquitous, normal thing. The
Speaker 3: crossword is a fairly recent invention, born out of desperation.
Speaker 3: Arthur Wynn is regarded as the inventor of the modern
Speaker 3: crossword puzzle. He was born in eighteen seventy one in Liverpool, England,
Speaker 3: and his father was the editor of the local newspaper,
Speaker 3: the Liverpool Mercury. When Arthur was nineteen, he immigrated to
Speaker 3: the United States, settling for a time in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Speaker 3: While in Pittsburgh, Winn worked on the Pittsburgh Press newspaper,
Speaker 3: and he played the violin in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
Speaker 3: We Love a Well Rounded chap He later moved to
Speaker 3: New York City, where he worked as an editor for
Speaker 3: the New York World newspaper, and then in nineteen thirteen,
Speaker 3: he invented the crossword puzzle. While working at the New
Speaker 3: York World, he needed something to fill up the space
Speaker 3: in the Christmas edition of the paper's fun supplement Fun
Speaker 3: in all caps, so he took advantage of the new
Speaker 3: technology at the time that could print blank grids cheaply,
Speaker 3: and he created a diamond shaped set of boxes with
Speaker 3: clues to fill in the blanks smack in the center
Speaker 3: of the Fun supplement. So for the December twenty first,
Speaker 3: nineteen thirteen edition of The New York World, he introduced
Speaker 3: this puzzle with a diamond shape and a hollow center,
Speaker 3: with the letters f un already being filled in. He
Speaker 3: called it a word cross puzzle, and nearly overnight the
Speaker 3: word cross puzzle went from a space filling ploy to
Speaker 3: the most popular feature of the page. A few weeks
Speaker 3: after the first word cross appeared, the name of the
Speaker 3: puzzle was actually changed to crossword, but this was only
Speaker 3: a result of a typesetting error. However, these puzzles have
Speaker 3: been known as crosswords ever since. Arthur Wynn didn't necessarily
Speaker 3: invent word puzzles, though ever since we've had language, we've
Speaker 3: played games with words. Crosswords are basically where two long
Speaker 3: standing strands of word puzzles interconnect, the first being word squares,
Speaker 3: which demand visual logic to understand the puzzle but aren't
Speaker 3: necessarily using deliberate deception, and the second being riddles, which
Speaker 3: use wordplay to misdirect the solver but don't necessarily have
Speaker 3: any kind of graphic component to work through. Maybe you're
Speaker 3: wondering what's a word square. Maybe you're not wondering that,
Speaker 3: but I'm going to tell you anyway. The word square
Speaker 3: is the direct precursor of the crossword grid. It's a
Speaker 3: special kind of acrostic puzzle in which the same words
Speaker 3: can be read across and down. The number of letters
Speaker 3: in the square is called its order. While two squares
Speaker 3: and three squares are easy to create in English, by
Speaker 3: the time you reach order six, you're very likely to
Speaker 3: get stuck. An order ten square is a holy grail
Speaker 3: for those who are regarded as logologists, that is, wordplay experts.
Speaker 3: So a word square is a puzzle requiring the discovery
Speaker 3: of a set of words of equal length, written one
Speaker 3: under another to read the same down as a cross Apparently,
Speaker 3: the ancient Romans loved word puzzles. The first known word square,
Speaker 3: the so called Sadder square, was found on a slab
Speaker 3: in the ruins of POMPEII. The sadder square, which I
Speaker 3: don't know if I'm saying that right, but it's spelled
Speaker 3: sat r. It's also known as the rotess square, depending
Speaker 3: on which way you read it, because rotess is satur backwards.
Speaker 3: And I say this because word order apparently doesn't matter
Speaker 3: in Latin. But this square that was found is a
Speaker 3: five x five five word Latin palindrome. I'm gonna say
Speaker 3: it in Latin, but I'll tell you what it means,
Speaker 3: so apologies on this pronunciation. But satoor a repo, tenant
Speaker 3: opera rotus the farmer, a repo works, a plow a palindrome.
Speaker 3: Just a reminder that it's something spelled the same way
Speaker 3: forwards and deck. So that's not necessarily the English translation,
Speaker 3: but in Latin that's what it is. Author Adrian Raffel
Speaker 3: described the Sadder square as the quote Kilroy was here
Speaker 3: of the Roman Empire for those who don't know or
Speaker 3: need a refresher. Not going to pretend I neew this either,
Speaker 3: but kil Roy was Here was a popular American graffiti
Speaker 3: that was seen overseas throughout World War II. The words
Speaker 3: Kilroy was here were accompanied by a cartoon drawing of
Speaker 3: a man looking over a wall, and this became a
Speaker 3: popular piece of graffiti that was drawn by American troops
Speaker 3: in the Atlantic theater and then later in the Pacific theater.
Speaker 3: It eventually came to be a universal sign that American
Speaker 3: soldiers had come through an area and left their mark,
Speaker 3: and then during the Second World War, Kilroy became so
Speaker 3: popular that this graffiti could be found everywhere. It was
Speaker 3: on shipholds, bathrooms, bridges, and it was painted on the
Speaker 3: shells of Air Force missiles. Its origins most likely come
Speaker 3: from a British cartoon and the name of an American
Speaker 3: shipyard inspector. The myths surrounding it are numerous, and they
Speaker 3: often center on a German belief that Kilroy was some
Speaker 3: kind of superspy who could go anywhere he pleased. Apparently,
Speaker 3: there are two Kilroy inscriptions hidden in the World War
Speaker 3: II Memorial in Washington, d c. And these were found
Speaker 3: tucked in the corners of both the Atlantic and Pacific
Speaker 3: sides of the memorial, and so the Satter Square was
Speaker 3: essentially the Kilroy was here of the Roman Empire. The
Speaker 3: square was found scrawled from Rome to Corinium, which is
Speaker 3: in modern England, to Dura Europos, which is modern Syria.
Speaker 3: It's unclear why this ancient meme was such a thing.
Speaker 3: Maybe it was the first meme ever. I guess it
Speaker 3: depends on what your definition of a meme is. To
Speaker 3: repeat what the square says. The words in the square
Speaker 3: are sator arepo, tenant, opera rotas the farmer arepo works
Speaker 3: on a plow. A repo is what's known as a
Speaker 3: haypax legomenon, which means it is a term of which
Speaker 3: only one instance of its use is recorded or can
Speaker 3: be found. This means that the Satter Square is the
Speaker 3: only place where the word arepo shows up in the
Speaker 3: entire corpus of Latin literature. The best working theory as
Speaker 3: to why this is is that it's a proper name,
Speaker 3: invented only to make the square work. But the Satar
Speaker 3: square has more tricks up its sleeve. If you reshuffle
Speaker 3: the letters around the central end, which was in the
Speaker 3: word tenant, you can make a Greek cross that reads
Speaker 3: pator noster in both the and This means our father
Speaker 3: I mean, come on, so clever, and then the four
Speaker 3: leftover letters, the two a's and two o's. Those stand
Speaker 3: for alpha and omega. Early Christians might have used the
Speaker 3: square as a discreete way to signal their presence to
Speaker 3: one another, and the Satar square stuck around for a
Speaker 3: very very long time. In the Middle Ages, it was
Speaker 3: regarded as a magical object, gaining a reputation as a
Speaker 3: talisman against fire, theft, and illness. The devil apparently gets
Speaker 3: confused by palindromes, so with the devil not knowing which
Speaker 3: way to read, a five x five two dimensional palindrome
Speaker 3: is an extra powerful devil repellent. The Satar square also
Speaker 3: appears etched into tablets as a prevention against mad dogs,
Speaker 3: a snake bite cure, and a charm to protect cattle
Speaker 3: from witchcraft. While word squares have maintained their quasi mail
Speaker 3: magic reputation for hundreds of years to come. Other visual
Speaker 3: word games also became popular during the nineteenth century. In
Speaker 3: the Victorian era, visual word games became extremely popular. These
Speaker 3: visual word games include double acrostics, which paved the way
Speaker 3: pretty directly for the crossword. Queen Victoria I guess was
Speaker 3: regarded as a crucioverbialist, which apparently means a person skillful
Speaker 3: in creating or solving crossword puzzles. In researching all of this,
Speaker 3: I have learned many English words. I had no idea
Speaker 3: or even words to begin with. So crucioverbalist Queen Victoria
Speaker 3: constructed what's known as the Windsor Enigma to teach her
Speaker 3: subject how to bring coals to Newcastle. In her eighteen
Speaker 3: sixty one book Victorian Enigmas, author Charlotte Eliza Cappell a
Speaker 3: tribute to the Windsor Enigma puzzle to Queen Victoria. The
Speaker 3: Queen was known to be fond of riddles and enigmas.
Speaker 3: One hoax apparently kept her occupied for half a week.
Speaker 3: From a passage from the Private Life of the Queen
Speaker 3: by quote one of Her Majesty's servants, written in eighteen
Speaker 3: ninety seven, quote, her Majesty, Queen Victoria takes delight in
Speaker 3: a clever riddle or rebus, but on one occasion she
Speaker 3: was very angry at having been hoaxed over a riddle
Speaker 3: which was sent to her with a letter to the
Speaker 3: effect that it had been made by the Bishop of Salisbury.
Speaker 3: For four days, the Queen and Prince Albert sought for
Speaker 3: the reply. When Charles Murray, controller of the household, was
Speaker 3: directed to write to the bishop and ask for the solution.
Speaker 3: The answer received was that the bishop had not made
Speaker 3: the riddle nor could he solve it.
Speaker 4: End quote.
Speaker 3: Okay, Queen, we love feminism anyway. The Windsor enigma was
Speaker 3: basically like a riddle. And this is what it said
Speaker 3: the Windsor enigma. The initials of the following places formed
Speaker 3: the name of a town in England, and the finals
Speaker 3: read up words what that town is famous for. And
Speaker 3: these are the nine clues in this enigma. A city
Speaker 3: in Italy, a river in Germany, a town in the
Speaker 3: United States, a town in North America, a town in Holland,
Speaker 3: the Turkish name for Constantinople, a town in Bosnia. I
Speaker 3: wasn't saying that with the list. It's not Bosnia. It's
Speaker 3: spelled Bothnia, just fy. A city in Greece, a circle
Speaker 3: on the globe. So when you solve these nine clues,
Speaker 3: the nine letters which are on the left hand side
Speaker 3: of these answers, it spells out Newcastle, and then on
Speaker 3: the right side it says coal mines. When you read
Speaker 3: it from the bottom to the top, as the riddle
Speaker 3: says to do so, Newcastle's famous for its coal mines.
Speaker 3: You know what else is famous for its coal mines?
Speaker 3: I can't actually answer that question. I have no idea,
Speaker 3: but here's some ads. Okay, we're back. So. Another old
Speaker 3: word game, which was a precursor to the crossword, is
Speaker 3: a game called doublets. It was invented by Oxford mathematician
Speaker 3: Charles Dogson, who was better known by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll.
Speaker 3: In this game, you transform one word into another of
Speaker 3: equal length, changing a single letter at a time, using
Speaker 3: as few moves as possible. All the linking steps also
Speaker 3: have to be legitimate words. A lot of modern puzzle
Speaker 3: books have doublets in them, including a bunch of the
Speaker 3: ones that I have, and they're pretty fun. As in
Speaker 3: a crossword, the process of moving stepwise letter to letter
Speaker 3: forces you to think about all the possible word combinations,
Speaker 3: and each doublet has a theme, a kind of mini
Speaker 3: alchemy that keeps the words all somehow related to each other.
Speaker 3: And Charles Doxon's are Lewis Carroll's eighteen eighty book Doublets
Speaker 3: a word Puzzle. There are examples of this where he
Speaker 3: says to quote, drive pig into sty raise four to five,
Speaker 3: make wheat into bread. So the idea is that those
Speaker 3: words become the other one with a couple of changes.
Speaker 3: A classic classic word puzzle. And we're inching closer and
Speaker 3: closer to how the crossword came to be, and the
Speaker 3: crossword came about when riddles entered the grid. Crossword clues
Speaker 3: trace their origins to riddles. Riddles have been around since
Speaker 3: the dawn of time and can be found in basically
Speaker 3: every religious book, in ar scene, in mythology, in literature
Speaker 3: for centuries and centuries. The Exeter Book is an eleventh
Speaker 3: century Old English manuscript and it's the largest and perhaps
Speaker 3: oldest known manuscript of old English literature, containing about a
Speaker 3: sixth of all the Old English poetry that has survived
Speaker 3: until today. That's a lot. And it has about one
Speaker 3: hundred riddles of all types. They say there are quote
Speaker 3: unquote about one hundred because these riddles still to this
Speaker 3: day drive people crazy. In the ten centuries since their composition,
Speaker 3: scholars haven't conclusively solved every riddle. There are four basic
Speaker 3: ways that quote riddle logic operates. One true riddles, two wordplay,
Speaker 3: three neck riddles and four anti riddles. The enigma, which
Speaker 3: is a metaphorical statement that's designed to feel like it
Speaker 3: has one solution but actually contains unresolvable multitudes, is different
Speaker 3: than this. The word enigma comes from a Greek word
Speaker 3: that means quote to speak in riddles. It applies to
Speaker 3: things as well as people that puzzle one's mind. Examples
Speaker 3: of enigmas can be Egypt's ancient pyramids and how the
Speaker 3: hell they were built, Amelia Earhart going poof, or the
Speaker 3: Bermuda Triangle being weird. Plenty of enigma occur in modern
Speaker 3: times too. One example that people point to of this
Speaker 3: is the twenty fourteen disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines Flight
Speaker 3: three seventy. On March eighth, twenty fourteen, the airplane departed
Speaker 3: Kuala Lumpur. It was bound for Beijing, China, but thirty
Speaker 3: nine minutes after takeoff, the plane disappeared. It quite literally
Speaker 3: vanished without a trace, becoming one of aviation's greatest mysteries,
Speaker 3: and over a decade later, investigators still do not know
Speaker 3: exactly what happened to the plane and its two hundred
Speaker 3: and thirty nine passengers. But just a few months ago
Speaker 3: In March of twenty twenty four, Malaysia's government said it
Speaker 3: may renew the hunt for MH three seventy after an
Speaker 3: American marine robotics company that tried to find the plane
Speaker 3: in twenty eighteen proposed a fresh search. A massive multinational
Speaker 3: search at the time in the southern Indian Ocean where
Speaker 3: the jet is believed to have crashed, found nothing apart
Speaker 3: from some small fragments that later won. Nobodies or wregage
Speaker 3: have ever been found spooky, so that's an enigma. Examples
Speaker 3: of enigmas with word puzzles could be something like what
Speaker 3: is the sound of one hand clapping? These are logic
Speaker 3: knots that want to stay knotted or not solved. Uh huh,
Speaker 3: there's another little pun for you or riddle anyway. Riddles,
Speaker 3: on the other hand, do want to be solved. A
Speaker 3: true riddle one of these four basic ways that riddle
Speaker 3: logic operates transforms think a into solution B. True riddles
Speaker 3: rely on a logical connection that's not obvious on the surface,
Speaker 3: so you need to think more deeply about it and
Speaker 3: maybe a non conventional or non literal way in order
Speaker 3: to reach the solution. When riddles become baked into culture,
Speaker 3: they can turn into like inside jokes. Riddles have been
Speaker 3: around for millennia, and the best riddles have been repeated
Speaker 3: for just as long. One quote unquote famous riddle, if
Speaker 3: you will, is the sphinx's riddle in Greek mythology. Just
Speaker 3: some background on the Greek sphinx, because I personally found
Speaker 3: it fascinating and very interesting. But the Greek sphinx was
Speaker 3: clearly inspired by the Egyptian sphinx, but the Greeks modified
Speaker 3: the sphinx and made it their own. The Greek sphinx
Speaker 3: had a woman's face and breasts and a lion's body
Speaker 3: with bird's wings, while the Egyptian sphinx had a male
Speaker 3: head which could be either human or animal. The word
Speaker 3: sphinx is Greek and it means quote strangler, perhaps stemming
Speaker 3: from the fact that lionesses usually kill their prey by
Speaker 3: strangling it. Since sphinxes were seen as very intimidating, the
Speaker 3: Greeks frequently put them on gravestones to frighten a way
Speaker 3: would be grave robbers. This use is called apotropaeic, meaning
Speaker 3: causing someone to turn away. Most of the examples of
Speaker 3: ancient Greek sphinxes that we have today are from ancient
Speaker 3: Great Gavestones. So in Greek mythology, there was one famous
Speaker 3: sphinx who turned up in Thebes shortly after its king
Speaker 3: Lias had been killed. While on his way to consult
Speaker 3: the Delphic oracle. This sphinx flew on top of the
Speaker 3: city walls and asked all the theban youths a riddle.
Speaker 3: When they could not answer it, she ate them. Feminism
Speaker 3: strikes again. At the time, Creon was the region in
Speaker 3: Thebes since Lias had died, and he was so desperate
Speaker 3: to get rid of the sphinx that he promised the
Speaker 3: kingship and the hand of the widowed queen Jocasta, who
Speaker 3: also happened to be his sister in marriage to anyone
Speaker 3: who could solve the sphinx's riddle. This was the sphinx's riddle,
Speaker 3: which you may have heard before, which is why I
Speaker 3: said it was quote unquote famous. What goes on four
Speaker 3: feet in the morning, two feet in midday, and three
Speaker 3: feet in the evening In the myth around this time,
Speaker 3: Oedipus came into Thebes and he solved the riddle. Oedipus said,
Speaker 3: the answer is man, because a man crawls on all
Speaker 3: fours in the mornings of his life, he walks on
Speaker 3: two feet in the mid day of his life, and
Speaker 3: then he uses a cane for extra support when he
Speaker 3: is old. The sphinx was so upset that Oedipus had
Speaker 3: answered the riddle correctly that she threw herself down from
Speaker 3: the walls of thieves and she died. You know what, else,
Speaker 3: died my soul when I realized we need ads to
Speaker 3: make money. So here you go. Okay, we're back. We
Speaker 3: were talking about types of riddles again. There are four
Speaker 3: basic ways that riddle logic operates, true riddles, wordplay, neck riddles,
Speaker 3: and anti riddles. And we talked about the true riddles
Speaker 3: before the break, and so now let's talk about word
Speaker 3: play riddles. A word play riddle does this same thing
Speaker 3: as a true riddle, but it adds an extra layer
Speaker 3: of trickiness to it. So it's thing A turning into
Speaker 3: solution B. But there is a slight catch in between
Speaker 3: that has to interrupt the pathway between those things. First,
Speaker 3: wordplay riddles include puns and other bits of linguistic gymnastics
Speaker 3: to take the anticipated answer to the next step. A
Speaker 3: ribis is an example of a wordplay riddle which uses
Speaker 3: letters as part of the clue. A ribis is a
Speaker 3: puzzle device in which words are represented by combinations of
Speaker 3: letters and pictures. A neck riddle gives a solution that
Speaker 3: would be impossible for the solve to arrive at without context,
Speaker 3: so question mark equals b. The term neck riddle comes
Speaker 3: from stories in which the hero of the story uses
Speaker 3: an unsolvable riddle to outwit a judge or a monster
Speaker 3: and save himself from being hanged. So a neck riddle
Speaker 3: saves your neck.
Speaker 5: Wow.
Speaker 3: This is one typical folk tale example. As I walked
Speaker 3: out and in again from the dead the living came,
Speaker 3: six there is, and seven there'll be. So tell me
Speaker 3: this riddle or set me free. You're probably never gonna
Speaker 3: get this answer unless you've heard it before. But the
Speaker 3: answer is a horse's skull that contains a bird hatching eggs.
Speaker 3: Six have hatched, but one is still to come. What.
Speaker 3: So a neck riddle has an answer that's so specific
Speaker 3: it's deeply unsatisfying, because that's precisely the point. After all,
Speaker 3: it's not meant to actually be solvable. It has to
Speaker 3: stump the other person or in this case a judge
Speaker 3: or a monster to ensure that you or the hero
Speaker 3: gets off scot free. Often that's achieved through over precision,
Speaker 3: but sometimes a change in perspective will do the trick.
Speaker 3: In the Hobbit, our hero Bilbo Baggins best Scullum in
Speaker 3: a riddle contest by asking him the unknowable what's in
Speaker 3: my pocket? And then there's the anti riddle. An anti
Speaker 3: riddle is one that tricks the reader because it looks
Speaker 3: like a riddle, but it's actually not a riddle at all.
Speaker 3: It's basically a equals a For example, why did the
Speaker 3: chicken cross the road? Seems like a riddle, but the
Speaker 3: answer to get to the other side is just the
Speaker 3: literal answer. So, in conclusion, a word grid and a
Speaker 3: bunch of riddles. Those two things are what evolved over
Speaker 3: time and over the centuries to bring us what we
Speaker 3: know today as the crossword puzzle. Authorn Adrian Raffel, who
Speaker 3: wrote the book Thinking Inside the Box Adventures with Crosswords
Speaker 3: of the puzzling people who can't live without them, wrote
Speaker 3: in The Paris Review in twenty twenty quote, if you're
Speaker 3: a piece of artificial intelligence software, you might have a
Speaker 3: hard time solving a crossword, you'd have to separate the
Speaker 3: puzzle into two separate strands of problems to tackle the
Speaker 3: issue how to figure out what a clue was saying,
Speaker 3: or rather what it's precisely not saying, and how to
Speaker 3: fill the letters in the grid in the way that
Speaker 3: makes the most sense. Crosswords force the brain to cross
Speaker 3: wires and solve both these problems at once, balancing the
Speaker 3: visual spatial part of the brain with the logic run
Speaker 3: part of the brain. This is part of the reason
Speaker 3: why even the best crossword solving AI in the world
Speaker 3: isn't yet better than the best human. The AI can
Speaker 3: fill in the grid pretty quickly, but in terms of
Speaker 3: resolving that grid through riddle logic, humans are still a
Speaker 3: step ahead. The most innovative aspect of the crossword is that,
Speaker 3: through braiding together tasks the mind already wanted to do,
Speaker 3: it created an itch we didn't know we had, and
Speaker 3: yet we've always been primed to solve them. End quote.
Speaker 3: And that is just a beautiful way to end this episode.
Speaker 3: So that's it. That's the crossword. I'm going to go
Speaker 3: do a cross word right now, because why not. I
Speaker 3: told you I needed things to do in the beginning
Speaker 3: of this episode, and this is my thing to do
Speaker 3: that does not include scrolling on my phone and wanting
Speaker 3: to die. So will that bye?
Speaker 1: Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about it
Speaker 1: happening here. It being the slow crumbling of the old
Speaker 1: world and the painful birth of the new. And here
Speaker 1: to talk about the painful birth of the new world
Speaker 1: is someone who was compared to me very recently born,
Speaker 1: Garrison Davis. How are you doing, gare good?
Speaker 4: Good?
Speaker 6: As a new member of the KHive nation, I have
Speaker 6: a new life under me now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you've embraced the kamala of it all and are
Speaker 1: now just a are now just vibing? Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: beautiful place to be.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Unfortunately it might be just as a delusional as Biden's
Speaker 6: own insistence that he should be the one to run.
Speaker 6: And that's kind of what we're talking about here today.
Speaker 1: Oh good, I love delusion and its impact on American
Speaker 1: political life.
Speaker 6: So our initial post debate comments were a little bit frenzied,
Speaker 6: a little bit chaotic, as was the debate, I suppose,
Speaker 6: and post debate polls were also just kind of a
Speaker 6: mess initially, with wildly differing results from source to source,
Speaker 6: but over time they have since stabilized and kind of
Speaker 6: synced up to like seccifically put it, essentially, the debate
Speaker 6: undid most of the pro Biden shifts that had happened
Speaker 6: in the wake of Trump's felony conviction.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I've seen some polls have shown it tightening
Speaker 1: up a little bit again, but it's very I mean,
Speaker 1: I always wonder, like how much you've got kind of
Speaker 1: two camps, broadly speaking in terms of the people who
Speaker 1: seem like they're not completely insane. One of them is
Speaker 1: kind of the Nate Silver side of things, which shows
Speaker 1: Biden as having fallen fairly far behind and having you know,
Speaker 1: he's got Biden about a thirty percent chance, which is
Speaker 1: where Trump was in twenty sixteen, so that doesn't mean zero.
Speaker 1: Whereas the new five thirty eight polling average, and I
Speaker 1: kind of have been following their new head of statistics
Speaker 1: for a while, has it still close to a dead heat.
Speaker 1: And then obviously, you know, there's arguments that people will
Speaker 1: make that trumpet or that Biden is actually very far behind,
Speaker 1: which have more to it than the arguments that Biden
Speaker 1: that Biden is going to win in a landslide the
Speaker 1: kind of democratic like the polls are wrong entirely. I
Speaker 1: don't think that's likely, but I think we're looking at
Speaker 1: somewhere between Biden as a definite like underdog, or more
Speaker 1: or less tied. I guess that's where it seems to me.
Speaker 1: Like the evidence still is yep.
Speaker 6: A USA Today Suffolk University poll conducted immediately after the
Speaker 6: debate gave Trump a four point boost. The week after
Speaker 6: the debate, a New York Times Siena poll found Trump's
Speaker 6: lead had increased by three percent, now leading by six
Speaker 6: points with lately voters. Other questions were pulled in the
Speaker 6: wake of the debate. A CNN poll found that seventy
Speaker 6: five percent of Democrats believe the party would have a
Speaker 6: better chance at defeating Trump with a candidate to other
Speaker 6: than Biden. And overall, yes, his number dropped or kind
Speaker 6: of coasted with what it had been in like, you know, April,
Speaker 6: March February, and according to Politico, other than Trump in
Speaker 6: twenty twenty, no incumbent has trailed this far behind in
Speaker 6: horse race polling since Jimmy Carter's reelection bid forty four
Speaker 6: years ago, which does not make me feel super optimistic.
Speaker 1: It's not great, and man, it would be. I suspect
Speaker 1: the polls are still over emphasizing it to a degree
Speaker 1: because if if Biden losing by six percent would be
Speaker 1: like the big the worst performance of a Democrat totally,
Speaker 1: like a generation, like in a long, long time, and
Speaker 1: I just don't believe it's going to be that far off.
Speaker 1: But like it is. Definitely things are a lot uglier
Speaker 1: than they were when we recorded our last horse race episode, right,
Speaker 1: Like the debate was somewhere between pretty bad and catastrophe
Speaker 1: in terms of its impact on the polls.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, but Trump, what Trump actually gained himself as a
Speaker 6: candidate is not very much. It's mostly it's mostly, it's
Speaker 6: mostly decreases on Biden. And five pollsters did pre and
Speaker 6: post debate polls, and Trump is gaining on the margin,
Speaker 6: but in none of the polls did he gain anything
Speaker 6: more than a four point swing. So they're all pretty
Speaker 6: consistent and it's not all the end of the world
Speaker 6: here either. A poll released last Saturday by Bloomberg and
Speaker 6: Morning Console showed Biden narrowing Trump's post debate lead, specifically
Speaker 6: in swing states, with only a two percent difference between
Speaker 6: all seven in swing states, with Biden being ahead in
Speaker 6: Michigan and Wisconsin. Yeah, two percent is within that margin
Speaker 6: of error, So things are also starting to level up
Speaker 6: over time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think some of this may have to
Speaker 1: do We're going to talk a bit about Project twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five, which I tend to think, and we've been
Speaker 1: chatting about this online all week in our work chat.
Speaker 1: People are overemphasizing as opposed to what Trump is because
Speaker 1: Agenda Project twenty twenty five is basically a blueprint for
Speaker 1: a Christian fascist takeover of the US, published by the
Speaker 1: Heritage Foundation, and a lot of people who have been
Speaker 1: affiliated with Trump, who were in his administration last time,
Speaker 1: have are on board with it, have talked about it,
Speaker 1: have boosted it, So people are obviously scared of it.
Speaker 1: I think what Trump is actually promised to do in office,
Speaker 1: which is the Agenda forty seven, we did a whole
Speaker 1: week of stuff on it, is a more realistic thing
Speaker 1: to be afraid of. But either way, I think that
Speaker 1: some of that tightening is probably a mix of you've
Speaker 1: got everywhere, you had a bunch of kind of on
Speaker 1: the fence, voters swing away from Biden because he performed
Speaker 1: so badly in the debate, and then it has dims
Speaker 1: have done a pretty intensive job of spreading out a
Speaker 1: lot of you know, what you might call fear porn
Speaker 1: over a fascist takeover of the country, and I think
Speaker 1: that's part of why things might be tightening back up.
Speaker 6: I mean, it would be nice to eventually, one year
Speaker 6: vote vote for something instead of just be voting against something.
Speaker 6: But again, I'm not sure if we'll ever get to
Speaker 6: that point to get yeah.
Speaker 1: Hasn't happened yet. Well no, no, no, I mean I was.
Speaker 1: I remember I got to vote for Obama the first
Speaker 1: time he ran, and it was hard not to be optimistic.
Speaker 6: So immediately after the debate, we had a whole bunch
Speaker 6: of like friends of Biden, kind of upper level democrat,
Speaker 6: not like online influencers, but like actual like influential, like
Speaker 6: like pundits and people you know, call for perhaps Biden
Speaker 6: should step down, perhaps we should find somebody else. And
Speaker 6: this has kind of been the ongoing post debate ever
Speaker 6: since the debate has been this question and we'll we'll
Speaker 6: kind of get to this a little bit more later. Honestly,
Speaker 6: I think we had a stronger chance at this possibility
Speaker 6: a week or two ago. I think by now Democrats
Speaker 6: have largely kind of closed ranks around Biden, but this
Speaker 6: is definitely still developing. And I've been keeping up with
Speaker 6: all of Biden's appearances in the media since the debate
Speaker 6: just because I've been interested to see how he will
Speaker 6: handle this kind of universal flub. I watched his ABC
Speaker 6: interview and his recent phone calls into various morning news shows.
Speaker 6: In all of those, he did not perform especially well
Speaker 6: as expected. They were slow and sometimes kind of like mumbly,
Speaker 6: But neither have they been like the death blow to
Speaker 6: his campaign needed to finalize the shift to an alternative candidate. Instead,
Speaker 6: we're just kind of coasting along with this general uncertainty
Speaker 6: regarding the Democratic candidacy, and meanwhile, Biden is just continuing
Speaker 6: to affirm that he will be the one to lead
Speaker 6: the ticket. I'm gonna quote from Washington Post here.
Speaker 5: Quote.
Speaker 6: As of Sunday, nine House Democrats, four privately and five publicly,
Speaker 6: had called for Biden to exit the race. In addition,
Speaker 6: at least to eighteen current and former top Democrats as
Speaker 6: of Saturday had publicly raised concerns about Biden's fitness for
Speaker 6: office and his ability to defeat Trump. Unquote, and it
Speaker 6: has remained the same since then. There's gonna be meetings
Speaker 6: in the next few days, including the day after we
Speaker 6: record this. We're recording this on Monday, so there's gonna
Speaker 6: be meetings in the Senate and in the House about
Speaker 6: kind of this issue. So this is definitely still developing,
Speaker 6: but you're starting to see more and more politicians fall
Speaker 6: into rank. AOC just put out a statement saying, no,
Speaker 6: we're gonna We're gonna all support Biden. So like there
Speaker 6: was this uncertainty for a while, and now I think
Speaker 6: people are kind of being told to, like, come on,
Speaker 6: get on the platform. Yeah, but Biden hasn't been handling
Speaker 6: this well like personally either. He's come across like very angry.
Speaker 1: No, the emails I've been getting from the Biden campaign
Speaker 1: have been he's been blaving podcasters.
Speaker 6: He's been blaming.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the media, and I'm kind of bummed that it's
Speaker 1: the pods.
Speaker 5: Save guys.
Speaker 1: He got angry. Yet we've been shitty to Joe Biden
Speaker 1: for so much longer than those assholes.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he's been treating it very weirdly. He's been doing
Speaker 6: a lot of like a denial of the polling he's
Speaker 6: been doing revisionist.
Speaker 1: History, very magical thinking.
Speaker 6: Regarding like twenty twenty polling. I think, I think kind
Speaker 6: of referencing the Democratic primary, but still the way that
Speaker 6: he's talking about it, it's making it sound like he,
Speaker 6: you know, like he was behind in the polls in
Speaker 6: twenty twenty. That was that Democrats were behind in the
Speaker 6: poles in twenty twenty two, which just wasn't true. The
Speaker 6: red wave comment was was certain pundits and Republicans trying
Speaker 6: to conjure a red wave, but the actual polls were
Speaker 6: very accurate in twenty twenty two. And he's also crediting
Speaker 6: himself for that red wave not happening in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 6: So he's been having a lot of weird statements, like
Speaker 6: blaming media and blaming the elites for trying to replace
Speaker 6: him on the ticket. I'll include one clip here from
Speaker 6: Morning Joe, come on, give me a break.
Speaker 5: I'm getting so frustrated, but by the Leaf.
Speaker 1: Now, I'm not talking about you guys, but about the
Speaker 1: Leaf in the party, who.
Speaker 6: They know so much more.
Speaker 4: With any of these guys, I don't think I should
Speaker 4: run against me.
Speaker 6: Announced for president.
Speaker 1: Challenge man the convention.
Speaker 6: Kind of his continuous line to justify his own candidacy
Speaker 6: is has been him claiming that he won the primary,
Speaker 6: which is a ridiculous thing to say as an incumbent,
Speaker 6: because like, come on, come on, and he has repeatedly
Speaker 6: said that that Democratic voters in the primaries have quote
Speaker 6: spoken clearly and decisively. They've chosen me to be the
Speaker 6: nominee of the party. That is not how it worked.
Speaker 1: Quote.
Speaker 6: Do we now just say that process didn't matter, that
Speaker 6: the voters don't have a say I declined to do that.
Speaker 5: How could we stand.
Speaker 6: For democracy in our nation if we ignore it in
Speaker 6: our own party. I cannot do that. I will not
Speaker 6: do that, unquote, which is just absurd, right because especially
Speaker 6: there was many people who actually voted in the Yeah,
Speaker 6: like a false primary for like the like other option.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, but like poles, just like them. Seventy
Speaker 1: five percent of Americans would prefer to vote for someone
Speaker 1: besides Biden.
Speaker 5: Like it's it's.
Speaker 6: Absurd, especially when you're running like an uncontested as an incumbent.
Speaker 6: If you want people to challenge you, you could have
Speaker 6: said so, like it's come on, like this is there
Speaker 6: was there was no pretty goofy.
Speaker 1: No real primary for the dims, and there usually isn't.
Speaker 1: That's not abnormal with an incumbent, but in this case,
Speaker 1: people have severe questions about the incumbent's fitness to do
Speaker 1: the job in a physical way. Like I hate to
Speaker 1: say it, but like Trump might physically be better able
Speaker 1: to survive a four year term than Biden. Is you know,
Speaker 1: not that I think he's mentally a better president. Sure,
Speaker 1: I don't think honestly. Part of what we are accepting
Speaker 1: here is that, like that's so that doesn't really matter, right,
Speaker 1: Like we're all kind of acknowledging if you're on team
Speaker 1: anything but Trump because he might end the concept of
Speaker 1: democracy in this country, then you're accepting that, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I am not. I am voting for a guy who
Speaker 1: probably can't really do the job anymore, and just assuming
Speaker 1: that the people around him will not be as evil
Speaker 1: like you do. Kind of have to accept that otherwise
Speaker 1: you're just lying to yourself about the state that Joe
Speaker 1: is in because he's not all there. He's not all
Speaker 1: there the way he was in twenty twenty.
Speaker 6: No, but do you know what still is here just
Speaker 6: like it was back in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: Capitalism, Baby, We didn't manage to take it out even
Speaker 1: though we elected this our communist leader, Joseph Biden, chairman Joe.
Speaker 6: Enjoy these capitalism sponsored ads.
Speaker 5: All right, we are back.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So there was a report that came out from
Speaker 1: CHIP fifty, which is like an analytic project. It's like
Speaker 1: the Civic Health and Institution Project, So it's like a
Speaker 1: survey of all fifty US states, And they did a
Speaker 1: survey on like opinions of voters before and after the debate,
Speaker 1: and there showed like fairly small movement, like very little
Speaker 1: was changed at all in terms of like and primarily
Speaker 1: what was changed wasn't people going from Biden to Trump,
Speaker 1: but from people preferring from preferring Biden to preferring other right,
Speaker 1: like that someone else someone else right. And so that
Speaker 1: does kind of go back to what we're like, people
Speaker 1: are not making their minds up about Trump, like, and
Speaker 1: I think what the dims can do if Biden stays
Speaker 1: in and he doesn't seem like he's leaving. It seems
Speaker 1: like the primary thing that will make progress for them
Speaker 1: is hitting on how dangerous Trump having a second term
Speaker 1: will be. That seems to be what moves the needle, which.
Speaker 5: Is part of their current strategy.
Speaker 6: But the strategy is kind of all influx right now
Speaker 6: because of the poor performance the debate. They're trying to
Speaker 6: save face on Biden's part, as well as emphasizing that
Speaker 6: Trump is like a dangerous possibility. And again, like, even
Speaker 6: if Biden does decide to drop out or step down,
Speaker 6: He's going to keep saying he's running until literally the
Speaker 6: day that happens, right, because that is that is what
Speaker 6: you do as a politician. You were gonna you were
Speaker 6: gonna keep insisting it until one day you are no
Speaker 6: longer doing that, And that's just kind of how politics goes.
Speaker 6: But he has made continuous, continuous gestures towards the fact
Speaker 6: that he is he is going to stay. He has
Speaker 6: no plans on stepping down. He wants to win in November.
Speaker 6: This Monday, he personally made twenty calls to congressional members
Speaker 6: trying to convince them that he is going to be
Speaker 6: the one on the ticket.
Speaker 1: No, really, guys, it's going to be me again.
Speaker 6: Really, And I think part of what he's doing here
Speaker 6: is like he does not have to demonstrate at the
Speaker 6: moment that he will like survive until like November. All
Speaker 6: he has to do right now is run out the
Speaker 6: clock until the convention, and then it'll be too late
Speaker 6: to swap him for anyone else. There's a few other
Speaker 6: people kind of saying this, and I believe that is
Speaker 6: kind of what is what is happening, that all they
Speaker 6: need to do is just keep delaying this question, keep this,
Speaker 6: keep this uncertainty until the convention, and then it's going
Speaker 6: to get locked in there. And that's all he needs
Speaker 6: to do. He doesn't need to demonstrate his viability come November.
Speaker 6: He just needs to make sure that he gets that
Speaker 6: he gets the official nomination this August. And I don't
Speaker 6: know biden supporters reactions to this have been really weird,
Speaker 6: including we've kind of had like a new upgrowth of
Speaker 6: a pro Biden personality cult among liberals. Wcause I feel
Speaker 6: like largely like a culmination of like MSNBC Russia Gates,
Speaker 6: like bluing on type stuff that people are just now
Speaker 6: convinced there's like a secret conspiracy to take down Biden
Speaker 6: and any attempts to question Biden's legibility as a candidate
Speaker 6: could only be rooted in some secret agenda to get
Speaker 6: Trump elected. So I think this is why they're so
Speaker 6: volatile about this is that they think like the only
Speaker 6: one who would ever propagate questions over Iden's like legibility
Speaker 6: would be someone who secretly wants Trump to be in
Speaker 6: office again, and that is such a threat to them
Speaker 6: that they they're lashing out very very oddly and very
Speaker 6: conspiratorially against anyone raising questions about maybe Biden's not the
Speaker 6: best guy actually, and they're spinning this into like actually
Speaker 6: being secret Trumpers. It's odd because even the way Biden
Speaker 6: talks about his own drive to beat Trump is kind
Speaker 6: of wishy washy, certain like more polished statements will be like, yes,
Speaker 6: this is like a threat to democracy. We have to
Speaker 6: we have to do this to keep Trump out of office.
Speaker 6: This is an existential threat. But in that ABC interview,
Speaker 6: he gave a really kind of soft answer to this question,
Speaker 6: saying that all that he needs to do is just
Speaker 6: give it his all.
Speaker 7: And if you.
Speaker 1: Stay in and Trump is elected and everything you're warning about.
Speaker 2: Comes to pass, how will you feel in January?
Speaker 7: I feel as long as I gave it my all
Speaker 7: and I did the goodest jobs I know I can do,
Speaker 7: That's what this is about.
Speaker 5: It was that's not convincing.
Speaker 1: That's such like a like ninth like cartoons for a
Speaker 1: ninth grader's way of saying it, like, well, what matters
Speaker 1: is that I tried put all my best work board. No, man,
Speaker 1: that doesn't matter at all.
Speaker 6: Yeah it is. It's not great, it's it's it's not
Speaker 6: it's not reassuring because it doesn't matter if you give
Speaker 6: it your all. People's lives are are on the right
Speaker 6: and you're just like.
Speaker 3: Eh, I'll give it the old college try.
Speaker 6: You're like okay.
Speaker 1: It means one of two things. He's either he either
Speaker 1: is completely delusional to the point where he doesn't realize
Speaker 1: how nonsensical that is, or he doesn't really think that
Speaker 1: Trump is a threat to democracy in people's lives. And
Speaker 1: I guess the third option would be he doesn't care,
Speaker 1: like if he loses re election, fuck everybody, if he
Speaker 1: doesn't get to keep being president. Like maybe he is
Speaker 1: just that kind of person. I do have a feeling
Speaker 1: that only that kind of person can become president of
Speaker 1: the United States.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, like that was kind of my read
Speaker 6: after the ABC interviews that he seemed just kind of
Speaker 6: like delusional and narcissistic, like he really believes after twenty
Speaker 6: twenty that he's the only one that can beat Trump.
Speaker 6: And this feels like like a very genuine view of
Speaker 6: himself that he's the only one strong enough to beat Trump.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And the more and more.
Speaker 6: That there's been pushback against his legibility, the more he's
Speaker 6: been digging his heels in. And I think if things
Speaker 6: continue like this, I don't think the Democratic Party will
Speaker 6: be able to organize and unite enough to do like
Speaker 6: a soft coup and convince Biden to step down. And
Speaker 6: without a complete united front against Biden, he himself would
Speaker 6: need some kind of like excuse to allow himself to
Speaker 6: step down without sacrificing his pride and showing weakness both
Speaker 6: in himself and the party. This could be like a
Speaker 6: convenient medical diagnosis, right, although the increasing number of calls
Speaker 6: for him to undergo thorough neurological examination will probably have
Speaker 6: the same backfire effect of Biden attempting as much as
Speaker 6: he can to avoid any in depth medical and neurological testing.
Speaker 6: He's been making these comments like every day I take
Speaker 6: an rological test by doing my job, and like, come on, man,
Speaker 6: we we're watching you do your job. It's not that's
Speaker 6: part of.
Speaker 1: The problem, bro, Like you got up in front of
Speaker 1: the like again, refer to the last episode you and
Speaker 1: I did on the horse race. Our attitude was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: things have really improved for Biden. I think he's probably
Speaker 1: the smart money bet. And like sitting down and watching
Speaker 1: that it was horrifying, Like, yeah, there's no dinner. That's
Speaker 1: part of why this. You have to if you're still
Speaker 1: on team, Like, I don't think it's fair what people
Speaker 1: are saying to Joe if you're on team. This was
Speaker 1: bad strategy from the beginning expressing any kind of doubt. Well,
Speaker 1: maybe that's right, but I don't know what else people
Speaker 1: are supposed to do if you don't if you really
Speaker 1: think that this is he has not demonstrated, Like it's
Speaker 1: seriously concerning incapacity for the work. Think about how unprecedented
Speaker 1: having this degree of open challenging of him as the
Speaker 1: candidate this close to an elections. I've never seen anything like.
Speaker 6: That, especially especially on like an incumbent, yes, the president, yeah,
Speaker 6: and an incumbent who's served two times as vice Like
Speaker 6: that's ridiculous. And like the last real neurological medical examination
Speaker 6: that he undertook was last February, which for an eighty
Speaker 6: one year old is a very long time, especially if
Speaker 6: you can bear like news clips of him from like
Speaker 6: the debate, two clips of him from last February or
Speaker 6: last year. There actually is like a decent difference, And
Speaker 6: I don't know, it seems it seems kind of absurd
Speaker 6: that he that he keeps harping on this line. For
Speaker 6: his ABC interview, he declined to take a cognitive test
Speaker 6: and make the results public in order to reassure voters
Speaker 6: that he was fit to serve another term, saying that
Speaker 6: I have a cognitive test every single day doing this job.
Speaker 6: Everything I do is a test.
Speaker 4: No, not great. No.
Speaker 6: He also said that only the Lord Almighty could persuade
Speaker 6: him to change his mind and drop out of the race.
Speaker 1: What the fuck? What the fuck is show?
Speaker 5: There we go?
Speaker 6: Seriously, man, So that's again not super reassuring. But do
Speaker 6: you know what I can be reassured by Robert.
Speaker 1: The fact that sweet lady capitalism is always there for us.
Speaker 6: It's always there, like a good uncle or something.
Speaker 1: I don't know, Yeah, yeah, yeah, something something that state
Speaker 1: farm mad.
Speaker 6: I agree, all right, we are back. It is certainly
Speaker 6: feeling like nineteen sixty eight all over again, isn't it?
Speaker 1: Yeah, uh yeah, I mean, and that's obviously having an
Speaker 1: open convention in sixty eight. The chaos around that did
Speaker 1: not help the Democrats. They did not know in that election. No,
Speaker 1: we got fucking Dick Nixon. So that's not good.
Speaker 6: No, it's not granted with with campus protests and everything,
Speaker 6: it all is starting to feel like sixty eight over here.
Speaker 6: So yeah, a lot of people are saying, if Biden
Speaker 6: does step down before the DNC in Chicago this August,
Speaker 6: we could have ourselves an open convention to nominate a
Speaker 6: new candidate. The last time this method was used by
Speaker 6: Democrats was in sixty eight at the also Chicago DNC,
Speaker 6: after the leading candidate, Senendate Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated
Speaker 6: weeks before the convention by twenty four year old Palestinian
Speaker 6: man for his support of Israel during the Six Day War.
Speaker 6: So again, there is a lot of parallels here. And
Speaker 6: if it's not going to be Biden, then who is
Speaker 6: it going to be? Right, This was a bigger question
Speaker 6: last week and it still is kind of a lingering
Speaker 6: question in a lot of people's minds. Who's it going
Speaker 6: to be? Probably Kamala I don't know, Yeah, I.
Speaker 1: Mean, there's really for a lot of reasons in terms
Speaker 1: of including like I think, what would have to happen
Speaker 1: with like the donations, like if it would to be
Speaker 1: a totally new group of people, that would cause insurmountable bullshit.
Speaker 1: And also like if you're talking about from a war
Speaker 1: gaming this out perspective, you know, Kamala does not look
Speaker 1: bad in the polling and might might in fact be
Speaker 1: just for a variety of reasons, one of the better choices,
Speaker 1: Like I can in my head think, wow, I sure
Speaker 1: wish it was you know, Pritzker and Whitmer maybe, but
Speaker 1: like I think that a lot of what I've seen
Speaker 1: in the polls has kind of convinced me that Kamal
Speaker 1: is probably our best all around bet and if you
Speaker 1: include practicality and actually like beating Trump.
Speaker 6: Yes, in the polls, she is consistently higher than any
Speaker 6: other potential Democratic replacements and doing, if not as well,
Speaker 6: often better than Biden against Trump, usually closing that race out.
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 6: A CNN poll from last Wednesday showed that she's in
Speaker 6: the margin of error against Trump nationally with forty five
Speaker 6: to his forty seven, which is much better than Biden
Speaker 6: is doing nationally. And she's projected to do much better
Speaker 6: in an electoral college race than Biden specifically.
Speaker 5: So there we go.
Speaker 6: I'm gonna quote from CNN here quote An anonymously written
Speaker 6: Google doc titled Unburdened by What has been the Case
Speaker 6: for Kamala, written by self described senior operatives within democratic
Speaker 6: political institutions, has been popping up in group chats of
Speaker 6: Democratic donors and leading coalition groups. It lays out a
Speaker 6: detailed argument and plan for a campaign. So this doc
Speaker 6: I was able to get a hold of a copy,
Speaker 6: and parts of it definitely read like an aaronsor counscript
Speaker 6: like that is that is the closest thing I can
Speaker 6: I can describe this thing as But I think it
Speaker 6: is worth digging into here for our last section. So
Speaker 6: I'm gonna I'm gonna read some small parts of this
Speaker 6: doc and Robert, I'm curious to hear what your thoughts
Speaker 6: are on this. It starts by saying, we are currently losing.
Speaker 6: We need to do something different to win. The number
Speaker 6: one most important priority above all others is defeating Donald Trump.
Speaker 6: Nothing is more important, and we need to be very
Speaker 6: real that we are currently losing. So off to a
Speaker 6: good start, that is I would I would argue accurate quote.
Speaker 6: Biden's debate performance, the campaign's defensive response, and the total
Speaker 6: lack of plan to reassure his base and the voters
Speaker 6: about his about his capability should shake everyone's confidence that
Speaker 6: he can win this election. Now we have three possible options.
Speaker 6: Biden can take the necessary step to demonstrate that he
Speaker 6: is up to the job, he can step aside for
Speaker 6: another candidate, or Trump will win. The discourse around potential
Speaker 6: alternative candidates in the event that Biden does step down
Speaker 6: is increasingly detached from reality. Donors, pundits, and democratic elites
Speaker 6: are freely slinging around wild ideas about dream tickets. This
Speaker 6: chaos is used as a shield by stay the Course
Speaker 6: advocates who frame the choice as Biden or chaos. The
Speaker 6: swirl over different possible candidates is obscuring the fact that
Speaker 6: there's a single clear path forward. There's one path out
Speaker 6: of this mess, and it's Kamala unquote. And this is
Speaker 6: one of the interesting things I found about this doc
Speaker 6: is that the way that they view this kind of
Speaker 6: current chaos as we win just as a deliberate strategy
Speaker 6: and as an as a deliberate tactics just to continue
Speaker 6: this uncertainty all the way to the convention, and a
Speaker 6: lot of the what this dock advocates for is that
Speaker 6: we need to call this as soon as possible to
Speaker 6: give whatever option we're going to go forward with the
Speaker 6: most amount of success, whether that's Biden, whether that's Kamala,
Speaker 6: it needs to we need to decide what it is
Speaker 6: so we don't spend the next few months doing weird
Speaker 6: like democratic party infighting and instead actually like lock down
Speaker 6: what's happening, so there's a cohesive strategy. And they argue
Speaker 6: that Kamala has the strongest claim to democratic legibility among
Speaker 6: all other alternative candidates. Quote, she's the only candidate that
Speaker 6: can take the reins right now instead of in late
Speaker 6: August with less than three months ago. To be clear,
Speaker 6: this isn't an argument about deservedness or why should personally
Speaker 6: love Kamala. It's about strategy and winning in the face
Speaker 6: of unimaginable electoral stakes.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Now, the doctors point out that only Biden himself has
Speaker 6: the power to drop out and choose to head off
Speaker 6: chaos by anointing Harris. But Biden does listen to people,
Speaker 6: and the people that he listens to listens to other people,
Speaker 6: and that is the audience for the people reading this doc.
Speaker 6: That's what this is circulating among. That was like the intention,
Speaker 6: and they argue that if Biden does drop out, Democrats
Speaker 6: have to unite quickly behind the elected successor, as opposed
Speaker 6: to inviting this extended period of chaos. And although Kamala
Speaker 6: has limitations in polls regarding her name recognition, she currently
Speaker 6: wins any poll of alternative Democratic candidates by a very
Speaker 6: wide margin. This doc dos pointed out that Kamala is
Speaker 6: by no means a perfect candidate. She does have real deficits,
Speaker 6: but they are mostly addressable. The doc mentions her Biden
Speaker 6: level approval, rating her involvement with Biden's immigration shortcomings, and
Speaker 6: her kind of awkward camera moments reminiscent of a drunk
Speaker 6: aunt and quote. After years of a relatively low profile,
Speaker 6: voters don't see her as a strong leader for the country,
Speaker 6: but running as a presidential candidate will allow Harris to
Speaker 6: present herself in a more commanding light. She'll be a
Speaker 6: prosecutor going up against a convicted felon, a woman fighting
Speaker 6: against the man who ended Roe v. Wade unquote, and
Speaker 6: that is a lot of the tight sort of messaging
Speaker 6: that they are promoting if Kamala does end up being
Speaker 6: the option. A Morning consoled political poll on the vice
Speaker 6: president from June reflects a number of advantages she would
Speaker 6: have over Trump in a head to head match based
Speaker 6: on his greatest vulnerabilities. A majority of voters ci Kamala
Speaker 6: is mentally fit, level headed, and prepared contrast to Trump
Speaker 6: and even Biden, and a majority of voters trust Kamala
Speaker 6: on jobs, abortion, climate change, and LGBTQ rights. Public opinion
Speaker 6: is already moving towards Harris over Biden. Forty three percent
Speaker 6: of voters indicate Harris is fit to run, compared to
Speaker 6: Biden's thirty five and while the issue is complex and
Speaker 6: the distance here is relative, she's broadly considered to be
Speaker 6: on Biden's left on Israel Palestine, an issue where he
Speaker 6: has major vulnerabilities. Kamala also has advantages with the younger
Speaker 6: and POC voters that the Democrats are currently bleeding in
Speaker 6: the dock. Here they contain some stats on this, saying
Speaker 6: Biden won the twenty twenty election by just forty four
Speaker 6: one thousand votes, and most of those are votes that
Speaker 6: he is bleeding. A New York Times cenpol in February
Speaker 6: found that Harris is nearly ten points ahead of Biden
Speaker 6: with black voters, and fifteen points up with Latino voters,
Speaker 6: twenty points up with young voters. These are massive advantages.
Speaker 6: Now that is older data, but it's probably worth some consideration.
Speaker 6: Part of the reason why she's also favored among other
Speaker 6: Democratic contenders is that she has direct access to the
Speaker 6: Biden Harris campaign war chest of over ninety one million
Speaker 6: dollars in cash, which would create a smoother transition.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and is probably I mean again, just given the
Speaker 1: amount of chaos that would be inherent in a totally
Speaker 1: open convention, it just seems like the only feasible option.
Speaker 6: And what they're advocating for is that if Kamla takes
Speaker 6: a position now or soon to now, she'll have an
Speaker 6: extra month and massive structural advantages. Quote, if we can
Speaker 6: unite behind Harris in July, we have an extra month
Speaker 6: of party unity and message unity. That's a month where
Speaker 6: we can and keep the media focused on Donald Trump,
Speaker 6: Project twenty twenty five and mega extremism instead of waiting
Speaker 6: in dread for the next Biden misstep or talking about
Speaker 6: democrats fighting it out to win delicate count fear of
Speaker 6: racism and sexism is playing an outsized role not supported
Speaker 6: by data. The impact of sexism and racism on the
Speaker 6: vote is marginal compared to the potential to make gains
Speaker 6: in the crucial block that will decide the election.
Speaker 5: Right now.
Speaker 6: This race hinges on alienated and unenthusiastic double haters who
Speaker 6: dislike both Biden and Trump and want an alternative choice.
Speaker 6: Some polls put the size of this group at twenty
Speaker 6: five percent nationally, or even higher nearly thirty percent amongst.
Speaker 1: Basically for every one I know well.
Speaker 6: Especially among inconsistent voters who are who are likely to
Speaker 6: decide the election in key battleground states. For these double haters,
Speaker 6: vote choices being driven not by prejudice but by anti
Speaker 6: enthusiasm for the two currently eighty year old white men
Speaker 6: presented here as the only options.
Speaker 4: Yeahs more likely.
Speaker 6: These voters are also more likely to be young, Hispanic,
Speaker 6: black back and women in urban or suburban areas, the
Speaker 6: exact kind of voter profile that Kamala is gaining appeal with.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I find.
Speaker 6: This little bit to be the most compelling statement in
Speaker 6: this entire document. Because that lays out an actual map
Speaker 6: towards how Kamala would have a better election viability than Biden,
Speaker 6: especially in the voters that he's been bleeding dramatically in
Speaker 6: the past six seven months.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 6: The doc does close by saying, if Biden stays the course,
Speaker 6: we need Kamala to be strong. The most likely outcome
Speaker 6: is that President Biden declines to step back. In that case,
Speaker 6: Kamala's role is more crucial than ever. She will be
Speaker 6: the strong communicator on the ticket, especially on our most
Speaker 6: important issue abortion. Second, many voters will understand her to
Speaker 6: be Biden's near guaranteed successor, and we will need to
Speaker 6: feel comfortable with her potential assent to the presidency to
Speaker 6: vote for the Biden Harris ticket. For anyone in the
Speaker 6: Biden's nominee, we must rally around him camp. It's essential
Speaker 6: that we project confidence in his selection of a running
Speaker 6: mate by one pushing the administration to stop sideline and Kamala.
Speaker 6: By two promoting Kamala as the leader of the party
Speaker 6: and country. Three be prepared to align with political and
Speaker 6: financial support, and three debate over and ultimately organize around
Speaker 6: a new running mate. Consolidation around Vice President Harris will
Speaker 6: not guarantee victory in November. No option is free of
Speaker 6: risk at this point. But this is our clearest path
Speaker 6: to win. We should take it. And that's how the
Speaker 6: document ends. And I like some of the arguments they
Speaker 6: make here. I don't like Kamala as a person. I
Speaker 6: think she is many many issues both the person and
Speaker 6: I don't like cops, but absolutely, especially if their messaging
Speaker 6: will be like Kamala the prosecutor against Trump the felon,
Speaker 6: which I personally don't like.
Speaker 1: But that could work.
Speaker 6: That's not going to lose her important voters. That's not
Speaker 6: going to lose her all of the anarchists who already
Speaker 6: aren't going to vote.
Speaker 1: That might be a really good strategy because Americans do
Speaker 1: not feel the same way about prosecutors as I do,
Speaker 1: and these you who do right like we have to
Speaker 1: accept that at a certain point. I think so I
Speaker 1: I and I think that's most frustrated to me about
Speaker 1: the fact that it doesn't look like Biden's going to
Speaker 1: step down, is that like the smartest thing they could
Speaker 1: do strategy wise would be to drop that announcement on
Speaker 1: like Monday of next week and utterly like cut the
Speaker 1: wind out of the sales of the rnc ye, Like
Speaker 1: suddenly the biggest story is that and not you know,
Speaker 1: everything that the Republicans are putting out, like you could
Speaker 1: actually really do some damage to them, because there's there's
Speaker 1: not really anything that they could do in response.
Speaker 6: And so much media attention right now is being focused
Speaker 6: on Biden very clearly not being fit for office, and
Speaker 6: all of that would go away if Kamala gets put
Speaker 6: into the spot, then then then everyone will start focusing
Speaker 6: once again on how bad Trump is. And I can
Speaker 6: understand some of like the Biden camps like upsetedness at
Speaker 6: at like the fact that currently there is just so
Speaker 6: much attention on Biden and everyone kind of is ignoring Trump,
Speaker 6: but that just is due to how poorly he himself
Speaker 6: has been behaving like that, Like that is ultimately the
Speaker 6: Biden campaign's fault that they didn't plan for this contingency,
Speaker 6: And if they want all of that like discourse to stop,
Speaker 6: they have a very easy option to And it's just
Speaker 6: reliant on Biden not being too personally prideful and acknowledging
Speaker 6: that he's just too old for office and there are
Speaker 6: better candidates out there. So yeah, that is that is
Speaker 6: the current, that is the current situation on the rise
Speaker 6: of the k Hive, something I at this point am
Speaker 6: very skeptical to think will actually happen. But it may
Speaker 6: be actually a viable strategy for the Democratic Party.
Speaker 1: Yep. I mean, we'll see what they actually do. Probably
Speaker 1: keep running Joe Biden and hope that Americans panic enough
Speaker 1: about Trump to but you know, we can all dream.
Speaker 6: Now, I'd agree to that point. We could also dream
Speaker 6: that like that, that like the delegates will just like
Speaker 6: rebel against their like polite duty. Yeah, by by not
Speaker 6: committing to their to their no'm binding promises. Although that
Speaker 6: would be extremely unprecedented and it would make the DNC
Speaker 6: a lot more fun.
Speaker 1: Oh, we would have a great DNC if that were
Speaker 1: to go down. Yep.
Speaker 6: Anyway, well, we're gonna have fun at the RNC instead.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we sure will. Garrison, You and I are going
Speaker 1: to be on the ground in the exclusion zone and
Speaker 1: at the convention itself where we cannot have backpacks or gas.
Speaker 6: Masks or canned food.
Speaker 1: But I might be able to carry a gun. Let
Speaker 1: me see if they do reciprocity. What is this is Minnesota?
Speaker 5: No, this is not Minnesota.
Speaker 4: This is Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: Oh, Wisconsin, this.
Speaker 6: Is Milwaukee, Milwaukee.
Speaker 1: We're gonna see how well prepared I am. Let me see.
Speaker 1: That could make a fun episode all its own.
Speaker 6: I do have an idea for an episode that I
Speaker 6: will mention to you off air that I really want
Speaker 6: to do for the rn C.
Speaker 1: Wait, it looks like yes with restrictions.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I love I love restrictions.
Speaker 1: That's great, we'll see what those are.
Speaker 4: Stay tuned to the restriction.
Speaker 7: Stay tuned everybody e sports.
Speaker 8: Oh god, Okay, that was not a great intro. They
Speaker 8: conpen here. The podcast that we do I be a
Speaker 8: log with me is James. We're doing it another be
Speaker 8: a James episode.
Speaker 4: Yep, we're back. We would have a theme for our episodes.
Speaker 4: I feel like, yeah, maybe it is Petro dollars.
Speaker 5: I guess it is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, we vote to you today by Big fossil Fuel.
Speaker 8: You know, this entire episode is is the what do
Speaker 8: you do with your fossil fuel muddy episode? So we
Speaker 8: did an episode like a year ago about sports washing,
Speaker 8: and it has gotten much worse since then, you know. So,
Speaker 8: so the big kind of sports washing thing that's happening
Speaker 8: right now is this thing called the Esports World Cup
Speaker 8: that the Saudi government is putting on. It is going
Speaker 8: on right now. Barring unfathomable disaster, it will still be
Speaker 8: going on by the time this episode comes out. We
Speaker 8: kind of talked about in the last episode how the
Speaker 8: Saudis have been getting into sports. I mean it sort
Speaker 8: of starts with soccer, they said, they start to WWE,
Speaker 8: they get into tennis, they're in golf, they're in boxing,
Speaker 8: they're in Formula one, and in the last like two
Speaker 8: years specifically, they've gotten really really deep into esports. In
Speaker 8: twenty twenty two, they spent one point five billion dollars
Speaker 8: wow to acquire face It in EESL Gaming, which were
Speaker 8: two organizations that ran esports leagues. Esports, by the way,
Speaker 8: are professional video game competition. Yeah, the people who didn't
Speaker 8: spend their youth waking up at five in the morning
Speaker 8: to watch Korean StarCraft tournaments like I did.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's me, I thought to that category.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 8: I feel like on this episode we have both the
Speaker 8: sports washing angles covered, because you have the sports washing
Speaker 8: like regular sports angle, and I've had.
Speaker 5: To do the sportswa washing e sports angle.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know what you call them. P sports
Speaker 4: like physical sports, meat space sports. Yeah, I've been privy
Speaker 4: to a decent amount of sports washing. Like I raced
Speaker 4: a lot against Iranian teams when I was cycling those
Speaker 4: dudes one. So much sports washing has just straight up
Speaker 4: like national state sponsored doping programs. But then the UAE, Bahrain, Dubai,
Speaker 4: all these different Petro states and emirates will sponsor cycling teams,
Speaker 4: very very common. Ry, Brunei another one. Yeah, I raced
Speaker 4: for Quebec once, which is not not a Petro state.
Speaker 5: Well it's not I guess it's not a petro state.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, they got big maple syrup behind them. Yeah,
Speaker 4: in Catalonia, which again not a Petro state. But yeah,
Speaker 4: it's very common in all kinds of professionals sports. Right,
Speaker 4: because as sports has become more like an entertainment industry,
Speaker 4: it's become unfathomably expensive to own a sponsor a team
Speaker 4: for like enthusiasts, and the value proposition isn't really there
Speaker 4: for brand I don't think the amount that it costs
Speaker 4: now to even a sport like cycling, which is not
Speaker 4: a massive sporting global terms, right, it's not football soccer
Speaker 4: for the Americans out there, it's not worth it for
Speaker 4: many brands to sponsoring entire cycling team millions and millions
Speaker 4: of euros. But like, if you can use that cycling
Speaker 4: team to launder and normalize your state's reputation, if that
Speaker 4: cycling team can be what people think of when they
Speaker 4: hear about your country, then maybe that is worth it, right,
Speaker 4: And when you have a bottomless pot of oil money,
Speaker 4: you don't have to worry so much about whether it's
Speaker 4: worth it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So the thing I want to do with this
Speaker 8: episode is to get into why specifically the Salus are
Speaker 8: doing this right now, because again, like most countries do
Speaker 8: sort of versions of this, right, but again, you know,
Speaker 8: that is one point two billion dollars they've thrown into
Speaker 8: two StarCraft leagues that I primarily known them for StarCraft.
Speaker 8: They do a bunch of stuff, but those things were
Speaker 8: not worth one point five billion dollars, Like, there's no way.
Speaker 8: But most of the money that had been sponsoring this
Speaker 8: stuff was crypto money, right, Okay, you know, but I
Speaker 8: wanted to get into why this is sort of happening.
Speaker 8: Something I think is very important to note going into
Speaker 8: this is that the sort of league thing that's being
Speaker 8: run right now is being run directly out of the
Speaker 8: Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is called Public Investment Fund,
Speaker 8: So this is directly state money. So the Esports World
Speaker 8: Cup that's happening right now has sixty million dollars in prizes,
Speaker 8: which is unreal is an extraordinary amount of money split
Speaker 8: around twenty one esports. There are thirty sports teams involved,
Speaker 8: and I am going to read the names of every
Speaker 8: single fucking one of them, because fuck you.
Speaker 4: Okay, let's do it.
Speaker 8: Fanatic, G two Sports Guildy, Sports, car Mine Corp, Movie
Speaker 8: Star KOI.
Speaker 4: Actually I've never heard of those ones, uh og not
Speaker 4: as muviy stides. I'm guessing it's Spanish Spanish telephone network.
Speaker 5: Yeah, probably, you know, there's a couple I don't know.
Speaker 5: But like, these are like the largest esports teams in
Speaker 5: the world.
Speaker 8: Okay, Nija's and Pajamas or NIP Team Liquor, which I'm
Speaker 8: really sad about because I was a Team Liquid fan
Speaker 8: for a fucking decade and I'm no longer one now
Speaker 8: because fuck this shit. Team Secret Team, Vitality, tuns of Esports,
Speaker 8: Vertus Pro one hundred Thieves, Cloud nine, Phase Clan Game
Speaker 8: in Gladiators, Energy Esports space Station Gaming, TSM Blacklist, International,
Speaker 8: LGD Gaming, Jenny Sports, t One Talent Esports, Webo Gaming,
Speaker 8: for Real Esports, Loud Team, Falcons, Twist and Minds. Fuck
Speaker 8: all of you for fucking doing this and doing the
Speaker 8: super pr thing. There's been a backlash, and the backlash
Speaker 8: is largely focused on you know, Saudi's institutionalized state homophobia
Speaker 8: and you know, I mean the fact that women are
Speaker 8: not full citizens. Yeah, like miss such Yeah, I mean
Speaker 8: just are just straight up owned by their husbands, right
Speaker 8: like that. That's that's how the sort of legal conservativeship works.
Speaker 4: I'm not very familiar with esports, so I can be
Speaker 4: there the podcast Grimace. Here are competitions in esports, like
Speaker 4: gender segregated? Do people all compete together?
Speaker 8: Basically No, there are like women's leagues, but like if
Speaker 8: you just if you want to compete, you can just
Speaker 8: compete assumeing you gift, you don't get forced out by
Speaker 8: sexist And this is actually a kind of big deal
Speaker 8: for StarCraft because you talked about this be four, but
Speaker 8: like probably the number two or number three best StarCraft
Speaker 8: player in the US is Scarlett, who's a trans woman,
Speaker 8: and I mean she's just in the regular league, right, like.
Speaker 4: Right, yeah, other turfs mad about it.
Speaker 8: You know, It's funny inside the StarCraft community, this was
Speaker 8: a huge thing for a long time, and eventually the
Speaker 8: tides just turned against them because everyone likes her because
Speaker 8: she's really good and she's also just like a good person,
Speaker 8: and so they kind of I got a watch over
Speaker 8: the years as they just kind of got obliterated. Weirdly,
Speaker 8: the like regular turfs haven't really found out about this,
Speaker 8: probably because StarCraft is, I don't know, too good of
Speaker 8: a game for them to be fucking dealing with.
Speaker 4: Not understanding things has not stopped this.
Speaker 5: That's true. That's true.
Speaker 8: It's kind of too obscure by this point. But you know,
Speaker 8: like there's been a lot of real concern for sort
Speaker 8: of queer players. There are a lot of these teams,
Speaker 8: like right as they were announcing they were going to
Speaker 8: the fucking Esports, well kup, we're doing all of these
Speaker 8: fucking Pride posts and talking about how they're gonna let
Speaker 8: their players wear Pride jerseys, and it's like, are you
Speaker 8: fucking kidding me?
Speaker 9: Yeah?
Speaker 4: You know, so are they physically pressed in Saudi Ara
Speaker 4: able to play?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 8: Yeah, These these tournaments are happening physically in Riod. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 8: you know this is this isn't the first one they've had.
Speaker 8: They've had some other events before this too there, but
Speaker 8: you know, like yeah and yeah, things are very very bad.
Speaker 5: There was a well, a story that was.
Speaker 8: Famous among trans people, but I don't ever think broke containment.
Speaker 8: Was there's a Saudi trans woman named Eden who was
Speaker 8: tricked into going back to like see her family, and
Speaker 8: her family just kidnapped her and locked her up and
Speaker 8: she killed herself Jesus.
Speaker 5: And this is not an uncommon thing.
Speaker 8: It happens to sist women too sometimes when they try
Speaker 8: to like get out of the country, sure is, they'll
Speaker 8: be kidnapped and like renditioned back.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there have been some pretty good reports on that. Yeah,
Speaker 4: well linked amost something because it's too it'll be too
Speaker 4: lankly to go and do here.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: But I think I think kind of the weakness of
Speaker 8: the backlash is that it doesn't it doesn't really quite
Speaker 8: understand exactly why the Saudis are doing this. You know,
Speaker 8: they understand that the Saudi government is incredibly repressive and
Speaker 8: that it's you know, institutionally homophobic, and it's institutionally sexist.
Speaker 8: It does not understand like just exactly how fucking bad
Speaker 8: these people are. Like this is like the most feted
Speaker 8: up state in the entire world.
Speaker 5: It is like it is. It is the fucking CIA state.
Speaker 8: And the rest of this episode is going to be
Speaker 8: us running through the exact sequence of stuff that caused
Speaker 8: the Saudis to need to do all of this fucking
Speaker 8: PR bullshit and how the sort of structural economic cycle
Speaker 8: of funneling petro dollars around has led to genocide and
Speaker 8: then also the stupid fucking esports tournament for PR.
Speaker 4: Two things which I'm not to say.
Speaker 8: But first, do you know who's probably not a large
Speaker 8: enough company to have sponsored this tournament? Although I can't
Speaker 8: promise that it's not KitKat or whatever.
Speaker 4: The fuck, hopefully it's kit Kat. I would like some
Speaker 4: cake cats, if that is any they're one of the
Speaker 4: sponsors of this fucking Esports World Cup. You keep your
Speaker 4: way for a biscuit cake cat, you'll hate cookie. I
Speaker 4: don't want you to hate Jocobar anymore.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's the products and services of this podcast, which
Speaker 8: hopefully are not supporting a genocide. But good god, we
Speaker 8: copy show YEP, so we are back and we are
Speaker 8: going to talk petro dollars. So Saudi wealth takes a
Speaker 8: form of what are called petro dollars. Petro dollars are
Speaker 8: in some sense, they're very very simple, right, It's dollars
Speaker 8: that you get from selling oil. This is important for
Speaker 8: a number of reasons. Though technically speaking you can sort
Speaker 8: of sell oil in other currencies now, but like most
Speaker 8: oil in the world is sold specifically in dollars, and
Speaker 8: so around the world, dollars are one of the things
Speaker 8: that if you are an economy, you need dollars in
Speaker 8: order to get oil from people. So huge sinks of
Speaker 8: American dollars from all across the world, you know, from
Speaker 8: the US of the US imporce, a lot of oil
Speaker 8: flow into these sort of oil producing countries.
Speaker 5: These are called petro dollars.
Speaker 8: The most obvious manifestation of this in Saudi Arabia is
Speaker 8: the country's solving Wealth Fund, which has nine hundred billion
Speaker 8: dollars of assets. Right, this is an unfathomable amount of money.
Speaker 8: It is so much money that it is a structural
Speaker 8: problem for the global economy trying to figure out what
Speaker 8: the fuck you do with this money. This is a
Speaker 8: problem that has caused disaster around the world. Is something
Speaker 8: where I'm fond of talking about on this show, but
Speaker 8: we're going to talk about again because it's important here.
Speaker 8: In the seventies and eighties, as sort of Opek realized
Speaker 8: that it could, you know, use its sort of political
Speaker 8: power to gain enormous amounts of wealth and power and
Speaker 8: gain enormous amounts of petro dollars by controlling the price
Speaker 8: of oil. Suddenly they had, you know, that you have
Speaker 8: hundreds of billions of dollars floating around and because this
Speaker 8: is capitalism, you can't just sit on that money. You
Speaker 8: have to find a way to turn that money into
Speaker 8: more money. But again, you know, I mean just a
Speaker 8: sovereign wealth fund is almost a trillion dollars, right, and
Speaker 8: so this is extremely hard, and it means that this
Speaker 8: money is constantly flowing around the world trying to find
Speaker 8: a way to get returns on it, you know. And
Speaker 8: in the modern era, these are things like people remember
Speaker 8: we work, oh yeah, but incredibly stupid dune. From the
Speaker 8: beginning office space rental scheme that went under that that
Speaker 8: was a lot of that was funded by Saudi money
Speaker 8: because Tuddy's had put an enormous amount of money in
Speaker 8: this Japanese bank called soft Bank, and soft Bank was
Speaker 8: trying to figure out what to do with this unfathol
Speaker 8: amount of money, and they were like, Okay, what if
Speaker 8: we fund the dumbest project of all time?
Speaker 4: Yeah, And it became a thing where they could fund
Speaker 4: it and like just buy them funding it. Its stock
Speaker 4: price would go up even if it was like we
Speaker 4: work a really shit idea.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: And this is something about global capital that I don't
Speaker 8: think has been fully processed really. But the sheer, the
Speaker 8: sheer extent of capital concentration, right, the amount of money
Speaker 8: that the richest people in the world and the riches
Speaker 8: sort of families in the world in the sort of
Speaker 8: Saudi case, right, you know, the Saudi Arabia is a
Speaker 8: country where a family has access to the resources of
Speaker 8: extremely wealthy nation state. Right, And that being true has
Speaker 8: structural effects on the entire rest of the economy because
Speaker 8: you know, we've been seeing the consequences of this for
Speaker 8: a long time in the tech sector, right, where you
Speaker 8: don't have to fucking make money, like your revenue stream
Speaker 8: can just be investor money and you can coast for
Speaker 8: a decade off of just taking money from the Saudis
Speaker 8: who are like trying to find some way to turn
Speaker 8: this money.
Speaker 5: And the more money.
Speaker 8: I think this has downstream effects that we don't we
Speaker 8: haven't even begun to really understand yet, right, But very famously,
Speaker 8: in the seventies and eighties, there was all this money
Speaker 8: floating around and what it was poured into was the
Speaker 8: Third Book debt crisis. People bought state debt with it,
Speaker 8: and then these loans were on it were on adjustable rates.
Speaker 8: So when the vulgar shock hit and the US like
Speaker 8: massively increased interest rates, the interest rates on these loans
Speaker 8: like skyrocketed and suddenly you know, you're paying like fifty
Speaker 8: percent interest on a loan of like cephal billion dollars.
Speaker 8: And all of these countries are just systematically looted. Their
Speaker 8: economies are destroyed. I mean, David Grab rememorably talks about
Speaker 8: this thing in Madagascar where Madagascar had eliminated malaria. You know,
Speaker 8: but the way you eliminate malaria is through mosquito extermination.
Speaker 8: Like programs are not that expensive, but they are a
Speaker 8: little bit expensive. And when the fucking government of Madagascar
Speaker 8: had to like pay off this IMF debt, they had
Speaker 8: to get.
Speaker 5: Rid of the they.
Speaker 8: Got rid of this mosquito programs, and there was a
Speaker 8: malaria outpick and it killed unfathomable numbers of people, and
Speaker 8: stuff like this happened all over the world. And the
Speaker 8: source of all of this, right, partially the source of
Speaker 8: this is these loans. And partially the source of this
Speaker 8: is this these enormous piles of petro dollars that you
Speaker 8: have to find some way to sort of turn into
Speaker 8: more capital, right, and you know, so there are sort
Speaker 8: of trademark things you can do with this money. Of
Speaker 8: them is buying a bunch of a military equipment. Mostly
Speaker 8: what you're doing with that is sort of buying American patronage.
Speaker 8: If you spend enormous amount of money buying American tanks,
Speaker 8: and this is you know, something the Saudi has been
Speaker 8: doing for ages, right, you spend a bunch of money
Speaker 8: on American defense contracts. You know, you can sort of
Speaker 8: buy us protection and guarantees that you know, for example,
Speaker 8: as it is gonna happen later in this episode, you
Speaker 8: can buy a guarantee that an invading army won't sack
Speaker 8: your capital. But the thing with the Saudis is that
Speaker 8: they have a lot of equipment but Saudi Arabia cannot
Speaker 8: maintain a strong functional army, right if they were, if
Speaker 8: they had an actual serious army, there would be a
Speaker 8: coup tomorrow. So their army is extremely well equipped kind of,
Speaker 8: but it's trained like shit and it's run by like
Speaker 8: just dipshits intentionally so that it sucks. But you know,
Speaker 8: so that's like sort of one thing you can do
Speaker 8: with this money. A lot of this money ended up
Speaker 8: going into real estate, and there are sort of cycles
Speaker 8: of this happening. The one that ain't that's of concern
Speaker 8: to us is what happens after two thousand and eight,
Speaker 8: in the sort of aftermath of two thousand and eight.
Speaker 8: There are bill places in the world where, you know,
Speaker 8: you can park an extremely large amount of money in
Speaker 8: real estate and have it be a relatively liquid asset.
Speaker 8: If you have like property in a market that is,
Speaker 8: you know, where the housing market is really hot and
Speaker 8: prices are increasing rapidly, you can pretty quickly get rid
Speaker 8: of it. And you can also there's liquidity. There's sort
Speaker 8: of financial instruments you can do based off of your
Speaker 8: ownership of real estate, and this is something that drives
Speaker 8: the Saudis into a bunch of very very I don't
Speaker 8: know if risky is exactly the right word, but a
Speaker 8: bunch of moves in ye Many real estate that really,
Speaker 8: truly we're about to not pay off.
Speaker 5: There's a very good book about this.
Speaker 8: It's by Lisa Bloomy called Destroying Yemen, which is about
Speaker 8: like a lot of the factors that start the war
Speaker 8: in Yemen, and this is one of them.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 8: We can't really do a full recap of the Many
Speaker 8: Civil War because that's its own seven hundred episode podcast, Like,
Speaker 8: oh god it is. Yeah, it's on a surface level,
Speaker 8: it's not that complicated, but the moment you get any
Speaker 8: granular detail on it, it's like the most complicated conflict
Speaker 8: I've ever studied.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean there's so many conflicts like this, right, Like, yeah,
Speaker 4: civil war appreciates us. When I was studying Yemen in college,
Speaker 4: I longed for the simplicity of the Spanish Civil War,
Speaker 4: Like this conflict is nuts, Yeah, but for simplicity's sake.
Speaker 4: There's roughly ish two factions. There are the sort of
Speaker 4: forces allied with what's called the Coalition government, which is
Speaker 4: the government backed by the Saudis, and then there are
Speaker 4: what's sort of in the West become called the Huthis.
Speaker 4: I mean it's more complicated. It's all of this is
Speaker 4: enormously more complicated than that. These are all alliances. A
Speaker 4: lot of these alliances are extremely tenuous. But one of
Speaker 4: the things that happens is that when a government that
Speaker 4: is hostile to the Saudis, which is like you know,
Speaker 4: the sort of like unterer a law like that whole
Speaker 4: coalition is very awso to the saudiast because the Saudis
Speaker 4: sucks shit. You know, Suddenly the Saudis are looking at
Speaker 4: an enormous amount of capital they've sunk in real estate
Speaker 4: that they are you know, based on these like incredibly
Speaker 4: corrupt land deals with the previous administration, which have been
Speaker 4: friendly to them, they are looking at suddenly losing all
Speaker 4: this land. The Saudis weren't the first people to come
Speaker 4: into sort of the m many real estate market right
Speaker 4: on the uae Omah and a bunch of other states
Speaker 4: has sort of been in there before. And so part
Speaker 4: of what a big part of what this sort of
Speaker 4: this like what was called the coalition is is this
Speaker 4: like basically a bunch of these assholes trying to protect
Speaker 4: their housing assets. Look, that's a lot of what a
Speaker 4: lot of wars are. If we're on it, it's people
Speaker 4: trying to protect xoy assets, right like unfortunately.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and it's not really seen in these terms in
Speaker 8: the way that's covered. But that's that's a lot of
Speaker 8: what's going on. And this produces one of the worst
Speaker 8: wars of the twenty first century, which is saying something
Speaker 8: because the twenty for centuries had a lot.
Speaker 5: Of really really terrible wars.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we've had some reference.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and we're going to get into what the Saudis
Speaker 8: were doing during this war. After these products and services
Speaker 8: you have returned and.
Speaker 5: The thing we're returning.
Speaker 4: Into is a really really bleak war.
Speaker 8: So we said this kind of from the beginning, right,
Speaker 8: the Saudi military is not very good. The Saudi's attempt
Speaker 8: to sort of end the war by like rolling a
Speaker 8: tank column over the border. It's like, I think it's
Speaker 8: twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, in like the early period of
Speaker 8: the war, they try to end up by just rolling tanks,
Speaker 8: and tanks get obliterated because the Saudi army isn't worth shit, right.
Speaker 8: All of their ground forces are a joke, but their
Speaker 8: air force is very very well equipped with a bunch
Speaker 8: of like incredibly modern US warplanes that we sell them
Speaker 8: all the fucking time, and so you know, they don't
Speaker 8: really have good infantry. What they have the ability to
Speaker 8: do is just obliterate people with air strikes. The kind
Speaker 8: of like terror air campaign that they're waging is something
Speaker 8: that I think we're all familiar with from Palestine. But
Speaker 8: they're doing air strikes on school buses full of children,
Speaker 8: and they're taking the American thing. They're doing double tap
Speaker 8: drone strikes on weddings where they're they're hitting a wedding
Speaker 8: and then when rescue workers come up, they hit they hit.
Speaker 5: The rescue workers with their strikes.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 8: I'm pretty sure it was young when they had the
Speaker 8: triple tap fucking airstrike where they did an airstrike on
Speaker 8: someone's funeral. They didn't airstrike on the rescue workers, and
Speaker 8: then when they had a funeral for those people, they
Speaker 8: did air strike on fucking that.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: This is a just.
Speaker 8: Unbelievably brutal war. And you know, I want to get
Speaker 8: which we talked about, right, like there are some there
Speaker 8: are some parts of the Saudi coalition that can you know,
Speaker 8: field ground forces, right, that stuff's mostly the sort of
Speaker 8: southern secessionist groups and those people are not really that loyal,
Speaker 8: so you know, so they have to start importing infantry
Speaker 8: to try to fight the who thies, and so they're
Speaker 8: importing a bunch of Columbian mercenaries. So these are guys
Speaker 8: who've been like desk squad guys in Columbia.
Speaker 4: The Columbian guys, the new I was going to say,
Speaker 4: the new Rhodesians that it's a dog shadowt to cost
Speaker 4: and a group of human beings. Yeah, it used to
Speaker 4: be that when you were running into private military contractors abroad,
Speaker 4: it would be people white folks from Africa, right, Like
Speaker 4: they call themselves Rhodesion South Africans, what have you. Now
Speaker 4: you'll see a lot of like a lot of private
Speaker 4: military contractors, like at the boots on the ground, you know,
Speaker 4: infantry level of Colombians.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and so so that that's one of the sources
Speaker 8: they went to. But then you know, part of the
Speaker 8: Saudi coalition is the UAE, and the UAE has a
Speaker 8: lot of very very close ties to militant groups in Sudance,
Speaker 8: specifically a group of militias that's now known the West
Speaker 8: of the Rapid Response Forces but these are the people
Speaker 8: who did the genocide and are for yeah, and they
Speaker 8: are like right now like doing a genocide in like
Speaker 8: in Sudan as they attempt to sort of seize control
Speaker 8: of the country. And because the UAE is very very
Speaker 8: well connected to these one of the ways that the
Speaker 8: coalition tries to get ground troops is by using troops
Speaker 8: were you know, kidnapped by these militias. And when I
Speaker 8: say troops, I mean child soldiers. What the forces that
Speaker 8: they are deploying in Yemen in an attempt to use
Speaker 8: as cannon fodder are Sudanese child soldiers. It is unbelievably believe,
Speaker 8: I mean kind of funnily. A lot of these people
Speaker 8: end up not fighting because they you know, they get
Speaker 8: handed a rifle, will get thrown into Yemen and they
Speaker 8: just immediately sell their guns and I to fight. But like,
Speaker 8: you know, but like that, that's the kind of shit.
Speaker 8: Like again, the kind of pure evil we are dealing
Speaker 8: with is we are having the guys who did the dart,
Speaker 8: who did the fucking Darfur genocide, kidnap fucking villagers from Sudan,
Speaker 8: like child soldiers from Sudan and attempting to use them
Speaker 8: as cannon father in their fucking war in Yemen, so
Speaker 8: they can like defend their fucking real estate assets.
Speaker 4: Yeah right, I think Friend of the Show Eric Prince
Speaker 4: makes a uh makes an appearance in Yemen as well
Speaker 4: his Triumvira of companies, which are the same company, right,
Speaker 4: Black Quota Z.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Probably, I quite frankly don't remember that part, but probably also, Yeah, you.
Speaker 4: Can rely on EP to show up in a situation
Speaker 4: I is.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: I mean the part of this we haven't gotten to
Speaker 8: yet is the worst part of it, which is so
Speaker 8: this the Saudis and the sort of coalition government they
Speaker 8: you know, they do okay in the sort of southwest
Speaker 8: of the country because the Southern Yemen secessionst groups are
Speaker 8: well organized and are good soldiers, even if they eventually
Speaker 8: sort of rebel. There's this whole it's it's a whole mess.
Speaker 8: But in the west of the country everything is completely different,
Speaker 8: and you know, they're basically getting their shit kicked in
Speaker 8: and in that theater, the Saudi's plan is we are
Speaker 8: going to starve the country, so, you know, and the Saudi,
Speaker 8: the Saudis have naval assets nobody else really in this
Speaker 8: war does, right, and they just set up a blockade
Speaker 8: on like all of the ports on that side of
Speaker 8: the country. We do not know how many people get
Speaker 8: starved as a result of this. The last good mortality
Speaker 8: figures I could I could find, this war is still
Speaker 8: going on, by the way. I mean, fighting has gotten
Speaker 8: a lot less intense since of twenty twenty one, twenty
Speaker 8: twenty two, but I mean it's it's still going The
Speaker 8: last good numbers that I can find suggest three hundred
Speaker 8: and seventy seven thousand dead, and it's probably way way
Speaker 8: worse than that, because again, we just don't know how
Speaker 8: many people died in the famines that you know that
Speaker 8: that the Saudi set off, and this was you know,
Speaker 8: this was explicitly there. Their plan here was was to
Speaker 8: just kill off the population of this part of Yemen
Speaker 8: by starving them to death. You know, this is the genocide, right,
Speaker 8: they were trying to do genocide. It doesn't work, and
Speaker 8: it doesn't work because, I mean there's a number of
Speaker 8: reasons why it doesn't work. They basically they get defeated militarily.
Speaker 8: Kuthi troops like take several cities like inside of Saudi Rabia,
Speaker 8: and like they like they march across the border and
Speaker 8: take them. And you know, I mean, it's it's bad
Speaker 8: enough for the Saudis that like the there's a moment
Speaker 8: where it like it looks like they're going to lose
Speaker 8: ri Odd and the US has to step in and
Speaker 8: be like no, like okay, you guys need to fucking.
Speaker 5: Pull out of this shit.
Speaker 8: But that you know that, and that that makes the
Speaker 8: war less bad, you know, like the blockades not still
Speaker 8: in place. But this is the situation in twenty twenty
Speaker 8: two that we walk into when when suddenly there's they're
Speaker 8: buying all these esports companies that they have just attempted
Speaker 8: to commit a genocide, right, they have just attempted to
Speaker 8: exterminate a vast part of the population of Yemen. That's
Speaker 8: I think, like really the true sort of heart of darkness,
Speaker 8: evil shit, right, Like I don't know, it's like US
Speaker 8: and Cambodia is shit.
Speaker 5: But you know, there's stuff that got.
Speaker 8: More media attention too, which was like in a lot
Speaker 8: of ways more harmful to them because that the pr
Speaker 8: from it. But one of the things I think people
Speaker 8: have forgotten now because this was six years ago, is
Speaker 8: that in twenty eighteen they kidnapped and then killed a
Speaker 8: Washington Post columnist named Jamal ka Shogi by tricking him
Speaker 8: into going into a consulate, killing him, carving his body
Speaker 8: up with a bone saw.
Speaker 5: And we're pretty sure the way.
Speaker 8: That they got the body out of the consulate was
Speaker 8: by stuffing the fucking again bone saled parts of his
Speaker 8: body into see bags in a diplomatic community and walking
Speaker 8: them out of the embassy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is one of those things that I should
Speaker 4: never be forgotten, right, Like, yeah, he was a citizen, right,
Speaker 4: was he a green cod hode?
Speaker 8: I'm not one hundred percent sure, but this is obviously
Speaker 8: like a fucking unbelievable crime. I think I wish that
Speaker 8: you know, the fact that they were doing fucking airstrikes
Speaker 8: on school buses had gotten as much attention as this did.
Speaker 8: But you know, for for a long time, right, like
Speaker 8: in the late twenty tens and the early twenty twenties,
Speaker 8: and this this was an issue in the twenty twenty
Speaker 8: presidential campaigns because you know, I mean, Trump fucking went
Speaker 8: and touched the orb with Muhammed bin Salman, who's the
Speaker 8: Crown Prince of now Well at the time, was known
Speaker 8: as Mohammad Been bone saw because she just straight up
Speaker 8: ordered this guy to be fucking bone salved, you know,
Speaker 8: but like that it was. It was a real sort
Speaker 8: of issue. And this is the reputation that the Satuda
Speaker 8: government has that causes them to kind of go really
Speaker 8: really hard into the into this esports angle. And there
Speaker 8: there's one last kind of angle to this, which is
Speaker 8: like the worst kept secret in the of the oil
Speaker 8: market is that the Saudis are running out of oil.
Speaker 8: It's like it's it's technically a secret, but it's like
Speaker 8: everyone knows this, Like every everyone knows that a lot
Speaker 8: of sort of oil that's technically sold by Saudi Ramco
Speaker 8: is not their oil, it's their labels and other people's oil.
Speaker 8: And people have known this for a long time, and
Speaker 8: the Saudis obviously know it. And so the trick they
Speaker 8: have to pull right in order to continue to be
Speaker 8: this fucking like nightmare dictatorship state propped up by the CIA,
Speaker 8: is to find something else to base their economy on.
Speaker 8: And their plan has been a lot of like they're
Speaker 8: trying to do just tech bullshit we're not going to
Speaker 8: get into because that's its own thing.
Speaker 4: I'm so sad. I'm so sad to be talking about
Speaker 4: the line.
Speaker 5: Sorry, the lines.
Speaker 4: Yet they're trying to build a city that is a
Speaker 4: lot of that is also a city, a really really
Speaker 4: long city is a line that's to be their tech thing.
Speaker 4: You may sound like we're ever simplifying this, We are not. No,
Speaker 4: it is that they are trying to build a city
Speaker 4: that is aligned.
Speaker 5: It's not going to get built.
Speaker 8: What it has done is they've absolutely destroyed the lives
Speaker 8: of a bunch of sort of people who are just
Speaker 8: like farmers and cattle like herders, like some of the
Speaker 8: metic cattle herders, and people who've been there for a
Speaker 8: really long time have had their land taken away from
Speaker 8: them and their lives have been.
Speaker 5: Destroyed by it. So you know.
Speaker 8: But the thing is that in order for them to
Speaker 8: try to do their tech pivot, they have to fix
Speaker 8: the reputation people. They cannot be the state that is
Speaker 8: you remembered for like bone sawing a journalist and attempting
Speaker 8: to start of an entire population and doing air strikes
Speaker 8: and school buses. Right, this can't be the reputation they have.
Speaker 4: This is it Vision twenty thirty or Planned twenty thirty
Speaker 4: or some big yeah yeah, for their like rehabilitation and
Speaker 4: diversification of their income. But like posts Jamal Kashogi, a
Speaker 4: lot of big companies like we can't be like like
Speaker 4: companies like Google, right, and like big big tech companies, Yeah,
Speaker 4: kind of took a noticeable step back.
Speaker 8: And so this has been why they've been going into
Speaker 8: sports because they can throw around, like we're talking nine
Speaker 8: hundred billion dollars of assets, right, they can just swamp
Speaker 8: a sport, right, especially something like esports where people are
Speaker 8: not very well paid, there's not that much money, sources
Speaker 8: of income are tenuis. They could just sort of buy
Speaker 8: off these entire industries and it's kind of and it's working.
Speaker 8: And part of the reason that it's working is that,
Speaker 8: you know, the focus is on and like, I understand
Speaker 8: why people are doing this, but the focus has been
Speaker 8: on the fact that set like the Saudi government is,
Speaker 8: you know, is sexist and homophobic.
Speaker 5: And that's true.
Speaker 8: But if that's the reputation that the Saudis have, that
Speaker 8: is a win for them because A they'll be able
Speaker 8: to find people who agree with those views, and B
Speaker 8: nobody's talking about again the fact that they they they
Speaker 8: fucky they did an airstrike on a school bus, like
Speaker 8: like the bodies of children and their fucking school bags
Speaker 8: were flying over like they they've been able to sort
Speaker 8: of avoid any kind of more reckoning with this because
Speaker 8: people are off talking about other stuff, and if this
Speaker 8: keeps working like it's going to work, there going to
Speaker 8: be a country that killed three hundred and seventy thousand
Speaker 8: people and probably more.
Speaker 4: I think also like one of the reasons they've been
Speaker 4: able to get away with this is that ah media
Speaker 4: has normalized massive amounts of death and dying of Muslim
Speaker 4: people in the Middle East. Yeah, for twenty plus years, right,
Speaker 4: so a lot of people's entire life of media consumption.
Speaker 4: Every day, we've dropped bombs and killed hundreds of people
Speaker 4: in the Middle East, and it's just, yeah, it's the
Speaker 4: background noise in US media.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I want to watch one more thing they did
Speaker 8: that wasn't the script, but I need to fucking talk
Speaker 8: about because it's one of my formative political experiences. Was
Speaker 8: So when the Arab Spring started, one of the biggest
Speaker 8: uprisings was in Bahrain. This is one of the earliest
Speaker 8: up rising in twenty eleven. There's an attempt to knock
Speaker 8: off the monarchy of Bahrain, and they probably could have won.
Speaker 8: The kids in the streets in Bahrain are probably the
Speaker 8: bravest on of the bravest people I've ever seen. And
Speaker 8: the Saudis rolled tanks into Bahrain to crush the protests
Speaker 8: and fucking keep the government intact. And for I mean
Speaker 8: years for you, I mean like a decade afterwards. Every
Speaker 8: once in a while, you'd get a video coming like
Speaker 8: that came out of like the of these kids dressed
Speaker 8: in all black chasing down an armored vehicle that's shooting
Speaker 8: at them with molotovs. Right, I've never seen anything. I've
Speaker 8: never seen anything like it. Like, they're some of the
Speaker 8: bravest people in the world, and the Saudis fucking rolled
Speaker 8: tanks into their country to fucking crush them. The fucking
Speaker 8: esports companies, sure, those are the people whose money you're taking,
Speaker 8: right you you were, you were taking the money of
Speaker 8: a bunch of people who rolled tanks into the country,
Speaker 8: whose people wanted fucking democracy.
Speaker 5: And yeah, that's that. That's all I got about this.
Speaker 8: I'm extremely angry about all of this, and.
Speaker 5: Yeah, fuck them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, if I can say from a perspective of someone
Speaker 4: who's been paid to do sports for a decent amount
Speaker 4: of my life. Yeah, you make shit money, but like
Speaker 4: it's so much better to not make shit choices as well,
Speaker 4: And like that goes way beyond like not cheing in
Speaker 4: the manifest ways of people cheating in in sports, but
Speaker 4: also just like you don't compromising to the way more
Speaker 4: important than like playing right, Like sports is supposed to
Speaker 4: be fun, and if you allow yourself to be a
Speaker 4: vehicle for things that are terrible, like you're gonna be
Speaker 4: miserable in your fucking forties anyway, because your body will
Speaker 4: fall apart. Like, don't make yourself feel guilty for this
Speaker 4: as well.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and one last thing I want to address because
Speaker 8: one of the defenses that Saudi people have been rolling
Speaker 8: out is this like, oh, you guys don't respect Muslim culture,
Speaker 8: like because because the main line of complaint has been
Speaker 8: about sort of about homophobia and sexism, and it's like, yeah, man,
Speaker 8: those fucking children in their school bosses were Muslim to
Speaker 8: like fuck you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the people in Bahrain are Muslim too. Regularly the
Speaker 4: people who yeah, bodies are all over the streets because
Speaker 4: they asked for a chance to have some say and
Speaker 4: how the country was run like that, there's just you
Speaker 4: don't get to do that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so this has been nic could happen here?
Speaker 8: Fuck every single one of the scenes that's fucking doing
Speaker 8: this shit fucking call.
Speaker 9: Yeah all right, hello, welcome to the podcast It could
Speaker 9: happen here.
Speaker 4: Podcasts for me and Cheren talk about vegetables or terrible things,
Speaker 4: depending on the week. It's me, it's uine and today
Speaker 4: it's a terrible thing. It's not a vegetable or a
Speaker 4: cea animal. How are you Cherene, how are you doing?
Speaker 3: I'm good. That's honestly a great premise just for a
Speaker 3: show in general, Like we talk about either food or
Speaker 3: something terrible.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like and you never know, you know, Yeah, it's
Speaker 4: just in your playlist. And then is it a fucking artichoke?
Speaker 4: Is it genocide? You don't know.
Speaker 3: You have to find out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the only way is by listening.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but Hi, I'm good, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 4: Good. I'm glad to hear it. Sreen. So, what I
Speaker 4: wanted to talk about today is what is happening in Turkey?
Speaker 4: Why are they like this? What is going on? Specifically?
Speaker 4: I want to talk about some these attacks on Syrian
Speaker 4: refugees in Turkey. The people may have seen, they may
Speaker 4: not have seen. I see them in my timeline, but
Speaker 4: maybe that's because of the people I follow. I think.
Speaker 4: To start off with, to understand what's happening in Turkey,
Speaker 4: you have to understand the relations between Turkey and Syria.
Speaker 4: Since the Civil War began in Syria, which is more
Speaker 4: than a decade ago now, thirteen odd years ago. So
Speaker 4: from the start of the war, Turkey has backed anti
Speaker 4: a SAD factions, right, so those are the rebels in Syria.
Speaker 4: This is a big change. In two thousand and eight,
Speaker 4: A Sadden Herdigan's family went on holiday together really Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 4: they went into southern Turkey and a little little beach
Speaker 4: holiday together.
Speaker 3: Disturbing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, what a time. Yeah, just to do to
Speaker 4: rarking by the beach. But unfortunately they're no longer holiday together.
Speaker 4: They might be holding again soon, as we'll see.
Speaker 3: Yeah that's what it sounds like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they are becoming tight again, and again referenced their
Speaker 4: family holiday in his most recent comments on really yeah,
Speaker 4: it's like our relations have been familial.
Speaker 5: I like that at all.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, you know what'd be going on holiday with
Speaker 4: Marshal Lasad. Just as a moral principle, I think.
Speaker 3: It's just crazy to be because you're right they I
Speaker 3: feel like we're very open about supporting the anti Assad forces,
Speaker 3: and so to be like suddenly, why can't we have
Speaker 3: diplomatic friendliness, Like come on, it's just like the weirdest
Speaker 3: plot to us to be.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it comes
Speaker 4: from anti migrant sentiment in Turkey, which I want to
Speaker 4: get into. I think it's so like we are witnessing
Speaker 4: this global crackdown on migration on refugees. We see it
Speaker 4: in Europe, we see it here at southern border, we
Speaker 4: see it here in Turkey, We're seeing it in North Africa.
Speaker 4: We're seeing it all over. So this is hasn't always
Speaker 4: been a case like at the start of the war,
Speaker 4: Turkey Thrope and it's bordereds to s Syrian refugees, right,
Speaker 4: They built camps to house them. They were strong backers
Speaker 4: of the revolution. They spent forty million dollars carrying for
Speaker 4: their refugees. The Nationally Intelligence Organization, the MIT, actually trained
Speaker 4: parts of the FSA, the Free Syrian Army, and then
Speaker 4: later they brought together the SNA. There will be many acronyms, right,
Speaker 4: like every civil war loves a three letter acronym. And
Speaker 4: the Syrian War is no different.
Speaker 3: But they were really open. They were really public about
Speaker 3: being like we welcomed the refugees. I remember that was like,
Speaker 3: I don't know, as a Syrian, I was like, oh,
Speaker 3: that's nice.
Speaker 4: It was nice, nice thing to do.
Speaker 3: Like I mean, like at the time, no one gave
Speaker 3: a shit for the most part. So to have like
Speaker 3: a country out loud be like we welcome the refugees,
Speaker 3: come over here will help. And now they have the
Speaker 3: largest population of Syrian refugees like in the world. I
Speaker 3: don't know if you're gonna mention this coming up, but
Speaker 3: I feel like the only thing that changed, not the
Speaker 3: only I think one of the only things. The main
Speaker 3: thing that changed is that no one in Turkey thought
Speaker 3: it would last as long.
Speaker 4: Yeah no, yeah, absolutely not.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we'll get into that because the nature of their
Speaker 4: legal residence there is very temporary. Yeah, okay. So Turkey
Speaker 4: has used the SNA as Syrian National Army right, which
Speaker 4: is it's more explicitly Turkish backed faction, as a directly
Speaker 4: linked proxy force. They've used it in their operations against
Speaker 4: the STF. So the Syrian Democratic Forces another acronym for you,
Speaker 4: the organization which includes the Yepige right their YPG, the
Speaker 4: YPG the other elements of the military forces of the
Speaker 4: Autonomous Areas North and East Syria, sometimes called RISHABA. They
Speaker 4: have also used the SNA outside of Syria, right in Azerbaijan,
Speaker 4: Libya and Nizier like just as a private military right
Speaker 4: as a mercenary army more or less, and you'll you'll
Speaker 4: hear them refer to sometimes as mercenaries, certainly like when
Speaker 4: they're being used outside of Syria, it's hard to argue
Speaker 4: that they're not, and other times, like when they're being
Speaker 4: used in Syria. A lot of these folks were previously
Speaker 4: parts of other groups that have kind of been repackaged
Speaker 4: and bundled up together by Turkey, and there are still
Speaker 4: many factions within these broadly speaking Turkish supported Arab rebel
Speaker 4: forces in Syria. There are some Kurdish groups as well,
Speaker 4: but not so many, and there are some Turkic groups
Speaker 4: that are not Arab. So these property forces are really
Speaker 4: vital to the Turkey strategy in Syria. I wanted to
Speaker 4: get a sense of how numerous the redirected or re
Speaker 4: recruited Jahadis were from other groups, so I reached out
Speaker 4: to Zagros Hiwa. People are not familiar with Zagros. He
Speaker 4: is a spokesperson of the Kurdistan Communities Union's Foreign Relations Commission.
Speaker 4: If you're not familiar with the Kurdistan Communities Union, it's
Speaker 4: the umbrella organization for the several democratic confederalist political parties North, South,
Speaker 4: East and West Kurdistan which are inspired by the ideology
Speaker 4: of Abdullah Asient. So we're going to hear more from
Speaker 4: Zagoros next week. I have a number of questions about
Speaker 4: the ongoing Turkish bombing there in the in the Kandil
Speaker 4: Mountains in the in the north of the Kurdistan Autonomous
Speaker 4: Region of Iraq. But we're going to drop a little
Speaker 4: quote here where he talks about the interactions at the
Speaker 4: SDF and the EPIGAY and the other other units Right
Speaker 4: hPG have had with the Turkish Army's Arab Syrian elements.
Speaker 4: When you hear Zagros here talking about DASH, what he's
Speaker 4: talking about is the so called Islamic State, the Islamic
Speaker 4: State of Iraq and the levant Right. It's just the
Speaker 4: Arabic acronym of the same organization. So if you went
Speaker 4: aware that's what he's talking.
Speaker 10: About, invading Turkish Army is that many Jajaradists have been
Speaker 10: incorporated into the Turkish Army. They are acting as units
Speaker 10: with the Turkish or separate units with the Turkish Army.
Speaker 10: They have been embedded with with the with natal second
Speaker 10: largest army. I can say these Jajadists are x DAJ members,
Speaker 10: ex Nostra Front members, x Alpaider members. They are from
Speaker 10: many nationalities, according to pu K officials Patriotic Union of
Speaker 10: Kdistan officials, they say that they have learned the names
Speaker 10: of three hundreds of these DASH members in the Turkish
Speaker 10: Army ranks.
Speaker 5: So also.
Speaker 10: Underground Kedystan Freedom guerrillas themselves have observations about the inclusion
Speaker 10: of jihadist members in the ranks of the Turkish Army
Speaker 10: and many of the close range classes blanket point classes
Speaker 10: with the Turkish Army. Kurdistan Freedom Guerrillas here some of
Speaker 10: the soldiers speaking Arabic, shouting.
Speaker 1: Yearning in Arabic.
Speaker 4: To understand further what's going on in Turkey, I think
Speaker 4: you need to understand the phenomenon of Turkish ultra nationalism
Speaker 4: and social Darwinism. This is not just endemic in Turkey,
Speaker 4: but also in European countries. With a large Turkish diaspora.
Speaker 4: The most extreme and concerning example of this is a
Speaker 4: group called the Gray Wolves. The Gray Wolves are the
Speaker 4: military street wing of the Nationalist Movement Party in Turkey
Speaker 4: and they've been involved in political violence there since the
Speaker 4: nineteen sixties, with their primary target being curved Greeks, Alavis, Arabs, Christians,
Speaker 4: Jews and Armenians. These are all minority ethnic groups, I guess.
Speaker 4: To understand this further, you have to be able to
Speaker 4: differentiate between race, state, and nation. Right, which is getting
Speaker 4: into things that I lecture about. But the idea of
Speaker 4: a race is effective biological link, right, This isn't born
Speaker 4: out necessarily, but the idea of a shared biology. The
Speaker 4: idea of a nation. A nation is an imagined community, right,
Speaker 4: which are can have many races. It could have a
Speaker 4: state aligned to it or not. Right, So the Turkish
Speaker 4: nation doesn't necessarily align with the Turkish state. There are
Speaker 4: like other groups within the Turkish state. You have Turkish citizenship,
Speaker 4: but do not see themselves as nationally or ethnically Turkish.
Speaker 4: For what the gray Wolves believe is the superiority of
Speaker 4: a Turkish race, and they strive for a monoethnic Sunni
Speaker 4: Islamic Turkish nation. They're pan Turkic organizations, so they want
Speaker 4: to join together all the Turkic peoples in one kind
Speaker 4: of renewed Turkish empire. Right after clap to the Soviet Union,
Speaker 4: they called for this revived empire that would unite Turkic people.
Speaker 4: They like many of these extremely right wing violent organizations
Speaker 4: have their roots in anti communism right in the Cold
Speaker 4: War and specifically and something called Operation Gladio, which was
Speaker 4: a sort of anti communist guerrilla training supported by the
Speaker 4: CIA and other groups. They began as government condoned and
Speaker 4: a sort of sort of deny government forced to use
Speaker 4: against the left right. I'm not going to be able,
Speaker 4: like I can't detil every think the Gray Wolves are down,
Speaker 4: and this isn't what that episode it's about. I do
Speaker 4: want to explain one incident. It's maybe one of the
Speaker 4: most heenous things that they're known for, and it's called
Speaker 4: the Marush massacre. Are you familiar with this? Sharene?
Speaker 3: No, I'm not.
Speaker 4: Actually, Okay, a little little history for you. So in
Speaker 4: December nineteen seventy eight in Karaman Mirash Karaman Marash in Mirash,
Speaker 4: you'll hear those two terms used both right, like Karaman
Speaker 4: I think means hero in Turkish. There was a battle
Speaker 4: there in the early part of twentieth century. I think
Speaker 4: it was in the First World War, and so they
Speaker 4: added like hero to the start of the town. But
Speaker 4: Alavi people don't tend to use that when they talk
Speaker 4: about the massacre because it seems a little weird to
Speaker 4: be like a great town where this horrible massare occurred.
Speaker 4: So you're here both it's mrs, but s has a
Speaker 4: little diacritical mark, so it's ah noise. The massacre starts
Speaker 4: in seven ninety seventy eight, when an anti Soviet movie
Speaker 4: is being shown in a movie theater in town and
Speaker 4: someone throws a bomb into the theater. Right Communist brouts
Speaker 4: were blamed for this. It's a little unclear if it
Speaker 4: really was them or someone who who wanted to start
Speaker 4: some drama by pretending to be them, if that makes sense, right,
Speaker 4: So many Alavi's Alavis are a group of kurd Are
Speaker 4: you familiar, Sharen?
Speaker 3: I was actually just trying to rhy myself because I'm
Speaker 3: really not familiar with this sect because I know it's
Speaker 3: completely separate from Sunni Islam. Is shea Islam? Is it
Speaker 3: more like Sufiism. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I thought.
Speaker 4: They're like a twelve Sufiist with syncretic elements from like
Speaker 4: uh like veneration of nature, and they have this sort
Speaker 4: of idea of sainthood. Right. I probably used a lot
Speaker 4: of words that people aren't super familiar with. So can
Speaker 4: you explain to Sufism and then Sunni and Shia maybe.
Speaker 3: So maybe you're familiar with the two different main sects
Speaker 3: of Islam, which are Sunni and Shira. The main difference
Speaker 3: between the two, if you want to really boil it down,
Speaker 3: is who they believe these cessor should have been to
Speaker 3: the prophet Muhammadu. The shi has believe that his cousin
Speaker 3: and his son in law Aidi should have been the successor,
Speaker 3: versus the Sunnis don't believe he needed a successor at all,
Speaker 3: and it was more just like passing down his teachings.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of history behind that, and there's a
Speaker 3: lot of drama and violence, but that's like the most
Speaker 3: simple way to put it, and it kind of grew
Speaker 3: from there. The Sufism sect, on the other hand, is
Speaker 3: a little different. It's described as a contemplative school of Islam.
Speaker 3: That aims to develop an individual's consciousness of God through chanting,
Speaker 3: recitation of litanies, music, and physical movement. Maybe you know
Speaker 3: or you've seen the Sufi like whirling dervishes. It's basically
Speaker 3: a form of like physical active meditation for them. So
Speaker 3: it definitely differs from both Sunni and Sushia Islam. It's
Speaker 3: more in a way spiritual. Is that is that a
Speaker 3: decent summary?
Speaker 4: Not for me? Yeah, I think I think you've done
Speaker 4: a great job. And Sufi's are like broadly Sunny, I guess,
Speaker 4: and Alavites are like there are twelves and seven is
Speaker 4: which is like to do with the amount of people
Speaker 4: you think are the the imam's successes to Ali, which
Speaker 4: we don't need to go into I don't think a
Speaker 4: very great depth, but I guess Alavites would would fall
Speaker 4: into the twelve a camp in not traditional twelve Shia.
Speaker 3: That's what the V you're saying, the V al yes.
Speaker 4: As opposed to Ala whites, right, another ship al whites
Speaker 4: is very different?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, Like I feel like it's very confusing because
Speaker 3: they sound so similar. But Ala whites they're they're considered
Speaker 3: disbelievers by the classical like Sunny and Shia theologies. They're
Speaker 3: their own separate group. It's like a religious sect that
Speaker 3: like kind of splintered off from early Shi'ahism in the
Speaker 3: ninth century.
Speaker 4: And they are the sector which the Asad family yes belongs,
Speaker 4: and many other military families in Bathistsiria belonged, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when the Bathist party like led by half said
Speaker 3: Bashar's dad, when he took power, the Alo Whites in
Speaker 3: the military sect or the Alo white sect in the
Speaker 3: military were really supportive of that regime. And I feel
Speaker 3: like it's a big reason why he gained popularity and
Speaker 3: was able to like overthrow the government.
Speaker 4: Yeah. But yeah, Okay, so that's a little breakdown of Islam.
Speaker 4: I know, it's good.
Speaker 3: There's just so much like like little details that I
Speaker 3: know I will miss, and it's just it's so much
Speaker 3: more complicated. But yeah, there's just many sects that stem
Speaker 3: all from the one religious book of the Quran, and
Speaker 3: then just shit happens. I don't know what else is.
Speaker 4: Well, maybe we'll explain it in another day for people
Speaker 4: because they do think like I went to school at
Speaker 4: a very woke time in the United Kingdom's history where
Speaker 4: you could do Islam as your like religious studies. Wait
Speaker 4: really yeah, yeah, it's because Tony Blair in the wokness crazy. Yeah, No,
Speaker 4: it's cool, it's really good. I land a lot.
Speaker 3: Well, so what did what did I miss? You tell me?
Speaker 4: No, I'm not, I'm not. I'm not here to fucking
Speaker 4: I'm serious. I am absolutely not here to tell you
Speaker 4: what you go right around. I think you did an
Speaker 4: excellent job. Shia comes from like the party of Ali, right,
Speaker 4: That's what the word means.
Speaker 3: And I think that's the main reason why Sufism is
Speaker 3: more associated with Sunni Islam. F I'm being honest, because
Speaker 3: that's like the main tenet of being Shia is that
Speaker 3: you believe that Ali was the successor. And so I
Speaker 3: think anything that is not that usually is more under
Speaker 3: the Sunni umbrella.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I think sometimes you'll see it like as a
Speaker 4: third like Sufism is his own thing. Yeah, Germany, like
Speaker 4: more Muslims in the world are Sunni than Shiah. I'm
Speaker 4: not going to do a thing that people do where
Speaker 4: they go around naming the governments which are one or another,
Speaker 4: and like, I don't think that's very useful. So let's
Speaker 4: go back to nineteen seventy eight in Marash right these
Speaker 4: Alavis for reasons that we have just explained up as received.
Speaker 4: A they are Kurdish right, so they're not Turkic, and
Speaker 4: B they are perceived to be heretical by people with
Speaker 4: a more conventional Sunni Islam or some people, I should
Speaker 4: say so. The day after this bomb, guys of a
Speaker 4: left wing cafe in town is bombed and two leftist
Speaker 4: teachers are murdered on their way home from school. Later,
Speaker 4: at their funeral it's attacked by a mob of Turkish nationalists.
Speaker 4: Right later that week, exes start appearing on the doors
Speaker 4: of the Alavi homes in this area of town, which
Speaker 4: is predominantly Alavi right. They made announcements to the mosques
Speaker 4: saying that communists and Alavis are burning your mosques. You
Speaker 4: should attack them and kill them well. And on the
Speaker 4: twenty thirty December, crowd stoked buying comprised of the gray
Speaker 4: Wolves rampaid through all the neighborhoods. Children, women and men
Speaker 4: were murdered in their homes and their bodies were thrown
Speaker 4: in the street. Women were raped, an injured people removed
Speaker 4: from the hospital beds and murdered were burned alive in
Speaker 4: the furnaces of their own homes. Estimates of the amount
Speaker 4: of people who were murdered vary from like one hundred
Speaker 4: and eleven, which is the official government number, to one
Speaker 4: hundred and fifty which is sort on the British Alaviu society.
Speaker 4: Five hundred and fifty something houses were burned to destroy
Speaker 4: nearly three hundred businesses were looted. Writer as is Tunk
Speaker 4: my oppointing, I got that wrong. I'll try my best,
Speaker 4: who's written a book about the massacre, believes that the
Speaker 4: Alavis were killed for refusing to assimilate to the Turkish
Speaker 4: language and culture, and he adds occurs to not the
Speaker 4: only victims of the attack, progressive and leftist Turks who
Speaker 4: had opposed the official policies of Ancro Wolves included. The
Speaker 4: trials for this massacre actually continued until nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 4: So it happened in nineteen seventy eight, right now, it's
Speaker 4: a long time. A total of eight hundred and four
Speaker 4: people were put on trial, which kind of shows you
Speaker 4: the scale of the mob that you have.
Speaker 3: Was it mostly the gray Wolves?
Speaker 4: Yeah, So it comes out of the HP, which is
Speaker 4: this Turkish nationalist party, right and it's generally attributed to
Speaker 4: the Gray Wolves as like causality. And when you get
Speaker 4: these massive crowd violence things, it's not like everyone's a
Speaker 4: card carrying member necessarily. You'll hear people say that they
Speaker 4: consider there to be like state or organizational complicity beyond it.
Speaker 4: It wasn't a spontaneous thing, right, and that that's an
Speaker 4: allegation that's sometimes made. Twenty nine people were sentenced to
Speaker 4: life in prison for this by nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 3: Out of eight hundred and four or twenty nine percent.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and all of them were released in nineteen ninety two. Okay,
Speaker 4: it's part of an anti terrorism law. Now it's a
Speaker 4: good time shream. Do you know who will not commute
Speaker 4: your life sentence? Oh my god, they won't do it.
Speaker 3: Well, whatever it is.
Speaker 11: Yeah, all right, we're back.
Speaker 4: We're moving on from massacres thankfully. So we're talking about
Speaker 4: the Gray Wolves, right, that's where they come from. Today,
Speaker 4: the party that they were sort of founded by their
Speaker 4: MHP is allied with Erligan's party, and they've continued their violence,
Speaker 4: and particularly they've begun to focus on Kurdish people. Right
Speaker 4: last year, groups of them in that Diaspa could be
Speaker 4: found in Belgium attacking Kurds who they found to be
Speaker 4: celebrating the Kurdish New Year right, celebrating the year often
Speaker 4: with fire outside. It's pretty fucking easy to see who's
Speaker 4: doing it right, and they were attacked. You could see
Speaker 4: videos of this if you scroll far enough back on
Speaker 4: my Twitter timeline you'll see I've shared some of them.
Speaker 4: Twenty fifteen, they protested and burned Chinese flags and attacked
Speaker 4: people who looked Asian, to include Korean folks and folks
Speaker 4: who certainly were not Chinese, in response to the Chinese
Speaker 4: government span on Turkic wigas fasting during the month of Ramadan.
Speaker 4: They also opposed Russia due to its collaboration with a
Speaker 4: SAD and its attacks on Syrian Turkmen. Some Gray Wolves
Speaker 4: have gone over to Syria to fight. They're fighting against
Speaker 4: a SAD right with Turkmen units. I guess perhaps their
Speaker 4: most famous incident in the war was in twenty fifteen
Speaker 4: when they shut down a Russian plane was shut down
Speaker 4: and the pirate parachute out and then they machine gunned
Speaker 4: him while he was parachuting down. WHOA yeah. So they
Speaker 4: pretty strongly opposed to the Russian support of the assad rasion.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean there are one of the many reasons
Speaker 3: why I really get frustrated with all these different sects
Speaker 3: that are like anti Assad, and I am also anti Sad.
Speaker 3: But then they make it so complicated because they're terrible people,
Speaker 3: and so it's not just the rebels and these citizens
Speaker 3: of their own country trying to stand up against their government.
Speaker 3: It becomes this larger political clusterfuck that gets hard to
Speaker 3: keep track of, and I think that's why it's gone
Speaker 3: on for this long. It's not simple. It's not just
Speaker 3: like government versus people anymore. It's just too many elements.
Speaker 4: Right that you have people fighting within their revolution and
Speaker 4: the government constantly exploit those divisions, right. Yeah. So yeah,
Speaker 4: as I said, the Wolves have significant support in the
Speaker 4: Turkis Jasper, and they represent the largest right wing movement
Speaker 4: in Germany, which is pretty impressive when you consider like Germany. Yeah,
Speaker 4: like Germany is not known for not having much right
Speaker 4: wing Go ahead, Green, you're looking.
Speaker 3: I can see there's a question inside you. I'm just okay,
Speaker 3: because so the Gray Wolves believe in the superiority of
Speaker 3: the Turkish race, correct, that's correct, And you're saying that
Speaker 3: they are also big in Germany. I feel like Germany
Speaker 3: for a time also considered themselves to be the.
Speaker 4: True Sine. There are some things that they share. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it does feel a little bit on the nose, doesn't it.
Speaker 4: Yeah it does, Yeah, it does if it makes a difference.
Speaker 4: In Austria, the gray wolf salute is banned. Oh whoa,
Speaker 4: we're going to get into the gray wolf salute. Imagine
Speaker 4: making a little wolf with your hands. Right, you're right,
Speaker 4: that's they took that. That's like a shadow puppet. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 4: really that's not fair. Yeah no, yeah, you're no longer
Speaker 4: you do. We're gonna learn about the solution. So far,
Speaker 4: if not familiar, your big finger and your a little
Speaker 4: pinky finger up in the air. Your other two fingers
Speaker 4: are touching your thumb.
Speaker 3: It's almost like the six six to six rocker sign,
Speaker 3: like yeah, but yeah, it's not it's such a shadow puppet.
Speaker 3: I feel like I've done that as a kid. That's
Speaker 3: not fair. They can't take a shadow puppet. Whatever they've
Speaker 3: done worse.
Speaker 4: Sharene's hard right youth that is coming out. So if
Speaker 4: you weren't familiar with the Grabels before and their salute,
Speaker 4: you might have become familiar with them this week when
Speaker 4: a Turkish footballer received a two day band for flashing
Speaker 4: the salute after scoring when the team beat Austria in
Speaker 4: Euro twenty twenty four. Turkish fans responded to the band
Speaker 4: by giving the salute on mass at the quarterfinals. So
Speaker 4: that was the next game, right, Yeah, yeah it was.
Speaker 4: It was a scene. Like people have obviously drawn the
Speaker 4: comparison to the previous German movement, which thought one race
Speaker 4: was better than the other races. Right, but seeing a
Speaker 4: whole crowd of people doing that disturbing. Yeah, it's concerning.
Speaker 4: They did it in a game in Germany, so the
Speaker 4: salute's not banned in Germany, but right. And then the
Speaker 4: Turkish president Rep. Type Herd Gun postponed his plans to
Speaker 4: visit asba Jahan and attended the game after the suspension
Speaker 4: to show his support for the team. Right. He defended
Speaker 4: the player, saying he'd merely expressed his excitement after scoring.
Speaker 4: Germany was big mad about this. In the defense, they
Speaker 4: summoned the Turkish ambassadors to Foreign Ministry to explain what
Speaker 4: the fuck was going on? And it has resulted in
Speaker 4: considerable amounts of violence across Europe. Right, we saw in Austria,
Speaker 4: we saw in Germany, we saw in Belgium where there
Speaker 4: is a large Turkish and often a large Kurdish yeaspora. Right,
Speaker 4: because of the tensions between these two groups, which the
Speaker 4: football has increased, then we saw like street fighting between
Speaker 4: these two groups in predominantly migrant neighborhoods. Right. But I
Speaker 4: don't want it's episode to just be about the football
Speaker 4: or the Turkish participation in the Syrian civil War. I
Speaker 4: want it to be about what's happening to Syrian refugees
Speaker 4: in Turkey today. So many Turkish people have come to
Speaker 4: recent the Syrian refugees who relocated there since the started
Speaker 4: the war. Estimates range from three point one to three
Speaker 4: point five. I've seen four million, evidently, Like they have
Speaker 4: a land border, right, Turkey and Syria. So some of
Speaker 4: the people crossing will have come without being documented, whereas
Speaker 4: others will have come in the more formal process and
Speaker 4: be documented. Right. So whatever, it's millions of refugees, I
Speaker 4: think that's what matters. They are largely baselessly and evidently
Speaker 4: baselessly in some cases accused of causing the economic troubles
Speaker 4: and include low wages and inflation inflation exceeded seventy five
Speaker 4: percent in Turkey in May. They have also been blamed
Speaker 4: for the earthquake that happened if every twenty twenty three,
Speaker 4: which I'm not quite sure how like who or what
Speaker 4: the process exactly that they're postulating is there.
Speaker 3: That's crazy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, you just clear things that people generally can't make,
Speaker 4: earthquakes happen. So across the political spectrum, we've seen support
Speaker 4: grow for sending these refugees home. In twenty sixteen, Turkey
Speaker 4: began to accuse the SDF of ethnically cleansing Arab areas
Speaker 4: in Syria, and the UN refuted these accusations. Right, But
Speaker 4: in twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen, and in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 4: with the explicit approval of President Trump, the Turkish military
Speaker 4: and its proxies attacked the SDF and seized territory inside Syria. Right,
Speaker 4: Operation Peace Spring and Olive Branch. In these areas, Turkey
Speaker 4: has attempted to resettle Arab refugees.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 4: This is why we can't understand anti Syrian sentiment in
Speaker 4: Turkey without understanding Turkey's involvement in the Syrian Civil war. Right,
Speaker 4: it's trying to create what it calls a safe zone,
Speaker 4: and in this safe zone, it's trying to take the
Speaker 4: refugees that it's people have decided they don't want and
Speaker 4: relocate them back into a country which is at war.
Speaker 4: Turkey has already resettled Syrian rec Fujis in this safe zone.
Speaker 4: But obviously some of them have been in Turkey for
Speaker 4: more than a decade. Their children have gone to school
Speaker 4: in Turkey, they speak Turkish, they've learned a new language,
Speaker 4: they've learned a new alphabet. Right, they have lives there.
Speaker 4: So not all of them are just taking the chance
Speaker 4: to Yeah, let me get straight back to Aleppo. For
Speaker 4: very obvious reasons, people don't want to go back. Since
Speaker 4: twenty eighteen, a cost of living crisis in Turkey has
Speaker 4: been leveraged by the right to stoke anti Syrian sentiment.
Speaker 4: Research found that in twenty twenty, only twenty three percent
Speaker 4: of Turkey citizens would accept a Syrian bride or groom
Speaker 4: into their family or consider having a Syrian as a
Speaker 4: business partner, and only thirty one percent would want to
Speaker 4: have the child educated in a class with a Syrian
Speaker 4: in it.
Speaker 3: That is yeah, that makes me so fucking mad.
Speaker 4: One of the things I've come across with is doesn't
Speaker 4: by any means apply to all Turkish people. I've met
Speaker 4: some very cool Turkish people who I like very much
Speaker 4: that people who are ultranationalists in Turkey. America has its
Speaker 4: fair share of bigots, right generally, they know that it's wrong.
Speaker 4: They're like, say it with your whole chest of the
Speaker 4: certainly the anti Syrian sentiment that I've heard expressed online
Speaker 4: from Turkish people, it's not something that like it's considered shameful.
Speaker 4: They'll just they'll just fucking say it, which is kind
Speaker 4: of wild. No, it's scary, Like, yeah, it's very scary.
Speaker 3: Like if you've raised your child in Turkey and that's
Speaker 3: the only that's their first language essentially, or that's the
Speaker 3: only thing they know, that's just one of the most
Speaker 3: unsafe places for them to be there. Yeah, that's scary
Speaker 3: and not fair.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And like I know, I've met lots of Kurdish
Speaker 4: people who, like, you know, they come in and to
Speaker 4: the United States right where I'm helping out the border,
Speaker 4: and I'll greet them in Kurdish. And like I was
Speaker 4: talking to a guy the other day and mc Curdish
Speaker 4: is by no means great, but it took a little
Speaker 4: class and can say some words. And then also a
Speaker 4: dude walked around the market with me every morning in
Speaker 4: Cambichelow and just pointed at vegetables and shouted. So I'm
Speaker 4: pretty pretty good when it comes to like the eggplant spectrum.
Speaker 4: So I'll greet them in command gee and they will.
Speaker 4: They only speak Turkish, right, Like, it's not that they
Speaker 4: could just drop back. And I'm sure that's true for
Speaker 4: kids who would have grown up speaking Arabic in Syria
Speaker 4: if they went to school in Turkey.
Speaker 3: So that's a language, and it's also like not necessarily
Speaker 3: something they wanted to happen. I think that's something that
Speaker 3: really frustrates me. It's like Bashar started attacking as people
Speaker 3: and they needed somewhere to go. Turkey welcome them. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And when you resettle and you make a home somewhere,
Speaker 3: it really feels like, especially now in this world, like
Speaker 3: if you're a refugee, it feels like you're always going
Speaker 3: to be kind of displaced in one way or another. Heartbreaking.
Speaker 4: Yeah, best you're like temporary.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: After the earthquake in twenty twenty three, which folks will remember,
Speaker 4: we did a little fundraiser for World Central Kitchen. Syrian
Speaker 4: refugees were accused of fluting a lot on social media.
Speaker 4: Turkish Twitter had trending slogans like immigrants should be deported,
Speaker 4: just straight up saying it. Syrian refugees were kicked out
Speaker 4: of like tent camps and left homeless. They faced verbal abuse,
Speaker 4: which trying to act as services. Separate shelters were set
Speaker 4: up for Syrian refugees, like literally like they couldn't be together, right,
Speaker 4: Resentment simmered amongst the groups. Yeah, I read some NGO reports.
Speaker 4: One of the things they say is that like women
Speaker 4: who were refugees, especially women who run their own preferred
Speaker 4: not to drink water because they didn't want to go
Speaker 4: to the bathroom, like they were afraid and they wanted
Speaker 4: to stay in their tents. And like, well, yeah, that's
Speaker 4: something I've seen in other settings too, but like it,
Speaker 4: it's obviously that's a pretty fuck situation to be in, right, Yeah,
Speaker 4: in a hard place and you're choosing to dehydrate yourself.
Speaker 4: MNGOS later reported that refugees did not receive mobile container
Speaker 4: homes until displaced Turkish residents received them, and that refugee
Speaker 4: women in particular experience violence in these container camps, right,
Speaker 4: that's when they're they're dropping like chipping containers for people
Speaker 4: to live in because all the how they's filed down
Speaker 4: because of the earthquake. Many Turkish refugees have a sort
Speaker 4: of temporary protected status, so that temporary protected status only
Speaker 4: allows them to live in the provinces that they arrived in,
Speaker 4: and many of those provinces are obviously border provinces.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 4: Initially, many folks had come Syrian folks that come to
Speaker 4: Turkey hoping that they could then continue right. Turkey kind
Speaker 4: of bridges between Asia and Europe, right, so they had
Speaker 4: hoped that they could go through Turkey right from east
Speaker 4: to west and then and then continue into the European
Speaker 4: Union preps and you live there. But that didn't work, right,
Speaker 4: Many of them found themselves stuck in Turkey and not
Speaker 4: even able to leave the province that they lived in.
Speaker 4: After the earthquake, Turkey lifted those those restrictions on movement,
Speaker 4: and you saw tons of Syrian folks traveling around Turkey
Speaker 4: and being like, whoa like is Stumbul, How cool is
Speaker 4: this like? Having lived there for ten years? Right, But
Speaker 4: they couldn't leave their province before for this generation of
Speaker 4: Syrian some of them, like I was reading some of
Speaker 4: their like social media, Like some folks I think meaningfully
Speaker 4: became felt more Turkish when they were able to access
Speaker 4: so things. But other folks they went back to Syria
Speaker 4: to visit family, they were briefly allowed to do that.
Speaker 4: They weren't allowed to do that before. But it also
Speaker 4: broadened the resentment against them. I think it's fair to say.
Speaker 4: And in the twenty twenty three presidential election, there wasn't
Speaker 4: really an option that wasn't hostile to refugees. At Agam
Speaker 4: was probably the least hostile, but still hostile. Neither did
Speaker 4: the TURKEYEU deals to prevent further migration westward help right,
Speaker 4: So all of this just continues to turn up the temperature.
Speaker 4: Between January and December twenty twenty three, over fifty seven
Speaker 4: thousand Syrians were deported. According to Human Rights Watch, these
Speaker 4: deportations took place with the authorities quote pressuring the border
Speaker 4: authorities to list the majority of border crossings as returnees
Speaker 4: or voluntary. Turkey's voluntary returns are often coerced returns to
Speaker 4: quote unquote safe zones that are pits of danger and
Speaker 4: despair that's quote from Adam Kogle, who's a deputy Mid
Speaker 4: East North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.
Speaker 3: It's weak.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's pretty bleak, right, like, oh, look, we're going
Speaker 4: to volunteer you to go back to Aleppo or a
Speaker 4: free do you know who'll not force you to return
Speaker 4: to a country that is well decade long siver to
Speaker 4: be bes surprised.
Speaker 3: I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's what I strike to do. Shrine. Just when
Speaker 4: you think it couldn't get any worse, to hit you
Speaker 4: with a terrible ad pivot. We're back and I want
Speaker 4: to talk about the most recent outburst of tension. There
Speaker 4: have been outburst of attension, outbursts of violence against Syrian
Speaker 4: refugees before in Turkey and twenty twenty one springs to mind,
Speaker 4: but recently this all came to a head in early
Speaker 4: July when a Syrian man was accused of molesting his
Speaker 4: seven year old cousin in a public toilet in central Turkey,
Speaker 4: which is a pretty fuck thing to do. The guy
Speaker 4: was arrested, the young girl was taken into protective custody
Speaker 4: I think, along with her mother, but it didn't stop
Speaker 4: violence exploding. Then the town whard has happened. That night,
Speaker 4: cars were destroyed, Syrian shops were attacked, and homes were
Speaker 4: set on fire. The next night, the violence spread in
Speaker 4: the border city of Gaziantep, which has like a twenty
Speaker 4: five percent Syrian population. A man was stabbed. I've seen
Speaker 4: the videos of like teenage boys, like I don't know
Speaker 4: if they're dead or unconscious, but they're certainly not capable
Speaker 4: of responding, and mobs of people are stamping on them,
Speaker 4: kicking them, and it's pretty horrible stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the videos I've seen of the the riots and
Speaker 3: the moms are really terrifying.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like it's petrifying to think of like a mob
Speaker 4: of people coming for you because of who you are,
Speaker 4: where your parents came from, with nothing you can do
Speaker 4: to defend yourself. Right. Turkey's Interior minister said that four
Speaker 4: hundred and seventy four arrests have been made, and Urdigan
Speaker 4: did condemn the violence, but also blamed the opposition rhetoric,
Speaker 4: which like the opposition to him, Yes, the opposite to him. Yeah,
Speaker 4: when he himself has said it is they're going to
Speaker 4: try and send a million more people back to Syria. Right. Unsurprised,
Speaker 4: several nights of these programs have led to anti Turkish
Speaker 4: sentiment in areas of Syria that are controlled by Turkey
Speaker 4: and its proxy forces. Right. Indeed, there's very proxy forces
Speaker 4: in some cases turned on their Turkish backers, and you
Speaker 4: could see on social media. Again I shared some of them,
Speaker 4: like numerous videos last week of SNA so that Syrian
Speaker 4: National Army fighters firing on Turkish positions, tearing down and
Speaker 4: burning Turkish flags, and even like mobs attacking Turkish civilians
Speaker 4: in a Frien right, which is one of the cities
Speaker 4: that Turkey captured from the SDF. You can say in
Speaker 4: another Turkish occupied areas too, demonstrators tried to storm the
Speaker 4: headquarters or Turkish backed administration. SNA fighters withdrew from their
Speaker 4: frontline positions to set up roadeblocks and tack Turkish bass.
Speaker 4: Dozens of people stayed to sit in in the Al
Speaker 4: Hayya Square in Afrene. Again, these are not tensions have
Speaker 4: popped up overnight, right, This just happened because mobs in
Speaker 4: Turkey attacked Syrian refugees. But this was kind of the
Speaker 4: cork popping, if you like, and one of the things
Speaker 4: that has caused tensions to increase in recent weeks is
Speaker 4: this sort of detente between Asad and Turkey, Right, So,
Speaker 4: in response to these protests, Turkey shut off the internet,
Speaker 4: closed border crossings, and it sent more troops into the area.
Speaker 4: Masses of people were arrested and people were charged with
Speaker 4: things like desecrating national symbols of Turkey, which like again
Speaker 4: that this is not in Turkey, right, this is in Syria. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but in the area occupied by Turkey.
Speaker 3: I think anytime a government or an occupying power like
Speaker 3: shuts off Internet, that is terrifying to me. Yeah, because
Speaker 3: you know, they're trying to do something they don't want
Speaker 3: you to see.
Speaker 4: Yeah, totally. Fortunately, it's twenty twenty four and like there's
Speaker 4: only so far that they can go. Like I've seen
Speaker 4: lots of videos from those protests, but yeah, they're trying
Speaker 4: to stop people organizing. They're trying to stop them and
Speaker 4: the world seeing.
Speaker 3: It's more so the act that that power like choosing
Speaker 3: to do so purposeful and that's like a choice.
Speaker 4: Yeah, totally, Like, yeah, everyone knows what you're going for there. Yeah.
Speaker 4: On the fifth of July, detainees who arrested during protests
Speaker 4: in northern Aleppo, including a child, were forced to film
Speaker 4: themselves with a Turkey flag behind them and apologized to
Speaker 4: the Turkish government and people for burning the Turkish flag.
Speaker 4: One of the videos obtained by the Syrian Observatory for
Speaker 4: Human Rights showed a child under pressure admitting to quote
Speaker 4: burning the turkeysh flag and apologizing to the Turkish people
Speaker 4: before kissing the flags. Chris, Yeah, again, when people kiss
Speaker 4: the flags on TV, it's not a great sign. I
Speaker 4: did see videos of some of the SNA who appear
Speaker 4: to have captured some Turkish soldiers making them kiss their
Speaker 4: flag as well, like the Syrian Revolution flag. So I
Speaker 4: want to talk about these Turkish safe zones, right, so
Speaker 4: called safe zones, I guess they're anything but safe. They've
Speaker 4: been seized through military incursions and their rife with corruption
Speaker 4: in human rights abuse. It is both by Turkish back
Speaker 4: forces and Turkish forces directly. And you'll be familiar with
Speaker 4: some of this stuff from what Israel does in Palestine,
Speaker 4: specifically the destruction and theft of ancient olive orchids. You
Speaker 4: can see it like listed on the Syrian Observatory of
Speaker 4: Human Rights if you go to like they organize the
Speaker 4: areas by the name of the Turkish Mission, so like
Speaker 4: Operation Peace Spring Area or Euphrates Shield or Operation Olive
Speaker 4: Branch is a real fucking on the nose name. And
Speaker 4: you can see like ten olive trees were cut down
Speaker 4: and sold for firewood, or like people reselling homes that
Speaker 4: were sees from civilians. Right wow. And I've spoken to
Speaker 4: people who have left a free in my time in
Speaker 4: KURDISTWN and Syrian Kurdistan and in the United States, and
Speaker 4: I've spoken to people who were there as part of
Speaker 4: the SDF and flat backwards, and like a lot of
Speaker 4: them have confirmed the same stuff, right, destruction and property
Speaker 4: theft of homes and houses, and then like there's evidence
Speaker 4: of there's evidence of corruption in these areas today, right,
Speaker 4: sexual violence, even torture. So it's pretty bad. There are
Speaker 4: a ton of links that will be on our sources
Speaker 4: page if you want to read more. I don't want
Speaker 4: to sort of traumatize you all on your way to
Speaker 4: work here. I'll just traumatize Serene. Yeah you're working, that's.
Speaker 3: Another day at work.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a normal day. Most of the protests seem
Speaker 4: to have died down now, but the situation doesn't really
Speaker 4: seem to have become any more stable in Turkey, just
Speaker 4: Like many other countries, politicians have rented a right response
Speaker 4: to an economic crisis and blame refugees for problems caused
Speaker 4: by capitalism. Reports abuse of Syrian refugees caught crossing the
Speaker 4: border of Rife and some of their data appears to
Speaker 4: be leaked in the last few days. I can't confirm this,
Speaker 4: but I've seen this from a few places right that
Speaker 4: data from a registry of refugees has been leaked, which
Speaker 4: would obviously be very concerning, like if we look at
Speaker 4: things like the Marash massacre, we look at like the
Speaker 4: totality of this sentiment and the people doing it. Tensions
Speaker 4: in the Turkish occupied areas of Syria remain high, with
Speaker 4: people there strongly opposed to the Turkish oppression, seizure and
Speaker 4: sale of their landed homes, and the potential of at
Speaker 4: a time between the two countries. This weekd Agan said,
Speaker 4: we will extend our invitation to a sad With this invitation,
Speaker 4: we want to restore Turkey Syria relations to the same
Speaker 4: level as in the past. Our invitation may be extended
Speaker 4: at any time. That's a readout of an interview by
Speaker 4: Turkish media that's obviously translated.
Speaker 3: That's some vague. It's like, at what point in the past.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I mean, look, I think it's the correct
Speaker 4: number of relations to have with the side is non yeah,
Speaker 4: and so like any more than that is bad. There
Speaker 4: are also reports that Turkey is going to open crossings
Speaker 4: between the territory it is controlling and regime territory, right.
Speaker 4: There are protests about that. I saw in a lepo.
Speaker 4: Syria has said that normalization can only happen after Turkey
Speaker 4: agrees to pull out the troops that it has. Turkey
Speaker 4: is opposed to this because it doesn't want the SDA,
Speaker 4: which it believes to be an extension of the p
Speaker 4: k K, which it considers to be a terrorist group,
Speaker 4: to have territory along its border, right, And the FDF
Speaker 4: still does already have territory along its border. Right, Like
Speaker 4: Cami Shlow where I was, you can go on top
Speaker 4: of a torp building and look across the border. But
Speaker 4: that does seem to be kind of a red line
Speaker 4: for Turkey. So I don't know where that leaves us, but.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that does seem something that they would never want
Speaker 3: to do. So but shar really called their bluff there, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is which is kind of funny,
Speaker 4: given that he's not exactly in a strong position to negotiate. No,
Speaker 4: but maybe Turkey has given up on the revolution in
Speaker 4: Syria and it just wants to join with US at
Speaker 4: and as long as they can both say fuck the Kurds,
Speaker 4: and that's enough for both of them, right, But like
Speaker 4: if they can both get together on a state level
Speaker 4: and be like, fuck these cords, and therefore, I guess
Speaker 4: the cost of that would be sending these refugees home
Speaker 4: for Turkey, which is I guess not because it's to
Speaker 4: be a cost by some of them. And that's millions
Speaker 4: of people, right, millions of people who like something. In
Speaker 4: some cases, people are worried about having a citizenship removed,
Speaker 4: like they went there to be safe. And of course
Speaker 4: it's a violation of international law, and of course that
Speaker 4: doesn't matter because international law is as real as unicorns.
Speaker 4: But it leaves millions of people in limbo, right. Urdigan
Speaker 4: said he's promised to send another million refugees back, but
Speaker 4: that's not possible without the cooperation of the regime. Really,
Speaker 4: I guess he could just pump them all into like
Speaker 4: a free or whatever. But he's pumping people into a
Speaker 4: situation where people are already actively opposed to the Turkish
Speaker 4: occupation there. Right, if he pulls out his troops, he's
Speaker 4: going to have to accept that there will be Kurdish
Speaker 4: forces on his border, which he hates. So it's a
Speaker 4: question of, like what value does he assigned to the
Speaker 4: safety of these three million refugees, And it doesn't seem
Speaker 4: to be very high. And like every time when we
Speaker 4: talk about migration, that people are eaving terrible things, right,
Speaker 4: that that's why people tend to end up as refugees.
Speaker 4: But there's never been a I don't think a more
Speaker 4: pronounced global crackdown than I've seen right now. It's not
Speaker 4: like these Syrian refugees, they can't leave their province, right.
Speaker 4: I've spoken to hundreds of people who have left Turkey
Speaker 4: in the last six months year. It's very hard, it's
Speaker 4: very expensive, and lots of the people who have fled
Speaker 4: from Turkey only went there for a few months, right,
Speaker 4: and then kept moving. Every country has made it harder
Speaker 4: than it ever was to immigrate. Like even you know
Speaker 4: that we talk about the Syrian refugee crisis in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 4: twenty sixteen, unleashing three million people, right that they need
Speaker 4: a safe place to go. If you try and force
Speaker 4: them back to Syria, it's either going to be an
Speaker 4: absolutely terrible humanitarian disaster or we're going to have more
Speaker 4: refugees entering the refugee system at a time when governments
Speaker 4: all around the world are indifferent at best to the
Speaker 4: survival of refugees, right, including the fucking buying government in
Speaker 4: this country. Yeah, yeah, it's uh, it's pretty big.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but uh, that fucking sucks.
Speaker 4: Dreams it does, fucking sucker. I will be back in
Speaker 4: two weeks to talk to you about what Turkey is
Speaker 4: doing in the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of a ruck where
Speaker 4: they are bombing Curtis Dan freedom gorillas, they're setting up
Speaker 4: roadblocks and again like making massive incursions into another country.
Speaker 4: So that'd be great, we can you can all look
Speaker 4: forward to that over the weekend. Yeah, I guess I
Speaker 4: guarantee that there are refugees, probably refugees from Turkeyosyria in
Speaker 4: the town where you live, or in the nearest big
Speaker 4: town to where you live, and you can do something
Speaker 4: nice for them this weekend if you want to.
Speaker 3: Especially if you live somewhere where it's hot as shit,
Speaker 3: you can I don't know, help out, drop off water
Speaker 3: somewhere or something.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like and I've just been talking to Kurtis refugees
Speaker 4: who are in like the Northeast, you know, I spoke
Speaker 4: to and they're not Kurdish or or Turkish, but talk
Speaker 4: about to Some refugees are in Scranton, famous for Joe
Speaker 4: Biden always talking about it. But yeah, there are folks
Speaker 4: everywhere who need your help. You can make a difference.
Speaker 4: I guess the fucking government isn't going to Joe Biden,
Speaker 4: isn't going to Kamala Harris isn't going to either, and
Speaker 4: neither is fucking Hillary Clinton. I'm damn sure of that.
Speaker 4: So it is only you, and that doesn't need to
Speaker 4: make you desperate. You can do something. I spoke to
Speaker 4: so many, Like another of our podcast listeners was at
Speaker 4: the border on Monday and I met them and they
Speaker 4: were lovely and we drove around and help people, and like,
Speaker 4: you just need to take that yourself, and like, you
Speaker 4: can do something. But the first step is, you know,
Speaker 4: lugging off Twitter and getting out there. And like I
Speaker 4: promise you you will feel less hopeless if you start helping.
Speaker 4: Even though it's only one person, it makes a difference.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is something that James did tell me that
Speaker 3: I think about is because I get really overwhelmed with
Speaker 3: the idea of how many people need help in this world.
Speaker 3: And I'm just like a big softie and I really
Speaker 3: just overwhelms me, like what can I what can me
Speaker 3: little me do to help anything? But Dreams is right.
Speaker 3: If you change even one person's life, that's one person's
Speaker 3: whole life. That's a big deal. And so I think
Speaker 3: it has to start there. And if there are many
Speaker 3: more of you doing the same thing, then that's how
Speaker 3: actual change happens. Because yeah, our government is useless. But yeah,
Speaker 3: listen to Dreams. Dreams is wise and.
Speaker 4: British, please, I listen to because I'm British, because that
Speaker 4: will lead you down some dark paths in terms of
Speaker 4: gender ideology.
Speaker 3: I mean maybe I meant that you sound wise because
Speaker 3: you're British.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that's what I got get for me. But
Speaker 4: just be nice to people and they take by someone
Speaker 4: fucking lunch this weekend if you have the money, if not,
Speaker 4: make them lunch, you know, make some rice. It's cheap.
Speaker 4: And yeah, you can make a difference. No one fucking
Speaker 4: else will if you want to talk about being a leftist.
Speaker 4: That's great, But like I have so much more respect
Speaker 4: for people who want to do stuff, So do stuff
Speaker 4: and the rest will sort itself out. Like you don't
Speaker 4: have to argue with people about the mind you share
Speaker 4: of ideology. It doesn't matter. Like help helping people matters.
Speaker 4: Making the world better matters. Say do that. It's Friday.
Speaker 4: Hopefully you can use your weekend to do something nice
Speaker 4: for someone.
Speaker 1: Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 1: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 5: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 3: You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
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