Speaker 1: Also 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
Speaker 1: in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for
Speaker 1: you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
Speaker 1: If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 2: Welcome to ikodefen here a podcast being recorded something like
Speaker 2: nineteen hours into bargaining with managements, thus at the peak
Speaker 2: of maximal derangements, and also about an hour after former
Speaker 2: President Donald John Trump was convicted of thirty four felony
Speaker 2: accounts of falsifying business records for his election time payoff
Speaker 2: of Stormy Daniels. We can only hope that this will
Speaker 2: bring voting race to a long suffering felons of Florida.
Speaker 2: And realizing that kind of sounds like a joke, it's
Speaker 2: actually not. It is in fact, really messed up that
Speaker 2: you can just disenfranchise an entire class of people and
Speaker 2: maybe the law hurting someone famous will do something good. Now,
Speaker 2: that's all the time we have to talk about Trump
Speaker 2: right now. You know, if you want, if you want
Speaker 2: to hear more about that, you can go to literally
Speaker 2: everyone who's ever done any media related thing. Ever, however,
Speaker 2: we now have to talk about the other candidate in
Speaker 2: the twenty twenty four election, Joe Biden, which means this
Speaker 2: is all the fun you're getting for this episode. It
Speaker 2: is now time for you to suffer and with me
Speaker 2: to talk about suffering, and specifically the suffering of my Well,
Speaker 2: I was gonna say my people like like one of
Speaker 2: my people's question work, I don't know, identities complicated. Sometimes
Speaker 2: you're more than one thing at a time. Is Karin Green,
Speaker 2: who's part of a Southern transfem collective launching a very
Speaker 2: long list of projects that you will be hearing you
Speaker 2: out very shortly. She also used to be a work
Speaker 2: on policy for the Equality Federation and for the Transientered
Speaker 2: Law Center. Yeah, Karin, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much, happy to be here, and yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm excited to get the opportunity to kind of talk
Speaker 3: about maybe what is behind some of the press releases
Speaker 3: and the HRC list of accomplishments that gets when I
Speaker 3: complain about lack of action on transpolicy.
Speaker 2: You know, I really should have looked this up the forehead.
Speaker 2: But I once one of my friends dragged me in
Speaker 2: college to a queer movie screening that I went to
Speaker 2: because I hadn't eaten all day and they had food.
Speaker 2: It ended up being this this really great little kind
Speaker 2: of I think it's like an indie movie thing that's
Speaker 2: about this group of queers robbing stealing a blood diamond
Speaker 2: from the from the HRC. Great movie, ten out of ten.
Speaker 2: I wish I remember what it was called.
Speaker 3: In the movement at the time, we all joked that
Speaker 3: HRC stood for peculiar Ron and Glinton rather than campaign
Speaker 3: because of how in the tank they were.
Speaker 2: So yeah, So, as as the listener may may have guests,
Speaker 2: we need to talk about Joe Biden's quite frankly, really
Speaker 2: terrible record on trans writes.
Speaker 4: And to do that, we.
Speaker 2: Need to talk a little bit about where the power
Speaker 2: of the president comes from, because, you know, the sort
Speaker 2: of traditional liberal wonk theories of the president tend to
Speaker 2: either focus on like the discursive effects of what the
Speaker 2: president says, or like the president's ability to like negotiate
Speaker 2: with Congress to get bills passed. But this largely is
Speaker 2: not where the president's power comes from. The president's power
Speaker 2: comes from. I guess three things, two of which are
Speaker 2: very similar. One is, you know, I mean just literally
Speaker 2: the command of the military. Right the president, since since
Speaker 2: Barack Obama, although Bush was doing similar things, has claimed
Speaker 2: the legal authority to kill any man, woman, or child
Speaker 2: the moment they leave us or regardless of her citizenship status.
Speaker 2: This is this is the legal foundation of the drone
Speaker 2: program and it is still in place to this day.
Speaker 2: You know, the second one, I'm talking a lot about
Speaker 2: Obama here because Obama weirdly established a lot of these
Speaker 2: kind of legal frameworks. But you know, the second one
Speaker 2: has to do with their ability to control the nation's
Speaker 2: intelligence services. You know, I mean one of the things
Speaker 2: that Obama did was personally coordinate the mess like multi
Speaker 2: agency crackdown on occupy. And then the third thing, and
Speaker 2: this is where really most of the power is is
Speaker 2: through the unbelievably massive federal bureaucracy. So like I do
Speaker 2: kind of get an assessed of this, and anytime you
Speaker 2: hear the words the Department of that is the thing
Speaker 2: the president has the ability to do shit with that.
Speaker 2: That that is that is a very simplified version of it.
Speaker 2: But yeah, you know, when when when you're dealing with
Speaker 2: an office's power is largely bureaucratic, it means that if
Speaker 2: you want to figure out what they're actually doing, you
Speaker 2: have to dig really deep into the depths of the
Speaker 2: American bureaucracy. So okay, let's let's let's do that. And yeah,
Speaker 2: first I want I want to ask you about p
Speaker 2: p a c A one five five seven, which is
Speaker 2: a part of the the Affordable Care Act. Otherwise, is
Speaker 2: it still better known as Obamacare? Do the kids Obamacare?
Speaker 3: Yeah, they reclaimed it. I think the lips took it back.
Speaker 4: I had.
Speaker 2: I've been having this realization that people don't remember Obama
Speaker 2: era stuff. Is why I'm saying. Oh, like I said,
Speaker 2: I started saying Ferguson to people and they had no
Speaker 2: idea what I was talking about. And I was like,
Speaker 2: oh no, we ventured the k we ventured the disaster era.
Speaker 2: So yeah, you can you talk about what that is
Speaker 2: and what what it sort of says about what the
Speaker 2: Biden administration isn't isn't doing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, So, as you mentioned, it's part of the
Speaker 3: Affordable Care Act, and so section fifteen fifty seven is
Speaker 3: the regulatory implementation of the non discrimination.
Speaker 5: Parts of the Affordable Care Act.
Speaker 3: Back in the day when we were fighting to prevent
Speaker 3: Trump from rolling back some fifteen fifty seven protections, we
Speaker 3: actually are comf people came up with a much sexier
Speaker 3: name than section fifteen fifty seven, but it never took
Speaker 3: off with any of the policy people, and so I
Speaker 3: don't even remember what I'm supposed to be calling it.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I never hear people say section fifteen fifty seven.
Speaker 3: What they're referencing is the basically the non discrimination part
Speaker 3: of the Affordable Care Act. And so the Affordable Care Act,
Speaker 3: as people have probably noticed by now, touches practically all
Speaker 3: of the US healthcare system and has extended, especially through
Speaker 3: Medicaid expansion, federal dollars into healthcare even more than they
Speaker 3: had been previously with the supplants for insurance through Medicaid
Speaker 3: expansion and those kinds of things, And so there's actually
Speaker 3: a lot of control that the Department of Health or
Speaker 3: Health and Human Services and associated other parts of bureaucracy
Speaker 3: like Center for Medicaid, Medicare Services, those kinds of things
Speaker 3: have over implementation. And so one of the ways that
Speaker 3: this works. Is when legislators write a law, they don't
Speaker 3: go into all the details. They just pass a law.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: And so most times, especially at the federal level, after
Speaker 3: a law has passed, the relevant agencies that are going
Speaker 3: to be dealing with that part of the law work
Speaker 3: on and issue rules or regulations. You might hear them
Speaker 3: called either thing, but they mean the same thing, right.
Speaker 3: So it's basically the additional agency policies and procedures that
Speaker 3: they issue through the formal process governed by the Adminied
Speaker 3: Rate Procedures Act. Very exciting, I know this is going
Speaker 3: to be like just bombshell episode.
Speaker 4: Terrible stuff is coming. Don't worry. Hold, oh you got
Speaker 4: a hold on. It's going to get really bad.
Speaker 3: I'm giving you the foundation to make sure you can
Speaker 3: get maximally angry along with me. And so they create
Speaker 3: the rest of the implementation of the laws at that
Speaker 3: Congress passes, right. And so in this particular case, for
Speaker 3: section fifteen fifty seven, it deals specifically with non discrimination,
Speaker 3: So it deals with race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, any
Speaker 3: any equality you can you can you typically find in
Speaker 3: federal non discrimination laws actually in the fifteen fifty seven
Speaker 3: and so it's obviously been kind of going back and
Speaker 3: forth as a political football between the Obama administration and
Speaker 3: then the Trump administration, and then I don't even know
Speaker 3: if I'm going to give Biden credit for treating it
Speaker 3: as a football. And so there's this regulatory process that
Speaker 3: has been going forward and been rolled back and going
Speaker 3: forward and been rolled back, and then simultaneousley there are
Speaker 3: several I don't know the current number, but several court
Speaker 3: cases over fifteen to fifty seven from various eras, like
Speaker 3: I think there's still at least one case ongoing from
Speaker 3: the Obama era fifteen fifty seven, there's some ongoing from
Speaker 3: the Trump rag and then obviously folks might have seen
Speaker 3: in the news that states like mine louisianatt that have
Speaker 3: a governor and attorney general super focused on raising their
Speaker 3: own profile have already filed suit against the recently issued
Speaker 3: Biden era Section fifteen fifty seven regulation. And so there
Speaker 3: is a lot of fighting around trans people specifically. Go figure.
Speaker 3: It has been We've been hot right now for the
Speaker 3: last four years or so. It's not been a super
Speaker 3: exciting time, and it is actually impacted if you know
Speaker 3: how to read the policy TA leaves. It has actually
Speaker 3: impacted what we have gotten out of the Biden administration
Speaker 3: in terms of actual trans policy. And I've been doing
Speaker 3: transpolicy for a very long time, start at the state
Speaker 3: level in Louisiana. You can't get paid to do a
Speaker 3: queer policy in Louisiana. So I moved out to Oakland
Speaker 3: to work for Transit Or Law Center for a while,
Speaker 3: and that was actually where I created the joint Protect
Speaker 3: trans Health campaign. It was actually the first ever coordinated
Speaker 3: collaboration between the National Center for Changuer Quality and Transgeneral
Speaker 3: Law Center. They had never formerly worked together on something before,
Speaker 3: but for trans policy folks, Section fifty and most of
Speaker 3: the country. Frankly, obviously, healthcare is like the thing right.
Speaker 3: It's always been really terrible in this country, no matter what,
Speaker 3: and so taking care of people's which should be a
Speaker 3: right to access healthcare, has been really really important. I
Speaker 3: kind of considered it since twenty seventeen the most important
Speaker 3: trans policy issue to work on. And so this is
Speaker 3: definitely kind of to the sense that you are a
Speaker 3: nerd like me, and you have, you know, headline regulatory
Speaker 3: actions that you're looking out for and hoping to influence
Speaker 3: and doing things around this is kind of the premiere
Speaker 3: regulatory action. In my opinion, in the trans polacy space,
Speaker 3: I'm trying to what it should ideally do is safeguard
Speaker 3: and guarantee trans people's access to healthcare, including gender affirming care.
Speaker 3: It does not if you actually read the five hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty eight page final rule, But if you just
Speaker 3: read like the press releases and the quotes that the
Speaker 3: head of Human Rights Campaign give, you might have a
Speaker 3: different understanding currently, And that's what I'm hoping we can
Speaker 3: kind of get into today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and unfortunately before we get into that, we have
Speaker 2: to do one of the other things that is required
Speaker 2: of trans people, which is promoting capitalism if you want
Speaker 2: to have a job.
Speaker 4: So here are some ads.
Speaker 2: God, we're going to end up with like some kept
Speaker 2: paid ad from Aluisi at our rep or something.
Speaker 3: Oh, they don't even need they have a superjority that
Speaker 3: they've been flexing muscle on.
Speaker 4: They don't need to.
Speaker 6: They're fine, and we are back with some chili.
Speaker 4: So, yeah, let's talk about what has.
Speaker 2: Been happening and what was actually in the rules that
Speaker 2: no one who's not a bureaucrat or a policy activist
Speaker 2: has actually read.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I think a little more backgrounds will will
Speaker 3: help you get just as angry as I need you
Speaker 3: to be, which is you know, So the administration is large.
Speaker 3: There are a lot of people that work in the
Speaker 3: executive branch, and a lot of them have, especially with
Speaker 3: this administration, where a lot of folks actually did come
Speaker 3: kind of directly from the Obama administration. They have relationships
Speaker 3: with issue advocacy organizations. So most of the nationals, the
Speaker 3: queer national organizations, avaccine nonprofits have relationships with executive branch folks.
Speaker 3: And so when an executive branch agency like HHS is
Speaker 3: working on a regulation that involves queer trans people, the
Speaker 3: way it worked in the Obama administration, there was actually
Speaker 3: very close collaboration between for example, the National Center for
Speaker 3: Changing or Quality and the administration in the writing and
Speaker 3: issuance of the first Obama era fifteen to fifty seven
Speaker 3: productive regulation. And so before the election and then during transition,
Speaker 3: the bid administration was obviously in contact back and forth
Speaker 3: with all kinds of issue of secreups, not just the
Speaker 3: queer movement but everybody, and they made commitments to the
Speaker 3: queer movement that you know, it would be a fairly
Speaker 3: smooth transition to working with them like we had worked
Speaker 3: with the Obama administration. If you think back a little while,
Speaker 3: that was before the kind of current fascist humanization campaign
Speaker 3: had really kicked off, and so these commitments were made
Speaker 3: kind of in the overturn window from before the last
Speaker 3: four years of hell or three years of how however
Speaker 3: you want a time it when they decided to come
Speaker 3: after trans people so hard.
Speaker 2: This was back in the kind of housey in days.
Speaker 2: I don't even know if people remember this right now,
Speaker 2: but like it used to be a thing where democratic
Speaker 2: like presidential candidates would attack each other for not being
Speaker 2: radical enough on trans healthcare. That was the thing that
Speaker 2: happened on the debate stage in like twenty nineteen. It
Speaker 2: feels like seven lifetimes ago now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And keep in mind that Biden. You know, every
Speaker 3: six months he tweets that he has our back or whatever,
Speaker 3: and then he's also called us the civil rights issue
Speaker 3: of our time. So you know, there there are some
Speaker 3: opportunities to question that and see if he stacks up.
Speaker 3: And my personal and professional opinion, this is what I do,
Speaker 3: is that he absolutely doesn't right. And so one of
Speaker 3: the things that you would really really want out of
Speaker 3: a section fifteen to fifty seven regulation in a context
Speaker 3: where states have been passing trans healthcare bands, is that
Speaker 3: you would want a section fifteen fifty seve regulation that
Speaker 3: deals with preventing transcrimination and healthcare. You would want that
Speaker 3: to strongly and efficiently preempt state bans against trans care
Speaker 3: as violating a federal rule against non discrimination. And because
Speaker 3: these things are you have to follow the Administrative Procedures
Speaker 3: Act when you're issuing regulations as a federal agency, and
Speaker 3: most states actually are the same a similar kind of process,
Speaker 3: and so you kind of have to The agencies have
Speaker 3: to show how they got to the final rule. So
Speaker 3: they issue a draft rule, invite comment. There's a comment
Speaker 3: period that you might have seen organizations asking you to
Speaker 3: submit comments for before, and then they're actually required to
Speaker 3: read and respond to all those comments. And so if
Speaker 3: you actually pull up the fifteen fifty seven final rule,
Speaker 3: it's actually one of it sounds like even wonkier than
Speaker 3: for example, looking at a bill, But because of the
Speaker 3: Administrative Procedures Act and the way they have to respond
Speaker 3: to comments, there's actually a lot more kind of conversational
Speaker 3: prose or not conversational, but you know, regular ask pros
Speaker 3: and not terrifying legal language in this stuff. That is
Speaker 3: them directly addressing comments people organizations have made and explaining
Speaker 3: their reason. And so one of the things that I
Speaker 3: think is most kind of emblematic of how we've been
Speaker 3: failed and thrown under the bus is because of this
Speaker 3: process where they have to kind of show you how
Speaker 3: the sausage is made. You can look up in this
Speaker 3: regulation and see that for some initial contacts, we were
Speaker 3: promised this would come out year one, and then we
Speaker 3: were promised it would come out year two, and then
Speaker 3: year three, and then I have actually heard that they
Speaker 3: were trying to push it, asked the election, and we
Speaker 3: kind of forced their hand on it. So you can
Speaker 3: tell that they initially wrote the first draft in this
Speaker 3: regulation to kill healthcare bans, to federally preempt healthcare bands.
Speaker 3: There's actually I did a Twitter thread on this about
Speaker 3: how one sentence that existed in the draft version of
Speaker 3: the fifteen to fifty seven role that one sentence alone
Speaker 3: could take down. I think the one I used for
Speaker 3: an example was Arkansas's trans healthcare ban or Missouri's actually
Speaker 3: potentially because that what that sentence did is it laid
Speaker 3: out very very clearly that a determination that trans healthcare
Speaker 3: is never helpful or useful and can never be provided
Speaker 3: does not meet the bar for considered medical reasoning, right,
Speaker 3: and so states just can't do it. And that's fantastic,
Speaker 3: because that is only what these healthcare bands do, right.
Speaker 3: And many of them, I think the one I used
Speaker 3: as an example even actually have include in the non
Speaker 3: effective text kind of the whereas preamble section of their bands.
Speaker 3: They can't help themselves. They go into all this flowery
Speaker 3: language about how trans care is never good and it's
Speaker 3: always harmful, in all this stuff right in garbage. And
Speaker 3: this sentence spoke directly to those trans healthcare bands, and
Speaker 3: it made a firm commitment to address them as a
Speaker 3: whole as they were happening right at the federal government
Speaker 3: to state level. And if you read the final rule,
Speaker 3: you will get to see them strike that sentence out
Speaker 3: and read their reasoning for striking that out. And so
Speaker 3: you actually had this language that was very clear and
Speaker 3: very strong, written very relatively early on in his term,
Speaker 3: when at the time there were only a handful of
Speaker 3: trans healthcare bands that had passed, right, And so it
Speaker 3: didn't And so now I'm just offering conjectures and form conjecture,
Speaker 3: conjecture informed by reading.
Speaker 1: Policy tea leaves.
Speaker 3: But it is my suspicion that at that time, because
Speaker 3: there weren't that many trans healthcare bands to preempt, they
Speaker 3: were more than willing to maintain, you know, to fulfill
Speaker 3: their commitment to us and to issue the kind of
Speaker 3: regulation that we had talked about. But as time went
Speaker 3: on and the fascist humanization campaign started and ramped up,
Speaker 3: and healthcare bands rapidly spread throughout the country. I've been
Speaker 3: doing this for a decade and I've never seen anything
Speaker 3: like this in any area of policy before. All of
Speaker 3: a sudden, if you're holding a card that nuke's health
Speaker 3: state healthcare bands, when you wrote it, that card was
Speaker 3: only going to nuke a few two or three trans
Speaker 3: healthcare bands, right, And if you're the federal government, you
Speaker 3: know you can expect to steam rolls and just a
Speaker 3: handful of states like that. But then later on, at
Speaker 3: this point I forget the exact number, but it's something
Speaker 3: like twenty twenty to twenty three states have healthcare bands implemented.
Speaker 3: And now if you're holding a card that nuke's healthcare bands,
Speaker 3: you don't really get to pick and choose which healthcare
Speaker 3: bands you're going to. Now you're going to you have
Speaker 3: to commit to new call of them if you play
Speaker 3: that card, and that just was not something that they
Speaker 3: seemed willing to do when it was going to make
Speaker 3: the waves that it would make with you know, twenty
Speaker 3: to twenty three or whatever, states being prete empted and
Speaker 3: required to make sure that trans people have healthcare access.
Speaker 3: And keep in mind that during this period, not just
Speaker 3: did more states past these healthcare bands, but the kind
Speaker 3: of national discussion and focus on trends people deteriorated horrifically, right,
Speaker 3: And so not only were the stakes higher in terms
Speaker 3: of the kind of policy confidence in projecting your politics,
Speaker 3: but also there was just I assume those lanyards run
Speaker 3: horrible polls all the time, right, and saw that we
Speaker 3: were losing points in terms of how the public views
Speaker 3: transpeople because there's a lot of money being poured into this,
Speaker 3: and just made the horrible unethical and moral calculations that
Speaker 3: democrats make decided that trans people weren't worth it. And
Speaker 3: so you can see them across that strike that part
Speaker 3: out of the final fifteen to fifty seven room, and
Speaker 3: it no longer contains any language even approaching that that
Speaker 3: is written to address states as a whole, and it
Speaker 3: is mostly what is in there at this point is
Speaker 3: the same thing that they've been telling us to do
Speaker 3: for the last over a decade, which is, individual trans
Speaker 3: people who just happened to encounter discrimination and health care,
Speaker 3: you just submit an OCR complaint, an HHSOCR complaint. OCR
Speaker 3: I stands for Office Civil Rights. So you would think
Speaker 3: an Office of Civil Rights maybe be proactive and notice
Speaker 3: that a state that has banned trans healthcare and some
Speaker 3: places even criminalized it might be ready for some enforcement,
Speaker 3: some broad enforcement. And yet they have they have maintained
Speaker 3: in this final rule that they expect individual trans people
Speaker 3: to file individual OCR complaints every time and that they
Speaker 3: will address each one on a case by case basis.
Speaker 3: They reiterate this at least a dozen times. It is
Speaker 3: one of the most offensive parts of all this, right
Speaker 3: because that's the only thing that AJS has ever told
Speaker 3: us about this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is just nuts, Like that's not an actual
Speaker 2: systemic way of addressing Can you imagine if they had
Speaker 2: done this with like literally any other kind of civil
Speaker 2: rights issue, Like you know, okay, we get we get,
Speaker 2: we get a state banned on gay marriage, and the
Speaker 2: Department is like, yeah, you have to submit a complaint
Speaker 2: to us individually, Like that's absolutely nuts.
Speaker 3: Or are oriented like states were band insulin or something,
Speaker 3: you know, right, like any other any other facet of healthcare.
Speaker 3: Just nobody would take that. Yeah, everyone to expect, Yes,
Speaker 3: the federal government will come in to make sure that
Speaker 3: people in Louisiana can still access insulin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And instead you have this just you know, I
Speaker 2: mean a complete abrogation of any like, not just any responsibility,
Speaker 2: but I mean any attempt to actually, like not even
Speaker 2: like any attempt to do anything to stop any of
Speaker 2: these bands that are you going to kill a like
Speaker 2: not in significant number of people like me?
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And one of the things I'd like to win is
Speaker 3: one of the benefits of of you know, the photogram
Speaker 3: having to follow the Administrative Procedures Act is they have
Speaker 3: to talk about the previous rules in this space, and
Speaker 3: so you also get really, I was gonna say funny,
Speaker 3: but they're not funny. They're they're deeply depressing paragraphs about
Speaker 3: how their final rule is worse than Obama's final rule. Right,
Speaker 3: they have and they have to explain it and open
Speaker 3: One of the things that I'll reference here is that
Speaker 3: Obama's final rule I believe, involved directing the Office of
Speaker 3: Al Rights to conduct a disparate impact analysis on you know,
Speaker 3: marginalized populations to determine if there were discriminatory outcomes in
Speaker 3: healthcare access, kind of even as a closed system, so
Speaker 3: they can look in from the outside and be like, oh, okay,
Speaker 3: all the transmuble in the state can't access.
Speaker 7: X, Y and z.
Speaker 3: So whether that whether there is a discriminatory you know
Speaker 3: law or not, there is a disparate impact on this population,
Speaker 3: and that means we need to take enforcement action. And
Speaker 3: you get to read the Biden HHS right about how
Speaker 3: they're not going to do that.
Speaker 2: Actually, no, no, don't, please, please do please do not
Speaker 2: do any analysis to see your trans people are being oppressed.
Speaker 2: This would look really bad for us. Yeah, speaking speaking
Speaker 2: of looking bad for us, you know, you know what
Speaker 2: won't look bad. It's if you buy these products and
Speaker 2: services from this ad that hopefully isn't I don't know.
Speaker 2: I feel I feel like we're kind of running We've
Speaker 2: run through the cycle of the terrible ads, so I
Speaker 2: feel like we're about we're on the precipice of there
Speaker 2: being another bunch of ads they put on the show
Speaker 2: without telling.
Speaker 4: Us that we can complain about. But for now these
Speaker 4: ones and we are back.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And I think this is something that I don't know.
Speaker 2: I think most people do not know this. I don't
Speaker 2: I think most people do not understand that not only
Speaker 2: is the Biden administration not being proactive, it's like they're
Speaker 2: actively rolling back protections, and they're actively rolling back things
Speaker 2: that the agency used to do under Obama, which was
Speaker 2: you know, in most other respects.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 6: Again, I don't.
Speaker 2: Really like, can I expect the people who listened to
Speaker 2: the show to remember the Obama administration?
Speaker 8: Now?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I mean, I was one of the people who came
Speaker 3: of aged off my parents' healthcare plan kind of exactly
Speaker 3: right before kind of primary PPACA productions kicked in, right
Speaker 3: and so I had a several month period where they
Speaker 3: could still deny you health insurance using or being trands
Speaker 3: as a pre existing condition, as they don't god and
Speaker 3: so that that that actually did happen to me. I
Speaker 3: applied for health insurance and they sent me a letter
Speaker 3: that said, you have your trends. That's a pre existing condition.
Speaker 3: We're not going to sell your health and so I
Speaker 3: so I actually did several months later, you know, those
Speaker 3: protections kicked in, and the Obama administration actually did do
Speaker 3: some kind of proactive work to make sure that those
Speaker 3: were spread around the country. Like it's not nowhere never
Speaker 3: has been as guys, good and throw.
Speaker 4: As it should be.
Speaker 3: But it worked for me here because then when I
Speaker 3: implied again, I was not denied for being trance.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I mean, I think that's the kind of
Speaker 2: general thing I want to say about that too, is like,
Speaker 2: you know, there were things where, like on these kind
Speaker 2: of issues where the obomaministration was a lot better broadly
Speaker 2: if you look at the rest of their policy, it
Speaker 2: was like significantly further right in the Biden administration.
Speaker 4: Like Obama.
Speaker 2: Obama tried to tried to like put up grand bargain
Speaker 2: together to destroy Medicaid, Medicare, social Security, Like he tried
Speaker 2: to do that and he was stopped by the Republicans. Right,
Speaker 2: it was like, I need to give people a sense
Speaker 2: of like how far right Obama was even compared to Biden,
Speaker 2: and yet the REGs are getting worse.
Speaker 3: Which is on our issues. He was fairly fairly good, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: and one thing that I think contributes to people not
Speaker 3: you know, I can't blame folks for not understanding this
Speaker 3: is happening because the queer advocacy orgs are not talking
Speaker 3: about things this way, right, and I think possibly one
Speaker 3: of them. The most illustrative things I can point out
Speaker 3: is when the first title nine n pr M drops.
Speaker 3: So NPRM stands for Notice of prop was rulemaking. So
Speaker 3: if I drop that again, it's a screw up on
Speaker 3: my part. I don't mean to use the dragon, but
Speaker 3: so that when they issue their first draft of a
Speaker 3: regulation and invite comment in a comment period follows.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 3: So the title nine inn PRM that they release around
Speaker 3: trans students' access to sports programs and education. If you
Speaker 3: read it the language of the actual draft policy, not
Speaker 3: the press releases people put out about it, it is
Speaker 3: functionally States rights for athlete bands.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 3: It gives the States rights to come up with a
Speaker 3: justification that involves fairness and safety, and then they will
Speaker 3: have deference to pursue or whatever, which is not just
Speaker 3: some of the ways they've done fifty fifty seven as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, and like to make it explicitly clear. What
Speaker 2: they're saying is that if you, as a stake can
Speaker 2: come up with a good enough reason, you were allowed
Speaker 2: to discriminate against trans people and prevent them. Yeah, exactly
Speaker 2: doing sports, which she's like, again, it is a vert
Speaker 2: discrimination based on gender, which you should not be able
Speaker 2: to do legally. However, come the absolute cowardly shits at
Speaker 2: the Biden administration. We're like, no, you could actually do this,
Speaker 2: go ahead to have fun.
Speaker 3: Fascist humanization marks. And so, if you remember back to
Speaker 3: that time, all of the national queer organizations put out
Speaker 3: these glowing press release. So I'm on the policy side, right,
Speaker 3: I'm not on the comp side. I reanalyzed the policy,
Speaker 3: I tell them what it means, and then it's unfortunately
Speaker 3: out of my hands at that point, right, and the
Speaker 3: national queer organizations have been messaging basically all of these
Speaker 3: things as great wins moving things forward. Biden truly the
Speaker 3: first trans president. We love them, stuff like that, right,
Speaker 3: And so they did not for that title nine in BRM.
Speaker 3: And then several days later, the Representative Zoe Zephyr, a
Speaker 3: Translin represent state representative from Montana, organized the out trans state,
Speaker 3: trans and non binary state legislators from around the country
Speaker 3: to release an open letter which you know, condemned the
Speaker 3: title nine NPRM for.
Speaker 4: Being dog shit. Yeah, and so that's that's.
Speaker 3: I think maybe the one and only kind of a
Speaker 3: crack in the in the facade that has gotten through
Speaker 3: over the past couple of years is when you know,
Speaker 3: this thing came out after the police people said this
Speaker 3: is how did this happen?
Speaker 1: What the hell?
Speaker 3: And then the comms came out and they were great,
Speaker 3: glowing you know, he love trans people. And then you know,
Speaker 3: the state trans elected is actually said no, this this
Speaker 3: fucking socks actually right, But that has not really happened
Speaker 3: for anything else because they're you know, most of the
Speaker 3: people who do what I do, they're you know, specialized
Speaker 3: in each and there are many jobs for it, and
Speaker 3: you could could I could speak at length about how
Speaker 3: you don't get to speak your mind if you want
Speaker 3: to continue to stay with kind of movement employment in
Speaker 3: this sector. And so in terms of publicly being able
Speaker 3: to speak about how we're being thrown under the bus currently,
Speaker 3: there are not many folks with the expertise who are
Speaker 3: free to do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I remember, like I'm not a policy person, right,
Speaker 2: Like I have I have, you know, part I mean
Speaker 2: parts of this is an analytical thing, right, Like I
Speaker 2: bailed out of going to law school because I had
Speaker 2: to read that, I had to read the Clean Air Act,
Speaker 2: and I was like, I will literally die if I
Speaker 2: have to do this for a living. But you know,
Speaker 2: I remember when when the sort of Title nine stuff
Speaker 2: came out and when and I remember trying to talk
Speaker 2: about it. I remember like the pushback that I got
Speaker 2: for being like, wait, this sucks. It was enormous. It
Speaker 2: was this like incredible sort of broad front pr campaign
Speaker 2: from just so many different and not even just you know,
Speaker 2: it had filtered down to the point where like it
Speaker 2: wasn't just like these origs. It was like just like
Speaker 2: like the random people on Twitter who's supposed to follow
Speaker 2: policy stuff were only in line. Like everyone was coming
Speaker 2: in and it was just like absolutely terrifying, Like kind
Speaker 2: of those people.
Speaker 3: Don't actually read policy. That's the thing that policy reporters don't, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so many such cases, and.
Speaker 3: So most people who report on policy or or kind
Speaker 3: of are follow policy do tend to kind of stick
Speaker 3: in the realm of those press releases and initial initial
Speaker 3: articles based on press releases and so if there is
Speaker 3: not kind of sincerity and truthfulness on the part of
Speaker 3: the orgs that are the trusted, you know, speakers in
Speaker 3: this space, then this stuff gets successfully laundered. And I
Speaker 3: think it's intentional. I think that it, on one hand,
Speaker 3: is an intentional move to prevent and stemy actual grassroots
Speaker 3: organizing around sincere and real and pressing trans needs. Because
Speaker 3: if you're trying to get a lot of people fired
Speaker 3: up about trans healthcare is like on fire, and half
Speaker 3: the like half the trans kids in the country don't
Speaker 3: have we have to like this is act up shit time. Right,
Speaker 3: But if everybody that you know is on your email list,
Speaker 3: if most of them have seen HRC and NCT and
Speaker 3: all these places put out these blowing press releases, people
Speaker 3: are like, you're crazy. If things are fine, Jo's moving
Speaker 3: things for We're good. And then also I think they
Speaker 3: have kind of backed themselves into a corner in terms
Speaker 3: of how a lot of Libs have have backed themselves
Speaker 3: into a corner at this point. Right, they know that
Speaker 3: Trump is worse on policy, even if Biden has done
Speaker 3: barely anything, Trump is obviously worse for trans people, and
Speaker 3: so they're they're allowing electoral weirdness to control actual kind
Speaker 3: of policy coms in a way that I find really
Speaker 3: really frustrating. And then I think is not doing trans people,
Speaker 3: especially in the South. It's not treating them with the
Speaker 3: respect that they deserve from their the organizations that claim
Speaker 3: to represent them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is a thing that Okay, this is
Speaker 2: this is going to sound like a weird sidebar, but
Speaker 2: I promise if you follow this train of logical do worthy.
Speaker 2: This is something you actually this is a debate You
Speaker 2: get a lot more clearly in Latin American social movements,
Speaker 2: where because because their social movements are significantly stronger from
Speaker 2: the social movements in the US, right, they are their
Speaker 2: own sort of coherent like political basis.
Speaker 4: You get this like a labor movement.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, like you know that this
Speaker 2: is the thing about the labor movement. Like you know,
Speaker 2: if if you look at for example, Bolivia, which has
Speaker 2: very very strong social movements or like has traditionally had
Speaker 2: very strong labor movements in a lot social movements in
Speaker 2: the last twenty thirty years, right, I mean, like their
Speaker 2: labor movement throws dynamite at bosses, right, Like you know,
Speaker 2: so like they have they have a very strong movement.
Speaker 2: And but one of the questions of these movements, and
Speaker 2: this is something that has just torn apart the m
Speaker 2: as they're there's sort of like supposedly movement political party,
Speaker 2: is this question of to what extent should you integrate
Speaker 2: your social movement with the state. And you know, and
Speaker 2: this is a long this is a long running debate
Speaker 2: in Budge social movements. Various movements have picked different directions.
Speaker 2: Some of them have become very unfolded in the states,
Speaker 2: some of them have resisted it. And there are you know,
Speaker 2: there are benefits and problems with both. But one of
Speaker 2: the big issues with trying to sort of incorporate yourself
Speaker 2: into the state is that the state isn't just a
Speaker 2: kind of neutral body. It will, you know, it's it's
Speaker 2: not just that you're working with the state. The state
Speaker 2: is also working with you, and it will attempt to
Speaker 2: and in its political parties will attempt to seize control
Speaker 2: of your organization and turn your organization into just a
Speaker 2: sort of into you know, into basically a pr outlet
Speaker 2: for whatever thing it's doing. And this becomes a real
Speaker 2: problem when you're you know, your your party is trying
Speaker 2: to screw you.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean this came to ahead in twenty twelve where
Speaker 2: there was a huge fight in Bolivia over a plan
Speaker 2: by the MS to build a highway through a bunch
Speaker 2: of indigenous land. And this this basically split the base
Speaker 2: of the party, right because the MAS had been sort
Speaker 2: of an indigenous socialist movement, and it got split between
Speaker 2: the people who supported building this growth of the people who didn't.
Speaker 2: And so like even Moreles has riot police stormed the
Speaker 2: offices of one of the of one of the indigenous
Speaker 2: federations and like replaces them, like replaces their leadership with
Speaker 2: guys who are loyal to him, who will push this
Speaker 2: thing through, right. And you know, I mean the reason
Speaker 2: I'm talking about this is the kind of social movement
Speaker 2: stuff I studied in college, right, And it's like and
Speaker 2: now in the US, we were like kind of starting
Speaker 2: to get to the point where we have real social movements, right,
Speaker 2: and we've seen sort of like BLM, you know, we
Speaker 2: we sort of have something that is a career movement,
Speaker 2: and we're running into exactly the same thing where yeah,
Speaker 2: like if you you know, this is the thing you
Speaker 2: can talk about more stifically in the US, but it's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: like these orgs are on are are in in the
Speaker 2: middle of this sort of state capture process, right, and
Speaker 2: this has having really really dogshit effects on queer people
Speaker 2: because is when when these organizations are you know, become
Speaker 2: becomes sort of media arms or become sort of political
Speaker 2: arms of these party apparatuses. They're not representing you, They're
Speaker 2: representing the party and I and.
Speaker 3: I think that one one of the easiest places to
Speaker 3: kind of see the dynamic that you and I are
Speaker 3: talking about in current US politics is in the discourse
Speaker 3: around palace and any liberation.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you try to talk with anybody about palace
Speaker 3: and any liberation, you get beset upon on all sides
Speaker 3: by people saying, well, do you want Trump to win?
Speaker 3: You think Trump's gonna be better? This like electoral project
Speaker 3: takes precedence over you know, politics guided by core values
Speaker 3: so quickly and so overwhelmingly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I mean, and it's it's accelerated to a point.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is something I remember in it during
Speaker 2: the Trump years, we would we would joke about this
Speaker 2: about sort of the spinelessness of liberalism, Like it used
Speaker 2: to be a joke that like if the democratic president
Speaker 2: did a genocide, people would go, oh, well, you still
Speaker 2: have to support them because the other tup and now
Speaker 2: it's literally happening.
Speaker 3: Yeah you know, I mean well, so I actually started
Speaker 3: working at Nationals. I took the drop at transfer A
Speaker 3: Law Center right after Trump took office, and so my,
Speaker 3: you know, it was very easy for me to especially
Speaker 3: as someone who you know, had never worked at large
Speaker 3: avoccine nonprofits before, because go figure, there's no money in
Speaker 3: doing transwork in the South that was scrappy and under
Speaker 3: resource as fuck. I got to delude myself, I think,
Speaker 3: because you know, Trump is such a uniquely dangerous force
Speaker 3: that a lot of people alongside me and the movement
Speaker 3: were had the same shared the values with me, because
Speaker 3: I could see them being equally strident and vocal on
Speaker 3: kind of all the bad things that were happening. And
Speaker 3: then you know, it's almost it's a tire joke at
Speaker 3: this point, but you know, Biden took over and the
Speaker 3: kids were still in cages and everybody else shut up,
Speaker 3: and I looked around and I'm like, wait, I'm.
Speaker 2: Still I still okay, Yeah, the hell or all go
Speaker 2: Like I want to yell about that for a second,
Speaker 2: because like so I kind of like this, this was
Speaker 2: like my sort of well, I mean, I guess my
Speaker 2: technical origin story. There's a slight longer thing this, but
Speaker 2: like my me being a person that any would listen
Speaker 2: to as a product of being involved in occupy Ice
Speaker 2: and like you know, going out and finding like you know,
Speaker 2: I mean, the sort of horror of that, like you
Speaker 2: can fucking hear people yelling from the inside of these
Speaker 2: buildings that they're being fucking held in. And now, you know,
Speaker 2: Biden like, well, we'll do a longer thing about this
Speaker 2: at some point, but like Biden is you know that
Speaker 2: that fucking bill that they were trying to pass like
Speaker 2: absolutely unbelievably fascist one saying that the president has the
Speaker 2: right to close the border. She's trying to just fucking
Speaker 2: do it anyways.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and and they're still doing concpts about it making
Speaker 3: them they think it makes them look good.
Speaker 2: No, it's it's like it's they're they're they're doing just
Speaker 2: pure evil. Like again, like literally, without like James and
Speaker 2: his friends, there would be pile like there's still are
Speaker 2: corpses floating up in the fucking rivers on the border,
Speaker 2: but there would be fucking like there would be stacked
Speaker 2: like mounds of corpses of people who fucking starved or died,
Speaker 2: Like if literally James and his friends weren't down there
Speaker 2: on the border right now, that and you know, and yeah,
Speaker 2: likes this is the thing you're talking about. It's like,
Speaker 2: I remember all these people in the streets for this.
Speaker 2: I was like, I was there, I was fucking helping
Speaker 2: to organize this stuff. And then like you watch them
Speaker 2: walk away. Yeah, it's terrible.
Speaker 3: And I want to make clearer that you know, you're
Speaker 3: talking about kind of the pressure that a party in
Speaker 3: power can can apply and the way in which these
Speaker 3: organizations can be captured, especially just due to how nonprofit
Speaker 3: funding is a whole cluster fucking and how it works
Speaker 3: here in the US. But I so, I actually by
Speaker 3: a White House staffer called my executive director within an
Speaker 3: hour of my boss forwarding the White House an analysis
Speaker 3: of mine that I'd written for a state without reading
Speaker 3: it herself at all. And in this analysis I included
Speaker 3: a dismal assessment of the likelihood that the federal government
Speaker 3: would use its power to prevent implementation that saw this
Speaker 3: was a this was a healthcare band, that a novel
Speaker 3: healthcare band that the estate wanted to quit turn around one
Speaker 3: and so my boss direct boss forwarded it to the
Speaker 3: White House, who had asked for analysis on it without
Speaker 3: reading it at all. And within an hour of my
Speaker 3: boss forwarding it to the White House, the White House
Speaker 3: had called our executive director to complain about me and
Speaker 3: I got written up for it. That is the fastest
Speaker 3: turnaround on anything trans that anybody has gotten out of
Speaker 3: this White House. And it was it was getting me,
Speaker 3: me disciplined for in a in an analysis that was
Speaker 3: not for them not being super impressed with their with
Speaker 3: their trans policy. And I and I have heard I
Speaker 3: have you know a lot of colleagues in the movement,
Speaker 3: the folks I trust completely on trans policy. And I
Speaker 3: know for a fact that I am not the only
Speaker 3: person that has had a situation like that occur. And
Speaker 3: so there they are applying pressure and even in the
Speaker 3: most direct ways to you know, the advocacy organizations. So
Speaker 3: it it, it is happening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think the thing I wanted to close
Speaker 2: on was talking about a bit about like the consequences
Speaker 2: of this, because what happens when this this is you know,
Speaker 2: this is part of going back to me talking about Bolivia,
Speaker 2: Like this is part of how even Moralees got overthrown
Speaker 2: in the coup, was that because the social movements, like
Speaker 2: most of the like a lot of these social movements
Speaker 2: have been sort of weakened to the point where they
Speaker 2: know they no longer had you know, that they'd become
Speaker 2: policy organs at the state and not actual like fighting
Speaker 2: movements that could like effectively resist. You know that that
Speaker 2: that could do a thing like for example, like you know,
Speaker 2: if you look at the the the the original coup
Speaker 2: against Hugo Chavez, right, like, the social movements were so
Speaker 2: strong that even though the army literally did a coup,
Speaker 2: they got fucking ran out by like several million uh
Speaker 2: Venezuelans taking to the streets and just like overturning the coup,
Speaker 2: right and that I I mean that happens later like
Speaker 2: in like that there was you know, there there was
Speaker 2: there was a second round of barricades that went up
Speaker 2: that got basically no press attention in twenty twenty. You
Speaker 2: know that there's a whole comp I'll talk about that
Speaker 2: one day. And how hilariously after getting bailed out, even
Speaker 2: Rallies pulled his people off the barricades because they didn't
Speaker 2: actually want to overthrow the government. They just wanted an election. Obviously, well,
Speaker 2: people off to keep the government intact long enough. He's
Speaker 2: done this in many This is the second time he's
Speaker 2: done this, by the way, this happened in the water
Speaker 2: in the.
Speaker 4: Water Wars in twenty and six.
Speaker 2: But uh, you know, but but like in the initial
Speaker 2: period of the coup, part of the reason this this
Speaker 2: was able to happen again was because the capacity of
Speaker 2: these groups to like overturn something like this had been
Speaker 2: so new, or that they were able to sort of
Speaker 2: be defeated in the streets. And you know, we are
Speaker 2: we are watching our own version of this where, yeah,
Speaker 2: like I wanted to sort of talk to you about
Speaker 2: what's been happening the fucking hell escape that's been happening
Speaker 2: in Louisiana, as you know, partially because of the sort
Speaker 2: of republican's fascist turn, but also because the resistance to
Speaker 2: them has been neutered by the fact that they're you know,
Speaker 2: they have to like defend this Biden policy shit.
Speaker 3: Right, And yeah, so one important point to make about
Speaker 3: the federal the need for federal protections is that you know,
Speaker 3: I live in Louisiana, federal protections are all I'm ever
Speaker 3: going to have, right, And so if the federal protections
Speaker 3: aren't there, and if there's not a federal government willing
Speaker 3: to enforce them, I'm I'm in big trouble. Like I
Speaker 3: would bet every single dollar I have, which is not many,
Speaker 3: that my medicaid will not will not cover my hormones
Speaker 3: by the end of the year. Right, And so what
Speaker 3: I what I think And I've highlighted kind of before
Speaker 3: when it was very clear that Jeff Landry was going
Speaker 3: to become governor after John Bell and actually did drug
Speaker 3: policy for John Bell for a while, and a lot
Speaker 3: of trans people were kind of quietly in his administration.
Speaker 3: I think that my friend Tucker, aside from Rachel Levine,
Speaker 3: was probably the highest ranked state executive branch transperson in
Speaker 3: history as deputy Press secretary for a while. Well yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm not sure, but yeah, trans people busted asks to
Speaker 3: get John Bell elected. And so we had held off
Speaker 3: a lot of this stuff for a long time, not
Speaker 3: just through having a nominally democratic governor, but through the
Speaker 3: organizing in the South that that happens on no resources
Speaker 3: whatsoever is some of the most broad based and inspiring
Speaker 3: kind of coalitional organizing that I've ever seen, and I've
Speaker 3: done work all around the country, and the way that
Speaker 3: people are able to organize kind of cross issue here
Speaker 3: is phenomenal. But we are all Jerry manderd to shit.
Speaker 3: We get no money, attention resources from national groups off
Speaker 3: in the media, and especially here in Louisiana and in
Speaker 3: much of the South, like we are not an attractive
Speaker 3: place for impact litigation because in the Fifth Circuit and
Speaker 3: all our state courts are shit, and so we really
Speaker 3: kind of are on our own here in a all
Speaker 3: of a sudden Republican super majority legislature with an activist
Speaker 3: fascist governor and ag so Jeff Jeff Blandery is very
Speaker 3: much in the model of the disantis or an abbot
Speaker 3: in terms of what he is hoping to do in
Speaker 3: Louisiana and what he's hoping to get out of it
Speaker 3: in terms of his own personal profile and ambitions. And
Speaker 3: there's so much we could talk about in terms of
Speaker 3: what's going on here, but I want to highlight specifically
Speaker 3: s B two seventy six, which is the bill you
Speaker 3: may have seen headlines about. It's the bill that adds
Speaker 3: Mith pristone and muspristalled to the State Schedule for Controlled
Speaker 3: Substances Act.
Speaker 2: And can you can you explain what that what that
Speaker 2: actually means for people who.
Speaker 3: Do Yeah, so MYTH and MISO are used for a
Speaker 3: lot of a lot of healthcare in terms of, for example,
Speaker 3: miscarriage management inducing labor in a hospital, but they can
Speaker 3: also be used for self managed medication abortion. And so
Speaker 3: this has not been done anywhere else in the in
Speaker 3: the country where the leading the charge here, No other
Speaker 3: state has ever added drugs like this to their controlled
Speaker 3: substances long and and so what that means is that
Speaker 3: those drugs are now going to be going through the
Speaker 3: Prescription Monitoring Program the PMP, which has a lot more
Speaker 3: controls and surveillance than non controlled substances. Right, So the
Speaker 3: Board of Medicine, the Board Pharmacy, and I'm trying, I'm
Speaker 3: trying to do a survey now to figure out which
Speaker 3: state agency specifically have like automatic inherent access to that
Speaker 3: PMP database. But it makes it a lot more traceable
Speaker 3: and trackable, which is which is really scary for anybody
Speaker 3: trying to access reproductive and abortion healthcare in a place
Speaker 3: like Louisiana. And then the other thing it does is
Speaker 3: it raises the stakes phenomenally for the people doing the
Speaker 3: kind of and I'm going to speak, I'm going to
Speaker 3: try to speak very carefully, or the people doing the
Speaker 3: kind of direct practical support work to work with underserved
Speaker 3: populations to make sure that they can access healthcare services
Speaker 3: that they need. Right, And it is just a it
Speaker 3: is a fact of life that you know, just like
Speaker 3: in the harm direction movement, there are a lot of
Speaker 3: people on the ground busting ass to get people what
Speaker 3: they need. And you know, for a lot of times
Speaker 3: for abortion funds, that's organizing money and transportation and hotels
Speaker 3: to get people out of state. Right since the Florida
Speaker 3: abortion van, we can't send people there anymore. We have
Speaker 3: to send people to Illinois, which is more expensive and
Speaker 3: further way. And it's those people who are at risk,
Speaker 3: the people doing the work like the backbone of the
Speaker 3: on the ground grassroots practical support mutual aid work, that
Speaker 3: are risking. I think it's you know, five to ten
Speaker 3: years per pill if they are you know, providing them
Speaker 3: to someone else. It's it's terrifying, and there's no we
Speaker 3: don't know what we're going to do about it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna call last night kind of like, what are
Speaker 3: we going to do about this? We don't know because
Speaker 3: it's it's scary, and then jumping back to kind of
Speaker 3: the problem with how not problem nonprofit and advocacy funding
Speaker 3: works in this country, there are a lot of restrictions
Speaker 3: that come that are you know, that organizations who are
Speaker 3: funded that way have to live with, Like especially I'll
Speaker 3: speak to the harm reduction world. For example, you'll get
Speaker 3: a grant at your syringe exchange and they're like, here's
Speaker 3: ten thousand dollars, but you can't spend any of it
Speaker 3: on needles, and you're like, that's my biggest expense, That's
Speaker 3: what I was going to you know, And so it's
Speaker 3: the same kind of thing. The more that this kind
Speaker 3: of work gets criminalized and pushed to the edge, the
Speaker 3: fewer resourced organizations are able to work on it, have
Speaker 3: the money that we're going it, but be just there
Speaker 3: legal teams. The chilling effects of this stuff are massive,
Speaker 3: and so it just falls more and more on the
Speaker 3: backs of kind of the grassroots folks who have always
Speaker 3: been making this happen for community to the extent that
Speaker 3: they can under the harshest of circumstances, and you know,
Speaker 3: it's people like that are who are going to have
Speaker 3: to make some really tough decisions going forward.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, like the.
Speaker 4: It's never.
Speaker 2: There's never been a good or safe time to do
Speaker 2: stuff like this. But you know, as it gets increasingly dangerous,
Speaker 2: and as you know, you get the sort of downstream
Speaker 2: effects of both the sort of legal like but both
Speaker 2: the sort of legal danger and the sort of like
Speaker 2: constricting of movement space by the sort of question of
Speaker 2: these engios, things just get more and more dangerous in
Speaker 2: a time where the people who need to be dangerous
Speaker 2: is us because otherwise we are going to die.
Speaker 3: Yeah, scary time, but yeah, you know, we keep us
Speaker 3: fucking safe and yeah, always have and always will. And
Speaker 3: it's going to be rough what we're heading into. But
Speaker 3: you know, I again, the organizing in the South is
Speaker 3: I've never seen anything that's made me so proud to
Speaker 3: be an organizer and an activist as the work that
Speaker 3: I see in the South. And so if there's anybody
Speaker 3: who can lead the way on how to respond to
Speaker 3: these things and how to take care of each other,
Speaker 3: you know, it's it's our people. It's these people who've
Speaker 3: been doing it forever.
Speaker 2: So yeah, and I think on that note, if people
Speaker 2: want to find you and the people you've been working
Speaker 2: with in the orgs that you're sort of working with,
Speaker 2: now where where where can they find that on the
Speaker 2: Internet or I guess other places too. Are there other
Speaker 2: things that are not the Internet at.
Speaker 3: This point, I'm not, I really don't. Yeah, so you
Speaker 3: can find me on Twitter. I'm Gay Narcan on Twitter.
Speaker 3: That's that's me. And then if you are interested in
Speaker 3: supporting kind of the work that my collective is doing,
Speaker 3: the probably best place to go for that right now
Speaker 3: is our first launched project called trans Income Project. It's
Speaker 3: trans Income Project dot org. And what that is is
Speaker 3: an organization that is solely dedicated to doing direct cash
Speaker 3: transfers to transsex workers in Louisiana. We just had some
Speaker 3: of our first listening sessions with folks and yeah, this
Speaker 3: is gonna be so kick ass.
Speaker 4: So yeah, go go.
Speaker 3: There for that direct project. And then I would also
Speaker 3: encourage folks to take a look at Louisiana Transadvocates. I
Speaker 3: used to be president there. It's the state Transavacy organization.
Speaker 3: We're actually the state in the South that has had
Speaker 3: the longest consistent trans presence at the Capitol through Louisiana Transadvocates,
Speaker 3: and we have no fucking money, so feel free to
Speaker 3: so maybe toss something over there too if.
Speaker 1: You get tired.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I will say this, given how fucking zero dollars
Speaker 2: every time transperson has, like this is what are the
Speaker 2: places where your individual dollar will go the furthest because
Speaker 2: you're like, you're your ten dollars is like a three
Speaker 2: hundred percent increase I like the total funding of these works.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, thank you so much for coming on
Speaker 2: and talking.
Speaker 3: About this, and thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I guess my final final final message to
Speaker 2: listeners go fuck him up. You can do you could
Speaker 2: do it too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that I agree completely. Coastline.
Speaker 11: Hi everyone, it's me James, and I just wanted to
Speaker 11: read you this today. I'm going to put it in
Speaker 11: our episode this week because it's a cause, it's important
Speaker 11: to us, and so we thought it would be something
Speaker 11: that might be important to you too as well. On
Speaker 11: the tenth of June twenty twenty four, Leonard Peltier, the
Speaker 11: name rolled member of the Turtle Band of Chippewa of
Speaker 11: Lakota and Ojibwei Ancestry and the longest serving political prisoner
Speaker 11: in the United States will be appearing before the US
Speaker 11: Parole Commission for the first time since two thousand, thousand
Speaker 11: and nine. He faces staunch opposition from the FBI and
Speaker 11: other law enforcement agencies due to having allegedly killed two
Speaker 11: FBI agents in a firefight on the twenty sixth of
Speaker 11: June nineteen seventy five, after the agents appeared on reservation
Speaker 11: land to execute a pretextural warrant. The initial firefight occurred
Speaker 11: during the quote reign of terror on Pine Ridge in
Speaker 11: the wake of the occupation of Wounded Knee, a time
Speaker 11: of extreme violence when federal law enforcement installed a puppet
Speaker 11: tribal chair and was arming vigilantes who targeted Indigenous traditionalists
Speaker 11: every since leading up to these events, as well as
Speaker 11: subsequent investigation and mister Peltier's tradition, trial, conviction, and sentencing
Speaker 11: were characterized by gross misconduct on a part of law enforcement,
Speaker 11: the prosecution, and the courts. Mister Peltier's co defendants were
Speaker 11: separately tried and acquitted on grounds of self defense. Mister
Speaker 11: Peltier was railroaded, and his case is tainted by discrimination
Speaker 11: at every level, ranging from the withholding of exculpatory evidence,
Speaker 11: to the torture and coercion of extradition and trial witnesses,
Speaker 11: and from the refusal of the judge to dismiss and
Speaker 11: vowedly racist Dura, to the apologetic gymnastics of the courts
Speaker 11: affirming his convictions in the face of meritorious legal challenges
Speaker 11: and admitted evidence about rageous government misdeeds. Mister Peltier has
Speaker 11: been in prison for more than forty eight years and
Speaker 11: he's almost eighty years old. He suffers from chronic and
Speaker 11: potentially lethal conditions for which he receives insufficient and substandard
Speaker 11: medical care. If you want to take action to hashtag
Speaker 11: free Leonard Peltier, you can call the US Parole Commission
Speaker 11: at two zero two three four six seven zero zero zero,
Speaker 11: And if you'd like to find more information on how
Speaker 11: to support, you can.
Speaker 4: Go to this url.
Speaker 11: It's http colon slash slash n d NC dot c
Speaker 11: c slash free Leonard Peltier. That's free l e O
Speaker 11: N A R D P E l t I E R.
Speaker 11: Or you can follow n d N Collective on social
Speaker 11: media for more ways to support him. More information on
Speaker 11: Leonard Peltier, listen to Margaret's podcast on the Lakota Nation.
Speaker 11: A read in the Spirit of the Crazy Horse by
Speaker 11: Peter Mathewson. Hi, everyone, welcome to It could happen here
Speaker 11: podcasts about things falling apart and people putting them back together.
Speaker 11: Today we're talking about a little of both of those things.
Speaker 11: I'm joined by Rose, who's a migration activist in the Netherlands,
Speaker 11: and Mick, who has studied migration. We're going to talk
Speaker 11: about the EU's border today, and we're going to talk
Speaker 11: about I think a lot of people, especially the bulk
Speaker 11: of our listeners in the United States, won't be aware
Speaker 11: perhaps of how incredibly cruel and fatal the EU's border is,
Speaker 11: what it does to people, how it does it, where
Speaker 11: it does it. So we're going to talk about that today.
Speaker 11: It's very exciting. There's even more wall than we have
Speaker 11: in the United States, so I'm looking forward to that.
Speaker 11: And so HI, Welcome to the show. Both of you.
Speaker 5: Hi, Thanks, Hi, Thanks for having us.
Speaker 11: Thanks for being here. The way we wanted to structure
Speaker 11: this was Mick has like an excellent presentation for We're
Speaker 11: going to structure this over two episodes. First, we want
Speaker 11: to talk about the state of things and then we
Speaker 11: want to talk about activism and ways that people can
Speaker 11: meaningfully make a difference in this situation. So, Mick, yeah,
Speaker 11: if you'd like to take it away with you with
Speaker 11: your script here, Rose and I will interject whenever we
Speaker 11: feel like it.
Speaker 5: Okay, fair enough, let's go.
Speaker 7: So.
Speaker 5: The EU border crisis is largely crisis of the Mediterranean
Speaker 5: to see that separates Europe from Africa, and it is
Speaker 5: arguably one of the most deadly borders in the world,
Speaker 5: if not the most deadly border. According to several activists
Speaker 5: organizations such as the United Against Refugee Devs and Abolish Frontex,
Speaker 5: which is the EU border agency in charge of protecting
Speaker 5: the border, over fifty two thousand people have died at
Speaker 5: this border as of June twenty twenty three. This number
Speaker 5: is almost certainly higher to a number of factors, one
Speaker 5: of which is that a significant amount of bodies are
Speaker 5: never recovered, which makes it very hard to verify whether
Speaker 5: or not someone has died or is lost somewhere in
Speaker 5: the migration routs. Migration patterns are very hard to keep
Speaker 5: track of. People travel hundreds of kilometers to simply get
Speaker 5: to a point where they can get access to boats,
Speaker 5: or other means of being transported across the sea. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I have a picture here that I would like to
Speaker 5: share with you. Listeners can find it in the notes
Speaker 5: and sources.
Speaker 11: Maybe we'll try and describe it, just so you know,
Speaker 11: to ones driving or something they can I guess, yeah,
Speaker 11: go ahead, give give me a best shot.
Speaker 5: Okay. It's a map of continental Europe with adjacent to
Speaker 5: it Africa and Eurasia. And it's a bunch of arrows
Speaker 5: coalescing on to certain points that grow bigger and bigger.
Speaker 5: And these represent the migration routes and the number of
Speaker 5: people that take a particular path. As you can see,
Speaker 5: the thicker line, the thicker the line, the more people
Speaker 5: it represents. The thinner lines come from the Middle East
Speaker 5: and further to the east. In terms of obstacles and danger,
Speaker 5: I think it's safe to say that crossing Iraq or
Speaker 5: Sybia is not without risk.
Speaker 11: Yeah. Yeah, I've done that. It's yeah, and I've done
Speaker 11: it in cause and with permission, and it's already pretty
Speaker 11: high risk. It's interesting this map is it is a
Speaker 11: twenty seventeen map. Am I seeing that right?
Speaker 5: Yes, it's from the Frontex's quarterly reports too. Which covers
Speaker 5: April till June twenty seventeen.
Speaker 11: Yeah, so maybe this is after the peak of people
Speaker 11: leaving that Iraq and Syria area they like the yeah,
Speaker 11: after Mayhem, Yes, yeah, exactly. Not not that there are
Speaker 11: not still significant numbers. I mean I speak to people
Speaker 11: in Syria most weeks who are trying to leave Syria.
Speaker 11: It's become harder and harder due in part to the
Speaker 11: EU making its borders harder and harder and more and
Speaker 11: more deadly to cross, and due to a number of
Speaker 11: other reasons. But yeah, I think those those lines would
Speaker 11: have been fatter if we'd gone back, like, you know,
Speaker 11: three or four years. Yeah, I mean people in Europe
Speaker 11: will probably have been familiar with this. I mean, of course,
Speaker 11: says the When was the photo taken of the the
Speaker 11: young child who passed away cross That was Alida?
Speaker 7: I think that was in the summer of.
Speaker 5: Bottom Yeah, Alan Curdi, Yeah, the bois name was Allen Curdie.
Speaker 5: I think a brother of his ground as well.
Speaker 11: Yeah, people can look that up if they want to.
Speaker 11: I'll try not to include it. It's quite a horrible
Speaker 11: thing to have to witness.
Speaker 5: No, it's not a nice photo to see ironically, it
Speaker 5: was one of the few moments where like European people
Speaker 5: could muster some sympathy for refugees. But yeah, that wins
Speaker 5: at some point. Yeah, it's always the case.
Speaker 11: Like I don't know, I am talking about this before
Speaker 11: speak about again, but like the other day, I was
Speaker 11: out dropping water and we came across a little three
Speaker 11: year old girl and her mother from Guinea, and they
Speaker 11: the young girl was very hypothermic. Like at first we
Speaker 11: didn't notice because we're like, oh, this girl is very quiet,
Speaker 11: and then we're like, go, okay, this girl is very
Speaker 11: very quiet, and perhaps, you know, we should be concerned,
Speaker 11: and like, I don't know how, and no one in
Speaker 11: their right mind would be like, yeah, this is normal
Speaker 11: and good and I'm really glad that this child is
Speaker 11: in a place where, you know, if left for several
Speaker 11: more hours, she might die. And everyone in that situation,
Speaker 11: to include people who were just driving by, were like,
Speaker 11: oh fuck, we need to help. But sadly, when we
Speaker 11: abstract it to numbers, which is the way it's always
Speaker 11: reported on, right, it's not stories, it's not people, it's
Speaker 11: not little children, it's fifty something thousand people. You know,
Speaker 11: it's hard to imagine fifty something thousand people dying. It's
Speaker 11: easier to feel something for one little boy.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And it's easier to feel something for a child
Speaker 7: than for a man. It's easier to feel something for
Speaker 7: a woman than men. And also even the death of
Speaker 7: Alanchourti despite all the yeah, outraged provoked. It was also
Speaker 7: used as a to make the Turkey Deal, which was
Speaker 7: intended to stop people crossing by boat from Turkey to Greece,
Speaker 7: even though that was actually one of the safest migration
Speaker 7: routs we had at the time, and it closed up
Speaker 7: and people started to move to Libya and instead of
Speaker 7: three kilometers of sea, that meant people had to cross
Speaker 7: one hundred or more kilometers of sea, which was obviously
Speaker 7: way more.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and just so do you need to Libya? And
Speaker 11: that time in Libya's where we'll find out later, is
Speaker 11: far from risk free.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Libya is a very different place than Turkey.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, Yeah, significantly worse to be than Turkey. So to
Speaker 5: get back on track, as you can also see from
Speaker 5: the picture of a vast majority of those migration routes
Speaker 5: across the Sahara desert, people who die in the desert
Speaker 5: or through other dangers on their journey do not make
Speaker 5: it to the Mediterranean and therefore tend to not end
Speaker 5: up in the statistics of people dying there. But I
Speaker 5: would still argue that it is undeniable that those people
Speaker 5: in fact died due to the migration policies that the
Speaker 5: EU puts in place and enforces. Definitely, it's just outside
Speaker 5: of our purview.
Speaker 7: The United list again of refugee deaths, it's taking into
Speaker 7: account anyone whose death can be attributed to the borders.
Speaker 7: So they do also include people dying in the desert,
Speaker 7: but there is much less news about it, So the
Speaker 7: figures of frontecs and of IOM usually do not include those.
Speaker 7: But the number you just mentioned that with fifty two thousand,
Speaker 7: it also includes people who meet at suicide and detention
Speaker 7: centers or who died of medical neglecting camps. But it
Speaker 7: also includes people who died further from the European border,
Speaker 7: but still on borders are that are controlled or are
Speaker 7: influenced by European policies.
Speaker 11: Yeah, in the US like to give a sort of
Speaker 11: comparison example that the statistics we have that come from
Speaker 11: border patrol, those are the remains that are found, which
Speaker 11: is a subset of the remains that exist in it,
Speaker 11: and it doesn't take into account people who died crossing
Speaker 11: Mexico Cree, people who died as Farsus as a Darian
Speaker 11: gap right, which is very dangerous and it's becoming more
Speaker 11: so as more traffic goes across it. People who died
Speaker 11: taking boats around the Darien Gap right, or for whatever reason,
Speaker 11: didn't make it. So we too have this kind of
Speaker 11: attempt to I guess when we get government statistics, we
Speaker 11: have to remember that they come from a government perspective
Speaker 11: and they will try and minimize the obvious cruelty that's happening.
Speaker 5: I think that's a characteristic of almost every government that
Speaker 5: keep the numbers low and don't really engage with the
Speaker 5: actual problems that are at hand. So before we go
Speaker 5: into more specific territories, there are a few things that
Speaker 5: should be made clear. The EU does not follow their
Speaker 5: own rules about migration. Hopefully at the end of this
Speaker 5: the listeners will also accept that the humanitarian and migration
Speaker 5: crises is much more a product of border policies rather
Speaker 5: than the policies being a consequence of migration. To first
Speaker 5: illustrate this, here is a quote from Government l the
Speaker 5: English version of the Dutch government websites asylum or a turn.
Speaker 5: All refugees entering the EU may apply for asylum. They
Speaker 5: must do this in the country where they enter the EU.
Speaker 5: Asylum seekers who do not require protection must return to
Speaker 5: their country of origin or to a save a third country.
Speaker 5: The EU respects the human rights of refugees, both when
Speaker 5: dealing with their applications and with regard to return. So
Speaker 5: I want you all to keep this in mind when
Speaker 5: we continue, because this phrasing ignores other policies that make
Speaker 5: it much harder for migrants and refugees to even enter
Speaker 5: the EU or to be able to apply for asylum. So,
Speaker 5: and before we dive deeper into the atrocities that the
Speaker 5: EU enables, I think it's important to first briefly explain
Speaker 5: how the border system works and the history behind it.
Speaker 5: Europe is no stranger to migration and migrants, and it
Speaker 5: is something that has been happening in waves over the
Speaker 5: past three to four decades. In the early nineties, there
Speaker 5: were multiple waves of migrants from Albania to other European countries.
Speaker 5: The main cause of this was the isolationist policies that
Speaker 5: were enforced by the communist regime that was in charge there,
Speaker 5: the unrest that followed at the end of the regime,
Speaker 5: and the crisis of Kosovo. For those unaware, Kosovo had
Speaker 5: a war with Serbia for independence and Kosovari people are
Speaker 5: largely ethnic Albanians with the same language, and because of this,
Speaker 5: it was easier for Albanians to merge with the Kosovari
Speaker 5: refugees and use that to migrate further and easier into Europe.
Speaker 5: Other waves are caused by other geopolitical events, such as
Speaker 5: the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, which I think Mia and
Speaker 5: Roberts covered in their episode on self immolation. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 5: and much more down to everyone, the wars in Syria
Speaker 5: and Libya.
Speaker 11: My interest in the border has always run parallel to
Speaker 11: my interesting conflict in reporting on conflict, and like it's
Speaker 11: just become such a recurrent experience to either learn about
Speaker 11: conflicts at the border here because someone is telling me
Speaker 11: about them, or learn about often like repression of ethnic
Speaker 11: or national or religious minorities because someone here tells me
Speaker 11: about them, or to go somewhere, you know, I was
Speaker 11: in Syria in October, was in Iraq and then return
Speaker 11: and see people from there at our border, and like
Speaker 11: as people will be aware the asylum system and it
Speaker 11: will cover it later. The asylum system allows people who
Speaker 11: are very in danger of persecution for various categories to
Speaker 11: apply for asylum. It's not functioning. It's not functioning in
Speaker 11: the EU, it's not functioning in the US. Like I've
Speaker 11: seen that persecution with my own eyes and the consequences
Speaker 11: of it, and I've seen people try and get away
Speaker 11: from it. Every single time I'm in somewhere like that,
Speaker 11: people will ask me for help, and it is fucking
Speaker 11: heartbreaking to be like, yeah, the country that you see
Speaker 11: flying the F sixteens or the F thirty fives over
Speaker 11: your head, the planes that cost more than this entire
Speaker 11: town makes in a year. No, we can't have a functioning,
Speaker 11: fucking immigration system. Like in the case of the US,
Speaker 11: it's this app which doesn't work and you can only
Speaker 11: use it north of Mexico City, and it's this broken
Speaker 11: system leads to people they're not like getting in a
Speaker 11: boat across the Mediterranean, crossing the Daryan Gap, walking across
Speaker 11: the mountains of northern Mexico because they want to have
Speaker 11: like a better iPhone. They're doing it because whatever the
Speaker 11: alternative is seems worse, and it's worth. People are fully
Speaker 11: aware that they're risking their lives on these journeys. It's
Speaker 11: you know, it's not that they live without access to
Speaker 11: news and the internet. They know about the death in
Speaker 11: the Mediterranean, they know about the Daryant Gap when I
Speaker 11: talk to migrants who haven't crossed the gap, like I
Speaker 11: was talking to group of Columbian migrants two or three
Speaker 11: days ago, and they were coming in to the US
Speaker 11: through It's in an area east of hookumber which is
Speaker 11: very rugged and very mountainous, and they were coming into
Speaker 11: an open air attention site where border patrol holds them.
Speaker 11: And I was talking to them, I say, how many
Speaker 11: if you walked, how many if you flew. Most of
Speaker 11: them flew and then were able to work forward. The
Speaker 11: ones who walked. Everyone was like, oh shit, that's horrible,
Speaker 11: Like you must have seen terrible things. Like they're very
Speaker 11: aware of how dangerous it's journeys are. The reason that
Speaker 11: they're taking them is because it seems like staying at
Speaker 11: home would be more dangerous.
Speaker 7: Yeah, although I would like to add that it's not
Speaker 7: every migrant is a real refugee, and not every migrant
Speaker 7: has to be a real refugee. Yes, at least as
Speaker 7: the definition was established in the fifties by a bunch
Speaker 7: of pretentious guys who kind of decided this is a
Speaker 7: good reason to migrate and all other reasons are not.
Speaker 7: At first, yeah, at first I worked in Greece and
Speaker 7: that was mainly with people of like what are considered
Speaker 7: like objectively real or good refugees, people from Afghanistan and
Speaker 7: Iraq and Syria, whereas when I was working in Bosnia
Speaker 7: it was mainly people from Morocco, Algeria and Pakistan. And
Speaker 7: a lack of opportunity can be a very good reason
Speaker 7: to move. I think most white people who moved to
Speaker 7: America did so because of that.
Speaker 8: Not because they were imminently bombed in their home countries,
Speaker 8: but because they wanted to make something out of their
Speaker 8: lives and they didn't have opportunities at home. And I
Speaker 8: think this whole concept of refugee is meant to distinguish
Speaker 8: between good and bad reasons to move, and good and
Speaker 8: bad people migrants.
Speaker 12: In the end, people can do really dangerous things for
Speaker 12: giving their children a better life and if their children
Speaker 12: are not immediate danger, and the other thing I would
Speaker 12: like to stress is that I think the migration regime
Speaker 12: that we see today is very tightly connected to colonization
Speaker 12: and decolonization. For example, specifically in the Midlands, Surnam was
Speaker 12: a Dutch colony, and one of the reasons why the
Speaker 12: Dutch government agreed with decolonization was because the Dutch society
Speaker 12: started to get worried about all the black people showing up.
Speaker 12: So and the same something similar happened with the independence
Speaker 12: word that.
Speaker 13: Algeria fought against France. France preferred to give them independence
Speaker 13: rather than give them equal rights and access to the
Speaker 13: French territory. So lifting like creating those barriers and keeping
Speaker 13: people in the Global South after these.
Speaker 7: Countries became independent is very tightly connected with decolonization. But
Speaker 7: of course, especially with new colonization and new ways of
Speaker 7: controlling people in the Global South and exploiting them.
Speaker 11: Yeah, if we look at like the US context, the
Speaker 11: United States government has managed to engineer this sort of
Speaker 11: compromise where capital travels freely across the Americas and people don't,
Speaker 11: so it's possible for them to exploit lower wage labor.
Speaker 11: For US companies to exploit low wage labor Mexico and
Speaker 11: other countries to the South, but not for those people
Speaker 11: to come and seek a better way to better way
Speaker 11: of living in the country that is consuming the products
Speaker 11: of their labor and so like, this is obviously not
Speaker 11: new to people, right, this is a thing that's Appatista
Speaker 11: highlighted in nineteen ninety four and it's been the case
Speaker 11: for thirty years. But yeah, we have in the US
Speaker 11: because the United States colonialism like kind of a in
Speaker 11: a somewhat less overt way, although often in a pretty
Speaker 11: overt way. It's facilitated undemocratic regimes and a low quality
Speaker 11: of life for people all across specifically the Americas, but
Speaker 11: also the rest of the world, and it's now seeking
Speaker 11: to prevent those people from coming here after it destabilized
Speaker 11: to their countries, right or in the case of climate change, again,
Speaker 11: like the consumption habits of certain countries have had an
Speaker 11: impact on people all around the world, to include people
Speaker 11: in more diaeconomic circumstances. And it shouldn't be any less.
Speaker 11: We shouldn't have any less empathy or solidarity with those
Speaker 11: people because no one's bombing them and they just want
Speaker 11: a chance to their kids to do the same shit.
Speaker 11: Like I moved to America and I was twenty one,
Speaker 11: because they want many jobs for me at home.
Speaker 7: Like there's something very arrogant about thinking that you can
Speaker 7: decide whether someone else has a right to exist totally,
Speaker 7: And I think that's kind of what migration policies are.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and as you pointed out, they were established after
Speaker 11: the after the Second World War with a very narrow
Speaker 11: set of categories. Don't include not only do not include
Speaker 11: climate change, but also like generalized violence, right, the generalized veru.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Actually fleeing from a war is not is not
Speaker 7: making you a real refugee according to international law.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, which is something people don't know.
Speaker 7: So like an average sharing refugee is actually legally not a.
Speaker 11: Refugee, right. Yeah, they are flying in.
Speaker 7: Discriminate violence, but not like they don't have like political
Speaker 7: they don't have a right to political asylum.
Speaker 11: Yeah, Or people in Ecuador will will talk to talk
Speaker 11: to people from Ecuador a lot, you know, and they'll
Speaker 11: be like, well, you've seen men they took over the
Speaker 11: TA TV station, So there's some gangs to go over
Speaker 11: a TV station there recently, and it's kind of an
Speaker 11: armed takeover. And then like, as you can see, would
Speaker 11: you want your child growing up there, you know, if
Speaker 11: you had children, and of course it's a very compelling argument,
Speaker 11: and if I was in their position with young children.
Speaker 11: Want guy I met the other day his son needed
Speaker 11: medical care that he couldn't obtain in his country. You know,
Speaker 11: like that's a perfectly valid reason for coming here. But
Speaker 11: none of those things count for asylum. So those people
Speaker 11: are i'd a lumped into quote unquote economic migrants, which
Speaker 11: is still you know, like people have a right to
Speaker 11: a living wage and to be able to pay for
Speaker 11: their family, to have the things that they need to
Speaker 11: survive and thrive. But you're right, the asylum system is
Speaker 11: very narrow.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and we should also not forget that, even if
Speaker 5: we're excluding war, you can't really separate migration from the
Speaker 5: things the West has done in those other countries to
Speaker 5: maintain that neo colonial relationship, and you know, those keep
Speaker 5: those people dependent on whatever whims there are in the West,
Speaker 5: and whether that's for resources, whether that's for because there
Speaker 5: were like the communist regimes there that we weren't happy with. Like,
Speaker 5: you can't separate that. You can separate the conditions that
Speaker 5: are happening there right now to things that have been
Speaker 5: decided in the West years prior.
Speaker 11: Yeah, very true. All right, we're back. Have you enjoyed
Speaker 11: those adverts for products and services following our discussion on
Speaker 11: how capitalism has made life unliverable in certain parts of
Speaker 11: the world, So Mick kil let's pick up with you
Speaker 11: explaining this to see border to.
Speaker 5: Us Well, I found a very nice scholarly article that
Speaker 5: breaks down how the EU borders work and makes a
Speaker 5: very clear distinction between the different layers that protect fortress Europe.
Speaker 5: These layers will be called the paper border, which largely
Speaker 5: consists of visa policies and similar bureaucracy that regulates movement
Speaker 5: to the EU and within it. Then we have the
Speaker 5: iron border, which is exactly what you imagine it. To me,
Speaker 5: it's the physical structures and forms of control that we
Speaker 5: put up to keep people out. And then we have
Speaker 5: the post border, and that's about the reception of migrants,
Speaker 5: migrant shelters and similar constructions that keep migrants and refugees
Speaker 5: ostracized and isolated even after being allowed access into the
Speaker 5: EU and having started a asylum process. For those stories,
Speaker 5: we should turn to Rows when we get there, because
Speaker 5: she is much more on the ground experience than I
Speaker 5: have with this, so we'll start with the paper border.
Speaker 5: During the mid eighties, the e WHO started to propose
Speaker 5: and enact a series of treaties and policies that in
Speaker 5: effect strengthened the external borders and loosened the borders within Europe.
Speaker 5: I think no one is particularly interested in this series
Speaker 5: of treaties, so I will name the only one is
Speaker 5: the Shangan Treaty. This treaty essentially unites the external borders
Speaker 5: under EU command rather than as a task for individual states.
Speaker 5: In practice, this also means that EU citizens who have
Speaker 5: a proper documentation can move freely between countries. Are who
Speaker 5: have signed the Shangan Treaty for holidays or work os,
Speaker 5: You and I we could move to Germany tomorrow if
Speaker 5: we wanted to, and I have little to know obstacles
Speaker 5: in terms.
Speaker 7: Of documentary Economically independent though, like that is very crucial
Speaker 7: about EO. Your fraend of movement is conditional.
Speaker 11: On you making money, yeah, having enough money to support yourself,
Speaker 11: but you can move like This is very funny because
Speaker 11: it pissed off British people who are living in Spain
Speaker 11: right when they when Britain brexited, because they hadn't realized
Speaker 11: that they would impact them. They you know, like such
Speaker 11: as a god thought it was.
Speaker 7: Only the Polish that we yeah, like the undesirable migrants.
Speaker 7: But yes, yes, assumed themselves to be desirable.
Speaker 11: Yeah, well yeah, I don't think we use the word
Speaker 11: expat right like Britain would use the word expact to
Speaker 11: describe a migrant from Britain to Spain, like it's yeah,
Speaker 11: it's really culou. I mean I've lived in France, in Spain,
Speaker 11: of fifd in Belgium and I was, I guess, somewhat
Speaker 11: economically independent, made twelve thousand years a year as a
Speaker 11: bike racer, but that was you know, I could do that.
Speaker 11: It was very easy for me.
Speaker 5: But it is.
Speaker 7: I do think it's important because I think it's one
Speaker 7: of those post border things that what we see for
Speaker 7: some point analysis that most homeless people here are not
Speaker 7: the undocumented migrants, they are not the refugees or Dutch people,
Speaker 7: but they're EU migrants. So people have low paying jobs,
Speaker 7: break their legs, get kicked out of their houses and
Speaker 7: their jobs, and are not welcoming the homeless shelters because
Speaker 7: in Endlands says well, you are not economically independent therefore,
Speaker 7: so this is also part of the migration regime, and
Speaker 7: this is also part of keeping migrants exploitable. Even if
Speaker 7: you use citizens have the right to work, they don't.
Speaker 7: They're only allowed to work. We only want them if
Speaker 7: they bring in economic profits. We don't want them when
Speaker 7: they're sick or.
Speaker 2: In need or whatever.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and then mostly we want them for jobs that
Speaker 5: we feel too good to actually do. When I was younger,
Speaker 5: I used to work in a greenhouse, and there's an
Speaker 5: immense amount of people from like Poland or other Eastern
Speaker 5: European countries coming there because Dutch people tend not to
Speaker 5: want to work in a greenhouse. It's one of those things.
Speaker 11: It's an extension of that like a colonial perspective. Right,
Speaker 11: these are jobs for.
Speaker 5: Us exactly because you get your hands dirty and we
Speaker 5: can't have that here. To put the whole thing about
Speaker 5: the paper border into less academic term, the EU started
Speaker 5: to act like a nation state and started to make
Speaker 5: sharp distinctions between native and non native European citizens. I
Speaker 5: think it's worth pointing out that what counts as EU
Speaker 5: is also a supposed European identity. It's very closely tied
Speaker 5: to geographical location and therefore also implicitly linked to Christianity.
Speaker 5: Countries that are largely non Christian but connected to Europe
Speaker 5: tend to be excluded. Turkey is partially in Europe but
Speaker 5: not part of the EU, and Bosnia Herzegovina, which is
Speaker 5: a majority Muslim country, is also excluded from that. But
Speaker 5: much like Turkey is being tempted with the whole you
Speaker 5: can join if you do this and that, but we're
Speaker 5: not really committing to that. That, however, is a story
Speaker 5: for another time. Maybe the point that I want to
Speaker 5: make here is that the visa program for Europe is
Speaker 5: based on geographical discrimination. Countries outside the geography of Europe
Speaker 5: are blacklisted and cannot gain access to the papers that
Speaker 5: they need to legally enter the EU. This bureaucracy prohibits
Speaker 5: people from entering the EU before fences or border guards
Speaker 5: have even entered the equation, hence the paper border, since
Speaker 5: entering or crossing without a paper visa is nah impossible.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I would like to add, of course, like it
Speaker 7: is geographical discrimination, but of course indirectly it is discrimination
Speaker 7: based on class and race. So it is yea color
Speaker 7: but not the super rich people of color. And it
Speaker 7: is yeah, it is. It is formerly colonized countries that
Speaker 7: are largely that even have an obligation to get so
Speaker 7: people from the US can travel visa free, same for
Speaker 7: people from Australia. So this is like, it is very ironic.
Speaker 7: I find that it's in Europe it's considered legal to
Speaker 7: discriminate based on nationality, even though it is very clearly
Speaker 7: a very smart way to discriminate actually people based on
Speaker 7: the color of their skin and their economic status.
Speaker 5: Exactly what you said, Rose Like all the countries that
Speaker 5: are backlisted are like from the the global South, so
Speaker 5: to speak, almost all of them. But I talked to
Speaker 5: about this with a professor of mine a while back,
Speaker 5: and I think if you can put down like thirty
Speaker 5: thousand euros, then you can get a visa even if
Speaker 5: you're from those countries.
Speaker 7: Exactly. So the super rich, actually, the super rich have
Speaker 7: freedom of movements. Yeah, but the it is always the
Speaker 7: poor migrants whose movement is problematic.
Speaker 11: And whose movement is Yeah. It Britain and in the
Speaker 11: US there's a lot of discourse about like open borders.
Speaker 11: I've noticed like, oh, the borders open, right, Like the
Speaker 11: border has always been open to people like me. I
Speaker 11: live in the United States, right, I am a US citizen.
Speaker 11: Now I'm also a British citizen. I've lived and worked
Speaker 11: in Spain. I've lived and worked in France. I've lived
Speaker 11: and worked in Belgium. I can go and I can
Speaker 11: get a visa to Iraq. I can get a visa
Speaker 11: to anywhere I want. The borders have always been open
Speaker 11: to white people who have financial means. What they're saying
Speaker 11: when they're saying open borders is implicitly borders open to
Speaker 11: people who are not white, not wealthy, perhaps not Christian.
Speaker 11: And what one can infer from that is a great
Speaker 11: deal of bigotry and a great deal of like unease
Speaker 11: about living, you know, alongside people who you feel like
Speaker 11: are not like the same quote unquote as you, which
Speaker 11: is particularly runic in the United States, right in a
Speaker 11: country which is a self a settler colony.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's all very very uplifting stuff. I do want
Speaker 5: to end this particular bit with the quote from that
Speaker 5: article because I think it says it much more fancy
Speaker 5: than I ever could. Rather than guards with guns, this
Speaker 5: first border, if the EU is watched over by bureaucrats
Speaker 5: armed with paper and entrenched in faraway embassies, through this
Speaker 5: political technology, all citizens of a large group of nations
Speaker 5: bar to view are blacklisted. This means, in practice that
Speaker 5: most of the citizens of these blacklisted countries cannot acquire
Speaker 5: the visas they required to legally travel to the EU.
Speaker 5: The implication is that the paper border of the EU
Speaker 5: remotely and invisibly cages people in the inequitable or tree
Speaker 5: of birth end quote. I think it's very much worth
Speaker 5: highlighting that if you're as we've established, unless you're like
Speaker 5: wealthy or white, you cannot legally enter the EU. And
Speaker 5: even though our politicians keep saying no, no, we're just
Speaker 5: against the illegals, now, there is for a lot of people,
Speaker 5: there simply is no way to enter legally. It's impossible,
Speaker 5: And it's a large part of the conversation that we
Speaker 5: conveniently ignore because it doesn't fit like the political narratives
Speaker 5: that people want to spread.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and of course, most retched deconventions allow for people
Speaker 11: to enter between ports of entry in whichever way they
Speaker 11: can to claim asylum, Like one does not have to
Speaker 11: enter in a certain way to claim asylum, despite what
Speaker 11: the discourse might suggest.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and I think this border is like probably the
Speaker 7: most overlooked because it doesn't create any dramatic pictures, right,
Speaker 7: it is indeed, it's just people sitting in an office
Speaker 7: and looking at papers and deciding no. But these are
Speaker 7: like in Dutch. Yeah, these are people working at the
Speaker 7: immigration office. And these are the people who then decide
Speaker 7: that's the only option for people is to go on
Speaker 7: a boat. So these these are policies and the people
Speaker 7: who are executing them are super crucial in enforcing people
Speaker 7: onto dangerous.
Speaker 5: Routes exactly because there is no way to do it legally. Therefore,
Speaker 5: I have to set food on that soil and then
Speaker 5: you know, apply for asylum because the other route is
Speaker 5: like before I even tried, already closed off.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and I really like that term, the inequitable a birth.
Speaker 7: We call it like support heads. Yeah, but it's one
Speaker 7: of the most insane or like most fundamentally unjust things
Speaker 7: that we see that we are living with and then
Speaker 7: we don't see or like that many people don't see.
Speaker 7: So just because we were born, like I was born
Speaker 7: in one of the richest countries of in the world.
Speaker 7: My parents had a Dutch fashboard. That's how I got
Speaker 7: a Dutch fastboard. I did literally nothing to get that.
Speaker 7: It is impossible for me to lose my Dutch passport.
Speaker 7: I commit, I can commit like the worst crimes, and
Speaker 7: they will not, you know, they will not lead me
Speaker 7: to lose my passport. Whereas other people who are born
Speaker 7: in countries where life expectancy is crazy low, or where
Speaker 7: there's no healthcare or no proper education or jobs, they
Speaker 7: too did absolutely nothing to be born there or to
Speaker 7: be assigned to that nationality. And so somehow this border
Speaker 7: and this passport is legitimizing the fact that some people
Speaker 7: just die and we're fine with that, and other people
Speaker 7: have insane privileges and opportunities, and the nationality is kind
Speaker 7: of a justification because if you really think about it,
Speaker 7: there is no reason why the minimum wage in Ethiopia
Speaker 7: should be lower than in the Netlands, Like there really isn't.
Speaker 7: The only reason is that they have a different nationality,
Speaker 7: and somehow that makes it normal. And if it's just yeah,
Speaker 7: it's just this injustice. Its structures that are so invisible
Speaker 7: and that are not questioned or talked about enough. So
Speaker 7: I'm glad we're talking about it today.
Speaker 11: But yeah, good. It's such a stark reality when you
Speaker 11: live on the border, like I live on the US
Speaker 11: Mexico border a like what on earth? Like, you know,
Speaker 11: the justification for being like, oh, yeah, this person should
Speaker 11: earn less money and they can't come here, but you
Speaker 11: can go down there and buy stuff at the same
Speaker 11: price they can. That's fine, Like it's totally fine. Yeah,
Speaker 11: and we're going to build a giant fuck off wall.
Speaker 11: And it's just such when I spent a lot of
Speaker 11: time in the more remote parts of the US border,
Speaker 11: and for most of the time that border country to
Speaker 11: what you might have seen on the news is a
Speaker 11: one meter high cattle fence with a single strand a
Speaker 11: bar wire, and it's so obviously just a light like
Speaker 11: very often cattle will cross the border and like that
Speaker 11: will have to be herded back, right, like the it's
Speaker 11: just a notional line in the sand. When they built
Speaker 11: the border wall, it really fucked up the migration habits
Speaker 11: of jaguar bears.
Speaker 4: Dea.
Speaker 11: I've seen animals unable to comprehend, Like, but no, that's
Speaker 11: where I go and get my water, right, Like, it's
Speaker 11: such an arbitrary distinction that it results in so much cruelty.
Speaker 7: But we do build walls better than you.
Speaker 11: Yeah, that's a good segue to the European iron boarder.
Speaker 7: One thing we are more cruel at than the Americans.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, finally something we can beat the American sets.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm mad.
Speaker 11: We're working on it, believe me.
Speaker 5: Okay, well, not too hard. We want we want to
Speaker 5: keep this trophy for a while.
Speaker 11: You know what else is competing to be the most
Speaker 11: cruel Mick, No, it's it's it's potentially the products and
Speaker 11: services support this show. All right, we're back. We hope
Speaker 11: you enjoyed those products and services. Hopefully it wasn't for
Speaker 11: like a border surveillance technology or you know, something similar walls.
Speaker 5: Okay, so the next part is the Iron Border. This
Speaker 5: is very similar to what people already think of, but
Speaker 5: somehow worse. The Iron border is a collection of fences, walls,
Speaker 5: barbed and razor wire, or even fortified enclaves such as
Speaker 5: Suta and Melilla in Spain. Sorry for butchering those names.
Speaker 5: It is both a deterrent and a performance like. It's
Speaker 5: meant to project security for people within the walls. It
Speaker 5: shows that EU uses an iron fist to protect Europeans
Speaker 5: from irregular or illegal immigrant migration. What is more important
Speaker 5: to highlight, it also makes for very good outrage media
Speaker 5: for right wing and fascist platforms. Refugees will continue to
Speaker 5: breach those fences, and the photographs and videos of it
Speaker 5: made for very good propaganda about how borders need to
Speaker 5: be strengthed. The fence borders of Europe have increased from
Speaker 5: three hundred kilometers in twenty fourteen to its shocking two
Speaker 5: thousand and forty eight kilometers in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 11: Yeah, that's substantiary than the US we have. Of course,
Speaker 11: it's America, so it's miles. But the most generous estimate
Speaker 11: based on pre existing wall repairs Trump wall building is
Speaker 11: seven hundred and forty eight miles. That was actually I
Speaker 11: would say about seven hundred and fifty because I've seen
Speaker 11: construction happening since then, so that's what like eleven hundred kilometers.
Speaker 11: It's you know, we're just just over half of what
Speaker 11: the EU has.
Speaker 7: And I think for me, like when I when I
Speaker 7: was at the physical borders, like the border walls, I
Speaker 7: mean it feels like a military zone, like I was
Speaker 7: on the Hungarian border. There's drones, there is super heavily
Speaker 7: weaponed soldiers walking around, like helicopters flying around. It's a
Speaker 7: very intimidating feeling. But if you talk to the people
Speaker 7: crossing the fence, the fence is kind of a joke,
Speaker 7: like you can just bring Yeah, you can just go
Speaker 7: to a gardening shop and buy a stairs or like
Speaker 7: a ladder and just put it over the fence. You
Speaker 7: can buy a super simple scissor that you would use
Speaker 7: in the garden to cut your vegetables and you can
Speaker 7: cut the fence open with it. People were building tunnels,
Speaker 7: like of course it takes time to cross it, and
Speaker 7: it's so in that sense, it's a hindrance. But the
Speaker 7: entire promise that if a wall holl stop people is indeed,
Speaker 7: it's just a political game, and the politicians know that
Speaker 7: it's not true. It's just a way to show how
Speaker 7: tough they are and how rough they are. And at
Speaker 7: the same time, I think this is a good moment
Speaker 7: to instate on Palestine to the discussion. So most of
Speaker 7: the European borders are equipped with razor wire, and that
Speaker 7: is literally like knives wire, you know, like it is
Speaker 7: like it's razors.
Speaker 11: Its half razor blades.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and this is designed by the Israeli army and
Speaker 7: weapons industry, and the aim of this razor wire is
Speaker 7: to gut as deeply as possible into people's skin without
Speaker 7: causing pain, so people don't realize how realize how heavily
Speaker 7: wounded they are, in order to make them bleed as
Speaker 7: much as possible. This has been tested in Gaza, and
Speaker 7: Israeli army liked it, and now it's sold in Europe
Speaker 7: to sometimes stop the same people leaving fleeing Gaza trying
Speaker 7: to reach Europe. So the border in one hand is
Speaker 7: kind of useless, but at the same time, it is
Speaker 7: really built to be as cruel and as harmful as possible.
Speaker 7: And I know a lot of people with a lot
Speaker 7: of scars on their bodies just from those razor wires.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I think if we want to draw that connection further,
Speaker 11: like Lbit Technologies has mass, multi tens of million dollar
Speaker 11: contracts for border surveillance where I live. Right, the same
Speaker 11: things that are surveiling people in Gaza are surveilling you
Speaker 11: if you go for a hike in East County, San Diego,
Speaker 11: they're also surveilling migrants.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 11: The raser ware that you mentioned is everywhere out here. Right.
Speaker 11: It doesn't work, it gets cut eventually, it gets blankets
Speaker 11: thrown over it, But in the meantime, it hurts people
Speaker 11: the wall itself, right, there's also walls between Itsrael and Palestine,
Speaker 11: between Kurdistan and Turkey. What they, at least these larger
Speaker 11: ones do is is they force people. The US Wall
Speaker 11: is also one that's entirely breachable. I've seen people climbing it.
Speaker 11: I've seen people climbing it this week. I've seen people
Speaker 11: go under it, I've seen people go through it, I've
Speaker 11: seen people go around it. But what it does tend
Speaker 11: to do is force people into the more remote areas
Speaker 11: where they didn't build wall, and those areas are where
Speaker 11: you're more likely to die. And every year that we've
Speaker 11: built more wall, we've seen more deaths. And as someone
Speaker 11: who engages in mutual aid, every year that they build
Speaker 11: more wall, we have to think about where will people go,
Speaker 11: how will they get there, what state will they be in,
Speaker 11: How can we make this journey less deadly, and that
Speaker 11: becomes harder and higher for us. You know, we did
Speaker 11: a water drop on Sunday. It took us five hours
Speaker 11: to hike a very small section of this trail that
Speaker 11: people hiked in order to surrender themselves, just as they
Speaker 11: would if they could come through important entry, but it's
Speaker 11: a lot more deadly.
Speaker 7: Yeah. I think that's kind of some sort of most
Speaker 7: migration policies or migration like obstacles to migration in Europe
Speaker 7: as well. They don't actually stop migrants, but they do
Speaker 7: hurt them, and they do push them into danger or actual.
Speaker 5: Deadly Yeah, because you're never going to stop it, but
Speaker 5: you can use like quote unquote deterrents in the holes
Speaker 5: that it will all slow down, but you're just going
Speaker 5: to get people hurt and killed.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that is like how incredibly cinecle the border is.
Speaker 7: I think that the main desurance is the people dying,
Speaker 7: and that this is part of the political game to
Speaker 7: disencourage vibrants.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and then you can and then you can use
Speaker 5: other policies that we'll get to to present yourself as
Speaker 5: the good guy for wanting to make sure that people
Speaker 5: don't cross those walls or across the Mediterranean, and you
Speaker 5: can present yourself as the good guy trying to prevent
Speaker 5: those steps that your policies are causing.
Speaker 11: I think that's what we're going to end it for today.
Speaker 11: We plan for this to be a one part episode,
Speaker 11: but we really enjoyed talking and we had a learning comment,
Speaker 11: so this is going to be a two parter. Tomorrow
Speaker 11: we will be back to discuss the EU's external border
Speaker 11: and how it has non EU countries enforcing its border
Speaker 11: in ways that are very detrimental, damaging, and deadly to migrants.
Speaker 11: So I hope you look forward to that and we'll
Speaker 11: see you again tomorrow.
Speaker 7: Hi.
Speaker 11: Everyone, it's me James, and I just wanted to read
Speaker 11: you this today. We're going to put it in our
Speaker 11: episode this week because it's a cause that's important to us,
Speaker 11: and so we thought it would be something that might
Speaker 11: be important to you too as well. On the tenth
Speaker 11: of June twenty twenty four, Lennard Peltier, an enrolled member
Speaker 11: of the Turtle Band of Chippewa of Lakota and Ajibwei
Speaker 11: ancestry and the longest serving political prisoner in the United States,
Speaker 11: will be appearing before the US Parole Commission for the
Speaker 11: first time since two thousand and nine. He faces staunch
Speaker 11: opposition from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies due
Speaker 11: to having allegedly killed two FBI agents in a firefight
Speaker 11: on the twenty sixth of June nineteen seventy five. After
Speaker 11: the agents appeared on reservation land to execute a pretextural warrant.
Speaker 11: The initial firefight occurred during the quote reign of terror
Speaker 11: on Pine Ridge in the wake of the occupation of
Speaker 11: Wounded Kney, a time of extreme violence when federal law
Speaker 11: enforcement installed a puppet tribal chair and was arming vigilantes
Speaker 11: who targeted Indigenous traditionalists. Everything leading up to these events,
Speaker 11: as well as subsequent investigation and mister Peltier's extradition, trial, conviction,
Speaker 11: and sentencing, were characterized by gross misconduct on the part
Speaker 11: of law enforcement, the prosecution, and the courts. Mister Peltier's
Speaker 11: co defendants were separately tried and acquitted on grounds of
Speaker 11: self defense. Mister Peltier was railroaded, and his case is
Speaker 11: tainted by discrimination at every level, ranging from the withholding
Speaker 11: of exculpatory evidence to the torture and coercion of extradition
Speaker 11: and trial witnesses, and from the refusal of the judge
Speaker 11: to dismiss and vowedly racist Dura to the apologetic gymnastics
Speaker 11: of the courts affirming his convictions in the face of
Speaker 11: meritorious legal challenges and admitted evidence of outrageous government misdeeds.
Speaker 11: Mister Peltier has been in prison for more than forty
Speaker 11: eight years and he's almost eighty years old. He suffers
Speaker 11: from chronic and potentially lethal conditions for which he receives
Speaker 11: insufficient and substandard medical care. If you want to take
Speaker 11: action to hashtag free Lennard Heltier, you can call the
Speaker 11: US Parole Commission at two zero two three four six
Speaker 11: seven zero zero zero, And if you'd like to find
Speaker 11: more information on how to support, you can go to
Speaker 11: this u r L. It's h t T P colon
Speaker 11: slash slash n D N C O dot c c
Speaker 11: slash free Leonard Peltier. That's f R e E L
Speaker 11: e O n A R d P e L t
Speaker 11: I E R or you can follow n d N
Speaker 11: collective on social media for more ways to support him.
Speaker 11: More information on Leonard Peltier, listen to Margaret's podcast on
Speaker 11: the Lakota Nation, a read in the Spirit of the
Speaker 11: Crazy Horse by Peter Mathewson. Hi, we're back, and just
Speaker 11: to remind people, if you haven't listened to the episode yesterday,
Speaker 11: you probably won't pick up what's going on today, So
Speaker 11: I suggest starting there as we commence on our second
Speaker 11: part of the discussion about the EUS border. Today we're
Speaker 11: going to discuss the EU's external border and what that
Speaker 11: means for migrants. We'll pick up with Mick and Rose
Speaker 11: and we'll start off more or less where we left
Speaker 11: off yesterday. Like you can map, and I'm not the
Speaker 11: first one to have made these maps, but you can
Speaker 11: look at humane borders in Arizona, and then you can
Speaker 11: look at EFF's map of fixed and mobile towers and
Speaker 11: you can see people. And again, this is something I'm
Speaker 11: more familiar with, and I'd like to be people dying
Speaker 11: in the shade of the surveillance towers, without help, without water,
Speaker 11: without the very minor things that it would take for
Speaker 11: them not to have died. And so yeah, this provides justification.
Speaker 11: It provides a massive outlet for the post War on
Speaker 11: Terror like military industrial complex to continue to make its money,
Speaker 11: and to continue to make its money through innocent people dying.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think it was either a Polish Frontex or
Speaker 5: the Transnational Institute. I got some hands on some literature
Speaker 5: they were spreading, and there is a direct you can
Speaker 5: draw a direct line between like the end of the
Speaker 5: Cold War in the nineties, with military industrial complex having
Speaker 5: to fight new ways to sell their products to states.
Speaker 5: And that's also why the order keeps getting more and
Speaker 5: more militarized, because this is the one point where they
Speaker 5: can still sell a lot of things without their having
Speaker 5: to be a war.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, there's like a very serious lobby of companies who
Speaker 7: just want to make money out of making our borders deadly.
Speaker 7: And they're really successful.
Speaker 11: Actually yeah. I think they just want to make money
Speaker 11: and they don't care if they make up boarders deadly
Speaker 11: like they the end goal is always profit for them,
Speaker 11: right like, and everything else is consequent to that.
Speaker 5: Think of the stockholders, they have to live as well.
Speaker 5: What I personally find most troubling is this extension of
Speaker 5: the Iron border into non European countries. So the EU
Speaker 5: is making deals with countries in which for the in
Speaker 5: exchange for large sums of money that those countries are
Speaker 5: now containing or stopping migrants and refugees from ever leaving
Speaker 5: the Middle East Africa. Like Rose said earlier, the Turkey
Speaker 5: deal is essentially a political deal between the EU and
Speaker 5: Turkey for Turkey to hold a portion of Syrian refugees
Speaker 5: over within their border to stop them from coming into Europe.
Speaker 5: And I think we paid a few billion, more than
Speaker 5: a few billion probably for Turkey to do that. So
Speaker 5: the most prominent of these deals are, as i said, Turkey,
Speaker 5: but also Tunisia and Libya. We're essentially outsourcing the abuse
Speaker 5: and human rights violations to countries that are outside the
Speaker 5: scope of our media, who have regimes that we would
Speaker 5: declare dictatorships and autocracies. In the case of Libya, it's
Speaker 5: even like rebels and warlords being funded with EU taxpayer money. Today,
Speaker 5: the eupack with Libya has given rise to a full
Speaker 5: fledged slave market run by cold blooded human traffickers who,
Speaker 5: incentivized by the EU's crackdown on irregular migration and the
Speaker 5: resulting business downturn of would be profitable passengers, are now
Speaker 5: auctioning economic migrants and refugees as slaves. Yeah, we're just
Speaker 5: doing slavery with extra steps now. So to make it
Speaker 5: inescapably clear how bad the situation is, I'm now going
Speaker 5: to quote from an Amnesty International article from twenty twenty one.
Speaker 5: Three Police Shadra al Zawia Center is a facility facility
Speaker 5: which was pretty obviously run by a non affiliated militia
Speaker 5: and was recently integrated under the DCIM and designated for
Speaker 5: people in vulnerable situations at DCIM is an acronym for
Speaker 5: Libya's Directorate for Combat in Illegal Migration. It's essentially a
Speaker 5: department of their Interior Ministry. Former detainees from that facility
Speaker 5: said that guards raped women and some were cohoersed into
Speaker 5: sex in exchange for their release or for essentials such
Speaker 5: as clean water grace. A pseudonym said she was heavily
Speaker 5: beaten for refusing to comply with such a demand. I
Speaker 5: told the guard no. He used the gun to knock
Speaker 5: me back. He used a letter soldier's shoe to kick
Speaker 5: me from my waist. Two young women at the facility
Speaker 5: attempted to commit suicide as a result of such abuse.
Speaker 5: Three women also said that two babies detained with their
Speaker 5: mothers after an attempted sea crossing had died in early
Speaker 5: twenty twenty one. Their guards refused to transfer them to
Speaker 5: a hospital for a critical medical treatment and it's The
Speaker 5: International report documents similar patterns of human rights violations, including
Speaker 5: severe beatings, sexual violence, extortion, forced labor, and in human
Speaker 5: conditions across seven DCIM centers in Libya. In Abuisa Center
Speaker 5: in the city of al Zaya, DTNES reported being deprived
Speaker 5: of nutritious food to the point of starvation end.
Speaker 4: Correct.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Libya is is just on a completely different level.
Speaker 7: Like we have we have systematic torture on almost all
Speaker 7: border crossings by European border guards, but Libya just manages
Speaker 7: to do worse than that, just systematically enslave rate, murder, torture.
Speaker 7: And I think it's important to stress that, Like there's
Speaker 7: this Libyan Coast Guard. They're funded by the European Union,
Speaker 7: so the opinion Union will go out with drones support
Speaker 7: the boat of migrants. Previously, the European Union actually had
Speaker 7: rescue ships, but the European Union, if a boat is
Speaker 7: near another boat in distress, there's an obligation to rescue,
Speaker 7: and after the rescue, you have to bring the people
Speaker 7: to a safe court. So having a boat at sea
Speaker 7: meant that the European Border Agency Front Tax was obliged
Speaker 7: to rescue people at sea, and so they just thought,
Speaker 7: let's just do away with the boats and let's just
Speaker 7: have helicopters and drones, so we can still spot boats
Speaker 7: that are sinking, but we cannot help them, and instead.
Speaker 5: They are obligated to anymore.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean they're physically. Yeah, exactly. They they they
Speaker 7: managed to escape that responsibility under maritime law, and then
Speaker 7: they paid the Libyan Coast Guard to rescue rescue people
Speaker 7: quote unquote, Libya is so bad that weally migrants just
Speaker 7: jump in the water if they see a Libyan coast
Speaker 7: guard because people prefer to drown them to be taken
Speaker 7: back to Libya. The Libyan coast Guard takes the people
Speaker 7: on the boat, brings them back to Libyan mainland, and
Speaker 7: actually sells them to the militias running the detention centers.
Speaker 7: So the Libyan Coast Guard gets paid twice for stopping migrants,
Speaker 7: first by the European Union and secondly by the militias
Speaker 7: that will later sell them as slates or use them
Speaker 7: for slavery. And this is what we have been funding
Speaker 7: for years, and there have been extensive documentation about these
Speaker 7: human rights violations and the very direct link of the
Speaker 7: EU funding, and it just keeps going.
Speaker 5: I think it was a year or so back where
Speaker 5: I saw a video of someone, a woman on a
Speaker 5: dinghy who was just incredibly emotional. She was just exclaiming
Speaker 5: all the time like I'd rather die than go back
Speaker 5: to Libya, which.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's yeah, just literally what it is.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I would encourage that the listeners to just
Speaker 5: google something like Libya migrant detentions or something and look
Speaker 5: at the pictures because it's you might.
Speaker 7: Get like traumatized, but you will be more aware of
Speaker 7: the horrors in the world.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that they're not great pictures to look at, but
Speaker 5: thank God for you good sleep. Like, yeah, I think
Speaker 5: it's important to see those things because that is the
Speaker 5: reality that we in Europe often do not get to see,
Speaker 5: and this is the reality that has been created by
Speaker 5: our overlords. So what the EU is doing is to
Speaker 5: be very blunt, extending its own borders into sovereign territory
Speaker 5: of states outside of Europe to stop migrants from even
Speaker 5: entering the EU. Proponents of these policies will undoubtedly argue
Speaker 5: that this saves lives by preventing people from crossing the
Speaker 5: Mediterranean in overcrowded boats and ginghis personally, I would argue
Speaker 5: that people will continue to make that crossing if only
Speaker 5: to escape the EU funded hellholes that these regimes create
Speaker 5: in order to get that sweet, sweet EU funding. What
Speaker 5: is definitely very concerning is that despite criticisms from NGOs
Speaker 5: such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch Europe will
Speaker 5: likely continue these practices. Only last year did it sign
Speaker 5: a deal with Tunisia with the attention of using that
Speaker 5: as a third country, as they call it, to prevent
Speaker 5: sea crossings. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stated
Speaker 5: that this could be a blueprint for cooperation with other countries.
Speaker 5: To the surprise of no one, this will very likely
Speaker 5: increase the human rights violations and abusance that happen there.
Speaker 5: And after this, I have two examples of stories that
Speaker 5: that happens at the EU borders that are I think
Speaker 5: particularly the heartbreaking. And this was also the hardest part
Speaker 5: for me to write, because there are so many stories
Speaker 5: out there that I think deserve to be heard and
Speaker 5: deserve to have like some lights shone on there just
Speaker 5: to show people the reality. But that would be that
Speaker 5: would turn into a very very long episode.
Speaker 7: Yeah, can I can I quickly just I would like
Speaker 7: to say something about the these deals and I think
Speaker 7: there is something very ironic about the European Union pretending
Speaker 7: to value democracy and human rights and ladlah Well, I
Speaker 7: mean what you've just said makes it apondantly clear that
Speaker 7: human rights in Europe are just for Europeans and not
Speaker 7: for humans. But I would also just like to stretch
Speaker 7: that it's very strange and I think not maybe often
Speaker 7: enough address that what Europe is doing is it's just
Speaker 7: bribing countries. It is bribing countries to stop migrants. It
Speaker 7: is bribing countries to take unwanted migrants back through deportation.
Speaker 7: It is often also forced to take on its own citizens.
Speaker 7: So it's not only people from Sub Sahara Africa traveling
Speaker 7: through Libya, but it's also Libyan people themselves. So they
Speaker 7: have elected a government, they have an interest themselves as well,
Speaker 7: maybe in having the ability to move away from Libya,
Speaker 7: and the you needs to come up with enormous sums
Speaker 7: of money to force these governments to Yeah, why do
Speaker 7: they need that money, because that's not in the interest
Speaker 7: of the country or its citizens to do this. And
Speaker 7: especially in the Netherlands, there is this enormous Yeah, there's
Speaker 7: just this expectation that if we don't like something, other
Speaker 7: countries should do something about it. So in the Netherlands,
Speaker 7: Moroccan migrants specifically are filified a lot and and Algerian migrants,
Speaker 7: and both countries have not been very collaborative with deportations,
Speaker 7: but like, why the hell should they support the forced
Speaker 7: return of their own citizens who don't want to go
Speaker 7: back to their countries. Yeah, like there's no reason for
Speaker 7: them to do that, except if Europe is just abusing
Speaker 7: its power and forcing it these countries to do things
Speaker 7: that are yeah, not in their interest. I mean a
Speaker 7: lot of these border guards. I think Libya is an
Speaker 7: exception because they they actually make money out of the
Speaker 7: migrants in so many different ways. But if you look
Speaker 7: at Serbia or Bosnia, they are forced to control their borders,
Speaker 7: which is super expensive. And like, these are countries who
Speaker 7: have other issues to fix, Like, yeah, maybe they should
Speaker 7: make they want to focus on building up their country
Speaker 7: and improving living conditions, but instead the EU is just
Speaker 7: giving them money to yah to protect, to protect borders
Speaker 7: of people who aren't mainly just walking through their countries,
Speaker 7: Like that's not really a big problem for them. And yeah,
Speaker 7: it's very runic because Europe is like justifying its migration
Speaker 7: policies with this idea that every country has sovereignty over
Speaker 7: who it allows access. That's like legally, that's like the
Speaker 7: fundament of migration deterrence, but it only claims that right
Speaker 7: for itself. So if other countries say, well, I don't
Speaker 7: care if there is Serians walking through my country, like
Speaker 7: maybe they'll spend some money and they'll just leave anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 7: other countries don't have the right. I think Belarus is
Speaker 7: an interesting example as well, because Belarus welcomed migrants and
Speaker 7: then brought them to the new border with Poland and
Speaker 7: Lithuania mainly, and Belarus has every right to give freest
Speaker 7: to people.
Speaker 10: You know, it's actually like, just like the namelet says
Speaker 10: the rights to give frees out to people, battle US
Speaker 10: says that right too, and then of course people can
Speaker 10: also go to the border across the border if they
Speaker 10: want and ask for asylum.
Speaker 7: So yeah, I just wanted to highlight the irony of how.
Speaker 9: Incredibly one sided Europe is in how we can claim
Speaker 9: that we want to keep people out, but other countries
Speaker 9: are not allowed to have sovereign migration policies.
Speaker 11: Yeah, we see it exactly the same in the US, right,
Speaker 11: like we're trying to outsource processing of migrants to quatemoleson ondoors.
Speaker 11: We are trying to I mean, we pay Mexico massive
Speaker 11: some to Moody to enforce aborder. Right like we saw
Speaker 11: it's funny. There are three gaps outside of a combat
Speaker 11: that people who have listened to this podcast will be
Speaker 11: very familiar with my reporting on. And we saw those
Speaker 11: gaps closed down not when people started coming so much,
Speaker 11: but once once legacy media outlets showed up. Then by December,
Speaker 11: the US had a bilateral meeting with Mexico, and very
Speaker 11: soon thereafter, we saw Mexican National Guard sitting at those
Speaker 11: gaps in the border wall. The US is border like
Speaker 11: if people are leaving Mexico, it's not Mexico's problem. But
Speaker 11: we saw them with technicals and machine guns policing those
Speaker 11: gaps in the border. And the US gives a ton
Speaker 11: of money to countries to enforce its border right to
Speaker 11: prevent migration and get extremely The US has even taken
Speaker 11: actions to prosecute airlines that fly people north so that
Speaker 11: they can too. Yeah. Yeah, it's.
Speaker 7: Like insane, like half a million or something for like
Speaker 7: bringing one migrant without of these Yeah. Yeah, two is externalization,
Speaker 7: just as like bribing Libya to protect the border. It's
Speaker 7: also like actually forcing carriers, like forcing transport. Com needs
Speaker 7: to be the border guard.
Speaker 11: Yeah, to ascertain whether you have a visa or not.
Speaker 11: Decide if you have the right to travel. Let's pick
Speaker 11: up with those examples you make, because I think it
Speaker 11: is important for people to kind of have a human
Speaker 11: face or a human story.
Speaker 5: Well, to preface this, like migrants are under EU law,
Speaker 5: migrants are supposed to apply for aside in the first
Speaker 5: EU country that they enter. This policy is likely the
Speaker 5: result of fear from more affluent European countries that the
Speaker 5: majority of refugees will travel to those countries. This means
Speaker 5: that the countries geographically closest to Africa and the Middle
Speaker 5: East are the ones supposed to take in most refugees.
Speaker 5: Think of Spain, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria. They however, are not
Speaker 5: too afphusiastic at the prospect of taking in huge amounts
Speaker 5: of migrants.
Speaker 7: More are the migrants themselves.
Speaker 5: By the way, I can imagine that they're also a
Speaker 5: lot too keen to live in Bulgaria, especially after what
Speaker 5: follows next, because this story happened at Turkish Bulgarian border.
Speaker 5: But I also personally it's just incredibly cruel that like
Speaker 5: the Netherlands and Germany and the Scandinavian countries are like,
Speaker 5: oh no, you should take you should take all those refugees,
Speaker 5: like we don't want them here.
Speaker 7: And I would say that's like where the outsourcing starts,
Speaker 7: Like that's you law. We have shance, so we have
Speaker 7: like free travel within the u EU, but that comes
Speaker 7: with extremely violently guarding the outside of the EU. So
Speaker 7: if you are a border country, you are only welcome
Speaker 7: if you can prove to us that you are cruel
Speaker 7: enough to discourage people from crossing this border. Because again,
Speaker 7: like Bulgaria doesn't really have that much interest in guarding
Speaker 7: the borders if people can just if they any way
Speaker 7: want to go to Western European countries, right, so it's
Speaker 7: a way to again to I would say, the border
Speaker 7: externalization already starts from like the main countries of destination,
Speaker 7: which is like France and Germany, and even Bulgaria would
Speaker 7: not have much interest in stopping migrants if there were
Speaker 7: not all of these rules to make them responsible.
Speaker 5: Exactly. But again, which is why I said, like the
Speaker 5: more affluent countries within you don't want that for reasons
Speaker 5: that I think anyone can think of at this point
Speaker 5: of the story. Is where pushbacks come into play. This
Speaker 5: is a tactic used by the countries I just mentioned.
Speaker 5: It's a set of measures that force people back over
Speaker 5: the border they crossed, often immediately after it. This practice
Speaker 5: is often a force for violence and does not take
Speaker 5: into account the circumstances of nagrants and denies them the
Speaker 5: opportunity to apply for asylum. This means that the EU
Speaker 5: does pushback people that have very legitimate reasons to apply
Speaker 5: for asylum. Under the EU's own rules, I'm going to quote,
Speaker 5: pushbacks violate the prohibition of collective expulsion of asylum seekers
Speaker 5: in Protocol four of the European Convention on Human Rights
Speaker 5: and often violate the international law prohibiting on non refoulment. No,
Speaker 5: it's French, yeah, ah, okay, I was never good at French.
Speaker 9: All right.
Speaker 5: It's a fundamental principle of international law that forbids a
Speaker 5: country receiving asylum seekers from returning them to a country
Speaker 5: in which they would be improbable danger of persecution based
Speaker 5: on race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group,
Speaker 5: or political opinion. That being said, I'm aware even like
Speaker 5: the Dutch government has sent like LGBTQI people back to
Speaker 5: countries where they could be like persecuted for that. So again,
Speaker 5: those rules seem to be very optional So what follows
Speaker 5: now is two examples of border practices that I think
Speaker 5: are particularly egregious. So on October third, twenty twenty two,
Speaker 5: Abdullah Mohammed, aged nineteen, a Syrian refugee, attempted to cross
Speaker 5: the Bulgarian Turkish border. After being pushed back by border guards,
Speaker 5: they threw stones at the border about emphasize here at
Speaker 5: the border itself, not at the guards. After this, a
Speaker 5: shot rang and Abdullah fell to the ground with a
Speaker 5: bullet lodged one centimeter away from his heart. He survived
Speaker 5: and was interviewed by Lighthouse Reports. He states that there
Speaker 5: wasn't intent to kill when he was shot. That's his belief.
Speaker 5: The bullet also pierced this hand, which is now partially paralyzed.
Speaker 5: There seems to be no justification or reason whatsoever for
Speaker 5: border guards to have shot, or to have shot with
Speaker 5: live ammunition. This was the first time that such an
Speaker 5: incident was called on video. If you want, you can
Speaker 5: find it linked on lice Lighthouse Reports attached to the
Speaker 5: article about this incident. The video is not as bad
Speaker 5: as you might think, but watch you at your own risk.
Speaker 5: As far as I'm aware, there have been similar rumors before,
Speaker 5: but this was the first instant that has entered like
Speaker 5: the public record, or the first time it was actually documented.
Speaker 5: Needless to say, no one should be shot for attempting
Speaker 5: to cross a border. I don't care about anyone's opinion
Speaker 5: or bad faith nuances. People have a right to apply
Speaker 5: for asylum, and as far as I'm concerned, this was
Speaker 5: a deliberate and calculated attempted murder.
Speaker 7: Yeah. I do think there have been quite a lot
Speaker 7: of videos of people being shot, and definitely people making
Speaker 7: statements about it and just having the actual bullet in
Speaker 7: their body to prove that it happened. Yeah, it happened
Speaker 7: in Croatia, it happened in Greece. Greece is a habit
Speaker 7: of shooting at boats as well and in that way
Speaker 7: making people drown. Yeah. And of course, apart from the shootings,
Speaker 7: which I would say on the European borders that they
Speaker 7: are still kind of rare. The yeah, the pushbacks and
Speaker 7: the violence and the torture is yeah, the evidence of
Speaker 7: that is like an enormous pile. There's when I was
Speaker 7: working in Bosnia, I think that was in twenty eighteen nineteen,
Speaker 7: there was no video footage of a pushback and there
Speaker 7: was a journalist who volunteered with us for a while
Speaker 7: and they were the first one to film it. But
Speaker 7: in the past years they're been like many many horrible
Speaker 7: videos of people being beaten up and actual torture.
Speaker 11: Yeah. Of course, in the US, under the pretense of
Speaker 11: protecting us all from the coronavirus, which still killed millions
Speaker 11: of people in this country, we have something called Title
Speaker 11: forty two, which allowed border patrol to quote unquote repatriate
Speaker 11: people to Mexico even if they weren't Mexican, and just
Speaker 11: drop them back in Mexico to include laterally transferring them,
Speaker 11: which is a pseudonym for kind of trafficking them halfway
Speaker 11: across the country and then dumping them in a place
Speaker 11: where they have no connections, no money, and no way
Speaker 11: of establishing themselves. Right, And this led to massively increased
Speaker 11: a fatalities at the border because people were trying to
Speaker 11: avoid border patrol where they coming in and surrendering themselves
Speaker 11: for asylum as we see now, and massively increase encounters
Speaker 11: at the border. Encounters don't necessarily represent unique individuals, right,
Speaker 11: this is my I will beat this fucking drum until
Speaker 11: I die. But apparently our colleagues at New York Times
Speaker 11: haven't worked it out yet. Wall Street Journal, almost every NPR,
Speaker 11: every big outlet in the United States that likes to
Speaker 11: commission border reporters who don't live on the border will
Speaker 11: tell you that that, like the number of migrants went up.
Speaker 11: An encounter is an encounter. If someone crosses and then
Speaker 11: gets bounced into Mexico and then crosses again and does
Speaker 11: that five times, that's five encounters. It's the same person.
Speaker 11: BP doesn't doesn't keep records of unique individuals under Title
Speaker 11: forty two, or didn't keep under Title forty two. We
Speaker 11: don't know how many people, but we know that more
Speaker 11: people tried to cross, and we also know that every
Speaker 11: time you try to cross, you risk your life, and
Speaker 11: so we certainly know that more lives will put in
Speaker 11: danger because of this policy, because again, like turning someone
Speaker 11: back is not going to stop them, especially when you're
Speaker 11: dropping them in a country where they don't want to
Speaker 11: be and where they're not from. Like, the people aren't
Speaker 11: just going to be like, oh, okay, cool, I'll stay
Speaker 11: in Mexico like that. That has not historically been the case.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we had exactly the same kind of juggling with numbers.
Speaker 7: I remember people in Bosnia, some of them would get
Speaker 7: pushed back like forty or fifty times, and so they
Speaker 7: would be counted as individuals stops. Yes, indeed, so it
Speaker 7: would sound as if there was like, I don't know,
Speaker 7: tens of thousands, and I was like, it's really not
Speaker 7: that many, though, Yeah. Yeah, literally count the same person
Speaker 7: again and again and again.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: And also I would like to say that like, yes,
Speaker 7: it is a border like the EO border countries, but
Speaker 7: it is also much deeper into the territory. So we
Speaker 7: externalize the border towards like Libya and Niger and way
Speaker 7: further even, but we also internalized the border, so we
Speaker 7: would find we would have people who had made it
Speaker 7: to Austria or Italy. They would get caught in Austria Italy,
Speaker 7: be pushed back to Slovenia, taken over by Slownia police,
Speaker 7: brought to the Croatian border, taken off by Creation police
Speaker 7: often in Croatia, get tortured and then be dumped on
Speaker 7: the Boston border, which would be the EU border as well.
Speaker 7: So that's what they call chain pushbacks. And yeah, I yeah,
Speaker 7: so I worked in the Boston Hetzegovina, which is none you,
Speaker 7: so we would get the people after they had been
Speaker 7: pushed back. Yeah. The things that people have done, like
Speaker 7: water guards have done to migrants are yeah, I don't
Speaker 7: know if you actually want to use this footage, right,
Speaker 7: It's like it's really really gruesome. Like in Bosnia, they
Speaker 7: would they would be like snow form, like they have
Speaker 7: very long and very cold winters. They would take away
Speaker 7: people's shoes and socks and like make them walk for
Speaker 7: five hours on bare feet. So one of the main
Speaker 7: tasks of our volunteers or medical volunteers was amputating toes.
Speaker 7: People would Yeah, people would come back with broken bones,
Speaker 7: broken skulls. People would be sent back with just their underwear.
Speaker 7: That minus twenty degrees celsius.
Speaker 11: I don't know how much that is in the US,
Speaker 11: neither do way. It's I think they come together around
Speaker 11: minus twenty. It's extremely the cultret.
Speaker 7: Gets the more accurate.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 7: So like at some point we start to call this
Speaker 7: could torture as a kind of specific yeah, tactic that
Speaker 7: mainly the Croatian border guards were using.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Also, yeah, and I also want to stress again that yes,
Speaker 7: it is the European border countries in the East and
Speaker 7: in the west and in the south. But when I
Speaker 7: was working in Bosnia, Croatia was not yet part of
Speaker 7: the Shanan Zone, and like politicians were pretty explicit about
Speaker 7: Croatia can only enter if they have solved their border problem,
Speaker 7: even though there was constantly proof of torture coming out.
Speaker 7: The same happened with Bulgaria and Romania. So these countries
Speaker 7: were very very much pressured by countries like the Netherlands
Speaker 7: and Germany, who like you know, pretend not to have
Speaker 7: anything to do with these atrocities, but who were very
Speaker 7: very explicitly saying if you are not, if you don't
Speaker 7: get your borders in control, you cannot join the economic Yeah,
Speaker 7: you cannot have the open borders within the U.
Speaker 11: Yeah, it's so sad to see all these serenities. This
Speaker 11: is very depressing. My friends and I were helping someone
Speaker 11: who had it, like the early onset of like like
Speaker 11: trench foot, Yeah, a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Yeah, we don't do it, like I guess as a
Speaker 11: policy as much as just by default. But in the
Speaker 11: mountains and then desert here in California when it rains,
Speaker 11: areas that are drive the rest of the year, turning
Speaker 11: to rivers and migrants have to cross. And we've also
Speaker 11: seen a large number of migrants drown this year in
Speaker 11: San Diego, and I more will have drowned if very
Speaker 11: brave people hadn't risk their own lives rescuing them. Not
Speaker 11: people who were working for the government, just individuals who cared.
Speaker 11: We've also seen a young man from Jamaica recently passed away.
Speaker 11: This was in early probably early for some February and March.
Speaker 11: From February March. He was on a migrant trail. I
Speaker 11: know exactly where, about a few hundred yards actually from
Speaker 11: where my friends have left warm clothes, hand warmers, jackets, food, water,
Speaker 11: But he wasn't able to make it that far and
Speaker 11: for whatever reason, you know, like one death of a
Speaker 11: tragedy and a million statistic or whatever. But that really
Speaker 11: impacted me. He was actually on the other side of
Speaker 11: the border when he died, but like he could have
Speaker 11: thrown a stone into the US and it's not a
Speaker 11: fence to border there. But yet we have chosen a
Speaker 11: policy which made that young man die of hypothermia by
Speaker 11: himself on the side of a mountain because for some reason,
Speaker 11: that's what we've decided or our government has decided it's
Speaker 11: better than having him come here and be able to
Speaker 11: make his case and live with us and get a
Speaker 11: job or what have you. And yeah, that was just
Speaker 11: a particularly heartbreaking one for me because I knew that,
Speaker 11: like he was five minutes walk away, ten minutes walk
Speaker 11: away from potentially being okay, And like that that's why
Speaker 11: my friends and I like to go out and leave
Speaker 11: stuff for people. But it shouldn't be a group of
Speaker 11: anarchists and migrant activists and people of faith like hiking
Speaker 11: into the desert every weekend with backpacks full of water
Speaker 11: and food and warm clothes. That shouldn't be what prevents
Speaker 11: people from dying coming here.
Speaker 7: Yeah, there's a kind of cruelty in that, even like
Speaker 7: it is amazing to help people to be part of
Speaker 7: a group of people who commit themselves to yeah, to
Speaker 7: resist these incredibly violent borders and to support people who
Speaker 7: decide to across them. But at the same time, it
Speaker 7: is just so problematic that someone's life, like access to
Speaker 7: food or healthcare, depends on whether or not there are
Speaker 7: some crazy volunteers willing to do that. So like it
Speaker 7: shouldn't be like our you know, are like, yeah, like
Speaker 7: I don't want to have that power over someone's life,
Speaker 7: and I think no one should have that power over
Speaker 7: someone's life. But this system where basically migrants' lives are disposable,
Speaker 7: also mean that it's like optional to offer super basic
Speaker 7: things that can save these lives.
Speaker 11: Yeah, yeah, very much, sir.
Speaker 5: Are you ready for the second depressing story?
Speaker 11: Yeah, let's let's get the second to break.
Speaker 5: Let's hit rock bottom.
Speaker 11: Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: So I'm sure you've you've heard this story before, but
Speaker 5: still I think it's very much worth repeating. So on
Speaker 5: June fourteenth, twenty twenty three, the Adriana, a ship on
Speaker 5: its way degrees, capsized and subsequently sank. The boat allegedly
Speaker 5: had the capacity for about four hundred people, but carried
Speaker 5: around seven hundred and fifty. Of all those lives, one
Speaker 5: hundred and four were saved, eight two were confirmed deaths,
Speaker 5: and up to four five hundreds are missing and presumed death,
Speaker 5: the majority of which are women and children. I'll refer
Speaker 5: back to the Lighthouse Reports, who did a reconstruction of
Speaker 5: the incident which makes this even worse than it already is.
Speaker 5: Transcriptions and witness statements obtained by Lighthouse Reports, the Oshpiego
Speaker 5: Monitors iiraj Lpos report is United and the Times strongly
Speaker 5: suggests that the Greek coast Guard attempted to conceal their
Speaker 5: own involvement in this stragedy. Nine survivors were asked to
Speaker 5: make statements, none of which appeared to blame the coast guard.
Speaker 5: Different suggestions were given for the capsizing, blaming it on
Speaker 5: the edge of the ship or the lack of life jackets.
Speaker 5: Four of these statements contained near identical phrasing. It was
Speaker 5: later discovered that one of the translators was a coast
Speaker 5: guard himself. There were other translators, all of which were
Speaker 5: sworn in on that very day later in Greek courts.
Speaker 5: Six of those nine stated that the coast guard did
Speaker 5: in fact tow the boat before it went down. Two
Speaker 5: survivors tot Lighthouse reports that certain parts of their testimony
Speaker 5: was omitted in the transcription. To clarify that a bit
Speaker 5: because of what I said earlier that migrants have are
Speaker 5: obligated to apply for asylum in the country in which
Speaker 5: they arrive. It's become a habit of like coast Guard
Speaker 5: and frontect to attrag them to certain areas of of
Speaker 5: water that are part of for example, Italy or Greece.
Speaker 5: This particular one boat may have been an attempt to
Speaker 5: drag the boat to Italian waters so the Greeks didn't
Speaker 5: have to take them in. So, to quote the report
Speaker 5: from Lighthouse sixteen out of the seventeen survivors we spoke
Speaker 5: to set the coast guard attached the rope to the
Speaker 5: vessel and tried to tow it shortly before it capsized.
Speaker 5: Four also claimed that the coast guard was attempting to
Speaker 5: tow the boat to Italian waters, while four reported that
Speaker 5: the coast guard caused more depths by circling around the
Speaker 5: boat after it capsized, making waves that caused the boat's
Speaker 5: carcass to sink. End quote not great badtime stories.
Speaker 11: If you ask me, yeah, things.
Speaker 4: There there's just no words like yeah, I.
Speaker 11: Think this like I don't think anyone should be okay
Speaker 11: with it. Perhaps I think we're going to talk again
Speaker 11: about how people can oppose this, and how people can
Speaker 11: try their best to to a change the system and
Speaker 11: be do what they can, you know, while we're stuck
Speaker 11: in this terrible place to make things more survivable and
Speaker 11: less cruel. So perhaps we can finish up here with
Speaker 11: you guys, plugging anything you want to. If there are
Speaker 11: orgs or social media where people can follow both of
Speaker 11: your work, then I'd love to hear about them.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you can follow us on migrates. That's the end.
Speaker 7: I think it's like for English and migrator is I
Speaker 7: G R E A C. Yeah, the system is super fucked.
Speaker 7: Are SIP super fucked?
Speaker 5: It is?
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's really treating human beings as disposable and human
Speaker 7: a monment. Life has absolutely no value. But I also
Speaker 7: just wanted to say that I think a lot of
Speaker 7: migrants who cross borders they are aware of the risks.
Speaker 7: But I think it's also important to say that it
Speaker 7: isn't it's a kind of resistance. It is a kind
Speaker 7: of We started that episode with talking about passport privilege
Speaker 7: and the lottery of birth, and I think we should
Speaker 7: not only look at like the bad border guards and
Speaker 7: the good people helping or something, but I think we
Speaker 7: should also acknowledge that the people crossing the borders are
Speaker 7: doing like taking unbelievable risk, often also to help their
Speaker 7: families or their friends. Yeah, and I think crossing a
Speaker 7: border without permission is a kind of resistance. And I
Speaker 7: think we as people who yeah, do direct support or
Speaker 7: direct aid. We are I mean for me, it's also
Speaker 7: part of the resistance, is like helping people cross the border.
Speaker 7: I don't mind if yeah, people that want to accuse
Speaker 7: me of being a smaller or something, or like aiding
Speaker 7: illegal border crossings. Like the whole point is that people
Speaker 7: should be able to cross that border.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I think that's a really good Someone recently accused
Speaker 11: us of in Cucumber that said that people people come
Speaker 11: to a cumber because we feed them, and like it's
Speaker 11: fucking ludicrous, Like you didn't fucking come from a guinea
Speaker 11: because I'm going to give you a peanut butter sandwich on.
Speaker 7: Some breadt like the best food.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, yeah, like it is.
Speaker 1: It is not the best.
Speaker 11: It's the best we can do, like you know, less
Speaker 11: than an other person or what have you. But like no,
Speaker 11: like but I guess. But I am doing it because
Speaker 11: I believe that person should be able to and not
Speaker 11: just because they're in those dire circumstances, but because I
Speaker 11: fundamentally support they're right, Like I want them to be
Speaker 11: my neighbor. Yeah, I'm okay with that, and that's why
Speaker 11: I'm doing it.
Speaker 7: Yeah, absolutely, I.
Speaker 5: Think we should all keep in mind how many of
Speaker 5: our friends, family, or other loved ones have moved at
Speaker 5: some point in their lives for a job or opportunities
Speaker 5: or love or whatever. That the essence of like human
Speaker 5: movement is the same, right right there?
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And it is our politicians who choose
Speaker 7: that this movement is a problem, that the movement of
Speaker 7: these people specifically is a threat or danger. Whereas I think, like, yeah,
Speaker 7: if you talk about like racism or systemic racism, the questions,
Speaker 7: I was like, yeah, but what is the system? Then?
Speaker 7: This is the system, the visa policies, the actual border.
Speaker 7: This is what is keeping people like is trying to
Speaker 7: keep people in exploitable conditions in the global South, is
Speaker 7: doing incredible cruelties to them just for political gain. Is
Speaker 7: exploiting people who do make it, but who are undocumented
Speaker 7: or on fragile residence status and are still exploited and
Speaker 7: deprived of basic rights even if they do arrive to
Speaker 7: their country of destination. Like this system is designed to
Speaker 7: create an underclass of people that is easily exploitable. There
Speaker 7: are companies who are profiting from this. There is absolutely
Speaker 7: no intention to stop migration, but there is definitely an
Speaker 7: intention to marginalize and segregate migrants and yeah, and just
Speaker 7: profit of it.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And meanwhile, we do the absolute bare minimum to provide
Speaker 5: aids to those countries to make the living conditions there better.
Speaker 7: Yeah, these borders are playing a role and keeping people
Speaker 7: exploitable there and making it possible to make them work
Speaker 7: for incredibly low wages and horrible labor conditions. Like these
Speaker 7: borders are forcing them into the in the those conditions.
Speaker 5: I think the mandatory international Development aid that countries should
Speaker 5: pay is like zero points zero zero seven percent or
Speaker 5: something of the GDP, and the majority of like Western
Speaker 5: countries are not doing that even that. So it's very
Speaker 5: much like the problem is that they're coming here, not
Speaker 5: that the conditions there are ship and war keeping them shits.
Speaker 5: Yeah great, I'm a bit bumped now.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Sorry, we've left you all saide. We will come back
Speaker 11: with Rose again and make to talk about ways to
Speaker 11: make it better. Is there anything you wanted to plug,
Speaker 11: make anything you want people to give the time money
Speaker 11: to follow on the internet.
Speaker 5: I just want to give a shout out to like
Speaker 5: organizations such as migrates, but also the abolished Frontext campaign
Speaker 5: and United Against refugee DEFs, and it would urge anyone
Speaker 5: to who feels compassionate to help out. There are so
Speaker 5: many ways you can help out, even if you don't
Speaker 5: know it yet, it is sorely needed. Like wherever you are,
Speaker 5: whoever you are, you can help out.
Speaker 7: Hi.
Speaker 11: Everyone, it's me James, and I just wanted to read
Speaker 11: you this today. We're going to put it in our
Speaker 11: episode this week because it's a cause that's important to us,
Speaker 11: and so we thought it would be something that might
Speaker 11: be important to you too as well. On the tenth
Speaker 11: of June twenty twenty four, Leonard Peltier, an enrolled member
Speaker 11: of the Turtle Band of Chippewa of Lakota and Ajibwei
Speaker 11: Ancestry and the longest serving political prisoner in the United States,
Speaker 11: will be appearing before the US Parole Commission for the
Speaker 11: first time since two thousand and nine. He faces staunch
Speaker 11: opposition from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies due
Speaker 11: to having allegedly killed two FBI agents in a firefight
Speaker 11: on the twenty six of June nineteen seventy five, after
Speaker 11: the agents appeared on reservation land to execute a pretextural warrant.
Speaker 11: The initial firefight occurred during the quote reign of terror
Speaker 11: on Pine Ridge in the wake of the occupation of
Speaker 11: Wounded Kney, a time of extreme violence when federal law
Speaker 11: enforcement installed a puppet tribal chair and was arming vigilantes
Speaker 11: who targeted Indigenous traditionalists. Every since leading up to these events,
Speaker 11: as well as subsequent investigation and mister Peltier's extradition, trial, conviction,
Speaker 11: and sentencing, were characterized by gross misconduct on the part
Speaker 11: of law enforcement, the prosecution, and the courts. Mister Peltier's
Speaker 11: co defendants were separately tried and acquitted on grounds of
Speaker 11: self defense. Mister Peltier was railroaded, and his case is
Speaker 11: tainted by discrimination at every level, ranging from the withholding
Speaker 11: of exculpatory evidence to the torture and coercion of extradition
Speaker 11: and trial witnesses, and from the refusal of the judge
Speaker 11: to dismiss and vowedly racist Dura to the apologetic gymnastics
Speaker 11: of the courts affirming his convin in the face of
Speaker 11: meritorious legal challenges at admitted evidence about rageous government misdeeds.
Speaker 11: Mister Peltier has been in prison for more than forty
Speaker 11: eight years, and he's almost eighty years old. He suffers
Speaker 11: from chronic and potentially lethal conditions for which he receives
Speaker 11: insufficient and substandard medical care. If you want to take
Speaker 11: action to hashtag free Lenard Peltier, you can call the
Speaker 11: US Parole Commission at two zero two three four six
Speaker 11: seven zero zero zero, And if you'd like to find
Speaker 11: more information on how to support, you can go to
Speaker 11: this r L it's h t t P colon slash
Speaker 11: slash n d n C dot c C slash free
Speaker 11: Leonard Peltier. That's fr e E L e O n
Speaker 11: A R d P E L t I E R,
Speaker 11: or you can follow n d N collective on social
Speaker 11: media for more ways to support him. More information on
Speaker 11: Daniel Peltier. Listen to Margaret's podcast on the Lakota Nation.
Speaker 11: I read in the Spirit of the Crazy Horse by
Speaker 11: Peter Matthewson.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about
Speaker 1: things falling apart, and today, the thing that's fallen apart
Speaker 1: is our shared concept of reality, our ability to exists
Speaker 1: as a population within the same world, or at least
Speaker 1: versions of the same world that even slightly interact with
Speaker 1: each other. And my guest for this episode about the
Speaker 1: breaking of reality. Garrison, Davis, Garrison, what do you know
Speaker 1: about the USS Eisenhower.
Speaker 4: Is that is that from Star Trek?
Speaker 1: Is that a Yeah, that's the ship that they all
Speaker 1: fly around and in Star Trek, the many voyages of
Speaker 1: the Starship Eisenhower. It's continually miss such a different show
Speaker 1: every episode. They're just fucking with Guatemala like every single episode,
Speaker 1: but cards just finding another way to overthrow the government
Speaker 1: of Guatemala.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: No, that's like alternate universe evil Gene Roddenberry.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, if Gene Roddenberry had been like a
Speaker 1: hardcore conservative. Yeah, speaking of hardcore conservatives, we are talking
Speaker 1: again about alternate realities, and the USS Eisenhower is relevant
Speaker 1: to that because it's kind of been the subject of
Speaker 1: a reality fracture recently, just talking in terms of like
Speaker 1: things that are actually true. The USS Eisenhower is a
Speaker 1: very big aircraft carrier. It's got something like five thousand
Speaker 1: people and its crew. It's nuclear powered. It can stay
Speaker 1: i think up to like twenty five years. Potentially, it
Speaker 1: could stay in the field without needing to like refuel
Speaker 1: or anything like that.
Speaker 4: That's wild.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, Aircraft carriers are insane things, and it is
Speaker 1: the center of an Air Force carrier group, which is
Speaker 1: a group of I think there's something like ten or
Speaker 1: eleven other ships in it, a combination of like you've
Speaker 1: got like destroyers, these little missile ships. I think there's
Speaker 1: some submarines. Probably an ice cream ship in there somewhere.
Speaker 1: That's kind of like a key thing the US military does. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the Eisenhower is the ship that's out in the Gulf
Speaker 1: of Aiden right now throwing down with the Hoothys. And
Speaker 1: on the thirty first of last month, there was a
Speaker 1: series of attacks launched by the Eisenhower along with some
Speaker 1: of our British allies, striking thirteen Hoothy targets at various
Speaker 1: locations in Yemen. This was in response to a number
Speaker 1: of attacks that the Hoothies had launched recently on shipping
Speaker 1: in the region, including I think they hit a Greek
Speaker 1: ship a couple of times. The strikes came also a
Speaker 1: day after the Hoothy's shot down an m Q nine
Speaker 1: Reaper drone, which was the third downing of a Reaper
Speaker 1: drone in May. So the Hoothies have been dropping reefs
Speaker 1: pretty regularly. So anyway, all of this led to a
Speaker 1: massive series of strikes that were kind of you know,
Speaker 1: launched from the Eisenhower on Houthy targets. Houthy rebels said
Speaker 1: that the air strikes killed at least sixteen people and
Speaker 1: wounded thirty five others. I think that death toll has
Speaker 1: risen since the article, the Washington Post article I'm looking
Speaker 1: at now, and that you know, we're going to be
Speaker 1: talking about things that are credible and not credible. If
Speaker 1: the Hoothies say, given the attacks launched, that death toll
Speaker 1: seems pretty credible to me, just based on other strikes
Speaker 1: that I've read about. The Houthis launched a retaliatory strikes
Speaker 1: on the Enterprise, or at least they claim that they did.
Speaker 1: Wait on the on the Eisenhower. We did used to
Speaker 1: have an aircraft carrier name the Enterprise. I don't I
Speaker 1: think we've decommissioned it since I'm blaming real fast.
Speaker 4: He would he would not, he will?
Speaker 1: He would He would be fucking his way through the
Speaker 1: Houthis already. Kirk would have. That's ah. God, Star Trek
Speaker 1: is so much more fun to talk about than actual geopolos,
Speaker 1: which are mostly depressing with the genocide and all anyway,
Speaker 1: the houthis claimed that they launched an attack on the
Speaker 1: Eisenhower the US. The DoD says that they did not.
Speaker 1: The Hoothy Press person stated that they hit the Eisenhower.
Speaker 1: The hit was accurate and direct. Again, there's no evidence
Speaker 1: of this whatsoever that's been posted. The story seems to
Speaker 1: have started percolating out into kind of lefty media when
Speaker 1: Hoothy Press people made this announcement. I think the first
Speaker 1: direct statement I found about it outside of like hoothy
Speaker 1: Press resources was a Twitter account called for an online
Speaker 1: news magazine calling West Asian geopolitics called The Cradle. I'm
Speaker 1: not wildly familiar with The Cradle. They've got something like
Speaker 1: one hundred and nine thousand followers on Twitter, and they
Speaker 1: seem to mostly be you could say, like a broadly
Speaker 1: sort of anti imperialist left. Most of their content lately
Speaker 1: is very pro Gaza. You know, there's stuff like articles
Speaker 1: about Israeli organ trafficking networks in Turkey. You know, they've
Speaker 1: got like video clips of like pro Palestinian protesters getting
Speaker 1: dunks in on pro israel protesters, a like protests and
Speaker 1: stuff like that, very standard stuff. And on the thirty
Speaker 1: first they posted a They made a post yeah, basically
Speaker 1: restating what the Houthis had said, although they instead of
Speaker 1: saying the Houthis made a claim that they had struck
Speaker 1: the Eisenhower, they claimed it was ye many Armed Forces.
Speaker 1: It's an easy way to tell that someone is not
Speaker 1: accurately reporting on what's happening in Yemen because the Houthis
Speaker 1: are actively at war with YEA many armed forces. Like
Speaker 1: that is the actual reality of the situation on the
Speaker 1: ground over there. So this got picked up by chunks
Speaker 1: of lefty media, and particularly like American lefty media. I
Speaker 1: think one of the first big accounts to take this
Speaker 1: story was a guy named Ashton Forbes. You know Ashton.
Speaker 4: I don't think I've heard of Ashton Forbes. This is
Speaker 4: this whole like left media anti imperialism bubble has just
Speaker 4: gotten so big the past like six months.
Speaker 1: These are mostly accounts, and I believe this is true
Speaker 1: for Ashton too, who like they blew up in the
Speaker 1: wake of October seventh once, particularly once the Israeli started
Speaker 1: launching massive strikes on Gaza. And they primarily exist within
Speaker 1: the profit ecosystem that Elon established in Twitter right where
Speaker 1: if you have a verified account and you get a
Speaker 1: lot of engagements from other verified accounts, you get a
Speaker 1: chunk of money from Twitter, right, And so all these
Speaker 1: people figured out that there's a huge appetite for reposted
Speaker 1: videos from Gaza or videos that you just claim are
Speaker 1: reposted videos from Gaza. A huge number of them are
Speaker 1: from Syria, and if they make people really angry or horrified,
Speaker 1: they'll get shared and get a ton of engagement, and
Speaker 1: you will get a check, right, Like, That's that's where
Speaker 1: Ashton comes out of. That's where all these guys come
Speaker 1: out of. So Ashton sees. I don't know if he
Speaker 1: picked it up directly from the hoothy press people. I
Speaker 1: don't know if he picked it up from that thing
Speaker 1: on the cradle, But he posts the next day breaking
Speaker 1: and he's got of course, of course I'll show you.
Speaker 1: I'll share screen garrisons. You can see he's got he's
Speaker 1: got the two little sirens. Yeah, he's got the two
Speaker 1: little sirens on either side. Oh yeah, no, of course
Speaker 1: there's a million of this guy. This guy is all
Speaker 1: over the internet. A source has informed me that the
Speaker 1: USS Eisenhower has been sunk all caps. Mainstream media reports
Speaker 1: from yesterday claim the ship was not hit by Houthy missiles.
Speaker 1: Social media shows conflicting reports of damage. I'm seeking corroboration
Speaker 1: on this potentially huge story. So first we see the
Speaker 1: escalation of the HOUTHI say, we shot at the Eisenhower
Speaker 1: and we hit it right. They didn't claim they'd sunk it.
Speaker 1: I think because the Houthis are like, they're not dumb,
Speaker 1: and like, that's an easy claim to disprove. Whereas yeah,
Speaker 1: you can kind of like there's not as much live
Speaker 1: footage of this, you could kind of get away for
Speaker 1: a while with making people think maybe you damaged it
Speaker 1: a little bit, or at least you got close, you know.
Speaker 1: But a source a source, yes, a source from citizen
Speaker 1: journalist Ashton Forbes speaking truth to power. Yeah. The evidence
Speaker 1: that Forbes post, because he says, like social media so
Speaker 1: there's conflicting reports of damage, is a screen grab of
Speaker 1: what looks like an aircraft carrier that's on fire. You
Speaker 1: can see a water very.
Speaker 4: Boring, very very blurry picture as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's there's there's a watermark. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you can see it clearly on this gear, but
Speaker 1: like that says Arabic journal so he clearly took it
Speaker 1: from another website. Right now, I would describe the image
Speaker 1: quality of this as cell phone camera circa two thousand
Speaker 1: and seven.
Speaker 4: That's accurate. Yeah, it roughly at like three d s camera. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: it looked.
Speaker 1: It's not even super clear to me that that's an
Speaker 1: aircraft carrier. Forbes's post obviously, you know, does not occur
Speaker 1: in a vacuum here, And it would be deeply fucked
Speaker 1: up for me to say, like citizen journalists shouldn't exist,
Speaker 1: Like if someone identifies themselves as that, it's a sign
Speaker 1: that they're danger or that they're they're full of shit, right,
Speaker 1: because recent history is filled with people who call themselves
Speaker 1: citizen journalists putting out bullshit. But like it's also filled
Speaker 1: with instances of citizens doing crucial journalism in the absence
Speaker 1: of credential professionals.
Speaker 4: Especially in Gaza right now.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean that's basically everything, right, in part
Speaker 1: because most of the journalists who have tried to report
Speaker 1: on it have been fucking murdered. But even in the US,
Speaker 1: we have the recent case of Darnella Frasier, who was
Speaker 1: the eighteen year old woman who filmed the murder of
Speaker 1: George Floyd on May twenty fifth, twenty twenty. She received
Speaker 1: a Pulitzer Prize the next year for her video. However, journalism,
Speaker 1: while again there's a lot of value in citizen journalism,
Speaker 1: journalism is also a technical trade and there are in
Speaker 1: fact some things that random dirts on the Internet should
Speaker 1: not report on, and an attack on the Eisenhower is
Speaker 1: maybe one of them. To make a long story short,
Speaker 1: the USS Eisenhower was not sunk. It is virtually impossible
Speaker 1: for non state forces like the Houthies, with the weaponry
Speaker 1: that they currently enjoy, to sink a vessel like the Eisenhower.
Speaker 1: And for a little bit of context on why that
Speaker 1: is the case, I want to talk about another aircraft
Speaker 1: carrier called the USS Independence. The Independence was one of
Speaker 1: many many aircraft carriers produced by the United States to
Speaker 1: curb stomp the Empire of Japan during World War Two.
Speaker 1: After that war, we found ourselves with way more aircraft
Speaker 1: carriers than we needed or could afford to operate indefinitely
Speaker 1: at peacetime. So we decided to do the smartest thing
Speaker 1: we could with all these extra aircraft carriers and nuke them.
Speaker 4: That was swait.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, well, it's classic nineteen forty six America logic.
Speaker 4: That is true. That is true.
Speaker 1: That is so, the Independence didn't brave nuclear hell fire alone.
Speaker 1: As part of Operations Crossroads, we detonated two nuclear bombs
Speaker 1: within seventeen hundred feet of a fleet of ships. That's
Speaker 1: pretty close to point blank range in nuclear weapons terms.
Speaker 1: Fourteen ships were sunk out right by these nukes, and
Speaker 1: the remainder were badly damaged. The Independence was one of
Speaker 1: the boats that remained floating, though, and it actually was
Speaker 1: towed back to San Francisco after being nuked twice. Two
Speaker 1: nukes could not sink a nineteen forty six aircraft carrier.
Speaker 4: What are they building these things out of?
Speaker 1: They're very big, and they are if you are attacking
Speaker 1: them above the water line, it's really hard to sink
Speaker 1: one of these boats, right, Like, that's kind of the thing.
Speaker 1: You can lob huge missiles and hit them with huge
Speaker 1: missiles on the top of the thing, and that can
Speaker 1: stop them from being able to launch aircraft. It can
Speaker 1: kill crew, but unless you're actually blowing a big hole
Speaker 1: in it below the water line, you're not going to
Speaker 1: send one of these fuckers to the bottom of the ocean,
Speaker 1: right That's just kind of sure.
Speaker 4: Physics, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: So we towed the Independence back to San Francisco. They
Speaker 1: actually built a radiation lab in the boat itself for
Speaker 1: a while. And then that's again because the United States
Speaker 1: be how the United States do? We filled this massive
Speaker 1: boat with concrete drums full of radioactive waist and sunk
Speaker 1: it thirty miles off the coast of California with two torpes.
Speaker 4: That's fucking hilarious. That rules. Hell yeah, brother, this country man.
Speaker 1: So again, once we started lobbin torpedoes at this fucker
Speaker 1: underneath the boat, it was not wildly hard to sink
Speaker 1: the son of a bitch, right, And that's the reality
Speaker 1: of the situation. If the Huthies were able to get
Speaker 1: like some subs that were capable of like actually getting
Speaker 1: through you know, the dragnet of boats that are defending
Speaker 1: the Enterprise, and they could get any kind of you know,
Speaker 1: decent sized torpedo underneath it, they might have a chance
Speaker 1: of sinking it.
Speaker 4: Photon torpedoes, photon torpedo for the Enterprise, yes, yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 4: or a quantum torpedo.
Speaker 1: If we've moved on to d S nine Garrison.
Speaker 4: Oh, I've not started DS nine year.
Speaker 1: Oh, oh, it's great. It's the horniest star Trek Garrison,
Speaker 1: which is shocking to it is shockingly horny. So I
Speaker 1: want to note while I'm talking about the impossi ability
Speaker 1: of the Huthies using their current methods, which are basically
Speaker 1: when it comes to how they've been attacking the Eisenhower,
Speaker 1: they've been either flying drones at it, trying to ram
Speaker 1: it with an explosive drone, or launching cruise missiles at
Speaker 1: it right, and all of these are basically aiming for
Speaker 1: the top of this boat, because that's kind of the
Speaker 1: option that they have.
Speaker 4: I was not aware that they had like advanced submarine capabilities.
Speaker 1: They sure don't as far as I'm aware they don't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: now it is. It's worth noting potentially it could be
Speaker 1: surprisingly easy sometimes to sink a modern aircraft carrier if
Speaker 1: you have a decent submarine. And there's evidence of this
Speaker 1: that came from a joint Franco US naval exercise off
Speaker 1: to the coast of Florida in March of twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: where basically we're doing this exercise with the French at
Speaker 1: one point. This French submarine is part of the Op
Speaker 1: four which is like opposition forces during a war game,
Speaker 1: and it sinks the Roosevelt and most of its escorts
Speaker 1: in like a simulated battle. And this is you know,
Speaker 1: it's very funny because like the French military posted about
Speaker 1: this and then had to delete it because it was
Speaker 1: really embarrassing for the Navy, and it's seen as evidence
Speaker 1: by people who actually know their shit about naval power
Speaker 1: and naval warfare is like, oh, US anti sub interdiction
Speaker 1: tactics and technology really took a hit in the post
Speaker 1: Cold War period. We stopped putting money into it because
Speaker 1: like we thought, well, who's going to send subs after
Speaker 1: us if the Russians are gone?
Speaker 9: Right?
Speaker 4: Yeah exactly, yeah, yea yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: So I don't mean to say that like these boats
Speaker 1: are invulnerable. Nothing can stop the US Navy. In fact,
Speaker 1: the evidence suggests that like a modestly powerful naval power
Speaker 1: could do some serious damage to a carrier group in
Speaker 1: the right circumstances. It's just the way the houthis. The
Speaker 1: claims people are making about how the houthis sunk the
Speaker 1: Eisenhower is not a way in which the Eisenhower could
Speaker 1: realistically be sunk. Right, some bootleg Iranian missiles are not
Speaker 1: going to sink the most advanced carrier in the world today.
Speaker 1: Two nukes couldn't do a comparatively shitty carrier in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty six. Now, this is all pretty obvious to anyone
Speaker 1: who knows the first thing about modern naval warfare. But
Speaker 1: it was not obvious to our citizen journalist friend, Ashton Forbes.
Speaker 1: When numerous people pointed out to him that his claims
Speaker 1: were absurd, he replied, yeah, I wanted to hold back
Speaker 1: on this story in case it's not true, but I
Speaker 1: trust my source and the media reports stink to me.
Speaker 1: If this ends up being wrong, I'll retract. But the
Speaker 1: implications are too huge not to report?
Speaker 4: Sure, sure, yeah, sure, buddy, why not.
Speaker 1: We're going to dig into that and the ethics of
Speaker 1: the journalism that he claims to be practicing. But first,
Speaker 1: the ethics of my journalism are that you should buy
Speaker 1: whatever these advertisers are selling, and we're back. So I
Speaker 1: really hate the too huge not to report justification. That's like,
Speaker 1: that's incredibly unethical journalism, because like, if a story is
Speaker 1: that huge.
Speaker 4: Actually, Robert, no, no, no, I just got an update
Speaker 4: from a source that nine to eleven two just happened.
Speaker 4: Oh wow, I have, I have, I have a very
Speaker 4: blurry picture. I'm going to post it up on Twitter
Speaker 4: right now. I can't verify, but this is if true,
Speaker 4: this is groundbreaking, uh literally in case of you know
Speaker 4: the ground.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I know listeners are like, there's no way
Speaker 1: nine to eleven two happened several days ago by the
Speaker 1: time you listened to this episode, and I haven't heard
Speaker 1: about it. I want to remind you about the film
Speaker 1: Mad Max Fury Road. You know, when that came out,
Speaker 1: none of us were expecting another Mad Max movie and
Speaker 1: we got a great one. And I think nine to
Speaker 1: eleven two could be the Fury Road of terrorism attacks.
Speaker 4: Real promise, real promise. They also could be censoring the story.
Speaker 4: They may not want you to know.
Speaker 1: In case you haven't heard the news, doesn't want you
Speaker 1: to know that nine eleven two already happened because it's
Speaker 1: going to destroy the market for nine to eleven one memorabilia.
Speaker 1: You know, that's everybody needs to read Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky.
Speaker 1: He lays it all.
Speaker 4: As you're saying.
Speaker 1: So obviously, if a story is as big as this
Speaker 1: and the sinking of the Eisenhower would be like the
Speaker 1: most significant military reversal in the twenty first century. Maybe,
Speaker 1: you know, I guess you could argue like the US
Speaker 1: of leaving Afghanistan. Maybe, But honestly, from a technological standpoint,
Speaker 1: at least the huth he's managing to drop an aircraft
Speaker 1: carrier would be massive. And if a story is that big,
Speaker 1: you have a responsibility not to report on it until
Speaker 1: you have any reason at all to believe that it's true.
Speaker 1: So when somebody says the implication or too the implications
Speaker 1: are too huge not to report on what they mean
Speaker 1: is I wanted the clout in traffic from getting this
Speaker 1: out first, and I don't really care if it's true.
Speaker 1: Now it happens to be quite easy to prove that
Speaker 1: the USS Eisenhower is still among the living, because the
Speaker 1: captain of that boat is a poster.
Speaker 4: His name is oh God, Oh.
Speaker 1: This man posts like you wouldn't believe Garrison. I've never
Speaker 1: seen a commanding officer in the military who posts.
Speaker 2: Like this man.
Speaker 4: Do you think Riker would be a poster? I don't know.
Speaker 1: Riker would be. He would do a lot of dming.
Speaker 1: He would be sliding into DMS, an awful loss like yeah, yes, absolutely,
Speaker 1: he would constantly be trying to fuck But I think
Speaker 1: the only reason he would actually post is when like
Speaker 1: something broke and he couldn't figure out how to fix it,
Speaker 1: he would he would be like adding Jordie constantly like yes,
Speaker 1: I can't get my computer working.
Speaker 4: That makes sense.
Speaker 1: So the captain of the Enterprise is Christopher F. Hill.
Speaker 1: And again he's a poster for reasons that I have
Speaker 1: not bothered to look into and don't care to learn.
Speaker 1: He goes by chowda on Twitter like with a with
Speaker 1: a dah, I don't I don't know why, and within
Speaker 1: minutes of the Forbes post about uh, or of of
Speaker 1: Forbes's post, he himself posted videos of the bakery on
Speaker 1: board the Eisenhower, which showed no signs of being underwater.
Speaker 1: I think that was kind of his subtle way of
Speaker 1: being like, we are still making like cinnamon rolls, like
Speaker 1: every is fine on board this ship. In short order,
Speaker 1: Internet Salutes discovered that the video clip posted by Forbes
Speaker 1: that claimed to show the Eisenhower in flames was Garrison.
Speaker 1: Do you want to guess where this what this was
Speaker 1: a screenshot from?
Speaker 4: Is this a video game?
Speaker 1: It is a video game. It's the video game Arma three.
Speaker 1: It's from Arma three every time, every time, whenever this
Speaker 1: happens in the war in Ukraine too. Constantly they'll be like,
Speaker 1: we've shot down you know, a bunch of these MiG
Speaker 1: twenty ones, or you know, shot down this massive Russian
Speaker 1: jet that's never been shot down before. Every time it's
Speaker 1: Arma three, like every single time.
Speaker 4: Unbelievable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like eighty percent of the time, fake videos of
Speaker 1: military vehicles being destroyed, it's just clips from Arma three. Now,
Speaker 1: a brief glance into the backstory of Ashton Forbes would
Speaker 1: have made it clear that his claims were nonsense, as
Speaker 1: this rite up by George Allison in the UK Defense
Speaker 1: Journal notes, Ashton Forbes, despite his self identified role as
Speaker 1: a citizen journalist, has i'm told, a history of hosting
Speaker 1: sensational and often unverified claims, particularly about Malaysia Airlines. Flight
Speaker 1: three seventy was a commercial flight that disappeared in twenty
Speaker 1: fourteen we'll en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, leading
Speaker 1: to numerous conspiracy theories. Now we don't actually know why
Speaker 1: MH three seventy went down. I think probably the leading
Speaker 1: theory was that the pilot committed suicide. But even that,
Speaker 1: I don't think that there's like strong. I don't think
Speaker 1: it's it's very unclear, could have just been a fuck up,
Speaker 1: something like it's we really don't know, which is why
Speaker 1: there's so much conspiracy.
Speaker 4: It could have gone into a wormhole.
Speaker 1: So it could have gone into the wormhole right now.
Speaker 1: Forbes's belief, according to I found a post by Swift
Speaker 1: on security, who's a popular security expert, who states that
Speaker 1: Forbes believes MH three seventy had secret free energy tech
Speaker 1: on it that was raptured into a wormhole by reptilians.
Speaker 4: Are you so good?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you actually got it.
Speaker 4: I was doing a bit.
Speaker 1: You got it right, Garrison, Oh my god, Swim. It's
Speaker 1: an example of another one of the Citizen Journalist's big
Speaker 1: scoops free energy announcement. Free Energy, otherwise known as over Unity,
Speaker 1: is one hundred percent real. The devices exists already. I
Speaker 1: have been told exactly how an operational device works. I
Speaker 1: signed an NDA, so won't be able to disclose specifics.
Speaker 4: One hundred.
Speaker 1: That's great. I love that the people who figure out
Speaker 1: free energy would let you post about it as long
Speaker 1: as you don't explain how it works.
Speaker 4: I like that you signed an NDA, so you can't
Speaker 4: talk about it except for this post in what you
Speaker 4: do talk about it, and which have absolutely talk about
Speaker 4: classic classic move Now.
Speaker 1: Once Forbes's post started to gain traction, the entire ecosystem
Speaker 1: of infogrifters who cropped up like mushrooms to profit off
Speaker 1: the massacre in Gaza swung into gear thanks to Elon's
Speaker 1: new ownership of Twitter, Being able to draw viral crowds
Speaker 1: to your content by latching onto the most discussed topics
Speaker 1: of the day is very profitable, as we discussed, and
Speaker 1: into this mix you do have some state funded actors.
Speaker 1: You've got people working for Iran, for Israel, for Russia,
Speaker 1: for the United States, all trying to push their own
Speaker 1: sundry lines of propaganda using the engines of algorithmic virality.
Speaker 1: And then, of course there are the legitimately hopeful but
Speaker 1: ill informed. And these are the people that I have
Speaker 1: sympathy with and who I'm kind of like focusing on.
Speaker 1: These are people who are understandably numb from constant exposure
Speaker 1: to a barrage of photos and videos of war crimes,
Speaker 1: and they are desperately ready to believe in some kind
Speaker 1: of miraculous underdog victory.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 1: Hollywood fiction has trained us all to see that as possible.
Speaker 1: This is being thought of by a lot of people
Speaker 1: who are just numb and broken from videos of horror
Speaker 1: as like, well, I don't know, maybe we could have
Speaker 1: our Star Wars moment, right, maybe we've got a Luke
Speaker 1: Skywalker downing the death Star. Now the houthis aren't Luke Skywalker,
Speaker 1: and the Eisenhower isn't entirely the death Star. It's like
Speaker 1: it's got shades of Death Star. It's DNA, it's got
Speaker 1: some Death Star DNA and it sure yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean it's closer to closer to a star.
Speaker 1: Destroyer, closer to a star destroyer right right right. One
Speaker 1: of the posts I came across researching this was Alden Marky,
Speaker 1: who describes himself as a counter propagandist and researcher with
Speaker 1: a focus on Yemen. He posted a photoshop of the
Speaker 1: Eisenhower from above with a dagger in the water beneath it.
Speaker 1: This was accompanied by the text uss Eisenhower was just
Speaker 1: struck for the second time in twenty four hours, and
Speaker 1: it had something like two thousand likes, two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty thousand views when I came across it. Another account
Speaker 1: quote tweeted this and got nearly five thousand likes, saying
Speaker 1: it won't happen, but it would be so fucking funny
Speaker 1: if Yeman sinks an aircraft carrier, like can you imagine?
Speaker 1: And I think that guy represents the more common attitude,
Speaker 1: which is this mix of on we and desperation. Right,
Speaker 1: nothing is going to stop this massacre. It seems like that.
Speaker 1: It really feels like that, right, But wouldn't it be
Speaker 1: rad if something did? And to be realistic, I don't
Speaker 1: know that. I think there's a real odds that dropping
Speaker 1: the Eisenhower somehow would stop netnyahou from what he's doing.
Speaker 1: I mean maybe it would, like it would certainly reduce
Speaker 1: the ability of the United States to interdict Iranian messles
Speaker 1: coming into Israel, But I don't know that. I think
Speaker 1: that it's realistic that that's going to stop net Yahoo
Speaker 1: from doing the shit that net Yaho's doing. You can
Speaker 1: feel however you want about that. It's not irrational to
Speaker 1: be like, boy, I don't think this is real, but
Speaker 1: like I wish it was, right, So you can feel
Speaker 1: however you want about this guy. Wanting, you know, thousands
Speaker 1: of US soldiers to get murdered. I get both, Like,
Speaker 1: I don't think that realistically, anything the hoo thies are
Speaker 1: doing is going to stop what Israel's doing at this point,
Speaker 1: But I also understand just desperately wanting some violence to
Speaker 1: come down on the other side of this thing after
Speaker 1: months of watching videos of the slaughter in Gaza. You know,
Speaker 1: especially as you have you.
Speaker 4: Have like Nikki Haley signing right bombs that right and
Speaker 4: is sending over like come on, Like yeah, no, I
Speaker 4: could understand the emotional like, yeah, braw.
Speaker 1: It doesn't speak to the best angels of our nature, right,
Speaker 1: because you're what you're thinking, you're hoping for huge amounts
Speaker 1: of human death either way. But like, I get it,
Speaker 1: and it's not irrational, right, Saying there's no way this
Speaker 1: is real, but I wish it was is not an
Speaker 1: irrational feeling, right. You can contrast that to the posts
Speaker 1: of independent journalists and newsgrifter Richard Medhurst with four hundred
Speaker 1: and eighteen thousand followers, who posted this on June second,
Speaker 1: Jim instruct the best ship in the US Navy with
Speaker 1: ballistic and cruise missiles. The ship is fleeing, and the
Speaker 1: Captain of the us S Eisenhower, tried to do damage
Speaker 1: control by posting a video of the deck on Twitter,
Speaker 1: But it's an old Instagram reel from thirteen weeks ago.
Speaker 1: Left Yemen never lie, and.
Speaker 4: This is just an alternate reality that they've entered into.
Speaker 1: Now, yes, yes, you have. You have departed reality in
Speaker 1: favor of one that you are crafting because it's it's
Speaker 1: more comforting than the one in which nothing seems to
Speaker 1: be able to actually alter the course of violence in Gaza, right,
Speaker 1: So you're just deciding to believe in something else. Now,
Speaker 1: Community notes flagged this post, but it still has something
Speaker 1: like three hundred and fifty thousand views and more than
Speaker 1: four hundred thousand likes. Medhurst tis one hundred thousand or
Speaker 1: four thousand likes, sorry, four hundred and eighteen thousand followers,
Speaker 1: four thousand likes on the post I see four thousand
Speaker 1: likes is still a mess? Is a sizable super large number? Yeah.
Speaker 1: Medhurst has leaned hard into repeating claims that the Houthis
Speaker 1: have sunk or damaged the Eisenhower and another post with
Speaker 1: six thousand likes in eight hundred and twenty one thousand views.
Speaker 1: He describes the IKE as being hit with ballistic and
Speaker 1: cruise missiles and add, yeomen never lie in their press breathings,
Speaker 1: so I'm inclined to believe them. In one post, heam,
Speaker 1: I know it's In one post, he notes that the
Speaker 1: Houthy's recently shot down an m Q nine Reaper drone,
Speaker 1: which did happen, and claims the US won't admit to
Speaker 1: that either, and like, I haven't run into the US
Speaker 1: denying that this happened. There's three clear cases of m
Speaker 1: Q nine's being shot down last month alone, right, Like,
Speaker 1: we actually know a lot about this, which is part
Speaker 1: of why I don't believe the Eisenhower shot down, As
Speaker 1: they the Houthis were able to prove quite readily that
Speaker 1: they had shot down the MQ nine's. I have seen
Speaker 1: no proof that the Eisenhower's been hit, right, and this
Speaker 1: isn't just a case where like the Houthis should be
Speaker 1: able to provide some actual proof if they'd done this.
Speaker 1: The Eisenhower is a floating city with a population of thousands.
Speaker 1: There's like seven or eight thousand people. I think at
Speaker 1: least in the whole strike group. I will con see
Speaker 1: that the military could probably keep a lid on an
Speaker 1: attack against the Eisenhower, and might even temporarily be able
Speaker 1: to hide the fact that it had suffered minor damage.
Speaker 1: But you're not keeping any anything significant secret for the
Speaker 1: long haul, right, Like you just you can't. You can't
Speaker 1: keep secrets like that. There's too many people. They're going
Speaker 1: to talk to their families. If the boat goes down
Speaker 1: with thousands of people on board, family members are going
Speaker 1: to be like, boy, none of us have heard from
Speaker 1: our loved ones in a while. Right.
Speaker 4: Also think also like the government would say something and
Speaker 4: like start like a massive batch of retaliation, Like it's
Speaker 4: not like America would be like, oh, sh.
Speaker 1: Quiet, we just have to pretend this didn't happen.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're gonna be talking about a NonStop for the
Speaker 4: past like three months.
Speaker 1: We sent the Eisenhower and its crew to a nice
Speaker 1: farm up state exactly. So why would the Houthies this
Speaker 1: is a question to ask, Then why would the Hoothies
Speaker 1: make fake claims that are obviously fake claims about striking
Speaker 1: the Eisenhower?
Speaker 7: Right?
Speaker 1: And I think it's because at this point, for a
Speaker 1: sizeable chunk of people, fake Hoothy attacks on US assets
Speaker 1: are just as good as real ones. And I think
Speaker 1: there are people within the leadership cadres of the Houthis
Speaker 1: who know that perfectly well. It is entirely possible that
Speaker 1: the Hoothies find themselves low on munitions after months of
Speaker 1: conflict with the US, and somebody smart realized, like, what
Speaker 1: if we just say we shot at them, right, It'll
Speaker 1: have the same propaganda impact and we won't have a
Speaker 1: waste a missile.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 4: No, you'll still be able to talk about it on
Speaker 4: your Los Angeles Twitch stream to your hundreds of thousands
Speaker 4: of followers.
Speaker 1: Right, the ongoing gendescide, If that's what actually is happening here,
Speaker 1: I could see that as a reasonably cunning move. You know,
Speaker 1: the ongoing genocide and gaza the other inability of protest
Speaker 1: or armed resistance to change it in any way leads
Speaker 1: some people to a kind of mad desperation. In this desperation,
Speaker 1: the Houthis have become a symbol of hope to many
Speaker 1: people for the simple reason that they seem to be
Speaker 1: capable of taking action against the forces protecting Israel as
Speaker 1: Israel commits war crimes. Now, the reality of the situation
Speaker 1: is that the Huthis themselves have committed their share of
Speaker 1: war crimes, some of which are remniscent of the very
Speaker 1: crimes committed by Israel. In December of twenty fourteen, the
Speaker 1: Houthis laid siege to Yemen's second city, Ties, leading to
Speaker 1: a humanitarian catastrophe, as this article from The Guardian lays out.
Speaker 1: Quote sincerely April, when the resistance, an alliance of local
Speaker 1: forces dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, fought off the Houthi's
Speaker 1: attempt to control the city. The militia retaliated by cutting
Speaker 1: off roads, preventing food and medical aid from getting in.
Speaker 1: Access is only allowed through a single checkpoint dubbed the
Speaker 1: Rapha Crossing by the residents after its more famous namesake
Speaker 1: on the Egypt Gaza border. Every morning, long queues form
Speaker 1: outside the crossing by those wanting to enter the city
Speaker 1: hoothy malicious search and confiscate medicine, cooking, gas, cigarettes, bottled
Speaker 1: water or anything more than a small shopping bag of food.
Speaker 1: In order to survive. The city has for months been
Speaker 1: relying on groups of young boys and long trains of
Speaker 1: donkeys to bring its supplies via a long and arduous
Speaker 1: journey through the mountains, but donkeys alone can hardly fulfill
Speaker 1: the needs of the city. Medicine and food have all
Speaker 1: but disappeared from the market, and the prices of what
Speaker 1: are left have jumped in the last few months, pushing
Speaker 1: most of the population below the poverty line. Now the
Speaker 1: comparison between Tis and Gaza are striking, right, Like the
Speaker 1: crossing was called Rafa you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, they literally named it after the crossing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, you hear a lot of the
Speaker 1: same stories, like the hospitals basically were out of you know,
Speaker 1: anything to actually treat the injured. One of the one
Speaker 1: doctor at one of the two functioning hospitals in the
Speaker 1: city told the Guardian, we can't do operations, we can't
Speaker 1: put people in intensive care. We can only patch wounds
Speaker 1: and tell the patient you are welcome to die here. Now,
Speaker 1: I want to be clear here. The other side in
Speaker 1: this conflict was inarguably even worse. The Saudi led coalition,
Speaker 1: using US weaponry, put the whole country in a state
Speaker 1: of siege that led to catastrophic famines and situations very
Speaker 1: similar and in some cases worse than what the Huthi
Speaker 1: did toties right, like this is the this I mean,
Speaker 1: it's war right. This is like unspeakable suffering compounding on
Speaker 1: unspeakable suffering.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 1: You've probably heard that old saying when you stare into
Speaker 1: the abyss, the abyss stares back. And there's a corollary
Speaker 1: to that statement that I think is relevant to some
Speaker 1: of the fantasies that some people on the left have
Speaker 1: about the hoothies. When you start giving yourself up to
Speaker 1: false realities, eventually you can lose yourself entirely. And we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk a little bit about that, but first lose
Speaker 1: yourself to these products. We're back. So people like Medhurst,
Speaker 1: you know, postliked by these guys, they aren't meant to
Speaker 1: inform people about the real world. Medhurst's fans, the people
Speaker 1: who take him seriously, have departed reality in favor of
Speaker 1: a fantasy, because that fantasy world is the only place
Speaker 1: in which victory feels possible. There's a term that you
Speaker 1: and I talk about a lot garrison, coined by the
Speaker 1: author Robert Anton Wilson, that I think is useful in
Speaker 1: dealing with situations like this, and that term is reality tunnel.
Speaker 1: The concept is complex and explanations of it tend towards long,
Speaker 1: but the basic idea is that we in the modern
Speaker 1: world are all constantly flooded by information from our senses
Speaker 1: and from the different information delivery devices that we filled
Speaker 1: our world with. In order to function, we have to
Speaker 1: triage that information, to pare it away until we get
Speaker 1: to a reality that we can live inside, the fact
Speaker 1: that human beings can and perhaps inherently do. This is
Speaker 1: not necessarily bad, and in fact, I might argue that
Speaker 1: without the ability to choose and flip between different realities
Speaker 1: to change the channel, as Wilson put it, positive progress
Speaker 1: is impossible. I found this explained well in an essay
Speaker 1: on Wilson's work by Mikola Bilokonski. Quote, we can slide
Speaker 1: between reality tunnels by consciously choosing to pay attention to
Speaker 1: things we might normally ignore. It's hard at first, but
Speaker 1: as a skill that we can develop with practice. Train
Speaker 1: yourself to pay more attention to the emotions of the
Speaker 1: people you're speaking to, for instance, and you'll be surprised
Speaker 1: at how much richer the world gets. Train yourself to
Speaker 1: pay attention to your caloric intake and eating fundamentally changes.
Speaker 1: Train yourself to hear the voices of minorities, and suddenly
Speaker 1: you see racism and sexism everywhere. Now, those other reality
Speaker 1: tunnels like that you can key yourself in on are
Speaker 1: always there. They always exist, right, You just had to
Speaker 1: actually learn the filters that you existed within in order
Speaker 1: to access them.
Speaker 4: You know, whether or not you're tuned in doesn't mean
Speaker 4: like they just don't exist.
Speaker 1: They're still there. Yeah. Yeah, So again the constant you know,
Speaker 1: the fact that people can like pick and choose which
Speaker 1: reality chair can change the channel, so to speak, isn't
Speaker 1: necessarily bad and in fact is part of you know,
Speaker 1: necessary positive progress. But some people don't want to hop
Speaker 1: between tunnels and explore the dazzling variety of realities that exist.
Speaker 1: They want to pick a tunnel in which they feel
Speaker 1: comfortable and then burrow so deep into it that no
Speaker 1: other realities can find them. I want you to think
Speaker 1: of one of my favorite recent Trump World grifts, right,
Speaker 1: is these kind of this company that started putting out
Speaker 1: these like ads with an obvious AI Donald Trump or
Speaker 1: Elon Musk voice where they're like, Trump is going to
Speaker 1: change the monetary system, and if you buy these like
Speaker 1: trump Bucks debit card things or fake checks, he's going
Speaker 1: to like when he changes it, they'll be worth a
Speaker 1: ten thousand times what you put in. So if you
Speaker 1: put in two or three thousand dollars worth of this,
Speaker 1: you'll be rich. He's doing this to reward his loyal fans.
Speaker 1: He's going to like he's gonna fix everything and you'll
Speaker 1: finally be rich, right, you know you deserve to be rich, right,
Speaker 1: And a bunch of people bought these like fake promisary
Speaker 1: now and then like went to Bank of America to
Speaker 1: cash them in, and the bank was like, well, no,
Speaker 1: that's not this, this isn't real this, this is nothing
Speaker 1: at all, right, and you know, these people got fleeced.
Speaker 1: And one way to look at the people who got
Speaker 1: fleeced is like, well they're dumb, right, These people are stupid.
Speaker 1: You know, they did a stupid thing. They believed something
Speaker 1: that was obviously fake, and you can you can take
Speaker 1: that out of their story if you want. I don't
Speaker 1: think that's helpful, though. The reality is that these people
Speaker 1: represent a cautionary tale. They didn't start out believing that
Speaker 1: the guy from the Apprentice was their messiah. Their break
Speaker 1: from consensus reality began years or decades earlier, and it's
Speaker 1: going to be different for every individual person. When I
Speaker 1: think about my own family members who came to believe
Speaker 1: pretty unhinged things that you know, figures within the Republican
Speaker 1: Party or Trump himself told them. I tend to trace
Speaker 1: their break from reality back to well back to the
Speaker 1: day when the calming, charismatic voice of Ronald Reagan said
Speaker 1: this about the Iran Contraus scandal, a deal in which
Speaker 1: his administration gave Iron weapons in exchange for hostages. And
Speaker 1: this is Reagan. A few months ago, I told the
Speaker 1: American people, I did not trade arms for hostages. My
Speaker 1: heart and my best intentions tell me that's true, but
Speaker 1: the facts and the evidence tell me.
Speaker 9: It is not.
Speaker 1: Yes, And I think that line is an important moment
Speaker 1: in the shattering of what we might call reality, consensus, reality, right,
Speaker 1: The undeniable, actual truth is that Ronald Reagan and many
Speaker 1: members of his administration committed high crimes and light about it.
Speaker 1: But Reagan's supporters, his fans, people like my parents, loved
Speaker 1: him too much to accept this, and old Ronnie offered
Speaker 1: them a way out, ignore the facts and the evidence
Speaker 1: and embraced the deeper truth of his heart and his
Speaker 1: best intentions. And in that moment, I think that's where
Speaker 1: a lot of Americans, who are now in an even
Speaker 1: more unhinged place, started burrowing down and started tunneling away
Speaker 1: from their friends and family and towards the heart of
Speaker 1: something dark. As the years went on, the consequences of
Speaker 1: many Reagan era economic and social policies became impossible to ignore.
Speaker 1: No wealth trickled down, Mourning did not return to America.
Speaker 1: The promise of the Internet boom yielded to the dot
Speaker 1: com bubble bursting September eleventh sobered us up from the
Speaker 1: hallucination of permanent victory. After the end of the Cold War,
Speaker 1: the housing market crashed, the hideous reality of climate change
Speaker 1: became unavoidable, the promise of a bright future faded, and
Speaker 1: people buried themselves deeper in fantasies to avoid oblique and
Speaker 1: empty horizon. And all throughout this the Left prided itself
Speaker 1: on a sort of logical sobriety, a willingness to stare
Speaker 1: into the abyss, to accept the reality of our dire moment,
Speaker 1: and to propose radical solutions. Yet one by one, the
Speaker 1: different protest movements put out by the left flopped and fizzled.
Speaker 1: Promising organizers and ideological leaders were revealed as frauds or
Speaker 1: became corrupted by the system. Capitalism failed to fall or reform,
Speaker 1: and rather than confront the dire complex reality that leaves
Speaker 1: us in, increasing numbers of leftists found alternative realities, served
Speaker 1: eagerly by an alliance of conman and paid propagandists. Now,
Speaker 1: leftists have always been just as vulnerable to vicious fantasy
Speaker 1: as conservatives. This has proven well in the last century.
Speaker 1: There's a case of a Marxist academic named Malcolm Caldwell,
Speaker 1: who I think is which I think is valuable depending
Speaker 1: on who you talk to about Caldwell. He's the Scottish academic.
Speaker 1: He was a college professor, apparently a pretty good economist,
Speaker 1: and he also had this weird thing for agrarian communist movements,
Speaker 1: which he thought were He believed that there was this
Speaker 1: like massive global famine coming and he believed that these
Speaker 1: like back to the Land Marxist movements sweeping Southeast Asia
Speaker 1: where the only way forward for a lot of humanity.
Speaker 1: He was this like third worldist. A lot of his
Speaker 1: belief was kind of centering that, you know, the United
Speaker 1: States was the source of all evil in the world effectively,
Speaker 1: but this kind of led him to he became a
Speaker 1: stan of every communist state, even the ones that were
Speaker 1: in conflict with each other. He traveled to like North
Speaker 1: Korea and came back like talking about all of the
Speaker 1: wonderful accomplishments of Juche ideology. You know, he was in
Speaker 1: love with Vietnam, and he was also in love with
Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. And that's kind of part of
Speaker 1: the evidence that like he had entered a reality tunnel
Speaker 1: that had taken him away from any kind of logical
Speaker 1: reality because like Cambodia and Vietnam went to war, right,
Speaker 1: Vietnam invaded Cambodia, Like these these two were not like
Speaker 1: communist fellow travelers on the same side of a conflict.
Speaker 1: Whenever this would get brought up to Caldwell, when he'd
Speaker 1: argue about, you know, Vietnam and the conflict that Vietnam
Speaker 1: was having with Cambodia, or he you know, people would
Speaker 1: try to argue with him about the realities of the
Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge system, he would just kind of shut down,
Speaker 1: like he was he was, yeah, he couldn't talk about
Speaker 1: it right now. Eventually, Caldwell, because he's an academic, he
Speaker 1: travels to a lot of these countries and you know,
Speaker 1: it's fine. He travels to the Ubas, he gets a
Speaker 1: tour there. He travels to North Korea, he gets a
Speaker 1: tour there, he gets a tour at Vietnam. That's all fine.
Speaker 1: All of those states are sane states, right, which is
Speaker 1: not to say that like they don't do bad things,
Speaker 1: but they're they're run by people who like, there's no
Speaker 1: benefit in us to anything bad happening to this guy
Speaker 1: who's out there in the West writing nice things about
Speaker 1: our regimes. Right, Polepot was not sane. The Khmer Rouge
Speaker 1: was not sane.
Speaker 4: So he goes to.
Speaker 1: Cambodia with two American journalists, one of whom had been
Speaker 1: in Cambodia in the years prior to the Khmer Rouge
Speaker 1: overthrow of the US backed government of Law Nol and
Speaker 1: knew the country well. And when she got there, they
Speaker 1: had all these arguments where he was like, I think
Speaker 1: the revolution is working. You know, it's not perfect, but
Speaker 1: it needs its time. Look at all the wonderful accomplishments already.
Speaker 1: And she would point out, I have been to these
Speaker 1: cities years ago, and there's no people anymore. All of
Speaker 1: the people are gone. Something is terribly wrong, and he
Speaker 1: just couldn't listen to her. So they're there a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks and he gets invited to have a meeting
Speaker 1: with Polepot, and you know, he has a meeting with
Speaker 1: him right after these journalists do, and he comes back
Speaker 1: from it really excited, being like, we had a great talk.
Speaker 1: He's such a smart man. You know, we talked about economics.
Speaker 1: I feel really he's invited me back next year, you know.
Speaker 1: And by the way, within like weeks of this, Vietnam
Speaker 1: invades and forces Polepot out of the capitol, right, Like
Speaker 1: the state of the Khmer Rouge was deeply precarious at
Speaker 1: this point. But he comes out super optimistic, and then
Speaker 1: later that night a gunman shoots him to death and
Speaker 1: then shoots himself to death. It is really unclear to
Speaker 1: this day. It's a bit of a mystery what happened.
Speaker 1: The most likely explanation is that the Khmer Rouge wanted
Speaker 1: to pin the murder of a leftist Western academic on
Speaker 1: Vietnam to try and generate international outrage against Vietnam who
Speaker 1: was about to invade. It's possible Vietnam killed him for
Speaker 1: but I don't really see a benefit to Vietnam and
Speaker 1: doing that again. They invade right after this. It seems
Speaker 1: like one of the journalists who was there basically was
Speaker 1: like a pollpot, was out of his fucking mind. Of
Speaker 1: course he would do this. There's no like, there's no
Speaker 1: trying to lay out like the rationality behind this man's actions.
Speaker 1: I think what's more interesting is Caldwell had been presented
Speaker 1: with plenty of evidence that the Khmer Rouge regime was
Speaker 1: deeply evil and violent, and in fact, he had published
Speaker 1: right before he went over there, he published an article
Speaker 1: about like the successes of their agrarian reforms and the
Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge government official that he cited in that paper
Speaker 1: that's like the basis of most of his claims about
Speaker 1: how well the reforms had worked. With it like a
Speaker 1: couple of weeks before he arrived in Cambodia was tortured
Speaker 1: to death in the S twenty one prison. Well, that's
Speaker 1: not a great sign, not a great sign anyway. I
Speaker 1: bring this guy up because I think he's maybe the
Speaker 1: best example of like the damage that you do to
Speaker 1: yourself when you let yourself fall into these tunnels. Because Caldwell,
Speaker 1: he's not one of these like gray zone guys. He
Speaker 1: didn't make a bunch of money being a stand for dictatorships.
Speaker 1: He seems to everyone who talked, even the people who
Speaker 1: thought he was like out of his mind and his
Speaker 1: opinions on the Khmer Rouge agree he was a really
Speaker 1: nice man. He was a family man, he was a
Speaker 1: good teacher. He just completely left reality in this one thing,
Speaker 1: and it led him to oblivion.
Speaker 4: You know, I've been thinking about a lot of similar
Speaker 4: stuff in terms of like what Israel's currently doing, and
Speaker 4: like there's so many people who ares vocally supportive every
Speaker 4: single action that's being done. And there's even been attacks
Speaker 4: where I've seen people like vietnamly uh like defend what happened.
Speaker 4: It's like, no, this was like a necessary strike. It
Speaker 4: it did for all these reasons, blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 4: Even if even if someone like net and Yahoo then
Speaker 4: like like comes out and says like actually, no, this
Speaker 4: was like quote unquote like terrible accident or whatever, there
Speaker 4: will still be people defending it. And like, I don't
Speaker 4: know if all of these people are literally like bloodthirsty,
Speaker 4: Like I don't know if they actually really want to
Speaker 4: see like everyone in Gaza killed I'm sure there's there's
Speaker 4: maybe some people who are like just bad, but I
Speaker 4: think the reality tunnel version, I think is a lot
Speaker 4: more useful for understanding how there's so many otherwise very
Speaker 4: like normal, normal people who feel totally fine about cheering
Speaker 4: on the actions of the State of Israel right now
Speaker 4: as there you know, as the death told just gets
Speaker 4: higher and higher and higher every single day. No, it's
Speaker 4: certainly been something I've I've thought about very often these
Speaker 4: past few months, as I as I'm sure many other
Speaker 4: people are, you know, both staring into the abyss on
Speaker 4: on Twitter dot com wherever everyone has a take. But
Speaker 4: then also you know, if if you're ever going out
Speaker 4: to any like if you're ever going into any of
Speaker 4: these protests, there will probably be like a group of
Speaker 4: Zionist counter protesters yelling something. And it's it's a really
Speaker 4: tricky thing to navigate.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is, like it because like, and I guess
Speaker 1: what the scary question to me is, like, how do
Speaker 1: you communicate with someone who is not living in the
Speaker 1: same reality, And like, totally I don't think you really can.
Speaker 1: I think sometimes I know sometimes because I've seen it happen.
Speaker 1: Sometimes people just get out of that alternate reality on
Speaker 1: their own. Right, that does happen, thank god, but it's
Speaker 1: not like reliable that it happens. And I have, you know,
Speaker 1: as someone who has been in this space of researching cults,
Speaker 1: of researching disinformation for years now, I'm not aware of
Speaker 1: any reliable ways to break people out of these now
Speaker 1: you know, these these tunnels when they get themselves in.
Speaker 1: And that's that's the scariest thing to me. Right, there's
Speaker 1: there's a number of people. I don't think it's huge
Speaker 1: in an electoral sense, but it's probably thousands or tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of people who now believe that the Eisenhower
Speaker 1: is either badly damned or at the bottom of the sea,
Speaker 1: and they will keep believing that the same way that
Speaker 1: like a chunk of people believe that when they look
Speaker 1: up and see clouds, every cloud they see is like
Speaker 1: poison the US government shot out into the sky using
Speaker 1: our secret planes to murder people with fucking whatever. I
Speaker 1: don't know it's anyway, or the.
Speaker 4: Belief that literally ever university in Gaza has been secretly
Speaker 4: turned into a military.
Speaker 1: Base, right, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: It's They're like underground tunnels. It's like, you know, it's
Speaker 4: all of all of all of these things that it's
Speaker 4: not just like a I don't know if this switch
Speaker 4: happens immediately. I don't think it does. They're they're there.
Speaker 4: There may be like a tipping point. It is often
Speaker 4: a very gradual shift into different reality tunnels, and then
Speaker 4: you don't realize how far you are in one until
Speaker 4: you're like fully in it. And then in that case
Speaker 4: you probably don't even realize yourself. People on the outside
Speaker 4: will point out, oh wow, this is this is uh,
Speaker 4: this is some interesting beliefs you have suddenly fallen into. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but it it doesn't, It doesn't happen overnight.
Speaker 7: It is it is.
Speaker 4: It is a slow shift in a lot of cases.
Speaker 4: And yeah, laying out you know, quote unquote facts and
Speaker 4: logic often cases does not help at all and will
Speaker 4: actually hurt. It will produce a backfire effect. That's not
Speaker 4: the case for everybody, but that is the case for
Speaker 4: a lot of people. And it's easy to discount, you know,
Speaker 4: people yelling horrible things that you at a protest. It's
Speaker 4: easy to discount people you know saying horrible things on Twitter.
Speaker 4: But it's more frustrating when it's like you're on who
Speaker 4: you like previously like had a good relationship with And yeah, no,
Speaker 4: I mean this this this kind of reminds me of like,
Speaker 4: you know, attempts at QAnon and deprogramming back in like
Speaker 4: twenty nineteen, where you know, we had this influx of
Speaker 4: influx of older people and boomers and sometimes just like
Speaker 4: not super old people either also just like like moms
Speaker 4: in their thirties who started like leaving all this stuff
Speaker 4: and cutting them off from you know, contact with you
Speaker 4: or other people doesn't help obviously, but they can also
Speaker 4: be really hard to maintain, like a good relationship. And yeah,
Speaker 4: it's a weird balance of being able to provide a
Speaker 4: little bit of like compassion to someone and not completely
Speaker 4: cut them off while also maintaining your own personal boundaries.
Speaker 4: It's a really tricky thing. But in a lot of
Speaker 4: the cases of the QAnon stuff, all the most successful
Speaker 4: things that I've heard about people getting out of it,
Speaker 4: it did require a line, like there had to be
Speaker 4: some connecting thread to the person, and over time that
Speaker 4: thread could be pulled upon and maybe the person would
Speaker 4: use that thread as like as like a crutch when
Speaker 4: the reality so slowly started to crumble around them and
Speaker 4: it's really tricky and I don't have any good solutions
Speaker 4: for this. Nobody does. Anyone who does say they do
Speaker 4: is also a grifter who's lying and trying to make money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I will, I will agree with you. The closest
Speaker 1: we come to there being a solution is don't cut
Speaker 1: off time with the person. I mean, unless you have Obviously,
Speaker 1: there are some things that people can come to believe
Speaker 1: and advocate for that you have to, like, I'm not
Speaker 1: saying that that that line doesn't exist. Like I had
Speaker 1: someone reach out about a family member who had started
Speaker 1: to believe some conspiracy stuff regarding extra terrestrials that was
Speaker 1: like obviously untrue and it worried them, And I was like, well, look,
Speaker 1: you know, you don't have to tell them that you
Speaker 1: believe them. You can say like, I don't, you know,
Speaker 1: really feel the same way you do about this, but
Speaker 1: I'm always down to talk about it, right or like
Speaker 1: you know, I'm always you know, here to to listen
Speaker 1: if you want to talk about this and let him
Speaker 1: know that like they have a connection still if you
Speaker 1: make sure that there's like still a way they can
Speaker 1: get out of that tunnel and back up to something
Speaker 1: that resembles reality. Maybe they will.
Speaker 4: You know, yeah, I I really wish Robert Anti Wilson
Speaker 4: could have seen the twenty era internet. I'm sure he
Speaker 4: would have had some thoughts.
Speaker 1: He would have had some fascinating things to write about it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well this is this has been an exciting tale.
Speaker 1: Yes, indeed, so I don't know aircraft carrier down. We
Speaker 1: did it, Joe, Yeah, we did it.
Speaker 7: Joe.
Speaker 1: Go destroy the USS Eisenhower in your own life, just
Speaker 1: like the bake Koothies. Pretend did.
Speaker 7: This is?
Speaker 14: It could happen here a daily podcast and this might
Speaker 14: be our annual oh my god episode. And we have
Speaker 14: Robert and Garet and I am also here, Sophie, Hi, Garrett.
Speaker 1: We've been chasing the high of the come episode for
Speaker 1: more than a year, so let's try this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so, you know, last week we all got some
Speaker 4: really exciting news. The Rule of Law has found Donald
Speaker 4: Trump guilty on thirty four counts. So that's exciting. You can,
Speaker 4: of course google Trump Rule thirty four to learn more.
Speaker 4: Which was, you know, a joke. I saw a lot
Speaker 4: online and then I wanted to actually see what would
Speaker 4: happen if I did that?
Speaker 1: And then that turned into like that's evidence of mental illness.
Speaker 4: Well nobody does that, and then it turned into like
Speaker 4: five days of work that's further evidence. So that is
Speaker 4: what we're doing today. Hey, this is Gere from the Future,
Speaker 4: just cutting in to clarify one little aspect. When doing
Speaker 4: the legal review for this episode, we noticed that we
Speaker 4: never actually defined what rule thirty four is. Now, I
Speaker 4: assumed if you're listening to this podcast, you know what
Speaker 4: rule thirty four is, But just in case you do not,
Speaker 4: Rule thirty four is part of the memified Rules of
Speaker 4: the Internet. It originally comes from a two husand through webcomic,
Speaker 4: but Rule thirty four states that if it exists, there
Speaker 4: is porn of it, meaning that you can find porn
Speaker 4: of anything on the Internet, whether that be cooking, bowling
Speaker 4: or in this case Donald J. Trump. And you know,
Speaker 4: as someone who is just reviewed basically all of the
Speaker 4: old J. Trump pornography that I could find on the
Speaker 4: Internet these past five days, I did try to keep
Speaker 4: this episode roughly PG thirteen. We kind of cross that
Speaker 4: boundary a little bit. So I do think it's you know,
Speaker 4: probably wise to give some sort of general sexualized content
Speaker 4: warning here. But again I tried, I try to keep
Speaker 4: things as tame as I can, you know, all things considered. Anyway,
Speaker 4: back to the episode, I started my journey by doing
Speaker 4: the most obvious thing I could think of, which is
Speaker 4: opening a virtual PC and using Google through the tour
Speaker 4: browser to search Trump rule thirty four.
Speaker 14: No, this is already sounding like a great, great life
Speaker 14: choice when you have to make all of.
Speaker 15: Those steps to search something, well, because.
Speaker 4: I don't what all of my like entire computer and
Speaker 4: search results just to get completely fucked over for the
Speaker 4: next like week or two, which they might just already
Speaker 4: because this is all in a Google doc now, so
Speaker 4: it's already being mine, you know. Yeah, so I'm already
Speaker 4: fucked very similar to the way that we'll be discussing today.
Speaker 4: So wow. The first result when you google Trump rule
Speaker 4: thirty four is the website's rule thirty four dot xxx.
Speaker 4: So here we go, just straight to the source. I
Speaker 4: clicked on the link, and as the page loaded, I
Speaker 4: was shocked by what I saw, or more accurately, what
Speaker 4: I didn't see. There was far less Trump porn than
Speaker 4: what I was expecting. That not even like a single
Speaker 4: full page of results.
Speaker 1: See this is what Joe Biden's taken from.
Speaker 4: US only thirty one pieces of artwork came up in
Speaker 4: the search results, seven of which didn't even feature Donald
Speaker 4: Trump and only used to name. That's right, But many
Speaker 4: of them just didn't even have Trump and only used
Speaker 4: his name as like a joke tag for typically some
Speaker 4: sort of like furry pornography, which is can it be
Speaker 4: a very common trend for the rest of this episode?
Speaker 4: So what would you expect the first results to contain
Speaker 4: on the website? Rule thirty four do xxx god I Garrison.
Speaker 1: I don't even know. I'm imagining a lot of like
Speaker 1: you know how, there's those like political cartoons like yeah,
Speaker 1: I forget. I think the guy's name Ben Garrison. I
Speaker 1: think it is who like always draws Trump as like shredded.
Speaker 1: I guess that's kind of what I expect.
Speaker 4: There are certainly some of those, but the very first
Speaker 4: piece features a glossy rendering of Vladimir Putin's head with
Speaker 4: a quote. This isn't me just quoting myself. I don't
Speaker 4: know why I said a quote, but it's what I
Speaker 4: described as a penal like object looming in front, and
Speaker 4: I believe this is alluded to be Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: I feel like the listener needs to know that Garrison
Speaker 1: for reasons that surpass all understanding, is wearing a fitted
Speaker 1: shirt and tie. As they explain this to us, this
Speaker 1: is serious and ambiance you are not getting as a listener.
Speaker 4: This is a serious topic for me.
Speaker 1: I can see that.
Speaker 15: See, Like I was thinking, like Trump fucking a flag.
Speaker 4: But we'll get some flag action later, don't worry.
Speaker 15: I'm so glad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So there we go.
Speaker 4: The next image is actually gonna be a little bit
Speaker 4: more useful in kind of forecasting some trends that we're
Speaker 4: gonna be going over. The next image is Donald Trump
Speaker 4: in the makeup and lingerie engaged in some sort of
Speaker 4: what I would describe as an interracial cuckhold scenario in
Speaker 4: the White House.
Speaker 1: Not the best.
Speaker 4: This is where we're gonna start start seeing some worrying trends.
Speaker 4: And part of the difficulty in this episode was like
Speaker 4: I can't just show everyone all this pornography. That would
Speaker 4: be like an HR violation. And I'm not gonna have
Speaker 4: the editor, you know, cut together weird poorn audio like,
Speaker 4: so it's it's all I often to describe this with word.
Speaker 4: But I did find one the tie sense the tie.
Speaker 4: But I did find one work around is I collected
Speaker 4: all of the pictures of just Trump's face, divorced from
Speaker 4: any other context of the image. I will actually share
Speaker 4: the picture of his face across some of these some
Speaker 4: of these artworks. Okay, so here is here is image
Speaker 4: number one?
Speaker 11: Oh honey, not great?
Speaker 7: Is that not like that?
Speaker 1: So this is not I need to qualify here. This
Speaker 1: is not like a political cartoon. This is somebody trying
Speaker 1: to get off.
Speaker 4: Okay, correct, Almost none of these are going to be
Speaker 4: political cartoons. Great, the very last one is, but all
Speaker 4: of these are just just regular artwork.
Speaker 1: I feel like I have to comment on this with
Speaker 1: a reference that Garrison might be several decades past your time,
Speaker 1: but he looks like Missus doubt fire. He looks like
Speaker 1: Robin Williams and drag a little bit.
Speaker 4: I would say Williams pulls it off a little bit better.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, I mean Robin Williams could pull off anything.
Speaker 14: I just don't think that lipstick works for Trump's complexion.
Speaker 4: No, And I think it's fair.
Speaker 1: His eyeshadows a little heavy, There's definitely some some troubling.
Speaker 1: Hair look good, Hair's looking great.
Speaker 15: Side note is the image framed behind him also Trump?
Speaker 1: Yes, that's him? That's Trump as some sort of Mussolini
Speaker 1: type figure. He's got like the Roman laurel wreath in
Speaker 1: his hair he does, which I believe that Trump has
Speaker 1: a photo like that in his house. That that actually
Speaker 1: all right, that could be real.
Speaker 15: Next one, yeah, we have to get.
Speaker 4: We have to get through a few of these. So
Speaker 4: there is there is multiple tentacle pieces, which I'm sure
Speaker 4: we could all all guess, right, that's that seems pretty obvious.
Speaker 4: There is a drawing of Putin and Trump engaged in
Speaker 4: what I would describe as old man yawi, which is uh,
Speaker 4: I'm gonna need to see that two parts, and one
Speaker 4: of one of these images is actually animated into a gift.
Speaker 1: So that's exciting competent though, you know, I actually kind
Speaker 1: of like those as caricatures of both men. You really get,
Speaker 1: you get, you get a lot of personality, and I
Speaker 1: do feel like that's how Vladimir Putin looks when he's coming.
Speaker 4: It's it's not bad.
Speaker 15: Uh oh, I don't think about that, Jesus Christ.
Speaker 4: Two fun comments underneath this one is this is actually
Speaker 4: so hot hashtag mega and this is why isn't to
Speaker 4: our president anymore?
Speaker 1: Perhaps?
Speaker 15: Oh okay.
Speaker 4: We also we also have Trump in a in like
Speaker 4: a dungeon orgy comprised of horror movie characters and female
Speaker 4: pop stars. An image posted the day after the election
Speaker 4: in twenty sixteen, there is Trump in his suit having
Speaker 4: sex with an anime girl wearing a Confederate battle flag
Speaker 4: bikini and cowboy hat. This is back dropped by a
Speaker 4: big American flag and the Confederate girl has a make
Speaker 4: America Great again butt tattoos. So getting some kind of
Speaker 4: conflicting messages there. But this Trump face is really not great.
Speaker 4: I really don't like it. See yeah, his eyes early
Speaker 4: squished together. In a lot of these, he's giving a
Speaker 4: thumbs up. I would say about half the images he's
Speaker 4: giving you know where that you know where that thumb's
Speaker 4: about to be right, Like that's part of what makes
Speaker 4: this unsettling.
Speaker 14: I really appreciate in this one that for his fingerprint,
Speaker 14: it's just like a spiral swirl.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's this.
Speaker 15: Yeah, not the best one, read us some comments.
Speaker 4: The comments for this one are quite good. Quote. I
Speaker 4: want to see more thick or flat blonde wife who's
Speaker 4: wearing a cowboy hat. I want to help make America
Speaker 4: to be great. This turned me on bigley and frankly.
Speaker 1: Okay, you've buried the lead, which is that I want
Speaker 1: to help America to be great was posted by hex
Speaker 1: Maniac undersco or poke or yeah, I'm guessing this is
Speaker 1: some sort of Pokemon obsessed slut witch. That's that's kind
Speaker 1: of many such cases. Taking this many such cases quite
Speaker 1: frankly made my peepy huge. And if people say this
Speaker 1: is not pretty, they are wrong. They are working for
Speaker 1: the socialist globalist democrats and Chinese government, and it's impossible
Speaker 1: to know if that's a joke.
Speaker 4: We have a really interesting one by an artist named L. G.
Speaker 4: L Eing. How I'm gonna say sorry.
Speaker 1: There's also the last post on that is why is
Speaker 1: the Coctus color?
Speaker 4: Yes, the last covet for the Confederate for the Confederate girl.
Speaker 4: What is why is the Coctus color? Which is quite funny,
Speaker 4: but we have the next one is actually a three
Speaker 4: panel spread. First is a Democrat donkey for Sona. The
Speaker 4: second part is a floating Donald Trump elephant head with
Speaker 4: like a propeller extending out of the top and a
Speaker 4: robot hand coming out of the trunk reaching for the
Speaker 4: donkey's ass. Lastly, the Trump elephant now has an extendable
Speaker 4: boxing glove trunk and is flying victoriously over the Donkey
Speaker 4: Democrat with a black eye.
Speaker 1: See they I like this more before we got into
Speaker 1: like domestic abuse territory.
Speaker 4: No, this is We're gonna get into a lot of
Speaker 4: problematic aspects. I will just say now if you don't
Speaker 4: want to listen to some kind of deeply troubling psycho
Speaker 4: sexual themes develop over the course, especially once we get
Speaker 4: to the A three section.
Speaker 1: Okay, you know, okay, sorry, we need to talk about
Speaker 1: this post by user trash Fucker.
Speaker 15: Yeah, I don't wow. Okay, So this the.
Speaker 4: Comment, the comment for the donkey first, so no one says,
Speaker 4: quote I love you and your art, though, this really
Speaker 4: represents how that orange treated women and how he assaulted
Speaker 4: them by grabbing their genitut test. Beautiful art, beautiful styles.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 15: If you can't spell genitals, you're not allowed to grab them.
Speaker 15: That is the law of the world.
Speaker 1: Now reading that post, I want more than anything to
Speaker 1: have Trump comment on some of these. Oh, get him
Speaker 1: up on the podium talking about this beautiful art, beautiful styles.
Speaker 1: They're saying, it's the most beautiful donkey pornography. Anybody's ever
Speaker 1: made on the dark web.
Speaker 4: A really bad one is a cartoon of Milo Ianopolis
Speaker 4: having sex with a hashtag never Trump Orthodox Jew who
Speaker 4: might be Ben Shapiro. I can't tell please, please, please
Speaker 4: until he supports building the wall as then, so as
Speaker 4: this is happening, on the background, a yasified Trump is
Speaker 4: sitting on the wall giving a thumbs up. This is
Speaker 4: by a Nazi cartoonist named Emily Usis here is here
Speaker 4: is yasified Trump thumbs up?
Speaker 1: He sure is, man.
Speaker 4: The cheeks are apple. It's the only way to describe it.
Speaker 4: Where is my Sophie. I don't think I can show
Speaker 4: you that image because it'll be an HR. I can't
Speaker 4: show you that part because it's too there's too much
Speaker 4: stuff going on.
Speaker 15: Okay, send it to me on signal later, Sophie, that's
Speaker 15: an HR violation.
Speaker 1: You're not allowed to ask here. I don't think.
Speaker 4: I barely look.
Speaker 6: I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't have a great recall of the of the
Speaker 1: HR course we have to take every year about sexual harassment.
Speaker 4: But I am assure that you are both in violation
Speaker 4: of company that Robert, that is because you're like two
Speaker 4: years behind and all of your all of your man
Speaker 4: did work trainings.
Speaker 14: I get a notification in my email twice a day
Speaker 14: that Robert hasn't done some like legally required training.
Speaker 1: So maybe I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure you are
Speaker 1: both in violation of our companies.
Speaker 4: Probably.
Speaker 15: Probably, But these Trump drawings just get keep getting more bizarre.
Speaker 4: There's a really good one of an octopus doytal Trump
Speaker 4: getting intimate with a furry fox and cat. Well, I
Speaker 4: do want to see that, with the comment posted under
Speaker 4: from what I've known, Trump doesn't support these kind of things.
Speaker 1: That's probably true. I don't think he'd be thrilled about that.
Speaker 4: So there's a few other furry ones, notably one with
Speaker 4: Trump grabbing the buttocks of a wildcat with some with
Speaker 4: very small hands, and one of a sexy Trump plowing
Speaker 4: down Fluttershy in front of an American flag. Oh god,
Speaker 4: that makes Yeah, it's bad. Quote. I guess I'm not
Speaker 4: the only mega bronie out there. Also quote I want
Speaker 4: to end my life. Sorry, also quote I want my
Speaker 4: life to end right.
Speaker 15: FU me too, honey, me too. That's that's like a
Speaker 15: lot of Trump back. I did not need to see
Speaker 15: that much of his Sophie.
Speaker 4: There's so much more Trump back anyway, So results for
Speaker 4: Donald J. Trump specifically produced a handful of new images,
Speaker 4: one really bad one of Trump groping a family guy character.
Speaker 1: But which family guy cares character?
Speaker 4: Garrison, I've never seen family guy. It's some woman.
Speaker 15: There's also okay, sorry, is that his face as a
Speaker 15: ball sack?
Speaker 4: No, that's just his face.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that feels like that does feel like some
Speaker 1: kind of like standard lib political cartoon Trump drawing covered
Speaker 1: bronze areas.
Speaker 4: It's trying to be in the family guy style. There's
Speaker 4: also a cartoon of a of a of a naked,
Speaker 4: very very buff well endowed Donald Trump flexing while holding
Speaker 4: a cigar, sitting in his armchair, which has the really
Speaker 4: good comment his thumb is on the wrong side, which
Speaker 4: is that that's true.
Speaker 15: I just wile everyone to know about. Garrison has pged
Speaker 15: these for us.
Speaker 4: They're like PG.
Speaker 15: Thirteen, so we're not seeing anything.
Speaker 4: This is this, this is all, this is all above board.
Speaker 4: One of the worst ones, in my opinion, is a
Speaker 4: very very steamy rendering of a blushing Trump looking behind
Speaker 4: toward the viewer with his butt pushed into the foreground.
Speaker 4: MEGA is written across the cheeks in the upper left
Speaker 4: corner is a close up of a smooth scrotum stretched
Speaker 4: out hole Garrison.
Speaker 1: When it comes to HR violations, I feel like you
Speaker 1: can't say stretched out whole. I think that's forbidden on
Speaker 1: a company call. I don't think you're allowed to say tried.
Speaker 4: To really turn the script into like the most like
Speaker 4: academic word I can. There are text bubbles of Trump
Speaker 4: conversing with the viewer. Trump says, you will vote for
Speaker 4: me after this right, with the viewer responding yeah sure.
Speaker 1: In the board they can't even get somewhat excited about
Speaker 1: this election.
Speaker 4: Extra text with an arrow pointing to Trump reads ineligible
Speaker 4: to run again. This piece has by far the highest
Speaker 4: number of horny comments underneath the image. Now I think
Speaker 4: the actual worst when I discovered is a happy International
Speaker 4: Men's Day cartoon of Trump wearing an American flag thong
Speaker 4: standing on top of a box of noble Peace prizes.
Speaker 15: With thanks you for censoring that.
Speaker 4: Jesus with the Stephen with the Stephen Universe character Pearl
Speaker 4: in a bikini holding onto Trump, rubbing her leg against
Speaker 4: his thigh.
Speaker 1: Now see, and I don't feel like Pearl would do this.
Speaker 4: No, No, so Pearl has a text bubble saying forget women,
Speaker 4: I only make love to real men.
Speaker 7: Now.
Speaker 4: Now, I wanted to learn more about why this image exists.
Speaker 4: The artist behind this creation is named Luke Weber, and
Speaker 4: he actually used to work on this show Steven Universe
Speaker 4: as a story artist.
Speaker 1: Oh god, so this is Cannon.
Speaker 4: No, Luke had really unhealthy Luke had a really unhealthy
Speaker 4: obsession with the lesbian character Pearl, and would often waste
Speaker 4: time at work by drawing really horny art of himself
Speaker 4: and Pearl in a relationship of his art of him
Speaker 4: and Pearl would include other co workers like Ian Jones, Corty,
Speaker 4: and show creator Rebecca Sugar. He allegedly gave Rebecca Sugar
Speaker 4: a drawing of having sex with Pearl, which allegedly got
Speaker 4: him fired from the show among many other reasons, and
Speaker 4: he's been blacklisted from large parts of the animation industry
Speaker 4: for sexual harassment and violence.
Speaker 1: Oh well, that was much worse than I thought it
Speaker 1: was going to do.
Speaker 15: I was like, this is bat Novis is really fucked up.
Speaker 4: Eh, so this this there's there's some bad stuff. Now,
Speaker 4: I say the best for last. There's a small collection
Speaker 4: of pieces riffing on that picture of Trump playing tennis
Speaker 4: where he looks all quote unquote caked up one uh
Speaker 4: with Trump in his tennis SciFIT is bending over pants
Speaker 4: down crackout with a variation of featuring two large what
Speaker 4: I'm gonna call dark skinned penises, I think Trump interracial
Speaker 4: bottoming is a is a trend that we'll see reoccurring
Speaker 4: here of course. Now, however, I believe the superior tennis
Speaker 4: piece is from an artist named Shad Bass, who might
Speaker 4: be a Nazi or just pretends to be one online.
Speaker 4: Cutting in here to do a quick correction. So originally
Speaker 4: in this episode identified a Shad Bass as a trans woman,
Speaker 4: which is not the case. The reason why I thought
Speaker 4: this is because the most recent picture appearing to be
Speaker 4: Shad based on his Twitter account from like a year ago,
Speaker 4: is him as a trans woman talking about getting on estrogen. Now,
Speaker 4: this was actually part of an ongoing joke that I
Speaker 4: just didn't have the context for, as he's like a
Speaker 4: really scummy and deeply problematic artist who I did not
Speaker 4: feel like doing a whole deep dive on so Apologies
Speaker 4: for that and back to the episode. But she has
Speaker 4: drawn Trump in the same post as the famous photo,
Speaker 4: but as an anime girl wearing a transparent tennis skirt
Speaker 4: with the comments underneath saying I'd vote for her and
Speaker 4: I don't have enough weed for this shit.
Speaker 1: Nobody does.
Speaker 15: That's what I was about to say about this recording.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but you know what we do have, Sophie, an
Speaker 4: ad break, an ad break.
Speaker 14: Yeah, we can all consume substances to get through the
Speaker 14: rest of this.
Speaker 4: Okay, we are back now. The most interesting thing I
Speaker 4: found on a Real thirty four is a political comic
Speaker 4: by a guy named Larry Weltz who makes this thing
Speaker 4: called Cherry Comics. He's like an old hippie cartoonist. This
Speaker 4: is a long running series, but these collection of panels
Speaker 4: are about a group of women using quote unquote weaponized
Speaker 4: sex to bring to bring down Donald Trump. One page
Speaker 4: depicts the main character, Cherry, breaking into the White House
Speaker 4: like a quote unquote sex ninja to quote Fuckum to
Speaker 4: death unquote. One plotline has Cherry using her love powers
Speaker 4: to make all of the riot police at a twenty
Speaker 4: twenty protest to take off their riot gear and start
Speaker 4: having gay sex with each other through the power of love. Now,
Speaker 4: in the main panel, Cherry seduces a very unflattering Trump
Speaker 4: from the bushes of a golf course. Quote grab some
Speaker 4: uh this py word, Pretend I'm your daughter unquote. She
Speaker 4: gets trumped to chase her naked through a golf course,
Speaker 4: and when he's about to grab her, she disappears with
Speaker 4: the accompanying on a monopea twink, which I think is
Speaker 4: completely unintentional, naked into a face full of mud. I
Speaker 4: think this comic is actually good natured, but it's still
Speaker 4: kind of really problematic and very boomer.
Speaker 14: Pretend I'm your daughter, So they're like rooting for Trump
Speaker 14: to insst fa.
Speaker 4: There is a lot we will get to this. There
Speaker 4: is a lot of a Vanka Trump weird incest shit.
Speaker 4: It is deeply upsetting. Like I said, I put the
Speaker 4: content warning further up because there's gonna be some really
Speaker 4: bad psychosexual shit that I tried to really like clean
Speaker 4: up here. But yeah, this like boomer hippie cherry comic
Speaker 4: thing is really weird because it's very like nominally liberal,
Speaker 4: but it also has like really like classically racist cartoon
Speaker 4: depictions of black people. Oh great, It's just it's just
Speaker 4: a lot anyway. So but I again, I was kind
Speaker 4: of surprised that tags for Trump only returned like a
Speaker 4: few a few Trump images. When I started just quote
Speaker 4: unquote Trump on roll thirty four, most of the results
Speaker 4: were for a furry Japanese webcomic that's over one hundred
Speaker 4: and twenty pages. Because I think the artist just goes
Speaker 4: by the name Trump, He's completely unrelated, and I was
Speaker 4: really just expecting more stuff. I checked Dvan art and
Speaker 4: it was largely barren of Trump themed not safe for
Speaker 4: work images. Now, just as I was about to give
Speaker 4: up and I thought maybe there's not enough for an episode,
Speaker 4: my my primal Zoomer brain activated. It's like it's like
Speaker 4: something deep in my core knew what had to be done.
Speaker 4: Rival Zoomer. That's what I logged into the website archive
Speaker 4: of our own, the most popular fiction website on the Internet.
Speaker 4: There are over one thousand and seven hundred works titled
Speaker 4: tagged with Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: It's like the right number.
Speaker 4: Now, not all that's porn or erotica, right, So I
Speaker 4: had to really whittle down the results based on my
Speaker 4: own judgment and to my own tastes. Now, I had
Speaker 4: a very specific focus on the genre of old man yowie, which,
Speaker 4: of course you conveniently was also what the majority of
Speaker 4: the Trump centric works that were like rated, M and
Speaker 4: explicit could be categorized.
Speaker 1: As of course they were.
Speaker 4: Let's start our journey by going over the most popular
Speaker 4: Donald Trump relationship pairings and any guesses for what. The
Speaker 4: first one is like Donald Trump X, like who you
Speaker 4: know what, I'm.
Speaker 1: Gonna swing for the fences here and say Condoeza Rice.
Speaker 4: Sorry in a wrong Yeah, that was that was always
Speaker 4: a Sophie coming to the ste.
Speaker 15: I mean, unfortunately, I kind of think it's probably Avanka.
Speaker 7: It is not.
Speaker 4: It's not Avokavanka and Hillary had very few, so few
Speaker 4: that they're not even notable and not even in my list.
Speaker 4: The number one pairing for Donald Trump is Joe Biden
Speaker 4: with what one hundred and ninety two works? You know,
Speaker 4: that's what we deserve as a country. The number two
Speaker 4: is Vladimir Putin with one hundred and four. Number three, okay,
Speaker 4: number three is Shrek with thirty four works. Sorry, that's sorry,
Speaker 4: that is number four. Number four is Shrek. Number three
Speaker 4: is Barack Obama with thirty seven works.
Speaker 1: Well, that's less Obama than I expected of it.
Speaker 15: Yeah, that was my point.
Speaker 4: Number five is Kim Jong un with twenty.
Speaker 1: Four k the that's the exact number of Kim Jong
Speaker 1: owd once I expect.
Speaker 4: We have twelve works that are titled Donald Trump X Reader.
Speaker 4: Seven of them are Trump and Jesus Christ, six are
Speaker 4: Donald Trump Kanye West, five are Adolf Hitler Donald Trump,
Speaker 4: and two are Teletubbies and Donald Trump. Forty one works
Speaker 4: are titled as or tagged as bottom Donald Trump Wow Wow,
Speaker 4: far outnumbering the numbers where he tops.
Speaker 14: So I'm actually really surprised by only seven for Jesus
Speaker 14: because I'm kind.
Speaker 1: Of curious about the cheese.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Robert, I have I had great news for you.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 4: We don't have the time, nor do I have the
Speaker 4: willpower to go through each and every one of these,
Speaker 4: so instead I like to highlight some of the plot summaries, tags,
Speaker 4: and select paragraphs that caught my eye to give you
Speaker 4: a taste of the horror that I've gazed upon. I'll
Speaker 4: start with one of the newest entries in the Cannon,
Speaker 4: titled Donald Trump Prison Era. I'm gonna start with a
Speaker 4: time skip quote. It's been four years since Trump was rejailed.
Speaker 4: Him and his friends were locked in the safest, most
Speaker 4: desolate place in the prison. They may not have freedom,
Speaker 4: but at least they have each other. During those four years,
Speaker 4: Ben Shapiro was thrown in prison too. He was very
Speaker 4: silent at what he had done and therefore distanced himself
Speaker 4: from everybody. I don't know what he did, but he
Speaker 4: must have done something to ruin him as a person,
Speaker 4: Warren Buffett said, and everyone nodded. Is he one of
Speaker 4: Trump's friends? We have each other at least will be
Speaker 4: fine in this jail. Elongated muskrat said, Trump was cuddling
Speaker 4: with Andrew Tate in the corner.
Speaker 1: This is the closest I've come for feeling bad for
Speaker 1: Andrew Tate.
Speaker 15: I for the record, I still don't feel bad for
Speaker 15: Andrew Tait.
Speaker 4: Another one which is Trump ex reader. The summary is quote.
Speaker 4: It began four years ago when you saw him on
Speaker 4: TV during the presidential inauguration. You were laying on your bed,
Speaker 4: listening to country music on you American bedsheet. Suddenly you
Speaker 4: saw his big, handsome orange face and you knew he
Speaker 4: had to be yours. So in this one, the reader
Speaker 4: gets to marry or get with Trump in some way,
Speaker 4: and then you kind of like plan the January sixth
Speaker 4: insurrection together. So that's a fun one. There's a really
Speaker 4: good one titled Trump poly Relationship with the tags Joe Biden,
Speaker 4: Brock Obama, Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Sonic
Speaker 4: the Hedgehog, enemies to lovers see.
Speaker 1: I feel like only Sonic the Hedgehog of that group
Speaker 1: as the communication skills necessary for a successful polyamorous relationship.
Speaker 4: There's another one that's tagged as Donald Trump, Kanye West,
Speaker 4: BoJack Horseman.
Speaker 1: Of course I feel you know, BoJack, would you get
Speaker 1: him drunk enough, he'd get on with that.
Speaker 4: And there's really like there's two big genres here. There's
Speaker 4: the genre that's just like regular smut, where you feel
Speaker 4: like someone's just like a controlled f to all of
Speaker 4: the names and like just like switched it around, versus
Speaker 4: the fan fits that are entrenched in world building that
Speaker 4: integrates erotic literature with the world of Donald Trump. And
Speaker 4: those are the ones I like to focus on more
Speaker 4: because you know, it's not universe exactly. You know, it's
Speaker 4: not just someone control effing just like a regular sex scene.
Speaker 4: I wanted to actually like, I want to have lore,
Speaker 4: I want world building. I need to be connected to what.
Speaker 1: The story titled Donald Trump's Monstrous dick that you've put
Speaker 1: in this document.
Speaker 4: No, I'm gonna skip over that one. Actually we don't
Speaker 4: have enough creat Oh okay, this is just a woman
Speaker 4: talking about how she finds his orange, shiny body attractive,
Speaker 4: which there's a lot of that kind of stuff, right,
Speaker 4: I'm gonna instead go to Where the Wind Blows by
Speaker 4: Just and lone three summary. Joe Biden is a seventeen
Speaker 4: year old senior who happens to the top of his class.
Speaker 4: Not as the perfect straight, a capable student to friends
Speaker 4: and family, but what happens when a new student who
Speaker 4: got kicked out of his old school for fights gets
Speaker 4: partnered up with him for tutoring. I'm actually gonna skip
Speaker 4: to chapter two titled what the Sigma?
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, oh, my god.
Speaker 4: Quote. After about two hours they finished their study session,
Speaker 4: Joe went out to a cafe with his childhood friends
Speaker 4: Brock and Bury the Bee Benson just imagine Bury the
Speaker 4: Bee to be six feet tall. The three of them
Speaker 4: talk at a booth inside when the topic of Donald
Speaker 4: brought up. Joe, bro Dude, I heard that Donald got
Speaker 4: kicked out of his old school for selling illegal stuff
Speaker 4: and getting into three fights per week at least Barry
Speaker 4: said in a hushed tone. Has he tried to hurt
Speaker 4: you at all? Do need help? Is he meeting up
Speaker 4: with a secret gang or something? Barry uttered under his
Speaker 4: breath as his wings slightly flapped.
Speaker 1: What the fuck? So he's a literal b wait?
Speaker 14: So no, no, no, no, no, Barry the Bee Benson
Speaker 14: is the Jerry Seinfeld Bee movie?
Speaker 4: Be correct?
Speaker 15: I'm might wait? No really joking, Robert, Yes, yes.
Speaker 4: We got back.
Speaker 15: Why fucking b movie?
Speaker 1: Somehow Jerry's I can't escape jerrys idfelt. No matter where
Speaker 1: I go, He's always there. Even in Trump pornography, Jerry
Speaker 1: follows me.
Speaker 4: Barry, you're overreacting, Brock said as he rubbed the inner
Speaker 4: of his eyes with his pointer fingers. I'm sure Joe
Speaker 4: can handle himself. He's almost eighteen. Besides, can we talk
Speaker 4: about something else, like how Drake and Kendrick got caught
Speaker 4: making out under the bleachers. I'm pretty sure they hated
Speaker 4: each other just three weeks ago, or at least Kendrick
Speaker 4: hated Drake after he dated the freshman. There's one called
Speaker 4: Election Day where Shrek tries to prevent you from voting
Speaker 4: and Trump shows up as like a superhero. There's some
Speaker 4: like isis jokes, refugee jokes. Anyway, there's some there's some
Speaker 4: funny lines in here.
Speaker 1: To be sure, it is Donald Trump who is your hero.
Speaker 1: His intense alpha stare disintegrates the rest of Shrek's body,
Speaker 1: leaving you covered dot dot dot. Donald pulls his pants
Speaker 1: back on.
Speaker 4: Yeah so Yeahrek, Yeah. Anyway. There's a really troubling one
Speaker 4: titled Under the Crooked Lamp, which is tagged with American
Speaker 4: history fandom, World War II fandom, Nazi Germany fandom. The
Speaker 4: summary is quote short smut about Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump,
Speaker 4: with cameos from Barack Obama and Kanye West. So there
Speaker 4: you go, now, I The one of the most popular
Speaker 4: Donald Trump benfix is titled Donald Trump Story. Quote. I
Speaker 4: walked past the door of the Oval Office, No, my office,
Speaker 4: my house. Finally, the White House, the only race that
Speaker 4: should be here unquote. So not off to a great start.
Speaker 4: Throughout this fick. Trump falls in love with a Mexican
Speaker 4: architect that he hired to build the wall. That's the
Speaker 4: whole bit, now, Robert, I know you said you were
Speaker 4: interested in Jesus Christ.
Speaker 15: Of course is yeah, he is kind of.
Speaker 4: The most popular Jesus Christ. One I could find is
Speaker 4: called Jesus X Trump pussy Sure the uh. The summary
Speaker 4: is Trump kicks the bucket and has a very interesting
Speaker 4: surprise waiting for him. Chapter one, Trumpy Dumpty meets sky Daddy.
Speaker 15: Oh my god, I'm so worried about our society.
Speaker 4: So Trumpet Trump gets assassinated and to his surprise, gets
Speaker 4: sent to heaven. He thought he was going to be
Speaker 4: going to hell with gay people on Hillary Clinton, but
Speaker 4: instead Jesus is waiting for him, and Jesus says, be
Speaker 4: prepared for the right of your life or death. You
Speaker 4: are a bad little slut on earth and it's time
Speaker 4: for you to pay for your sins. My little Trump
Speaker 4: was sy I hope you're ready anyway.
Speaker 1: I kind of hate that they stole my catchphrase.
Speaker 4: Now by chapter seven, Donald Trump is pregnant. There's eight
Speaker 4: chapters in this.
Speaker 7: Kid.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, that's that's all you need to present to
Speaker 1: get someone fifty one fifty Like that's an involuntary mental
Speaker 1: health hold right there.
Speaker 4: Speaking of pregnancy, there's a very popular or the most popular.
Speaker 15: Go to an ad break speaking of pregnancy.
Speaker 4: Speak the most popular Donald Trump Xaydalf Hitler. One is
Speaker 4: titled Warped Tour A Great Place for Home of Hobes
Speaker 4: to mate hot guys. It's set at this music.
Speaker 1: Festival about wharfed Tour It's Not Wrong, where.
Speaker 4: Adolf Hitler and Donald tr are both there to like
Speaker 4: disrupt like a gay concert and they have like a
Speaker 4: little meet cute. Trump invites invites Hitler back to the
Speaker 4: back to his hotel room to come up with new
Speaker 4: plans for how to try to harass gay people. And
Speaker 4: it ends with Adolf Hitler being impregnated. But Trump is
Speaker 4: not a supportive parent, so Joseph Goebelers has to help
Speaker 4: deliver the child with Hitler instead of Trump.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I gotta say, at least they get
Speaker 1: the personalities right, because Joseph, Joseph is the kind of
Speaker 1: guy who would who would come in at the clutch
Speaker 1: like that to help Hitler deliver his lust baby.
Speaker 4: There's there's two decently popular Trump x Biden ones that
Speaker 4: are set during presidential debates, one of which they fuck backstage.
Speaker 4: And I don't think five thousand hits, I don't. Okay,
Speaker 4: no one gets pregnant in this one, but there are
Speaker 4: certainly others, so there's one where they have sex backstage,
Speaker 4: and then there's another one where they have sex on
Speaker 4: stage and Chris Wallace is moderating.
Speaker 1: Someone should let him know.
Speaker 4: Oh, and then in chapter two, Donald Trump gives birth
Speaker 4: because he got he got imprinted on stage.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think, Garrison, you need to do your job as
Speaker 1: a journalist, and we need to We need to reach
Speaker 1: out to Chris Wallace and ask, theoretically, would he narrate
Speaker 1: Donald Trump sex with Joe Biden they if they were
Speaker 1: to do that on stage, how does he feel about that?
Speaker 4: I will go to the very last one with sixty
Speaker 4: five thousand hits, by far, the most popular Donald Trump
Speaker 4: kind of erotica smut on the whole website. It's called
Speaker 4: go Fuck Yourself Donald Trump by orphan underscore account, who's
Speaker 4: actually written a few of the ones that we've talked
Speaker 4: about here.
Speaker 1: Sixty five thousand views.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Published in twenty seventeen, just before in Auguration day. Quote
Speaker 4: another person told me to go fuck myself today. Donald
Speaker 4: Trump told his strong Russian lover Vladimir Putin. I want to,
Speaker 4: but it's importants. There's only one of me. So the
Speaker 4: first paragraph is about how Putin forces Trump to eat
Speaker 4: three tubs of crisco a day. It's basically just body
Speaker 4: shaming for the majority of this of this piece sounds
Speaker 4: like too yes totally. And then Putin presents a clone
Speaker 4: of Donald Trump. Quote its eyes were almost as lifeless
Speaker 4: as Donald's himself. That was the true perfection of this creature.
Speaker 4: He's gorgeous, Trump said, tears sliding down his face. He
Speaker 4: felt as if he was looking into the mirror. But
Speaker 4: when he reached to touch his reflection, his his hands
Speaker 4: met soft clammy skin. Thank you, daddy. Trump eagerly began
Speaker 4: kissing his clone, pushing his tongue past slack lips until
Speaker 4: it learned to respond to him. Each hungrily tried to
Speaker 4: devour the other, their bodies writhing against each other, tears
Speaker 4: rolling down their faces in unison as they realized that
Speaker 4: neither one could ever fill the empty void that they
Speaker 4: felt inside. So that is my extremely abridged version of
Speaker 4: my AO three adventure. And unfortunately I do have one
Speaker 4: more section, but it's a bit shorter that we will
Speaker 4: get to after the break. For some of the more
Speaker 4: kind of I would say mainstream Trump pornography that can
Speaker 4: be found on the internet.
Speaker 1: Finally, all right, we are so back.
Speaker 4: We have never been more back. So I've been to
Speaker 4: you know, the regular zoomer places, right, we have like
Speaker 4: you know, DV and art type stuff. We have AO three.
Speaker 4: And then I realized that boomers also watch poor So
Speaker 4: I went to the two most popular porn websites, something
Speaker 4: I've never done before, and I there's only around thirty
Speaker 4: Trump centric videos across both sites. Now, there is a
Speaker 4: decent sort of like repeat uploads, right, and there's some
Speaker 4: videos that are just cut into shorter clips from longer scenes.
Speaker 4: But there's only about thirty source videos that I could
Speaker 4: find across the two top porn sites.
Speaker 15: Question, is it because they're being censored or is he
Speaker 15: nons with somebody that.
Speaker 4: No, it's just it's just not the most popular thing interesting.
Speaker 4: And now I would argue Trump is probably one of
Speaker 4: the more sexualized presidents we've we've had in recent years
Speaker 4: because of his which he.
Speaker 14: Makes because of who he is, not because of his
Speaker 14: sex appeal.
Speaker 4: Because of how he looks, but because of like his
Speaker 4: personal background and all of his you know, very obvious
Speaker 4: sex crimes. Right, Like we can go with like Bill Clinton,
Speaker 4: but like Trump, Trump is so much more sexualized than
Speaker 4: like Bush or Obama. It's it's it's it's kind of interesting,
Speaker 4: and yet very few materials on these sites now so weird.
Speaker 4: There's a few different types here.
Speaker 7: We have.
Speaker 4: We have animated ones, which is what I first went through.
Speaker 4: Some of these are just like voiceover clips of someone
Speaker 4: playing a porn game and doing voiceover for dialogue. Now,
Speaker 4: all of these are narrated in one take, and it's
Speaker 4: very clear the voice of over per and has not
Speaker 4: reviewed the material at all prior to their courting, because
Speaker 4: they will often and sentences at the wrong spot, breaking
Speaker 4: the flow of the dialogue. So that is one genre.
Speaker 4: There is a really upset anyone titled storby Daniels ex
Speaker 4: Trump cartoon hen Ti causeplay Milk with eleven thousand views,
Speaker 4: which has the worst most creepy looking PlayStation.
Speaker 1: Level What is happening? Holy oh?
Speaker 15: He looks like a corpse, but also is little like Clinton.
Speaker 4: Like these these three D models are fucking in what
Speaker 4: looks like a college dorm room. Trump is wearing his
Speaker 4: suit jacket and red tie with leather shoes but nothing else.
Speaker 4: And something I can't show you but I found really
Speaker 4: upsetting is that his legs are about as twice as
Speaker 4: big as his body, but with tiny feet. Like his
Speaker 4: legs are so much wider than the rest of him,
Speaker 4: they're huge. It's really concerning, and I don't think it's
Speaker 4: on purpose. It's just like a really bad three D model.
Speaker 4: So weird.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's upsetting.
Speaker 4: In one of the in one of the video game
Speaker 4: type ones, when Trump is orgasming, he says, ah bing
Speaker 4: bing bong bong bing bing bing.
Speaker 1: I just thought I should you.
Speaker 4: Big indeed, I now so onto live action.
Speaker 1: The first ive.
Speaker 4: The first live action one is a bit of an outlier.
Speaker 4: It is titled Donald Trump Parody clip Smoking and Drinking
Speaker 4: in the Oval Office Lol, with about two thousand and
Speaker 4: six hundred views. It's a woman cause playing a gender
Speaker 4: bent Trump and just like casually monologuing at the camera
Speaker 4: for like eighteen minutes. At one point she takes off
Speaker 4: her suit jacket and unbuttons her shirt, but not in
Speaker 4: like a strip teas way. At eleven minutes in she
Speaker 4: quote unquote rubs one out her words while continuing the
Speaker 4: half in character, ranting it was it's kind of a
Speaker 4: weird outlier, but I thought to mention it. Now onto
Speaker 4: the two major genres of Trump porn, the first one
Speaker 4: being the debate orgy Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton fucking
Speaker 4: Bernie Sanders and Megan Kelly parody. This one has a
Speaker 4: combined total of over of almost eight million.
Speaker 15: Views wave Bernie alone.
Speaker 4: This is christ This is the most popularly Donald Trump
Speaker 4: pornographic work on the internet.
Speaker 1: Oh no, the Bernie they got is kind of hot.
Speaker 1: I think we're good.
Speaker 4: This one, oddly enough, focuses on Bernie more than Trump.
Speaker 4: I think because the Bernie.
Speaker 15: Accident, because he's more fuckable.
Speaker 4: Because the Birdie actor did a really good job. Okay,
Speaker 4: and also this was this was like a live stream
Speaker 4: that's been edited together into a video, So the audience,
Speaker 4: like on the chat, was responding to Bernie Moore, so
Speaker 4: he got way more of the attention.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he just uses charisma.
Speaker 14: The sound qualities is carraboozes right now, Robert Jesus.
Speaker 4: The sound quality is terrible. Everyone's slowly reading off scripts
Speaker 4: and not even trying to hide it at all. Trump
Speaker 4: says he's going to build a wall around Mexico and
Speaker 4: install one big glory hole, which isn't how a glory
Speaker 4: hole works.
Speaker 1: No, I mean it could be.
Speaker 4: Hillary has asked if she thinks she might fall to
Speaker 4: the same infidelities as her husband, and Hillary explains that
Speaker 4: the Clinton family has a rule that whatever happens in
Speaker 4: the Oval office doesn't count unquote.
Speaker 1: That actually might be a Clinton family rule.
Speaker 4: All of the actors except for Bernie, look really uncomfortable
Speaker 4: the entire time. At one point they switched to like
Speaker 4: an unscripted Q and a section using like the live
Speaker 4: stream and it all reads like high school improv but
Speaker 4: obviously like not with high schoolers, not for high schoolers,
Speaker 4: but just like it is so awkward. About halfway through
Speaker 4: the twenty minute video, Megan Kelly asks Trump if you
Speaker 4: would like to improve his personal rating among married women
Speaker 4: as they start having sex, and then Hillary says, quote,
Speaker 4: I'd rather fuck the party than the enemy, and calls
Speaker 4: on Bernie. There is a lot of feel the burn
Speaker 4: jokes in here, so.
Speaker 1: Many, there's a couple of good there. We should We
Speaker 1: should figure out that burn party actor though, get them
Speaker 1: on the pod, honestly. Staff.
Speaker 4: The second most popular one is titled Erection to twenty
Speaker 4: sixteen Donald trumpf Fox Hillary Clinton during debate. It has
Speaker 4: over five million views. Once again, we start with a
Speaker 4: build a wall bit, but at this time it's Hillary
Speaker 4: who makes a move on Trump. The third most popular
Speaker 4: one is called cream Pie Debate. This is the closest
Speaker 4: one in the entire collection. It has three to a
Speaker 4: half million views. Much more accurate ages, but the impressions
Speaker 4: are really bizarre. Like they all have like weird accents.
Speaker 4: I can't quite tell where they're from, but they all
Speaker 4: sound there.
Speaker 1: Almost certainly somewhere in eastern Europe.
Speaker 4: No, they're American.
Speaker 7: Now.
Speaker 4: Trump waves around a gun on the debate stage, talking
Speaker 4: about Hillary wants to take away the Second Amendment. He
Speaker 4: points the gun at her, threatens to blow the wench
Speaker 4: away because she's trying to rig the election. The winch,
Speaker 4: the wench. That's a quote, when and calls her crooked
Speaker 4: Hillary with quote unquote crooked genitals.
Speaker 9: You know, he.
Speaker 4: Actual Trump might say that at some point. But you
Speaker 4: can kind of see how the video will develop from
Speaker 4: here right right now. I was not prepared for how
Speaker 4: racist it would get. Trump gets like this, this like
Speaker 4: dark dildo, and it starts screaming and growling in like
Speaker 4: a really upsetting fashion. There's a whole bunch of really
Speaker 4: racist comments. Hillary implies that she took part in all
Speaker 4: of the sexual growling. It's the best. It's the best
Speaker 4: word I could find to describe the sea.
Speaker 1: I think, I think I get what Garrison is.
Speaker 14: I was gonna say, I noted, don't expand uh yeah.
Speaker 4: Hillary talks about how she took part in all of
Speaker 4: Bill Clinton's sexual escapades and then uses a strap on
Speaker 4: on Donald Trump, but it's simulated. They don't actually do
Speaker 4: it in the clip, so minus points for that. The
Speaker 4: actor for Trump makes some really interesting faces, and at
Speaker 4: the end of the video, Hillary shoots out Trump's votes
Speaker 4: from her ballot box, which covers Trump's face in the
Speaker 4: rejected votes, which he wipes off with an American flag,
Speaker 4: something that multiple commenters took great offense to. Not the
Speaker 4: rest of the video, but the fact that he wipes
Speaker 4: it off with an American flag seemed to really upset
Speaker 4: some people.
Speaker 10: Now.
Speaker 4: The guy that made this created four other Trump themed
Speaker 4: porn videos, a Deep Throat Diplomacy where Trump dribes the
Speaker 4: president of Mexico to pay for the wall by offering
Speaker 4: a quote beautiful white woman who happens to be Trump's daughter, Avanka.
Speaker 4: He makes another Avanka one called Bobblehead butt Plug, which
Speaker 4: I think is pretty self explanatory. The third one is
Speaker 4: Trump and Obama's Daughter, which I skipped through mostly because
Speaker 4: it was really gross. And the last one's called Cuckold
Speaker 4: Trump with again three and a half million views. And
Speaker 4: this one has President and Obama and the Secret Service
Speaker 4: breaking into Trump Tower where Trump and Blaney are sleeping
Speaker 4: in bed, and then a cuck scene unfolds, once again
Speaker 4: very racist. We're nearing the end, I can I can
Speaker 4: see the tunnel at the end. We're now going to
Speaker 4: get to the last debate, one called Donald Tramp in
Speaker 4: the White House. This is going to be huge. With
Speaker 4: only a quarter of a million views, pretty low, but
Speaker 4: seventy percent up voted, So there you go. Now, in
Speaker 4: this one, Trump is doing a solo debate by himself,
Speaker 4: kind of predicting how he would handle the Republican primary in.
Speaker 1: Twenty twenty four ahead of its time.
Speaker 4: But in the context of the video, it's basically just
Speaker 4: a journalist that's interviewing him. So after some like, you know,
Speaker 4: very very typical haha, Trump is racist type jokes, the
Speaker 4: skit turns oddly poigniant, where Trump kind of starts whispering
Speaker 4: and says, quote, I'm using my ranting billionaire charm to
Speaker 4: win you over. First, I'm going to tell you that
Speaker 4: America is really lost and I'm the one to find it.
Speaker 4: And then you will be drawn to all of my
Speaker 4: ideas like a very special episode of Shark Tank. And
Speaker 4: then I will tell you how all the other candidates
Speaker 4: are stupid, idiotic morons, and you'll be left wondering is
Speaker 4: he trying to get his subrenet band or is everything
Speaker 4: he's saying really what he means. Now, let's have sex.
Speaker 4: As I whisper racist comments into your ear unquote this
Speaker 4: Trump actor. The hair is too orange. The hair is
Speaker 4: too orange.
Speaker 15: Everything's too orange.
Speaker 4: He's really orange. They're really into making him orange. But
Speaker 4: the hair is just way too red. So that is
Speaker 4: the that's the that's the like the main category, which
Speaker 4: is like these like debate ones. But there's a second
Speaker 4: category which is almost equal in numbers. And this is
Speaker 4: this is the last genre of work we'll be talking about,
Speaker 4: and it's the one I find the most telling. It's
Speaker 4: it's they're all a very distinct type of like amateur
Speaker 4: video of a man in a low quality Trump mask
Speaker 4: getting beaten up, downed, pegged, interrogated, or otherwise humiliated by women. Now,
Speaker 4: these these have anywhere from like four hundred views to
Speaker 4: twenty five thousand views, so they're watched less, but the
Speaker 4: people that are making them seem really passionate. We have
Speaker 4: titles like Trump gets a Donkey punched by two sexy women,
Speaker 4: one hundred percent Real, sixty FBS ten.
Speaker 15: EVP or one hundred percent Real.
Speaker 4: Or make America beg Again, Kick my Ass President Trump,
Speaker 4: and I think most evidently two beautiful femdoms humiliate, feminize,
Speaker 4: and peg sissy in Donald Trump mask. So, okay, do
Speaker 4: you want to see the collection of masks before or
Speaker 4: after I talk about this genre? I'm gonna save it
Speaker 4: for after, and it never I'm gonna save it for after.
Speaker 4: So I've gone through like these these three different kind
Speaker 4: of medium series in this in this episode, right, we
Speaker 4: have we have uh like the drawn art, We have
Speaker 4: AO three fan fic, and we have this like you know,
Speaker 4: more classic pornography live action stuff. And each each of
Speaker 4: these has different aspects that I believe are are clearly
Speaker 4: tied to the medium, right, like like furry stuff for
Speaker 4: drawn art, the largely homosexual pairings oft AO three and
Speaker 4: the normy hetero misogyny of classic pornography. But I'm more
Speaker 4: interested in when some of these kind of medium specific
Speaker 4: aspects intersect and how that might tell us something about
Speaker 4: what's really going on here. So, based on all the
Speaker 4: evidence I reviewed the past five days, I'm gonna split
Speaker 4: the Donald Trump pornographic catalog into two main kind of
Speaker 4: thematic sections, the two genders, if you will. First, we
Speaker 4: have Trump the strong man right. This is either propagated
Speaker 4: by like people on the right who genuinely admire Trump
Speaker 4: as like a dominant dictator, thus like displaying sexual submission
Speaker 4: to him is like a righteous duty, or like a
Speaker 4: sign of respect or a quest for validation. Alternatively, this
Speaker 4: strong men framing can also be used, and I would
Speaker 4: argue more perversely by liberals in some form of like
Speaker 4: a post irony desire for subjugation stemming from a like
Speaker 4: a neoliberal disenfranchisement or like neoliberal nihilism. Having a like
Speaker 4: a Freudian father figure you deeply despise strengthens the taboo
Speaker 4: aspect of repressed desire for the inherent domination of authoritarianism.
Speaker 4: I think the master slave kink is very common in
Speaker 4: the Trump AO three fix, presumably mostly written by people
Speaker 4: on the left, and this type of thing I think
Speaker 4: can be vulgarly tied to like the Lord Bondsman dialectic
Speaker 4: at play in this sort of politic, which is like
Speaker 4: defined by and desiring what you cannot be, So we
Speaker 4: have that plus all like the fucked up yet very
Speaker 4: common incest framing strengthens these kind of psychoanalytic links. But
Speaker 4: enough of that babble to contrast Trump the strong Man.
Speaker 4: The other major category is Trump the defiled, which is
Speaker 4: exceedingly popular on Rule thirty four AO three, and this
Speaker 4: kind of later category of femdom porn videos. This is
Speaker 4: like a revenge fantasy. It's uncaring in its embrace of
Speaker 4: problematic tropes so long as Trump is symbolically stripped of
Speaker 4: what signals his status of power. This often includes a
Speaker 4: misogynistic embrace of social norms that reflect authoritarian patriarchy. Trump
Speaker 4: is feminized mostly through actions to signal that he is
Speaker 4: lesser right. He's a masculated, penetrated, dominated, assaulted, and very
Speaker 4: often impregnated. Even death is no escape for in the
Speaker 4: eye after life, Jesus Christ continues the holy work of
Speaker 4: Trump's psychosexual humiliation. The hope is that the Catharsists will
Speaker 4: be found in putting the image of Trump through the
Speaker 4: types of things that the actual Trump has done to others,
Speaker 4: perhaps with some kind of perverse pleasure in this role
Speaker 4: reversal of now being the one to subject Trump to
Speaker 4: such experiences even through fiction. Now, I'm not necessarily saying
Speaker 4: all this stuff is bad or there are plenty of
Speaker 4: materials that I've reviewed that I do object to, but
Speaker 4: this mostly does fall under the guise of play and kink,
Speaker 4: which can be valid and often useful ways of sorting
Speaker 4: through psychosexual or psychological affairs. And obviously throughout a lot,
Speaker 4: if not most of these works, there is a large
Speaker 4: comedic element, but I think such comedy is still underpinned
Speaker 4: by some of these maybe deeper motivations. And to detox
Speaker 4: from that rant, here's a collection of really uncomfortable Trump
Speaker 4: mask pictures which, oh my, I have so many, I
Speaker 4: have so many of these. I have a whole collage,
Speaker 4: a whole alage of this.
Speaker 1: It's really I've got hr on the other line here,
Speaker 1: So we're gonna we're gonna actually swing over to a
Speaker 1: separate zoom call to talk through some of this.
Speaker 4: These looks so.
Speaker 14: Bad, it's the Iheartedaddy shirt with the horrible Trump mask.
Speaker 4: It's so bad. No, it's like it's weirdly trans misogynistic
Speaker 4: for all of all of these ones in the mask.
Speaker 4: It's just there's a deep he's a deep uncanny. He
Speaker 4: looks like he looks melting.
Speaker 1: David Bowie does bottom once it looks like the thin
Speaker 1: white Duke.
Speaker 4: If the thin white Duke like, oh God, got coke
Speaker 4: bloated or something terrifying stuff. I will I will post
Speaker 4: some of these mask images onto Twitter so you can
Speaker 4: check that on at Hungry bow Tie.
Speaker 7: I will.
Speaker 4: I will reply once this episode drops with with these
Speaker 4: awful with you with these awful collages I've created? Anyway, Robert,
Speaker 4: what what do you think about all this Trump porn again?
Speaker 1: I think we're all going to get fired for doing
Speaker 1: this episode. I think this has crossed every professional line
Speaker 1: that exists. But good work.
Speaker 15: Other than that, I was gonna say, I think yours
Speaker 15: serve is a really big race.
Speaker 9: I was.
Speaker 4: I was really proud I was able to sneak in
Speaker 4: a little bit of Hagel there at the end.
Speaker 9: I was.
Speaker 7: I was.
Speaker 4: I was really proud of that one.
Speaker 15: I can say one thing for sure, you can do
Speaker 15: a follow up.
Speaker 1: That's all of the hegel porn Really curious how much
Speaker 1: of that you can fight.
Speaker 14: What's exciting, what's exciting about this entire thing is Trump
Speaker 14: would fucking hate it, just like he hates all of
Speaker 14: his followers.
Speaker 4: In his core many such cases. Well, thank you for
Speaker 4: joining us on this deeply disturbing journey.
Speaker 1: I love to see it.
Speaker 4: Don't do this, thankfully, you only have.
Speaker 14: To listen to it.
Speaker 4: You'll you'll only have to listen to me explain it now,
Speaker 4: So now you don't have to fulfill this curiosity that
Speaker 4: I know has been bubbling in a lot of you.
Speaker 1: So there you are, and check back in next week.
Speaker 1: We'll be covering all of the best Hegelian pornography that
Speaker 1: the Internet can provide.
Speaker 15: Take a long weekend.
Speaker 11: Hi, everyone, it's me James, and I just wanted to
Speaker 11: read you this today. I'm going to put it in
Speaker 11: our episode this week because it's a cause that's important
Speaker 11: to us, and so we thought it would be something
Speaker 11: that might be important to you too as well. On
Speaker 11: the tenth of June twenty twenty four, Leonard Peltier, an
Speaker 11: enrolled member of the Turtle Band of Chippewa of Lakota
Speaker 11: and Ajibwei ancestry and the longest serving political prisoner in
Speaker 11: the United States, will be appearing before the US Parole
Speaker 11: Commission for the first time since two thousand and nine.
Speaker 11: He faces staunch opposition from the FBI and other law
Speaker 11: enforcement agencies due to having allegedly killed two FBI agents
Speaker 11: in a firefight on the twenty sixth of June nineteen
Speaker 11: seventy five, after the agents appeared on reservation land to
Speaker 11: execute a pretextural warrant. The initial firefight occurred during the
Speaker 11: quote reign of Terror on Pine Ridge in the wake
Speaker 11: of the occupation of Wounded Kney, a time of extreme
Speaker 11: violence when federal law enforcement installed a puppet tribal chair
Speaker 11: and was arming vigilantes who targeted and as traditionalists. Every
Speaker 11: since leading up to these events, as well as subsequent
Speaker 11: investigation and mister Peltier's extradition, trial, conviction, and sentencing, were
Speaker 11: characterized by gross misconduct on the part of law enforcement,
Speaker 11: the prosecution, and the courts. Mister Peltier's co defendants were
Speaker 11: separately tried and acquitted on grounds of self defense. Mister
Speaker 11: Peltier was railroaded and his case is tainted by discrimination
Speaker 11: at every level, ranging from the withholding of exculpatory evidence
Speaker 11: to the torture and coercion of extradition and trial witnesses,
Speaker 11: and from the refusal of the judge to dismiss and
Speaker 11: vowedly racist Dura, to the apologetic gymnastics of the courts
Speaker 11: affirming his convictions in the face of meritorious legal challenges
Speaker 11: had admitted evidence of outrageous government misdeeds. Mister Peltier has
Speaker 11: been in prison for more than forty eight years and
Speaker 11: he's almost eighty years old. He suffers from chronic and
Speaker 11: potentially lethal conditions for which he receives insufficient and substandard
Speaker 11: medical care. If you want to take acttion to hashtag
Speaker 11: free Lennard Peltier, you can call the US Parole Commission
Speaker 11: at two zero two three four six seven zero zero zero,
Speaker 11: and if you'd like to find more information on how
Speaker 11: to support, you can go to this r L. It's
Speaker 11: h T T P colon slash slash n d n
Speaker 11: C O dot c c slash Free Leonard Peltier. That's
Speaker 11: f ir E E L E O n A R
Speaker 11: D P E L t I E R, or you
Speaker 11: can follow n d N Collective on social media for
Speaker 11: more ways to support him, more information on Lennard Peltier.
Speaker 11: Listen to Margaret's podcast on the Lakota Nation, a read
Speaker 11: in the Spirit of the Crazy Horse by Peter Mathison.
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 15: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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