Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's got to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions. Welcome back to it
Speaker 1: could happen here. A podcast that is being recorded far
Speaker 1: too early in the morning with me to help me
Speaker 1: stay conscious. Is my friend and coffee entrepreneur prop aka
Speaker 1: Jason Petty Prop.
Speaker 2: How are you doing, buddy man, I'm wonderful on this
Speaker 2: fine day.
Speaker 3: I almost did an AKA song forgetting which shows?
Speaker 2: I was like, oh wait, that's a zeigeis bit happens
Speaker 2: to me all the time?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: So which bit for which Show'm I suppose do? Right now?
Speaker 1: Here's here's here's what we were talking about before the show,
Speaker 1: which is that we're both exhausted despite sleeping normally.
Speaker 2: This week. I feel like this.
Speaker 1: May be something to do with these aliens. Everybody's talking
Speaker 1: about something's going on here.
Speaker 3: It's yeah, aliens or just this like kind of week
Speaker 3: long sort of holiday festival. I've been a part of that.
Speaker 3: Apparently all of Black America has been participating in.
Speaker 2: Mm hmmm.
Speaker 3: We're all experiencing a level of bliss I don't think
Speaker 3: we've had in a long time.
Speaker 1: That is, that is our subject of today, which is uh.
Speaker 1: I think the term generally being used for it is
Speaker 1: the Montgomery riverboat brawl. That seems to be what we've
Speaker 1: all settled on.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they say the fade in the water.
Speaker 3: I mean there's new, there's new spirituals and hymns.
Speaker 1: The Ballad of Black Aquaman. Yes, I love that kid.
Speaker 1: But we should before we get into all this, we
Speaker 1: should have know what actually happened, because I'm gonna guess
Speaker 1: there's at least a chunk of people listening who are like,
Speaker 1: what the fuck are you guys talking about. The short
Speaker 1: of it is a couple of days ago, video dropped
Speaker 1: two different clips I think are mainly what's what people
Speaker 1: are watching of a fight at a riverboat dock in Montgomery, Alabama.
Speaker 1: And basically what happens is you had this this river
Speaker 1: boat and it's you know, Montgomery, Alabama's got a lot
Speaker 1: of tourism. It's one of these big boats that holds
Speaker 1: about two hundred and seventy people. I think, takes them
Speaker 1: up and down the river. You know, you go up
Speaker 1: and down the river, you look at the pretty things.
Speaker 1: I assume there's there's beer or something.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It's all sorts of cities do this. So this boat
Speaker 1: is heading back into dock and they've got all these
Speaker 1: people who want to get off the boat because they've
Speaker 1: been on for a while and.
Speaker 3: They have people to get back in a lot of
Speaker 3: people to get the next one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And you know they have a set
Speaker 1: spot that is their spot, and no one else is
Speaker 1: to park their boat at the dock, as is usual
Speaker 1: for a large business like this, and some dudes with
Speaker 1: a pontoon boat have taken it up.
Speaker 2: They've parked there.
Speaker 1: So the captain gets on the pa for quite a
Speaker 1: while and is like, hey, guys, move your pontoon. Hey guys,
Speaker 1: you got to get that pontoon out of here. Hey, y'all,
Speaker 1: if you don't get that pontoon out of here, I'm
Speaker 1: going to call the cops. And if you have open containers,
Speaker 1: the cops are going to fuck you. You don't want that,
Speaker 1: So why don't you just move? And these guys get
Speaker 1: like shitty at him and start like yelling at him
Speaker 1: and cursing at him, flipping him the bird. So he
Speaker 1: sends over his co captain, and the captain of the
Speaker 1: boat from the videos if scene appears to be a
Speaker 1: white dude. The co captain is a middle aged black man.
Speaker 1: He gets off the boat and he goes over to
Speaker 1: just like move the pontoon boat right, which is a
Speaker 1: thing that boat people do when situations like this occur.
Speaker 1: It is not like an unheard of situation. And while
Speaker 1: he's doing it, a whole bunch of the presumably the
Speaker 1: dudes who own this pontoon boat boat who were all white,
Speaker 1: surround him and start attacking him. And then at one
Speaker 1: point that looks like five or six people trying it,
Speaker 1: and he's, for the for the record, he's holding his own.
Speaker 1: He's doing as long as you can. Yeah, And then
Speaker 1: a number of nearby people start running to his aid,
Speaker 1: including at least one of the kids on the river boat.
Speaker 1: Uh hops out or like hops into the water and
Speaker 1: like swims.
Speaker 2: Yeah you are talking about the rest of this, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: There's a Hood Politics episode recorded where I try to
Speaker 3: do like initial reactions and try to add some some
Speaker 3: like color to this, which will come out a little later.
Speaker 3: This will come out before that. But there's Yeah, so
Speaker 3: you're watching the video, you can't it's all inaudible, so
Speaker 3: you can't really hear except for the people recording. You
Speaker 3: hear them talking to them talking, right, but judging from
Speaker 3: there's so many context clues to understand what's happening.
Speaker 2: Right, So as the co.
Speaker 3: Captain, the black dude's getting off the boat to come
Speaker 3: talk to these white boys right the way that you
Speaker 3: could just you know, when someone's like and unfortunately for
Speaker 3: white people, y'all can't when you're drunk. Just your skin
Speaker 3: shows it, you know, I'm saying, like, so you can
Speaker 3: just see, Okay, this dude's like, your skin's very flush
Speaker 3: with color right now. So you're you're clearly drunk, you
Speaker 3: know what I'm saying. And it's hot as hell because
Speaker 3: it's Montgomery, Alabama, right, It's also Montgomery, Alabama. So you
Speaker 3: just from seeing the interaction and the body language of
Speaker 3: both people in this conversation, you're like, Okay, this conversation
Speaker 3: is getting intense. And then and then once once the
Speaker 3: uh the the white gentleman decides he's gonna put hands
Speaker 3: on his black dude.
Speaker 2: The black dude throws his hat up into the air.
Speaker 3: He shure does, he shares does as a Now, Robert,
Speaker 3: is that not a universal bet?
Speaker 2: It is signal?
Speaker 1: I would go so far as to say, it's like
Speaker 1: that's damn near like a mortal combat opener. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is universal.
Speaker 3: Hands.
Speaker 5: Yes, it's like, all right, we got.
Speaker 3: To throw hands, right, So it's so good. So at
Speaker 3: that point, that's when like clearly, like clearly, either these
Speaker 3: white boys are very inebriated or have grossly underestimated the
Speaker 3: feeling of collective identity black people have, because when they
Speaker 3: decided to jump this man, you're in front of hundreds
Speaker 3: of black people, oh yeah, who are all waiting in
Speaker 3: line to get on this boat, right, who are already
Speaker 3: pissed at you because you not moving right. So, so
Speaker 3: when he does that, as you can see, there are
Speaker 3: people running, you know, black men running as fast as
Speaker 3: they can to kind of help you know this, uh,
Speaker 3: this this co captain who by this point is being
Speaker 3: stomped because he's overpowered by five people. And then you
Speaker 3: see this young man swimming yeah to the shore, which
Speaker 3: is like, he's a Yeah, I mean, that guy's a
Speaker 3: national treasure.
Speaker 1: Now, so I don't know that guy, but I can
Speaker 1: tell that we can tell a couple of things about him.
Speaker 1: One of them is that he reacts quickly in a crisis.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, yeah. And the other is that pretty good swimmer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he must be a teenager, because how you're gonna
Speaker 3: have the energy to swim there and then still start
Speaker 3: doing work.
Speaker 1: Well and then pull yourself up onto a dock when yeah,
Speaker 1: clothing's all soaked. Very impressive feet.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So anyway, so so as that happens, people finally catch up,
Speaker 3: the boat finally gets a chance to dock. Now these
Speaker 3: other people who were on the boat and watched all
Speaker 3: this happen are like, now it's our turn. So they
Speaker 3: get off the boat, go to the pontoon. Shirts off again,
Speaker 3: another universal signal. If I've taken my T shirt off,
Speaker 3: we're we're here, We're gonna throw down. So they start
Speaker 3: throwing down. I mean it's women getting involved. And then
Speaker 3: now now, now, now it becomes this this entire brawl right. So,
Speaker 3: and if you've ever been in situations where brawls break out,
Speaker 3: they kind of move and shift as different people decide
Speaker 3: they want a part of it, and other people get tired,
Speaker 3: and somebody's finally, you know, his nosebleeding whatever. And while
Speaker 3: this is happening, there's a few clips where you can
Speaker 3: see whether they're security officers or police, they're.
Speaker 5: Kind of just watching, kind of like I don't know
Speaker 5: if we needn't do anything about this just yet.
Speaker 3: Now, finally the brawl gets around the corner and a
Speaker 3: brave old man, old head who sees his opportunity wile.
Speaker 1: Who is who has brought? Who has brought? But he's
Speaker 1: got the soul of a sniper. This man is like
Speaker 1: watching and waiting to act.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, So at this point, uh, there are some
Speaker 3: security officers involved who have finally been like, all right, man,
Speaker 3: maybe we just maybe we should stop this. And it's
Speaker 3: almost like again you can't hear it, but judging by
Speaker 3: their body language, the cops were kind of like, I
Speaker 3: don't know, man, and white boys kind of ask for it,
Speaker 3: like and you don't say so, I just kind of
Speaker 3: watch it like, hey man, you ask for it, man,
Speaker 3: And this is what happened. You should have moved your boat,
Speaker 3: shouldn't have been talking shit like like like Kat Williams says,
Speaker 3: shouldn't have been talking shit, you know.
Speaker 5: So so anyway they.
Speaker 3: Do this, and this this hero of a man grabs
Speaker 3: a white folding chair and just wax a dude over
Speaker 3: the head with it who was attempting to attack some
Speaker 3: other people. Now clearly again if you've been in a brawl,
Speaker 3: maybe adding color that's not on the video, but like
Speaker 3: if you've been in a brawl, you understand at some
Speaker 3: point you're kind of blackout and you just you just
Speaker 3: get punched drunk. So while he's hitting a guy with
Speaker 3: a folding chair, the there's this other white lady who's
Speaker 3: attempting to intervene with an interaction that one of the
Speaker 3: security or cop guys is having with turns out which
Speaker 3: with probably one of her compadres.
Speaker 1: And this is, by the way, a mixed gender brawl.
Speaker 1: There's there's like, yeah, this is not not just dudes
Speaker 1: uh throwing hands, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: It's it's it's it's girls on girls, it's girls on dudes,
Speaker 3: it's dudes on girls.
Speaker 2: It's a brawl, you know.
Speaker 3: So the officer, like officers do when you try to
Speaker 3: intervene with them having interactions with with somebody.
Speaker 2: Pushes the lady away.
Speaker 3: Now, now the lady's in riverbroke crocs, right, so her
Speaker 3: feet just fall right through the crocs, right. She gets
Speaker 3: pushed down and just happens to be in the eyesight
Speaker 3: of this of this sixty old man with a folded chair.
Speaker 5: And while she's down, he just turns and just whacks
Speaker 5: her over the head with this chair.
Speaker 1: He does, he shares it gives you the w W
Speaker 1: E special I mean, just New World Order suck.
Speaker 3: It just smacks her with a folding chair and at
Speaker 3: that point, you it's almost like and again it's all audible,
Speaker 3: but you just see the officers go like.
Speaker 1: Ship man, yep, Now we gotta do something.
Speaker 5: Now, we gotta like the fuck man. Now we gotta
Speaker 5: arrest you dude.
Speaker 3: Right, So the cops finally go like what the fuck man,
Speaker 3: They take the chair from the guy, and the dude
Speaker 3: his body language is so like like he doesn't even
Speaker 3: know what's happening, like I'm just swinging, you know. So
Speaker 3: when the officer finally takes the chair and they like
Speaker 3: they're like, dude, you.
Speaker 5: Hit the lady, You hit the lady, hit the lady.
Speaker 2: We got yeah, we gotta do something.
Speaker 3: We got to arrest you now, right, and which, of
Speaker 3: course the internet watching it, and even the person holding
Speaker 3: even the person shooting the video, we all like, oh, yeah, nah.
Speaker 2: But he's definitely going to jail.
Speaker 3: That guy going to jail. Everybody else yeah might be fine.
Speaker 3: He go to yeah and uh.
Speaker 5: And that's pretty much where where the video stops.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it has.
Speaker 1: It has obviously gone everywhere since then, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of writing about like, yeah, why this has like taken
Speaker 1: off so much and been seen as so inspirational to people.
Speaker 1: I think it's because it seems we've all seen like
Speaker 1: too many videos that are just kind of the first
Speaker 1: part of this where like, yeah, there's like a bunch
Speaker 1: of racist white pean and by the way, there's at
Speaker 1: least you can't hear it on the video, but people
Speaker 1: have said that, like these folks when that co captain
Speaker 1: came down, were like shouting the inward adam and stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we've all seen the variants of this that are
Speaker 1: just like, yeah, some some black men or black woman
Speaker 1: getting abused by a bunch of racists, and this one
Speaker 1: starts looking like that and then turns into like like
Speaker 1: a beautiful come uppets, like these people picked a fight
Speaker 1: against a man they thought was like alone and kind
Speaker 1: of heavy set and older, and that they could like
Speaker 1: wail on and just wound up getting absolutely housed. Based
Speaker 1: on at least what I'm looking at here, looks like
Speaker 1: three of the white folks involved in this have been
Speaker 1: charged with crimes. The police are talking to the chair guy.
Speaker 1: It's unclear yet like what exactly charges he's gonna catch.
Speaker 3: He was on a he was on a radio show,
Speaker 3: a morning show in Alabama, ware with just sort of
Speaker 3: an internet personality that like in the black community, we're
Speaker 3: all very familiar with.
Speaker 2: And so they asked her.
Speaker 3: They asked him, like, the lady asked him like okay, okay,
Speaker 3: you had to chair, And the lady was already down,
Speaker 3: like what what what happened? He said, It feels like
Speaker 3: it's like we wrote this script where he goes man.
Speaker 2: I blacked out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he said, I just thought about rows of parks
Speaker 3: and that lady that wouldn't give the seat to her.
Speaker 2: I was like, I'll give her a chair.
Speaker 1: But you know, fights are ugly things but also in
Speaker 1: some ways beautiful things. It's a there's a lot going
Speaker 1: on in this video. I'm not surprised that it's it's
Speaker 1: been taken by so many people. There's some lessons I
Speaker 1: think bystanders can take from this. From one thing, if
Speaker 1: like fifty people are having a giant brawl, might want
Speaker 1: to get out of there.
Speaker 5: Just leave, Yeah, just bounce. You should know to leave.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, not a good thing to get in the
Speaker 1: middle of. Second, if you're parked in someone else's boat spot,
Speaker 1: maybe instead of shouting racial slurs, get your fucking boat moved.
Speaker 5: It's not.
Speaker 3: It was like, Yeah, I think what it's It speaks
Speaker 3: to so much because this was such an avoidable situation.
Speaker 3: You guess is completely avoidable. Bro, we just slide over
Speaker 3: a little bit. I feel like if you've like if
Speaker 3: you've driven a car on a highway, then you've seen
Speaker 3: a semi truck and when the semi truck come, just get.
Speaker 2: Out his way, Like, why is you picking this fight?
Speaker 5: Man?
Speaker 2: Just he can't. It's a big old at wheelerd.
Speaker 5: Just this is courtesy.
Speaker 3: That's a bigger So I'm just saying, like, that's a
Speaker 3: bigger boat than you.
Speaker 5: You're more nimble, you.
Speaker 3: Can move, and clearly it's a line of people waiting
Speaker 3: to get off.
Speaker 5: I just don't understand.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, no, That's one of the things I think
Speaker 1: that's involved here that's interesting to me is that there's
Speaker 1: this This is not just I mean, like, obviously the
Speaker 1: fact that these guys were biggots is a factor here,
Speaker 1: but there's also just this increasingly common freedom that the
Speaker 1: most selfish people in our society feel to be like
Speaker 1: aggressive about the fact that they don't owe anyone else,
Speaker 1: like basic like politeness, right, like the the very basic
Speaker 1: Though two hundred and seventy people are being inconvenienced because
Speaker 1: I parked my shit in the wrong space, I should bounce,
Speaker 1: you know, I should probably at least say, oh, sorry,
Speaker 1: I fucked up. Instead like, no, we're gonna make this
Speaker 1: a thing because like we get to park wherever the
Speaker 1: fuck we want and fuck you like that. That kind
Speaker 1: of attitude is like it's so frustrating, Like I can't
Speaker 1: even get myself into the head of someone who would
Speaker 1: do what these guys did and not like feel like
Speaker 1: they were an asshole, Like I had to do the
Speaker 1: thing every now and then I think most of us
Speaker 1: do where like I park my car in like a
Speaker 1: a like a red zone or something, because it's like
Speaker 1: I got to be it's like there's no spaces. I'm
Speaker 1: thirty students, right, Yeah, and you get out and someone seeing.
Speaker 2: You like in the fucking red and they're.
Speaker 1: Like, yes, you know, like I know, it's sorry. Well
Speaker 1: at one point, man, I'm sorry, Like yeah, dude.
Speaker 5: I'm so sorry. Bro, I'm so sorry. Look I'm gone,
Speaker 5: I'm gone.
Speaker 4: My bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: And to have the the fucking hutzpa to just like,
Speaker 1: look at a boat of two hundred and seventy people
Speaker 1: be like, fuck all of you, like I want to
Speaker 1: keep my stupid ass bart doing here for some reason.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then the willingness to be like, what the
Speaker 3: fuck you gonna do about it? Well, we'll jump you
Speaker 3: if you get that mad, and just and whether it's
Speaker 3: whether you're adding to either the lack of like situational
Speaker 3: awareness or just that that overall hutzpah, like you said
Speaker 3: of just like.
Speaker 2: Whatever, I'll take all of.
Speaker 3: You, like really you really really like Yeah, I think
Speaker 3: that there's there's a lot to color here too, with
Speaker 3: the fact that first of all, this is take where
Speaker 3: it's taking place. I mean we're still in Montgomery, Alabama here,
Speaker 3: and which and on a.
Speaker 2: Dock that.
Speaker 3: Was obviously and verifiably a dock where slaves were dropped
Speaker 3: off at you know what I'm saying. So you have
Speaker 3: that history, right, you have the history of the Montgomery
Speaker 3: bus boycotts. You know what I'm saying, Like, this is
Speaker 3: this is the city where Rosa Parks did the thing.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying, Like, this is where it happened.
Speaker 3: So there's so much history in the city. And on
Speaker 3: top of that, like I mean, there's high schools in
Speaker 3: Alabama named Robert E. Lee, like Robert E. Lee High School,
Speaker 3: Like we're talking about we're talking about a place that
Speaker 3: I mean what it was in the news in the
Speaker 3: odts that Like I mean, there was a high school
Speaker 3: that just desegregated, like in the year twenty something, like
Speaker 3: they got there, Yeah, yeah, they just desegregated high school.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: It made the news in twenty ten because they finally
Speaker 3: had a desegregated prom. But that was just the prom.
Speaker 3: And it's just that the prom white school invited to black.
Speaker 3: They can't go to school together. They could just do
Speaker 3: a dance with this this is where. This is the
Speaker 3: state that this happened in. So you're like you're in
Speaker 3: this like and I hate to like otherise them, but
Speaker 3: I'm an otherise them in the sense that.
Speaker 2: This is some like multiverse bizarro world.
Speaker 5: Where you were. Desegregation is recent, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: So when you have that type of thing, first of all,
Speaker 3: you have to have you have to remember, like both
Speaker 3: of those things are sitting in sort of the collective
Speaker 3: consciousness of that community, whether especially for the black people
Speaker 3: who are like.
Speaker 5: This, this is the world we live in.
Speaker 3: But we've also proven that if you push us far enough,
Speaker 3: you know what I'm saying, like, we're not gonna stand
Speaker 3: for it.
Speaker 2: You know, We'll pick up a folded chair.
Speaker 5: We'll pick up a folding chair, which has.
Speaker 1: Become something of a symbol in the last new open carry. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I saw at least one TikTok video that was just
Speaker 1: it was like there's like a couple of people watching
Speaker 1: as this young black guy in a Walmart like was
Speaker 1: holding up and like testing it like the way that you.
Speaker 2: Will like a gun at the gun store.
Speaker 3: He's like, yeah, man, the memes have been glorious.
Speaker 5: I've seen folding chair ear rings, I've seen dot.
Speaker 3: But the one is this that I said, uh, I
Speaker 3: said Robert a video of the folding chair getting interviewed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh he's.
Speaker 3: One of the first of all, that's one of the
Speaker 3: funniest accounts you could ever follow.
Speaker 4: But he was just like you.
Speaker 5: I was just sitting there and then we started doing
Speaker 5: charity work.
Speaker 2: And which account is that?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, Ace Vance a ce B A n CE.
Speaker 3: He does just the most incredible voiceovers. Yeah, with the
Speaker 3: chair was just like, who's heading out charities?
Speaker 2: I was doing charity work.
Speaker 3: Yeah, freely given ass whoopings like have a seat, might
Speaker 3: step up, have a seat anyway.
Speaker 4: It's so good.
Speaker 3: But I I I think that that is important. I
Speaker 3: think another thing that I think is just see specifically
Speaker 3: for like that it can.
Speaker 4: Happen here.
Speaker 3: Audience, which I one thing I love about the show
Speaker 3: is like you you give y'all give so much historical
Speaker 3: context to whatever we're looking at. You know what I'm saying,
Speaker 3: as as almost like proof of concept that not only
Speaker 3: can it happen here, it is happening here, you know
Speaker 3: what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: And I think for this one, there was this interesting.
Speaker 5: Moment.
Speaker 3: This is another good follow for you. Guys got named Consciously.
Speaker 3: Uh his name is the Consciously. He was like like
Speaker 3: world renown like debater, a master debater. I'm just kidding, uh,
Speaker 3: but he was a world renowned debater. He was one
Speaker 3: of the first like like him and his partner was
Speaker 3: like the first black like co champions in like professional
Speaker 3: debate or college level debate anyway.
Speaker 2: So he's a brilliant, brilliant thinker.
Speaker 3: He's like you know, YouTube early year styles whatever, right anyway,
Speaker 3: content creator. Anyway, he brought up this this point among
Speaker 3: sort of the the black community that what came out
Speaker 3: of this too was this hashtag of like yo were
Speaker 3: we are not our ancestors, you know which, as I
Speaker 3: understand the sentiment, it also shows sort of a lack
Speaker 3: of historical knowledge of like really how our ancestors handled slavery.
Speaker 2: Like yeah, like of the amount of resistance.
Speaker 3: The amount of resistance we actually had, you know what
Speaker 3: I'm saying. And and even just like I would even
Speaker 3: courage just like a simple Google search of the amount
Speaker 3: of rebellions, you know, you just whether you're talking about
Speaker 3: the famous ones like the Haitian rebellion, which we did
Speaker 3: a bastard's pot about, you know what I'm saying, We're
Speaker 3: like these fool these fools threw off their their oppressors.
Speaker 4: You have.
Speaker 3: Nah Turner, you know what I'm saying, which I talk
Speaker 3: about more on on on hood politics, but like I
Speaker 3: my seventh grade like historical figure report was on net
Speaker 3: Turner and I was busted like a suburban like middle
Speaker 3: school for a little bit.
Speaker 2: So I'm walking into the suburban middle.
Speaker 3: School with my NAT Turner paper.
Speaker 2: My poor English teacher she hadn't been thinking.
Speaker 3: I don't know what she was thinking. But anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know what I'm saying. You have like there was one,
Speaker 3: there was there were one in New York. There was
Speaker 3: the one during the Thirteen Colonies. Like we have such
Speaker 3: a history of like rebellion and resistance, Like don't think
Speaker 3: not to mention slave ships that were overtaken, you know
Speaker 3: what I'm saying by their captors, Like you know what
Speaker 3: I'm saying, So like these things have there is a
Speaker 3: rich history of us of US rebelling. So like it's
Speaker 3: almost a point a point of lesson, a point of
Speaker 3: learning for the black community too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think that's uh, like a really useful
Speaker 1: teachable moment. While everyone's kind of amped up about this
Speaker 1: thing to talk about it. I've heard it described as
Speaker 1: like left handed power, uh kind of in some books
Speaker 1: that would talk about not just you know what we've
Speaker 1: been chatting about, which are these kind of big moments
Speaker 1: of insurrection among enslaved people, but like the everyday acts
Speaker 1: of resistance by people who were enslaved, like while they
Speaker 1: are you know, on the plantation stuff, different ways of
Speaker 1: like pulling autonomy of like you know, teaching their kids
Speaker 1: how to read, or you know, taking you know, getting
Speaker 1: things like money or extra resources you know out of
Speaker 1: the out of the people who are attempting to uh yeah,
Speaker 1: to own them. Like methods of escape and resistance, you know,
Speaker 1: all these methods of like preserving traditional art and religion
Speaker 1: while you know, in chains like all that kind of
Speaker 1: stuff is also Yeah, I hope it. I hope it
Speaker 1: like spurs some of that, you know, the the the
Speaker 1: folding chair can be added to a richtory of resistance.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, and yeah, I'm also curious around like obviously
Speaker 3: you and I on this on that are currently being recorded,
Speaker 3: plus a lot of the community that both of us
Speaker 3: represent like yeah, we're not pacifists like you at all,
Speaker 3: you know what I'm saying. And I find that discourse
Speaker 3: to be interesting too, and especially.
Speaker 5: Around you know if you're you're and I'm like, you know,
Speaker 5: neither is.
Speaker 3: The broader racist community, Like y're not pacifist either, Like
Speaker 3: you ask for the smoke, you got the smoke.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Like what is more American than this?
Speaker 1: It's I think a more optimistic chapter, especially like as
Speaker 1: we head into twenty twenty four, as we deal with
Speaker 1: like kind of these continuing efforts to disenfranchise particularly black
Speaker 1: voters across large chunks of South. I'm glad that we've
Speaker 1: got this, Uh what will hopefully continue to be a
Speaker 1: powerful image for people to kind of rally behind. This
Speaker 1: is a this is a nice thing to have. It's
Speaker 1: a I don't know, and it's interesting, like people things
Speaker 1: are said in a video like this that is just
Speaker 1: kind of like chaotic brawling, but it speaks to people
Speaker 1: in a way that you know, a history textbook, uh
Speaker 1: maybe isn't going to reach them, because there's just something
Speaker 1: so kinetic and powerful about like watching watching a large
Speaker 1: group of people realize that an injustice is going down
Speaker 1: and then be like, well, I guess we've got to
Speaker 1: throw throw hands to stop this shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, It's a microcosm of like a century and a
Speaker 1: half or so of or a couple of centuries of history.
Speaker 3: Whether it's yeah, whether it's a absolutely the couple.
Speaker 2: Centuries of history.
Speaker 3: And then you're like at at least ten years of witnessing,
Speaker 3: you know, black bodies being brutalized when no one, when
Speaker 3: no one was there to help, you know what i mean.
Speaker 2: Just seeing the video and.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then seeing no recourse like okay, well there's
Speaker 3: well there's never I mean, are we gonna wait for
Speaker 3: the justice system? You know, the best thing we've gotten
Speaker 3: so far is like no no knock warrants. I mean, thanks,
Speaker 3: you know what I'm saying, Like, you know, at a
Speaker 3: state you know, like so so and and a lot
Speaker 3: of promises of police reform, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: So you just you don't.
Speaker 3: I mean, like during Trump's presidency, there was I mean,
Speaker 3: there was an uptick in lynching, Like you know what
Speaker 3: I'm saying, Like these fools.
Speaker 2: A getting old school, you know.
Speaker 3: So it is without hearing any video, without knowing anything
Speaker 3: that those men were actually saying, whether they were just
Speaker 3: running the mill pricks or just pricks, whatever it was.
Speaker 3: It is a Again, if you're a if you're a
Speaker 3: black person in Alabama, it is completely reasonable to believe
Speaker 3: that if we wasn't there to help, that man would
Speaker 3: have been on the bottom of that river. Yeah, that
Speaker 3: man would have been strung up in a tree in
Speaker 3: the woods and we hadn't never seen him again.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, just the the the sheer like rapidity with
Speaker 1: which he was surrounded and put on the ground by
Speaker 1: a large number of men did not suggest that they
Speaker 1: were that the uh, that the additional dudes who had
Speaker 1: arrived to wail on him were in a mood to
Speaker 1: like de escalate the situation.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And that's like, I mean, I feel like that's
Speaker 3: like a reality that uh, you know, you this it's
Speaker 3: almost like for the rest of the country, it's like
Speaker 3: this if you underst like, this is the reality we
Speaker 3: need you to understand when we say I could die,
Speaker 3: you know what I'm saying, Like when you talk about
Speaker 3: racism and not thing, it's just some people are stupid.
Speaker 3: There's fucking bigots everywhere. Like no, when we say it's
Speaker 3: life or death, like you' that's what you're witnessing, Like
Speaker 3: he could have died that moment, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: And I think at a at a whether it's front
Speaker 3: of mine or back of mine. That is something that
Speaker 3: as a person of color, like you just kind of
Speaker 3: know that like this, this would this if it would
Speaker 3: have just been a fight, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 5: Then, I think if it was just just.
Speaker 3: Been a brawl, like most people would have just stayed
Speaker 3: out of it, Like if them to just if.
Speaker 1: They just prescribe guys swinging on each other a smart play,
Speaker 1: if it's just two guys swinging on each other, just yeah, you.
Speaker 3: Take your phone on your watch, You're just like, all right, man, hey,
Speaker 3: get your licks in. You know, you cheer for your boy,
Speaker 3: but like jump but when somebody jumps in, it's like, Okay,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna help the homie. But you jump in helping
Speaker 3: the homie in Montgomery, Alabama. But it's like, all right,
Speaker 3: yeah this he might die. So it's different.
Speaker 1: Anything else to get to on this, Man.
Speaker 3: I think I might be I think one more thing
Speaker 3: I think to add color to this, and I might
Speaker 3: be like aggrandizing, but I think it's also important because
Speaker 3: what I'm what I'm really interested in is just the collective,
Speaker 3: cathartic sort of feeling this has had. Is because there's
Speaker 3: so much built up tension. You have to talk about
Speaker 3: the Florida of it all, you know what I'm.
Speaker 5: Saying, and being aware of the idea that like you're.
Speaker 3: Right in front of our face, like you're trying to
Speaker 3: erase history, you know what I'm saying. Like and and
Speaker 3: I just five minutes ago watched that prager you video
Speaker 3: for kids about about Christopher Columbus and slavery, and it
Speaker 3: was just like, well, you know, and this is approved, approved,
Speaker 3: approved content for children, Like, well, you know, at least
Speaker 3: we didn't kill them, yeah, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 3: And like, well, you know, you know, in Europe, we
Speaker 3: don't we draw the line at like cannibalism. And these
Speaker 3: people that we're enslaving like they practice.
Speaker 2: It, you know.
Speaker 3: So I guess it's kind of you know, maybe slavery's
Speaker 3: not bad, and slavery, I mean it's all over the world.
Speaker 2: They've always had slavery, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: So like they learned useful skills, yeah, I mean, you know.
Speaker 5: Okay, so there are skills in Africa.
Speaker 2: Like so you're trying to tell me.
Speaker 3: This this civilation's civilization that is the bedrock of civilizations
Speaker 3: where all the humanity come from.
Speaker 5: You know what I'm saying, We didn't know how to
Speaker 5: do nothing right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know, Like if you're yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's so frustrating because it's it's what you could. I
Speaker 1: think they're trying to like draw line between I don't know.
Speaker 1: The way slavery was often practiced in like the Mediterranean,
Speaker 1: where there was a lot of manumission, people were often freed,
Speaker 1: and when they were freed, there was not like ongoing
Speaker 1: stigma against having been a former slave with like a
Speaker 1: racial slavery system. In the Americas that was completely different,
Speaker 1: where manumission very rarely happened, and when it did, you
Speaker 1: were still subject to heinous restrictions on your personal liberty.
Speaker 3: Like it's just not a comparison, Yeah, trying to use
Speaker 3: the lack of awareness of just even the term slavery
Speaker 3: and what you mean by that, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 3: using it to your advantage. It's like, well, anyone you
Speaker 3: know who's read a book or two can be like, ah,
Speaker 3: what you did was different.
Speaker 5: You know what I'm saying, and you know and you
Speaker 5: know it.
Speaker 2: You know it's different. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like serfdom, you know, involuntary servitude, debt, slavery. Any whenever,
Speaker 3: if there was ever two tribes and a tribe got
Speaker 3: raided by another one, there was slavery. Like I know,
Speaker 3: like that it exists since the dawn of time. Not
Speaker 3: what you talking about though, you know what I'm saying
Speaker 3: you and you know it. You know, so you're playing
Speaker 3: on that.
Speaker 2: So I just think like collectively us just like.
Speaker 3: Keep hearing this shit and keep having to like, you know,
Speaker 3: keep your cool and try to fight it in the
Speaker 3: ballots and just and just the.
Speaker 2: The just the mind fuck of like.
Speaker 3: These folks, y'all, really you're gonna you're gonna vote for
Speaker 3: a dude that's out on bail, that's a felon like
Speaker 3: this Sniggs face in seventy years and y'all really finna,
Speaker 3: y'all really finna you really trying to put this man.
Speaker 5: In office again? Like just it's such a mind fuck
Speaker 5: that you're like, man, I just.
Speaker 3: Need to hit I just need to hit a white
Speaker 3: lady with a chair, Like I don't, I just I'm
Speaker 3: just gonna hit a white lady to the chair. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 3: And we you know something I've I've brought up many
Speaker 3: times on the politics is understanding sort of like the
Speaker 3: collective sort of Black American psyche is we just processed
Speaker 3: trauma through humor, like we when we make a joke
Speaker 3: out of everything, and it's really so we're just not
Speaker 3: like pushing random white people in the moving traffic, you.
Speaker 5: Know, just because if not, you'd being like what's his name?
Speaker 3: James Baldwin says that he was like to be black
Speaker 3: in America is to I'm butchering the quote, but to
Speaker 3: be constantly under the surface at a rage level that
Speaker 3: you're constantly trying to push down, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 5: So I feel like the humor, why.
Speaker 3: Why we got so many jokes about like nah, chare
Speaker 3: chair homie going to jail, Like here go your bail money?
Speaker 3: But it was amazing because like you just good job,
Speaker 3: you know, I'm saying, an aquaman coming out the water,
Speaker 3: Like why why we make jokes about it? Is like well, yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean this is it's funny and if not, we'd
Speaker 3: be enraged all the time.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm, Well, prop amen, I do feel like this
Speaker 1: is a good lead in for the fact that we
Speaker 1: are we are actively well preparing to do our Robert E.
Speaker 1: Lee episodes which have taken a lot of reading. But
Speaker 1: I think you're gonna enjoy.
Speaker 2: I can't wait.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because again I just like I'm already locking and
Speaker 3: loading the jokes like I can't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's he's such a baby, I think you Like
Speaker 1: that was the thing that surprised me, Like I expected, like, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: this guy's, you know, a bad person for obvious reasons,
Speaker 1: being the military leader of the Confederacy, but like the
Speaker 1: degree to which this dude is a fucking baby is
Speaker 1: uh right. Yeah, we're gonna have a good time with
Speaker 1: this one.
Speaker 3: I also, I also, as a thought experiment, my question
Speaker 3: would be, Okay, Robert Evans, if you were in Montgomery
Speaker 3: at that moment, I just how would you handle that.
Speaker 1: I mean, if I see a bunch of people wailing
Speaker 1: on a single dude, even outside of a situation where
Speaker 1: it's clearly racist, I'm going to try to stop that
Speaker 1: because I don't want to watch someone get beaten to
Speaker 1: death in the street. Yeah, like, unless they have it coming.
Speaker 1: I don't know, if it's like a guy with a
Speaker 1: swastika armband and people are kicking him on the ground,
Speaker 1: I might not intervene I don't know, and that I
Speaker 1: might in that case, I might just to try to
Speaker 1: stop people from catching a fucking murder charge. But like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like now at the point at which there's
Speaker 1: like sixty people fighting on the dock, I don't know
Speaker 1: that I'm I'm running into that. Like for one thing,
Speaker 1: it seems like enough people are there. But yeah, you see,
Speaker 1: you see a bunch of people like kicking the shit
Speaker 1: out of a man trying to do his job.
Speaker 2: You should try to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, like those fucking security should have gotten in
Speaker 1: there faster. But like, yes, I I would hope that
Speaker 1: I would run in at that point an attempt to
Speaker 1: stop this what was happening. Yeah, absolutely, that's good. And
Speaker 1: I would have had the presence of mind to pick
Speaker 1: up that chair though the.
Speaker 3: Chair is Yeah, no, I just I would hope that,
Speaker 3: like it would be I just wonder, like because again,
Speaker 3: once you black out and get punch drunk, it's like
Speaker 3: I would hope that, like they that the black people
Speaker 3: around have the wherewithal to be like no, no, no, no,
Speaker 3: he's with us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, we'll say, yeah that dude's with us. No no, no, no,
Speaker 2: he's with us.
Speaker 5: He's good he's good, he's good.
Speaker 1: I think that's that's part of why you don't roll
Speaker 1: in when there's like sixty people fighting also at that point, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's hard to tell how do you how do
Speaker 1: you help? And if you've got like five people beating
Speaker 1: a man on the ground, it's easy to know how
Speaker 1: to help. You try to get that guy up and
Speaker 1: away from them. You try to get them off of him.
Speaker 1: If you've got what are effectively like two or three
Speaker 1: dozen fights going on on a doc, it's like, well,
Speaker 1: do you just like start throwing hands like yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, everybody puts somebody Yeah, just like you know,
Speaker 3: you just grab like find children and just kind of
Speaker 3: like let me just move.
Speaker 2: Y'all out the way, y'all back up? Yeah, yeah, yeah
Speaker 2: you should.
Speaker 1: I think when you're anytime you're in encountering a situation
Speaker 1: like this, like your first is like.
Speaker 2: What can I do that will help? You?
Speaker 1: Know, again, it's easy if you if there's a guy
Speaker 1: getting beaten, or if there's someone seriously injured that needs
Speaker 1: medical care, if it's at a point where it's like,
Speaker 1: well this is just fucking chaos, then maybe you just
Speaker 1: watch yeah yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Get it, get it, get a higher vantage point. Just
Speaker 3: make sure you can watch the watch where it's going.
Speaker 3: You don't want to get sucked in, you know, because
Speaker 3: you might get trampled.
Speaker 5: You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, keep your fucking don't. Don't fall into your
Speaker 1: phone because ship like that spreads.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, yes, yeah, so true. Yeah, well that's a
Speaker 3: usable piece of information. Yeah for this otherwise just jokes
Speaker 3: full podcast yep.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well we all had a good time today.
Speaker 7: Prop.
Speaker 1: Where can the people find you if they if they
Speaker 1: would like to do that?
Speaker 3: Man, please, I am on the same network you are.
Speaker 3: I'm on the Hood Politics Pod. My socials are all
Speaker 3: the they're all prop hip hop. Like you said, I
Speaker 3: am a coffee business owner. It's terraform cold Brew. You
Speaker 3: could use promo code hood and get fifteen percent off
Speaker 3: your cold brew needs Please help me sell Please buy
Speaker 3: his coffee. Good Lord, I saw a lot of money
Speaker 3: into this shit. Please buy the coffee. But yeah, man,
Speaker 3: prop hip Hop and yeah and yeah and Hood Politics Pod.
Speaker 3: I'm on the network, man, and please check out the show.
Speaker 1: Yeah, check out Hood Politics, check out props Delightful Coffee
Speaker 1: and yeah, you can find us right here. Tomorrow, unless
Speaker 1: it's a weekend, in which case you can find us
Speaker 1: here when the weekend ends the next weekday. We're here
Speaker 1: every weekday. We never stop. It could happen here. A
Speaker 1: podcast about frustrating people and frustrating times. That's not all
Speaker 1: it's about. Sometimes we talk about nice things like raising
Speaker 1: sheep or unionization efforts, you know, the endless struggle of
Speaker 1: working people to better the world. Yeah, but not today.
Speaker 1: Today we're having a real, real piece of shit episode
Speaker 1: about a real piece of shit, and it's gonna make
Speaker 1: everybody unhappy. Hello Garrison, Hello James. How are you both
Speaker 1: doing today?
Speaker 2: So much better for hearing that, Robert, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 8: Just ready to have a fine evening here yet about
Speaker 8: something that's probably very fun.
Speaker 2: Yeah, go to bed. You don't have you don't have
Speaker 2: your Soda Stream disappointed in you. Yeah, James and I
Speaker 2: are now soda Stream pilled.
Speaker 8: I've not gotten the company Soda Stream yet. That hasn't
Speaker 8: must generational thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the unfortunately the company beverage is is Billy Beer.
Speaker 1: Uh Billy Carter Jimmy Carter's Brothers beer that was on
Speaker 1: sale for roughly a year in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2: Is it made of peanuts? If only?
Speaker 1: No, So today let's start. I got a question for you.
Speaker 1: Have either of you seen the Barbie movie?
Speaker 2: Yes? I have. I was it well done?
Speaker 3: Gear?
Speaker 2: Oh, I didn't go, buddy sol Gear.
Speaker 8: The said dressing was was nice?
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 8: It was a great lesson in like liberal recuperation. I'm sure,
Speaker 8: I'm sure. I'm sure it'll be great for like kids
Speaker 8: who like don't know who like don't know what feminism is.
Speaker 8: But but yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it seems I have not watched it either. It
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like my kind of movie, but it seems
Speaker 1: broadly act correct me if I'm wrong here, that it
Speaker 1: has what you might call like very very modest and
Speaker 1: fairly mainstream, approachable feminist messaging. Yeah, yeah, that seems like
Speaker 1: it's fair, which most people would not be particularly angry about.
Speaker 1: But a sizable chunk of the very online right, the
Speaker 1: chunk of the right, particularly that makes their living by
Speaker 1: having takes on shit has has has been up in
Speaker 1: arms ever since it came out, and particularly ever since
Speaker 1: it made more than a billion dollars in the box office.
Speaker 1: I'm sure a lot of people are aware that our
Speaker 1: old friend Ben Shapiro filmed a forty two minute video
Speaker 1: tearing it apart and his signature preteen stolen valor voice
Speaker 1: a boy.
Speaker 8: After I watched the movie, me and some friends tried
Speaker 8: to watch the Ben Shapiro video for fun. We made
Speaker 8: it like six minutes in, and that everyone forced me
Speaker 8: to stop.
Speaker 2: Intolerable shit.
Speaker 1: Cowards. Cowards are cowards. But that's yeah. So elsewhere in
Speaker 1: the right and kind of the less mainstream acceptable chunks
Speaker 1: of what we'd call the insurgent right around here, various
Speaker 1: thought leaders attempted to declare the movie stealth conservative propaganda
Speaker 1: as a way of insisting that its success was really
Speaker 1: due to it being anti woke. That's silly too. None
Speaker 1: of this is worth discussing in detail. I promise you
Speaker 1: all this is not going to be a podcast about
Speaker 1: the fucking Barbie movie. None of this is worth discussing
Speaker 1: in detail, save to say that Shapiro's anger at the movie,
Speaker 1: and particularly its comic relief character Ken, seems to have
Speaker 1: been the more wide spread response from those kinds of people. Now,
Speaker 1: because I have made, over the years a lot of
Speaker 1: poor decisions in my browsing and engaging habits over the years,
Speaker 1: Twitter sends me a lot of weirdo right wing responses
Speaker 1: to everything that happens in the world, including this movie.
Speaker 1: And one of these posts that I caught somewhere in
Speaker 1: late July or on the twenty second, twenty third, caught
Speaker 1: my eye. Now, this post features a vapor wave filtered
Speaker 1: kin photoshopped in front of a burning Viking long house,
Speaker 1: accompanied by the text exit the long house. Now, when
Speaker 1: you see something like this and you don't know what
Speaker 1: they're getting at, like, you have two choices. If you're like,
Speaker 1: you get like, I don't know, kids, a really demanding job,
Speaker 1: anything at all going on in your personal life, you
Speaker 1: scroll right past it. If you're me, you spend like
Speaker 1: four and a half hours reading various fascist essays about
Speaker 1: feminism to try to figure out what the fuck a
Speaker 1: long house has to do with the Barbie movie. Now,
Speaker 1: the guy who had made this post is a low
Speaker 1: level fascist political columnist named Lomez. He is, He's kind
Speaker 1: of on me. He's a little bit of volapild. He
Speaker 1: doesn't he's not like a very major figure. He's kind
Speaker 1: of several steps below anyone you've heard of. I would say,
Speaker 1: like two or three steps standard deviations of fame below
Speaker 1: like Jack Pisobiec, but his writing has a degree of
Speaker 1: purchase among the kinds of conservatives who trick Ron DeSantis
Speaker 1: into running in comprehensible campaign ads with son and rads in.
Speaker 2: Them he has.
Speaker 1: He's like, he's got a little bit of influence among
Speaker 1: that kind of crew, and he's sort of in the
Speaker 1: conversation with a lot of those people. I took notice
Speaker 1: of his post because I'd seen the term long house
Speaker 1: being used by a couple of these guys off and on,
Speaker 1: and because Lomes's posts got like three thousand something likes,
Speaker 1: which meant that, yeah, there's some community out there that
Speaker 1: that gets what he's talking about. So on a whim,
Speaker 1: I clicked to viewed the quote tweets for this post,
Speaker 1: and I found a post by a user named Siege,
Speaker 1: which is of course a reference to a book about
Speaker 1: carrying out acts of terrorism in order to bring about
Speaker 1: a white Ethno state. The post says, ken is you.
Speaker 1: He is an exaggerated Western man in the twenty first century, anxious, confused,
Speaker 1: chasing women who don't care about him. He exits the
Speaker 1: long House and discovers his own will to power. Like you,
Speaker 1: he decides to bring this knowledge back to his fellow man.
Speaker 1: And it's you know, I'm gonna I'll show you guys
Speaker 1: this this post here, it's.
Speaker 2: Pretty it's pretty Nazi. Yeah, pretty pretty pretty Nazi. It's
Speaker 2: not the best work on Ken, like he guys, looks
Speaker 2: like a blob.
Speaker 1: No, I will say I have a little bit of
Speaker 1: respect for the craft here that he didn't just go
Speaker 1: to an ai that looks like somebody like crudely cut
Speaker 1: a picture of kin that they have like color inverted
Speaker 1: and then photoshopped it into a picture of a long
Speaker 1: house with a fire behind it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's too.
Speaker 8: I will say Siege's description of Ken from the from
Speaker 8: the from the Barbie movie is pretty accurate to what's
Speaker 8: in the film.
Speaker 1: M that's good. So what is the long house? What
Speaker 1: the fuck does a long house have to do with
Speaker 1: what are otherwise pretty standard neo Nazi esque messaging about,
Speaker 1: you know, the decadence and failure of modern man and
Speaker 1: all that kind of shit. And is this dumb fascist
Speaker 1: memes something that you need to care about now? Unfortunately
Speaker 1: the answer to that is yes, because all of this
Speaker 1: ties back to one extremely influential, insurgent right wing ideologue
Speaker 1: whose followers have been close to the presidency once before
Speaker 1: and may yet find themselves there again. That asshole is
Speaker 1: an MI I T graduate named Kostin Alamaru who posts
Speaker 1: online under variations of the name Bronze Age Pervert. You guys,
Speaker 1: how aware are you of Bronze Age Pervert or BAP,
Speaker 1: as he's often known.
Speaker 2: Ah, I've heard of BAP, but maybe only in passing
Speaker 2: because I wasn't familiar with Bronze Age pervert. Thank you, Yeah,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for sharing with me today, Robert. Oh, oh,
Speaker 2: you're going to be so much less happy, Garrison. Are
Speaker 2: you familiar with this fella?
Speaker 8: I I think I may have only seen stuff from
Speaker 8: him in passing. I'm not overly familiar now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was kind of my experience until like a
Speaker 1: month or so ago when I started really digging into
Speaker 1: the guy. And I don't feel better as a result
Speaker 1: of having done that. But yeah, we know that this
Speaker 1: guy's actual name is Kostin Alamariu because of a very
Speaker 1: recent Atlantic articles like a month ago that this guy
Speaker 1: got revealed in this article because this writer for the
Speaker 1: Atlantic was a friend of his, like at mit, like
Speaker 1: it was just somebody who like and recognized his voice
Speaker 1: on a podcast. Now, this article, I find it frustrating
Speaker 1: for a number of reasons. I don't think it's great
Speaker 1: analysis of BAP's work or what people find appealing in it,
Speaker 1: or a particularly honest, intellectual look at what this guy
Speaker 1: has to say. But it does have some interesting reveals,
Speaker 1: including the fact that bronze age perverts. First public media
Speaker 1: appearance was a parody audio tour for an exhibition at
Speaker 1: the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, written by bj Novak,
Speaker 1: who played Ryan in The Office. Yeah, so that's odd,
Speaker 1: and it's one of those BJ Novak is not a
Speaker 1: stealth Nazi, don't worry. But the video or the thing
Speaker 1: that they put together does kind of fit for like
Speaker 1: a fascist art project. And I I'm going to read
Speaker 1: how The Atlantic describes this audio tour they put together together,
Speaker 1: or put that they assembled together. Novak had recruited a
Speaker 1: Romanian classmate with a deep voice, and together they'd recorded
Speaker 1: an audio tour for the exhibition, Tales from the Land
Speaker 1: of Dragons a Thousand Years of Chinese Painting, with the
Speaker 1: help of friends. They then slipped cassettes containing their tour
Speaker 1: into the museum's official audio guides. Art lovers must have
Speaker 1: wondered about the thick Eastern European accent that greeted them
Speaker 1: over the twang of a Chinese string instrument. The Romanians
Speaker 1: soon became opinionated. Personally, he said, I think this painting
Speaker 1: is a piece of crap. Then deranged, he alluded to
Speaker 1: his disgusting anatomical abnormalities. He called his listeners decadent in
Speaker 1: heerialless maggots, and confessed a desire to smash a glass
Speaker 1: case with a sledgehammer and rip a scroll to shreds
Speaker 1: with my teeth, which, by the way, are extremely long
Speaker 1: and sharp, more like fangs than human teeth. At last,
Speaker 1: he offered an interlude of idiot music while he fumbled
Speaker 1: with his script. This should keep you occupied, you drooling, imbecile,
Speaker 1: he bellowed at the listeners, by now either amused or
Speaker 1: complaining to management. So there's like there's like little little
Speaker 1: whiffs of degenerate art stuff in there, but it's also
Speaker 1: just kind of like like a little bit like Max
Speaker 1: head roomy kind of stuff, like where you're kind of
Speaker 1: tricking people into into into consuming this like parody artwork thing.
Speaker 1: Like again, I think this was a pretty innocent joke.
Speaker 1: On Novak's fall part. But Costin number one probably got
Speaker 1: picked for this because he's a He's got a thick
Speaker 1: Romanian accent that he very much plays up. He was
Speaker 1: noted in this time as kind of talking like Dracula deliberately.
Speaker 1: He also would always wear these like long and elaborate
Speaker 1: black coats so that he kind of looked like a
Speaker 1: Dracula type figure, like he was, you know, he was
Speaker 1: he was doing a bit. He was putting on like
Speaker 1: a That was the image he wanted to He wanted
Speaker 1: to portray himself as to people's kind of like mysterious
Speaker 1: and Eastern Europeans sort of sort of figure.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Costin first started posting as Bronze age pervert on a
Speaker 1: series of obscure web forums in twenty ten. In the
Speaker 1: November of twenty thirteen, he joined Twitter and immediately fell
Speaker 1: in with a loose community that some people call frog Twitter.
Speaker 1: And these are you know who these guys are. It's
Speaker 1: like a general term for anonymous alt right adjacent posters
Speaker 1: with like pepe avatars. Yeah, and the other group the
Speaker 1: kind of related people that he fell in with and
Speaker 1: that he started to have traction with our adherents to
Speaker 1: a fascist philosopher known as Curtis Jarvin or Minsius Moldbug.
Speaker 1: Curtis is his real name, Minsius Moldbug is the pseudonym
Speaker 1: he wrote under Now.
Speaker 2: I know it's a it's these people through this shit, man,
Speaker 2: it's just so pathetic, like play Dungeons and Dragons.
Speaker 1: Just a solid twenty percent of our fascist problems are
Speaker 1: like people didn't get a reliable D and D group
Speaker 1: early enough, like a lot of these I think Balder's
Speaker 1: Gate three is gonna save us from a lot of
Speaker 1: these guys in the future.
Speaker 2: It is the antifa computer game. Yeah.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 1: Curtis Yarvin aka Mensius is a UC Berkeley graduate in
Speaker 1: computer science who joined the tech industry and got pilled
Speaker 1: on a strain of anti democratic libertarian theory.
Speaker 2: This is this is like a this is a pathway, man, Yeah,
Speaker 2: this is perfect well.
Speaker 1: Bronze age pervert also goes into tech after graduating from MIT. Right,
Speaker 1: and like, you know, a decent number of these guys
Speaker 1: come out of like Stanford and shit, like it's all, uh,
Speaker 1: it's all these guys who are, in fact, to some
Speaker 1: extent like intellectual elites, bronze age perverts.
Speaker 2: Dad is a.
Speaker 1: Teacher at MIT, like just kind of like you look
Speaker 1: at like Stephen Miller's background, Right. A lot of these
Speaker 1: guys come out of like liberal academia families.
Speaker 2: But anyway, it's very common.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Curtis comes out of Yeah, gets into the tech industry,
Speaker 1: and he writes a book kind of while he's working
Speaker 1: and like he's a he's a founder and stuff for
Speaker 1: some company. He writes a book in two thousand and
Speaker 1: one titled Democracy, The God That Failed, follows it up
Speaker 1: with a series of blog essays, and his writing becomes
Speaker 1: very influential amongst Silicon Valley proto fascists. Jarvin's ideas in
Speaker 1: Brief is that the US is run and a lot
Speaker 1: of Western society is really run by what he calls
Speaker 1: the Cathedral, which is a mix of professors and journalists
Speaker 1: who act as a Brahmin class dominating the United States
Speaker 1: with a progressive state religion. He sees their egalitarian impulses
Speaker 1: as toxic the destruction of natural civic order, and advocates
Speaker 1: for his followers to design new architectures of exit to
Speaker 1: replace the Cathedral with what is effectively a right wing
Speaker 1: to tatorship. The number one supporter of Curtis Yarvin's ideas
Speaker 1: and financial backer of him is Peter Teal. Teal has
Speaker 1: a funded Yarvin's work as a big fan of what
Speaker 1: he has to say and his philosophy, which is generally
Speaker 1: referred to as the Dark Enlightenment. And this is when
Speaker 1: we're talking about the Dark Enlightenment, we're talking like mid
Speaker 1: aughts is kind of when this stuff starts to really
Speaker 1: take off. This is before the alt right that kind
Speaker 1: of becomes really well known nationwide. Is a is A
Speaker 1: is a major term. This is like in the pre
Speaker 1: and right around gamer Gate period is when he's really
Speaker 1: starting to take off with a lot of folks. And
Speaker 1: he certainly he feeds into the alt right to Trump,
Speaker 1: you know, and to that period of time. But he's
Speaker 1: much more on the the pseudo intellectual end of things
Speaker 1: as opposed to the like hitting folks in the street
Speaker 1: end of things. That's what he gets a lot of
Speaker 1: Peter Teal money. So, uh yeah, Bronze age pervert is
Speaker 1: kind of a He espouses a philosophy that rhymes with
Speaker 1: moldbugs with Jarvin's philosophy in many ways, but where Jarvin
Speaker 1: dresses his words and is writing up in a costume
Speaker 1: version of mainstream academic discourse. Bronze age Pervert is unapot
Speaker 1: apologetically online and weird, and he writes like somebody who
Speaker 1: spends too much fucking time on the Internet. A lot
Speaker 1: of his stuff is cloaked in things that are like
Speaker 1: half jokes, or at least want to be have plausible
Speaker 1: deniability of jokes, so that like, if you take them seriously,
Speaker 1: he can make fun of you for falling for the bit.
Speaker 1: But he describes himself on Twitter as an aspiring nudist, bodybuilder,
Speaker 1: free speech and anti zeno estrogen activist, so just the
Speaker 1: most irritating kind of guy, the normal guy. Much of
Speaker 1: his politics centers around a worship of ancient Greece, which
Speaker 1: he believes settled on the scientifically ideal human form. He
Speaker 1: believes men should engage in bodybuilding and nude sunbathing to
Speaker 1: emulate the Greeks. And you'll see sometimes his followers be like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're an idiot if you fell for that. But legitimately
Speaker 1: half of what this guy posts about is just pictures
Speaker 1: of bodybuilders and his pictures of himself being looking very
Speaker 1: jacked like he's he's it's it's that if that's all
Speaker 1: a bit. Then all he has is this silly bit
Speaker 1: because it is it is dominant in his content. BAP's
Speaker 1: Ancient Greek or baps ancient Greeks are incredibly straight and
Speaker 1: hate women with a passion. One of those things is
Speaker 1: more or less right Greek like upperclass Greeks, not super
Speaker 1: pro women. Yeah, not woke. The Cathedral, in his eyes,
Speaker 1: is an oppressive dictatorship of femininity, if not always of
Speaker 1: women over masculinity. Cancel culture is a particular topic of
Speaker 1: his ire, and he seems to see it as basically
Speaker 1: these that there are traditionally feminine methods of argumentation and conflict,
Speaker 1: whether or not women are the ones doing them in
Speaker 1: any given situation. Cancel culture is like the purest expression
Speaker 1: of this, and he believes that these kind of feminine
Speaker 1: methods of conflict destroy masculinity and and make cultural progress impossible.
Speaker 1: They chain men to this kind of like he sees.
Speaker 1: You know how, a lot of anarchists will talk about
Speaker 1: how ancient societies hunter gatherer societies and like were often
Speaker 1: more egalitarian than a lot of like medieval societies classical societies,
Speaker 1: and this is often a lot of folks do make
Speaker 1: the mistake of like idealizing these cultures. But like, that's
Speaker 1: a thing that gets talked about a lot positively by
Speaker 1: some anarchists and I think obviously worth studying. He takes
Speaker 1: the opposite tact of like these ancient cultures like light,
Speaker 1: like people lived in the fucking mud and were miserable,
Speaker 1: and it was because they weren't a galitarian. It was
Speaker 1: because the women were dominating the men. Right, this is
Speaker 1: going to lead us to the long house in short order,
Speaker 1: but we have somewhat to cover right here. So he
Speaker 1: focuses a huge amount on anti egalitarian arguments and on
Speaker 1: supporting a culture dominated by strong, beautiful, powerful people who
Speaker 1: look like Greek statues and suppress women and anyone else
Speaker 1: who doesn't look sexy. Basically, you get to feel like
Speaker 1: that's a big part of it to this guy, like
Speaker 1: he wants a date a dictatorship of hot, violent men,
Speaker 1: that's his.
Speaker 2: That's a big part of what he argues with. Has
Speaker 2: he watched Lenny riefenstyles Olympia, because this scene, Oh god, yeah,
Speaker 2: I feel like that's.
Speaker 1: Playing in the back of this fucking mind at all times.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, bapp argues that the state in its present form
Speaker 1: preserves the lives of the weak and feeble minded, allowing
Speaker 1: them to oppress the naked Aryan bodybuilders, who by all
Speaker 1: rights ought to run things. The prime repository of his
Speaker 1: philosophy is his twenty eighteen book Bronze Age Mindset, which
Speaker 1: was at one point in the top one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty books on Amazon. A former Trump White House official
Speaker 1: Toad Politico in twenty nineteen and if you're a young person, intelligent,
Speaker 1: adjacent in some way to the right, it's very likely
Speaker 1: you would have heard of it. In chapter thirty five
Speaker 1: of his book Bronze Age, the Bronze Age Mindset bap
Speaker 1: rights quote, should the tyranny that has descended on our
Speaker 1: age ever gain the power it seeks and then be
Speaker 1: challenged enough to feel itself in danger? The mass annihilations
Speaker 1: that will be carried out by homosexual, transsexual, and especially
Speaker 1: lesbian commissars will exceed in scale and cruelty anything that
Speaker 1: has yet happened in known history. Imagine lesbian Mulata commissars
Speaker 1: with young Martin sheen face and haircut manning the future
Speaker 1: Bergen Belsons installations that will span tens of miles.
Speaker 2: Yep sending you to the transgender goolag.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's it's something else, And it's very funny
Speaker 1: because like that fucking the Atlantic writer here like talks
Speaker 1: about how he's he's got this like almost hypnotizing quality
Speaker 1: to his writing, and he's he's got this really like
Speaker 1: h fascinating mind that you just want to engage with,
Speaker 1: and it's I'll read you a fucking quote from this
Speaker 1: guy's profile on Bronze Age pervert and try not to gag.
Speaker 1: I consider myself a connoisseur of brilliant lunatics, and I
Speaker 1: have a high tolerance for their lunacy if it has
Speaker 1: compensating virtues of say humor or ingenuity. But even I
Speaker 1: find back worrisome what starts as comedy can become something
Speaker 1: more sinister and bap shtick. Well sometimes hilarious shows every
Speaker 1: sign of transforming into a mode of new far right radicalism.
Speaker 1: He goes on at a various point to be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he likes this book that I like. So I was
Speaker 1: willing to put up with the fact that he was
Speaker 1: he was bigoted for years because like we would talk
Speaker 1: about literature together, you know, I just had so much
Speaker 1: respect for his mind that I was willing to be
Speaker 1: strung along for a long time. I know, I find
Speaker 1: this guy kind.
Speaker 8: Of connoisseur, Yeah, connoisseur, A connoisseur of pig ship.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 8: I really love sifting through all the different types of
Speaker 8: donkey dogs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I just can't stick quite enough ship. Uh Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know what make you become a cornish? There of
Speaker 2: dog shit? Internet content? What?
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 2: James? What? James?
Speaker 4: What?
Speaker 2: Woman? Well, it's it's a Washington State Highway patrol.
Speaker 1: Uh, that's that's I hope they are ready for the
Speaker 1: lesbian commissars.
Speaker 2: Oh you know, I know I am. Yeah, there the
Speaker 2: work police.
Speaker 1: Ah.
Speaker 2: And we'll back.
Speaker 1: We're back, We're back, We're back, We're back.
Speaker 2: We're back. Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: So it was Joseph Conrad's novel Nostromo that that this
Speaker 1: Atlantic writer and UH and Bronze.
Speaker 2: Age Pervitt both loved.
Speaker 1: Yeah, co herorige another fucking paragraph. For many years we corresponded.
Speaker 1: Costin's messages arrived regularly, and the tone ranged from friendly
Speaker 1: and inquisitive to boorish and insulting. I went to South
Speaker 1: America on assignment. He sent long messages extolling the versues
Speaker 1: of Jouseph Conrad's Nostromo, which is selt there set there.
Speaker 1: A friend who reads books like Nostromo and can talk
Speaker 1: about them is a friend worth putting up with.
Speaker 2: South America. It's fucking not even a fucking country.
Speaker 1: Just yeah, incredible South America. And like, right after that,
Speaker 1: he says, after about ten years he took to calling
Speaker 1: my friends, and then he uses a series of slurs.
Speaker 1: At some point he had begun bodybuilding, and he sent
Speaker 1: me a picture of himself shirtless with the message, do you.
Speaker 2: Like this pic of me? Again? Say a cuture guy.
Speaker 1: It's just a just a real genius. So Bronzets writings, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's obsessing one of the.
Speaker 2: One of the Greeks.
Speaker 1: He's obsessed with because he's he claims it, like frames
Speaker 1: himself as an expert on Greek society, which he portrays
Speaker 1: as something of a paradise. But he only knows about
Speaker 1: like six guys, and one of them is Alcibieties And
Speaker 1: Alcibietes was an Athenian general and a statesman who was
Speaker 1: a big player in the Peloponnesian War. He defected from
Speaker 1: Athens to Sparta, and then from Sparta to the Persian
Speaker 1: Empire before being recalled and reinstated as an Athenian general.
Speaker 1: He is a real motherfucker and an interesting guy. And
Speaker 1: because he was so interesting and kind of he was
Speaker 1: very charismatic in his own time and this kind of
Speaker 1: like very shady figure two, he becomes an early celebrity.
Speaker 1: He's like one of the first famous people that's really
Speaker 1: out there. And a big part of why he stays
Speaker 1: famous is that Plato will write a lot about him
Speaker 1: and Socrates, right, and Plato's at writing I think after
Speaker 1: they're dead, So a lot of Alcibiades is like a
Speaker 1: character written by Plato as opposed to the actual historical
Speaker 1: fact about the dude. It's also worth noting, given how
Speaker 1: anti queer bap is, that Alies and Socrates were lovers.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: Socrates was like famously kind of a simp for Alcibieties,
Speaker 1: while Alcibieties was kind of a piece of shit to Socrates.
Speaker 1: A lot of fun stories about that. But these guys
Speaker 1: were not at all straight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, Pederastie was an institution in ancient Greece.
Speaker 2: That pederaste is the same as being no, no.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't think that's the same as what
Speaker 1: was going on with these duodoes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these dudes are just yeah, yeah, yeah, happy for
Speaker 2: mm hmm.
Speaker 1: Bronze age perverts. Rants are profoundly silly to anyone who
Speaker 1: wasn't a deranged chud obsessing over white girls don't like
Speaker 1: him while shooting steroids into his ass. But because that's
Speaker 1: a fertile demographic, he has influence among some important conservatives
Speaker 1: form the White House.
Speaker 2: Shot in the technical sense of the word, yeah not not,
Speaker 2: after all, those steroids using too much. Well, and none of.
Speaker 1: These guys will let themselves touch a walms because they're
Speaker 1: they're so they're so horrified by the cons of women.
Speaker 1: So former White House speech writer Darren Beattie followed him
Speaker 1: on Twitter and interacted with his writing, as did Minnesota
Speaker 1: State Senator Roger Chamberlain. Curtis Jarvin called him his White
Speaker 1: House cell leader. This is interesting to me because BAP
Speaker 1: himself has encouraged his young followers to avoid supporting him
Speaker 1: in public and instead of hide their sympathies while taking
Speaker 1: positions in the government to institute his ideas. It's also
Speaker 1: worth noting that you can find some fans of bronze
Speaker 1: h pervert on the so called anti woke left. There's
Speaker 1: clips out there from the red Scare podcast, which the
Speaker 1: less set about the better, where the two hosts read
Speaker 1: segments of his book with a what seems like a
Speaker 1: degree of appreciation, calling it the good kind of racist.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Does that also makes sense in terms of their condess
Speaker 8: they're like anti feminist stuff that they did.
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 1: Yes, And I think his his writings, he has a
Speaker 1: very like florid purple prose style. I don't think it's
Speaker 1: good writing. I don't find it particularly engaging. It's very
Speaker 1: channy and kind of exhausting. But people who are dumbfall
Speaker 1: for it. So yeah, yeah, he's hit his demo.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: His influence is significant enough that some conservatives have sought
Speaker 1: to explain it. I found a fun write up on
Speaker 1: americanmind dot org that describes his appeal this way. So,
Speaker 1: what exactly is the teaching of Bronze age mindset and
Speaker 1: why is it so attractive to so many young men?
Speaker 1: The answer I think is simple. It is a revitalized
Speaker 1: paganism obsessed with strength and beauty. It appeals to today's
Speaker 1: young men because these things, strength and beauty are exactly
Speaker 1: what contemporary society has tried so hard to deny them.
Speaker 1: The gospel of son and steel, of vitalism and strength
Speaker 1: and power are exactly would have been denied to the
Speaker 1: boys of the Western world, and their spirits militate against this.
Speaker 1: Everything great ever achieved, Bap tells us, was done through
Speaker 1: strong friendships between two men or brotherhoods of men. And
Speaker 1: this includes all great political things, all acts of political
Speaker 1: freedom and power.
Speaker 2: Now, I should note.
Speaker 1: Part of what he's BAP gets at when he's talking
Speaker 1: about how these strong groups, friendships of between two men
Speaker 1: or small brotherhoods of men. He is a big advocate
Speaker 1: and one of the reasons why he is popular among
Speaker 1: like the Adam Waffen set is he's a big advocate
Speaker 1: of his followers forming small two, three, four man groups
Speaker 1: and training with weapons together and preparing for the future,
Speaker 1: you know, day of the rope style thing. He doesn't
Speaker 1: use that term, but he's he's speaking to those people
Speaker 1: from like a more educated mindset. And there's I think
Speaker 1: an extent to which you could see his writing as
Speaker 1: trying to pull in that kind of educated upper crust
Speaker 1: kids of the upper middle class, you know, with ivy
Speaker 1: league educations who go into politics trying to draw them
Speaker 1: in closer to the actual violent insurgent, right, at least
Speaker 1: in terms of the sympathies of their ideas and support
Speaker 1: for methods of organizing that are more traditionally found against
Speaker 1: you know, the Elohim city set, right. I think there
Speaker 1: is a degree of that going on here now. Bronze
Speaker 1: Age Pervert is more supportive of Trump than a lot
Speaker 1: of these guys, largely because he finds him funny and
Speaker 1: sees him as an avatar of disruption and destruction.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 8: I think it's it's like an accelerationist support.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly exactly, which is actually honestly that Dore's that's
Speaker 1: perfectly logical because Trump is accelerating both the death of
Speaker 1: the kind of conservatism that is state loyal that is
Speaker 1: sort of system loyal, right, the George W. Bush kind
Speaker 1: of conservatism, which is a.
Speaker 9: Conservative system that's like the two thousands.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and Trump is has done damage, terrible damage to
Speaker 1: that and damage to the structure of the state in
Speaker 1: the hole. So it doesn't it's to perfectly logical for
Speaker 1: him to support Trump. He's not like, this is not
Speaker 1: inconsistent with the other things that he talks about. One
Speaker 1: of the people that that Atlantic writer talked to is
Speaker 1: Michael Anton, a former Trump administration national security official who
Speaker 1: wrote a twenty nineteen essay and the Claremont Review of
Speaker 1: books about Bronze Age Pervert. He acknowledges that Bapp's work
Speaker 1: is racist, anti Semitic, anti democratic, misogynistic, and homophobic, but
Speaker 1: suspect suggested that, like, you know that that's all, that's
Speaker 1: not you know, that's not necessarily.
Speaker 2: What he really believes.
Speaker 1: Maybe it is, but the big reason why he does
Speaker 1: this is it key. It distracts leftists from his like
Speaker 1: his more serious, like secret heresies that are like the
Speaker 1: real deep, dark arcane wisdom at the center of it,
Speaker 1: like hang out with your bros and trading with guns
Speaker 1: or whatever. Or yeah, like heiden the fucking government and
Speaker 1: waiting for the right moment to strike, but then blow
Speaker 1: it all up when you make an ad for Ronda Santis,
Speaker 1: that kind of cleverness.
Speaker 2: Anyway.
Speaker 1: Anton writes that Bronze Age pervert quote speaks directly to
Speaker 1: a youthful dissatisfaction, especially among white males, with equality is
Speaker 1: propagandized and imposed in our day, a hectoring, vindictive, resentful, leveling,
Speaker 1: hypocritical equality that punishes excellence and publicly deny all differences,
Speaker 1: while at the same time elevating and enriching a decadent, incompetent,
Speaker 1: and corrupt elite.
Speaker 2: There you go.
Speaker 1: So what does all this have to do with long houses? Well,
Speaker 1: let's finally get to that. Longhouse describes a category of
Speaker 1: dwellings that have existed on basically every land mass and
Speaker 1: the planet in some form, stretching back to the Neolithic period.
Speaker 1: These are, in general, large halls, sometimes with private family
Speaker 1: rooms built into them, sometimes with communal sleeping arrangements, but
Speaker 1: always organized around a large, single communal hall. In ancient days,
Speaker 1: these are where feasts would be held and where groups
Speaker 1: of families or tribes would huddle together in long cold winters.
Speaker 1: Bronze Age Pervert conceives of the long house as an
Speaker 1: example of the miserable lives primitive and shameful cultures not
Speaker 1: his beloved Greeks, lived in before modernity. In his writing,
Speaker 1: he makes it clear that his fear is rule by
Speaker 1: degenerates and our fallen modernity will cause society to regress
Speaker 1: to this prehistoric misery. Now part of his hatred of
Speaker 1: what he calls long house culture is that, in his mind,
Speaker 1: these dwellings were dominated by women who forced men to
Speaker 1: live inside the smoky, cloying, stinking confines. This is not
Speaker 1: really accurate to any kind of history. I expect his
Speaker 1: conception here comes largely from the fact that long houses
Speaker 1: are often suspected because we know relatively little about many
Speaker 1: of the cultures that had them, are often suspected of
Speaker 1: having been organized among matrilineal lines. In other words, if you,
Speaker 1: as a dude, merry a lady, you move into her
Speaker 1: family's long house. Right, this does sink out. There are
Speaker 1: modern cultures that that had long houses or have long
Speaker 1: houses who also live this way, the Iroquois being a
Speaker 1: good example. Right, there was a long house culture and
Speaker 1: where which house lived in was matrilineal. But it is
Speaker 1: a mistake to characterize matrilineal as meaning like the women
Speaker 1: are completely in charge, because they were not an Iroquois culture,
Speaker 1: nor many other cultures where longhouses existed. Vikings lived in longhouses,
Speaker 1: and you might recognize their society as not precisely anti masculine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the work vikings, Yeah, the woke vikings. So this is
Speaker 1: more of a problem though with the conceptions of the
Speaker 1: Longhouse that are spread by Bab's followers, because again, he's
Speaker 1: using it as a shorthand for the fact that this
Speaker 1: kind of like prehistoric darkness of egalitarianism is going to
Speaker 1: destroy the only thing that, in his view, can bring progress,
Speaker 1: which is small groups of beautiful men enforcing their will
Speaker 1: through violence. Right, that's what he talks about when he's
Speaker 1: talking about the Long House. His followers tend to use
Speaker 1: the long House as a short end, more of a
Speaker 1: shorthand for the kind of stuff Curtis Yarvin gets at
Speaker 1: with the cathedral, a catch all term for progressive modernity,
Speaker 1: women who get to say no to sex and have
Speaker 1: their own credit cards, trans people on hormones, vegan meat, substitutes,
Speaker 1: and yes, the Barbie movie Now. I open this episode
Speaker 1: with a post about that movie by Lomez, an adherent
Speaker 1: of Baptism who wrote an interminable article on the Long
Speaker 1: House for a website called First Things, which describes itself
Speaker 1: as America's most influential journal of religion and public life.
Speaker 4: I love it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I bet it is, buddy, And you can tell
Speaker 2: because they always let you know straightaway.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's true. Yeah, yeah, they really got to hit
Speaker 1: that up for you. I'm going to quote from that now.
Speaker 1: Even for those of us who use it, the longhouse
Speaker 1: evades easy summary. Ambivalent to its core, the term is
Speaker 1: at once politically earnest and the punchline to an elaborate
Speaker 1: in joke. Its definition must remain elastic lest it lose
Speaker 1: its power to lampoon the vast constellation of social forces
Speaker 1: it reviles. It refers at once to our increasingly degraded
Speaker 1: mode of technocratic government, but also to wokeness, to the progressive, liberal,
Speaker 1: and secular values that pervade all major institutions. The most
Speaker 1: important feature of the long house, and why it makes
Speaker 1: such a resonant and controversial symbol of our current circumstances,
Speaker 1: is the ubiquitous rule of the den mother. More than anything,
Speaker 1: the long House refers to the remarkable over correction of
Speaker 1: the last two generations towards social norms centering feminine needs
Speaker 1: and feminine methods for controlling direct and modeling behavior. As
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty two, women held fifty two percent of
Speaker 1: professional managerial roles in the US. Women earn more than
Speaker 1: fifty seven percent of bachelor degrees, sixty one percent of
Speaker 1: master's degrees and fifty four percent of doctoral degrees. And
Speaker 1: because they're overrepresented in professions such as human resource management
Speaker 1: and compliance officers that determined workplace behavioral norms, they have
Speaker 1: an outsized influence and professional culture, which itself has an
Speaker 1: outsized influence on American culture more generally so the wall
Speaker 1: taken over human resources.
Speaker 2: He sounds like he loves to fight with his fosaurus
Speaker 2: when he's writing that, Like, yeah, at every point, like
Speaker 2: he's just using unnecessarily long word. Yeah, it's it's I mean,
Speaker 2: it's also just like women have are dominating society because
Speaker 2: they they're getting more bachelor's degrees. Yep, that's what it is.
Speaker 2: Huh okay, uh huh. Yeah, that's a famously useful bachelor's degree,
Speaker 2: which always leads to employment and power to tremendous wealth.
Speaker 8: Oh.
Speaker 1: Also, and the idea that like human resources are in
Speaker 1: some degree to somehow setting the terms culturally as opposed
Speaker 1: to responding to the needs of corporations to mitigate risk. Right,
Speaker 1: Like right, that's what HR actually is. It's not setting
Speaker 1: an agenda, it is avoiding lawsuits, it is minimizing exposure whatever.
Speaker 1: H Lomez also goes on to quote Richard Hannania, an
Speaker 1: influential conservative thought leader who is revealed recently to be
Speaker 1: a neo Nazi, or at least someone who regularly wrote
Speaker 1: neo Nazi things in neo Nazi parts of the web
Speaker 1: and wants to be seen as respectable. Now, well, we'll
Speaker 1: talk about him later. Lomez approvingly notes that Hannania echoes
Speaker 1: a bapist talking point when he discusses how female domination
Speaker 1: of HR has given them control over public and private institutions.
Speaker 1: Now again, the way Lomez is talking about this shit
Speaker 1: is not actually in line with how bronze a pervert
Speaker 1: conceives of the longhouse. And one of the funnier results
Speaker 1: of everything that I've been talking about today is that
Speaker 1: bronze age pervert now spends much of his time on
Speaker 1: Twitter angrily tweeting at his followers that they're using the
Speaker 1: long house wrong.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna read you.
Speaker 1: What post it is from July twenty seventh, longhouse has
Speaker 1: gone crazy out of control.
Speaker 2: Usually misused.
Speaker 1: It's not a synonym for feminism or matriarchy, nor for
Speaker 1: group consensus, though those are part of the story. It's
Speaker 1: a concrete image from pre airy in Europe. Of lower
Speaker 1: life and of most traditional societies. Baby Got Away from You. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and some of his ire is likely due to the
Speaker 1: fact that his followers, who are largely very young, tend
Speaker 1: to apply what they see as his analysis to children's movies.
Speaker 1: He's here's a real good one. Yeah, this is a
Speaker 1: it's a post for a picture of like the female
Speaker 1: villain from the movie Tangled by Activated Sleeper. If you
Speaker 1: want a good example of the nebulous long house, look
Speaker 1: no further than mother gothal Fane narcissism driven by resentment
Speaker 1: and envy of the young, whose primary and most effective
Speaker 1: weapons are gaslighting, manipulation, and the rhetoric of fanatical safety ism.
Speaker 2: It's good stuff.
Speaker 9: Thank you, Activated Sleeper.
Speaker 8: For you Activated Sleeper exposing that great cutting, cutting commentary
Speaker 8: on the twenty twelves Tangled.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite recent examples of how many of
Speaker 1: these guys use the long house was a post in
Speaker 1: the off my Chest reddit which went viral on Twitter.
Speaker 1: The post is by a woman who says that she
Speaker 1: interrupted her husband while he was telling a story and
Speaker 1: he was like, hold up, Tony Minner, talking as like
Speaker 1: a joke, and she got angry at this, and they
Speaker 1: had a fight. One popular bapist response to this story,
Speaker 1: fifteen hundred likes in counting when I found it, stated,
Speaker 1: men attempt to take one meeting step out of the
Speaker 1: long house, and the locks get ten times bigger.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ. It is.
Speaker 1: It is very silly to like bring up actual history
Speaker 1: with this, but one of the points you'll find and
Speaker 1: like writing about long houses traditionally is that because everyone
Speaker 1: was cooped up in the winter comes spring, the women
Speaker 1: were generally like doing everything they good to get the
Speaker 1: men to fucking leave and go hunter something. They get
Speaker 1: the fuck out of that thing, get out of here, Like,
Speaker 1: go do something else. We need something we need like
Speaker 1: a fucking week or two without you hanging around. Go
Speaker 1: to yeah, go to war, do something. Jesus Christ. Nobody
Speaker 1: likes being cooped up in a fucking long house anyway.
Speaker 1: That's that's the long house. That's uh, bronze age pervert.
Speaker 1: It is kind of worth noting because these guys are
Speaker 1: convinced that like they are the intellectual vanguard of this
Speaker 1: movement that's going to overturn what is classically described as liberalism,
Speaker 1: this idea that like people have like rights that are
Speaker 1: worth protecting and shit that that's a failed idea. It's
Speaker 1: obviously failed. Look at how ugly buildings are today. Then
Speaker 1: they'll post some picture of like the Chicago World's Fair.
Speaker 1: These people are like weirdly adjacent to the the Tataria
Speaker 1: conspiracy theory that one hundred years ago the world was
Speaker 1: ruled by this like vast advanced Russian empire that made
Speaker 1: all the nice buildings, and then World War two was
Speaker 1: a secret excuse for the rulers of the world to
Speaker 1: destroy all the good architecture and that's why buildings are ugly.
Speaker 8: I definitely seen like this bad guy in those in
Speaker 8: those like circles of people who are like like culture
Speaker 8: critic or like Greek Greek enjoyer or whatever. Like yeah,
Speaker 8: those pictures of like like old expensive architecture stuff and
Speaker 8: mixed in with like like either like uh mostly mostly
Speaker 8: like brutalist like modern architecture and be like what happened.
Speaker 1: Which way, Well, for one thing, like the society that
Speaker 1: people like you insisted upon this one in which like
Speaker 1: value is maximized at all costs. So we we took
Speaker 1: windows out of my school that was built in that
Speaker 1: brutalist periods because.
Speaker 2: It kept.
Speaker 8: Because like it's like because some like Prince bankrupted their
Speaker 8: country building this pretty building, and that's why we don't
Speaker 8: do that anymore.
Speaker 1: Idiot like you thought, like, yeah, jacked dudes with guns
Speaker 1: should run everything started a series of wars that bankrupted
Speaker 1: those countries and they had to sell their nice buildings
Speaker 1: to the Americans.
Speaker 2: Why we got the London Bridge, I assume.
Speaker 8: But it's it's definitely all that all in like in
Speaker 8: that in that same rough rough Twitter mill you. I mean,
Speaker 8: it's certainly now that you've explained all of this at
Speaker 8: Longhouse stuff, it certainly makes sense why they're kind of
Speaker 8: fawning over the Barbie movie.
Speaker 9: And I mean very.
Speaker 8: Clearly Ken is going to become one of these like
Speaker 8: memable characters because of what he does in the film.
Speaker 8: It's he's he's going to join the pantheon of like
Speaker 8: American Psycho and uh.
Speaker 9: All of Ryan Gosling's other roles.
Speaker 8: It's it is fascinating how Ry Goslin kind of has
Speaker 8: become like the literal poster child for much of like
Speaker 8: the dissident like anti feminist rite just because of the
Speaker 8: types of roles that he's taken.
Speaker 9: But yeah, I mean, it's it's.
Speaker 1: Really cautionary tale male actors.
Speaker 8: It certainly makes sense in context of the Barbie movie
Speaker 8: in terms of how they kind of structured all of
Speaker 8: the like social critique in that in that movie. But
Speaker 8: but yeah, this is very silly. I mean, uh, it's
Speaker 8: I'm excited I won't have to hear much more about
Speaker 8: like the uh, the stunning poetic prose of Bronze Age.
Speaker 4: Perfect.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fucking the Atlantic every time. Never.
Speaker 1: It's it's so like weird because there's there's this whole
Speaker 1: thing that open in the article where he's talking about
Speaker 1: how like, you know, the the first strains of this
Speaker 1: new anti democratic, you know, anti liberal thinking in academia
Speaker 1: came out through philosophy students who you know, realized that
Speaker 1: their professors just took for granted, you know, the the
Speaker 1: truth about things like the value of human rights and
Speaker 1: didn't weren't ready for their arguments against them. And it
Speaker 1: was these like these people who didn't want to be
Speaker 1: told not to think in certain ways. No, man, they
Speaker 1: were assholes. They're asshole rich kids who needed somebody to
Speaker 1: hit him in the fucking face. They need they need
Speaker 1: a folding chair deployed on them, Like yeah, yeah, we
Speaker 1: got to see.
Speaker 8: I demand a shutdown of all coastal universities until we
Speaker 8: figured out what the fuck is going on.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, I'm sorry if you were pretending that you are,
Speaker 1: like somehow in the insurgent underground, uh as the son
Speaker 1: of an M I T professor, going Tom I T
Speaker 1: yourself like you fucking diletant.
Speaker 2: That's all.
Speaker 1: That's all this fucker is is a dilat hunt. And
Speaker 1: that's all most of the people following here. It's a
Speaker 1: mix of dilettants and guys who are going to shoot
Speaker 1: up walmarts anyway, right, cool.
Speaker 8: Give them, give him a follow, give him a follow, Yeah,
Speaker 8: checking out activated sleeper and I've learned a lot already.
Speaker 2: So oh yeah, yeah, you're getting killed by him? Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: pretty much. I you know, as much as one can
Speaker 2: be ill by a fourteen year old. But yeah, really
Speaker 2: interesting stuff here. I think fair to say that this
Speaker 2: is an insight into a world. Oh buddy, fuck me,
Speaker 2: all right, yeah wait, we're not talking about that. We
Speaker 2: are not talking about his bedroom wall by everyone.
Speaker 1: Oh oh wait, now I got a lotch James, what
Speaker 1: did we can bleep it?
Speaker 9: You have to at least tell us what you.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, his his pinned. It's fucking good. I'm not
Speaker 2: sure to get betteran playing Yeah no, what's on the veterans?
Speaker 2: And what looks like is that a German national? Like
Speaker 2: a German in there? Is that Imperial Germany? Yeah? I
Speaker 2: think this guy is a kaiser Reich.
Speaker 1: Dude.
Speaker 9: Impressive, I'm sure, I'm sure all the ladies in there.
Speaker 1: I gotta I gotta show you guys this pinned tweet
Speaker 1: and then I'll read it. It's all caps fed. Let
Speaker 1: me tell you how much I want a FED post.
Speaker 1: There are a hundred billion neurons within my brain. If
Speaker 1: a FED post was written on each and every one
Speaker 1: those neurons, it would not equal one billionth of the
Speaker 1: compulsion I feel feel the FED post at this micro
Speaker 1: instant fed post, FED post that means posting about doing
Speaker 1: a terrorism So that.
Speaker 8: This is the type of tweet that could either come
Speaker 8: from the sun like like mentally unwell leftist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The flag he has, just to be clear,
Speaker 2: it's a franco Is flag of Spain, which, okay, is
Speaker 2: something that something that we will have to talk about,
Speaker 2: which is the American right has been embracing franco As
Speaker 2: like based and good uh for a while now like
Speaker 2: it's just kind of returned to Catholic tradition and like
Speaker 2: it's just anti woke crusader.
Speaker 8: I do like call of the suggestion follows here on
Speaker 8: activity Sleepers page, son Optimist.
Speaker 2: Aleric, the Barbarian Emperor Philippus.
Speaker 7: These people are such birds.
Speaker 1: Here's he's reached a post from Bronze Age Jacob Eurowski
Speaker 1: Jews are like the one ring for politics.
Speaker 9: I think I think, I think I think we reached
Speaker 9: the I think we reached peak peakfulness. I don't think.
Speaker 2: Yes. I hope you've all learned a lot from this.
Speaker 2: Have a wonderful week, every wonderful week, and funk you
Speaker 2: for making me write this to our listeners.
Speaker 6: Welcome to Dick It Appon Here, a podcast where if
Speaker 6: you're listening to this episode is the middle of the week,
Speaker 6: you probably know you know what this podcast is, you
Speaker 6: know what it's about. I'm your host, Mia Wong. Now,
Speaker 6: if you've been reading the news about China at all
Speaker 6: in the past few years, you've probably at least heard
Speaker 6: of China's Belton Road initiative, probably followed by a stream
Speaker 6: of almost panicked fear mongering about China displacing America's role
Speaker 6: in the world and luring countries, and the debt traps
Speaker 6: that allow the CCP to seize control of the country's
Speaker 6: assets and then its entire foreign policy, and all of
Speaker 6: this begs the question what actually is Belton Road. This
Speaker 6: is not a simple question because Belton Road isn't really
Speaker 6: a coherent, single project at all. It is effectively a
Speaker 6: marketing term slapped onto an enormous array of loans, investments,
Speaker 6: some things that are effectively grants, infrastructure projects, and special
Speaker 6: economic zones across the world. The money for these projects
Speaker 6: comes from a variety of Chinese banks and sometimes just
Speaker 6: like government agencies like the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and
Speaker 6: involve a vast array of different Chinese companies and contractors.
Speaker 6: So what are these banks and companies and governments actually
Speaker 6: up to. I'm going to run through three examples to
Speaker 6: get a sense of the kind of program that composes
Speaker 6: Belton Road. One very common program is extending lines of
Speaker 6: credit to state oil companies of oil producers in order
Speaker 6: to secure china supply of oil. I'm starting here because
Speaker 6: this is not typically what people think of when someone
Speaker 6: brings up Belton Road, and it gets at a couple
Speaker 6: of the central complexities of Belton Road. One is, you know,
Speaker 6: a lot of this stuff is just, in some sense
Speaker 6: almost ban all attempts to just sort of secured natural
Speaker 6: resources by paying money for them and investing money in them,
Speaker 6: which is you know, very very standard sort of capitalist behavior.
Speaker 6: But another complexity of this aspect of Belton Road is
Speaker 6: that these loans to oil producers were happening well before
Speaker 6: Belton Road ever existed. The credit lines were simply absorbed
Speaker 6: into Belton Road when the project was announced in twenty thirteen,
Speaker 6: and now these loans are considered Belton Road projects. This
Speaker 6: is a very common thread in Belton Road. Much of
Speaker 6: the vaunted one trillion dollars of investment in Belton Road
Speaker 6: projects comes from, you know, the extension of pre existing projects,
Speaker 6: which really sort of puts into perspective all of those
Speaker 6: like very very scary like maps that you'll see where
Speaker 6: they're like one hundred blah blah blah countries have accepted
Speaker 6: Belton Road projects. It's like, well, yeah, okay, like how
Speaker 6: much of that's new and how much of that is
Speaker 6: just people who had like some random agreement with China.
Speaker 4: Beforehand.
Speaker 6: Now, lest you think the fact that China is giving like,
Speaker 6: you know, a bunch of money to like Brazil State
Speaker 6: Oil Company, means that like this, the whole Belton Road
Speaker 6: thing has something to do with socialism. Here's a quote
Speaker 6: from China's thirteenth five Year Plan quote, we will speed
Speaker 6: up efforts to implement the free Trade Area strategy, gradually
Speaker 6: establishing a network of high standard free trade areas. We
Speaker 6: will actively engage in negotiations with other countries and regions
Speaker 6: along the route of Belton of the along the routes
Speaker 6: of the Belton Road Initiative on the building of free
Speaker 6: trade areas. Now, this is the ancient neoliberal dream.
Speaker 4: It is.
Speaker 6: It is a dream of a world where corporations can
Speaker 6: freely move their comb use across borders while maintaining, you know,
Speaker 6: zones of just unlimited exploitation of workers and special economic zones. Now,
Speaker 6: speaking of sort of the condition of workers, let us
Speaker 6: move to a more typical belt and road project, Jamaica's
Speaker 6: North South Highway. In twenty fourteen, at the astounding cost
Speaker 6: of seven hundred million dollars, the Jamaican government opened the
Speaker 6: North South Highway. Here's from an article that was republished
Speaker 6: in laoson quote. Since Jamaica needed a Chinese loan to
Speaker 6: finance the highway, Chinese Harbor Engineering Company was granted the
Speaker 6: right to own and operate the highway for fifty years
Speaker 6: as part of the arrangement. Also, the tolls collected on
Speaker 6: the highway cannot be used for debt servicing and rather
Speaker 6: go to the China Harbor Engineering Company directly as profit. Additionally,
Speaker 6: the tolls are astronomical by local standards. To drive the
Speaker 6: length of the highway, and a standard car costs the
Speaker 6: equivalents of over twelve dollars each way. This is well
Speaker 6: out of reach for the vast majority of Jamaican's where
Speaker 6: the average monthly salary is about six hundred dollars and
Speaker 6: only sixty percent of workers have a waged or salaried
Speaker 6: position at all. Many of my respondents wondered for whom
Speaker 6: was this highway. The answer may lie in the additional
Speaker 6: concessions granted to the China Harbor Engineering Company, primarily twelve
Speaker 6: hundred acres of land across the highway to be held
Speaker 6: in perpetuity. Apparently, this will be used to construct hotels
Speaker 6: and adjoining infrastructure by Chinese companies for Chinese tourists, a
Speaker 6: kind of economic enclay from which locals would not benefit directly,
Speaker 6: as acknowledged by the then Jamaican Minister of Transport. Now,
Speaker 6: this sucks for Jamaican workers who you know, didn't get
Speaker 6: any of the money from the contract, which you know
Speaker 6: went through Chinese firms.
Speaker 2: That input and these workers.
Speaker 9: And it's also not.
Speaker 4: A great deal for.
Speaker 6: Like the Jamaican government, which is enormous about of debt
Speaker 6: and gets seemingly very little for this. And this begs
Speaker 6: the question why do countries agree to this? Now, the
Speaker 6: short answer is that they need money for development projects,
Speaker 6: and you know, for a poor country, that money is
Speaker 6: very hard to come by. Part of the popularity of
Speaker 6: the project is that economies who've been through the you know,
Speaker 6: the just devastating process of IMF structure reforms, who've had
Speaker 6: literally their entire economy and social system torn apart, who
Speaker 6: have literally watched food being taken from the mouths of
Speaker 6: their children in order to pay off IMF loans, are
Speaker 6: looking for literally any alternative. And as we've discussed on
Speaker 6: this show before, Jamaica itself was the first country to
Speaker 6: be looted by the IMF as the Social Democratic government
Speaker 6: was forced to shred as well for a state in
Speaker 6: its economy in the seventies as a condition for getting
Speaker 6: IMF loans. This history and the current day threat more
Speaker 6: of these structural adjustments should you attempt to go to
Speaker 6: the IMF for more loans, make it more likely that
Speaker 6: countries will turn to Belton Road rather than the IMF
Speaker 6: to deal with their complete lack of development and to
Speaker 6: stave off economic crises resulting from the fact that their
Speaker 6: government has completely run out of money. And this is
Speaker 6: something even liberal imperialist institutions will admit. Here's from the
Speaker 6: Council on Foreign Relations Belton Road Task Force report quote.
Speaker 6: In contrast to loans from traditional providers of development finance,
Speaker 6: China's loans are generally not concessional, and the Chinese Development
Speaker 6: Bank and the Export Import Bank of China expect to
Speaker 6: make a return on their investments. The loans also lack
Speaker 6: Paul conditionality, They contain fewer no exceptions of host country
Speaker 6: economic policy or political reforms. Now, the Council on Foreign
Speaker 6: Relations concludes this with a very slick line that goes
Speaker 6: quote for many Belton Road initiative countries, especially authoritarian regimes.
Speaker 6: This is an attractive package, especially compared with other lenders
Speaker 6: who insist on reforms tied to loans. Now, okay, when
Speaker 6: do you hear the words, you know, when do you
Speaker 6: hear that authoritarian regimes don't want to do the quote
Speaker 6: reforms tied to loans. That makes it sounds like the
Speaker 6: quote unquote reforms are like, you know, you dictators seed
Speaker 6: power to a democracy. Woke at IMF funding. That is
Speaker 6: not that is not how i am F loan conditions work.
Speaker 6: What those reforms actually entail is much closer to sell
Speaker 6: every state out asset in the country to abund of
Speaker 6: American investors. We will leave your children to.
Speaker 2: Die, now, you know.
Speaker 6: And this leads into some other stuff that the Council
Speaker 6: on Foreign Relations talks about a lot, which is, you know,
Speaker 6: they have entire giant sections about corruption on Belton Road programs,
Speaker 6: to which you know, the immediate response is like, man,
Speaker 6: do you know how much money the IMF gave Pinochet?
Speaker 6: They gave him over a billion dollars in nineteen eighties,
Speaker 6: money that he is like three billion dollars in today's money. Now, clariously,
Speaker 6: the other people who gave Pinochet a boatload of money
Speaker 6: was the Chinese Communist Party, although you know, orders of
Speaker 6: magnitude last, because this is this is like the seventies
Speaker 6: Chinese Communist Party who do not have much money, but
Speaker 6: they had enough money apparently to give a bunch of
Speaker 6: the pinochet. And it's at this point that I want
Speaker 6: to remind everyone that China is the third largest voting
Speaker 6: member of the IMF, which is a real issue for
Speaker 6: both the sort of liberal and pro CCP accounts of
Speaker 6: the conflict between the CCP and the IMF over providing loans.
Speaker 9: Because you know, contrary to the way both.
Speaker 6: Of these groups seem to think about sort of the
Speaker 6: modern capitalist economy, China is not a you know, an
Speaker 6: old communist radical like throwing stones at the liberal order
Speaker 6: from outside the house. They are parts of the global
Speaker 6: financial institutions. And to the extent that like you know,
Speaker 6: China can be fighting an institution that it is also
Speaker 6: a part of right to the sense of to the
Speaker 6: sent that that even makes sense to talk about. What
Speaker 6: you're really talking about is just inter capitalist competition over
Speaker 6: who gets to give people loans. Now, there's other interesting
Speaker 6: stuff in this report, like an admission that the Chinese
Speaker 6: you know, the sort of Chinese debt trap narrative is overblown,
Speaker 6: and this is true. The sort of like case study
Speaker 6: in about like a Chinese company taking a port in
Speaker 6: Sri Lanka is not It's not exactly like the story
Speaker 6: that everyone thinks it is. And you know, like the
Speaker 6: Chinese company like got the port after like a bidding
Speaker 6: process and stuff.
Speaker 2: So you know, and this is true.
Speaker 6: And the fact that it's been used sort of like
Speaker 6: hyped up to do fear mongering is absolutely true. However,
Speaker 6: the thing the Council in Foreign Relations can't actually sort
Speaker 6: of say is that the actual conclusion that you get
Speaker 6: if you look closely at sort of combination of you know,
Speaker 6: country like Sri Lanka that has both IMF loans and
Speaker 6: like loads from China is that all of the lenders
Speaker 6: in the global capitalist economy absolutely suck and they all
Speaker 6: exploit the working class and the deador countries like in
Speaker 6: their own ways. Do you know who else exploits the
Speaker 6: working class of debtor countries? It is the products and
Speaker 6: services that support this podcast and we're back now. What
Speaker 6: is notable about Belton Road is that Belton Roads infrastructure
Speaker 6: projects usually do actually get built, but for all of
Speaker 6: the sort of screaming about like China's geopolitical expansion, its
Speaker 6: attempt to subvert the Democrats, subvert the democratic order. The
Speaker 6: actual reason why these projects, unlike you know, so many
Speaker 6: other large scale development projects, actually happen and you know,
Speaker 6: actually do get built, is much more banal. It is
Speaker 6: a product of internal Chinese economics. So to explain this,
Speaker 6: I'm going to turn to another example of a type
Speaker 6: of Belton Road project giving countries loans to buy telecommunications
Speaker 6: and internet equipment from Chinese companies. Here's some dot org.
Speaker 6: China's demand for infrastructure, including communications and internet gear, is
Speaker 6: not as high as it used to be, said Chinese
Speaker 6: Development Big President Jang Gigi. So what can we do
Speaker 6: with the excess production capacity. We can only send it abroad.
Speaker 6: We may give you loans to buy Chinese equipment and materials,
Speaker 6: but there must be a Chinese element, Jang told AFP
Speaker 6: of his bank's loans to help Chinese firms abroad. Now
Speaker 6: this is an interesting quote for a number of reasons.
Speaker 6: Recent sort of American and also Canadian. The Canadians went
Speaker 6: wild over this concern around Chinese telecom companies. Have you
Speaker 6: know argued that the spread of Chinese economy communication technology
Speaker 6: is like a geopolitical power grab by the CCP, a
Speaker 6: Chinese development bank. However, kind of like lets the actual
Speaker 6: game slip, which is that the reason for these loans,
Speaker 6: and you know, a major impetus for the sort of
Speaker 6: broader Belt and Road initiative is finding a solution to
Speaker 6: Chinese production over capacity, which is the giant structural problem
Speaker 6: which sort of hangs like the doom of Damocles over
Speaker 6: the Chinese economy. And this is incredibly important. Foreign policy
Speaker 6: analysts have a tendency which is replicated in the media
Speaker 6: to think about Belton Road is fundamentally a geopolitical tool.
Speaker 6: Take for example, this line from Foreign Policy quote will
Speaker 6: the developing world fall through China sway? Many policy makers
Speaker 6: in Washington, DC certainly fear so, which is one of
Speaker 6: the reasons they have created the new International Development Finance Corporation,
Speaker 6: which is slated to begin operating at the end of
Speaker 6: this year. Like the Marshall Plan, which in post World
Speaker 6: War two years used generous economic aid to fight the
Speaker 6: appeal of Soviet Communism in Western Europe, the International Development
Speaker 6: Finance Corporation aims to help Washington push back against Beijing
Speaker 6: sweeping Belton Road initiative. Now, fascinatingly, the authors don't seemed
Speaker 6: to understand what the Marshall Plan actually was. Now, the
Speaker 6: Marshall Plan, you know, despite what you will like probably
Speaker 6: read in sort of like mainstream like diplomatic histories, was
Speaker 6: not like originally was not really driven by anti communism
Speaker 6: at all. It was in large part a product of
Speaker 6: massive industrial overcapacity in post war In the post war US,
Speaker 6: particularly in the automotive sector, demand from the domestic American
Speaker 6: market couldn't support the enormously expanded auto industry's industrial capacity.
Speaker 6: And so the auto industry went to Congress and tried
Speaker 6: to get them to rebuild Europe as like, you know,
Speaker 6: another market that they could sell there, you know, that
Speaker 6: they could sell cars to that could absorb the product
Speaker 6: or of throbic capacity. The only way they could actually
Speaker 6: get this to work was to tie it to a
Speaker 6: raft of anti communism. And this is now how the
Speaker 6: project is remembered as this, you know, as this sort
Speaker 6: of like grand anti communists like political strategy, you know.
Speaker 6: And in this sense, Belton Road can be understood as
Speaker 6: China's Marshall Plan. It is a bold attempt to forge
Speaker 6: an international solution to its domestic economic problems. And this
Speaker 6: means to actually understand what Belton Road is, we need
Speaker 6: to go back to the beginning. In response to the
Speaker 6: financial collapse of two thousand and eight, China carry out
Speaker 6: what was until COVID the largest stimulus in human history,
Speaker 6: an incomprehensibly large Kinesian program focused on internal infrastructure development
Speaker 6: designed to shock the Chinese economy back into shape, and
Speaker 6: it worked for about one year. In twenty ten, the
Speaker 6: Chinese economy hit ten percent a year on yr GDP growth,
Speaker 6: and it has been falling ever since. In twenty eleven,
Speaker 6: the round of global uprisings kicked off by the Arab Spring,
Speaker 6: hit China in the form with the Wukan riots and
Speaker 6: a wave of strikes, and by twenty thirteen, a year
Speaker 6: into the first new Chinese presidents, Chichiping, the economy was
Speaker 6: doing terribly and the government was still not out of
Speaker 6: the woods politically either. In response, the government announced two
Speaker 6: programs within about four months of each other, Belton Road
Speaker 6: and the so called Mini Stimulus, another Chinese stimulus package
Speaker 6: aimed at improving Chinese rails at the proper term for it,
Speaker 6: and it ended improving the Chinese train network. Now, these
Speaker 6: two programs were effectively the same response to the economic
Speaker 6: crisis fased by the CCP. Rising wages of strike activity
Speaker 6: and later environmental protests were threatening the profitability of the
Speaker 6: Chinese manufacturing sector in its traditional coastal urban sector.
Speaker 2: Is like Shenzhen.
Speaker 6: The solution then was to move Chinese capital towards the
Speaker 6: interior of the country, into more rural areas with lower wages,
Speaker 6: and then build an infrastructure network to export Chinese commodities abroad.
Speaker 6: This move serves several purposes at the same time. On
Speaker 6: the one hand, cheaper rural workers are less likely to
Speaker 6: organize either strikes or environmental protests. On the other hand,
Speaker 6: some kind of rural investment could secure rural factional support
Speaker 6: for the Party at a time when the rural Ukon
Speaker 6: riots meant that such support was anything but assured. But
Speaker 6: even in twenty thirteen, it was clear that the vaunted
Speaker 6: Chinese transition to a consumer economy was going to fail
Speaker 6: because and this is really blindingly obvious if you think,
Speaker 6: if you think about how the Chinese economy works for
Speaker 6: like ten seconds, Okay, in order to have a consumer economy,
Speaker 6: you must have a class of consumers. Now, this requires
Speaker 6: average people to have a thing called money, and both
Speaker 6: Jesionping and the Chinese capitalist class were broadly just absolutely
Speaker 6: resolutely refuse to do anything that involves paying Chinese workers more,
Speaker 6: which is what you need to make this happen, and
Speaker 6: they just refuse to do it. It is genuinely stunning.
Speaker 9: Xi Jinping.
Speaker 6: Xi Jinping would literally rather force like the force the
Speaker 6: randomly the head like the CEOs of corporations to give
Speaker 6: money to charity and call it a government program before
Speaker 6: he would like fucking raise a minimum wage. So you know,
Speaker 6: if you're in twenty thirteen, right, you can see the
Speaker 6: writing on the wall. You can see the Chinese economy
Speaker 6: isn't going to like turn into a consumer economy. There's been,
Speaker 6: you know, there's been some transition into like a service
Speaker 6: based economy, but like you know, ask ask the US
Speaker 6: how growth that a service based economy works for you.
Speaker 6: And because they've seen the writing on the wall, Chinese
Speaker 6: capitalists start looking for ways to make money overseas, and
Speaker 6: this overlaps with a growing demand to do something with
Speaker 6: the enormous reserves of American dollars that China has from
Speaker 6: like basically propping up the US economy by buying like
Speaker 6: a trillion dollars of US bonds in the two thousands
Speaker 6: and early twenty tens. And like you think I'm joking
Speaker 6: when I say, like e trillion dollars, but it is
Speaker 6: actually around a trillion dollars. Well, okay, this is where
Speaker 6: I need to make an enormous disclaimer. Why okay, it
Speaker 6: is atrociously difficult to get reliable economic statistics out of China,
Speaker 6: to the point where, like the Chinese central government when
Speaker 6: they get data from their own provinces, who are legally
Speaker 6: required to report data to them, they have to mess
Speaker 6: with the data to make it make literally any sense
Speaker 6: at all. They have these they have these equations that
Speaker 6: that they like apply to the statistical data from the
Speaker 6: provinces they get that are effectively attempts to calculate how
Speaker 6: much the provinces are lying to the central government and
Speaker 6: how you know, and try to figure out a way
Speaker 6: to fix it. And you know, they are doing things.
Speaker 6: They are doing things like that, they're doing things out
Speaker 6: of like the old late Soviet Union. They are they
Speaker 6: are they are using satellite pictures to check how much
Speaker 6: light there is from factories at nights. They are like
Speaker 6: measuring how many freight trains are like going into a
Speaker 6: province and trying to use that to estimate their actual
Speaker 6: industrial capacity.
Speaker 2: It is wild.
Speaker 6: And that is just the CCP trying to figure out
Speaker 6: its own numbers. And that means, right that the numbers
Speaker 6: the CCP actually decides to release when they're done trying
Speaker 6: to get the data to look kind of real so
Speaker 6: they can understand what's going on in their own economy.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 6: So there's that data which is unreliable because again, like
Speaker 6: you're dealing with, everyone is lying to you, but what
Speaker 6: the data is, but in the data of the CCP
Speaker 6: actually releases. Oh boy, So we're gonna come back to
Speaker 6: this in a little bit. But Chinese youth unemployment right
Speaker 6: now is twenty percent. And the CCP's response to this
Speaker 6: is they've announced that they refused to release any more
Speaker 6: youth unemployment numbers until they finish like recalculating it or something.
Speaker 6: So great stuff, amazing stuff happening in the world of
Speaker 6: Chinese satistical addicxes.
Speaker 2: It is awful. I don't wish this on anyone.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Now, all of this is to say that the
Speaker 6: case I'm about to make is probably true, Like there's
Speaker 6: like a ninety percent chance that what I'm about to
Speaker 6: say is true, but we don't one hundred percent know
Speaker 6: because it relies on Chinese economic data that is incredibly sketchy,
Speaker 6: and a lot of this has turned into this sort
Speaker 6: of like game of financial hide and seek with all
Speaker 6: these assets that are in weird places. But what seems
Speaker 6: to have happened is that a lot of built in
Speaker 6: road projects are being funded by Chinese for inch just
Speaker 6: change research, which is those trillions of dollars of like
Speaker 6: bonds I was talking about earlier. Of that, you know,
Speaker 6: we're moved from the People's Bank of China which is
Speaker 6: China Central Bank to like other banks, and then those
Speaker 6: banks use that to do investments. And this appears to
Speaker 6: be some of the money that was used to fund
Speaker 6: belt and road projects. And this is where things get
Speaker 6: very sketchy. Now, these banks seem to initially have been
Speaker 6: flushed with capital, which you know, contributed to a massive
Speaker 6: like as as the product is initially starting and up
Speaker 6: through about twenty eighteen, like it's just you know, it
Speaker 6: just keeps the amount of money going into this keeps increasing,
Speaker 6: keeps increasing, and then twenty eighteen, it starts to slow.
Speaker 6: And then after the pandemic, and particularly after like twenty
Speaker 6: twenty twenty two, like the amount of money that's going
Speaker 6: into belt road projects has imploded, and the amounts of
Speaker 6: loans that the CCP is writing off has just diminished enormously. Now, Okay,
Speaker 6: this is the sketchy part. You will see a lot
Speaker 6: of people if you look into this, who are going
Speaker 6: to argue that the reason that these loans have sort
Speaker 6: of dried up and the reason that this has been
Speaker 6: decreasing is that China is like burning through its reserve
Speaker 6: of foreign exchange, like it's burnning out of its burning
Speaker 6: burning through its reserve of like US dollars that it
Speaker 6: has its banks. This may be true, maybe it's probably
Speaker 6: not true of like twenty eighteen, because and this is
Speaker 6: the thing that's been discovered very recently, a lot of
Speaker 6: Chinese's like a lot of things that like are technically
Speaker 6: foreign exchange reserves were like technically aren't qualified classified as
Speaker 6: foreign exchange reserves because they've been weird stuff has happened
Speaker 6: to the balance sheet. I don't know, it's kind of
Speaker 6: a mess, but like it seems like China has way
Speaker 6: way larger. They have these things called shadow reserves that
Speaker 6: are the things that they've been using to like turn
Speaker 6: for x into like investments, and this seems to this
Speaker 6: seems to indicate that China has like way way larger
Speaker 6: foreign exchange reserves then it tacnically are on the balance sheet.
Speaker 6: So what the actual relationship between how much forward exchange
Speaker 6: reserves China has and how much money is putting into
Speaker 6: belt in run.
Speaker 4: We don't know.
Speaker 6: It's a disaster, but what we do know is that
Speaker 6: these investments were not like sort of like mere geopolitical tools, right,
Speaker 6: These investments were actually designed to make money, and that
Speaker 6: means that they were and still are, an attempt to
Speaker 6: solve sort of the weakness of the Chinese economy by
Speaker 6: finding ways to invest capital with better returns than the
Speaker 6: absolutely terrible and increasingly dogshit rates that you can find
Speaker 6: in China. And this is something that we've been seeing,
Speaker 6: you know, in the last year, We've been watching sort
Speaker 6: of the dogs come like the chickens come home to
Speaker 6: roost for the Chinese economy, where like, you know, all
Speaker 6: this debt build ups paying off. Why I say it
Speaker 6: paying off all this debt build up is you know,
Speaker 6: like really starting to damage the economy, like the housing
Speaker 6: is kind of imploding, and you know, Belton Road was
Speaker 6: supposed to be sort of the answer to this. Right,
Speaker 6: If you combined, if you combine the fact that we
Speaker 6: know for a fact that these loans are an attempt
Speaker 6: to actually like generate returns, and we also know that
Speaker 6: these loans are a way to sort of stimulate demand
Speaker 6: for Chinese goods that there's no domestic market for, we
Speaker 6: get this clear picture of what's really driving Belton Road.
Speaker 6: It's the crisis of Chinese capital, which in and of
Speaker 6: itself is just sort of a global reflection of the
Speaker 6: global crisis of overproduction under consumption that's haunted the world
Speaker 6: since the nineteen seventies. Now, there's one last aspect of
Speaker 6: Belton Road that we need to talk about that gets
Speaker 6: way less attention than any other aspect of the initiative.
Speaker 6: Belton Road also acts as a work program for a
Speaker 6: very specific kind of Chinese worker. Belton Road projects, as
Speaker 6: you see in Jamaica, are run by Chinese corporations almost always,
Speaker 6: I mean occasionally other firms get contracted. Mostly it's Chinese
Speaker 6: corporate and they import Chinese workers to do the work.
Speaker 6: And you know, we've looked at it from the Jamaican end,
Speaker 6: where you know, Jamaican workers are getting screw odd jobs
Speaker 6: and wages, but we should also look at it from
Speaker 6: the perspective of Chinese workers as well. Working in China,
Speaker 6: as we've discussed elsewhere extensively sucks ass. Wages are dogshit,
Speaker 6: the hours are inhuman, and there's intense competition for what.
Speaker 4: Jobs do exist.
Speaker 6: On the other hand, salaries for Chinese workers on built
Speaker 6: in road projects are much much higher than they are
Speaker 6: for the same job in China. Amazingly, Chinese corporations abroad
Speaker 6: actually have less ability to just not pay people for
Speaker 6: their work, which is, you know, the thing that you know,
Speaker 6: usually the first thing that rich people are trying to
Speaker 6: do when they when they have our face with having
Speaker 6: to pay someone in Chinese corporations absolutely constantly attempt to
Speaker 6: just not pay their workers. And as a bonus to that,
Speaker 6: on top of the fact that you're like actually getting paid,
Speaker 6: and you're getting paid way more of you would for
Speaker 6: working a job in China, these these Belton road jobs
Speaker 6: have a much faster promotion track and the cost of
Speaker 6: living is much lower than it is in China. Which
Speaker 6: allows workers to save money and cent remittances back home.
Speaker 6: That mean this means that Belton Road jobs, which are specifically,
Speaker 6: you know, in sort of like nationalist circles, conceptualized as
Speaker 6: quote Africa, which is oh boy, is seen as you know,
Speaker 6: it's seen as a way out for Chinese workers. And
Speaker 6: we actually talked about this a long time ago in
Speaker 6: our Lying Flat anti work episodes. Part of the origins
Speaker 6: of Lying Flat was his reaction to this sort of
Speaker 6: like nationalist discourse but like finding your own personal Africa
Speaker 6: to break out of like Chinese involution. And you know,
Speaker 6: from this kind of like ulternationalist, like really racist like concept,
Speaker 6: you get this like left wing backlash of co opting
Speaker 6: of like the refusal to work that is you know,
Speaker 6: lying flat. But for our purposes right now, the important
Speaker 6: thing about this is Belton Road was a solution to
Speaker 6: a sort of new like highly educated Chinese working class
Speaker 6: who you know, were suddenly realizing that like this education
Speaker 6: that they put literally everything into and this like they
Speaker 6: sunk their entire lives into, was just going to get
Speaker 6: them nowhere. And you know, Belton Road appeared as a
Speaker 6: sort of mirage of way out. But it's not it's
Speaker 6: not a way out for Chinese workers. It's it's its
Speaker 6: own kind of imperialism. It's the same sort of shit
Speaker 6: that oil companies do where they said highly paid American
Speaker 6: workers to oil wells in Nigeria to avoid having to
Speaker 6: deal with, you know, a class of skilled and politically
Speaker 6: sophisticated Nigerian oil workers. It's the same kind of sort
Speaker 6: of racial divide and conquer that funds Chinese workers at
Speaker 6: the expense of workers in Jamaica, and that ultimately is
Speaker 6: the core of both Belton Road and the American response
Speaker 6: to Belton Road. It is a desperate attempt to keep
Speaker 6: the embers of capital burning by lighting the working class
Speaker 6: on fire, feeding it to the flames.
Speaker 2: Hi. Everyone, it's me James today and I'm joined by
Speaker 2: Meghan Bodette, who's the director of research at the Kurdish
Speaker 2: Peace Institute. We're picking up where we left off at
Speaker 2: the end of last week to discuss more about the
Speaker 2: Autonomous Administration in North and Eastyria and perhaps more specifically,
Speaker 2: to talk about the detainees the ISIS detainees in the
Speaker 2: Al Whole camp and in other camps around there.
Speaker 10: How are you, Megan, I'm doing well, thank you, James,
Speaker 10: thank you for having me on for this important conversation
Speaker 10: about a really critical security and humanitarian issue that we're
Speaker 10: seeing in north east Syria these days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks, thanks for joining us. So I think start
Speaker 2: out with would you be comfortable giving a sort of
Speaker 2: baseline explanation of what's happening with these ISIS detainees and why,
Speaker 2: despite the fact that many of them are citizens of
Speaker 2: other countries, they haven't been a returned there.
Speaker 10: Yeah, that's a very important place to start with. So essentially,
Speaker 10: after the territorial defeat of ISIS in twenty and nineteen
Speaker 10: by the Syrian Democratic Forces and the International Coalition, the
Speaker 10: Syrian Democratic Forces and the Autonomous Administration, which is the
Speaker 10: political body governing Northeast Syria ended up with tens of
Speaker 10: thousands of ISIS detainees and the family members of these
Speaker 10: ISIS members as well. And in the Alhol camp you
Speaker 10: now have a population of essentially ISIS affiliated women and
Speaker 10: the children of ISIS members who are now housed in
Speaker 10: that camp as well. And this camp is a serious
Speaker 10: humanitarian issue. You have these children who are in very
Speaker 10: difficult conditions. It's a massive security problem for these surrounding
Speaker 10: Syrian and Iraqi communities that were victimized by ISIS and
Speaker 10: the world. ISIS openly wants to reconstitute itself. It is
Speaker 10: operating inside the camp clandestinely to reconstitute itself. It wants
Speaker 10: to break prisoners out and go right back to its
Speaker 10: genocidal policies against minorities in the region like Zidis and Christians,
Speaker 10: and to continue terror attacks not only in Iraq and
Speaker 10: Syria but around the world. It's also a real drain
Speaker 10: on the resources of the Autonomous Administration and the SDF themselves,
Speaker 10: who we have to remember are not a state actor,
Speaker 10: but are dealing with the sort of problems that even
Speaker 10: the wealthiest and most militarily established state actors would have
Speaker 10: trouble with. So they've ended up in this unenviable position
Speaker 10: of having to take care of essentially criminals from around
Speaker 10: the world who came to their country to commit mass atrocities,
Speaker 10: while the victims of these ISIS crimes across Northern and
Speaker 10: Eastern Syria and victims of the subst Turkish invasions that
Speaker 10: a Northern and Eastern Syria suffered during and after the
Speaker 10: fight against ISIS really lack basic resources. Now, this is
Speaker 10: something I heard a lot on the ground when I
Speaker 10: was in the region in February and March, speaking to
Speaker 10: people from Afrin, which was invaded and occupied by Turkey
Speaker 10: in twenty eighteen, and to people from Serkanya and Telabyad,
Speaker 10: which were invaded and occupied by Turkey in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 10: Many of them asked rightly why there were so many
Speaker 10: resources from international bodies and NGOs and governments provided towards
Speaker 10: the ISIS detainees in al Hole and the ISIS affiliated
Speaker 10: individuals there, when their communities, their families who had done
Speaker 10: nothing other than simply living in areas that Turkey decided
Speaker 10: to invade and occupy, who were displaced because of that
Speaker 10: in what experts, including myself, would refer to as ethnic cleansing.
Speaker 10: These communities are receiving nothing from the international community. You know,
Speaker 10: they feel forgotten and they have some serious questions about that.
Speaker 10: Of course, the Autonomous Administration has many needs and many
Speaker 10: pressing security problems that it simply can't devote enough resources
Speaker 10: to when it's tasked with managing the world's ISIS members.
Speaker 10: So in a recent study that we published at the
Speaker 10: Kurdish Peace Institute by journalist Matt Broomfield, who spent a
Speaker 10: lot of time on the ground in northeast Syria during
Speaker 10: and after the defeat of ISIS. He found that just
Speaker 10: four percent of foreign ISIS fighters held by Syrian Kurdish
Speaker 10: authorities have been repatriated since twenty nineteen four percent. The
Speaker 10: most of the repatriations have been women and children, not
Speaker 10: the fighters themselves, who are housed in prisons. But of
Speaker 10: course the women and children are a humanitarian issue and
Speaker 10: a security issue too, so think about that. Those are
Speaker 10: really dangerous numbers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think that differentiation between fighters and women
Speaker 2: and children is interesting and perhaps one we should like
Speaker 2: pick apart a little bit, because we talked about this
Speaker 2: before we recorded. There's a betrayal certainly of like Western
Speaker 2: women who went to join ISIS as having been sort
Speaker 2: of victims in their own right, which some of them
Speaker 2: were very young, right and might not have been making
Speaker 2: adult choices at that time. And that's one thing. But
Speaker 2: like a lot of these people willingly participated in an
Speaker 2: extremely oppressive and violent regime, and they sort of a
Speaker 2: being that they're often not portrayed as such in the press.
Speaker 2: Is that fair to say?
Speaker 10: Absolutely? Look what I always go back to when I
Speaker 10: talk about this issue is reading accounts from Uzb women
Speaker 10: and children who survived ISIS captivity, who said on multiple
Speaker 10: occasions that the women were no less brutal than the men,
Speaker 10: and that they were willing participants in every aspect of
Speaker 10: the worst of ISIS crimes of genocide, of crimes against humanity,
Speaker 10: against the zd people and of course all the other
Speaker 10: peoples that ISIS targeted. So that I think when you
Speaker 10: have these genocide survivors saying that no, these women participated
Speaker 10: fully in these crimes. They facilitated these crimes, They made
Speaker 10: this system of genocide of crimes against humanity possible. That's
Speaker 10: something we have to listen to. And I'm glad that
Speaker 10: you bring up the Western media portrayal because you really
Speaker 10: you see this idea that the women could not have
Speaker 10: been perpetrators themselves, when what we hear on the ground
Speaker 10: is that that's not true, and what legal cases have
Speaker 10: begun to find is that that's not true either. There's
Speaker 10: been trials in Europe for ISIS affiliated women for their
Speaker 10: complicity in acts of genocide against the Auzeti community. And
Speaker 10: you know, one point that you hear very commonly on
Speaker 10: the ground is that. How can there have only been
Speaker 10: one or two, just a handful of trials. I'm not
Speaker 10: sure the exact number. But after all of these people missing,
Speaker 10: all of these people killed, how are all of these
Speaker 10: ISIS members? And that's why I said, you know ISIS
Speaker 10: affiliated women, because I don't think I do agree with you.
Speaker 10: It's a disservice to just refer to them as ISIS
Speaker 10: brides or whatever sensationalistic media framing you have. These people
Speaker 10: simply aren't being put on trial. And one of the
Speaker 10: reasons for that is that when we come to female
Speaker 10: members of ISIS, there is this perception, both in media
Speaker 10: and from governments, from international institutions, that these women are
Speaker 10: victims that because they're women, because they subscribed willingly to
Speaker 10: a political and ideological system that was very, very oppressive
Speaker 10: of women, that puts women only into certain roles as housewives,
Speaker 10: as mothers of the next generation of ISIS, that these
Speaker 10: women couldn't have committed atrocities.
Speaker 2: But they have.
Speaker 7: They did.
Speaker 10: And you know what we're hearing right now, and some
Speaker 10: of the reporting that's coming out of Northeast Syria is
Speaker 10: that even within the camps, these women have continued to
Speaker 10: commit some of the most serious abuses that ISIS has
Speaker 10: been committing. There's reports that they have raped, sexually assaulted
Speaker 10: the teenage boys who are in the camp in order
Speaker 10: to essentially become pregnant and raise more children to create
Speaker 10: that next generation of ISIS that they seek to create.
Speaker 10: And so this continued perpetration of sexual violence against these
Speaker 10: boys who've done nothing other than had the misfortune to
Speaker 10: have their parents be members of ISIS. You know, this
Speaker 10: is a very very serious allegation. The reporting about this
Speaker 10: is something that needs to be taken very seriously. Like
Speaker 10: I said, this is a massive human rights crisis for
Speaker 10: these children and it is you know, these women are
Speaker 10: no less dangerous and no less culpable for their crimes
Speaker 10: than their male counterparts who joined ISIS.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's just very fair to say, And
Speaker 2: it's somewhat of a like sexist outlook to be like
Speaker 2: a women couldn't have had agency in the way that
Speaker 2: men clearly have been held accountable for. And I think
Speaker 2: it's the last issue you raised. It's obviously pretty horrible,
Speaker 2: but also we should at least dig into a little bit.
Speaker 2: I think like the ongoing like not only the abuse
Speaker 2: of children, but like the sort of attempt to indoctrinate
Speaker 2: children into that same like extremist ideology, the attempts to
Speaker 2: even like I've seen videos of kids training with little
Speaker 2: wooden guns, and yeah, I'm sort of raising another generation
Speaker 2: of people who believe in this kind of hateful outlook.
Speaker 2: And can you talk a little bit about how common
Speaker 2: that is or how I guess you don't know entirely,
Speaker 2: but can you speak to that a little bit.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean that is something that none of us
Speaker 10: know how common it is because of the sort of
Speaker 10: difficulty of accessing that information. But if you look at
Speaker 10: what is coming in from sources from North and East Syria,
Speaker 10: from international reporting on the camp, these women are indoctrinating
Speaker 10: their children into the ISIS ideology. They have said many
Speaker 10: times over and many of their communications that their goal
Speaker 10: is to raise the next generation of ISIS fighter. There's
Speaker 10: no reason to believe that the majority of these women
Speaker 10: have given up on their beliefs, and there is evidence
Speaker 10: that this is what they're trying to do. And of course,
Speaker 10: when you look at the broader situation that these children
Speaker 10: are in, it's a situation that's exceedingly conducive to radicalization
Speaker 10: because of the poor conditions in the camps because of
Speaker 10: the fact that they remain with their mothers, many of
Speaker 10: whom believe firmly in ISIS ideology and who see the
Speaker 10: role of women in ISIS as doing exactly that, as
Speaker 10: passing down this ideology. And you know, when these children
Speaker 10: they can't be safely repatriated to their countries, they can't
Speaker 10: be put into safe environments where they can receive the
Speaker 10: support they need, the positive influences, they need, any kind
Speaker 10: of medical or psychological help that they need in these conditions,
Speaker 10: it's inevitable that you're going to have the continuation of
Speaker 10: this ISIS ideology being perpetrated and the adults there, these
Speaker 10: women cantinuing to pass this down on these children, who
Speaker 10: again have done nothing to be put in the situation
Speaker 10: that they're in. They're continuing to be victimized by the
Speaker 10: actions of their parents and the other ISIS members. So
Speaker 10: and the international community too, as it fault here for
Speaker 10: refusing to repatriate at least these children and to try
Speaker 10: ISIS perpetrators of war crimes, criinds against humanity and genocide.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in some cases they've even been like had their
Speaker 2: citizenship stripped from them of the countries that they came from,
Speaker 2: the UK have done that for example, right, which is
Speaker 2: kind of just failing to do anything to acknowledge it,
Speaker 2: like this is an international problem that they.
Speaker 9: Have help completely.
Speaker 10: And that's something we can get into, is the international
Speaker 10: dynamic surrounding these issues, because it's obviously very closely related
Speaker 10: to the ISIS issue, but it touches on so many
Speaker 10: other very internationalized conflicts as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's do that. Perhaps before we explain the way
Speaker 2: the nations that are more distant from this are engaging
Speaker 2: with it, we should talk about how nations that are
Speaker 2: more proximal to this are engaging within specifically how at
Speaker 2: times it seems like Turkish drone strikes, which we've discussed
Speaker 2: previously on our podcasts so people be familiar with them,
Speaker 2: have the very least not helped the SDF to keep
Speaker 2: these camps secure, right, And in some cases it's you
Speaker 2: can see, like there's a video that the YPJ have
Speaker 2: of like these people celebrating a drone strike inside the camp,
Speaker 2: And can you talk about the impact these drone strikes have.
Speaker 10: Look something that has been reported by journalists, by local sources,
Speaker 10: and by all sorts of international researchers and experts since
Speaker 10: the earliest days of the war against ISIS is that
Speaker 10: Turkey wanted ISIS to succeed in it's mission of taking
Speaker 10: over northern Iraq and northern Syria in order to not
Speaker 10: only destroy Kurdish political and military structures operating there, including
Speaker 10: the YPG, the YPJ, the later the SDF, and the
Speaker 10: Autonomous Administration, but also to destroy the social base for
Speaker 10: any form of Kurdish autonomy, any kind of multi ethnic
Speaker 10: project to potentially be able to exist there, either now
Speaker 10: or in the future. And this facilitation of the rise
Speaker 10: of ISIS reached such a level that you've had legal
Speaker 10: experts through the Yazidi Justice Committee, which published an in
Speaker 10: depth report on this last year, find based on a
Speaker 10: review of the evidence that Turkey was quote complicit in
Speaker 10: the commission of genocide end quote by ISIS by allowing
Speaker 10: fighters to cross its borders to join the group, allowing
Speaker 10: ISIS related economic activity to go on, and other forms
Speaker 10: of facilitation of the rise of ISIS when it was
Speaker 10: committee its most serious crimes. So this is not something new.
Speaker 10: The way that these drone strikes specifically impact this issue.
Speaker 10: They're part of the broader Turkish campaign of aggression against
Speaker 10: Northeast Syria. Obviously, the two ground invasions of Afrin and
Speaker 10: of Sera Kanya and Talabyad had very negative impacts on
Speaker 10: the fight against ISIS and the drone strikes. Now, first
Speaker 10: of all, they make it difficult for any SDF or
Speaker 10: autonomous administration structure to simply do the day to day
Speaker 10: work of providing security and providing the government. You know,
Speaker 10: if a government official or a member of the local
Speaker 10: security forces has to modify their behavior, has to modify
Speaker 10: where they go, how they interact with their constituents. You know,
Speaker 10: what kind of missions they can conduct to avoid being
Speaker 10: assassinated in a drone strike, They're simply not going to
Speaker 10: be as effective. Right, So this is a problem in
Speaker 10: many areas. It certainly impacts the counter ISIS mission, and
Speaker 10: Turkey has specifically started to increasingly target ans, SDF and
Speaker 10: Asayish internal security forces personnel who are directly engaged in
Speaker 10: counter ISIS missions. We saw this in late twenty twenty
Speaker 10: two when there were severe Turkish air operations following a
Speaker 10: bombing in Istanbul that Turkey, based on all evidence, falsely
Speaker 10: attempted to attribute to Kurdish groups despite there being no
Speaker 10: real evidence supporting that claim. These attacks targeted civilians, civilian infrastructure,
Speaker 10: and SDF forces engaged in key counter ISIS missions, including
Speaker 10: SDF forces involved in securing the Alhole Camp. And now
Speaker 10: we've even started to see in addition to these anti
Speaker 10: SDF anti Autonomous Administration drone strikes, Turkey's been using drones
Speaker 10: to fire essentially warning shots at the international coalition led
Speaker 10: by the US and the other coalition countries itself. We
Speaker 10: saw this in November when there were a drone strike
Speaker 10: on the joint SDF coalition base where the SDF and
Speaker 10: the international community worked together to plan ongoing counter ISIS missions,
Speaker 10: and earlier this year, in i believe April of this year,
Speaker 10: the drone strike on Sulimania International Airport in Iraqi, Kurdastan,
Speaker 10: where there was a joint SDF coalition convoy where SDF
Speaker 10: Commander in Chief Muslim Kobani was present and US forces
Speaker 10: were also present. That strike, for all intents and purposes,
Speaker 10: was Turkey's attempt not only to threaten the SDF and
Speaker 10: the Autonomous Administration, but to threaten the coalition as well,
Speaker 10: specifically for its continuing counter isis partnership with Syrian Kurds.
Speaker 10: So this has risen to a level where Turkey is
Speaker 10: not only using these to disrupt governance and security at
Speaker 10: the local level in the Autonomous administration, it's not only
Speaker 10: using them against locally led SDFYPG led counter ISIS missions,
Speaker 10: but Turkey is using drones to threaten the entire global
Speaker 10: counter ISIS campaign, of which on paper is formally a member.
Speaker 2: So there you go, Yeah, and Turkey is kind of
Speaker 2: it's we've talked about this again before, how it pressured
Speaker 2: like newer NATO members Finland and Sweden to even stop
Speaker 2: accepting Kurdish refugees, right, It's yeah, while at the same
Speaker 2: time being a member of NATO and as you say,
Speaker 2: also like drone striking other members of NATO. It's certainly
Speaker 2: like it's making it as hard as possible for people
Speaker 2: in this part of the world to have the stability
Speaker 2: and peace and the things that they fought so hard
Speaker 2: for for such a long time. I wonder if you
Speaker 2: can talk about, like, so, what is the into as
Speaker 2: far as the international community exists, which is a pretty
Speaker 2: nebulous thing to really kind of pin down, but is
Speaker 2: what is specifically like this US led coalition to the
Speaker 2: feat ISIS. I think they call it doing to help,
Speaker 2: and I guess a little more broadly, building on that,
Speaker 2: this coalition has a very narrow focus in a place
Speaker 2: where there are a lot of different aggresses to include
Speaker 2: various other Islamist groups, to include the Turkish State and
Speaker 2: obviously the day the state in Syria. Can you explain
Speaker 2: a little bit about how the mission of this coalition
Speaker 2: is narrow in a way that helps it doing the
Speaker 2: things that people on the ground they need to ensure
Speaker 2: peace and stability.
Speaker 10: Yeah, exactly. That's a really important question because, as you said,
Speaker 10: this international relationship with North Eastyria is very narrowly built
Speaker 10: on a counter ISIS focus, which means a military focus.
Speaker 10: So there's relationships between security forces and security forces. What
Speaker 10: we don't see our political relationships. And this connects to
Speaker 10: a wide variety of issues related to this immediate problem
Speaker 10: of ISIS, of securing ISIS prisoners, of bringing perpetrators of
Speaker 10: genocide and war crimes to justice, but it also connects
Speaker 10: to the deeper problem of the kind of long term
Speaker 10: stability in Syria that's necessary to end this ongoing civil war,
Speaker 10: to bring justice to the victims of ISIS and to
Speaker 10: all other abuses and atrocities during the twelve years of
Speaker 10: conflict in Syria, and to prevent the next endless war
Speaker 10: in this region from inevitably taking place in the future.
Speaker 10: So we have this narrow military partnership. The reason that
Speaker 10: this relationship evolved in this way was going back to
Speaker 10: the role of Turkey, because the United States and its
Speaker 10: European allies had no other option but to partner with
Speaker 10: Kurdish groups if they wanted to achieve a territorial defeat
Speaker 10: of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. There was no force
Speaker 10: other than the SDF and the YPG and the YPGA
Speaker 10: at that time that would be capable of the military
Speaker 10: responsibility of defeating ISIS. It was essentially, if people remember
Speaker 10: the resistance of the YPG and the YPJ at Kobani
Speaker 10: in northeast northeastern Syria, that held out long enough where
Speaker 10: the United States and the international Coalition realized that their
Speaker 10: only option if they wanted to defeat ISIS on the
Speaker 10: ground was to partner with these forces. Before that, also,
Speaker 10: we're recording this in August, the situation in Sinjar where
Speaker 10: ISIS had gone in had committed genocide against the Azdi community,
Speaker 10: and we're the only people who were able to actually
Speaker 10: come in and help Uzidis defend themselves and evacuate refugees
Speaker 10: to safety in Syria, where again the YPG, the YPJ
Speaker 10: and the PKK gorillas as well. Because these Kurdish forces
Speaker 10: were able to help local civilians in Sinjar defend themselves
Speaker 10: and evacuate so many refugees to safety, it forced the
Speaker 10: international community's hand to act. The PKK intervened in Sinjar
Speaker 10: to start the humanitarian mission on August fourth, US air
Speaker 10: strikes began on August seventh. It was this local response
Speaker 10: from these non state actors that forced the international community,
Speaker 10: you know, these states with actual treaty obligations to respond
Speaker 10: to and prevent massatrocities, to take action. But because Turkey
Speaker 10: views the PKK as a terrorist group, it views the
Speaker 10: YPG and the YPG as indistinguishable from the PKK and
Speaker 10: therefore as a terrorist group. The entire counter ISIS mission
Speaker 10: from the very beginning was faced with this question of
Speaker 10: how these states that wanted to fight ISIS could do
Speaker 10: so without offending their relationships with Turkey as a member
Speaker 10: of NATO and an ally in other respects. So this
Speaker 10: connects specifically to the ISIS issue, not only because the
Speaker 10: contradiction here dates back to the counter ISIS campaign, but
Speaker 10: because actual international trials for ISIS members, actual security policies
Speaker 10: that could address the problems in al Hole, would legitimize
Speaker 10: the SDF and the autonomous administration on the international stage,
Speaker 10: and would legitimize the political philosophies behind what they're doing,
Speaker 10: all of which Turkey deems to be a very serious
Speaker 10: national security threat to its existence. I mean, imagine you
Speaker 10: have a Kurdish woman judge questioning an ISIS member responsible
Speaker 10: for potentially European and American casualties, certainly responsible for casualties
Speaker 10: and all sorts of abuses across Iraq and Syria, about
Speaker 10: the evidence that we have that the international community has,
Speaker 10: that Northeast Syria has, about how Turkey facilitated ISIS actions,
Speaker 10: you know, with the YPG and the YPG there for security,
Speaker 10: with international observers from the US and other coalition countries
Speaker 10: facilitating providing legal and security support. That would absolutely destroy
Speaker 10: Turkey's narrative about what individuals and entities are terrorists and
Speaker 10: which ones have actually contributed not only to the territorial
Speaker 10: militarily defeat of ISIS, but to social and political and
Speaker 10: governance projects that are able to prevent, you know, the
Speaker 10: resurgence of the next eye ISIS. So, you know, this
Speaker 10: kind of fear of building political relationships with the Autonomous
Speaker 10: Administration with legitimate this fear of legitimizing the Autonomous Administration
Speaker 10: project and helping it address security problems in a way
Speaker 10: that would you know, both increase its standing and legitimacy
Speaker 10: locally and internationally, and would show how the actions of
Speaker 10: states like Turkey contributed to prolonging and intensifying the civil
Speaker 10: war in Syria. States simply don't want to do that yet.
Speaker 10: But you know, when we look at the long term
Speaker 10: consequences of whether it's allowing Turkey to continue aggressive actions
Speaker 10: against North East Syria and more broadly, to pursue a
Speaker 10: military solution to its Kurdish conflict, whether it's allowing ISIS
Speaker 10: atrocities to go unpunished, you know, leaving communities that were
Speaker 10: impacted by ISIS to be essentially re traumatized and left
Speaker 10: to live in difficult conditions, you know, not receiving justice
Speaker 10: and allowing these ISIS MAS members to continue to have
Speaker 10: the space to attempt to reconstitute their group and go
Speaker 10: back to the kind of atrocities they were committing and
Speaker 10: attacks they were carrying out worldwide in twenty fourteen twenty fifteen.
Speaker 10: In the long run, this sort of appeasement of Turkey
Speaker 10: over the issue of the Kurdish question and the role
Speaker 10: of the Autonomous Administration, it's going to create the start
Speaker 10: of the next endless war in the Middle East. And
Speaker 10: you know, if policymakers want to avoid that, they need
Speaker 10: to be addressing these problems from a pro peace perspective,
Speaker 10: from a perspective that brings about justice, you know, political
Speaker 10: solutions based on democracy, on gender equality, on the equality
Speaker 10: of all communities in the region, all of these values
Speaker 10: that while imperfectly the Autonomous Administration is really.
Speaker 11: Trying to fight for.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's super important to point out that
Speaker 2: this isn't a necessarily a like Turkey versus Kurdish people
Speaker 2: like wo dichotomy or like those aren't the only people
Speaker 2: impacted by this, right, Like the I think the majority
Speaker 2: of the A, yes, it's not Kurdish people, right, and
Speaker 2: I think we are adf also are not Kurdish.
Speaker 10: I mean, there's a very good paper by doctor Amy
Speaker 10: Austen Holmes, who wrote in an analysis of this conflict
Speaker 10: and the sort of Turkey SDF security dynamics, that what
Speaker 10: we would refer to as the Turkish Kurdish conflict or
Speaker 10: the Turkey PKK conflict is actually a conflict that impacts
Speaker 10: every ethnic and religious group in Turkey, Iraq and Syria.
Speaker 10: And of course you have and we could do an
Speaker 10: entire other episode on this. You know, there are certainly
Speaker 10: Kurds who support Erdwan and the AKP, whether from an
Speaker 10: Islamist perspective or on the basis of class interests. And
Speaker 10: you have Turks ethnic Turkish people who went to North
Speaker 10: East Syria during the height of the fight against ISIS
Speaker 10: as members of socialist groups to provide humanitarian aid and
Speaker 10: to join Kurdish forces in their fight against ISIS. On
Speaker 10: the ground, you have Yuzids, Christians, Syriacs, Assyrians, Armenians, Arabs.
Speaker 10: All different ethnic groups in Iraq and Syria are very
Speaker 10: much impacted by this conflict, and particularly because of the
Speaker 10: Autonomous Administration's multi ethnic and multi religious model. And while
Speaker 10: the autonomous administration system certainly has it's shortcomings and hasn't
Speaker 10: been able to perfectly overcome years and years of sectarian
Speaker 10: and religious and ethnic challenges. It has made a real
Speaker 10: attempt at including all of the peoples of the region.
Speaker 10: And that's one of the reasons why despite all of
Speaker 10: these Turkish attacks, despite the threat of ISSIS, you know,
Speaker 10: these communities have continued to band together and participate in
Speaker 10: SDF and autonomous administration structures in order to try to
Speaker 10: build governance and real post ISIS security. So it's certainly
Speaker 10: not just a very narrowly defined Turkish Kurdish issue. It's
Speaker 10: an issue of civil rights, of political rights, of long
Speaker 10: term security and stability, of what kind of society and
Speaker 10: what kind of governance can and should exist in this region,
Speaker 10: where many Kurds and many other ethnic and religious minorities
Speaker 10: would argue the europe imposition of artificial borders and nation
Speaker 10: states onto areas that were multi ethnic and multi religious
Speaker 10: for thousands and thousands of years was the source of
Speaker 10: a lot of these problems that we see today, not
Speaker 10: only with ISIS, not only with the Syrian war, with
Speaker 10: the Kurdish conflict in Turkey, as well with many of
Speaker 10: the issues that we're seeing in Iraq, in Iran, all
Speaker 10: over the region. So it goes much deeper than that,
Speaker 10: And I think that understanding, you know, the very deep
Speaker 10: historical roots of these issues is what can start to
Speaker 10: point us to the actual very radical solutions that would
Speaker 10: be necessary to get long term peace and security.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that those on I think solutions, Like you said,
Speaker 2: many nation states still exercising kind of pseudocolonial control over
Speaker 2: these places or trying to or trying to at least
Speaker 2: sort of use force to extract wealth that are really
Speaker 2: open to So it creates it's just sort of half asked,
Speaker 2: like you've said that this sort of limited support for
Speaker 2: any some parts of a project, which it doesn't work
Speaker 2: if you only support part of this project right as
Speaker 2: we're seeing. I wonder if people are interested in following
Speaker 2: more about this. I think it's something that like so
Speaker 2: much of the coverage this whole area focuses on, like
Speaker 2: specifically women in our whole right or women who went
Speaker 2: to join isis where can people find out more about
Speaker 2: like the what sources would you suggest for following goings
Speaker 2: on in this area?
Speaker 10: So yeah, I would say following local Syrian and Kurdish
Speaker 10: news sources would be a good place to start. You
Speaker 10: have sites like North Press where I've written before, that
Speaker 10: provide good perspectives from Syrian Kurdish writers. You have a
Speaker 10: human rights organizations working on the ground, groups like Syrians
Speaker 10: for Truth and Justice that's done a lot of documentation
Speaker 10: of issues, like for example, ISIS members who've joined Turkey
Speaker 10: backed groups in the occupied areas. You have arguably one
Speaker 10: of the best English language resources, not only for their
Speaker 10: own publications, but for researchers and journalists to reach out to,
Speaker 10: the Ulsheva Information Center that does a lot of good
Speaker 10: work on their own and also a lot of really
Speaker 10: incredible work to facilitate the work of international researchers and journalists.
Speaker 10: You have the Kurdish media sites like kolar News that
Speaker 10: will give good updates on what the Autonomous Administration is
Speaker 10: doing and saying from their perspective. Of course, there are
Speaker 10: a lot of official pages and sites for Autonomous Administration
Speaker 10: and SDF institutions as well. Those tend to be in
Speaker 10: Kurdish or Arabic, so of course if you know either
Speaker 10: of those languages you can follow them. For English, you
Speaker 10: have some of the SDF affiliated sites that have been translated.
Speaker 10: The YPG Information and Documentation Office have done a lot
Speaker 10: of work on this issue of ISIS and the related
Speaker 10: security challenges, they publish an English, they provide good information
Speaker 10: from that security perspective, and then really, I think any
Speaker 10: sources on social media online that provide good perspectives from
Speaker 10: people who are on the ground, who are providing reputable information,
Speaker 10: whether it's from a human rights side of things, from
Speaker 10: the security side of things, from the administration side of things,
Speaker 10: it's good to get that full spectrum of perspectives of
Speaker 10: what different actors are doing and seeing.
Speaker 7: And then, of course I'd be.
Speaker 10: Remiss if I did not promote my own institution. We
Speaker 10: have published coverage of certainly the ISIS issue in North
Speaker 10: East Syria, but also a lot on the wider political, humanitarian,
Speaker 10: and security challenges related to these interlocking conflicts in Turkey, Syria, Iraq,
Speaker 10: Kurdistan that have sort of formed the very unstable basis
Speaker 10: on which these developments relevant to global security issues like
Speaker 10: ISIS are taking place. So you can certainly read what
Speaker 10: we've been publishing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's an excellent list of resources, and
Speaker 2: lots of the ones that I've been using, other ones
Speaker 2: that you've mentioned, I would just I suppose warned people,
Speaker 2: especially the latest YPJ Information and Documentation Center video and
Speaker 2: our whole comes with a heavy content warning for violence
Speaker 2: that you will see there, which is it's documenting things
Speaker 2: that happen. It's not like they are doing the violence.
Speaker 4: They're not.
Speaker 2: But still, if that's something you don't want to see,
Speaker 2: that's probably a video you don't want to watch, Megan,
Speaker 2: is there anything people can do to help like this?
Speaker 2: I was thinking when we were talking of like I
Speaker 2: met a Kurdish man a month ago at the border
Speaker 2: being held by immigrats and customs enforcement, But it's not
Speaker 2: a topic that gets much coverage in the US, and
Speaker 2: as a result, like people both there and people coming
Speaker 2: here don't get the compassion that let's say Ukrainian people
Speaker 2: who are also fleeing conflict do get. And you can
Speaker 2: see that in a way that they're literally treated differently
Speaker 2: in immigration laws. So is there anything people can do
Speaker 2: to help?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 10: I would say that the first thing is exactly like
Speaker 10: we're doing now on this discussion, and like you as
Speaker 10: a listener listening to this conversation are doing by hearing
Speaker 10: from us and following this issue, encourage media research, human
Speaker 10: rights groups, analysts, and all others who do work in
Speaker 10: any of these fields to cover this issue in its
Speaker 10: full political and security context. Look, we can't only talk
Speaker 10: about North and Ew Syria when there's a crisis. ISIS
Speaker 10: did not come out of nowhere in twenty fourteen. The
Speaker 10: Turkish invasion did not come out of nowhere in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 10: And had we as a society and certainly our institutions
Speaker 10: been more informed and more aware of the root conditions
Speaker 10: causing these outbursts of violence, these outbursts of violence may
Speaker 10: not have happened, They might have been addressed before they happened.
Speaker 10: And so what does it mean to build that awareness?
Speaker 10: That means everything from writing a letter to your local
Speaker 10: newspaper to producing a report at your university with input
Speaker 10: from institutions in North East Syria, some of these local
Speaker 10: media and human rights organizations that we've talked about, to
Speaker 10: hosting an event for your community group on the state
Speaker 10: of this broadly defined conflict in Turkey and Iraq and
Speaker 10: Syria in Kurdistan between the Turkish state and these Kurdish
Speaker 10: groups that, in addition to fighting against ISIS, have been
Speaker 10: struggling for autonomy, self determination, equality between men and women,
Speaker 10: equality of people of different religious beliefs of different ethnic backgrounds.
Speaker 10: Long before ISIS was on the agenda and Northeast Syria
Speaker 10: it was on the agenda. We at the Kurdish Peace
Speaker 10: Institute are always available to help you do this. You
Speaker 10: can reach out to us on our contact page. We
Speaker 10: have information on everything from submitting content of your own
Speaker 10: to resources for reaching out to us for media appearances.
Speaker 10: Of course, there's all the sources I'm mentioned as well,
Speaker 10: and there are other episodes of this wonderful podcast with
Speaker 10: very talented expert speakers and interviewers as well who've spoken
Speaker 10: about issues related to Syria, Turkey and Kurdistan. You can
Speaker 10: advocate for greater political support for the Autonomous Administration, for
Speaker 10: an end to Turkey's aggressive actions against Northeast Syria and
Speaker 10: its ongoing human rights violations in the occupied areas of
Speaker 10: Afriin and russ A Line, and for international political support
Speaker 10: for a democratic, just peaceful solution to the Turkish Kurdish conflict.
Speaker 10: This is, i think, at the end of the day,
Speaker 10: the root of all of these problems that we're seeing here,
Speaker 10: and if this conflict were to be resolved, if Turkey
Speaker 10: were no longer to take an aggressive militaristic approach to
Speaker 10: the very concept of Kurdish autonomy, the very social base
Speaker 10: of Kurdish communities that has the capacity to seek and
Speaker 10: organize for autonomy itself. This would mean an end to
Speaker 10: authoritarianism in Turkey, which has been leading Turkey to all
Speaker 10: sorts of destabilizing behavior and certainly in miserating countless Turkish citizens.
Speaker 10: This is one of the reasons why not only Kurds,
Speaker 10: but many Turkish people of all ethnicities as well have
Speaker 10: been fleeing Turkey to Europe and even to the United States.
Speaker 10: Has been the escalating persecution, poverty, and difficulty of life
Speaker 10: under Erdowan, which is directly connected to air Dowan's choice
Speaker 10: in twenty fifteen to end piece talks with the Kurdish
Speaker 10: movement in order to consolidate his total power over the
Speaker 10: state using war and far right nationalism. This would end
Speaker 10: not only these difficult conditions within Turkey, this persecution, this
Speaker 10: economic devastation, this oppression of all oppressed segments of society.
Speaker 10: It would end Turkey's aggressive foreign policy in the region
Speaker 10: as well, which would be hugely important for allowing North
Speaker 10: East Syria the stability it means to put ISIS members
Speaker 10: on trial, hold them accountable for what they've done, begin
Speaker 10: to rebuild, give post isis communities of future. Allow these
Speaker 10: people who have suffered so much to defeat this group,
Speaker 10: of course for themselves, but really for all humanity to
Speaker 10: be able to build new lives, recover and have a
Speaker 10: say in their future, and by doing that, to pursue
Speaker 10: a political solution to the Syrian conflict. Right now, northe
Speaker 10: Assyria is the only major part of Syria outside of
Speaker 10: government control that has a system that is semi functional
Speaker 10: despite all of the setbacks of the war and the
Speaker 10: economic crisis, which again could be a whole other episode,
Speaker 10: which has empowered women, which has empowered different ethnic and
Speaker 10: religious communities, They could be part of a political solution
Speaker 10: in Syria. Turkey's war on the Kurdish movement, you know,
Speaker 10: is preventing that. This goes into a lot of challenges
Speaker 10: in Iraq as well, with increasing Turkish military operations. They're
Speaker 10: related to the conflict that have made life extremely difficult
Speaker 10: for many different Iraqi communities. But again, all of this,
Speaker 10: this conflict, you could argue, is the largest and most
Speaker 10: impactful and certainly one of the longest running. You know,
Speaker 10: for forty years now of the modern Middle East. It
Speaker 10: is an international conflict. The United States European governments, like
Speaker 10: we saw with the example of the US and European
Speaker 10: position on NATO accession and the concessions to Turkey made there,
Speaker 10: have been very involved in supporting militarily and politically Turkey's
Speaker 10: efforts to resolve this conflict militarily and to deny the
Speaker 10: Kurdish people their rights by force. And we you listening
Speaker 10: to this are communities in all of these different countries
Speaker 10: that have a stake in this conflict. We're the ones
Speaker 10: you can change that. And you can do that on
Speaker 10: two different tracks. So One, you can build awareness in
Speaker 10: your own community. You can build connections between your community
Speaker 10: groups and institutions in North East Syria, in Turkey, in
Speaker 10: different places impacted by this conflict in order to find
Speaker 10: ways that you can help respond to specific needs, work
Speaker 10: on specific projects together. And two, in the long run,
Speaker 10: use those connections, your knowledge you gain from those connections,
Speaker 10: the resources you create as you reach out to the media,
Speaker 10: as you meet different people working on this, to reach
Speaker 10: out to decision makers and show this is an issue
Speaker 10: that their constituents care about. This is an issue that's
Speaker 10: not something that governments can do without a response from
Speaker 10: public opinion. And this is an issue where there is
Speaker 10: organized pressure to change policy, you know, in favor of peace,
Speaker 10: in favor of stability, in favor of political solutions. Because
Speaker 10: when we do that, and there's lots of examples of
Speaker 10: how different communities and organizations have done that, when we
Speaker 10: do that on a large enough scale, we're not only
Speaker 10: addressing a humanitarian problem, we're not only contributing to peace
Speaker 10: and stability in the region. But at the end of
Speaker 10: the day, we can find solutions for these conflicts that
Speaker 10: mean that there won't be another rise of Isis, there
Speaker 10: won't be another Turkish invasion and occupation of northern Syria,
Speaker 10: and there will be models for political and social transformation
Speaker 10: that can help us end conflicts in other parts of
Speaker 10: the world as well. So there's lots of ways to contribute.
Speaker 10: I hope you're inspired to do so. And I think
Speaker 10: that just listening to this conversation, hearing about what's going on,
Speaker 10: and thinking about what you can do, that's already the
Speaker 10: first step. You're already there, and that's the most important thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, great, thanks Bigin. That's a really good I think
Speaker 2: place to end because it gives some people something to do.
Speaker 2: I think far too often, like it's really easy and
Speaker 2: the immedia to just point at something and say it's
Speaker 2: bad and then walk away and not sort of leave
Speaker 2: people a way to help or do something. So I
Speaker 2: really appreciate you doing that. Is there any where people
Speaker 2: can find you on the internet, So you can find.
Speaker 10: All of my research and writing at Kurdishpeace dot org,
Speaker 10: as well as all of the research and writing of
Speaker 10: our brilliant contributors, many of whom are on the ground
Speaker 10: in Northern Syria, themselves in other parts of the region,
Speaker 10: or who have extensively traveled to that region for their work.
Speaker 10: I encourage you to read all of our content, and
Speaker 10: you follow our social media pages as well at Kurdish
Speaker 10: piece org on Twitter, and yes, you can read not
Speaker 10: only my work but the work of a lot of
Speaker 10: other really great people. But I'm very lucky to collaborate.
Speaker 2: With amazing Thanks so much for your time, Megan, Thank you.
Speaker 10: James.
Speaker 2: Hi everyone, it's just me James today and I'm joined
Speaker 2: today by James Cordero and Jacqueline Ariano. They're both from
Speaker 2: Border Kindness, which is a group that does border aid
Speaker 2: chiefly like water drops and support to keep people alive
Speaker 2: as they're making their journey across the desert here in
Speaker 2: San Diego. Is that a fair characterization of what you
Speaker 2: guys do.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we do work all across the border in California. Currently,
Speaker 4: some of us we're based out of San Diego. What
Speaker 4: we do are water drops in eastern San Diego County
Speaker 4: and Imperial Counties.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 12: The organization is based primarily in Mexicali, Baja California, on
Speaker 12: the Mexico side, and that's where it was founded.
Speaker 2: Okay, corresponds to the.
Speaker 12: Arrival of the migrant caravans in twenty eighteen. We've personally
Speaker 12: been doing drops since twenty sixteen, but we brought the
Speaker 12: program over to Border Kindness a little over a year ago,
Speaker 12: and we operate programs on both sides of the border.
Speaker 12: Primarily James and I are involved with water Drop, but
Speaker 12: we also as an organization, have a school on the
Speaker 12: Mexico side. We have operated in a pro bono clinic
Speaker 12: on the Mexican side, and currently we're providing direct aid
Speaker 12: with the families of migrant farm workers in Imperial and
Speaker 12: Riverside Counties.
Speaker 2: Nice. Yeah, that's a lot of very important things. I
Speaker 2: don't get enough money or attention. So you said you
Speaker 2: started about a year ago. I bet you bet. You've
Speaker 2: been doing the border drops for what's that seven sometime
Speaker 2: seven years? Yeah, since twenty sixteen, And I wonder like
Speaker 2: if we could start by and we can get into
Speaker 2: some of the details later. But I've been reporting on
Speaker 2: the border for that long and there certainly have been
Speaker 2: notable changes, And I wonder what changes you've seen, Like
Speaker 2: we go back to like pre twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: like that was before the whole wall shenanigans, So like,
Speaker 2: do you guys want to describe what changes you've seen
Speaker 2: in patterns of migration, and like I guess how safe
Speaker 2: that journey is or isn't, and how that's changed.
Speaker 4: Well, as far as patterns, I think it's definitely increased,
Speaker 4: definitely by the as far as seeing the amounts of
Speaker 4: supplies being used, the traces of you know, migrants crossing
Speaker 4: through in the desert in the mountains, seeing the amount
Speaker 4: of border patrol apprehensions and interactions with people that cross,
Speaker 4: and the overall militarization of the border.
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah, And I think like as far one of
Speaker 12: the biggest changes that we've seen on the border overall,
Speaker 12: and that has reflected in the water Drop as well,
Speaker 12: is a change in the demographics of people that are
Speaker 12: coming through. Even as recently as when we started in
Speaker 12: twenty sixteen, there were much more of like the trend
Speaker 12: that was generally kind of like stereotypically the case of
Speaker 12: like who was crossing, which was men of origin of
Speaker 12: working age crossing to work and send send money back
Speaker 12: to their families.
Speaker 11: Yeah, that's obviously.
Speaker 12: Still a large part of who is coming through, but
Speaker 12: in the most recent three to five years especially, the
Speaker 12: demographics are changing not just by country of origin to
Speaker 12: include all over the world and reflecting like this global
Speaker 12: migration crisis that's going on, but also the reasons and
Speaker 12: like the desperation is changing.
Speaker 7: So now it's not just like economic migration.
Speaker 12: There is asylum seekers, refugees, and it is just changing
Speaker 12: in tone of like why they're migrating and in what
Speaker 12: ways they're migrating.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, definitely, I've noticed that. And like as the
Speaker 2: climate continues to change, right, like more and more people
Speaker 2: come from those countries and you've seen that too that
Speaker 2: are most heavily impacted by climate change. Yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 2: that makes a journey as it gets harder and harder
Speaker 2: in the desert, like that makes a journey more and
Speaker 2: more perilous.
Speaker 12: I guess they've come from farther too, and they're the
Speaker 12: least sometimes like not at all familiar with the weather,
Speaker 12: with the terrain, what they're up against with like how
Speaker 12: you have to move in border town. If you're not
Speaker 12: from a border town, you don't really know how to
Speaker 12: move and who to trust or more importantly, who not
Speaker 12: to trust. Yes, yeah, and the people there's a lot
Speaker 12: of pitfalls to just arriving at the border, even from
Speaker 12: like internal migration, like within Mexico, people arrive to the
Speaker 12: border and don't really know how to operate like the
Speaker 12: day to day there, and it's really made an already
Speaker 12: incredibly dangerous situation.
Speaker 7: Like just just totally perilous.
Speaker 4: As more people have migrated from different countries around the world,
Speaker 4: you're also seeing people who have been on that journey
Speaker 4: just to get to the United States line for longer
Speaker 4: amounts of time that you know, instead of maybe just
Speaker 4: weeks or a month, you're talking about months on months
Speaker 4: that people have been traveling you know, by foot, by train,
Speaker 4: by bus, you know, sometimes by plane, however, they can
Speaker 4: and we've seen, you know, we've seen like invoices for
Speaker 4: like hotel stays that people traveling from Turkey came and
Speaker 4: they stayed like Inkan Koum for like a month. So
Speaker 4: like I mean, people are gone from their from their homelands,
Speaker 4: you know, longer amounts of time now that you know,
Speaker 4: isn't a comfortable thing. So it's not like you can
Speaker 4: ax and not like you can you know, rest and
Speaker 4: you know mentally and physically everything like that. So it's
Speaker 4: definitely making that part harder for people crossing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, Like I'm seeing more and more migrants
Speaker 2: from from Africa and like they are very much like
Speaker 2: it's the community for them is hard to find sometimes,
Speaker 2: like you know that, like there are different spaces for them,
Speaker 2: and like they they end up in like distinct spaces
Speaker 2: from from other like migrant too, coming from other areas,
Speaker 2: and I know it can be very perilous for them,
Speaker 2: like you say, just just moving around border towns and
Speaker 2: navigating the pitfalls of that. Yeah, it's it's becoming like
Speaker 2: a more and more difficult and I guess could have
Speaker 2: complicated issue, but I think what's not particularly complicated is that, Like,
Speaker 2: no one should have to walk across the desert without water,
Speaker 2: right like that, It's it's pretty basic. So maybe we
Speaker 2: could go through what a water drop is and like
Speaker 2: what just if we could walk through, like you know,
Speaker 2: how far you guys walk, What you're leaving at there,
Speaker 2: what you find that people take, what you find that
Speaker 2: they need in their journeys. And you were talking about
Speaker 2: the receipts. I found tons of those and plane tickets
Speaker 2: and stuff like the things that you find that help
Speaker 2: you understand how better to help people. I guess.
Speaker 7: You want to talk about like how far the drops
Speaker 7: are generally and all of that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so right now, it just depends on the season,
Speaker 4: the weather, you know, the length of the drops we hike,
Speaker 4: you know, a lot of our drops. We also utilize
Speaker 4: four x fours to get us closer to areas to
Speaker 4: start our hikes, so we don't have to walk even
Speaker 4: more miles. That helps us out in you know, being
Speaker 4: able to carry more supplies you with less walking in
Speaker 4: some areas. But when it's cooler times and the temperatures
Speaker 4: are you know, below eighty degrees, you know, we can
Speaker 4: hike you know anywhere up to I think the max
Speaker 4: that we did was like just about twenty. But on
Speaker 4: the average, you know, the cool weather hikes will do,
Speaker 4: you know, right around ten miles or so, and then
Speaker 4: when it gets hot and the desert gets really hot
Speaker 4: out there, you know, like over one hundred and ten
Speaker 4: degrees on a constant basis and starting to get over
Speaker 4: one hundred and twenty degrees, you know, we can maybe
Speaker 4: do about five miles by foot. We've kind of ran
Speaker 4: a trial and air this season as far as trying
Speaker 4: to push further to see how far we can go,
Speaker 4: and we attempted seven miles and that I mean we
Speaker 4: all were gassed right around the five mile mark. So
Speaker 4: we have to set limits because not only is the distance,
Speaker 4: but the time spent underneath the sun without shade, and
Speaker 4: that exposure is you know, what drives the internal body
Speaker 4: temperature up and everything like that, and if you don't
Speaker 4: have a chance to cool down, that's when your body
Speaker 4: starts to wear out. You get heat exhaustion, and you know,
Speaker 4: we want to avoid heat stroke at all costs, and
Speaker 4: we're trying to make sure everyone's safety is accounted for,
Speaker 4: so we have to kind of cap that in the
Speaker 4: in the summertime to like five miles.
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah, sure, we have to definitely make pushes in
Speaker 12: the winter to stockpile the areas that are just simply
Speaker 12: not accessible in the summer months. And the strategic and
Speaker 12: like paying attention to what are entry points and can
Speaker 12: we hit those entry points or exit points.
Speaker 7: So maybe we can't.
Speaker 12: Really access a route throughout its entirety, but we can
Speaker 12: hit certain points of it more safely as a team
Speaker 12: during these like incredibly hot months. But we leave supplies
Speaker 12: of water, food, and protective clothing. And the protective clothing
Speaker 12: varies depending on season. So I mean a lot of
Speaker 12: people don't really take into consideration how cold it gets
Speaker 12: in these areas. It gets wall below freezing in the winter.
Speaker 12: In the mountains of East San Diego County, it snows.
Speaker 12: You know, some drops have gotten snowed out. We haven't
Speaker 12: been able to complete them because of the snow. And
Speaker 12: so the protective clothing varies in the summer. It's things
Speaker 12: like bandanas, cooling towels, hats, socks we leave throughout the year.
Speaker 12: People's footwear not being appropriate almost almost always. Yeah, blister
Speaker 12: can be a death sentence out there. So if you
Speaker 12: get a blister and you're not able to keep up
Speaker 12: with your group, there's a really good chance that you're
Speaker 12: going to get left. So something like having dry socks
Speaker 12: to change into can very well save somebody's life. So
Speaker 12: we leave socks throughout the year, pop top cans of
Speaker 12: food and.
Speaker 6: Of course water.
Speaker 4: In the wintertime, we leave sweatshirts, beanie like mittens, gloves, scarves, jackets,
Speaker 4: sometimes puffy jackets, sometimes blankets, you know, stuff to keep
Speaker 4: people warm when the temperatures you know, can be freezing
Speaker 4: for you know, most of the day. You know, in
Speaker 4: those you know, harsh months of like January and February
Speaker 4: where eastern Sandiwo County gets the like the winter storms,
Speaker 4: the freezing cold, you know, when roads get shut down,
Speaker 4: we can't even access so as Jacqueline mentioned, you know,
Speaker 4: when it is cooler, we try to go as much
Speaker 4: as we can, as far as we can to stockpile
Speaker 4: as much as possible for when the weather prohibits us
Speaker 4: from doing so otherwise.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and just give people a sense of like the
Speaker 2: temperature swings, Like I've been in the mountains down by
Speaker 2: the border at like twenty degrees fahrenheit, which is like
Speaker 2: minus ten ish celsius, I think, And yeah, also at
Speaker 2: one hundred and twenty, which is like almost fifty celsius,
Speaker 2: and so you can they didn't swing that much in
Speaker 2: one day. But there are days when it's above forty
Speaker 2: degrees celsius and also below freezing in the same day.
Speaker 4: Like it's.
Speaker 2: It can be really. Yeah, it's a perilous place. It's
Speaker 2: that's why people don't live there as a rule, Like
Speaker 2: it's not a place that's kind to people. So I wonder,
Speaker 2: like a lot of people, I know, we did a
Speaker 2: series on title forty two. We spoke to a lot
Speaker 2: of people, and a lot of people reached out and
Speaker 2: they like they want to help, and I understand that
Speaker 2: the border I think for a lot of people, it's
Speaker 2: like I think reporting on the borders as a rule
Speaker 2: is not great, like that we tend to see migrants
Speaker 2: as numbers and not as people a lot when when
Speaker 2: people report on the border, right, and that that's kind
Speaker 2: of it happens with with more liberal outlets as well
Speaker 2: as more right wing outlets. But I wonder, like a
Speaker 2: how people who aren't in town, Like if you're not
Speaker 2: in if you don't live in the border lands, right,
Speaker 2: it's so you live in the middle of them America, Like,
Speaker 2: how can they help? What can they do to kind
Speaker 2: of support the prices that you're doing making this horrible thing?
Speaker 2: It will kind of.
Speaker 12: We have on all of our social media and as
Speaker 12: well as on our website ways that people can help.
Speaker 12: We have wish lists for items if people help want
Speaker 12: to contribute in that way, and that's literally like contributing
Speaker 12: the items that we leave. We also have donation links,
Speaker 12: so if people want to help financially, that goes a
Speaker 12: huge way in order to facilitate everything that we do.
Speaker 12: It's i mean, gas is incredibly expensive to the supplies
Speaker 12: that we don't get donated by a wish list have
Speaker 12: to be purchased, that sort of thing. So providing material
Speaker 12: aid is one way of contributing. And then aside from that,
Speaker 12: I think just following along with this work and sharing
Speaker 12: it and changing the conversation because, like as you said,
Speaker 12: reporting on the border can be really tricky. People tend
Speaker 12: to not just utilize migrants, but utilize the border as
Speaker 12: a region in order to have talking points for either
Speaker 12: like media outlets or people campaigns or that sort of thing,
Speaker 12: and the border gets treated as sort of like its
Speaker 12: own foreign area that's not related to either country, like
Speaker 12: nobody wants to take responsibility for it. And you know,
Speaker 12: residents of the United States also are complicit in that
Speaker 12: because they don't really they just.
Speaker 7: Talk about the border.
Speaker 12: They don't say like, this is something that's happening in
Speaker 12: my country. So I think sharing and discussing and becoming
Speaker 12: informed of what's going on, and also feeling like that
Speaker 12: kinship and ownership of like, hey, this is happening. I
Speaker 12: mean for people, it doesn't have to be as far
Speaker 12: as like the middle of the country. A lot of
Speaker 12: people in San Diego don't eat, really engage in.
Speaker 2: Yere, they don't don't bother.
Speaker 12: You know, it feels like so far away, even though
Speaker 12: it's like twenty minutes away. Meanwhile, peopeople are dropping dead
Speaker 12: so close to where people live and they choose to
Speaker 12: turn a blind eye.
Speaker 7: So I think.
Speaker 12: Kind of demystifying that for ourselves and sharing in that
Speaker 12: it goes a long way as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely, I think that's that's very true. It's always
Speaker 2: amazing to me, like how twenty eighteen or the other
Speaker 2: big one I guess would be the end of title
Speaker 2: forty two, which was this year in May, like people
Speaker 2: will become more aware of what's happening and turn up
Speaker 2: and like it's so very radicalizing from other people in
Speaker 2: a positive way, like get engaged m in a way
Speaker 2: they haven't been engaged before. But it's I know, it's
Speaker 2: like it shouldn't be, like we shouldn't be saying we
Speaker 2: ever get used to how like cruel our border infrastructure
Speaker 2: is and what it does for us, But people are
Speaker 2: just blown away every time. Absolutely, Yeah, but I think
Speaker 2: you're right, like witnessing it is very important, even if
Speaker 2: you know you can't done it financially, if you can't
Speaker 2: get down.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, definitely just share stuff that, you know, if
Speaker 4: you know our organization posts something on social media, you know,
Speaker 4: I mean it has to be taken as the truth
Speaker 4: because we're out there firsthand. We're the ones on the
Speaker 4: ground seeing reporting back, and by sharing that, you get
Speaker 4: people you know in different parts of the country or
Speaker 4: even you know, different parts of the world seeing like
Speaker 4: the realities of the US Mexico border, because you know,
Speaker 4: most people in the United States don't know. If they
Speaker 4: don't don't see it, they'll live near it. So that's
Speaker 4: you know, something that most people rely on the media
Speaker 4: and what they see on the nightly news, and you
Speaker 4: know even that, you know, the big media outlets don't
Speaker 4: take the most realistic or don't share the most realistic
Speaker 4: parts of the border, you know, only to you know,
Speaker 4: kate to their you know, their sponsors or cater to
Speaker 4: their crowds, and so a lot of people will get
Speaker 4: like the headlines, but they don't get the real deal,
Speaker 4: like you know, what's going on down the border, and
Speaker 4: so sharing is is a big part of you know,
Speaker 4: how the word spreads of the work that we do
Speaker 4: in other organizations as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's very very valid. It was interesting
Speaker 2: to me recently. I didn't if you guys saw this,
Speaker 2: but like the floating border barrier in Texas and like
Speaker 2: very like this week, people have been reporting that it
Speaker 2: has the blades on it, which it does, and that's
Speaker 2: fucked up, like they shouldn't. It's horrible, but like it
Speaker 2: was kind of illiterative that I guess none of that
Speaker 2: are that none of the nationalitists had someone who'd seen it,
Speaker 2: because the blades have been there for like months where
Speaker 2: the prototype sat there. They were in the twenty twenty
Speaker 2: solicitation to like it just seemed odd to me that
Speaker 2: someone had to tweet a video for them to like
Speaker 2: understand because they go no one had walked up to
Speaker 2: it and checked it out, which I don't know. I
Speaker 2: think it's hard to do border reporting in New York personally,
Speaker 2: But yes, you're interested in the northern border. So I
Speaker 2: wanted to ask about Title forty two because I think
Speaker 2: our listeners are pretty well informed on what that was
Speaker 2: and what happened before and after that. So did you
Speaker 2: guys notice when that came into effect? Just to recap
Speaker 2: I guess for people, Title forty two allowed border patrol
Speaker 2: to bounce people straight back south without processing them and
Speaker 2: in nearly all cases without hearing that their claims were
Speaker 2: asylum if they had, and then those people were sometimes
Speaker 2: latterally translated across the border to a border town where
Speaker 2: they may not have had contacts or family or any resources.
Speaker 2: And it often resulted in most people finding themselves in
Speaker 2: an even more difficult situation than they already were, or
Speaker 2: trying to cross in more difficult and dangerous places to
Speaker 2: avoid that. So did you guys notice any changes like
Speaker 2: around and that came in what March or twenty twenty?
Speaker 2: As soon as they could as soon as they found
Speaker 2: an excusing in COVID, and not so much.
Speaker 4: From what we see because we don't come across people
Speaker 4: too often face to face. Did notice that once the
Speaker 4: policy was put into place, meaning Title forty two, and
Speaker 4: you know, with the pandemic starting, we did notice a
Speaker 4: big uptick on the amount of people coming through. We've
Speaker 4: seen you know before that you know, just a handful
Speaker 4: of people maybe like that. We'd come across a lot
Speaker 4: of times, those people crossing at nighttime and it wasn't
Speaker 4: something that we came across much. But after that went
Speaker 4: into effect in twenty twenty, we started running into a
Speaker 4: lot more people. We started seeing people that knew, you know,
Speaker 4: somewhat of you know, the policy, and that people would
Speaker 4: try multiple times every day to you know, cross through,
Speaker 4: and if they got apprehended and got you know, taken
Speaker 4: into Mexico, they tried again that same day. And so
Speaker 4: we noticed a lot more of our supplies being used,
Speaker 4: a lot more foot traffic, and a lot more you know,
Speaker 4: interactions with us. We started seeing a lot more interactions
Speaker 4: with you know, board patrol and people crossing through. And
Speaker 4: so when the policy was coming to an end, the
Speaker 4: only thing that we really saw increase was the amount
Speaker 4: of people trying to get in before you know, quote
Speaker 4: unquote got closed off, you know, before like the bands
Speaker 4: would go into effect and you know, like the no
Speaker 4: you know, you can re enter for a you know
Speaker 4: a certain amount of years and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 4: So like the camp in Hukumba, you know, you see
Speaker 4: you know, thousands of people showing up as that you know, stopped,
Speaker 4: as Top forty two stopped. We really can't notice too
Speaker 4: much yet that less people are crossing through compared to
Speaker 4: the beginning the middle of the policy. Our supplies are
Speaker 4: still being used at a high rate, still see a
Speaker 4: fair amount of traffic come through, you know, these these
Speaker 4: corridors and everything like that. So it's kind of hard
Speaker 4: on our end. But you know, we also know that
Speaker 4: people who do cross not at a porta entry by foot,
Speaker 4: whether it's over a fence, whether it's around a fence,
Speaker 4: whether it's through the desert, over the hills. We know
Speaker 4: that people are still being apprehended, processed, and released with
Speaker 4: their asylum claims. So it's hard, as you know, on
Speaker 4: the board to know exactly what's going on because a
Speaker 4: policy can say one thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it doesn't matter exactly.
Speaker 4: Like the residential administration can say one thing, the DHS
Speaker 4: can say one thing, and completely different is happening, you
Speaker 4: know right right there. I don't know. I mean, I
Speaker 4: can't really say honestly how much it's changed from our perspective.
Speaker 12: I think when these things happen, like it's always really
Speaker 12: difficult because like I think the three of us are
Speaker 12: aware of there's the things that are put in place,
Speaker 12: and that's how they're going to be applied in theory,
Speaker 12: and then those of us that have been doing this
Speaker 12: work can anticipate how it's going to have an impact
Speaker 12: in practice.
Speaker 4: So, like.
Speaker 7: The things that are occurring now in order to so
Speaker 7: called like curb.
Speaker 12: The influx of people like using an app or having
Speaker 12: like on certain things, like all of these things like
Speaker 12: we know and we don't have like any faith that
Speaker 12: they were put in in good faith, and we know
Speaker 12: like that we can anticipate, Okay, you're gonna be banned
Speaker 12: if you don't go in through these like really ridiculously
Speaker 12: inaccessible means, and that that word is going to get
Speaker 12: around that people are going to freak out, They're not
Speaker 12: going to bother and they're going to hit the desert,
Speaker 12: and that's what we're seeing. Whether we can actually like
Speaker 12: attribute it directly to like these policy changes, what I
Speaker 12: think we can attribute it more directly to is like one,
Speaker 12: global migration, regardless of policy, is increasing all over the world,
Speaker 12: and that desperation doesn't like really wait for any kind
Speaker 12: of policy change. Two is like the misinformation and sort
Speaker 12: of like chatter that people are hearing about like this
Speaker 12: pos changing. Oh I heard that, like if you don't
Speaker 12: use this app, they're going to put you in jail.
Speaker 12: And like just like literally these things that we're hearing
Speaker 12: on the border that is funneling people directly into the
Speaker 12: desert because they want to avoid any kind of interaction
Speaker 12: with border patrol. Even if they have like what would
Speaker 12: be a you know, like an asylum claim. People aren't
Speaker 12: trusting because there's so much change and uncertainty at like
Speaker 12: a policy level. There's no accessibility to this information, there's
Speaker 12: no clarity to this information. Nobody knows what's going on,
Speaker 12: whether it's people that are working in border aid or
Speaker 12: people that are seeking asylum. So people are just you know,
Speaker 12: taking their chances and hitting the desert. And regardless of
Speaker 12: the policy change, like ever since the last like you know,
Speaker 12: like we said like three to five years, the increase
Speaker 12: has been like exponential every single year.
Speaker 7: It just continues increasing.
Speaker 4: I wanted to add in, is that so the Title
Speaker 4: forty two policy was used, you know, in conjunction with
Speaker 4: the you know, national emergency with COVID and all that
Speaker 4: kind of stuff with the country, you know, ending the
Speaker 4: national emergency, they couldn't you know, couldn't justify keeping Title
Speaker 4: forty two in effect. And in a way, I feel
Speaker 4: that the administration was just playing you know, political chess
Speaker 4: and using people, vulnerable people as pawns. And so the
Speaker 4: rhetoric coming out and you know, the you know, we're
Speaker 4: taking a hard stance and this that and the other,
Speaker 4: a crackdown on immigration, and that I feel it was
Speaker 4: the current presidential administration just trying to appeal to a
Speaker 4: larger audience or when the election comes up next year,
Speaker 4: you know, can you say, hey, look did this, did that,
Speaker 4: did this? And the way the numbers have been skewed
Speaker 4: for apprehensions, you know, that's when you'd have like say
Speaker 4: in San Luis and Yuma, Arizona, you would see you know,
Speaker 4: hundreds and thousands of people every day showing up to
Speaker 4: present themselves for asilence. Those all got recorded as apprehension numbers.
Speaker 4: So you've got in one month, you know, however many
Speaker 4: you know, thousands. Now Title forty two ends. Now that
Speaker 4: number shrinks down. Now that looks better, That looks tougher
Speaker 4: on you know, immergion. That looks like you're doing this,
Speaker 4: that and the other. Meanwhile, you have people just you know,
Speaker 4: being vulnerable, being you know, in limbo, you know, on
Speaker 4: the other side of the border, or you have them
Speaker 4: taking to the mountains and deserts and taking the dangerous
Speaker 4: trek just so they can be apprehended and you know,
Speaker 4: plead their case and try to get asylum and try
Speaker 4: to get released into the United States. So people that
Speaker 4: are being used as ponds in this political theater that
Speaker 4: we always talk about. As always, it doesn't matter the administration,
Speaker 4: whether it's blue, whether it's red, whether it's orange, whether
Speaker 4: it's old, whether it's you know, money, it's all money.
Speaker 4: And unfortunately, you know, we have to constantly like dispel
Speaker 4: a lot of that false narrative that comes out, and
Speaker 4: it gets exhausting, but I mean it's what we have
Speaker 4: to do because you're not going to find that out
Speaker 4: any other way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're really not. I think that's the next one point.
Speaker 2: And the point about apprehensions is good, right, they always
Speaker 2: reported and I've heard like NPR do this report apprehensions
Speaker 2: as if they're individuals, which they were not under Title
Speaker 2: forty two. Like if you cross five times in a
Speaker 2: day and get apprehended and sent back five times, that's
Speaker 2: five apprehensions. It's one person, And they were deliberately using
Speaker 2: that to make this to seem like more people are coming,
Speaker 2: and as you say, now it will seem like less
Speaker 2: because that doesn't happen anymore. I think your point about
Speaker 2: like the jacking and the points about the misinformation is
Speaker 2: super crucial and one that again often isn't reported. But
Speaker 2: like I'm not a lawyer, and I can't give people
Speaker 2: legal advice, but constantly when I'm in Tijuana, when I'm
Speaker 2: in Sonora, when anywhere where I'm like on the southern
Speaker 2: side of the border or on this side of the border,
Speaker 2: people will ask me, or when the people are trapped
Speaker 2: in between the two fences that constitute the border, people
Speaker 2: will say, hey have you had this? Hey I got this,
Speaker 2: and they'll play like voice messages on WhatsApp often or
Speaker 2: show me a WhatsApp and we'll go over like that's
Speaker 2: not my understanding, you know, like I don't think that's
Speaker 2: the case, but it's it's I understand you're vulnerable, you're scared,
Speaker 2: and this shit like I have a PhD and speak
Speaker 2: all the concerned languages, and I don't understand it fully,
Speaker 2: Like it's it's complicated and petrifying if this is your
Speaker 2: only hope of like a dignified life, and I think
Speaker 2: it's something that people don't understand. It's how hard it
Speaker 2: is for those people to get decent information about like
Speaker 2: what there's quote unquote supposed to do, especially when we
Speaker 2: have this app, which like I don't have a ton
Speaker 2: of foyers in around the app, but I don't think
Speaker 2: I'll ever get any documents back from the FAD to
Speaker 2: be honest, but yeah, it's it's so toerocious. I think
Speaker 2: it's ridiculous.
Speaker 7: Yeah no, then the information that people receive isn't even accurate.
Speaker 12: Like so whenever there is that somebody like say has
Speaker 12: come to like our office downtown in Mehigali and like
Speaker 12: you know, run in their paperwork and say, like I
Speaker 12: have a court date they're all like there was a
Speaker 12: time like during you know MPP and all of that,
Speaker 12: like where people were being giving court dates on Sundays
Speaker 12: or being given court dates in Texas when they were
Speaker 12: sent back after their arrest in Arizona to MEXICALI like,
Speaker 12: just crazy stuff. Like if people are even lucky enough
Speaker 12: to get somebody to help guide them through the process,
Speaker 12: it's not even like a certainty that the information that
Speaker 12: they're provided is even going to be accurate on purpose,
Speaker 12: Like people are given inaccurate information to wade through this
Speaker 12: process that doesn't seem to make sense to anyone. It's
Speaker 12: it's wildly like convoluted. I mean that's the intention, right,
Speaker 12: Like it's not meant to be navigated in any way.
Speaker 2: No, no, it's not. It's meant to be belove I think.
Speaker 2: And like even with the work that our friends at
Speaker 2: Alato do and other legal aid groups, I was speaking
Speaker 2: to an Ethiopian friend who I met in Tijuana and
Speaker 2: he lives in US and he helps other folks now
Speaker 2: who have arrived more recently, and he was saying that
Speaker 2: like getting a lawyer to represent you can cost you
Speaker 2: maybe five grand, maybe twelve, and you might not have
Speaker 2: the legal right to work, right, so where is that
Speaker 2: money supposed to come from? And then do you know
Speaker 2: if if your language is you know, aroma or something,
Speaker 2: it's that much harder to navigate that system, to find
Speaker 2: useful resources to explain it to you. And it's yeah,
Speaker 2: it's people like to talk about like how I know
Speaker 2: that their family did legal legal quote unquote migration when
Speaker 2: there weren't these checks in place and they didn't have
Speaker 2: to do any of this shit, And I don't know,
Speaker 2: it's I don't think people realize how brutalizing the system
Speaker 2: is until they've seen it first hand.
Speaker 11: That there the point.
Speaker 12: Like the and the confusion, like putting people in danger
Speaker 12: is the whole point. And it's intentional. Like so if
Speaker 12: somebody's there and like you said, like they speak there,
Speaker 12: they're not able to even like wrap their heads around
Speaker 12: the process, letl on access like the resources in order
Speaker 12: to navigate that system. Then Yota approaches them and tells
Speaker 12: them like, oh, I can take you over here to Romrosa.
Speaker 12: All you have to do is pay me three hundred
Speaker 12: American instead of five thousand for this, Like, eh, you're
Speaker 12: probably not going to win that case. The town's a
Speaker 12: mile away. The town's a mile away, and it's a
Speaker 12: straight shot and you'll get there in half a day
Speaker 12: and then you're good to go. And I mean we've
Speaker 12: heard the most wild stories, like even from people in
Speaker 12: the middle of the desert lost saying they told me
Speaker 12: it was two mile walk and that there was they
Speaker 12: were hiring in the town on the other side of
Speaker 12: that hill. Yeah, like, and I mean, like who wouldn't
Speaker 12: at that point it's like you don't have a country
Speaker 12: to go back to. Yeah, Like it's no longer like, oh,
Speaker 12: I'm fleeing my I'm migrating from my country because there's
Speaker 12: no work. No, there is no country to speak of,
Speaker 12: at least not for you. And you're here and this
Speaker 12: Goyota presents you this upper like so it's misinformation and
Speaker 12: exploitation like every single step of the way. And a
Speaker 12: lot of the time people's most straightforward avenue is through
Speaker 12: the desert, even though it's like unbelievable, hardened, very very
Speaker 12: often deadly. That's like the surest shot that they have
Speaker 12: and they take it because I mean it wouldn't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, it's it's not like yet, like you say,
Speaker 2: people aren't like you know, doing the numbers and thinking
Speaker 2: they'll make more money in the US. It's like I
Speaker 2: will die if I stay, or someone who's already killed
Speaker 2: someone I love, and I have to leave now, and
Speaker 2: especially when like the Trump administration, like the people aren't aware,
Speaker 2: Like towards the end of the Trump administration, Trump started
Speaker 2: making claims in presidential debates about the number of miles
Speaker 2: of wall he was he had built as far as
Speaker 2: I can work out, he pulled out of his ass,
Speaker 2: and then the like then they started rushing to build
Speaker 2: more wall, and they I asked them how they came
Speaker 2: up with that number, and then they like they did
Speaker 2: this thing where they were like, oh, well, we repaired
Speaker 2: this much wall and they were like eight miles of
Speaker 2: border wall prototype and like cool man, Like they didn't
Speaker 2: build that much wall, but they started skipping the harder parts,
Speaker 2: right like Valley of the Moon, even that boulder Pilo
Speaker 2: outside of Cumba, Like there are areas that don't have
Speaker 2: wool and those areas that are harder, and then that's
Speaker 2: where people try and cross and like I love to
Speaker 2: go outside. I'm a pretty fit person, and like the
Speaker 2: value of the Moon is hard going, like if you're
Speaker 2: not going up the road, like that's tough travel and
Speaker 2: that's where people don't have a choice bed to cross,
Speaker 2: right right, Yeah.
Speaker 4: That's where and that's where, like you in May, it
Speaker 4: was I think with the first second week in May,
Speaker 4: when you know, just a few days before Total forty
Speaker 4: two was ending, that's where thousands of people came through.
Speaker 4: Was through that area down into the town of Cumba,
Speaker 4: and a lot of people, i mean we're talking about
Speaker 4: you know, thousands came through there, and a lot said
Speaker 4: that they paid upwards to one thousand dollars ahead two
Speaker 4: coyotes that brought them there and said, hey, when you
Speaker 4: get down there, you just follow this road. Once you
Speaker 4: get down to the bottom, there's gonna be a buzz
Speaker 4: waiting for you. It'll take you in. And then they
Speaker 4: got the stranded for days after going through that terrain.
Speaker 4: The temperature that's when like the season really started shifting,
Speaker 4: so the nights were really cold, the daytime highs were
Speaker 4: pretty hot. And I mean that was the you know
Speaker 4: designed you know.
Speaker 12: Cruelty the invasion that gave the semblance of the invasion.
Speaker 2: Because you could huddle people together and then claim that
Speaker 2: you weren't detaining them that right, exactly.
Speaker 4: They weren't free to leave, they said the border patrol
Speaker 4: told them that they had arrest them if they left
Speaker 4: the I mean I say camp loosely because it was
Speaker 4: just like out in an open field with that people
Speaker 4: you know, cut down branches and turn into shelters and
Speaker 4: use areas that they cut down for like fires, campfires
Speaker 4: and knights to stay warm. And you know, border patrol
Speaker 4: probably didn't expect that a people locally in Hukumba were
Speaker 4: going to care or be that the word would get
Speaker 4: out and so their crual practices that they were in
Speaker 4: acting on like the first day or two of people
Speaker 4: showing up and being stranded no food, no water, then
Speaker 4: it kind of backfired. And then you know, I believe
Speaker 4: you went out there as well. You saw how many
Speaker 4: people showed up to care, and like we were working
Speaker 4: around the clock to try to you know, organize and
Speaker 4: make food, prepare food pack, collect donations everything. And you
Speaker 4: know that's I've gone through that terrain and you know,
Speaker 4: after all that was closed down and looking through as
Speaker 4: you know, as we did like trash cleanups and people
Speaker 4: you know, would have their last remaining food and water
Speaker 4: that you could see coming through across you know, the
Speaker 4: area where they were brought to and like people shedding
Speaker 4: clothes because the temperatures were so warm dur in the
Speaker 4: daytime and then just wondering like okay, so they shed
Speaker 4: their clothes and now they're like freezing down the bottom
Speaker 4: of the hill and the terrain's too tough to go
Speaker 4: all the way back up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's no fence over there. And the fences, you know,
Speaker 4: we've said have always been kind of built for the
Speaker 4: most part where people can see them. It gives the
Speaker 4: appearance to the rest of the country that's not out there,
Speaker 4: that there's a fence across the whole border, and you know,
Speaker 4: go into a lot of areas where we see that
Speaker 4: that's not the case. And also we see where border
Speaker 4: fences stop and migration makes its way right around the
Speaker 4: edge of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in the old time, but the.
Speaker 4: Disk now has increased longer for the walks because instead
Speaker 4: of just being able to walk through like an open area,
Speaker 4: now you have to go miles out of the way
Speaker 4: to get around to an opening in the fence or
Speaker 4: go up and over a mountain, and you know, doing
Speaker 4: that in the summertime, you exhaust yourself from the strategies,
Speaker 4: hike on top of the unbearable heat, and then you
Speaker 4: pass away, you know, an eighth of a mile from
Speaker 4: a fence, you know, as someone that we know that
Speaker 4: happened to them a couple of years ago. So it's
Speaker 4: as you're saying, like the fences and like where they're
Speaker 4: not put it's it's just a point of cruelty and
Speaker 4: part of the prevention through deterrence policy that's been going
Speaker 4: on for you know, almost thirty years now, and definitely yeah,
Speaker 4: and the CBP one app app and all the kind
Speaker 4: of stuff that's just another extension of prevention through the
Speaker 4: turns by making it harder for people and pushing people
Speaker 4: to ways that they can try to get through or
Speaker 4: you know what they think they can try to get
Speaker 4: through easier. And as Jacklin said, it's just it's become
Speaker 4: more and more deadier. And every year the numbers go
Speaker 4: up of confirmed US, but that doesn't count the amount
Speaker 4: of people that go missing every year.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or the people who like Border patrol to find
Speaker 2: and they you know, their numbers are any the people
Speaker 2: who they found, and that's the areas that are going
Speaker 2: like if people die for the North or yeah, or
Speaker 2: the death.
Speaker 12: That they they deliberately miscategorize as non migrant death. They're
Speaker 12: just John Doe's Jane Doe whatever, you know. They just
Speaker 12: say like, oh, you know, cause of death unclear, or
Speaker 12: cause of death for exposure, but they don't necessarily call
Speaker 12: it a migrant death even though someone you know, traveling
Speaker 12: with a backpack and the desert. Yeah, and they you know,
Speaker 12: like say that they were migrating just because they had
Speaker 12: you know, under and passport on them.
Speaker 7: That all the time too.
Speaker 12: So all of this is like we don't know the
Speaker 12: scope of their cruelty. Like it's just scary, is that,
Speaker 12: Like it's so much bigger than we even know, even
Speaker 12: like those of us that are like in it every day.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's no numbers like I would in a sense
Speaker 2: love to in a sense would be horrible. I don't
Speaker 2: think it should matter, Like I don't think it should
Speaker 2: matter how many people, Like every single one of those
Speaker 2: is a tragedy, and it's somewhat's mumal or dad or
Speaker 2: brother or sister. I kind of wanted to to maybe
Speaker 2: talk about like one incident that if if you're comfortable
Speaker 2: doing it like that, you might be familiar with that,
Speaker 2: I think can give people a sense of how dehumanizing
Speaker 2: this is and how cruel this is. You guys, I
Speaker 2: know you're familiar with it, but the young women who
Speaker 2: died on the shrine trail in was it winter of
Speaker 2: twenty twenty or winter of twenty twenty one?
Speaker 4: Yes, that was February twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's right before COVID. So for people who
Speaker 2: aren't as familiar, can I spoke a little bit about
Speaker 2: it in our series, but can you describe kind of
Speaker 2: the process that if you're comfortable, I know it's like
Speaker 2: a it's a pretty horrible thing, but can you describe
Speaker 2: like like how they crossed and what happened to them?
Speaker 4: I mean, we can give you like some of the
Speaker 4: background that was like in a newspaper article that we
Speaker 4: had come to learn.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, we have a like direct communication. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: you're not in content. I just like I think it
Speaker 2: would be helpful for people to realize that, like, you know, this,
Speaker 2: this is what happened to them, and then also that
Speaker 2: you guys have been able to respond after that happened
Speaker 2: to like at least try and and help like deploy
Speaker 2: kind of resources to that a bit less of a
Speaker 2: treacherous crossing.
Speaker 4: So as the situation was unfolding, it was nighttime and
Speaker 4: there was like a freak storm that came through eastern
Speaker 4: San Diego County around around the area of I think
Speaker 4: like Live Oak Springs Mount Laguna area, and it was
Speaker 4: just you know, raining and cold before, but like later
Speaker 4: on that day it kind of turned into snow and
Speaker 4: turned into heavy winds, like zero visibility snowstorm. And these
Speaker 4: three sisters that were from Wahaka, who've crossed over for
Speaker 4: work multiple times, came worked, went back home, you know,
Speaker 4: for you know, whatever season, came back, worked, went back home.
Speaker 4: And it was my understanding that they were trying to
Speaker 4: save up enough money from what they made here in
Speaker 4: the United States to open up their own business.
Speaker 1: And so.
Speaker 4: The day came when they were crossing over the they
Speaker 4: came through, I think like in the Campo area, I
Speaker 4: think it was, and they were led by two brothers
Speaker 4: that had crossed previously in the same spot and knew
Speaker 4: the trail of which to go, but I believe it
Speaker 4: was their first time actually leading people through and not
Speaker 4: just themselves coming through, so they you know, they remember
Speaker 4: the way, got up close to where the shrine is
Speaker 4: of the shrine trail, there's a little shrine up there
Speaker 4: that people would you know, leave little little symbols and
Speaker 4: tokens and little items behind, mostly to you know, the
Speaker 4: Virgin of Wa Loupe. And from that point it is
Speaker 4: that that's the last time you can be hiking on
Speaker 4: that trail that far north and turn around and still
Speaker 4: see Mexico. Anything beyond that, it's kind of like the
Speaker 4: point of like you can't see Mexico, Like you've got
Speaker 4: to keep moving forward, You've already gone, you know. At
Speaker 4: this point it's close to thirty I think air miles,
Speaker 4: so like you know, you know, walking miles is a
Speaker 4: lot more than that. Yeah, And they were at this
Speaker 4: kind of like rock boulder outcropping just about five minutes
Speaker 4: walk shy of the shrine when the sisters couldn't keep
Speaker 4: going anymore and because of the extreme weather in the
Speaker 4: extreme cold, they were soaking wet from the rain and
Speaker 4: then the you know, sub freezing temperatures with the snowstorm,
Speaker 4: they couldn't keep going anymore, and so they were kind
Speaker 4: of huddled up underneath of this boulder. It's the only
Speaker 4: spot that kind of gave like a little bit of
Speaker 4: shelter from that storm. Yet, I mean those rocks are
Speaker 4: you know ice cubes, you know, being out there that long.
Speaker 4: So the two brothers I believe left to try to
Speaker 4: get cell phone signal because you know, you're you're up
Speaker 4: pretty high in the mountains. I think that elevation up
Speaker 4: there on the mountain, I think it's somewhere around five
Speaker 4: thousand feet. More so that that location where that we're
Speaker 4: where they passed away, and the brothers that took off
Speaker 4: to try to get cell phone range to calm you know, ems,
Speaker 4: which turns out to be you know, border patrol in
Speaker 4: that region, and so got to hold a border patrol.
Speaker 4: Uh border patrol arrived to where the brothers were, and
Speaker 4: first thing, you know, before you know, rushing to try
Speaker 4: to make a rescue anything, they you know, detained and
Speaker 4: arrested the brothers for you know, for you know, human smuggling, trafficking,
Speaker 4: you know, just you know, being colliotes, and then they
Speaker 4: put in efforts of trying to rescue. By the time
Speaker 4: I believe that they got to the three sisters, two
Speaker 4: of them had already passed away, and there was one
Speaker 4: that was still barely alive. Unconscious and due to the whether,
Speaker 4: as Border Patrol has stated, the agents, the four star
Speaker 4: you know rescue agents, the search and trauma rescue, they
Speaker 4: had to take off. They couldn't airlift the last remaining
Speaker 4: sister out because there's zero visibility. The helicopter couldn't even
Speaker 4: get like find them, couldn't get like anywhere close to them,
Speaker 4: couldn't hover because the wind was blown so hard. It
Speaker 4: was just about a whiteout condition. So, I mean, the
Speaker 4: most you know fucked situation possible, and Border Patrol in
Speaker 4: order to make sure it didn't turn into from a
Speaker 4: triple fatality to however many of them there were, I
Speaker 4: think there was three or four's that were out there,
Speaker 4: so to you know, in order to save their lives,
Speaker 4: they took off. They put the last remaining sister like
Speaker 4: in a like a puffy overall type of situation, and
Speaker 4: they they had taken her wet clothes, they cut her
Speaker 4: wet clothes off her, and you know, we're actively trying
Speaker 4: to warm her with like heat packs and wrapping her,
Speaker 4: and so they took off and kind of just like
Speaker 4: left her, you know, with basically, as I said, the
Speaker 4: best you know chances possible of survival even though someone
Speaker 4: being left on their own in that condition there's zero
Speaker 4: chances of survival. Border patrol took off, allegedly injured themselves,
Speaker 4: you know, in doing so, got frostbited, et cetera. I
Speaker 4: think it was the next day, came back out for
Speaker 4: the would turn out to be the recovery, and all
Speaker 4: three sisters had passed away, you know, from you know,
Speaker 4: freezing to death. And so as we learned about that,
Speaker 4: you know, as the situation was unfolding, we reached out
Speaker 4: to the the journalist who wrote the article in local
Speaker 4: San Diego Union Tribune. His name is Alex Riggins, and
Speaker 4: through you know, some back and forth contact, he was
Speaker 4: covering the trial of the two brothers that brought the
Speaker 4: sisters through their in court for their deaths, and reached
Speaker 4: out to see if we could find out any information,
Speaker 4: if Alex could let us know, like maybe where the
Speaker 4: shrine trail was, or maybe where the location of the
Speaker 4: recovery was, just something that we would have so we
Speaker 4: can put it on a map, figure out how to
Speaker 4: get there, and give boots on the ground to leave supplies,
Speaker 4: you know, a few times a year, whether it's going
Speaker 4: to be really hot, or really cold. We wanted to
Speaker 4: make sure that, you know, we responded to the crisis
Speaker 4: as we found out about it. There's something that we
Speaker 4: unfortunately have had to do all too common in this
Speaker 4: work is that's unfortunately.
Speaker 7: In the way that we learn, yeah, when it's too late.
Speaker 2: Sometimes yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: A lot of you have to learn efforts too late.
Speaker 4: And that's part of our you know, expansion of areas
Speaker 4: that we cover. That's how we learn stuff, and that's
Speaker 4: how we work at preventing you know, further suffering and
Speaker 4: further deaths. So we got more or less a good
Speaker 4: location and one of our team members at the time,
Speaker 4: he h he went out on a weekday that he
Speaker 4: had off, and he just went kind of driving around
Speaker 4: in the area and start hiking out in this area
Speaker 4: that looked like from the photos that were in the
Speaker 4: newspaper could have been this location. And he put in
Speaker 4: a long hike that day and he found the clothing
Speaker 4: that was removed from the last he found the like
Speaker 4: the puffy overalls. He found a bunch of medical equipment,
Speaker 4: like emergency equipment that was used for you know, the
Speaker 4: three sisters during that process. And shortly after that, I
Speaker 4: think it was just like a couple of weeks, we
Speaker 4: got together h some of our strongest hikers, and we
Speaker 4: decided to go out there and leave a bunch of supplies.
Speaker 4: And that is it is a hard, hard hike, whether
Speaker 4: you're you know, carrying thirty five forty pounds on your
Speaker 4: back or you're just carrying, you know, a backpack with
Speaker 4: like a bottle of water and some food. Like, it's
Speaker 4: hard no matter what. So we got up there and
Speaker 4: we left supplies. And you know, we've been going back
Speaker 4: you before, seasons change, where it gets hot, it gets cold,
Speaker 4: and we track to see if you know, anything has
Speaker 4: been taken. And it doesn't appear that that trail gets
Speaker 4: too much use, but it does get some use. Yeah,
Speaker 4: So you know, I don't know if if the three
Speaker 4: sisters passing away there had anything to do with like
Speaker 4: future travel for people on the trying trail or or what,
Speaker 4: but you know, we made that commitment in their honor
Speaker 4: and to prevent anything like this ever happening again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sent me a very sad, very sad situation, and like, yeah,
Speaker 2: it so many things have to go wrong and so
Speaker 2: many people have to turn a blind eye. I guess
Speaker 2: for the three people to die like.
Speaker 10: You know, there's.
Speaker 12: Platant negligence on the part of border Patrol very regularly,
Speaker 12: given that they are supposedly like as James mentioned, the
Speaker 12: emergency medical service that's out there, and there is outright blatant,
Speaker 12: deadly discrimination that occurs when it comes to providing emergency
Speaker 12: services for migrants. In this case, they prioritize apprehension over
Speaker 12: saving people. Every moment is going to count and regardless
Speaker 12: of what the conditions were, those are the conditions, and
Speaker 12: that's the story that they're reporting. I think we rightfully
Speaker 12: are skeptical of anything that they say when it comes
Speaker 12: to rescues and how they prioritize doing so when we
Speaker 12: have seen entirely the opposite occur on a regular basis
Speaker 12: when they have the opportunity to provide aid them electing
Speaker 12: to do so. You know, going back to Hakumba, when
Speaker 12: people were out there and they had nothing, They weren't
Speaker 12: being provided a city water for days and days and days.
Speaker 7: Order Patrol could have done that.
Speaker 12: If they are the emergency services, they could have provided
Speaker 12: emergency aid. When it comes to a rescue like this.
Speaker 12: They have the agency. They are the agency. They have
Speaker 12: the agency to deprioritize processing somebody for apprehension and prioritizing rescue,
Speaker 12: and they chose not to do it. Like time and
Speaker 12: time and again, we see these situations and I think,
Speaker 12: like when you know, before we started recording, and you asked, like,
Speaker 12: what's the thing that like we want to talk about
Speaker 12: that doesn't often get talked about, And.
Speaker 7: I think it's this. I think it's the.
Speaker 12: It's not just like the surveillance and the patrolling and
Speaker 12: all of that stuff that to humanizes migrants, but like
Speaker 12: when they're in danger, they're regarded as less than human
Speaker 12: by the because the only agency that's out there to
Speaker 12: help them is like the reason that they're in danger
Speaker 12: in the first place. So we have come across multiple
Speaker 12: search and rescues that aren't migrant related, just being out
Speaker 12: in the desert where either a US citizen or in
Speaker 12: one instance, a tourist was lost in the desert, and
Speaker 12: the response is night and day. When there's a migrant
Speaker 12: that's lost and we are calling for assistance, you know,
Speaker 12: any kind of can a search be initiated, can we
Speaker 12: get like the response is so blase and minimal, and
Speaker 12: there's no accounting, there's no holding them accountable for acting
Speaker 12: or failing to act right, and it's blatant, like and
Speaker 12: I think that's the thing that like the general public
Speaker 12: that isn't involved in this work like should know about
Speaker 12: how cruel it is and how little the response is
Speaker 12: when somebody is lost, when they're dying, when they're dead,
Speaker 12: like us having to call the coroner repeatedly to have
Speaker 12: children's bone picked up. That would not happen if that
Speaker 12: child was not presumed my grant. So this is like
Speaker 12: we have story after story after story of like situations
Speaker 12: like this is just one tragedy, but there's a lot
Speaker 12: of could have, should have, would have like on the
Speaker 12: end of like eight organizations that we carry, And it
Speaker 12: doesn't seem to ever be like a shared weight with
Speaker 12: any of the agencies that actually have the ability to
Speaker 12: respond to this kind of thing in like an organized way.
Speaker 7: They don't care, they don't do anything about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's like so much money spent on our border, right,
Speaker 2: Like I remember in Houcumber, I was like sitting underneath
Speaker 2: this thing for shade and then I like coming like,
Speaker 2: oh yeah, just think us a million dollars, right, that
Speaker 2: little trailer with the solar panels that intercepts the signals, like,
Speaker 2: and they didn't give these people a bottle of water,
Speaker 2: like all the water came from other people, from random
Speaker 2: San Diego people who bought it, right, Like, and it's
Speaker 2: just such a strange priority, Well, not strange, it's a
Speaker 2: cruel and horrible priority choice, right to prioritize that kind
Speaker 2: of like enforcement of a human lives like which are
Speaker 2: being lost. And it's the same like you know, ever
Speaker 2: bolted in Arizona or a time, I spend a lot
Speaker 2: of time there. I spent a lot of time here,
Speaker 2: reported in Texas a couple of times. Like, it's the
Speaker 2: same all across the border, right, the priority is not
Speaker 2: rescuing people. It's and it's not even particularly enforcing the
Speaker 2: law as it's written, it's just stopping people coming.
Speaker 12: Here selectively though, yeah, selectively, because they do let a
Speaker 12: significant amount of people through, Like even like in Hakumba,
Speaker 12: when people that weren't familiar with this whole kind of
Speaker 12: like smoke and mirror show of the border were coming
Speaker 12: and responding, they were saying, like, well, why are they
Speaker 12: letting them through? Why is this open over here? Why
Speaker 12: is like the amount of surveillance, you know, We've had
Speaker 12: people come out on water drops and say like, oh,
Speaker 12: should we be hiding the water?
Speaker 11: Should we be doing this?
Speaker 8: And that?
Speaker 11: Should we like they have eyes on the whole desert,
Speaker 11: So yeah, it's they do there. The point is to
Speaker 11: stop people from coming through, but not completely right, is
Speaker 11: that labor that's coming through.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that.
Speaker 12: They're they're selective, and how much they like, you know,
Speaker 12: how much the gasket is being opened and shut.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and in different sectors at different times, like it
Speaker 2: seems like things are done and even like, yeah, there
Speaker 2: are The other thing I think that people who don't
Speaker 2: live on the border don't realize is to what degree
Speaker 2: every single person here, whether they give a shit or not,
Speaker 2: is surveiled because they live near the border. Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: but we saw them twenty eighteen with a lot of
Speaker 2: a lot of friends of mine who can't go to
Speaker 2: Mexico anymore, right, who have flagged passports. Yeah you too, Yeah,
Speaker 2: so many people I know. I Yeah, I don't know
Speaker 2: how I went over a ton at that time, but
Speaker 2: I guess managed to avoid it. But yeah, it's it's that.
Speaker 2: And then like I have been in the middle of
Speaker 2: nowhere in the desert and found cameras, surveillance towers, right like,
Speaker 2: stuff that would not be the constitution is largely irrelevant,
Speaker 2: but like there wouldn't be legal or just like unjustifiable
Speaker 2: anywhere else, And like this spans from here to like
Speaker 2: our Otum friends in Arizona to Texas, right like, if
Speaker 2: you live on the border, like or any within one
Speaker 2: hundred miles of the border, right, the border can come
Speaker 2: to you. It doesn't matter if you care or not.
Speaker 2: It doesn't matter if you consider yourself to be like
Speaker 2: an immigrant to the US, or if you've sort of
Speaker 2: decided that that doesn't apply to you or you don't
Speaker 2: care about those people like then it doesn't matter that
Speaker 2: surveillance still impacts you, and often it impacts like our
Speaker 2: indigenous friends, right like my my all time friend Kumii
Speaker 2: friends had the grave yards bulldose to build the wool.
Speaker 2: And yeah, even if you don't care, even if you
Speaker 2: think the wall is great, that your cell phone still
Speaker 2: there through distinct ray down.
Speaker 10: I know, it's wild, Like how much people who are
Speaker 10: like very you know, right wing anti like.
Speaker 12: You know, pro like freedom and all this stuff like
Speaker 12: will very readily give up those freedoms and in exchange
Speaker 12: for like constant surveillance, like if it justifies the means
Speaker 12: of like you know, their big try or like whatever,
Speaker 12: like their worldview is like they're they're suddenly like very
Speaker 12: pro border patrol, very pro CP, very T. Well that's
Speaker 12: like in direct conflict with like everything else that they're saying.
Speaker 2: Right, but yeah, it's freedom for who I guess.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well also goes with the same people are saying, well, well,
Speaker 4: not breaking the law, then what do you have to
Speaker 4: do about Yeah, well everything starts with the border. So
Speaker 4: the surveillance, the facial recognition, the plate scanners, all that
Speaker 4: stuff started the border. And now we see that just recently,
Speaker 4: like the San Diego City Council approved to have the
Speaker 4: like the streetlight eras and all that kind of the
Speaker 4: lamps and all those you know, hundreds of cameras that
Speaker 4: are going to be out there with that same type
Speaker 4: of technology, and like, well, if you're not breaking the law,
Speaker 4: it's like okay, we'll give a little bit of time
Speaker 4: until you're not breaking law, and then like stuff still happens.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's that's how you know things, you know, Snowball.
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone. Shortly after we finished talking about why San
Speaker 2: Diego's lamp posts are also spies. My internet once again died.
Speaker 2: So that's what we're going to end it today. It's
Speaker 2: already been a long episode. But what I would like
Speaker 2: you all to know is that you can find Border
Speaker 2: Kindness online. You can find them on Instagram. You can
Speaker 2: find James there Brolo el Cordero prott to be able
Speaker 2: to work out how to spell that, and you can
Speaker 2: find them on Facebook, and you can find them on Instagram,
Speaker 2: and you can pretty much find them anywhere you go
Speaker 2: on the internet by searching Border Kindness, and like James said,
Speaker 2: they in his I'm looking at his Instagram profile right now,
Speaker 2: so it's Brolo el Cordero. I guess b r O
Speaker 2: l O e l c O r d e r O.
Speaker 2: James has a wish list, an Amazon wish list, so
Speaker 2: if if you're not close to San Diego, then you
Speaker 2: can you can just click on that and buy them something.
Speaker 2: I'm sure you could collect donations and send those as well.
Speaker 2: So there are a lot of different ways you could help.
Speaker 2: But I hope you all enjoyed this. If you're in
Speaker 2: town and you want to help, go hike with them
Speaker 2: and you can reach out to them on social media
Speaker 2: as well, and I'm sure they'd be happy to hear
Speaker 2: from you. Thanks so much for listening, Goodbye, Hey.
Speaker 1: We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
Speaker 1: now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 7: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 4: cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
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Speaker 6: You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
Speaker 6: monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources.
Speaker 10: Thanks for listening.