Speaker 1: Also media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted
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Speaker 2: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's just me
Speaker 2: James today and I'm joined by Jamie who is a librarian,
Speaker 2: and we are here to discuss the pending federal cuts
Speaker 2: on library funding and I guess years of attacks on
Speaker 2: library funding. So welcome to the show. Jamie, thanks for
Speaker 2: joining us.
Speaker 3: Hi, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is really great for me because I have
Speaker 2: been trying to find librarian for a very long time
Speaker 2: to talk to us on the podcast. I understand that
Speaker 2: lots of people have been like really concerned that we
Speaker 2: cover this, but also very afraid for their jobs, which
Speaker 2: is a rough position to be in, So thank you
Speaker 2: for coming on. I thought we'd start with like there
Speaker 2: was an executive order on the fourteenth of March I
Speaker 2: think it was called something like further something the federal bureaucracy, cutting, slashing, diminishing, whatever,
Speaker 2: you know, I don't really care. One of the outcomes
Speaker 2: of this was I believe the Trump administration moving towards
Speaker 2: a complete closure of IMLS. Is that right?
Speaker 3: So it depends upon how much joj and Trump and
Speaker 3: company are going to listen to Congress, because Congress has
Speaker 3: already funded IMLS, just the Institute of Museum and Library
Speaker 3: Services for this year, so that money already exists, it's
Speaker 3: already been allocated, and so in theory, they should be
Speaker 3: good for at least a year, and then next year
Speaker 3: when the budget comes up again, it should be up
Speaker 3: to Congress because Congress created this institution and Congress funds it.
Speaker 3: But the Executive Order and the commentary on it does
Speaker 3: say that they would like to dissolve it kind of
Speaker 3: as soon as possible, definitely next year. So it's really
Speaker 3: up in the air about how fast things would move,
Speaker 3: what exactly would happen, if it would be this year,
Speaker 3: if it'd be next year, whether anyone's going to listen
Speaker 3: to Congress.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we will find out, I guess. So can you
Speaker 2: explain for listeners who aren't familiar what IMLS is and
Speaker 2: what it does.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So it's, as I said, the Institute of Museum
Speaker 3: and Library Services, And so basically they are allocated money
Speaker 3: by Congress every year and then they hand it out
Speaker 3: to states, especially them, who kind of break it down
Speaker 3: into other grants. They give grants to states and libraries
Speaker 3: and institutions for things that museums and libraries do. So
Speaker 3: that includes things like on the museum side, maybe you know,
Speaker 3: putting together programming or doing big digitization projects. I used
Speaker 3: to work at an institution where we had a grant
Speaker 3: that did a lot of digitization of historic documents. And
Speaker 3: on the library side, they do all sorts of stuff,
Speaker 3: especially for public libraries. They end up funding things like
Speaker 3: summer reading programs, equipment, especially for Internet access, you know,
Speaker 3: all this stuff related to job training and those services
Speaker 3: that libraries offer. And interlibrary loan is a big one,
Speaker 3: so that people can access materials of their library doesn't hold,
Speaker 3: but it's held by other libraries. And rural libraries and
Speaker 3: tribal libraries especially really really benefit from this. Every single
Speaker 3: state and territory in the country gets these funds.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, I was, I was wondering why who fund
Speaker 2: it interlibrary loans so that they're the ones who facilitate
Speaker 2: like the trandsporting of the books.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, you know, depending on how your library, some
Speaker 3: libraries will fund it from their operations budget. But if okay,
Speaker 3: you know, especially for small rural public libraries where that
Speaker 3: might be very expensive, that is one thing that these
Speaker 3: grants go to is interlibrary loan.
Speaker 2: Okay. Yeah, So there are lots of very important services.
Speaker 2: And what would it mean if we didn't have that
Speaker 2: IMLS budget at all? Like, what would it mean especially
Speaker 2: for like, like you said, those kind of libraries that
Speaker 2: are financially I guess more marginalized in tribal libraries and
Speaker 2: rural areas and stuff.
Speaker 3: So I first want to mention that the entire budget
Speaker 3: of IMLS for twenty twenty four was something like two
Speaker 3: hundred and sixty six million dollars. We're not talking about
Speaker 3: huge sums of money in terms of the federal government.
Speaker 3: It comes out to about seventy five percent per person
Speaker 3: in the country. So yeah, we're not going to be
Speaker 3: saving on our taxes if this goes away, but that
Speaker 3: money makes a really big difference. So even smaller states
Speaker 3: that you know, maybe have a million people in it,
Speaker 3: might see a couple million dollars of these grants per year.
Speaker 3: And so what that would mean is that the things
Speaker 3: that maybe not all of them, but most of the
Speaker 3: thing that these grants cover would not be there. So
Speaker 3: that means that there wouldn't be summer reading in some places.
Speaker 3: That means that they wouldn't be able to buy the
Speaker 3: hot spots that they lend out to people who don't
Speaker 3: have internet at home. That means that maybe there wouldn't
Speaker 3: be the class that teaches your grandma how to not
Speaker 3: get caught in a fishing scam. So all sorts of things,
Speaker 3: those things just wouldn't be there because there's probably not,
Speaker 3: especially in red states, other funds that are going to
Speaker 3: come to cover that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like I think I was looking online and that
Speaker 2: by Judy something, it's something like zero point zero zero
Speaker 2: three percent of the federal budget is going to It's trivial.
Speaker 3: It's so small, right, Yeah, you could like take the
Speaker 3: I don't know, the gold toilets away from the Navy
Speaker 3: and cover it in yeah, right, Like it's so small, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: and yet it has this enormous outsized impact. You know,
Speaker 3: the statistics say that every dollar spent on imls returns
Speaker 3: two dollars to the economy. So it's actually, if you're
Speaker 3: going to measure it that way, highly beneficial, especially to
Speaker 3: these more marginalized areas.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe we should talk about that because I think
Speaker 2: if people like maybe they just don't happen to go
Speaker 2: to the library, maybe they don't you know, realize they
Speaker 2: have services they need, or maybe they don't live in
Speaker 2: the US. The library is not just a place where
Speaker 2: you can go and borrow the books, right, Can you
Speaker 2: explain some of the services that libraries provide, like you
Speaker 2: mentioned some, but they really help people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So, in for better or for worse, public libraries
Speaker 3: in the United States have become the social safety net
Speaker 3: of last resort because they already exist almost everywhere and
Speaker 3: it's so hard to get you know, not right now,
Speaker 3: but even in the past couple decades, other social programs
Speaker 3: started in many parts of the US that things kind
Speaker 3: of just get lumped into the libraries. So now you
Speaker 3: get your tax forms there, maybe they have a social
Speaker 3: worker on staff. It's the place that homeless folks can
Speaker 3: sit when it's snowing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so that kind of is like a little bit.
Speaker 3: Of side from what we're talking about right here, but
Speaker 3: I really do want to point out that public libraries
Speaker 3: have become the social safety net in many many places,
Speaker 3: so that aside, you know, offerings of aside from books
Speaker 3: and other media including ebooks, audiobooks, movies, and lots of formats, magazines, newspapers,
Speaker 3: there are tons of classes about all sorts of things,
Speaker 3: especially technology claus It's a place that a lot of
Speaker 3: people it's their only reliable Internet access. So you know,
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty five, you can't do mostly anything without
Speaker 3: the internet. You can't get a job without the internet,
Speaker 3: you can't maybe pay your bills without the internet. So
Speaker 3: that's a reliable place that people who don't have internet
Speaker 3: for various reasons. Maybe they live so far out in
Speaker 3: the country that just doesn't go there unless you have
Speaker 3: satellite right even now, or maybe you can't afford it
Speaker 3: or whatever, or there's one computer in your house and
Speaker 3: there's six kids and someone has to do their homework,
Speaker 3: so what everyone else is going to do, so then
Speaker 3: the computers themselves. And then also the other thing that
Speaker 3: I am less also does is those grants will sometimes
Speaker 3: purchase research databases. So if people kids, especially are trying
Speaker 3: to do their homework. Again, like children's and teens programming
Speaker 3: is another thing between homework help, social things clubs. So
Speaker 3: in a lot of places where there's not much going on,
Speaker 3: it's one of the places where young people can go
Speaker 3: in the afternoon or on the weekend and not be
Speaker 3: getting in trouble, either because they're making trouble or the
Speaker 3: adults think they are. Because there's somewhere productive to be.
Speaker 3: There's somewhere that's inside supervised or something to do. And
Speaker 3: so that's the kind of stuff we talk about in
Speaker 3: normal times when we're trying to fight for like weekend
Speaker 3: service or later hours. But if we're looking at it
Speaker 3: in the lens of IMLS, the building might be open,
Speaker 3: maybe because maybe they have the foundational operationals. But but
Speaker 3: then there won't be these programs, there won't be these resources.
Speaker 3: There will just be a bunch of books on the shelves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, It's like, I don't know, I'm amazed how many
Speaker 2: of my friends and neighbors don't understand how much celebrity does.
Speaker 2: Like I'm forever Like San Diego A, housing prices are
Speaker 2: ridiculous and no one seems to want them to not
Speaker 2: be ridiculous with lots of us do, but we don't
Speaker 2: get to choose it. And so like we have a
Speaker 2: larger house population, and I'm always like helping my in
Speaker 2: house neighbors go to the library and give them a
Speaker 2: ride or whatever so they can yet, like you say,
Speaker 2: access internet services life for benefits.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or just like sit and read the paper and
Speaker 3: know what's going on in the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and like not get harassed by the cops just
Speaker 2: for existing, which is the rest of their existence here. Certainly. Yeah,
Speaker 2: these are massively important. I think most people like have
Speaker 2: it no one because there's not really a big like
Speaker 2: fuck the library's movement, you know, like I think people
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, I guess, yeah, I guess that's the
Speaker 2: whole Like people should only read stories if they conformed
Speaker 2: and whatnot. Yeah, well fuck those people absolutely. Yeah. Talking
Speaker 2: of fuck those people, we unfortunately have to pivot to ads,
Speaker 2: so you know, here is some unfortunate advertisements. All right,
Speaker 2: we're back talking to people I dislike. Actually, San Diego
Speaker 2: mayor Todd Gloria, who was elected in twenty twenty and
Speaker 2: re elected shamefully this year, which is very disappointing. One
Speaker 2: of his first actions was to propose a budget which
Speaker 2: increased the bunding to the police, surprise, and decrease the
Speaker 2: funding to the libraries. It would lead to them closing
Speaker 2: for an extra day. Right, and this is our quote
Speaker 2: unquote progressive mayor, who you know has been anything but
Speaker 2: but this isn't a particularly uncommon scenario, right. I've spoken
Speaker 2: since then to librarians around the country who, for the
Speaker 2: last at least half decade have faced funding cuts. Can
Speaker 2: you explain, like, why doesn't the state see value in
Speaker 2: these services? I mean, I don't wanted to speak for
Speaker 2: you know, the Democrats defunding the libraries to give the
Speaker 2: cops more money, but can you explain, like why there
Speaker 2: has been this ongoing assault on library budgets.
Speaker 3: So you know, you're talking about the last decade and
Speaker 3: a half decade. I think we can really trace it
Speaker 3: back much farther, at least thirty years to the Clinton administration. Actually, okay,
Speaker 3: I want to talk about the Democrats, but even you know,
Speaker 3: the roots farther back than that, because we have a
Speaker 3: neo liberal problem. Right, So it's basically the idea that
Speaker 3: all activities should generate obvious immediate monetary profit, that everything
Speaker 3: should be run by a business, that everything should be
Speaker 3: subject to the market, quote unquote, And so that's where
Speaker 3: we are with libraries. Is that even though I can
Speaker 3: sit here and say every dollar that the IMLS spends
Speaker 3: generates two dollars of economic activity, then that somehow isn't
Speaker 3: even good enough because when the powers that be look
Speaker 3: at libraries, they just see money being flushed down the
Speaker 3: toilet and that's the only way they can measure anything.
Speaker 3: So if you look at it and you're just saying, well,
Speaker 3: this is a place we spend money. This doesn't create money,
Speaker 3: This doesn't make more money happen. The idea that everything
Speaker 3: should be run by a business and everything is it
Speaker 3: should be subject to market logics, that that would say, well,
Speaker 3: if we're going to subject everything to market logics, libraries
Speaker 3: have no value because we're only measuring it. And can
Speaker 3: this make the balance sheet? Can this make number go up?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 3: And even though libraries do make number go up, it's
Speaker 3: not obvious. You can't make it obvious. There's no direct
Speaker 3: line between what libraries do and number go up, even
Speaker 3: though there are actually is for example with IMLS. So
Speaker 3: you know, starting during the Clinton administration, when the federal
Speaker 3: government changed, and how the federal government work changed very
Speaker 3: much under the guise of increasing service quality, but what
Speaker 3: they actually did was lay off a quarter million workers
Speaker 3: and you know, turn everything into contract work instead of
Speaker 3: regular labor. And that I think filtered down from the
Speaker 3: federal level into states and municipalities, so that those levels
Speaker 3: of government too also started to look at how they
Speaker 3: ran their government things. And in many places public libraries
Speaker 3: are arms of local government. That those two should also
Speaker 3: be run like a business and be subject to market logics,
Speaker 3: and therefore number does not go up. We don't value this,
Speaker 3: and that's basically it is that you know. There, it's
Speaker 3: hard now that we've had thirty years of overt neoliberalism
Speaker 3: in our government system and a couple decades more of
Speaker 3: less obvious versions of it to make government, which is
Speaker 3: now being run like a business, even in the best
Speaker 3: of times, value things that aren't that aren't valued strictly monetarily, right,
Speaker 3: So there's no cultural value. And even if the monetary
Speaker 3: value isn't extremely obvious, if somehow doesn't.
Speaker 2: Count, yeah, yeah, I guess it. Kind of. I used
Speaker 2: to lecture it, so do lecture a university actually starting
Speaker 2: again next month, but like we pivoted towards like everything
Speaker 2: has to be stem in education Germany because.
Speaker 3: So that'll make money or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know why, because like Bill Gates make
Speaker 2: the line go up, and yeah, we lost so much
Speaker 2: that has not just intangible value you say, but actual
Speaker 2: tangible value, very very obvious value. But nonetheless, like like
Speaker 2: you say, it's not easy to purn on a graph,
Speaker 2: so it disappears.
Speaker 3: Right, and then you know, even though cops also don't
Speaker 3: make money, yeah, in a direct sense, somehow we can
Speaker 3: still fund that. So it really shows that like in
Speaker 3: the case of where you are, but the carcel solution
Speaker 3: is now the solution we have. Yeah, and when we
Speaker 3: sit here as abolitionists and we say, well, let's get
Speaker 3: rid of all that stuff, and people say, well, what
Speaker 3: are you going to do instead, our answer is often
Speaker 3: it would be so different that it wouldn't be necessary,
Speaker 3: so we'd have prevention of the entire situation. And that's
Speaker 3: one of the things that libraries offer is prevention of
Speaker 3: the entire situation, making vaslavs of the carcial state unnecessary.
Speaker 3: So there's a conscious choice there, especially when money is
Speaker 3: being taken out of the balance sheets of a city
Speaker 3: government from the libraries and put into the cops of
Speaker 3: this carcural choice of saying, we'd rather everyone in life
Speaker 3: is shit, so we can throw them in jail. Then
Speaker 3: everyone have a nice life and no one would have
Speaker 3: to go to jail.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then they can come read a book instead,
Speaker 2: and yeah, it would be nice. It reminds me of
Speaker 2: one of the big projects of the anarchists in Spain
Speaker 2: in the nineteen thirties was to create popular education centers,
Speaker 2: which included libraries, right, And they funded these entirely. They
Speaker 2: were not funded by the state. The state was not
Speaker 2: interested in making libraries in nineteen twenties ninety thirties in Spain,
Speaker 2: and they funded them from popular subscription and from people
Speaker 2: union dues, and they built these atta nails which are
Speaker 2: now really beautiful places. So one of the places I
Speaker 2: did my PhD in Barcelona, and like, I wonder if
Speaker 2: there is I guess it's it's very hard for us
Speaker 2: to conceive of like a library without the state in
Speaker 2: the United States, right, And it like rich people putting
Speaker 2: little libraries in in their middle class neighborhoods is not
Speaker 2: the same thing, right, As much as they'd like to
Speaker 2: think it is like your little phone box library. It
Speaker 2: is not replacing these services. So like, is there a
Speaker 2: model for like recreating this in a way that isn't
Speaker 2: reliant on the state, which seems increasingly hostile to it.
Speaker 3: I think there's a couple models, and it depends upon
Speaker 3: how far down the revelution you go. So the example
Speaker 3: you gave of Spain, we have contemporary with that and
Speaker 3: slightly more recent versions of that in the US. So
Speaker 3: the Workmen's Circle, now the workers circle, they funded really
Speaker 3: wonderful culture programs, including libraries. Unions often had libraries, especially
Speaker 3: back when they used to have more buildings, like my union.
Speaker 3: I'm part of my union, and aside from just like
Speaker 3: being where I work, we don't necessarily have a building
Speaker 3: per se. Yeah, So those things have always existed, especially
Speaker 3: in the workmen circle in ethnic communities who were trying
Speaker 3: to preserve a culture. And that's something that fit into
Speaker 3: twentieth century capitalism. And so if we go farther than
Speaker 3: the Revolution, I read a really great pamphlet recently from
Speaker 3: the seventies, actually that was from the UK, and it
Speaker 3: kind of discussed libraries. You know, if we make it
Speaker 3: through the revolution a little bit as being operated as
Speaker 3: under a syndicalist model where workers and patrons is what
Speaker 3: we call them now, that wouldn't be quite that split.
Speaker 3: Then would be able to govern and run these libraries.
Speaker 3: And there was a really great diagram. So there's definitely
Speaker 3: been ideas for a long time about what this could
Speaker 3: look like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I guess in the collective's economy of revolutionary Barcelona,
Speaker 2: library still existed at the nails existed, and I'm sure
Speaker 2: it was a long a syndicalist model because everything was
Speaker 2: so Yeah, I think that's like a good thing for
Speaker 2: people to look towards. I want to stop and take
Speaker 2: one more break, and then I want to talk about
Speaker 2: what people can do to protect libraries. All right, we
Speaker 2: are back so currently, Like I mean, this is like
Speaker 2: a funding cliff for the library system, right, I suppose
Speaker 2: it's hard to say, but like, how long would it
Speaker 2: take before people stop seeing these services if DOGE was
Speaker 2: to start doging tomorrow?
Speaker 3: I honestly can't tell, you know, I think that people
Speaker 3: it really doesn't. It's hard to say now, right because
Speaker 3: we do have the funding there. It just will it
Speaker 3: actually happen? Will the thing happen?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: That has already been allocated. I think we have a
Speaker 3: little bit of time, but I would expect if that
Speaker 3: congressional isn't expressed that, especially when summer reading rolls around,
Speaker 3: will really start to see it, because that's something that
Speaker 3: a lot of people depend on to keep their kids
Speaker 3: occupied during the summer. Yeah, and especially out you know,
Speaker 3: in red states and rural areas. It's going to be
Speaker 3: very much like the I never thought the leopards were
Speaker 3: going to eat my face.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, kind of situation, which is sad, like because
Speaker 2: it's someone's kid who doesn't get to go to the
Speaker 2: library very.
Speaker 4: Often, right right, right.
Speaker 3: That sucks, you know, because it's going to be a
Speaker 3: lot of a lot of kids, especially without those resources.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think about like how like I wouldn't have survived
Speaker 2: my undergraduate without libraries book only grad school books are
Speaker 2: super expensive, especially academic books, and like I relied very
Speaker 2: heavily on intolibrary loan.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And this is you know, at the university level,
Speaker 3: to be sure, where books are very expensive. Yeah, but
Speaker 3: at the public and school library level, you know, this
Speaker 3: is exactly why this is happening, is because there is
Speaker 3: this ongoing narrative from the last few decades where where people,
Speaker 3: especially like queer kids, say that the library saves their lives. Yeah,
Speaker 3: young people of color saying like this is the only
Speaker 3: place I could see myself in culture by reading these books.
Speaker 3: So of course, of course this is happening because that
Speaker 3: you know, they want to take that away.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a place where people can kind
Speaker 2: of exist yeah without that. Yeah, So let's talk about, like,
Speaker 2: how can people engage to protect their libraries. What can
Speaker 2: they do?
Speaker 6: What?
Speaker 2: I like some action items they can take.
Speaker 3: I unfortunately don't have great news. I don't think, you know,
Speaker 3: because of the way this is working, and it is
Speaker 3: so much about just like raw brute power that no
Speaker 3: one at the federal government or even state governments for
Speaker 3: the most part, seems to be able to counter. It's
Speaker 3: just like not something they can conceive of, Yeah, because
Speaker 3: they already are doing things that supposedly shouldn't be allowed. Right,
Speaker 3: We've already had the congressional funding. This should have a
Speaker 3: congressional you know, this is passed by Congress, and yet
Speaker 3: an executive order and Elon Muskin undo it.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: If things were working, this wouldn't be happening, right, So
Speaker 3: we are really kind of down down the line a
Speaker 3: little bit in what we can do and how effective
Speaker 3: it's going to be. That said, there are things we
Speaker 3: can do. A lot of them are the things that
Speaker 3: liberals usually do, which is like calling your senator over
Speaker 3: and over and over again every day, and your representatives
Speaker 3: and your state or state government too, to make sure
Speaker 3: that your state government is paying attention to what they're
Speaker 3: going to lose. There are certainly, you know, things one
Speaker 3: can sign on to for major library organizations. The ALA
Speaker 3: has been writing a lot, and less formal organizations than that.
Speaker 3: I think one thing that we can always be doing,
Speaker 3: not just in the situation, but if you want to
Speaker 3: be supporting libraries, one of the best thing and easiest
Speaker 3: things you can do is go get a library card
Speaker 3: if you don't already have one, and use your damn library.
Speaker 3: There's probably something there that you want and that actually
Speaker 3: really does help. Because libraries, whether it's with something like
Speaker 3: IMLS or whether it's grants from foundations and or local funders,
Speaker 3: you know, their local government are better able to make
Speaker 3: their argument for why they should be given money if
Speaker 3: they have good statistics to say we had ten percent
Speaker 3: more readers this year. You know the number of books
Speaker 3: we loan this year is higher than it's ever been.
Speaker 3: People are coming to our events and droves that kind
Speaker 3: of you know, success breeds success. If they can show
Speaker 3: that to potential funders, they're more likely to get money.
Speaker 3: So don't about the read the book. Just check the
Speaker 3: book out, keep it for we can give it back,
Speaker 3: you know, on time. Make those numbers go up.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And you can even like, let's say you're not
Speaker 2: inclined to go to the library for whatever reason and
Speaker 2: you don't like going out, or worried about COVID or
Speaker 2: something like, you can do most of this online, right, Like,
Speaker 2: if you have Libby, you can certainly you can borrow books.
Speaker 3: You can borrow ebooks and audiobooks from Libby. Some libraries
Speaker 3: have streaming movies. A lot of libraries have still either
Speaker 3: all online or hybrid events that you can watch rather
Speaker 3: than having to go to the event at the library.
Speaker 3: You know, the one thing about about some of those
Speaker 3: streaming services and Libby that I will caution about is
Speaker 3: that you're data is less secure. If that's something you're
Speaker 3: concerned about, then it would be borrowing paper books. It's
Speaker 3: good to be because most libraries, even in the kind
Speaker 3: of tech dystopian future we live in, do a decent job,
Speaker 3: or at least try to be good about your borrowing
Speaker 3: data when you borrow hard copies. But because things like
Speaker 3: Libby and the streaming services are third party integrations, those
Speaker 3: collect some amount of use data. So it's absolutely great
Speaker 3: to use those. But I would caution that if if
Speaker 3: you are a person who has a very high front
Speaker 3: model and you want to be careful about your data,
Speaker 3: go for the paper.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, yeah, it's kind nicer, nicer experience to read
Speaker 2: a paper book as well. It is what about like
Speaker 2: if people I know lots of people who are librarians
Speaker 2: listen see email me like is their way that they
Speaker 2: can organize? Who is the way the people are organizing,
Speaker 2: either to prevent this or like as a way of
Speaker 2: harm reduction, right, like, as a way of reducing the
Speaker 2: damage to the state can do to people's access to Yeah.
Speaker 3: So there are a few more radical organizations that I
Speaker 3: think are worth paying attention to. My favorite is Library
Speaker 3: Freedom Project. They're really wonderful and more willing to say
Speaker 3: the thing without bullshit, Yeah, the thing that you know.
Speaker 3: I would obviously urge every worker to do this, but
Speaker 3: if you're if your workplace is not unionized, start working
Speaker 3: on that. Yeah, that will always give you more power,
Speaker 3: So you should you should start trying to organize your workplace.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely, hopefully hopey there's still time for people to
Speaker 2: do that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, who knows where that's going to go, but you
Speaker 3: can at least try.
Speaker 2: It's still legal now, yeah, right when it starts, and like,
Speaker 2: regardless of what happens, Like, we're stronger in this together
Speaker 2: than we are a part. And the unions have done
Speaker 2: a lot to prevent fascism in the past.
Speaker 3: And similarly, there are depending upon what state you live in,
Speaker 3: there might be a state library organization that is active
Speaker 3: and that would be just a good way to make
Speaker 3: connections with other libraries near you and their librarians. And
Speaker 3: you know, maybe if you do lose some of your funding,
Speaker 3: you can put your heads together and you know, use
Speaker 3: each other's resources and have joint programming and things like that.
Speaker 2: That makes sense. Are people like attempting so some of
Speaker 2: the stuff i mls have is like online archives. Are
Speaker 2: people attempting to somehow to download that in order to
Speaker 2: preserve it in the event that it goes away?
Speaker 8: I don't know.
Speaker 4: That that's really is that not what's a threat?
Speaker 3: That's not really what we Yeah, I think that there
Speaker 3: are other kind of data rescue projects with the federal
Speaker 3: government that have better data than that. IMLS doesn't get
Speaker 3: that much data, So I wouldn't be too concerned with.
Speaker 2: That, Okay, So it's more like along the workplace organizing side.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's definitely like trying to figure out to make
Speaker 3: how to make your and the libraries around you keep
Speaker 3: going and offering the things to your communities that they've
Speaker 3: been offering.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely, it would be pretty tragic, Like there's a
Speaker 2: library not so far from my house, Like I can
Speaker 2: rent my bike do it. I get it all the time,
Speaker 2: and it would be be really tragic to be without that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So yeah, please continue to organize your libraries. Is there
Speaker 2: anything else that you'd like to plug or suggest people?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 2: It's a pretty bleak time generally, and I think a
Speaker 2: lot of us take refuge, especially in reading. Actually think
Speaker 2: it's a way you can escape terrible things. Is there
Speaker 2: anything else you'd like to kind of suggest for people
Speaker 2: as we dive deeper into fascism every day at the moment.
Speaker 3: I think in libraries and elsewhere where. It's just being
Speaker 3: able to offer a counter narrative, like not buying into
Speaker 3: the idea that the library is a money hole. You know,
Speaker 3: it can only be valued monetarily. So when you hear that,
Speaker 3: maybe start going to your library's board meetings and when
Speaker 3: you hear those kinds of things said, get online for
Speaker 3: the comments and offer a different narrative. And you can
Speaker 3: do that all over your life in different in different ways.
Speaker 3: When you hear that narrative that is monetary and neoliberal
Speaker 3: and harmful, offer a different one. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think it's like, it's so sad to think that
Speaker 2: we should have to quantify the value of everything monetarity,
Speaker 2: but especially something like a library, like so many people
Speaker 2: have had such positive engagements with them which have nothing
Speaker 2: to do with the with the cash next. The's sort
Speaker 2: of like generating revenue and that's what makes them valuable
Speaker 2: and what makes them special sometimes. So yeah, hopefully people,
Speaker 2: hopefully people can advocate for that. How would you find
Speaker 2: your library board meeting if you wanted to look?
Speaker 3: If you you're a library, if you have a public
Speaker 3: library near you, they should have a website and the
Speaker 3: website should have an events page that includes board meetings.
Speaker 3: Hopefully other information about your library's board as well, and
Speaker 3: if you can't find it, maybe call it the library
Speaker 3: and ask. I'll probably just tell you they're really good
Speaker 3: at information there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that is the thing that they do. All right, Well,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for joining us, Jamie. That was
Speaker 2: that was great. It was really really helpful.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 5: Hey and welcome. Take it happen here. Today we'll continue
Speaker 5: our journey through Latin American anarchism where we last left
Speaker 5: off with a look at the anarchist history of Uruguay.
Speaker 5: We talked about Uruguay's general history, it's radical influences anarchism,
Speaker 5: this period of popularity in the early twentieth century, it's
Speaker 5: radical experiments and it's cultural influence. So today James and I,
Speaker 5: because James is here, Hello, James.
Speaker 4: Hi Andrew.
Speaker 5: Today we're going to look at what Iuruguaian anarchists have
Speaker 5: been up to from the fifties onward, paying special attentions
Speaker 5: the activity of the Ferracion Anarchista Uruguaya and the idea
Speaker 5: of especifismo. By the way, as James is indicated, I
Speaker 5: am Andrew Andrew Saige. You can find me on YouTube
Speaker 5: as Andrewism. But all that aside, let's get into it.
Speaker 5: The Feracion Anarchista Irguaya or FAU, was founded in Montevideo, Uruguay,
Speaker 5: in nineteen fifty six. According to Paul Sharki in the
Speaker 5: Feracion and Aquista Iraguaia, the FAU had very strong work
Speaker 5: in class roots, as many of the militans came from
Speaker 5: labor heavy districts like Zero, which definitely shaped their outlook.
Speaker 5: The FAU was also very much emphasized in direct action
Speaker 5: over electoral strategies. It favored armed struggle as a necessity
Speaker 5: in reaction to save repression and economic exploitation, and the
Speaker 5: FAU had a very strong stance against Marxist Leninism. Although
Speaker 5: some members sympathized with aspects of Marxism, many of them
Speaker 5: resisted to bureaucratic and authoritarian tendencies that influenced that miliu.
Speaker 5: Unlike in many other Latin American countries, as you may
Speaker 5: have recalled us covering in the past, anarchism persisted in
Speaker 5: mainstream relevance even after the rise of the Bolsheviks and
Speaker 5: the influence globally, and of course the coincide and fall
Speaker 5: of the anarchists in Spain. According to all of us
Speaker 5: Zenkos sixty five years of revolution, the FAU came about
Speaker 5: in a time when u requires prosperity coming out of
Speaker 5: World War two had come to an end, as its
Speaker 5: agricultural exports were no longer needed to feed the alli's
Speaker 5: massive standing armies. This economic downturn triggered major social unrest,
Speaker 5: which the anarchist presence was able to spring upon. One
Speaker 5: such instance of unrest involved one hundred and fifty thousand
Speaker 5: workers going on strike in Salidarity with their fellow workers
Speaker 5: in a tire factory. During the strike and after, the
Speaker 5: FAU involved students, unionists, intellectuals, community organizers, and even a
Speaker 5: few exiles from the Spanish Civil War to build up
Speaker 5: a more united labor movement. So rather than having unions
Speaker 5: split along political ideological affiliations like moderates, socialists, anarchists, right
Speaker 5: populists and so on, there'll be one big tent just
Speaker 5: focused on labor. Now, I personally think a big tent
Speaker 5: has its benefits and its drawbacks, as with any other strategy.
Speaker 5: I think the benefit is obviously that it has the
Speaker 5: ability to mobilize a large number of people. But I
Speaker 5: think the difficulty in the drawback is that having so
Speaker 5: many affiliations under that big tent can mean it there's
Speaker 5: not really much of a shared goal left behind, Like, yeah,
Speaker 5: the anarchists want anarchy, the right populists might just want
Speaker 5: to secure some benefits and protections, and the socialists will
Speaker 5: be interested in launching a party. Sure they all proclaim
Speaker 5: to have some interest on the side of the workers
Speaker 5: or how that manifests looks different from group to group.
Speaker 5: But we'll see how that big tent approach turned out
Speaker 5: for the FAU. So they formed the National Confederation of
Speaker 5: Workers or CNT as that big tent in nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 5: but even before that there was a split, not too
Speaker 5: much of a surprise. After the Cuban Revolution, the FAU
Speaker 5: is actually divided between those who were opposed to Castro
Speaker 5: and those who critically supported the revolution. Those who were
Speaker 5: opposed to Castro eventually broke away from the FAU in
Speaker 5: nineteen sixty three as Castro entrenched himself in the Soviet Bloc,
Speaker 5: while those who remained in the FAU were critical of
Speaker 5: Castro and his government but still supported the fall of Batista.
Speaker 5: Of course, with the Cuban Revolution, came that very noticeable
Speaker 5: shift in American foreign policy. They saw that with all
Speaker 5: that happening right in their backyard, they need to take
Speaker 5: a very different approach if they wanted to win the
Speaker 5: Cold War. Such a Zignco actually describes how in nineteen
Speaker 5: sixty one JFK changed the approach of the now infamous
Speaker 5: School of the Americas from preparing for Soviet invasion to
Speaker 5: prepare in for anti communist counterinsurgency against homegrown revolutions. So
Speaker 5: as a result, militaries across Latin America became more right
Speaker 5: wing and seized power for themselves to protect civilians from
Speaker 5: the danger of their rights. In nineteen sixty four, it
Speaker 5: was Brazil, in nineteen sixty eight, it was Peru, in
Speaker 5: nineteen seventy three was Chile, and Uruguay fell, and in
Speaker 5: nineteen seventy six Argentina fell. So Zenko noted in jest,
Speaker 5: over a decade, Uruguayan and anarchists would becomes surrounded by
Speaker 5: right wing dictatorships which collaborated to round up and extillminate
Speaker 5: left wing dissidents of all flavors. Not to mention, the
Speaker 5: economic situation wasn't exactly getting better. According to Paul Sharky.
Speaker 5: Between nineteen fifty five and nineteen fifty nine, the cost
Speaker 5: of living doubled and wages did not keep pace. By
Speaker 5: nineteen sixty five, inflation was running one hundred percent ABU
Speaker 5: nineteen sixty seven at one hundred and forty percent madness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well just wait and see, Andrew, Oh yea, yeah,
Speaker 1: we are living in some interesting times.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you never know.
Speaker 5: So the president that preceded the military dictator imposed a
Speaker 5: wage freeze and devalue the currency. That was his bright idea,
Speaker 5: his solution to the crisis. So people's lives were obviously
Speaker 5: getting worse and the time had come for some decisive action.
Speaker 5: So the CNT aided in strikes across sectors and even
Speaker 5: tried to call for a general strike as the encle rights.
Speaker 5: The FAU decided that they were going to take on
Speaker 5: a strategy of urban guerrilla warfare, so they tapped into
Speaker 5: a coalition of leftist groups to robin hood food from
Speaker 5: the corporations to be able to the poor. Awesome, have
Speaker 5: just hit it, Yeah, But sadly the coalition couldn't last
Speaker 5: very long. Differences in strategy would lead to the FAU
Speaker 5: doing its thing by building defense councils similar to those
Speaker 5: organized in the Spanish Civil War.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Interesting, while the other groups copied a Sheikwavara style gorilla
Speaker 5: army approach, forming the National Liberation Movement to Permeros or
Speaker 5: the MLNT.
Speaker 2: The existential debate among anarchists in arms is this that
Speaker 2: you've just like highlighted, right, it's need we form authoritarian
Speaker 2: structures similar to those using, for example, the Cuban Revolution,
Speaker 2: the Russian Revolution, these kind of statist revolutions which characterize
Speaker 2: the left in the twentieth century in some ways. Or
Speaker 2: is it possible for us to go from our community
Speaker 2: defense and the defense committees like the six person groups
Speaker 2: that the CNT organized in Spain to a more egalitarian
Speaker 2: large formation, like a like a truly revolutionary army. And
Speaker 2: like the split that you're talking about is the split
Speaker 2: that almost every movement had.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Although the mlent T was necessarily anarchists.
Speaker 2: Right, they were like following the Castro model, Is that right?
Speaker 2: Like the Shagha Vara kind of guerrilla warfare.
Speaker 5: Doctrine, pretty much the Gervara sort of model.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Although I'm glad that you bring up this point because
Speaker 5: it's actually something that I was writing about earlier today
Speaker 5: in preparation for a video.
Speaker 2: Interesting.
Speaker 5: I think there's a conflation that anarchists need to be
Speaker 5: careful with between leadership in the sense of authority, as
Speaker 5: in the right to command and control and that kind
Speaker 5: of thing, versus leadership in the sense of guidance, advice, coordination, expertise.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think that just as that you might have even
Speaker 5: you might have an anarchist construction collective, right and they're
Speaker 5: building a house, you might have something like foreman who
Speaker 5: is coordinating all the actions and all the different builders
Speaker 5: and all the different treatsment of engaging in to ensure
Speaker 5: that the different parts of the house come together cohesively
Speaker 5: and seamlessly, that nobody is like stepping on anybody's tools,
Speaker 5: that everything is being done in a proper timement. That
Speaker 5: is an instance where there will be coordination without necessarily
Speaker 5: having authority. It's just really a division of labor to
Speaker 5: ensure that the task that everybody is there to accomplish
Speaker 5: can be accomplished. And the person who is given that
Speaker 5: particular task within that division of labor is doing so
Speaker 5: by taking all that responsibility. But just as they have
Speaker 5: the responsibility, others will also have the responsibilities and that
Speaker 5: does not elevate them above the other people in that association, right, yeah,
Speaker 5: and so kind of in the same way that you
Speaker 5: have that in a construction site. I think that that
Speaker 5: is the kind of approach we need to take in
Speaker 5: a military formation, where the person who is you know,
Speaker 5: respected for their knowledge of military strategy or has the
Speaker 5: information or the expertise to be able to handle the
Speaker 5: planning of that approach. Because we're all here to win, right,
Speaker 5: We're all here to defend our freedom and to defend
Speaker 5: the freedom of the people we love. So there's no
Speaker 5: sense in splitting off into a bunch of different groups
Speaker 5: and failing out our task when we can come together
Speaker 5: where necessary to engage in the coordination of our strategy
Speaker 5: to improve the chances of our success. You know. And
Speaker 5: of course there is a vulnerability in times of warfare
Speaker 5: that we do have the knowledge because warfare historically is
Speaker 5: one of the times that is the most ripe for
Speaker 5: authoritarian and seizure and control. But because that vulnerability exists
Speaker 5: in those times is when I think we have to
Speaker 5: be extra vigilant of how that could potentially manifest. You know,
Speaker 5: we don't sacrifice our course and defense of the course,
Speaker 5: you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: Definitely, because it's easy to do that. It's easy to
Speaker 2: be persuaded that this situation is unique and different, and
Speaker 2: therefore we need to accept some kind of compromise of
Speaker 2: the very essence of what we're doing, the method that
Speaker 2: like the people I have spoken to, both those within
Speaker 2: formations today in Rajava and West in Java, but also
Speaker 2: in the Emma and those for instance in the Iron Column,
Speaker 2: which was a FI column in the spanishivil War. They're
Speaker 2: probably the most famous for leaving the front line to
Speaker 2: attack the cops because they felt they didn't have enough
Speaker 2: weapons and that the cops had too many. And what
Speaker 2: they did was that they created a concept of the
Speaker 2: minimum necessary discipline, discipline being something that one has for oneself,
Speaker 2: not the hunting that comes from above. And they had
Speaker 2: leaders who would lead in times of combat right when
Speaker 2: we needed to make swift and decisive action. There wasn't
Speaker 2: time to obtain consensus. They used consensus to arrive at
Speaker 2: those leaders. Those leaders were able in times of urgency
Speaker 2: to make urgent decisions, but that didn't confer to power
Speaker 2: or status outside of that moment.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, it's just like in an emergency scenario, you know,
Speaker 5: somebody is, you know, leading a surgery, for example, or
Speaker 5: leading a rescue operation. That doesn't mean that they're elevated
Speaker 5: above everybody else. That just means that they have the
Speaker 5: knowledge and the skills to accomplish that particular task, and
Speaker 5: the others of their own free will respect that knowledge
Speaker 5: enough to go out with what the person is recommending exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that, yeah, that doesn't mean that that person
Speaker 2: is inherently capable of bossing you around, exactly.
Speaker 5: And I like the mention of discipline in particular because
Speaker 5: that really is a distinction, because he will talk about, oh,
Speaker 5: you need to have military discipline, how you school stab
Speaker 5: military discipline without blind obedience to authority, I'm sure we're
Speaker 5: not going to have we're ever going to have discipline
Speaker 5: to the extent that soldiers are dehumanized and treated like
Speaker 5: canon fodder as you would find in a traditional authoritaria
Speaker 5: and military. But the discipline is derived from solidarity, is
Speaker 5: derived from the responsibility people have for each other, the
Speaker 5: capable have for each other within their formulation, and the
Speaker 5: responsible do they have for their own actions as being
Speaker 5: part of that formation, and for how their actions will
Speaker 5: affect those around them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, And I think that's something like you say
Speaker 2: it again and again when you read the column, the
Speaker 2: Derouty column newspaper, right, they talk about discipline and how
Speaker 2: we have to have a discipline comes from our commitment
Speaker 2: to our cause and to each other, not from any
Speaker 2: fear of repercussions or like quote unquote disciplinary action, but
Speaker 2: from like the fact that we we don't want to
Speaker 2: let our comrades down, or do we want to let
Speaker 2: our course down, and like when people do do that. Right,
Speaker 2: there are It doesn't mean there aren't disciplinary actions, but
Speaker 2: it means that those are like like you said before,
Speaker 2: you don't break away from the core of what you're doing.
Speaker 2: So they agree by consensus to include with the person
Speaker 2: who has done the thing that is considered to be wrong,
Speaker 2: what a suitable punishment would be or a suitable set
Speaker 2: of repercussions would be. So then it reinforces the idea
Speaker 2: of like consensus and like discipline coming from oneself rather
Speaker 2: than from fear of punishment.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think there is, of course the potential for
Speaker 5: processes to potentially become How do I want to put this?
Speaker 5: What I will say is I think it's necessary. But
Speaker 5: even in engaging with those who have you broken trust
Speaker 5: or who have seemingly split from the association or have
Speaker 5: jeopardized the safety and security of the association, that you
Speaker 5: find we us to deal with those situations on a
Speaker 5: case by keyse basis. You know that you're responsive to
Speaker 5: the particular circumstances that cause that action that particular outcome,
Speaker 5: rather than as you would find in modernil ries where
Speaker 5: you have like a very clear this action has this consequence,
Speaker 5: this action has this concert this action like a lot
Speaker 5: more flexibility is required because we understand that we don't
Speaker 5: have this matrix of crime that authorities do. You know,
Speaker 5: we're dealing with calm. They deal with crime, right, and
Speaker 5: so in dealing with harm, we have to approach each
Speaker 5: of those situations in the context of their situations rather
Speaker 5: than in some sort of cold like distant calculation, you know.
Speaker 5: And I think in approaching it in that way, people
Speaker 5: are more willing I think, to fess up or to
Speaker 5: take accountability for their harm because they know that there's
Speaker 5: that relationship there that you're going to try to work
Speaker 5: through it. That well, there may be many potential consequences
Speaker 5: to their actions there's an openness to dialogue there rather
Speaker 5: than a rigidity of this is what you did, so
Speaker 5: this is the outcome automatically.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that is the latter is like a
Speaker 2: system that looks not at people but quote unquote crimes, right,
Speaker 2: and like this is the opposite of a restorative justice system,
Speaker 2: which looks at people in the situation they are in
Speaker 2: and not just the worst thing that they happen to
Speaker 2: have done.
Speaker 3: It.
Speaker 2: We should return to South America and really once again diverted.
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, although I feel like these digressions always get
Speaker 5: to something essential and brings out something extra to what
Speaker 5: I would have, you know, prepared in advance. So we
Speaker 5: had this split, right, we had the FAU and then
Speaker 5: you had the m L and T. And they did
Speaker 5: collaborate where there was a common cause, but it wasn't
Speaker 5: a permanent collaboration, you know. And while this was taking
Speaker 5: place in the urban guerrilla warfare sphere, you had different
Speaker 5: things taking place in the labor movement. The FAU was
Speaker 5: dealing with the consequences of big tent to organize in
Speaker 5: as they found that the Uruguayan Communist Party or PCU
Speaker 5: had pretty successfully claimed significant influence in the cnt SO.
Speaker 5: In response, according to Suzenko, the FAU created a rank
Speaker 5: and file alliance called the Combative Tendency, which pushed for
Speaker 5: more militancy and less bureaucracy in the union movement. Through
Speaker 5: that alliance, the FAU was able to accomplish a lot
Speaker 5: more outreach and action, but in return, the President of
Speaker 5: Uruguay introduced emergency laws executed by the military to counter
Speaker 5: the unrest. The revolutionary Left continued to fight against military's
Speaker 5: involvement in civilian life and also formed a daily people
Speaker 5: called Ipoca. When the government was like, stop, don't do that,
Speaker 5: that's illegal. And when the government says stopped on that,
Speaker 5: that's illegal, that means they put boots on the ground,
Speaker 5: and you know, raided their offices, and so the people
Speaker 5: fell apart and the groups involved went under around and
Speaker 5: like I said, the military raided their bases. But then
Speaker 5: when the FAU was like, let's get the band back together, unfortunately,
Speaker 5: the other groups were too scared to resurface, understandably, and
Speaker 5: so because of that fear, the PCU kind of had
Speaker 5: a fall from Greece. You know, for a while they
Speaker 5: were big boys on campus and the cnt but after
Speaker 5: the FAU kind of came to the forefront again in
Speaker 5: called its bravery and stuff. They kind of end up
Speaker 5: falling back. And you see, the PCU had chosen to
Speaker 5: appease the military because they believed that a leftist faction
Speaker 5: within the rounds the army might support their bid for power,
Speaker 5: kind of like what happened in the Russian Revolution. And so,
Speaker 5: you know, they really thought they were cooking something. But
Speaker 5: as it saying goes, the store was not even on.
Speaker 2: I haven't heard that one in this game.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the military saw them as pretty much insignificant, so
Speaker 5: much so that while other leftist groups were facing severe oppression,
Speaker 5: the PCU was actually pretty much left alone. And so
Speaker 5: when the union rank and files saw that and tilling
Speaker 5: their backs on the PCU, they ended up turning their
Speaker 5: focus toward the combative tendency because at least they were
Speaker 5: doing radical and serious stuff. And so the unions were
Speaker 5: under attack from all sides, the police, the military, and
Speaker 5: even neo fascist gangs, and the FAU led combatitive tendancy
Speaker 5: was focused on defending these workers' movements from those threats.
Speaker 5: According to the Zenko, the FAU held a secret congress
Speaker 5: and formed their own armed wing the OPR thirty three,
Speaker 5: which unlike other gorilla groups in the region, wasn't a
Speaker 5: top down organization. Instead, individual cells had the freedom to
Speaker 5: decide how they carry out missions and which actions it
Speaker 5: took part in the affair. You still set the overall strategy,
Speaker 5: but it wasn't about becoming some kind of vanguard. And
Speaker 5: some of the actions, by the way, according to Sharki,
Speaker 5: included bank robberies and factory owner kidnappings.
Speaker 2: It's like old school Spanish anarchism.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well there were some old school Spanish anarchists within
Speaker 5: their ranks. Yeah, so he really can't be surprised.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I drew. There's this wonderful line in able
Speaker 2: Pass's book about de Ruti that de Ruti was very
Speaker 2: fond of children, so he risked his life robbing banks
Speaker 2: to fund their education.
Speaker 5: Oh that's beautiful.
Speaker 4: It's such a wonderful Like, yeah, it's beautiful.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know, I just enjoy it very much
Speaker 2: the whole Like you never know what direction that sentence
Speaker 2: is going to go in.
Speaker 5: That is a quintessential example of that, Yeah, I think. Yeah,
Speaker 5: so you know, you do what you have to do
Speaker 5: pretty much.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And like I think it's really like he
Speaker 2: wasn't maximalist for the sake of maximalism. He was maximalist
Speaker 2: for the sake of like educating children. Yeah, yeah, it wasn't.
Speaker 2: He didn't see the violence as and ended.
Speaker 5: Itself exactly exactly. It had a cause and reasoning behind it. Yeah,
Speaker 5: And the FAU was the same way. Or their reasoning
Speaker 5: was just that if the capitalist class was going to
Speaker 5: use force to protect their interests, then the workers should
Speaker 5: be able to use force to defend theirs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, fannel and stuff, And so.
Speaker 5: They did what they had to do. Meanwhile, the PCU
Speaker 5: was stuck to their policy of appeasement, which actually had
Speaker 5: a detrimental effect in the broader movement. As a military
Speaker 5: kept growing in strength, and so the very anti communist
Speaker 5: military's involvement in breaking up all the work activities emboldened
Speaker 5: their role in politics. And then, once they defeated the
Speaker 5: m l n T, with the FAU struggling to resist
Speaker 5: isolated by the PCU's in action, the military to on
Speaker 5: the opportunity to coop the government, leading to the rise
Speaker 5: of Juan Maria Porteraberi, the first president of the Civic
Speaker 5: military dictatorship in ninety seventy three. In the aftermath, the
Speaker 5: FAU made the tough call to move the operations to Argentina,
Speaker 5: which hadn't yet fallen to military distatorship. From there, they
Speaker 5: worked within the CNT to organize a massive fifteen day
Speaker 5: general strike. It shut the country down for a time,
Speaker 5: but it wasn't enough, and the efforts to keep up
Speaker 5: the fight were constantly undermined by the PCU, which still
Speaker 5: insisted on negotiating instead of taking real action. Meanwhile, the
Speaker 5: people were suffering. According to Sharky, between nineteen seventy one
Speaker 5: and nineteen seventy six there was a thirty five percent
Speaker 5: fall in real wages, and by nineteen seventy nine inflation
Speaker 5: was running at eighty percent, with wages limping behind at
Speaker 5: forty five percent. So until nineteen seventy six, the FAU
Speaker 5: continued to work between Argentina and Uruguay, but after Argentina's
Speaker 5: coup that was it. The coach Enko directly. During the
Speaker 5: US's operation, Condo dictatorships across Latin America continued coordinated to kidnap, torture,
Speaker 5: and murder leftists across the continent. Between sixty eight thousand
Speaker 5: and eighty thousand leftists were killed and more than four
Speaker 5: hundred thousand were placed in political prisons end courde Jesus,
Speaker 5: And I think we need to sit with those numbers,
Speaker 5: because it's very easy to hear numbers like that and
Speaker 5: just think, you know, that's just a statistic. Pretty much
Speaker 5: we hear big numbers of mine, kind of goes statistic. Yeah,
Speaker 5: but to like think about the impact that would have
Speaker 5: for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people
Speaker 5: to be just taken out, whether killed or imprisoned, leaving
Speaker 5: like a keeping a whole of knowledge, of experience, of education,
Speaker 5: of radicalism. Yeah, a country may take decades to recover
Speaker 5: from something like that. It's a cultural death in a sense.
Speaker 5: You know, this is a political movement, but it's it's
Speaker 5: kind of similar to how during Cluanissm, elders would be
Speaker 5: wiped out and with them all of their knowledge, all
Speaker 5: of their oral histories, all their languages just wiped out
Speaker 5: in an instant.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: This is different, of course as a political ideology as
Speaker 5: opposed to an entire culture and ethnicity, but it's still
Speaker 5: just a massive loss of all that history, all that experience,
Speaker 5: all that radicalism and information just gone.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, it's hard for a movement to recover from that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not like a genocide or its colonial kind
Speaker 2: of you could call it like a dec well, it's
Speaker 2: like a decapitation of the movement, I suppose.
Speaker 5: Well, I would say it's more than a decapitation, because
Speaker 5: it's not just like notable figures that were taken out,
Speaker 5: or particularly influential thought leaders or anything. It's almost everybody. Yeah,
Speaker 5: anybody who had that fight in them, or had that
Speaker 5: radical knowledge or consciousness.
Speaker 2: Yeah, anyone with any lived experience, all the things they'd learned,
Speaker 2: all the mistakes they'd made, learned from like a garden
Speaker 2: that the movement has to begin almost from like a
Speaker 2: blank slate.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the history is basically raised in a sense, all
Speaker 5: this left is really what they might have written down, yeah,
Speaker 5: which is obviously only a small portion of what they
Speaker 5: might have had to share with the rest of the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, especially in a movement that's been criminalized and pursued
Speaker 2: by the state. Right, Like what they write down is
Speaker 2: what they risk the state discovering, so that they're only
Speaker 2: going to risk write sen things down.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, and then you know, when you look at this,
Speaker 5: this this didn't just happen, you require, that's happened all
Speaker 5: over the world. In some cases, this massive wipeout of
Speaker 5: the anarchists movement took place even earlier, you know, in
Speaker 5: the nineteen hundreds, nineteen tens, nineteen twenties. But in all
Speaker 5: these cases, that loss is something that we are still
Speaker 5: in a sense recovering from. We kind of had to
Speaker 5: solly build back, but we still haven't ever reached in
Speaker 5: many places the heights that anarchism's at at certain points
Speaker 5: in its history. It's in parts of the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, look at even like Spain still has
Speaker 2: a very strong anarchosyndicalist movement, right, but like the best
Speaker 2: of the anarchists died in Aragon, in Madrid and in
Speaker 2: concentration camps afterwards, or fighting in the Second World War,
Speaker 2: and like, it took decades for that movement to recover,
Speaker 2: and it's still not as strong as it was. That
Speaker 2: this was one of the high points.
Speaker 5: Especially when the legacy is so much erased. You know,
Speaker 5: when you look at how histories are taught everywhere in
Speaker 5: the world, you're barely going to get a mention of
Speaker 5: anarchism despite the massive role that plead in sheep in
Speaker 5: the twentieth century, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this has been one of my constant things as
Speaker 2: a historian, is that like, when people write histories today,
Speaker 2: they write them from the perspective of the inevitability of
Speaker 2: the state. And like, I'm not alone in making this analysis.
Speaker 2: David Graeber does it. Scott did it too. The idea
Speaker 2: is that people who exist outside of the state are behind,
Speaker 2: and that they have failed or chosen not to advance
Speaker 2: to the more advanced human existence that is a state.
Speaker 2: And Jim Scott does this in the art of not
Speaker 2: being governed, right, Like, if we look instead as people
Speaker 2: who have chosen to refuse the state, then we understand
Speaker 2: anarchism as a choice that people would make knowing the
Speaker 2: options available to them, rather than a step backwards of
Speaker 2: failure to advance to the state. And we can look
Speaker 2: at a whole of history from that perspective and see
Speaker 2: it very differently. But most historians don't exactly.
Speaker 5: I'm sure you've in commented this where people just kind
Speaker 5: of assume, all, well, the anarchists lost, so that means
Speaker 5: the destined to lose. Yeah, they lost that particular fight
Speaker 5: that doesn't mean the war necessarily lost. And additionally, states
Speaker 5: have lost too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, states continue to lose.
Speaker 5: States, state projects have lost, continue to lose, you know,
Speaker 5: the capitalist project, capitalist businesses, they lose, they fail. That
Speaker 5: doesn't mean that the project is destined to lose. The
Speaker 5: destined to feel just means that particular iteration or that
Speaker 5: particular attempt was not able to succeed in all its ambitions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and like, as historians, we shouldn't be making that judgment, right,
Speaker 2: We should be attempting to learn from and document the
Speaker 2: past rather than to sort of categorize it into like
Speaker 2: failed and successful.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that too, because the standards, the standards of failure
Speaker 5: and success are often dictated by the standpoint of the
Speaker 5: status school.
Speaker 2: Yes, very much so.
Speaker 5: Yeah, It's kind of like how the Heitian Revolution is
Speaker 5: spoken of as the only succes sucessful slave revolts, or
Speaker 5: one of the only successful slave revolts. Understand for success
Speaker 5: in that case is that they were able to establish
Speaker 5: an independent state, whereas other slave revolts in other parts
Speaker 5: of the world, including within the Caribbean, would have taken
Speaker 5: different paths. The Maroons, for example, their former revolts was
Speaker 5: a withdrawal from the system that surrounded them, creating a
Speaker 5: pocket of resistance, isolating themselves. Same thing in Brazil we
Speaker 5: had Kilombo's these set of ones that extracted themselves from
Speaker 5: the surround and oppressive structure and try to survive to
Speaker 5: the extent that they could not. All of them lasted.
Speaker 5: But nothing lasts forever, you know, Countries rise and fall.
Speaker 5: And so I think if we limit ourselves to just
Speaker 5: the example of Haiti, particularly in the context of success
Speaker 5: in a slave revolution, I think we miss out on
Speaker 5: a lot of those other examples and opportunities for inspiration guidance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you're right. I think like it supplies
Speaker 2: to lots of places. I think about it, Like, you know,
Speaker 2: I'm fortunate to have this like background in history, but
Speaker 2: also to be with people in their moments of revolution
Speaker 2: and to spend time with revolutionaries in the MR. And like,
Speaker 2: one of the analysies that you always see is that, like,
Speaker 2: this creation of liberated spaces is a not enough or
Speaker 2: be like there are also places within the non government though,
Speaker 2: and where there is still very strong control from a
Speaker 2: pseudo state, right, Like, but I think that overlooks the
Speaker 2: fact that, yeah, there are not like like libertarian states,
Speaker 2: but people are living their lives without gods and masters,
Speaker 2: that they are like experiencing freedom in every moment, and
Speaker 2: they are liberated in their own lives as they continue
Speaker 2: to struggle to liberate territory in other people. That might
Speaker 2: be what success looks like, like that they are able
Speaker 2: to be self realized.
Speaker 5: Yeah, just the psychological experience in itself, it cand of
Speaker 5: be under understated or underrated, even if it's on that
Speaker 5: small scale of the individual, that's still valuable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and like if we if we acknowledge that, it's
Speaker 2: much harder to go back, Like those people can't go
Speaker 2: back because they've existed in liberation, right, Like that that
Speaker 2: they've lived in a free way. Yeah, and like they
Speaker 2: will always know that that freedom is possible, that they
Speaker 2: can live without authority, live with without state power, that
Speaker 2: that like liberation is a thing that can exist not
Speaker 2: just in our minds but in physical space.
Speaker 5: And like exactly, they.
Speaker 2: Will always know that, like that's that's available, And if
Speaker 2: we can tell those stories, so will other people.
Speaker 5: Exactly exactly, because that listening, as we speak about so often,
Speaker 5: it's the need in the process of social revolution to
Speaker 5: help people's powers drives and consciousness. You do that by
Speaker 5: giving people both of course theoretical education and you know,
Speaker 5: share knowledge in that sense, but also through experience because
Speaker 5: and I've used us phrase before, you can't put the
Speaker 5: gene back in the bottle. You can't go from experience
Speaker 5: in freedom to a situation of unfreedom and then struggles
Speaker 5: rulers and think, oh that's all they could have a
Speaker 5: be After you've experienced to the status quo, you're not
Speaker 5: going to go back to thinking the status quo is
Speaker 5: all there is and all that could ever exist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly. We have to remember that when we're
Speaker 2: looking at these things, Like it's easy to look from
Speaker 2: where something ended and project that back, but we have
Speaker 2: to understand how it felt when people were doing it too.
Speaker 5: Exactly. So what kind of we kind of left on
Speaker 5: an on a somber chapter in the Uruguay's anarchist history,
Speaker 5: because unfortunately it was only after the fall of Uraguai's
Speaker 5: stutatorship in nineteen eighty five the anarchist militants were able
Speaker 5: to return to Uruguay and re estableublished the FAU in
Speaker 5: a fractured political and social landscape with greatly reduced numbers.
Speaker 5: Some of the former anarchists involved in the FAU created
Speaker 5: the People's Victory Party or PvP in exile, which had
Speaker 5: attempted to reorganize resistance efforts but also fell into some
Speaker 5: Leninist tendencies. But the main line after you continue to
Speaker 5: focus on grassroots organizing, workers struggles and political education. It
Speaker 5: continues to be engaged in Latin arcananarchist networks, particularly with
Speaker 5: Brazilian and Argentine groups like the Ferrascau Anarchista Culture, the
Speaker 5: Frau Araquista KABOCLA, the Ferrachau Anarchista do Rio de Janeiro,
Speaker 5: and the Argentine organization ALCA. Despite its past radicalism, the
Speaker 5: FAU has shifted towards a broader approach integrated mass movements
Speaker 5: while retaining its equipment to anti authoritarian socialism. Since then
Speaker 5: and up to today, they approach has aligned with the
Speaker 5: practice of especifismo, which it developed to rebuild their strength
Speaker 5: in Irauguaian and political movements. That approach has since been
Speaker 5: influential across Latin America and beyond, including North America, Europe, Asia, Africa,
Speaker 5: and Oceania. I've actually spoken about Especifismo on this podcast
Speaker 5: before and on my channel. But to give a quick summary,
Speaker 5: Especifismo is an organizational approach guided by three key concepts.
Speaker 5: The first is the need for specifically anarchist organization built
Speaker 5: around a unity of ideas and practice. The second is
Speaker 5: the use of the specifically anarchist organization to theorize and
Speaker 5: develop strategic political and organize and work. And the food
Speaker 5: is active involvement in and shaping of autonomous and popular
Speaker 5: social movement, which is described as the process of social
Speaker 5: in social as. Pacifists reject the left unity idea of
Speaker 5: a synthesis organization of revolutionaries or even multiple currents of
Speaker 5: anarchists loosely united, because they feel it boils down to
Speaker 5: lowest common denominator politics. The feel that when this unity
Speaker 5: is preferred at any cost, it leaves little room for
Speaker 5: united action or developed political discussion. It can be described
Speaker 5: in a sense as an affinity group with the shared
Speaker 5: interest in the advancement of a very specific politic. But
Speaker 5: they aren't just internally focused, you know. Specifismo is focused
Speaker 5: and build in popular power as a means of revolutionary transformation,
Speaker 5: rejecting both electoral and vang Goddess Marxist approaches. So the
Speaker 5: especifies more distinguishes between specifically anarchist political organizations or affinity
Speaker 5: groups and broader mass movements, and they advocate for anarchists
Speaker 5: creating the former and inserting themselves in the latter, building
Speaker 5: up anarchist presence and the presence of anarchist ideas in unions,
Speaker 5: in student groups, and in community struggles. So, if you
Speaker 5: want a more in depth exploration of especifismo, I suggests
Speaker 5: reading the discussion between Philippe Korea and Juan Carlos Maco
Speaker 5: so call the Strategy of a Specifismo on the Anarchist Library,
Speaker 5: and they talk about how the fragmentation of the working
Speaker 5: class under neoliberalism has created some very distinct challenges that
Speaker 5: require fresh organizational strategies and less dogmats of critgity to
Speaker 5: simplistic class analysis. But they also speak for the need
Speaker 5: to coordinate and discipline and strategically engage anarchist groups within
Speaker 5: social movements, routaining the independence but engaging in their struggle.
Speaker 5: And they also end up in that interview discussed in
Speaker 5: the FAUS long Term Strategy as a process of resistance,
Speaker 5: rupture and reconstruction resistance, meaning that the strengthening crassroots organizations
Speaker 5: direct action and ideological development, rupture meaning that they're breaking
Speaker 5: away from catalyst institutions through revolutionary action and reconstruction meanings
Speaker 5: they establish a new social relations based on self management
Speaker 5: and mutual aid. It's kind of similar to the way
Speaker 5: that I break down social revolution conceptually as an approach
Speaker 5: that incorporates both opposition and the proposal of alternatives. So
Speaker 5: I have been thinking about specifies more lately. I've made
Speaker 5: that video many years ago, and my anarchist understanding has
Speaker 5: shifted a lot, especially recently, in going back and looking
Speaker 5: at how I would have analyzed things previously, I think
Speaker 5: there's some different directions that I might take certain things in.
Speaker 5: I think, for example, the idea of affinity groups engaging
Speaker 5: in social intution is extremely valuable in shifting the conversation
Speaker 5: within you know, these mass movements. But I also think
Speaker 5: that there's a risk in the ways in which a SPECIFIESMO,
Speaker 5: if not properly understood or conceptualized, could end up opening
Speaker 5: ground for co optation towards some rather unanarchist outcomes. You
Speaker 5: know what I mean by that is, I think it's
Speaker 5: important one discussing a specifies more to be very careful
Speaker 5: against the interpretation of it as some kind of vangguard
Speaker 5: as strategy or way to dictate a vision of anarchy.
Speaker 5: I think that even if somebody has taken the pacifist
Speaker 5: approach in creating an efficiency group organized around a very
Speaker 5: specific form of anarchism, that group should still be in
Speaker 5: conversation with different tendencies and engaging in an ongoing process
Speaker 5: of critique and convergence of ideas. I believe this is
Speaker 5: the sort of motivation between Malichesta's idea of synthesis and
Speaker 5: the Synthesis Federation in anarchist history. I've still learn a
Speaker 5: bit about that, but anyway, I'd love to hear about
Speaker 5: what they are for you, and as anarchists you require
Speaker 5: up to here. Now you know they can feel free
Speaker 5: to reach out to me. I have a website now,
Speaker 5: Andrew Sage dot org, and I wish them or power
Speaker 5: to all the people. That's it for me today. You
Speaker 5: can find me on YouTube and Patreon and this has
Speaker 5: been it can happen here peace.
Speaker 8: Welcome to kidnapp and hear a podcast where I last
Speaker 8: left rfk JR on the proclamation that if he was
Speaker 8: able to take off as millions will die, and all
Speaker 8: evidence suggests that I am going to be right about this.
Speaker 8: I am your host Mia Wong with me is Gare Lou.
Speaker 6: He's making the meme come true. He's making the millions
Speaker 6: millions must die.
Speaker 8: We're really, really, really, truly only the white Man could
Speaker 8: make real unlimited gedocide in the first world. It's great,
Speaker 8: it's great stuff. So this is going to be a
Speaker 8: recap episode of not even all like some of the
Speaker 8: stuff AREFK Jr. Has done since he's gotten confirmed as
Speaker 8: the fucking United States is Secretary of Health and Human Services,
Speaker 8: an organization which can includes so many things, but like
Speaker 8: for example, the NIH, the cdc DA, I believe, yeah,
Speaker 8: many many things. So Okay, there are lots and lots
Speaker 8: and lots of different rounds of budget cuts that are
Speaker 8: happening and grant cuts from a whole bunch of different
Speaker 8: departments and agencies. We're going to start with National Institutes
Speaker 8: of Health cutting a whole bunch of studies for vaccines
Speaker 8: for new diseases. So RFKA Junior's thing was, well, we're
Speaker 8: not going to fund any COVID research because COVID is over.
Speaker 8: So no more research into COVID vaccine treatments. We're not
Speaker 8: going to fund that now. Obviously COVID is like not
Speaker 8: over trivially. Obviously you catch it and it makes you
Speaker 8: sick and sometimes you and sometimes you get debilitating, long
Speaker 8: term negative health outcomes. But this is the law to
Speaker 8: get they're using to just be like no, fuck it,
Speaker 8: fuck it, We'll cut all of the funding that we
Speaker 8: can find that does the stuff. Now the problem again.
Speaker 8: And so these these cuts look a lot like the
Speaker 8: very beginning of the Trump administration where they were just
Speaker 8: going through and like you'd get a giant list of
Speaker 8: grants that got cut in the sense that like they're
Speaker 8: like control effing programs, right, and they're like searching for
Speaker 8: keywords and then just killing all the block grants that
Speaker 8: do that. We'll get more into the end of the
Speaker 8: episode with like a different set of cuts. But one
Speaker 8: of the one of the big issues with this is
Speaker 8: that it's it's killing coronavirus research in general, like all
Speaker 8: of it is getting like massive cuts, and so this
Speaker 8: includes I think it was cnbcors You're putting on this
Speaker 8: killing a bunch of fairly like late stage research on
Speaker 8: things like you know, like like actually having vaccines that
Speaker 8: could work across like the broadcast category of coronaviruses, because
Speaker 8: like obviously there there are a whole bunch of different
Speaker 8: kinds of coronaviruses, and there are certain sort of vaccine
Speaker 8: techniques that can work to suppress like the families of them,
Speaker 8: and fucking I don't know, maybe maybe maybe the europe
Speaker 8: and the Chinese will figure out how to do that,
Speaker 8: because the surest fuck isn't gonna be US after recud
Speaker 8: all this fucking funding. It's great. So all right, we're
Speaker 8: starting sort of I guess on the vaccine beat here
Speaker 8: because there's there's so many different kinds of bullshit. One
Speaker 8: of the other really big things that happened is doctor
Speaker 8: Mark Peters, who was the guy who like did Operation
Speaker 8: Warp Speed, which was Trump's like big push to get
Speaker 8: a COVID vaccine now, and this is something I think
Speaker 8: is worth highlighting it again. This guy like worked under
Speaker 8: Trump right a lot, and some of these programs where
Speaker 8: we're talking about later were Trump programs, but Trump won.
Speaker 8: I mean, like Trump did do some anti vax shit
Speaker 8: and say some anti vac shit, but he wasn't like
Speaker 8: a hardline anti vaxxer, definitely not now.
Speaker 6: Yeah, at many points he tried to take credit himself
Speaker 6: for the fast response of the CODE vaccine, which, hey,
Speaker 6: as long as we get the vaccine, do whatever you want, buddy.
Speaker 6: And the amount that that's been like memory hold and
Speaker 6: like they're trying to like just alter alter history regarding
Speaker 6: the COVID vaccine is a little, a little head scratching.
Speaker 6: It gives me that just slow growing headache that I'm
Speaker 6: experiencing every day, nearly all the time, just not due
Speaker 6: to COVID, because I've actually, to my knowledge, never gotten it,
Speaker 6: but it is a headache of political origin.
Speaker 8: Yeah, And I think one of the one of the
Speaker 8: interesting elements of this is something the thing I've talked
Speaker 8: about more like in the wake of like the immediate
Speaker 8: wake of twenty twenty, like twenty twelve, twenty two, is
Speaker 8: there used to be a big split in the Republican
Speaker 8: Party between like the lab leakers and the anti vaxxers,
Speaker 8: because the thing about being a lab leak person is that,
Speaker 8: like you can't be a chin release a bioweapon person
Speaker 8: who also thinks that the vaccine is evil or at
Speaker 8: least you shouldn't be able to that those are like mutually.
Speaker 8: It took years. Legitimately, this is enough cognitive dissidence that
Speaker 8: even like the Alex Jones types, it took years for
Speaker 8: them to sort of like develop a level of cognitive
Speaker 8: dissonance that allowed them to do this. They did do
Speaker 8: it eventually. And what we're seeing right now right is
Speaker 8: like Trumps a way of sort of shring up his
Speaker 8: anti vaccine flank has just like handed control over all
Speaker 8: public health policy to these just like hideous anti vaccine
Speaker 8: like cranks. And so Peter Marx, who was like one
Speaker 8: of the big guys from Trump won and you know
Speaker 8: who stayed on through Biden, who was like, yeah, okay,
Speaker 8: I'm gonna fucking get this vaccine to work. He has
Speaker 8: been forced to resign. And Marx also was the guy
Speaker 8: who was in charge of vaccine safety in the US, right,
Speaker 8: and he's forced out. And he said in a statement
Speaker 8: for CNN, I mean, you can read the whole thing somewhere,
Speaker 8: but quote, it has become clear that truth and transparency
Speaker 8: are not desired by the Secretary this is OURFKA junior,
Speaker 8: but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.
Speaker 8: So that's good. That's the guy who used to be
Speaker 8: in charge of our country's vaccine safety going like, yeah,
Speaker 8: this guy wanted me to just fucking lie about vaccines constantly.
Speaker 4: So that's great. That's fun.
Speaker 8: So before we get into the people who he's also
Speaker 8: he's bringing in to do his like unbelievably fake, hack,
Speaker 8: bullshit vaccine study stuff, we should talk a bit about
Speaker 8: the measles outbreak in Texas.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 8: The reason that this isn't getting more coverage is that
Speaker 8: this is going to get a really significant amount of
Speaker 8: coverage on this show in the near future when when
Speaker 8: those episodes are done, this is going to get significant coverage.
Speaker 8: For now, what I think is sort of important about
Speaker 8: this is that so there's been an outbreak of measles, which,
Speaker 8: like there should not be outbreaks and measles. We have
Speaker 8: defeated measles. We have the vaccine that you can take it.
Speaker 8: It's part of the MMR vaccine. You take it and
Speaker 8: then you don't get measles. But there are massive, you know,
Speaker 8: like communities who are fucking not vaccinating and as like,
Speaker 8: in large part because of the fucking anti vaccine shit
Speaker 8: that's being spread by people like RFK Junior, and faced
Speaker 8: with this, RFK Junior has done a bunch of unbelievably
Speaker 8: mealy mouthed bullshit about his personal choice to do vaccines
Speaker 8: blah blah blah blah blah, and then also did a
Speaker 8: whole thing about how he was going to have the
Speaker 8: government sends vitamin A to like combat measles, which is
Speaker 8: just nonsense, right, Like, so this, this is obviously just
Speaker 8: a complete fucking fiasco. We're going to cover this more
Speaker 8: as it goes on. Yeah, so stay tuned for more
Speaker 8: measles horrors. Yeah. The other thing we're not going to
Speaker 8: cover because it's going to be covered by these products
Speaker 8: and services are these advertisements.
Speaker 6: I would love to talk more about them. Well, we're
Speaker 6: still trying to get that hymns and eventually that them
Speaker 6: is a sponsorship.
Speaker 8: But we're getting closer. We're getting closer, getting closer. We
Speaker 8: are back now. What we are not coming closer to
Speaker 8: is finding a connection between vaccines and autism, because there
Speaker 8: isn't one. It's all fake. However, come up, people who
Speaker 8: don't believe this include RFKI Junior. So our kid Junior
Speaker 8: has been doing something. Okay, it's genuinely a little bit
Speaker 8: unclear who exactly is running this, whether this is like
Speaker 8: the Department of Health and Human Services is like a
Speaker 8: broader organization, or just the CDC. But he's trying to
Speaker 8: set up a bunch of people to like basically cook
Speaker 8: the books and try to publish some shit that shows
Speaker 8: a link between vaccines and autism. It's genuinely, deeply murky
Speaker 8: and unclear as to who's doing what right now. But
Speaker 8: one of the people who's been brought in to do
Speaker 8: this is David Gear, who is oh god, oh boy.
Speaker 8: I mean, even by the standards of guy whose job
Speaker 8: it is to like cook evidence to make it look
Speaker 8: like there's a connection between vaccines and autism, even by
Speaker 8: their standards, Gear is like an absolute fucking hack. So
Speaker 8: we talked about Andrew Wakefield on this show, and there
Speaker 8: is weirdly a Wayfield connection here too. So Wakefield is
Speaker 8: the doctor who originally cooked up like a connection between
Speaker 8: the MMR vaccine and autism. Gear is from like a
Speaker 8: slightly different faction of these cranks, and this is this
Speaker 8: is the faction that's work that's like the most closely
Speaker 8: aligned with Harf K. Junior. And this is the faction
Speaker 8: that thinks that like weird methyl mercury or whatever the
Speaker 8: fuck in some older vaccines was causing autism, which like, no,
Speaker 8: it wasn't, but he, you know, he and his dad,
Speaker 8: Mark Gear like did a whole bunch of work to
Speaker 8: try to sort of establish this evidence. I'm gonna read
Speaker 8: this from NBC just describing their work. Quote, the Gear
Speaker 8: is conducted research from a makeshift laboratory in their in
Speaker 8: their carpeted, wood paneled suburban Maryland basement, so get They're
Speaker 8: doing this shit from their basement. Published several studies, many
Speaker 8: of which were retracted, and promoted an unproven treatment for
Speaker 8: autism that cost families tens of thousands of dollars and
Speaker 8: included injections of loopron, a drug used for prostate cancer
Speaker 8: and early puberty in children. It's only approved for precocious
Speaker 8: puberty and comes with side effects including bone damage, heart issues,
Speaker 8: and seizures. They diagnosed kids with precocious puberty without proper
Speaker 8: testing and misled parents in the thinking they were signing
Speaker 8: up for an approved autism therapy. A twenty eleven Maryland
Speaker 8: Border Physicians' investigation found the Gears that violated standards of
Speaker 8: care so to be back up for a second, right, A,
Speaker 8: they claimed that mercury and vaccines is causing autism. B
Speaker 8: they claimed to be able to treat it with puberty.
Speaker 8: But the here autism with a puberty blocker, Yes, which
Speaker 8: is an awes extremely funny given like you know all
Speaker 8: of that, these people are like, you know what, trying
Speaker 8: to bam puberty block give it to them. That's that's fine.
Speaker 6: We're gonna cure autism by giving all these autistic kids
Speaker 6: puberty blockers and making them trans Sure, sure, let's go
Speaker 6: for it. Let's give let's give that a shot. I'm sure,
Speaker 6: I'm sure that won't create a whole new problem for them.
Speaker 8: Yeah yeah that uh that.
Speaker 6: A bone damage thing isn't real. But that's fine.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Unfortunately, this is one of the other problems is this
Speaker 8: is like you get a lot of sources that are
Speaker 8: just fucking making ship up about these fucking diseases.
Speaker 6: To be fair, I also am probably I'm unfamiliar with
Speaker 6: this exact puberty suppresses.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I don't think. In general, Yeah, density.
Speaker 6: Loss of blockers is mostly mostly negligible.
Speaker 8: Yeah. So so again again, this guy is like I
Speaker 8: found the cure for autism. And it's puberty blocks.
Speaker 6: Very funny, you know, I do know a lot of
Speaker 6: autistic people that have gotten how do I say this,
Speaker 6: they've seemed more comfortable once they've transitioned.
Speaker 8: I guess I'll see it like that. Look, it's being
Speaker 8: on the right puberty blocker is better for an autistic
Speaker 8: kid than going through puberty if you are trans. Oh
Speaker 8: but yess.
Speaker 6: But this also shows how like the attack on puberty
Speaker 6: blockers for you know, quote unquote trans minors is completely nonsense,
Speaker 6: because these drugs have been used for SIS children to
Speaker 6: cease early on set puberty. These are fully reversible. Yeah,
Speaker 6: these are used for SIS children. It's used by these
Speaker 6: like hacks and weirdos to quote unquote cure autism.
Speaker 8: Yeah, by these same people as an autism.
Speaker 6: Here for the vaccines, oh my, even though these are
Speaker 6: the same like drugs, these quote unquote like chemical castration drugs,
Speaker 6: as Matt Walsh would put it, are you know now
Speaker 6: trying to be banned, uh for for for trans children?
Speaker 6: So you know, hypocrisy always, always always matters. It's always
Speaker 6: it's always important to point out their hypocrisy because that's
Speaker 6: how we win. So here this is one one more
Speaker 6: step towards victory, Garrison.
Speaker 8: Garrison putting out hypocrisy is important because morale's a tarada struggle.
Speaker 8: It makes you feel good, and that's a little bit important,
Speaker 8: average John Stewart post. But okay, let's continue. So his father,
Speaker 8: Mark Gear, who he was doing a bunch of this
Speaker 8: research wish, was short of his medical license. Now, David
Speaker 8: Gear actually amazingly, amazingly was not strict of his medical
Speaker 8: license at Garritton. Do you want to guess why he
Speaker 8: wasn't strict of his medical license. He didn't have one.
Speaker 8: He didn't fucking have one, so instead, instead he was
Speaker 8: prosecuted for doing this shit without a medical license. He
Speaker 8: also doesn't have a medical degree. He has like a
Speaker 8: liberal arts dek okay, that.
Speaker 6: Rules these these liberal art students are giving our kids
Speaker 6: transgender hormones many such reasons.
Speaker 8: He's like the only person I've ever seen who actually
Speaker 8: genuinely did do like dangerous and unauthorized like fucking like medical,
Speaker 8: like unauthorized medical experiments on children with puberty blockers. Like
Speaker 8: He's the only one. Yeah, this is the.
Speaker 6: First instance I've like heard of like mass unethical use
Speaker 6: of puberty suppressing drugs and it's.
Speaker 8: A fucking anti vaxxery and this is the guy they're
Speaker 8: bringing into the like the cook up a connection between
Speaker 8: vaccines and autism using like fucking bears data or whatever
Speaker 8: so investigative journals. Brian Deer, who is i think probably
Speaker 8: most famous to people who've watched like an h bomber
Speaker 8: guy video as the guy who brought down disgraced X
Speaker 8: doctor to Andrew Wakefield. Deer like also wrote about this guy,
Speaker 8: like in his like unbelievably dog shit study about h SO.
Speaker 8: So he publishes like an unbelievably dogshit study about like
Speaker 8: the mercury and vaccines causes autism, whatever the fuck, and
Speaker 8: it gets basically like immediately obliterated the moment autism, like
Speaker 8: activists discover it and like, holy fucking shit, like these
Speaker 8: people are evil. I'm going to read a quote from
Speaker 8: Brian Deer's article about it, one of miss Siedell's that
Speaker 8: that's the person who like the auctism like advocate activists
Speaker 8: to you, like discovered this stuff. One of her complaints
Speaker 8: concerning the Gears a parent institutional review. The seven member
Speaker 8: IRB Institutional Review Board consists of Mark and Dave Gear,
Speaker 8: doctor Gear's wife, two of his business associates, and two
Speaker 8: mothers of autistic children, one of whom has publicly acknowledged
Speaker 8: that her son is the patient's last subject at doctor
Speaker 8: Gear and the other whom is a plaintiff in three
Speaker 8: pending vaccine injury claims. So the IRB, right, this is
Speaker 8: like an ethical review board thing that you're supposed to
Speaker 8: go through to get your studies like approved. So the
Speaker 8: IRB for the study again is these two guys, his
Speaker 8: dad's fucking wife, two of the business associates, and the
Speaker 8: mothers of two attic children who think that that vaccines
Speaker 8: cause autism and are like one of whom is in
Speaker 8: a lawsuit about it and the other the one is
Speaker 8: taking the fucking puberty blockers to try to cure the autism.
Speaker 8: So this is the guy who is being brought in
Speaker 8: to do the book cooking is a guy with no
Speaker 8: medical license, no medical degree, who had to retract his
Speaker 8: papers because they were bullshit.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Also, and this is something that that's common between him
Speaker 8: and R. K. Junior is all these people they think
Speaker 8: that like me. And this is gonna be relevant when
Speaker 8: we get to the sort of HIV AIDS. Part of
Speaker 8: this is that these people think that diseases are caused
Speaker 8: by malnutrition and not by you know, like diseases, and
Speaker 8: they think that you can treat them with just being
Speaker 8: healthy instead of like vaccines. And you know, this is
Speaker 8: this is their worldview, right, this pepul or sort of
Speaker 8: view genesis. This is also why they like one of
Speaker 8: the reasons why they fucking hate autism so much is
Speaker 8: that they're just you know, just on on a sort
Speaker 8: of political level, like that's just that's just sort of
Speaker 8: that's just what their ideology is.
Speaker 6: Imagine how many skilled drone pilots they're going to lose.
Speaker 6: It's really going to backfire on I.
Speaker 8: We will see.
Speaker 6: Speaking of womp wamp, here's some ads.
Speaker 8: All right, we're back. Let's hear more about Robert F.
Speaker 6: Kennedy Junior, the second Kennedy to have a hole in
Speaker 6: his head, but this one's from a worm WHOA.
Speaker 4: Okay, So let's let's talk about the last group of
Speaker 4: things here, which is another series of massive budget cuts
Speaker 4: that they're doing. This is another thing where they have
Speaker 4: a giant list of grants that they're fucking cutting. This
Speaker 4: is another like anti DEI and so you know, there's
Speaker 4: a lot of the things that I guess you would
Speaker 4: expect from one of these, like you can only study
Speaker 4: white people ones. So, like, there are a whole bunch
Speaker 4: of programs in this list of like grants that they're
Speaker 4: cutting that are like studying you know, racism and medicine
Speaker 4: and like the different medical outcomes between like people of
Speaker 4: different races because they're getting different levels of medical care
Speaker 4: and because of the environments that they're in. And this
Speaker 4: is all stuff that like, you know, these people do
Speaker 4: not want there to be research demonstrating that like racism
Speaker 4: exists in the medical system, because it's it's just extremely
Speaker 4: bad for there just to be objective evidence that there
Speaker 4: is racism and that it's bad and that it kills people.
Speaker 4: So another very bleak thing that I haven't seen much
Speaker 4: coverage of is that a lot of these grants were
Speaker 4: funding research into trans healthcare and also the effects of
Speaker 4: like violence against trans people and things like mental health,
Speaker 4: you know. And this is also something that's devastating because
Speaker 4: like the state of trans medicine, it's like we know
Speaker 4: things that are safe and we know things that work,
Speaker 4: which is just letting people transition, but also there's so
Speaker 4: much more stuff that we need in terms of like
Speaker 4: hormone regimes that like work better, right and things like that,
Speaker 4: and also like you know, just sort of like basic
Speaker 4: health outcome stuff. And yeah, these people do not want
Speaker 4: anyone to know exactly how bad they're They're fucking transphobia
Speaker 4: is affecting the people that they're inflicting it on, and
Speaker 4: so yeah, they're like, fuck it, we'll just get rid
Speaker 4: of all these people's funding. There's also a whole bunch
Speaker 4: of stuff that has to do with COVID. I was
Speaker 4: going to read the description of one of the fucking
Speaker 4: grants they cut to give you a sense of like
Speaker 4: the shit that they're cutting. Development of a handheld rapid
Speaker 4: air sensing system to monitor and quantify stars COVID too
Speaker 4: in aerosols in real time, which actually would be an
Speaker 4: unbelievably useful thing, right, Like a system that could detect
Speaker 4: fucking COVID like aerosols like in real time and tell
Speaker 4: you that there's fucking COVID in the air, staggeringly useful.
Speaker 4: They don't fucking want it. One of the big things
Speaker 4: that they cut is, like you know, we're talking about
Speaker 4: this with sort of like cutting like programs that study
Speaker 4: structure racism and medicine. They basically went on a like
Speaker 4: a county by county basis and found every single grant,
Speaker 4: like state by state, Cannaby county, city by city, every
Speaker 4: single grant that talks about studying the effects of COVID
Speaker 4: on non white people, you know, and they're doing this.
Speaker 4: I think people have forgotten about this. But one of
Speaker 4: the things that RFK Junior said, like I think this
Speaker 4: is dream the campaign was he had this giant rants
Speaker 4: a boy how COVID was like specifically targeted to leave
Speaker 4: Chinese people in Jews alive, Which is great.
Speaker 8: That is how he put it.
Speaker 6: Someone should probably report that to Trump's Anti Semitism task Force. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: you know, Hall monitor whatever.
Speaker 8: No one cares anymore. Yeah, I mean there's you know.
Speaker 8: So so they're just trying to destroy all the stuff.
Speaker 8: They've also just like in blocks, just like got rid
Speaker 8: of every single fucking thing that was funding like any
Speaker 8: program that was like mental health care as a block thing.
Speaker 8: They're just cutting all of it. So that's gonna make
Speaker 8: everyone even more normal than we already fucking are.
Speaker 6: The Actually I agree with this because this is the
Speaker 6: one thing where I think the lifestyle choice thing does
Speaker 6: matter because I just read Yawi when I'm sad, and
Speaker 6: it fixes me. And if everyone does that, I think
Speaker 6: we don't need any of these other mental health services.
Speaker 8: What'd you do in your manic though? Read more Yaoi.
Speaker 6: Because famously, the Yawi, the Yawi you're reading demographic the
Speaker 6: most mentally stable and normal population.
Speaker 8: God. One of the other ones that's unbelievably concerning is
Speaker 8: again like county by county going through and cutting funding
Speaker 8: for like things things that promote child vaccination. They are
Speaker 8: systemically trying to cut off kids from getting vaccines, and
Speaker 8: they're trying to get rid of anything that opposes like
Speaker 8: their efforts to try to convince everyone to, like all
Speaker 8: parents to fucking not have your kids get vaccines. They
Speaker 8: also cut a whole bunch of grants for rapid disease response,
Speaker 8: which is great. We'll get to the exact reason why
Speaker 8: that's like so fucking terrifying in a second. In the
Speaker 8: like very very immediate term. They also have killed in
Speaker 8: one hundred and forty five grants for HIV, and this
Speaker 8: is a whole bunch of different HIV programs. They are
Speaker 8: killing funding for distributing and getting people to use PREP,
Speaker 8: which is a pill that like massively helps prevent HIV infections,
Speaker 8: especially if you were a trans woman and you were
Speaker 8: having sex, like you should get on PREP or a twink,
Speaker 8: I will say thank you. Yeah, the uptake rates for
Speaker 8: trans women are specifically lower, which is the thing that
Speaker 8: we know because we have these fucking funding and these
Speaker 8: and we're not gonna have that shit anymore because they're
Speaker 8: they're cutting all the fucking funding for these, for these
Speaker 8: fucking research programs.
Speaker 6: I sometimes do forget that there are trans women with
Speaker 6: different like lived like sexual backgrounds than me, because coming
Speaker 6: coming out of coming out of twink culture, it's like ingrained.
Speaker 8: Like your co host who permanently has only ever come
Speaker 8: out of lesbian culture.
Speaker 6: Yes, because in uh, in twin culture, getting on PREP
Speaker 6: is is ingrained pretty hard at this point.
Speaker 8: Yeah, well it's it's ingrained in a lot of places,
Speaker 8: but there's places where where it isn't. And those places
Speaker 8: are where things go very very bad, very quickly, which
Speaker 8: is why obviously they're they're eliminating the research for this
Speaker 8: because they want to fucking kill queer people like they
Speaker 8: think they think that HIV is a fucking lifestyle choice.
Speaker 8: RF Kid Junior particular things is because of poppers, which is.
Speaker 6: Now leading to the poppers raids. Red alert everybody, red alert. Yeah,
Speaker 6: it's it's getting pretty scary out there.
Speaker 8: So it's it's really fucking bleak. I mean they've cut
Speaker 8: you know, I mean they're they're they're trying to just
Speaker 8: fucking get rid of this because these people are just
Speaker 8: fucking unhinged, virulent homophobes and transphobes, and yeah, they want
Speaker 8: to fucking cut these programs because they think it'll hurt us.
Speaker 8: They've also laid off the entire Office of Infectious Diseases
Speaker 8: and HIV AIDS policy staff. Is that bad? Oh it's bad.
Speaker 8: Here's it's fairy CBS. Yeah, So they do child they're
Speaker 8: one of the other guers that a childhood vaccination efforts.
Speaker 8: They also run the fucking National Vaccine Program, which nobody
Speaker 8: knows what's gonna happen to it now because again, the
Speaker 8: thing that was supposed to run it's just fucking gone.
Speaker 8: So who the fuck knows what's happening with that now.
Speaker 8: They are probably going to just completely destroy Trump's like
Speaker 8: giant Trump actually in his first term had a giant
Speaker 8: program to like en HIV that like kind of did
Speaker 8: stuff because it was someone else's program that Trump just
Speaker 8: kind of implemented.
Speaker 6: We're getting so close to the HIV vaccine.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, and you know, and so who fucking knows,
Speaker 8: it's probably just completely fucked. Yeah, this is going to
Speaker 8: have just unbelievably hideous consequences on millions and millions of people.
Speaker 8: And they that's not even though they don't give a shit,
Speaker 8: it's that they think it's cool and funny and based
Speaker 8: when people like us fucking die. Now, on the other hands,
Speaker 8: the rest of the US population is about to run
Speaker 8: into the same fucking thing that all of these stupid
Speaker 8: ass bankers thought, which is that oh, Trump will just
Speaker 8: fuck with the queries and leave us alone. No, we're
Speaker 8: gonna was in the same place that I closed the
Speaker 8: last time I talked about fucking RFK junior, which is
Speaker 8: the fucking bird flu, which is that he wants the
Speaker 8: dillusion to the bird flu is he wants to fucking
Speaker 8: let it rip, and he just wants to just like
Speaker 8: be like, oh, we can just like take the birds
Speaker 8: to survive the bird flu, and we'll just let the
Speaker 8: We'll just let it spread and just use those ones
Speaker 8: and those ones will be healthy now. So thing about
Speaker 8: this bird flu right is that it kills within three
Speaker 8: to four days. I mean ill just Matt Hosey and
Speaker 8: Scientific Americas describes how this thing again within three to
Speaker 8: four days hasn't a ninety to one hundred percent kill rate.
Speaker 8: So you know you can't just do this right because
Speaker 8: they'll just it just fucking kills all the birds. He
Speaker 8: doesn't want to fucking vaccinate the birds, which is the
Speaker 8: thing that like, if you want to stop this but
Speaker 8: this this fucking pandemic from.
Speaker 4: Spreading, then you need to do it right.
Speaker 8: And once again I need I need to emphasize enough
Speaker 8: that when when I when I talked to virologist about this,
Speaker 8: they said that letting the bird flu rip through all
Speaker 8: the fucking bird populations, right, just letting you fucking spread,
Speaker 8: letting it kill everything until you only have the ones
Speaker 8: that like didn't die. Is if you were like trying
Speaker 8: to cook up conditions like field conditions specifically to try
Speaker 8: to get it to develop a mutation to spread to humans,
Speaker 8: this is what you would do as you would just
Speaker 8: let it fucking spread un controlled and kill everything. So
Speaker 8: this is what we're doing at the same time as
Speaker 8: again anti vaxxers are fucking running the running our fucking
Speaker 8: vaccine services. As we are cutting the staff of cutting
Speaker 8: grant funding for people who do response to rapid response
Speaker 8: to emerging diseases, as we are cutting the fucking entire
Speaker 8: policy staff for the Office of Infectious Diseases. They are
Speaker 8: building a fucking pandemic. And all of these fucking people
Speaker 8: think that COVID was fucking cooked up in a lab.
Speaker 8: And what they are doing is like they are, they
Speaker 8: are now doing the thing they are accusing everyone else
Speaker 8: is doing, which is they are fucking at timpting damblemant
Speaker 8: policy to cook up a fucking play in a lab.
Speaker 2: Excep.
Speaker 8: It's not going in a lab, is going to be
Speaker 8: in America's fucking factory farms, and we are all going
Speaker 8: to suffer the consequences of it.
Speaker 6: Well, I assume you saw the statement from Canter Analysts
Speaker 6: on Monday, the Wall Street investment firm. This founder was
Speaker 6: like a really was a really big Trump donor, was
Speaker 6: on the inauguration committee. But two of their analysts put
Speaker 6: out a statement today calling to reevaluate RFK Junior as
Speaker 6: a Secretary of Health and Human Services, calling out to
Speaker 6: quote unquote apparent anti science and libertarian agenda, saying it
Speaker 6: will put people's lives in jeopardy to advance a discredited
Speaker 6: theory on vaccines.
Speaker 8: Look, I will say this, like, there are a lot
Speaker 8: of riffs in the Trump coalition. RFK Junior and his
Speaker 8: people cannot fucking be allowed to run these institutions. They
Speaker 8: need to be fucking brought out now. If we do
Speaker 8: not do this now, millions of people are going to die.
Speaker 8: I have been saying this. I am going to continue
Speaker 8: to say this because you can see in real time
Speaker 8: all of the things that are going to lead to
Speaker 8: all of these people fucking dying. And you know, his
Speaker 8: position is not incredibly secure in this coalition, right, Like, Yeah,
Speaker 8: there are lots of sectors of capital who don't want
Speaker 8: the entire fucking population of the United States die in
Speaker 8: a plague.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: After Carl's grandson's resignation to his analysts also put out
Speaker 6: a statement advocating for vaccine use and specifically against RFK
Speaker 6: Junior and his vaccine rhetoric. Biotech investors also spread similar
Speaker 6: anti RFK Junior rhetoric over the weekend following marx resignation.
Speaker 8: So, yeah, go fucking I don't know. I don't I
Speaker 8: don't know exactly which public official you pressure or who
Speaker 8: you go scream at to try to get rid of
Speaker 8: this guy before he'd fucking gets us all killed. But
Speaker 8: go do that, I don't know, Go harassed or like
Speaker 8: legislator or whatever, or like, find find the nearest person
Speaker 8: who can can can be yelled at, who will convey this.
Speaker 6: Stand outside your local CDC office to sign and protest
Speaker 6: the CDC.
Speaker 8: The hospitals are empty. It's fake. Oh god, And on
Speaker 8: that note, getting us yet another fucking one of those.
Speaker 8: Actually do they even do the misinformation labels anymore? Onlike
Speaker 8: Spotify and shit and like YouTube, Well, of course not. God,
Speaker 8: we lost the election. It's not happy.
Speaker 6: Wow, truth and reasonable liss lost the election.
Speaker 8: Sorry not we So all right, yeah, this is the
Speaker 8: city could appen here. Get this guy out of office
Speaker 8: before we all fucking die in a plague.
Speaker 6: Again, this is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis today,
Speaker 6: I'm joined by James Stout. This episode is going to
Speaker 6: be about ice actions against students, scholars, and professors around
Speaker 6: the country and this wave of deportations targeting people engaged
Speaker 6: in pro Palestine speech. Protest, as well as some individuals
Speaker 6: who have been roped up in this new way of
Speaker 6: deportations who have not publicly engaged in Palestine activism. Let's
Speaker 6: start on the evening of Saturday, March eighth, my Mood
Speaker 6: Khalil and his wife were returning home from dinner when
Speaker 6: plane closed. ICE agents followed the couple into their campus
Speaker 6: apartment building at Columbia University. A man wearing a Marvel
Speaker 6: graphic tea arrested Khalil for then unknown reasons and threatened
Speaker 6: to arrest Khalil's wife, who is eight months pregnant and
Speaker 6: an American citizen. When Khalil's wife brought his green card
Speaker 6: from their apartment, she says, one of the ICE agents
Speaker 6: placed a phone call informing someone Khalil was a permanent resident,
Speaker 6: to which the person on the phone replied, let's bring
Speaker 6: him in any way.
Speaker 1: You've got to be under arrest, so turn.
Speaker 8: Turn around, turn around, going to be his phone?
Speaker 2: Okay, you.
Speaker 5: Worked anymore?
Speaker 8: You guys really don't.
Speaker 6: Need to be doing all of that.
Speaker 8: During the arrest.
Speaker 6: Khalil's lawyer, Amy Greer, spoke in the film with one
Speaker 6: of the ICE agents, who said that they were acting
Speaker 6: on State Department orders to revoke Khalil's student visa. Greer
Speaker 6: reiterated to the agents that Khalil was in fact a
Speaker 6: permanent resident with a green card, but the ICE agent
Speaker 6: just responded by saying they were revoking the green card instead.
Speaker 6: Khalil's a graduate student who has been studying at Columbia
Speaker 6: for over two years. Last year, Khalil emerged as a
Speaker 6: visible figure in the college encampment protests, becoming a public
Speaker 6: spokesperson and a lead negotiator on behalf of Columbia University
Speaker 6: apartheid divest Though never being arrested, Khalil faced harassment from
Speaker 6: right wing Zionist dosing campaigns calling for his deportation, and
Speaker 6: when ICE did come for Khalil, disappearing him to a
Speaker 6: detention facility in Louisiana and cutting him off from communication
Speaker 6: with his wife and lawyer. Throughout all of this, he
Speaker 6: was not charged with any crime. Instead, I used in
Speaker 6: the State Department are using a rarely used Cold War
Speaker 6: era immigration statute that gives the Secretary of State the
Speaker 6: power to exclude or deport any non citizen of the
Speaker 6: United States if there are quote reasonable grounds to believe
Speaker 6: that in individuals entry, proposed activities, presence or activities in
Speaker 6: the United States would have quote potentially serious adverse foreign
Speaker 6: policy consequences.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was the one that, like I remember at
Speaker 2: the time, you and I were discussing this se in
Speaker 2: our group chat, and we were trying to work out,
Speaker 2: like how the Secretary of State could be revoking a
Speaker 2: green card, Like yeah, and I think you found this,
Speaker 2: so you found it somewhere in it. The Trump administration
Speaker 2: has been very, very good at finding very obscure pieces
Speaker 2: of law that it can wheeld against migrants. Right, No
Speaker 2: one in twenty sixteen would have foreseen what they did
Speaker 2: with Title forty two, which is a public health law,
Speaker 2: and they're doing something similar here. I mean, they may
Speaker 2: have spent the last four years looking for these things,
Speaker 2: escescially when the campus protests began, But this is entirely
Speaker 2: unprecedented as far as them weare.
Speaker 6: And right off this happened, we discussed how this case
Speaker 6: was probably going to be used as a testing ground
Speaker 6: for employing these tactics on a more widespread scale, creating
Speaker 6: legal precedent, and sure enough, Khalil's case was not an outlier.
Speaker 6: This was just the first public instance of the Trump
Speaker 6: administrations directed targeting of students they believed to be associated
Speaker 6: with protests against Israel and its actions in Gaza, and
Speaker 6: this wave of actions by ICE had actually already begun
Speaker 6: before Khalil's arrest. The day before Khalil was arrested, ICE
Speaker 6: agents knocked on the door of PhD student Rajani Shrini Vassen,
Speaker 6: who a few days prior was suddenly notified that her
Speaker 6: student visa had been revoked. When I saygents knocked, she
Speaker 6: did not answer the door. The next day, I showed
Speaker 6: up again to her Columbia University apartment. Trina Aasen was
Speaker 6: not home, but upon hearing of Khalil's arrest just a
Speaker 6: few hours later, she decided to quickly collect some belongings
Speaker 6: and flee to Canada. Five days later, when ICE returned
Speaker 6: to her residence, but this time with a warrant, Trinavasten
Speaker 6: was already gone. Homeland Security Secretary Christy nom praised this
Speaker 6: as quote unquote self deportation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they talk about this a lot, Like self deportation
Speaker 2: is definitely one of their goals. They talked about it
Speaker 2: before Trump even came into power. Like that's what we're
Speaker 2: seeing a lot of these spectacle raids and like spectacle
Speaker 2: deportations gear tactic. Yeah, yeah, exactly the desires that people leave.
Speaker 2: Is she a Canadian citizen or like I.
Speaker 6: Don't believe so, No, Okay, it was just the fastest
Speaker 6: flight from LaGuardia out of the country out of like, yeah,
Speaker 6: the closest, the closest she could be.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wonder what her immigration states is in Canada
Speaker 2: now she.
Speaker 6: Is currently figuring this whole situation out still, okay, navigating
Speaker 6: her legal options both in Canada and the States.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that'd be interesting too to see what Canada can
Speaker 2: offer her. And like, I don't think the Trump administration
Speaker 2: would go after like having her extradited back because if
Speaker 2: she say she's not accused of a crime, and then
Speaker 2: they've kind of got what they wanted. It'll be interesting
Speaker 2: to follow that.
Speaker 6: There is no need for extradition because none of the
Speaker 6: people that were talking about today were accused of any crime.
Speaker 2: Yeah. With the other cases of quote unquote like self deportation,
Speaker 2: one of the issues is people have had their passport
Speaker 2: seized and held, like like lots of Venice Whelan migrants,
Speaker 2: so they actually can't ye or it would be very
Speaker 2: difficult for them to like just get on a fly
Speaker 2: and leave, which.
Speaker 6: I think is in part why she made the decision
Speaker 6: to get out when she could right. DHS claimed in
Speaker 6: a statement that Trine of Uson advocated violence and was
Speaker 6: quote involved in activities supporting hamas a terrorist organization unquote.
Speaker 6: ICE is targeting her seemingly stems from being mass arrested
Speaker 6: while trying to return to her apartment from a picnic
Speaker 6: friends on the same day as the Hamilton Hill occupation.
Speaker 6: She couldn't get home and was caught up in the
Speaker 6: crowd and was arrested among one hundred other people. She
Speaker 6: received two summons for obstructing traffic and failure to disperse,
Speaker 6: but her case was quickly dismissed. Homeland Security claims that
Speaker 6: failing to declare these two summons is what caused her
Speaker 6: visa to be revoked.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 6: Interesting That same week, ICE went after another Green cardholder
Speaker 6: at Columbia, a twenty one year old student named Yung
Speaker 6: Sao Chung, a permanent resident who immigrated to the United
Speaker 6: States from South Korea with her family when she was seven.
Speaker 6: On March ninth, ICE agents visited her parents' home looking
Speaker 6: for Chung, and that day she received an odd text message, reading,
Speaker 6: hi yunsaou. This is Audrey from the police. My job
Speaker 6: is to reach out to you and see if you
Speaker 6: have any questions about your recent arrest and the process
Speaker 6: going forward. When are you available for a phone call unquote.
Speaker 6: This recent arrest was allegedly in reference to being detained,
Speaker 6: among others, at a sit in protest at Bernard College
Speaker 6: on March fifth. Chung was charged and then released with
Speaker 6: misdemeanor obstruction. After receiving that sketchy text message, Chung got
Speaker 6: an email from Columbia Public Safety reading quote, the US
Speaker 6: Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has
Speaker 6: asked us to inform you that Homeland Security Investigation Agents
Speaker 6: are seeking to make contact with you in connection with
Speaker 6: an administrative warrant for your arrest. Consistent with universities practice,
Speaker 6: we wanted to share this information and their request with you.
Speaker 6: If you are represented by council, it may make sense
Speaker 6: for your lawyer to speak directly with DHS unquote. Chung's
Speaker 6: lawyer decided to call quote unquote to Audrey from the police,
Speaker 6: who revealed that she was actually an HSI agent and
Speaker 6: that the State Department was revoking Miss Chung's residency status. Now,
Speaker 6: rather than opting for self deportation or turning herself into
Speaker 6: immigration authorities, Chung decided to go into hiding and fight
Speaker 6: the deportation in the courts while trying to evade ICED attention.
Speaker 6: When ICE failed to locate her, they enlisted the help
Speaker 6: of federal prosecutors. To quote from the New York Times quote,
Speaker 6: on March tenth, Perry Carboni, a high ranking lawyer in
Speaker 6: the Federal Prosecutor's office, told Miss Amaud, miss Chung's attorney
Speaker 6: that the Secretary of State, mister Rubio, had revoked Miss
Speaker 6: Chung's visa. Miss A mad responded that Miss Chung was
Speaker 6: not in the country on a visa and was a
Speaker 6: permanent resident, according to lawsuit. Mister Carboni responded that mister
Speaker 6: Rubio had quote revoked that as well unquote. Yeah, So
Speaker 6: this is the exact same language we saw with Khalil,
Speaker 6: and it displays a general uncaring towards who they are
Speaker 6: actually targeting and what their actual legal status is in
Speaker 6: the United States. They think they're going after people student visas,
Speaker 6: but when it turns out they have green cards, that
Speaker 6: doesn't stop them, they still continue to do it anyway.
Speaker 6: On March thirteenth, ICE searched two residences on campus with warrants,
Speaker 6: citing a statute for harboring non citizens, but Chung was
Speaker 6: nowhere to be found. Like Khalil, the Trump administration is
Speaker 6: arguing that her presence of the United States hinders the
Speaker 6: administration's foreign policy agenda. But her lawyers note that Chung
Speaker 6: was not, by any means a quote unquote movement leader.
Speaker 6: She was simply one of hundreds of students who joined
Speaker 6: in nationwide protests against Israel's actions in Gaza. Her lawyer's right, quote,
Speaker 6: Miss Chung has not made public statements to the press
Speaker 6: or otherwise assumed a high profile role in these protests.
Speaker 6: She was rather one of a large group of college
Speaker 6: students raising, expressing, and discussing shared concerns.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 6: Chung had previously faced university disciplinary process, which found she
Speaker 6: was not in violation of any university policy related to protests.
Speaker 6: Last year, Chung's lawyers filed a lawsuit to prevent her deportation,
Speaker 6: claiming that ICE's actions against Chung are illegal and unconstitutional.
Speaker 6: This lawsuit reads quote, Officials at the highest echelon's government
Speaker 6: are attempting to use immigration enforcement as a bludgeon to
Speaker 6: suppress speech that they dislike, including Miss Chung's space. ICE's
Speaker 6: shocking actions against Miss Chung form a part of a
Speaker 6: larger pattern of attempted US government repression of constitutionally protected
Speaker 6: protest activity and other forms of speech unquote. On March
Speaker 6: twenty fifth, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order
Speaker 6: halting efforts from ICE to detain or relocate Chung. The
Speaker 6: judge said that the government produced quote nothing in the
Speaker 6: record to indicate Chung is a danger to the community
Speaker 6: or a quote unquote foreign policy risk, or that she
Speaker 6: was in any communication with terrorist organizations. The judge said
Speaker 6: that there would be quote no trip to Louisiana here unquote.
Speaker 6: This is in reference to the big ICE attention facility
Speaker 6: in Louisiana. We'll be right back after this ad break. Okay,
Speaker 6: we're back now. Although Chung has at least temporarily halted
Speaker 6: ICE's efforts to detain or deporter not all legal recourses
Speaker 6: have proven successful. This week, a US district judge declined
Speaker 6: a request to block the deportation of Cornell's student Mamadou
Speaker 6: Tall after the State Department revoked his visa on March
Speaker 6: thirty first, Tall released a statement, quote, given what we
Speaker 6: have seen across the United States, I have lost faith
Speaker 6: that a favorable ruling from the courts would guarantee my
Speaker 6: personal safety and ability to express my beliefs. I've lost
Speaker 6: faith I could walk the streets without being abducted. Weighing
Speaker 6: these options, I took the decision to leave on my
Speaker 6: own terms.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty bleak.
Speaker 6: So Tall has elected for the quote unquote self deportation option,
Speaker 6: at least for now. I believe his case is going
Speaker 6: to continue, but he is not going to remain in
Speaker 6: the United States.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think he returned to the UK, right, I believe so.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he's a British citizen now. Interestingly, last September, Cornell
Speaker 6: University itself tried to revoke Toall's student visa for involvement
Speaker 6: in student protests, but he successfully appealed and was able
Speaker 6: to continue his African studies PhD remotely.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I spoke to him a little bit back then,
Speaker 2: just FIA direct message, and I think at that time,
Speaker 2: whatever his agreement was, it seems like there was a
Speaker 2: component of it that at least he didn't want to
Speaker 2: talk about it in public, which is fine. Everyone has
Speaker 2: the right to do that, and he should do it
Speaker 2: was better for himself. But maybe I'll try and follow
Speaker 2: up with him again now see if he wanted to speak,
Speaker 2: because he seems to have like he's been of all
Speaker 2: of these people at the one who's been able to
Speaker 2: make the most statements and then control his narrative to
Speaker 2: some degree.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 6: No, he entered this period of like radio silence after
Speaker 6: he won his appeal last fall, and then only started
Speaker 6: speaking publicly again once he began getting targeted by the
Speaker 6: Trump administration.
Speaker 8: Yeah, like the past month and a half.
Speaker 2: I think he proactively filed that suit right like before.
Speaker 6: Now, the scale that Mark Rubio and Ice are seeking
Speaker 6: for in regards to deportations is seemingly going to be
Speaker 6: increasingly large. On March twenty seventh, Secretary of State Mark
Speaker 6: Rubio claimed that he has revoked over three hundred student
Speaker 6: visas so far, saying at a press conference, quote, we
Speaker 6: do it every day. Every time I find one of
Speaker 6: these lunatics, I take away their visas unquote. Now, there
Speaker 6: are a few ways the government is currently trying to
Speaker 6: find these quote unquote lunatics. ICE seems to be targeting
Speaker 6: non citizens who have been arrested or detained at Palestine protests,
Speaker 6: even if their charges were subsequently dropped. This is the
Speaker 6: case for Chung and Shrini Vawsen, as well as former
Speaker 6: student Leca Cordia, a Palestinian who was arrested at Columbia
Speaker 6: campus protests in April of twenty twenty four She is
Speaker 6: currently being held in an ICE attention facility in Texas.
Speaker 6: Now beyond arrest records. The government is utilizing the world
Speaker 6: Wide Web and social media to identify new and returning
Speaker 6: visa applicants and possibly current visa holders that quote support
Speaker 6: terrorist organizations unquote. Social media screening of immigrants and visa
Speaker 6: holders has been slowly ramping up since twenty fourteen and
Speaker 6: accelerated during Trump's first term, but a new directive from
Speaker 6: Secretary of State Mark Rubio titled Enhanced Screening and Social
Speaker 6: Media Vetting for Visa Applicants was sent out on March
Speaker 6: twenty fifth and leaked by journalist Ken Clippenstein. The directive
Speaker 6: cites two executive orders from Trump, measures to combat anti
Speaker 6: Semitism end quote protecting the United States from foreign terrorists
Speaker 6: and other national security and public safety threats.
Speaker 8: Quote.
Speaker 6: The State Department is now requiring consular officers to conduct
Speaker 6: a quote unquote mandatory social media review with screenshotting for
Speaker 6: students and student exchange visitors with the intent of looking
Speaker 6: for evidence of quote advocating for, sympathizing with, or persuading
Speaker 6: others to endorse or espouse terror activities or support a
Speaker 6: designated foreign terrorist organization unquote. Now this applies to FM
Speaker 6: and JAY visas, so student exchange visas, academic visas, and
Speaker 6: vocational visas. The directive also instructs officers to search social
Speaker 6: media for quote conduct that bears a hostile attitude towards
Speaker 6: US citizens or US culture, including government institutions or founding
Speaker 6: principles unquote, which is kind of the most incredibly broad
Speaker 6: thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, that's leaving it at the great discretion
Speaker 2: of the officer.
Speaker 6: Right, There's already been an instance of a US customers
Speaker 6: agent's denying entry to someone who had a quote unquote
Speaker 6: anti Trump sentiments found on their phone. Now, though this
Speaker 6: new directive is focused on denying or revoking student visas,
Speaker 6: the Department of Homeland Security is seeking to expand its
Speaker 6: social media data collection to US citizenship, green card, and
Speaker 6: Islam applicants, basically anyone and everyone in the US immigration system,
Speaker 6: no matter their current status or what previous vetting they
Speaker 6: might have already gone through.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: On March fifth, DHS issued a sixty day notice for
Speaker 6: public comment on a proposal for quote uniform of vetting
Speaker 6: standards and national security screening unquote that includes the collection
Speaker 6: of social media information for all non citizens applying for
Speaker 6: immigration benefits like citizenship or permanent residency. A statement from
Speaker 6: the US Citizenship and Immigration Service reads, quote, these efforts
Speaker 6: ensure that those seeking immigration benefits to live and work
Speaker 6: in the United States do not threaten public safety, undermine
Speaker 6: national security, or promote harmful anti American ideologies unquote.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like the anti American ideologies again is just fastly broad.
Speaker 8: Right, It's like crazy red scare level stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And I'm guessing this will be either like a
Speaker 2: literal control f of whatever they can find of your
Speaker 2: public social media or AI, some kind of AI assistant.
Speaker 2: That's what it seems to be, right, Like.
Speaker 6: Former immigration agents have suggested that they're probably going to
Speaker 6: use some AI system for this, as they've already kind
Speaker 6: of used more primitive versions. But ramping up to this
Speaker 6: scale and with like this increased focus and attention on
Speaker 6: quote unquote AI is going to affect the way that
Speaker 6: they do this betting process.
Speaker 8: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Great.
Speaker 6: So though the government is trying to increase their social
Speaker 6: media screening, so far, they actually haven't had to do
Speaker 6: that much of their own research to identify targets for removal.
Speaker 6: On March seventeenth, a Georgetown scholar named Badar Khan Suri
Speaker 6: was arrested by Homeland Security outside his home in Virginia,
Speaker 6: where he lives with his wife, who's a US citizen,
Speaker 6: and their three kids. According to Surrey's lawyer, masked agents
Speaker 6: quote refused to tell him the basis for the arrest,
Speaker 6: handcuffed him, and forced him into an unmarked black SUV unquote. Later,
Speaker 6: his wife was informed that her husband's visa was revoked
Speaker 6: based on social media posts and that Surrey was sent
Speaker 6: to ICE attention in Louisiana. Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia
Speaker 6: McLoughlin posted on x that Surrey was quote actively spreading
Speaker 6: Hamas propaganda and promoting anti Semitism on social media. The
Speaker 6: Secretary of State issued a determination that Surrey's activities and
Speaker 6: presents in the United States rendered him deportable unquote. Of course,
Speaker 6: any single post in support of Palestine is going to
Speaker 6: be seen as quote unquote promoting antisemitism. According to Mark Rubio,
Speaker 6: Surrey's lawyer wrote in a court filing, quote, doctor Surrey
Speaker 6: is an academic, not an activist. But he spoke out
Speaker 6: on social media about his views on the Israel Gazo war.
Speaker 6: Even more so, his wife is an outspoken critic of
Speaker 6: the Israeli government and the violence it has perpetuated against Palestinians. Yeah,
Speaker 6: see that he was identified through his wife, right, correct,
Speaker 6: and we'll get to that.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 6: Surrey has no criminal record, and according to a colleague,
Speaker 6: he did not attend campus protests. However, Surre's lawyer writes
Speaker 6: that his family have been victims of a docsing campaign,
Speaker 6: with his wife stating that a website had quote claimed
Speaker 6: falsely that my husband and I have quote ties to
Speaker 6: Hamas unquote. The Homeland Security Assistant Secretary references that claim
Speaker 6: in a public statement on Twitter. And this harassment stems
Speaker 6: in part from Surrey's father in law being a maud Yusef,
Speaker 6: a former advisor to Hamas a federal judge blocked serious
Speaker 6: deportation as immigration court proceedings continue, but he still remains
Speaker 6: in iced attention.
Speaker 2: What kind of visa was he on?
Speaker 6: He's not a green card holder. He received his visa
Speaker 6: to continue doctoral research on peace building in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Speaker 6: It's some kind of like academic or exchange visa. I
Speaker 6: don't think we know the exact type that he has.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, that would be it would be interesting to
Speaker 2: know if, like, are they searching just through f one
Speaker 2: visa databases or they I mean obviously not a find
Speaker 2: these green card people, but.
Speaker 6: Like, well, I think specifically in this case, they're searching
Speaker 6: social media. They're not searching through their own databases. They
Speaker 6: don't care what kind of visa he has. They're looking
Speaker 6: at this docksing campaign that's been targeted at him and
Speaker 6: his family for like over a year and using that
Speaker 6: as the basis to deport him.
Speaker 2: Right, and then being like, can we deport he's not
Speaker 2: a citizen?
Speaker 6: So yes, basically even though his wife is a citizen, yeah.
Speaker 2: It's children puberly therefore also citizens.
Speaker 6: His wife, whose father is a mod yusef. They can't
Speaker 6: deport her because she's a citizen, or at least they
Speaker 6: can't deport her right now. Who knows if they'll try
Speaker 6: to denaturalize in the future. Yeah, but this is the
Speaker 6: easiest person to target.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that's kind of what they're going for.
Speaker 2: Like a lot of this is it's like the politics
Speaker 2: of owning the Libs, Right, It's like the politics of
Speaker 2: being angry at your niece and nephew on Facebook and
Speaker 2: wanting to humiliate them. Like, It's not a particularly lately
Speaker 2: coherent policy other than like the Palestine protests made a
Speaker 2: lot of people on the right mad, and they don't
Speaker 2: like migrants and that now they're using this obscure legal
Speaker 2: provision as a cudgel against everything they dislike.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and using social media to identify people who have
Speaker 6: never been arrested, never been charged with anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: We're going to finished our discussion on these doxing campaigns
Speaker 6: and ICE action starting students after this ad break.
Speaker 4: All right, we're back.
Speaker 6: So right now, the two main vectors for iceed attention,
Speaker 6: whether you have a green card or a visa, seems
Speaker 6: to be previous arrests or these mass doxing campaigns. Now,
Speaker 6: someone like Mahmoud Khalil was never arrested or charged with
Speaker 6: a crime, but instead it has been the target of
Speaker 6: harassment from both a local campus doxing account run by
Speaker 6: Columbia professor and fellow students, as well as larger right
Speaker 6: wing Zionist organizations like Canary Mission. A few days before
Speaker 6: being arrested by Ice, Canary Mission posted a video naming
Speaker 6: Khalil as a quote unquote siren moog suspect it foreign
Speaker 6: national alert? So what is Canary Mission if you're lucky
Speaker 6: enough to be unaware? Since twenty fifteen, Canary Mission has
Speaker 6: been collecting and publishing personal information of people they accuse
Speaker 6: of promoting quote hatred of the United States, Israel, and
Speaker 6: Jews on North American college campuses and beyond unquote. Now
Speaker 6: they have profiles for a few legitimate American neo Nazis,
Speaker 6: but many profiles only cite criticism of the Israeli government
Speaker 6: and its actions in Gaza as proof of alleged anti Semitism.
Speaker 6: And now there is increasing evidence that the government is
Speaker 6: using websites like Canary Mission to target students, professors, and
Speaker 6: scholars for ICE deportation, essentially outsourcing intail gathering from these
Speaker 6: pro Israel non government organizations. A few weeks ago, Canary
Speaker 6: Mission uploaded a profile for Rumeza oz Turk, a Turkish
Speaker 6: graduate student at Tufts University. They included a picture her
Speaker 6: resume and linked to an op ed she co wrote
Speaker 6: last year for her student paper criticizing the university for
Speaker 6: its ties to Israel amidst the Warren Gaza. For this,
Speaker 6: the Canary Mission claimed oz Turk quote engaged in anti
Speaker 6: Israel activism unquote. Two weeks later, while walking alone to
Speaker 6: Iftar dinner for Ramadan, a plane closes, ICE agent approached
Speaker 6: oz Turk on the sidewalk. As he grabbed her arms
Speaker 6: and wrestled away her phone. Five more agents surrounded her
Speaker 6: and pulled up their gator masks as neighbors began filming
Speaker 6: the arrest. Within twenty four hours, she was moved to
Speaker 6: ICE attention in Louisiana. A statement from Homeland Security claimed
Speaker 6: that HSI Homeland Security investigation had determined that oz Turk
Speaker 6: quote engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign
Speaker 6: terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans, and Secretary
Speaker 6: of State Mark Rubio said, quote, we gave you a
Speaker 6: visa to come and study and get a degree, not
Speaker 6: to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.
Speaker 2: Quote yeah, I mean again, Like writing an op ed
Speaker 2: is like as central to the First Amendment as things
Speaker 2: can be.
Speaker 6: Right, Yeah, there's no evidence she was even attending campus protests,
Speaker 6: let alone tearing up tearing up the university she co
Speaker 6: wrote an op ed. And you should not be deported
Speaker 6: for engaging in protest on a university campus at all. Right,
Speaker 6: this is flatly unconstitutional, extremely worrying. The fact that this
Speaker 6: person just got a profile in the Canary Mission website
Speaker 6: for writing an op ed and then this is used
Speaker 6: as justification for her deportation is still like an even
Speaker 6: greater escalation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, if we're talking about like this is sort
Speaker 2: of like liberal idea of the the marketplace of ideas, right,
Speaker 2: the way that the ideas enter the marketplace, Like, you
Speaker 2: will find nothing more amenable to liberalism than writing an
Speaker 2: op ed in your campus newspaper. Right, that is the
Speaker 2: most like well behaved, straight down the middle, constitutionally protected
Speaker 2: thing way to engage in anti genocide activism, pro Palestine activism.
Speaker 2: So like, in a sense, this one is particularly disturbing,
Speaker 2: Like as a frontal assault on First Amendment. Rise for
Speaker 2: non citizens is what it is. Yes.
Speaker 6: On March twenty fourth, Canary Mission published a new section
Speaker 6: of their website titled Uncovering Foreign Nationals, which lists the
Speaker 6: profiles of non citizens who they believe qualify for deportation.
Speaker 2: Jesus.
Speaker 6: Another far right pro Israel docsn group called Batar, which
Speaker 6: even the ADL lists as an extremist group. Yeah, which
Speaker 6: is wild. Batar says that they have given the Troup
Speaker 6: administration a deportation list of thousands of names, including citizens
Speaker 6: that they expect to be denaturalized. People like Mamado Tall
Speaker 6: and Mahmood Khalil have been targeted by both of these organizations.
Speaker 2: People will be familiar with. I don't know if it's
Speaker 2: Bitar or Bitar, but like you probably have seen videos
Speaker 2: of them on campus trying to hand pages to people pagers, Yeah,
Speaker 2: like making.
Speaker 8: Light of the pager attack Israel.
Speaker 2: Did I mean making a threat? Like sure, Like if
Speaker 2: you're going to come onto a campus and make a
Speaker 2: fucking bomb threat and accuse someone else of terrorism, I
Speaker 2: mean the hypocrisy is kind of the point.
Speaker 6: But or even just like you know, quote unquote celebrating
Speaker 6: the deaths of people.
Speaker 2: Right yeah, right, like mocking this attack which killed children,
Speaker 2: which you know, crippled people. It's just disgusting. It's like
Speaker 2: just important. They seem to get a lot of attention
Speaker 2: online because they do the thing where they go up
Speaker 2: to people and say deliberately provocative things and film their reactions. Right,
Speaker 2: they're kind of IRL trolling.
Speaker 6: The past week, ICE actions against students have seemingly accelerated.
Speaker 6: Ali Reza Drudi, a doctoral student from Iran studying at
Speaker 6: the University of Alabama, was arrested by ICE on March
Speaker 6: twenty fifth in the middle of the night at his
Speaker 6: off campus apartment. Drudi's the entry visa expired, but he
Speaker 6: was allowed to stay in the States as he still
Speaker 6: maintained his student's status. It's unknown why exactly he was targeted.
Speaker 6: He has no ties to protests or any notable online footprint.
Speaker 2: It could be his ethnic origin, right leg yeah, it
Speaker 2: could be his name, right yeah. But that we should
Speaker 2: explain the status thing a bit more for people who
Speaker 2: aren't familiar. So, like, sure, your status is when you're
Speaker 2: in good standing with the university, So normally that means
Speaker 2: you need to be enrolled in twelve credits per You
Speaker 2: might be on semestis, you might be on courts. I
Speaker 2: don't think it's usually matters you have to does a
Speaker 2: minimum course load. It may be different for different systems.
Speaker 2: I don't know. You'd also need to be in good
Speaker 2: standing in terms of like not lay on your fees, right,
Speaker 2: your tuition fees, that kind of stuff, right, not in
Speaker 2: any you haven't been expelled or excluded from the university
Speaker 2: for any actions that you've taken that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: It means you are currently a student at the university.
Speaker 2: Basically the only time this normally affects international students that
Speaker 2: I'm aware of, because a person who now teaches students
Speaker 2: is like they can't drop below a certain course load,
Speaker 2: when otherwise they may wish to drop below a certain
Speaker 2: courseload to either focus on they might have like a
Speaker 2: research position, they might be doing other stuff on campus
Speaker 2: like taing. Right, Sometimes that ta and counter towards their
Speaker 2: course load. Sometimes it doesn't, but it can affect things
Speaker 2: like that. But generally it would be the university that
Speaker 2: would update that status. Right, that would notify US Customs
Speaker 2: and Immigration if somebody fell out of compliance with that.
Speaker 2: If I'm hearing right, that doesn't seem like that's what
Speaker 2: happened here, right.
Speaker 6: No, Simply his entry vis a expired, so if he
Speaker 6: left the country, he then would have to get another
Speaker 6: visa to get back in, but he can stay as
Speaker 6: long as he still has his valid student status. So
Speaker 6: not only is ICE trying to revoke these like visas,
Speaker 6: but they're trying to essentially say that by revoking these visas,
Speaker 6: they are also attempting to strip them of their student status,
Speaker 6: which is like a separate like step. These things can
Speaker 6: get kind of very very blurry though.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like I don't quite how that works in terms
Speaker 2: of like our ICE supposed to be able to I
Speaker 2: don't think it hugely matters at this point.
Speaker 6: Technically, the State Department does have that ability, but it's
Speaker 6: under the same like foreign policy risk designation, Okay, and
Speaker 6: they'll justify it by saying, well, his visa already expired,
Speaker 6: so we're just removing him because his visa expired, even
Speaker 6: though that's not really how this works.
Speaker 2: Yeah, then they don't have to remove him for that reason.
Speaker 2: But yeah, in this case, I guess they go for
Speaker 2: something else.
Speaker 6: No, because the University of Alabama did not elect to
Speaker 6: rescind his student status. He was a student good standing, Yeah,
Speaker 6: and thus legally allowed in the United States.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, like everyone else say, he hadn't done anything
Speaker 2: that would, under normal circumstances lead to him having any
Speaker 2: interactions with USCIS.
Speaker 6: Just this last week, I sttained a University of Minnesota
Speaker 6: grad student at their off campus housing. The university released
Speaker 6: a statement saying that they had no prior knowledge of
Speaker 6: this incident and had not shared any information with federal authorities.
Speaker 6: This person's name is still not released.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 8: Last week, a.
Speaker 6: Student at the Southern Illinois University had their visa revoked.
Speaker 6: The school administration told their college paper that the university
Speaker 6: has no role in the visa revocation process. The Illinois
Speaker 6: Governor's office is working with schools across the state to
Speaker 6: quote ensure they are being vigilant about what's happening on
Speaker 6: their respective campuses. The Governor's team has asked universities to
Speaker 6: communicate with international students about the general resources available to
Speaker 6: them through the institution. In addition, we have suggested that
Speaker 6: they connect impacted students with legal resources that have been
Speaker 6: in place for several years. According to a statement sent
Speaker 6: to the university paper, the Daily Egyptian Tina Sickinger, which
Speaker 6: is a very cool name. The school's director of International
Speaker 6: Student and Scholar Services sent an email to the international
Speaker 6: student body of Southern Illinois University advising them to carry
Speaker 6: photocopies of immigration documents with them at all times, as
Speaker 6: well as proof of enrollment and records of US residences.
Speaker 6: The email recommended that students quote use caution on social
Speaker 6: media and exercise discretion when participating in political demonstrations or
Speaker 6: protests unquote, warning that though protests should be protected speech, quote,
Speaker 6: such activities can sometimes be misinterpreted and may carry risks
Speaker 6: to your immigration status unquote. Unfortunately, I think this is
Speaker 6: the university trying to look out for these students.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's the best you could expect from them, really, And.
Speaker 6: They are providing like legal resources to these students, but
Speaker 6: they're essentially saying like you shouldn't post anything or do
Speaker 6: any protests because then ice might come kidnap you. Yeah,
Speaker 6: which is just a fucked up situation to be in.
Speaker 6: And like, yeah, they don't have any other ability to
Speaker 6: like stop this right now. I am curious what Prisker
Speaker 6: is going to continue to do here.
Speaker 2: Though, Yeah, I mean, none of what they've said is
Speaker 2: like wrong, It's kind of what you can expect from university.
Speaker 2: The best you can expect from the university really is like, hey,
Speaker 2: we've noticed it's happening.
Speaker 6: So that is the situation as it currently stands. I
Speaker 6: do have one final tidbit here just that highlights the
Speaker 6: absurdity of this whole situation. On March twenty fourth, a
Speaker 6: lawsuit on behalf of Israeli Columbia students and relatives of
Speaker 6: Israeli October seventh victims was filed against Columbia Jewish Voice
Speaker 6: for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, Columbia University
Speaker 6: Apartheid divest and individual Columbia students, including Mahmoud Khalil. The
Speaker 6: loss of allege is that these Columbia groups and students
Speaker 6: are the domestic propaganda arm of Hamas, and even claims
Speaker 6: that these groups had advanced notice that the October seventh
Speaker 6: attack was going to take place.
Speaker 4: Oh, come on.
Speaker 6: So the plan was kept secret among Hamas's own political
Speaker 6: allies in the region, but they gave an Ivy League
Speaker 6: university in the New York City.
Speaker 2: Had tip off. They just let him know what was coming.
Speaker 2: Completely absurd, absolutely like like the IDF completely failed to
Speaker 2: see this coming, right, But they're not the folks at
Speaker 2: the Ivy League universities who were who were ready and waiting.
Speaker 6: Hamas didn't tell the who thies, They didn't tell Iran,
Speaker 6: they didn't tell Hesbola, but they told student activist groups
Speaker 6: in New York City at the Columbia University campus.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely ludicrous. Like, await this court case. I guess
Speaker 2: to see what evidence they have of this. The evidence
Speaker 2: is going to be like someone had a Palestinian flag.
Speaker 6: Some of the quote unquote evidence that they that they
Speaker 6: allege is that some of these like activist accounts had
Speaker 6: a renewed activity in October of twenty twenty three, like
Speaker 6: before the attack happened. But this is just a simple coincidence.
Speaker 6: Obviously these people did not have a heads up that
Speaker 6: the October seventh attack.
Speaker 8: Was going to take place. Yeah.
Speaker 6: The lawsuit also argues that protest activity is not First
Speaker 6: Amendment protected speech, but in fact, quote substantial assistance in
Speaker 6: the form of propaganda and recruiting services and in coordination
Speaker 6: with a designated foreign terrorist organization, again alleging there's some
Speaker 6: kind of communication between hubmas and student activists in New
Speaker 6: York City.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is ludicrous. Like one of the reasons maybe
Speaker 2: we're seeing this so much over the Palestine advocacy is
Speaker 2: that Hamas is enlisted foreign terrorist organization. Many other groups
Speaker 2: and lots of groups in that part of the world are,
Speaker 2: But like it's just a bigger stick to waive I
Speaker 2: guess material aid or that no one has been actually
Speaker 2: accused of material aid to foreign terrorist organization as far
Speaker 2: as I'm aware, but like that is kind of the
Speaker 2: sort of stick that they're waving, right, that is the
Speaker 2: thing that they're alleging.
Speaker 6: I will end us with just this kind of final note. Now,
Speaker 6: while there are little signs that this would happen at
Speaker 6: a scale this large and disfocused under a democratic president,
Speaker 6: a degree of consent for this type of targeting was
Speaker 6: manufactured the past year as it relates to Palestine protests,
Speaker 6: with some liberals and democratic politicians associating activists as pro
Speaker 6: Hamas terrorists. And this is the consequence of that public
Speaker 6: perception building and the consent being manufactured for that framing.
Speaker 6: And now that the even more evil side is in charge,
Speaker 6: they can take that justification and run with it way
Speaker 6: further than what a Joe Biden or a Kamala Harris
Speaker 6: would have done. So it is far worse, but it's
Speaker 6: not in a political bubble. This has been like a
Speaker 6: growing project for the past few years.
Speaker 2: There was no point at which to buy the administration really,
Speaker 2: like effusively said, this is protected First Amendment speech. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we may not like it, but it is central to
Speaker 2: the Bill of Rights. It's central to what America is
Speaker 2: supposed to be about.
Speaker 6: They never defended the constitutionality of this speech. Yeah, nor
Speaker 6: would they have intervened to stop the deportation of someone
Speaker 6: like Tall if Cornell decided to revoke his status, right right, Yeah,
Speaker 6: I don't think they buy an administration or a Kamala
Speaker 6: Harris administration would be directed in these these universities to
Speaker 6: take that action themselves, nor would they be I think
Speaker 6: revoking student visas at scale like this, No, but they
Speaker 6: would have let Ice do the stuff that ICE does
Speaker 6: if universities themselves elect to remove student visas or unenroll
Speaker 6: these students, and like, a degree of the complacency here
Speaker 6: is placed on the actual university administrations, the university staff
Speaker 6: who have beenfying these protesters for the past two years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I mean in some cases, right, Like I'm
Speaker 2: thinking of one of Columbia, Like professors have got away
Speaker 2: with things which are absolutely unacceptable and like one hundred
Speaker 2: percent in some violation of your agreement with the university
Speaker 2: as a member of the faculty, Like doxing your students. Yeah,
Speaker 2: photographing students without their consent, following students around like absolutely unacceptable,
Speaker 2: Like in any other context that you would be immediately
Speaker 2: shitcanned for that. Like really, really, the only reason you
Speaker 2: can lose tenure seemingly is being a fucking creep to
Speaker 2: students or stealing a lot of money, And like universities
Speaker 2: did allow that for more than a year under the
Speaker 2: Biden administration, and like we're seeing the consequences of that now.
Speaker 6: It's also worth noting that, since I've had to quote
Speaker 6: from so many government statements this episode, the Trump admin
Speaker 6: is continuing to correlate any expression of sympathy or solidarity
Speaker 6: with Palestine as explicit support for Hamas. Basically, anything you
Speaker 6: say that's critical of the Israeli government its actions in
Speaker 6: Gaza are being interpreted by the Trump administration as anti
Speaker 6: semitism and support for the October seventh massacre. This is
Speaker 6: a false equivalency. What the government alleges should not be
Speaker 6: automatically taken as the truth. These tactics have been used
Speaker 6: for years to broadly smear pro Palestine activists while also
Speaker 6: hurting anti Zionist Jews. And I guess, like, finally, we
Speaker 6: are not necessarily endorsing every single thing that every single
Speaker 6: one of these students has said. We do not necessarily
Speaker 6: agree with the framing of every single sentence that they
Speaker 6: have said.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean we don't know everything that they've said.
Speaker 8: We can, yeah, exactly. This is like completely separate to that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it doesn't matter, Like we are defending their right
Speaker 2: to engage in constitutionally protected speaking.
Speaker 6: Correct no matter what they're saying, no matter if they
Speaker 6: have opinions on hamas that differ from ours. No matter
Speaker 6: what they are saying at a campus protest, it should
Speaker 6: not result in ICE targeting them and hunting them down
Speaker 6: and forcing students who attend to sit in protests into
Speaker 6: hiding to defend their own rights and to keep their
Speaker 6: green cards. This is like a completely absurd and like
Speaker 6: blatantly fascist to use the now overused word frankly, but
Speaker 6: this is like, this is this is what that is
Speaker 6: if this was happening in China, this was happening in Russia,
Speaker 6: in other countries, people would be very very quick to call.
Speaker 2: Out I mean, it does happen in Russia, right people exactly,
Speaker 2: people quick to call it out. Yeah, yeah, And if
Speaker 2: the State Department of this country has called it out
Speaker 2: right like it at right Ley, Yes, I don't agree
Speaker 2: with everything the State Department does, but they do agree
Speaker 2: with him on that, like yeah, And I think this
Speaker 2: is like I know, if you find yourself having a
Speaker 2: discussion about this, I think almost everyone in America can
Speaker 2: find something that they disagree with the government on or
Speaker 2: have disagreed with the government on, and like, this hurts
Speaker 2: every single one of us. Right, everyone's right to freedom
Speaker 2: of speech is challenged. When someone's right to freedom of
Speaker 2: speech is challenged, and like, I think that is the
Speaker 2: way to approach this. It doesn't really matter if the
Speaker 2: people whose speech is being challenged right now, the speech
Speaker 2: is if it's odious to us, if it's something that
Speaker 2: we don't agree with, Like, that isn't what's at stake.
Speaker 2: What's at stake is everyone's right to say everything without
Speaker 2: government consequences.
Speaker 6: Well, I think that doesn't for us today at it
Speaker 6: Could Happen Here? We will continue to report on the
Speaker 6: targeting of students, scholars and professors, and immigrants in general
Speaker 6: as the Trump administration ramps up its deportation efforts. If
Speaker 6: you would like to contact us about these topics, we
Speaker 6: have an encrypted email address at cool Zone, tips at
Speaker 6: proton dot ne. It is end to end encrypted, so
Speaker 6: if you use another encrypted email service or another proton
Speaker 6: mail account to send the email only, then is it encrypts?
Speaker 4: Did this?
Speaker 8: Is it could happen here?
Speaker 6: Executive Disorder our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the
Speaker 6: White House, the crumbling economic world, and what this means
Speaker 6: for you.
Speaker 8: I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Robert Evans, James Stout.
Speaker 6: And Mio Wong. It is a liberation day in America.
Speaker 8: Everyone. How do you feel?
Speaker 1: I feel liberated, last, free at last, Thank God Almighty,
Speaker 1: we are free at last for being able to afford things.
Speaker 8: I am so so liberated right.
Speaker 2: Now, unchained from a burden of having money.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, well, as the Buddhists say, know, freeing yourself
Speaker 1: from attachment is really the path to nirvana.
Speaker 8: Trump really is our first Buddhist president.
Speaker 2: Is one thing they say about him.
Speaker 1: That's right. He may be the new Dalai Lama who
Speaker 1: can say the Dalai Lama and he hasn't, but.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and the priests who looked for him after
Speaker 2: he dies. When he comes back. These guys, unfortunately, they're
Speaker 2: probably on a fucking travel band list.
Speaker 1: Now, oh my god, there's I mean, pretty good chance
Speaker 1: they're in ice custody at the moment. If I understand Buddhists.
Speaker 6: Well, I think we should just get right to the
Speaker 6: most pressing news, which is line go down.
Speaker 1: Line, Line is on its way down.
Speaker 2: Yeah, line in free fold currently.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's funny because they chose they were supposed to initially.
Speaker 1: I think it was like going to be three pm
Speaker 1: or something. E St two or three was the initial
Speaker 1: time they wanted to announce this, which would have given
Speaker 1: this dock market a couple of.
Speaker 8: Hours on April second, right, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, on April second, it would have given it Liberation Day.
Speaker 1: On Liberation Day, there would have been a couple hours
Speaker 1: for it to take effect, and they attempted to mitigate this.
Speaker 1: I guess in the hope that we would all get
Speaker 1: over it overnight, we would forget some other ship before
Speaker 1: the new prices. Even Kevin, we'd be like, ah no,
Speaker 1: I'm on and the next thing. But the Dow and
Speaker 1: the NASA is all all plunged because it's clear if
Speaker 1: the president is like deliberately shifting an event to not
Speaker 1: hurt the stock market, that's going to hurt the stock market,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's good. When you see a ninety degree
Speaker 2: angle on the old stock market graph, that's when you
Speaker 2: know someone's really crushing it in the economic delug.
Speaker 1: And so far, we're recording this a little afternoon on Thursday,
Speaker 1: the April the third, So just in the course of today,
Speaker 1: major stock indexes have dropped by about five point six percent,
Speaker 1: which means about two point seven trillion dollars in market value,
Speaker 1: which will be the just declined since March of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty sick. So we are it is looking like this
Speaker 1: is going to be, at the very least a stock
Speaker 1: market decline in line with the one that came as
Speaker 1: a result of the global pandemic, with the noted caveat
Speaker 1: that there's really no reason to believe it will get
Speaker 1: better at any point.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, you can't ready vaccinate against you now, I'm
Speaker 6: not qualified to give financial advice, but I think everyone
Speaker 6: should pull out your four O one k right now,
Speaker 6: go to the bank, withdraw all your money, all of your.
Speaker 1: Rivery bit of it. Put it into the worst tasting
Speaker 1: survival foods. Yeah, and you're gonna want to buy Kel texts,
Speaker 1: lots of Kel texts in a caliber no one else has.
Speaker 2: Five to seven. Yeah, get the one that doesn't take
Speaker 2: eighty thirty two ACP. I won the thirty two ACP.
Speaker 8: That's it.
Speaker 1: That's it, James. Everyone buy thirty two ACP.
Speaker 2: And guy, yeah, it's exceeded in ending one World war
Speaker 2: and right done.
Speaker 1: We call that doing a hitler, but in a good way.
Speaker 8: Someone here has to be vaguely responsible and say, don't
Speaker 8: fucking do that. Do none of those things, zero zero
Speaker 8: of those too. Your accounts, get hard cash.
Speaker 1: Mark Cuban told people to do that.
Speaker 8: Absolutely not.
Speaker 2: Mayor endorses Reagan Coin is the exclusive safe source of
Speaker 2: the time savings.
Speaker 1: You're gonna want to put every dime you've got in
Speaker 1: pressed latinum. Now I know that that's the currency from
Speaker 1: star Trek and does not exist. Nevertheless, cancel your accounts,
Speaker 1: put it all in latinum.
Speaker 6: I mean, it's gonna exist. In like what like forty
Speaker 6: years per time.
Speaker 2: On the ground, it's not already a meme coin ten
Speaker 2: minutes off to discuss more.
Speaker 8: Stable than your four oh one k Right now, you can.
Speaker 1: Be rich just in time for money to stop being
Speaker 1: a thing.
Speaker 8: There you go, there you go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is why we're launching cool zone coin.
Speaker 8: Guys.
Speaker 1: It's redeemable for whatever money the Ferengi use when they exist.
Speaker 6: We should probably talk about why the stock market is
Speaker 6: doing poor Leah, So I think Robert, you can handle
Speaker 6: this segue.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, wait, what is that? Oh my god?
Speaker 9: Is that Mina Wong's theme music by god Lock jas
Speaker 9: right jas locks right jasp.
Speaker 1: Oh god, that was a great purchase, you guys. I mean,
Speaker 1: can we all agree with every penny?
Speaker 3: Really?
Speaker 6: Was the best financial purchase we've made is the Tariff
Speaker 6: Talk theme though.
Speaker 8: We're gonna get so much mileage out of that thing.
Speaker 8: It's an unbelievable.
Speaker 1: You're gonna be using this fucker for years.
Speaker 2: At least something good came of face. When you're struggling
Speaker 2: to get by with your family, just remember the song.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, this will keep you warm as you huddle
Speaker 1: around a barrel waiting for the UH the new police,
Speaker 1: which are just called murder police to reach your chanty
Speaker 1: town anyway.
Speaker 8: Let us talk heraffs. Power sections of the left have
Speaker 8: long argued is in logistics. It was logistics that allowed
Speaker 8: the capitalists of the nineteen seventies and eighties to crush
Speaker 8: the labor movement by enacting the so called spatial fix
Speaker 8: to the crisis of capitalism. By shifting production from countries
Speaker 8: where workers movements were strong to countries where violence against
Speaker 8: workers was easier and workers were thus poorer and more exploited,
Speaker 8: CEOs could pit workers against each other in an endless
Speaker 8: race to the bottom. These practices became known as offshoring.
Speaker 8: Infused with the international attack on unions and the power
Speaker 8: of workers heralded in the US by Reagan, together they
Speaker 8: crushed the workers movement and implemented neoliberal austerity throughout the
Speaker 8: globe through a regime that is colloquially known as free trade. Now,
Speaker 8: there was, of course, resistance to this, maybe most famously
Speaker 8: the uprising of the Zapatistas and Chiapas in nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 8: on the day the NAFTA went into effect. But for
Speaker 8: all of the victories and all of the spaces that
Speaker 8: were carved out. It is still the CEOs, the bosses,
Speaker 8: and the capitalists to rule the world. However, in the
Speaker 8: wake of their defeat, sections of the working class came
Speaker 8: to see their own power as a product of the
Speaker 8: nation of masculinity of American jobs. For American workers, in
Speaker 8: this view, you didn't need to form a union, you
Speaker 8: didn't need to organize, you didn't need to fight the
Speaker 8: bosses who exploit you. All you needed to do for
Speaker 8: the high paying blue collar jobs of the nineteen sixties
Speaker 8: to return was getting rid of the immigrants and bring
Speaker 8: jobs back home. This American nationalist ideology was extremely useful
Speaker 8: to the ruling class. It allowed them to turn the
Speaker 8: rhetoric of the old base of the workers' movement into
Speaker 8: a fascist movement, which they could then use to smash
Speaker 8: any genuine worker struggle and then ride to power to
Speaker 8: impose more brutal austerity and more pro capitalist reforms, too,
Speaker 8: in their view, make it impossible for their power ever
Speaker 8: to be challenged again. But a strange thing happened in
Speaker 8: the nationalism bred by the defeat of the workers movement.
Speaker 8: The human personifications of the capitalist bubble economy in Donald
Speaker 8: Trump and Elon Musk have come to see their own
Speaker 8: victory as defeat. They became convinced that the trade deficits,
Speaker 8: which from a capitalist perspective simply do not matter as
Speaker 8: long as companies are making money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, they better for shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah here's the fuck.
Speaker 1: What you are calling a trade deficit is us getting
Speaker 1: things we want from.
Speaker 2: People, Like yeah, yeah, it's buying stuff. Like I saw
Speaker 2: a good post. It was like, you don't have a
Speaker 2: trade deficit with your dentist. You just pay them to
Speaker 2: fix your teeth, Like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was. I was told at one point in
Speaker 1: this nation's greatest living previous moment of crisis, that what
Speaker 1: we needed to do was go buy things to make
Speaker 1: it better.
Speaker 4: Not anymore, buddy.
Speaker 8: Nope, because because these people, Donald Trump and Elon Musk
Speaker 8: and the cadra of weird white nationals fanatic sets around them,
Speaker 8: have absolutely convinced themselves that if you have a trade deficit,
Speaker 8: you are being ripped off by foreigners.
Speaker 1: Yep, yep.
Speaker 8: And so they concluded that we needed to put tariffs
Speaker 8: on fucking all of the rest of the world in
Speaker 8: order to bring American jobs back to Americans. A new
Speaker 8: national autarchy for a fascist world now the ruling class,
Speaker 8: all the capitalists, all these fucking goddamn Goldman Sachs motherfuckers,
Speaker 8: financial analysts, all of these CNBC dipshits, all of these
Speaker 8: fucking all these motherfuckers at black Rock and all of
Speaker 8: the global hedge funds and all of these, all these motherfuckers,
Speaker 8: all of the tech dipshits, all of the people who
Speaker 8: backed Trump to a hilt, simply assumed that none of
Speaker 8: these hairs would ever happen, that it was all campaign bluster,
Speaker 8: that he was lying out of his ass. And you know,
Speaker 8: Obama again I've said this before, ran an abolishing NAFTA.
Speaker 8: So there was you know, and well, what the fuck
Speaker 8: ever came from that, right? We of course fucking tried
Speaker 8: to tell them otherwise. We tried to tell them that
Speaker 8: they could not fucking control the fascist beasts, that one
Speaker 8: day it would rise to consume them all along with us.
Speaker 8: They didn't care. They backed Trump anyways because they thought
Speaker 8: they would get fucking tax breaks and now liberation days here.
Speaker 1: Don't forget Krypto. They were really bullshot back.
Speaker 8: Yeah, all of these motherfuckers, they really thought that Trump
Speaker 8: was going to fucking literally all Trump was going to
Speaker 8: do was punish the transgenders, get rid of woke, and
Speaker 8: give them tax cuts.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm yep.
Speaker 8: And now if the terror falls have gone up, the
Speaker 8: old world is dead, the new world struggles to be born.
Speaker 8: Now is the time of monsters.
Speaker 6: Now we're in what I'm what I'm referring to as
Speaker 6: the Chinese Century. I came up with this this this
Speaker 6: week on my own.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, okay, mm hmm yeah. Good Now.
Speaker 1: That's that's of course named after Chinatown in San Francisco,
Speaker 1: which Garrison is very bullish about positive, positive real estate
Speaker 1: developments there. Uh, you're big into real estate. People don't
Speaker 1: know that.
Speaker 8: Chinese real estate absolutely where you want to be right now,
Speaker 8: both both in Chinatown and in actual China. You put
Speaker 8: all your money in the Chinese real estate. The bubble
Speaker 8: can't pop a second time, can only go back up.
Speaker 1: It does. There were so many like enemies on the
Speaker 1: verge of defeat in like the traditional US geopolitical sense,
Speaker 1: like China'scconoio was doing great. Russia could have been easily
Speaker 1: pushed to collapse, and we were just like Noah, no, no,
Speaker 1: you know what's better. We're gonna shoot ourselves right in the.
Speaker 2: Deck, which we've snatched defeat from.
Speaker 1: The ourselves in a dick with a bullet that venmos,
Speaker 1: both of you guys.
Speaker 2: It's great. We dug up the Cold War, resurrected it
Speaker 2: and then lost.
Speaker 4: Yeah, just to lose.
Speaker 2: It's beautiful.
Speaker 1: You can't. Yeah, it's so it's sort of like Michael
Speaker 1: Jackson coming back for Space Jam if he had immediately
Speaker 1: like fucking thrown a basketball so hard at a bugs
Speaker 1: bunny skull that it put him at traction.
Speaker 8: I'm sorry, did you just say Michael Jackson.
Speaker 1: Jordan didn't, Okay, Jordan, we just said Jacks Well, definitely,
Speaker 1: you know, leave it in different, different movie, maybe better.
Speaker 1: You know, he always he always performed well around kids.
Speaker 2: So it's good.
Speaker 8: God, yeah, I love Space Jam.
Speaker 1: It's a good movie.
Speaker 4: Anymore.
Speaker 2: Garret said, it's forevitainted.
Speaker 1: Now, so let's let's talk about the nature of like
Speaker 1: what's actually going down with these terrts.
Speaker 8: Yeah, let's get to the tariffs.
Speaker 1: Terrible, terrifable, terrifable, that's right, garrisons.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so okay, so let let me let me let
Speaker 8: me just let me just read off some of the
Speaker 8: ones that are going to fuck everyone. Great, fifty four
Speaker 8: percent tariff on all goods from China. This is a
Speaker 8: thirty four percent tariff that is being added on to
Speaker 8: the twenty percent tariff that was already on. There is
Speaker 8: a twenty percent tariff on all goods from the EU,
Speaker 8: forty six percent on Vietnam, which is fucking devastating because
Speaker 8: there's a huge amount of capital from China.
Speaker 1: Also, speaking of the China Panic, our strongest geopolitical ally
Speaker 1: in the region, like in terms of having a military right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that we've been discussing going to warfall.
Speaker 8: Quite really Yeah, like we we just we we have
Speaker 8: literally and this is this is the funny thing about
Speaker 8: all of these. Vicky Osto will pointed this out. The
Speaker 8: more closely allied with the US, the more fucked you
Speaker 8: got by these.
Speaker 1: It's such a weird move.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, twenty four percent tariff on Japan.
Speaker 1: What is it like eighty or ninety percent on fucking
Speaker 1: Cambodia why.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. So we'll we'll get to why
Speaker 8: in a second. I want to also cover so there's
Speaker 8: there's a thirty seven percent tariff on Bangladesh, which is
Speaker 8: going to be devastating. I mean a lot of textile
Speaker 8: imports twenty five percent on South Korea. So fucking rip
Speaker 8: you ever getting a phone again? On Taiwan. So rip
Speaker 8: the entire tech industry. Uh? I fucking rip Taiwan too.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 8: These tariffs are going to devastate the international economy. Okay,
Speaker 8: I have been angry about this since the fucking election.
Speaker 8: People have been calling these tariffs attacks. That is just no,
Speaker 8: it is not what's happening here. This is like calling
Speaker 8: it a tax is to completely underplay how serious this is.
Speaker 8: This is not a fucking tax. This is the wholesale
Speaker 8: destruction of entire industries. And some of these industries like
Speaker 8: fast fashion, which you know has always been undergirded by
Speaker 8: the exploitation of workers from China to Bangladesh and also
Speaker 8: like in the US two but like you know, fuck
Speaker 8: those things whatever, they never needed to exist. Fuck them.
Speaker 8: But like you know, like you're probably not gonna be
Speaker 8: able to fucking buy board games anymore because they're going
Speaker 8: to be too expensive to produce.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's gonna shatter games like tabletop gaming.
Speaker 8: Yeah yeah, yeah, it's done. Like the economy as we
Speaker 8: knew it does not exist as of like this morning, right,
Speaker 8: everything that we've known about how this thing works is
Speaker 8: fucking done. And some of these are just, you know,
Speaker 8: like unbelievably hideously cruel. So, for example, a forty four
Speaker 8: percent terriff on me and Mark, Yeah, which you know
Speaker 8: is a country, Yeah, devastated by a horrific war wage
Speaker 8: for a brutal dictatorship and also fucking suffering from a
Speaker 8: catastrophic earthquake, and we're like, fuck you eat shit.
Speaker 4: Forty four percent tariff also embargoed.
Speaker 2: No, like we've seized their government assets in the United States, Like, yep,
Speaker 2: it's one of like Diego Garcia for instance.
Speaker 1: Yes, there's well it's on the British Indian Ocean Territory,
Speaker 1: which collective population is primarily US soldiers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like Christmas Island is on there, like yeah, you know.
Speaker 8: And there's one more that I want to talk about,
Speaker 8: which is that so Sri Lanka has been suffering from
Speaker 8: an unbelievably devastating series of economic crises and they're getting
Speaker 8: hit with forty four percent fucking tariff in a moment
Speaker 8: when like they already haven't had enough dollars to fucking
Speaker 8: import fuel for their economy to function. So this is
Speaker 8: going to be devastating not just for us, but for
Speaker 8: a whole bunch of people across the world. So this
Speaker 8: is the other aspect of this too, that's really fucking brtle,
Speaker 8: is that for the US, right, we don't need other countries' money,
Speaker 8: We don't need to have piles of any other country's
Speaker 8: money around, Right, we can just buy things in American dollars.
Speaker 8: But if you are Sri Lanka, you need American dollars
Speaker 8: to buy oil.
Speaker 1: Yes, there are.
Speaker 8: So many fucking things that you could only buy in
Speaker 8: American dollars. And when these tariffs go up, when the
Speaker 8: prices increase, and when they can't fucking sell their stuff,
Speaker 8: that means that they don't have dollars, and that means
Speaker 8: that they can't get access to a whole bunch of
Speaker 8: the vital commodities that they need to survive. And this
Speaker 8: is just going to fucking devastate them. And I think
Speaker 8: that's been an angle that I really wanted to make
Speaker 8: sure we talked about, because it's been I haven't seen
Speaker 8: any fucking mention of it at all, even though those
Speaker 8: are the are going to suffer the most of this
Speaker 8: are people who are already completely on the fucking edge,
Speaker 8: whose economies have already been collapsed. You've already been so
Speaker 8: brutally exploited by these same fucking people, and they're just fucked.
Speaker 1: Yep. You know, we always say we know like tarifs,
Speaker 1: but we do like these ads.
Speaker 5: We're back.
Speaker 1: I don't feel great about that.
Speaker 8: But now there is a funny part of all of this.
Speaker 8: There is some fun here good, which is okay. So
Speaker 8: what if the big questions about the tariffs was how
Speaker 8: were they going to calculate the tariffs on all of
Speaker 8: these countries? Right because they were saying that that their
Speaker 8: terrorifts were going to be a projection of like currency
Speaker 8: manipulation and like value added taxes and like all of
Speaker 8: these like like subsidies to vital industries and you know,
Speaker 8: and the question again was like literally, how can they
Speaker 8: poss cocky at the tariff rates of hundreds of different
Speaker 8: countries and taking into account all these things right now
Speaker 8: have been making a couple of weeks ago, was that
Speaker 8: they were going to do brackets. What they actually appear
Speaker 8: to have done is ass chat GPT.
Speaker 1: It's entirely people have like reverse engineered the prompts. It's
Speaker 1: almost directly just the schatchy probably shit, there's a couple
Speaker 1: different engines that gave almost identical responses. But it's probably just.
Speaker 2: Amazing that they're doing the same shit as like my
Speaker 2: undergraduates and the people are doing the same shit.
Speaker 1: Sure you're undergraduates. Spends a little more time trying to
Speaker 1: hide it, James.
Speaker 2: Most of them a smart enough to to like had
Speaker 2: it a little bit so that you can't put prompt
Speaker 2: into chat GPT and find it. Yeah, so that my
Speaker 2: lowest effa undergrads.
Speaker 8: I want to give a lot of credit to the
Speaker 8: economist James Sarah reci who's the guy who figured out
Speaker 8: their formula. So their formula, and this is drawing for something,
Speaker 8: I mean I saw it from from James first. But like,
Speaker 8: so their formula is literally just you take a country's
Speaker 8: trade depisity with the US. And it's also important to
Speaker 8: note here that they're not counting services. They're only counting goods, right.
Speaker 1: And again, if you're if you're missing the products and
Speaker 1: just getting in services, that's half the economy as I
Speaker 1: understand it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, especially provides an enormous number of services. You know,
Speaker 8: But these people are fucking fascists, and so they don't
Speaker 8: they don't think that like services are fucking real, right,
Speaker 8: It's it's the same ideology that undergirds the whole thing
Speaker 8: about like service workers not being fucking real works.
Speaker 1: Literally, the only real job is that one video of
Speaker 1: a guy wrestling with an oil Derek.
Speaker 8: Yes, that is the.
Speaker 2: Only that is the manager just doing that for the
Speaker 2: video and was doing it very wrong.
Speaker 1: You've got to.
Speaker 6: Take some pieces of metal, move them around to where
Speaker 6: they're not supposed to go.
Speaker 8: That's that's when you're a real labor, labor that's working.
Speaker 2: Only jobs are things where you wear safety toe boots and.
Speaker 8: Well and and and that's and that's the thing they'll
Speaker 8: learn because like their image of the world is is
Speaker 8: the fascist image of the world, and the fascist image
Speaker 8: of the world, like labor is just masculinity. Yeah, and
Speaker 8: that's like that's why they're fucking doing it like this,
Speaker 8: and so you know, and so so the fascists have
Speaker 8: asked chat GPT how to do tariffs, and what they
Speaker 8: got is again, so do they take the country's trade
Speaker 8: deficit and divide it by their total exports in the US? Now,
Speaker 8: this is nothing, right, like in economic terms.
Speaker 1: No, that's not how you do anything.
Speaker 8: This is this is not a real thing like this
Speaker 8: is this is like trying to measure someone's height by
Speaker 8: like dividing their favorite number by the average radius of
Speaker 8: an apple. Like it's literally at.
Speaker 1: You know, what are we what are you coming after me?
Speaker 2: Here?
Speaker 8: Look?
Speaker 1: Just because I'm imagining so differently, Okay.
Speaker 8: There is no scientific basis, Robert for for for measuring
Speaker 8: height by dividing favorite number by apple radius. We simply
Speaker 8: must accept the truth of science.
Speaker 1: That's what you say, Joe Rogan, and I feel it differently.
Speaker 6: The dictatorship of chat GPT is just it's so bleak.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, it's just they they ask chat GPT.
Speaker 1: It's a mix of they don't actually care or think
Speaker 1: this will affect them, and also they legitimately think it's
Speaker 1: the smartest person in the world. Yeah yeah, it's smarter
Speaker 1: than them. Yeah, which is maybe a good thing, but
Speaker 1: not in this instant.
Speaker 8: Well, and you can tell the extent to which they
Speaker 8: were relying on this and didn't calculate themselves, because so
Speaker 8: after it started to spread that this is just how
Speaker 8: they were doing it, After James Turoreki like calculated it,
Speaker 8: the White House said no, no, no, no, no, hold on, no, no, no,
Speaker 8: that's not right. We use an actual complex formula, and
Speaker 8: so they released a fake formula. But I think about
Speaker 8: the formula, right, is it? The formula is just It
Speaker 8: is literally just trade deficit divided by total exports. But
Speaker 8: they threw in two random variables as Greek letters. But
Speaker 8: there's one on the top, and there's one of the
Speaker 8: numerator one of these denominator, and they're the same, so
Speaker 8: they can sell each other out.
Speaker 1: That sounds right to me.
Speaker 6: That's how you know they're smart. It's because they're using
Speaker 6: Greek letters.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 2: Which Greek letters did they use? And which person's fraternity
Speaker 2: does it represent?
Speaker 1: I don't even speak Greek letters, so they are They
Speaker 1: must be smarter than me, you know what. I rescind
Speaker 1: my complaints.
Speaker 8: This This is how the economy dies, not through tragedy
Speaker 8: but through farce.
Speaker 1: It's both.
Speaker 4: Yeah, tragic fuss, I think is what Marx cold it.
Speaker 1: A lot of people are gonna die, you know, And
Speaker 1: I mean, like, like.
Speaker 8: My actual serious line on this is that this is
Speaker 8: the great double bind of capitalism, is that we are
Speaker 8: all reliant simultaneously, We are reliant for our survival on
Speaker 8: the same economy that will make us all homeless, right
Speaker 8: is the same economy that we need to fucking eat
Speaker 8: every single day, that even in good times, this economy
Speaker 8: fucking strips from us the value of the labor we
Speaker 8: produce and hands us back a bunch of fucking scraps
Speaker 8: that pay for not enough of anything that we need.
Speaker 8: So even as our enemies, you know, terror part the
Speaker 8: system that exploits us, we are the fucking ones who's
Speaker 8: going to suffer. Deoliberalism finally has in Trump produced its
Speaker 8: own grave digger, And our fucking job and the job
Speaker 8: of every single one of us and every single person
Speaker 8: listening to this show is to make sure that we
Speaker 8: also aren't the ones thrown into this fucking grave. And
Speaker 8: this is going to require a kind of organizing that
Speaker 8: is in some ways like but in some ways unlike
Speaker 8: anything we've done before. We're about to experience a level
Speaker 8: of unbelievable economic chaos that we sort of saw dream
Speaker 8: twenty twenty. But during twenty twenty there was, you know,
Speaker 8: as bad as everything got, the state stepped in and
Speaker 8: decided to do welfare reforms, right like, they gave people
Speaker 8: a bunch of fucking money. Yeah, and it wasn't enough,
Speaker 8: but they did it now, none of that shit. He
Speaker 8: are the only people who are going to be able
Speaker 8: to keep each other alive. And that's what we have
Speaker 8: to be doing right now, is we have to be
Speaker 8: keeping each other alive until we are organized enough and
Speaker 8: we are powerful enough to fucking run these people out
Speaker 8: so they can't ever fuck us again like this, So.
Speaker 6: We can resurrect neoliberal globalism, we can restore free trade, that's.
Speaker 2: Right, that's right, and bring it back to the Clinton era.
Speaker 5: Oh god.
Speaker 8: One last thing we should mention is that like this
Speaker 8: has already united the entire world against us effectively, people
Speaker 8: countries who have never worked together before in their entire
Speaker 8: existence are working together.
Speaker 1: And unfortunately, Poles also show Americans can distrust or tendency
Speaker 1: to view like Canadians and the EU as enemies is rising,
Speaker 1: both for Republicans and Democrats. Yeah, so that's great.
Speaker 2: That's great, cool, cool, cool, cool cul cuck cool.
Speaker 8: Yeah. And also, you know, and like the thing, the thing,
Speaker 8: the other thing that we have to do here, and
Speaker 8: this is this is literally our responsibility on this podcast
Speaker 8: and also responsibility of like fucking everyone who is having
Speaker 8: conversations with another person, is that this is entirely Trump's fault.
Speaker 8: He fucking did this, Like, oh yeah, this is not
Speaker 8: fucking the EU or whatever the fuck whoever's during retalitary show.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is this is no one else ever wanted this.
Speaker 8: Yeah yeah, no, like the people who put Trump in
Speaker 8: power didn't want this. This is just him and so yeah,
Speaker 8: the the the actual solution to this is all of
Speaker 8: us running this fucker out and not us getting drawn
Speaker 8: into his fucking bullshit wars with Canada or Greenland or
Speaker 8: whatever the fuck country he decides to invade in the
Speaker 8: next year. Is that all for tariff talk? Yeah, that's
Speaker 8: all we got on the terrace.
Speaker 1: I don't know what else to say. I mean, I
Speaker 1: I'm just looking at the numbers right now where the
Speaker 1: Dow Industrial is down a fifteen hundred points since the
Speaker 1: start of the day, So it's things are looking very
Speaker 1: good all of the lines. Like if you look at
Speaker 1: the way in which the line went down, there's like
Speaker 1: it's just this direct vertical drop on the third Yep,
Speaker 1: it's shocking.
Speaker 2: No, it is a ninety degree angle.
Speaker 8: It is legitimately, if you set the Google stock viewer
Speaker 8: thing to a one day view, the drop is so
Speaker 8: shocking that it looks like it just started down.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it prompts you to turn your phone into other direction.
Speaker 1: I've never seen anything like it, but I guess no
Speaker 1: one has.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I mean some of us. I guess people
Speaker 2: are still alive in the nineteen thirties. Yeah, yes, ye,
Speaker 2: Woody Guthrie.
Speaker 8: Has fucking grammar. I guess, like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's great. We did it in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2: It was bad then and dates bad now.
Speaker 6: Well, now now that we got those pesky tariffs out
Speaker 6: of the way, let's talk about the actual most important
Speaker 6: thing to happen this week in the news, New Jersey
Speaker 6: Senator Cory Booker has broken the record for the longest.
Speaker 8: Twenty five hours in five minutes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's horrible, beating.
Speaker 6: Strom Thurmon's filibuster of the nineteen fifty seven Civil Rights
Speaker 6: Bill by forty six minutes.
Speaker 1: We did it, volks, excellent, outstanding.
Speaker 2: Good. I'm just checking on ah Wall Street bets and
Speaker 2: they're having a real one today.
Speaker 8: That's pretty.
Speaker 4: I will say.
Speaker 8: I will say the thing about the Booker won. So
Speaker 8: if you were writing a parody of the Democratic Party,
Speaker 8: you would write that Corey Booker did this, and like
Speaker 8: did the did this philibuster and then immediately turned around
Speaker 8: and voted yes for a cloture vote to allow Trump
Speaker 8: to appoint another nominee. And that's exactly what they did. Yeah,
Speaker 8: we can't even you can't peroy to them. It's beyond parody.
Speaker 8: I like astounding, it's astonishing.
Speaker 6: It's not even a filibuster. He's not filibuster or anything.
Speaker 2: We didn't he didn't actively stop anything happening other than
Speaker 2: people not paying attention to it.
Speaker 1: I got a response from someone being like, well, you know,
Speaker 1: they didn't get to do anything on Monday, and I
Speaker 1: was like, yeah, they weren't really planning on it, and
Speaker 1: things continued as normal Tuesday.
Speaker 8: Yeah. Yeah, And you know, and here's the thing about that, right, like,
Speaker 8: do you know how many Democrats there are in the Senate?
Speaker 8: Do you know how many hours you could filibuster them
Speaker 8: for if you were actually determined to fucking do this,
Speaker 8: and on how many different things? We had a rotating
Speaker 8: series of Democrats.
Speaker 2: Yeah, show it if you tag teamed it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, but they're not They're not willing to fucking do it.
Speaker 1: No, and they'd be stopped eventually. The Republicans would do
Speaker 1: something fucked up to stop it. But at least you'd
Speaker 1: have tried.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and people would maybe take some fucking energy
Speaker 2: from that.
Speaker 8: And even if you were gonna do this as a
Speaker 8: fucking show vote thing, you could have voted no one
Speaker 8: the cloture motion to like fucking do the to like
Speaker 8: appoint the next nominee. But they're just like no, fuck
Speaker 8: you man.
Speaker 6: The fact that Chuck Schumber caved on the Republican budget
Speaker 6: from a few weeks ago and secretly got a number
Speaker 6: of Democratic senators to switch their votes to make it pass,
Speaker 6: and no one did this for that which which previously
Speaker 6: Democrats were talking about this budget bill like it's the
Speaker 6: worst thing to ever happen because it is.
Speaker 8: A bad bill. Yeah, it's really bad.
Speaker 6: And then they just caved last minute, or specifically Schumer
Speaker 6: and the people he talked to caved, and Schumer definitely
Speaker 6: would not have been in supportive of Booker doing something
Speaker 6: like this for that bill. But now Schumer gets to
Speaker 6: applaud along as as Booker delivers a twenty five hour
Speaker 6: maybe like well orated speech.
Speaker 1: But it was a very well written speech, like technically
Speaker 1: it was good, but that didn't matter.
Speaker 8: It's just this pure show of like symbolic theater.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what's the point.
Speaker 1: It's like if a congress person got out and conducted
Speaker 1: like a perfect rendition of the Nutcracker like symphony of
Speaker 1: like the ballet portion of that on their own in
Speaker 1: front of like the Capitol building. Like, well, it's impressive,
Speaker 1: it's spectacle. Like you're clearly very good at what you're doing.
Speaker 1: But it didn't change anything, Like it had no impact
Speaker 1: on the problems. Right, Yeah, like you're good. I'll give
Speaker 1: you that. Corey Booker can deliver a fucking speech, but
Speaker 1: that was really not what I was looking for.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fiddling impressively while roam burned. Thanks Corey.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and every single moment the Trump is in power,
Speaker 8: the way that they fucking just rolled over for him
Speaker 8: looks worse and worse.
Speaker 1: Knowledge he said, I failed, and so did we. We
Speaker 1: didn't rise to the moment, and we let this horrible
Speaker 1: thing happen, which I even I got a little briefly,
Speaker 1: Oh shit, maybe he actually recognizes like.
Speaker 6: No, okay, well, because it took him like twenty hours
Speaker 6: to like break emotionally to the point where he could
Speaker 6: like admit that to himself.
Speaker 1: No knowledge, his deep, deep deep failed.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but like it took having your brain be be
Speaker 6: shattered by this like pretty impressive physical act that like
Speaker 6: destroys your body. So in spirit and anyway, I think
Speaker 6: that's all we have to say about that. Let's go
Speaker 6: on and add break and come back to discuss more
Speaker 6: sad and I'll actually also possibly good news or at
Speaker 6: least bad for Elon Musk, which is good for us.
Speaker 8: All Right, we are back.
Speaker 6: I think let's pivot to James Stout for an update
Speaker 6: on Venezuela. Well, no El Salvador, Salvador the torture labor prison.
Speaker 8: James m M.
Speaker 2: Of course, we have to begin my segment today by saying,
Speaker 2: tros be to Abdullah Ojulen, whose birthday it is on
Speaker 2: the day that you are hearing this. So if you
Speaker 2: want to plant, if you want to plant a tree
Speaker 2: for APPO, get it, get out there and plant your tree. Unfortunately,
Speaker 2: that is the only good news we have to Border
Speaker 2: Patrol has spent most of this week touting the quote
Speaker 2: lowest number of border crossings in history. It will shock
Speaker 2: listeners to hear that this is not historically accurate. Bordering
Speaker 2: counters are way down. If there's one thing that I
Speaker 2: have ever taught you. It is that bordering counters are
Speaker 2: not the same as unique individuals, because people are being
Speaker 2: sent directly back to Mexico and will tend to return
Speaker 2: attempting a different route crossing the border. Right, there's our
Speaker 2: way down. And they're the lowest since they began publishing
Speaker 2: monthly data in two thousand, but numbers will way lower
Speaker 2: in the fifties and sixties and before then. It's relatively immaterial.
Speaker 2: It's just sort of a nipiggy point. I guess today,
Speaker 2: what I really want to talk about is the case
Speaker 2: of mister Kilmar Abrador Garcia. He was removed by the
Speaker 2: Trump administration to Elsa aberdoor to SECOT in a way
Speaker 2: they have admitted was a mistake. So we have to
Speaker 2: go back a little bit to understand mister Abergo Garcia's
Speaker 2: story and how we got here. He was arrested in
Speaker 2: mid March due to the United States mcclaimed that he
Speaker 2: played a quote prominent role in MS thirteen M thirteen
Speaker 2: being the Salvadorrean gang. Right he'd come to the United
Speaker 2: States in twenty eleven. He was fleeing gang violence. He
Speaker 2: was allegedly arrested in twenty nineteen outside a home depot
Speaker 2: where he was standing with other men looking for work. However,
Speaker 2: the incident report for that particular incident gives other names,
Speaker 2: but not his. At that point, a Prince George's County
Speaker 2: Police Department detective filled out a quote gang worksheet and
Speaker 2: claimed that mister Abergagarcia was associated with a member of
Speaker 2: MS thirteen. The evidence he cited for this was a
Speaker 2: Chicago bulls hoodie and the claim of a confidential informant.
Speaker 2: The competition informant claimed that he was part of a
Speaker 2: group within this gang that was set up in a
Speaker 2: state that mister Abergagarcia had never lived in the United States.
Speaker 2: In twenty nineteen, Ice argued that he shouldn't be given
Speaker 2: bond because of this alleged gang membership right, and so
Speaker 2: he wasn't given bond, but through an asylum claim. Although
Speaker 2: he didn't get asylum, he was protected from removal right,
Speaker 2: so a judge ruled that he couldn't be removed back
Speaker 2: to El Salvador, where he would presumably face violence. When
Speaker 2: mister abergo Garcia's lawyers tried to interview the police detective
Speaker 2: who had filed this report, accusing him of gang membership.
Speaker 2: They found no record of his rest and that the
Speaker 2: detective has been suspended since then. The Department of question
Speaker 2: also settled a lawsuit with its own corps over racism
Speaker 2: in the department.
Speaker 8: JD.
Speaker 2: Vance, who has a law degree. Right the JD is
Speaker 2: I guess before and after his name. He has a
Speaker 2: law degree from Harvard has claimed that mister Ablergo Garcia
Speaker 2: is a convicted member of MS thirteen. This is not true.
Speaker 2: I can't find any evidence he has any conviction of
Speaker 2: any kind. I'm going to quote here from a filing
Speaker 2: by the United States government on the fifteenth of March.
Speaker 2: Although Ice was aware of his protection from removal to
Speaker 2: El Salvador, Abergo Garcia was removed to El Salvador because
Speaker 2: of an admis innstrative error. So the government there has
Speaker 2: admitted in the court finally that they accidentally sent this
Speaker 2: guide to the prison labor camp in El Salvador. Right,
Speaker 2: according to ice acting field Officer Robert Cerner quote, he
Speaker 2: was an alternate as others were removed from the flight
Speaker 2: for various reasons. He moved up the list and was
Speaker 2: assigned to the flight. So it appears that they had
Speaker 2: a large list of people they wanted to put on
Speaker 2: this flight. This is interesting, right, It's an insight into
Speaker 2: their process for filling that first flight that they some
Speaker 2: people they really didn't feel they had enough evidence for.
Speaker 2: But somehow this guy, who again has never been convicted
Speaker 2: of having any membership of any gang, they put on
Speaker 2: this flight. Right. His wife and child are both US citizens,
Speaker 2: and they have sued in court. That's why we're seeing this. Right.
Speaker 2: They've sued for the United States government to stop paying
Speaker 2: El Salvador for his detention and for the United States
Speaker 2: government to demand he returned. Vance has advanced a kind
Speaker 2: of unique legal theory response, claiming that withholding of removal
Speaker 2: only prevent someone being deported back to the home state.
Speaker 2: I mean you could, technically that is what the withholding is, right, Like,
Speaker 2: it's like, he can't go back to El Salvador because
Speaker 2: he will be at risk in El Salvador, so so
Speaker 2: they can deport him to a third state. But they
Speaker 2: deported him to El Salvador or renditioned him to El Salvador. Right.
Speaker 2: I want to read JD. Vance's post here. I'm not
Speaker 2: going to read the whole thing, but I'll start with
Speaker 2: the second paragraph in twenty nineteen. Immigration judge parentheses under
Speaker 2: the Biden administration. For those of you who are familiar
Speaker 2: with dates, it's twenty nineteen. Was under the first Trump administration.
Speaker 2: That that was the Strong administration. Yeah, moving on, determined
Speaker 2: that the deported man was, in fact a member of
Speaker 2: the MS thirteen gang. He also apparently had multiple traffic
Speaker 2: violations for which he failed to appear in court. A
Speaker 2: real winner. It is telling that the entire American media
Speaker 2: is going to run a propaganda operation today making you
Speaker 2: think that an innocent quote father of three was apprehended
Speaker 2: by a gula father.
Speaker 8: Of threes in quotes here by the way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And gulags generally not capable of doing the
Speaker 2: apprehensions themselves. If we think of a gulag as a place,
Speaker 2: is the police who are apprehend the person send them
Speaker 2: to the gulag. Moving on, here are the relevant facts.
Speaker 2: I'm still quoting. The man is an illegal immigrant with
Speaker 2: no right to be in our country. Obviously, the judge
Speaker 2: determined that he was protected from removal. Quoting again, and
Speaker 2: immigration judge during the Biden I've been determined he was
Speaker 2: a member of the MS thirteen gang. Again, that's not
Speaker 2: the case.
Speaker 8: It's staggering the extent to which they can say a
Speaker 8: sentence where every single individual word is a lie, like stunning.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6: The fact that so many members of the Modern Republican
Speaker 6: Party have like memory hold twenty nineteen and twenty twenty
Speaker 6: as being under the Biden in administration is just insane.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's bizarre. I think what they're referring to is
Speaker 2: that the initial hearing right where he was denied bomb
Speaker 2: within twenty nineteen, and then he filed his asylum claim
Speaker 2: and later was protected from removal. But that's not what
Speaker 2: saying here.
Speaker 6: But like even the way they talk about, like the
Speaker 6: COVID response, they talk about it as if Joe Biden
Speaker 6: was the president.
Speaker 1: They're not gonna lock us down again, but you locked
Speaker 1: us down?
Speaker 2: Yeah, who did that? And then the last one, I
Speaker 2: think it's most rebelatory because he's not a citizen, he
Speaker 2: does not get full jury trial by peers. In other words,
Speaker 2: whatever due process he was entitled to he received, the
Speaker 2: immigration court doesn't generally present the opportunity for jury trial.
Speaker 2: Right once again, holds a JdE and he presumably knows this.
Speaker 2: What's more disturbing is the claim made by the United
Speaker 2: States government in its filing in this lawsuit that the
Speaker 2: Abergo Garcia family filed quote, because plaintiffs conceived that Abergogarcia
Speaker 2: is not in the United States custody, this court cannot
Speaker 2: hear these claims. So they're claiming that no US court
Speaker 2: has jurisdiction over the question of these people who are
Speaker 2: in El Salvador because they're not in US custody, right, which, obviously,
Speaker 2: if they stick the landing on this, it suggests like
Speaker 2: it is a one way ticket to the prison labor camp,
Speaker 2: right that that you cannot challenge that in US court
Speaker 2: and you ain't going to get very far in in
Speaker 2: court elsauwud all right, So what they're suggesting here is
Speaker 2: this is this is a forever detention that that there
Speaker 2: is no habeas right that that was they were asking
Speaker 2: for habeas corpus.
Speaker 8: Can you spen my habest corpus actually is for the listeners.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it means bring me the body, right in this
Speaker 2: case is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you have to present evidence in order to charge
Speaker 1: like convict people and things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like the snaqua non of having a justice system,
Speaker 2: a criminal justice right, like show something. Yeah, you can't
Speaker 2: just be like bad man and then put the guy
Speaker 2: in jail.
Speaker 1: The most basic thing is that like, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: in literal terms, it means you have to like actually
Speaker 1: take somebody in front of a court in order to
Speaker 1: determine if they're like being detained for a reason, right,
Speaker 1: Like a judge has to see them and say, like, yes,
Speaker 1: this is this is not an unlawful imprisonment. There is
Speaker 1: a charge, there is some degree of evidence that somebody
Speaker 1: did something.
Speaker 2: Right, which they have not provided here, right.
Speaker 1: Not that like you can prove they did it, but
Speaker 1: like something was done and you are here for that
Speaker 1: for a reason.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so in this case, we don't have any
Speaker 2: of that. Mister Ablogacia is still the way his family
Speaker 2: found out he was in second was that his wife
Speaker 2: identified him by scars on his head when they shaved
Speaker 2: it and a tattoo they.
Speaker 8: Saw Jesus Christy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they had no idea. It presumably doesn't come up
Speaker 2: on the ice detainee locator. You know that you're going
Speaker 2: to look up your family members on if your family
Speaker 2: members are detained by I doesn't have l Salvador as
Speaker 2: an option. So yeah, this is where we're at. This
Speaker 2: is the case I will be following right because I
Speaker 2: say it's pretty pivotal if they can argue that the
Speaker 2: court doesn't have jurisdiction. Obviously, I'm sure at that point
Speaker 2: that ruling will be challenged and it will run up
Speaker 2: the courts. Currently it seems like the only court they're
Speaker 2: going to listen to is a Supreme Court. But evidently
Speaker 2: that this is what they're going for, Like this is
Speaker 2: their argument here that once you're in El Salvador, out
Speaker 2: of their hands and they can't do anything. So sorry,
Speaker 2: even though it's a mistake, you have stuck there forever,
Speaker 2: which is pretty disturbing.
Speaker 6: Yesterday, me and James did an episode on ICE's targeting
Speaker 6: of students, scholars, and professors that they believe are associated
Speaker 6: with pro Palace time protests. So we did an update
Speaker 6: on that story that I did a peace on or
Speaker 6: a segment on last week on Executive Disorder. So for
Speaker 6: a follow up on that, you can look to yesterday's episode.
Speaker 6: But we are going to close with I guess kind
Speaker 6: of a feel good story because it makes Elon Musk sad.
Speaker 6: He has had a bit a bit of a rough
Speaker 6: week for mister Musk's businesses and his political projects. I
Speaker 6: guess Elon Musk's efforts to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court
Speaker 6: have failed, as the Democratic backed candidate swept the election,
Speaker 6: maintaining four to three Liberal control of the Supreme Court
Speaker 6: of Wisconsin.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean the gist of it is of like three
Speaker 1: or four days ago, all of my friends from who
Speaker 1: are Scanies got furious because Elon Musk wore a cheesehead,
Speaker 1: you know, like the ones for the packers that the
Speaker 1: people from Wisconsin ware when they're at games while he
Speaker 1: got up on stage and gave a million dollars. Basically
Speaker 1: immediately before, like about little less than a week ago,
Speaker 1: a higher court ruled that it was not bribery for
Speaker 1: him to offer people a million dollars at random if
Speaker 1: they voted or showed up at like you know, different
Speaker 1: rallies and stuff, which is like what he's been doing, right,
Speaker 1: is making these basically fake offers of a million dollars
Speaker 1: because these two went to members of the local Republican party,
Speaker 1: like it was clearly set up.
Speaker 8: The head of the College Republicans.
Speaker 6: Of Wisconsin, amazing must fish twenty five million dollars leads
Speaker 6: on this race. He danced around on stage wearing a cheesehead,
Speaker 6: and he gave out million dollar novelty checks to quote
Speaker 6: unquote voters who won a contest by signing his petition
Speaker 6: against activist judges, which has been the new rally and
Speaker 6: cry on the right is that everything that's going wrong,
Speaker 6: everything that's stopping Trump, is from these active studges that
Speaker 6: we have to unseat. He also gave one hundred dollars
Speaker 6: each to every person who signed that petition, and on
Speaker 6: election Day, Musk offered voters fifty dollars if they posted
Speaker 6: a picture of a Wisconsin resident outside of a polling place.
Speaker 8: How is that allowed?
Speaker 6: These are the same people who scream about like election interference,
Speaker 6: rigging elections, buying elections for the elections, ed like, like
Speaker 6: this is insane stuff. You can go to jail for
Speaker 6: giving people a water bottle in line at polling places
Speaker 6: in multiple states, and Musk is allowed to give people
Speaker 6: fifty dollars for pictures posted outside of polling places. What
Speaker 6: the fuck is happening? But luckily, the negative polarization against
Speaker 6: Musk and Tesla that's been increasing the past few months
Speaker 6: has resulted in Judge SUVN. Crawford beating the mega had
Speaker 6: Republican judge who last year went as Donald Trump for Halloween,
Speaker 6: beating this guy by by ten percent. This was a massive,
Speaker 6: a massive reversal of the twenty twenty four persential election
Speaker 6: results in Wisconsin. There was a record high turnout for
Speaker 6: this spring election, forty percent higher than the last Wisconsin
Speaker 6: Supreme Court election, which was in twenty twenty three, which which.
Speaker 8: By the way, that was that was also a high
Speaker 8: turner election too.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 8: Like that that previous one. Then this one just fucking
Speaker 8: obliterated it.
Speaker 6: Like this was like just under the results of like
Speaker 6: what you would expect to out of like a midterm election.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 6: They shifted every single county in the state blue compared
Speaker 6: to the twenty twenty four presidential election, and on average
Speaker 6: by about ten to twelve points, massive, massive shifts.
Speaker 8: And this was before the tariffs, by the way. Yeah,
Speaker 8: like this this was before the terror.
Speaker 2: No, this was pure personal dislike of Elon musk meddling
Speaker 2: in Wisconsin politics. Well like and everything else has happened
Speaker 2: since January, but like it does seem like Elon Musk's
Speaker 2: personal presence was a net negative and all the money
Speaker 2: he spent Luckily.
Speaker 6: The next day there was a Tesla sales report which
Speaker 6: was one of the worst in the history of their company,
Speaker 6: of fifty percent of fewer vehicles being delivered in the
Speaker 6: first three months compared to last year, with Tesla's stock
Speaker 6: continuing to plunge the past week, although with reports that
Speaker 6: that Musk might exit the inner circle of the Trump administration. Yeah,
Speaker 6: those stocks are kind of flipping back and forth as
Speaker 6: he's expected to return to his company.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and who know, like a lot of that's
Speaker 1: clearly the tariffs.
Speaker 6: Well yes, and then with the tariffs, this is a
Speaker 6: whole other.
Speaker 2: Issue, real double whammy for Tesla.
Speaker 1: The reporting is that people around Trump have largely soured
Speaker 1: on Musk. Who knows how true that is. There's always
Speaker 1: a lot of reports from the Trump inner circle that are, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's yeah, he's always had a very
Speaker 1: leaky yeah, but and I can see it being multi causal.
Speaker 1: Like Musk has failed badly in Wisconsin. The kind of
Speaker 1: suspicion right now is that Schibble or whatever his name
Speaker 1: is was down about five points relative to other MANGA
Speaker 1: candidates in the same election, which people are attributing largely
Speaker 1: to Musk's intervention.
Speaker 6: Well, and like they were testing out if he was
Speaker 6: like a stable, consistent, reliable political operator, or if what
Speaker 6: he did in twenty twenty four was kind of like
Speaker 6: a one off event, if he's like a one trick
Speaker 6: tony there, and this complete, like devastating loss demonstrated that
Speaker 6: maybe this unstable drug addict no offense to a specifically
Speaker 6: for Elon Musk, who's railing ketemene all the time and
Speaker 6: trying to run the entire world. Luckily, Luckily, my friends
Speaker 6: who might indulge in kedymene don't try to run the
Speaker 6: entire world.
Speaker 1: You say that now, but you'll you'll get older at
Speaker 1: some point.
Speaker 4: It's it's the have midlife crisis too.
Speaker 6: But he was showed in like a very public way
Speaker 6: to be to be like an unstable political force. And
Speaker 6: and yeah, that's going to turn some of some of
Speaker 6: the people in the Trump admins against him.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 6: Anyway, that's I think that's all I have to say
Speaker 6: about this. Wisconsin, Rightisconsin, Rice, Sorry.
Speaker 1: All right, well I think that's probably an episode.
Speaker 8: Wait shit, hold on, I just I just found the
Speaker 8: funniest fucking thing about this terriff I think I've seen
Speaker 8: yet from fucking.
Speaker 7: Wait, locking Jack JASP, locking, locking, locking JASP.
Speaker 1: Okay, we're back.
Speaker 8: Apparently the tariffs are not broken down by country. This
Speaker 8: is quote from this guy of the effects on Twitter.
Speaker 8: They're not broken down by country, They're broken down by
Speaker 8: top level inn that domain. It's why the island's populated
Speaker 8: entirely by penguins the dot hm domain. And why the
Speaker 8: Diego Garcia military base.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, like fucking McDonald's island.
Speaker 8: Yeah yeah yeah. And why why Renion Gibraltar oliced sid
Speaker 8: when did yeah?
Speaker 1: Like yah? What love Reunion is part of France? Why
Speaker 1: are we hitting these guys? Okay, that makes sense. That
Speaker 1: that that is that that is what a nineteen year
Speaker 1: old who never went to college, my god, but thinks
Speaker 1: he's he understands all of reality would do. Okay, great
Speaker 1: dictatorship of Chad GVT. Fucking phenomenal, My fucking god, unbelievable.
Speaker 8: Look look, okay. The note I want to close on
Speaker 8: is that so podcaster Mike Duncan, the creator of the
Speaker 8: Revolutions podcast, a man who has spent literally tens of
Speaker 8: thousands of hours writing about like every revolution that's ever happened.
Speaker 8: At the end of the original run of the series, revolutions.
Speaker 8: He he makes this point, which is that all revolutions
Speaker 8: work because they encounter you encounter one of the great
Speaker 8: idiots of history, a man who is blessed with with
Speaker 8: the the the inalienable ability to make the wrong decision
Speaker 8: at every single time. And my god, if we can't
Speaker 8: beat these motherfuckers, like if that shit's entirely on us,
Speaker 8: because we have been handed one of the greatest idiots
Speaker 8: of history that has ever existed in the history of humanity.
Speaker 8: And our fucking job now is to turn that into
Speaker 8: fucking a better world, to do.
Speaker 1: Something, yeah, something, Yeah, we'll see. The problem is that
Speaker 1: there's a lot of greater idiots out there, and they
Speaker 1: are they all do still have guns and money. One
Speaker 1: of the great tragedies of the world is that very
Speaker 1: very stupid people can still fire guns. We made them
Speaker 1: too easy, folks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've seen I've seen that happen a couple of times. Yeah,
Speaker 2: in the old conduct of my work.
Speaker 1: Anyway, all right, well, we reported the news. We reported
Speaker 1: the news. Now you go out there and you know what,
Speaker 1: find someone who lives on the Isle of McDonald near
Speaker 1: the Arctic and kick their ass today.
Speaker 8: Fuck them up.
Speaker 1: Fuck that Island.
Speaker 2: Do trade with the penguin pay ten percent?
Speaker 1: Well yeah, send us a picture of you fighting a
Speaker 1: penguin and we'll get to make sure you get a
Speaker 1: hat or something.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll send you so much.
Speaker 5: We reported the news.
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 10: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 10: in episode descriptions.
Speaker 8: Thanks for listening.