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 gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. What a all right? The
Speaker 1: show started, Garrison. Hey, we're gonna be talking about Canada again,
Speaker 1: so yeah, um, and to discuss Canada and politics and
Speaker 1: the happenings here. We have another journalist who writes for
Speaker 1: I Believe, Anti Hate Canada and like the Canadian Antia
Speaker 1: Hate Network and also Vice. I believe right, I've written
Speaker 1: for Vice. I'm currently researching full time and extremism researcher or.
Speaker 1: It's a new initiative called the Online Hate Research and
Speaker 1: Education Project. It's actually partnered with Canadian TI Hate Network
Speaker 1: and it's it's under the new Burger Holocaust Education Center,
Speaker 1: which might be renaming very soon. I'm I'm very excited
Speaker 1: for you guys to get into a Twitter fight with
Speaker 1: James Lindsay can't wait. So, yes, Dan here has joined
Speaker 1: us to talk about Canada because I've gotten a few
Speaker 1: messages about this thing that's happening. My mother, who's in
Speaker 1: Alberta called me a few days ago to talk about
Speaker 1: this thing that's happening. So it's been, it's it's I'm
Speaker 1: getting a lot of things and it's definitely worth discussing,
Speaker 1: specifically on some of the rhetoric that people are using
Speaker 1: around this. So I'm actually I'm gonna I'm gonna hand
Speaker 1: it to Dan to talk about what like how did
Speaker 1: this thing like what is it and how did it
Speaker 1: kind of get started? Yeah, well, so Garrison is not alone,
Speaker 1: by the way, for anyone not in Canada. Every single
Speaker 1: person's mother in the entire country is called and asthen
Speaker 1: about it. I just got another message literally right now,
Speaker 1: like literally this second. Moms of Canada have been activated.
Speaker 1: Moms of Canada have been activated, but not in exactly
Speaker 1: the same way that they're being perceived to be all
Speaker 1: the way. So the quote unquote trucker convoy, which I
Speaker 1: might get into a little bit later, but I'm kind
Speaker 1: of like against even calling it a trucker convoy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was started on January and by a former Wigsit
Speaker 1: party now called the Maverick Party member Tomorrow Lich and
Speaker 1: a group of like very active far right grassroots protesters.
Speaker 1: You do a lot of organizing like this, uh, and
Speaker 1: most of them, most of their activities kind of go
Speaker 1: back to Yeah, they go back a decent a decent amount. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like this. I mean there's links to people that have
Speaker 1: been doing it in the nineties in Canada's movement right now,
Speaker 1: but a non binding motion against I think it's a
Speaker 1: M three a few years ago really mobilized people and
Speaker 1: it's kind of been more consistent since then of the
Speaker 1: same groups of people. Yeah, that's that's when we talked
Speaker 1: about in our first Canada episodes about kind of how
Speaker 1: we got to that point and now like those same
Speaker 1: people are still kind of behind what's going on right now.
Speaker 1: So yeah, there's this alleged caravan of truckers of all
Speaker 1: the truckers in Canada going going to Ottawa, um in Canada,
Speaker 1: all the truckers, and so this thing was kind of
Speaker 1: originally organized by some like known far right figures and
Speaker 1: the people associated with like the Canadian Yellow Vests, which
Speaker 1: kind of died down, but it didn't die down. It
Speaker 1: just morphed right, morphed into a very strong anti vax
Speaker 1: presence in Canada. Right now, the anti vacks movement is
Speaker 1: getting a lot of popularity in Canada, and it's run
Speaker 1: by these guys who were doing Wexit, which is like
Speaker 1: West Exit, but for like it's it's it's like for
Speaker 1: Alberta NBC to go away from Canada because the rest
Speaker 1: of Canada's too liberal. Um so what exit and the
Speaker 1: Elves have really changed all their focuses into this anti
Speaker 1: backs thing as a way to do recruiting, and they've
Speaker 1: prompted this kind of movement of truckers going to Ottawa.
Speaker 1: UM for a few specific reasons which I think Dan
Speaker 1: probably knows a little bit more about than I do.
Speaker 1: Like I I know the gist of it, but you've
Speaker 1: been focus on the on this slightly more than I have. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess the main reason is it works, um like,
Speaker 1: just from the perspective of getting attention and being able
Speaker 1: to get a message out. Um. There's been a lot
Speaker 1: of traction on this that these groups don't normally get.
Speaker 1: I think the last trucker convoy um that was done
Speaker 1: under this sort of umbrella it had like nine I
Speaker 1: think was the total amount of like trucks that made
Speaker 1: it to Ottawa the last time this was trying to
Speaker 1: be done and it was basically the same demands in
Speaker 1: the same reasons. So this one was started on January
Speaker 1: and it didn't get that much buzzed. There's a couple
Speaker 1: of days. The original goal was set at a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars. I don't remember the exact time, but once
Speaker 1: it hit that pretty fast, and it hit the first
Speaker 1: million pretty fast in ways that like these fundraisers really
Speaker 1: really don't like the last big one we saw in
Speaker 1: Canada that was quite alarming in that fast cap out
Speaker 1: at under four hundred thousand dollars and that was um
Speaker 1: for a barbecue for a barbecue that got defied protests
Speaker 1: last year and UH ended up getting like all it's
Speaker 1: it's a bad door shut down. So there's a lot
Speaker 1: more money now in this one. Yeah, because this this fundraiser,
Speaker 1: which was supposed to go like hand in hand with
Speaker 1: these truckers protesting the vaccine mandates because they're upset that
Speaker 1: they're not allowed to truck into these states because they're
Speaker 1: not vaccinated. So they have decided to all truck into
Speaker 1: Ottawa as like a pseudo strike slash like blockade type thing,
Speaker 1: because they're saying that they were not going to do
Speaker 1: our jobs and we're gonna kind of block off access
Speaker 1: to these roads, um until this mandate is is removed. Now.
Speaker 1: Of course, the funny thing here is that the man
Speaker 1: date that to enter to not being allowed to enter
Speaker 1: the States to do your trucking. That's not a mandate
Speaker 1: by Canada. That's done, but that like that's the rule
Speaker 1: in the United States because you're the United States, they're
Speaker 1: the States is actually the ones to be the blockage
Speaker 1: of the Canadian government has no control over this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not like it's not actually the thing. The way
Speaker 1: to get them out and support is incredibly effective because
Speaker 1: something I think like twenty percent there was a survey
Speaker 1: recently of Canadians are against the mandate, which is like
Speaker 1: really huge um for like Canada's anti vax movement to
Speaker 1: kind of get that like support and like a lot
Speaker 1: of people are mobilized too. By there's a trend of posting.
Speaker 1: It started from four chain and twenty team, but it's
Speaker 1: getting revived a lot again now of people posting like
Speaker 1: empty grocery stores. Even a Conservative member of parliament recently
Speaker 1: posted an empty grocery store. And as for people's emails
Speaker 1: to try to like change the laws, it turned out
Speaker 1: to be from the UK. It was a stock photo. Uh.
Speaker 1: And there's been like even like the stories themselves have
Speaker 1: had to come out and make statements being like we're
Speaker 1: not we're not empty, we have we have, we are
Speaker 1: in the process if we restocking. That's happened the US
Speaker 1: to where it's like we're literally emptying that shelf to
Speaker 1: move stuff with shelf. We've had really bad snowstorms for
Speaker 1: a lot of the real photos of like empty shelves
Speaker 1: and it's just like, oh no salads tap out and
Speaker 1: the stories just make a statement it's like, yeah, we
Speaker 1: had two snowstorms a day in a row in ock.
Speaker 1: But like the narrative that they're trying to push is
Speaker 1: like these these mandates are causing these shortages um and
Speaker 1: and the propaganda is working even though it's all at
Speaker 1: a false premise because first of all, it's not like
Speaker 1: that that those aren't that, that's not causting that and
Speaker 1: second of all, complainly to Canadas, that's not the Canada's
Speaker 1: not the one who's making the restrictions in the States
Speaker 1: are the one that's that's lucky from doing this. But
Speaker 1: but it's it's not actually about these issues. It's that's
Speaker 1: not the reason why you're getting all these people driving
Speaker 1: to Ottawa because there is a lot of people. There's
Speaker 1: not many trucks, but but there is there is a
Speaker 1: decent amount of people. You know that it's that that
Speaker 1: are that are going this because it's not it's not
Speaker 1: actually about these specific issues. It's this general um like
Speaker 1: seething hatred of Trudeau and like a generalized grievance that
Speaker 1: has gotten this broad support. It's gotten enough financial backing
Speaker 1: the fundraisers what like like over six million dollars now um.
Speaker 1: And it's it's not like it's just what it actually
Speaker 1: is is an incoherent kind of intention just to go
Speaker 1: to the capital and cause problems, right that that's what
Speaker 1: they're actually that. That's what like the underlying thing is
Speaker 1: for a lot of a lot of the like explaining
Speaker 1: why it's gotten so picked up. Some some official demands
Speaker 1: like have been put out and they would be even
Speaker 1: more confusing like to read than like some of them are.
Speaker 1: There A couple of the most recent ones are just
Speaker 1: very general like stop this divisive nature that our government
Speaker 1: is imposing kind of thing, like I'm paraphrasing, but it's
Speaker 1: it's really quite bland. Um. Some demands from sagittal groups involved.
Speaker 1: One they say they won't leave until Trudeau steps down.
Speaker 1: Others say at one point said until every politician stopped down,
Speaker 1: stepped down. I think that was when before something kind
Speaker 1: of pushed in more realisticals into the movement. But like
Speaker 1: in terms of like what they're talking about, for like
Speaker 1: the rhetoric surrounding it, We're seeing a lot of rhetoric
Speaker 1: around the sentence being like we this can be our
Speaker 1: version of January six, but like they're saying that like
Speaker 1: in a good way, like that's that's the thing that
Speaker 1: at least some of the organizers, and then it's being
Speaker 1: carried out into like the generalized rhetoric is that this
Speaker 1: this should be our own version of this, which is
Speaker 1: which is interesting on a few ways. But like also
Speaker 1: like this would not have been said like seven months ago,
Speaker 1: but it's being said now, which means like there's been
Speaker 1: a shift in how January six is being viewed. There
Speaker 1: was this initial like really distancing and now it's like
Speaker 1: it's becoming almost like more acceptable to acknowledge that it
Speaker 1: was is maybe a good thing in your eyes, And
Speaker 1: it's like, that's an interesting rhetorical shift that that's been
Speaker 1: going on. But then it's also concerning just like a
Speaker 1: regular level to be like, yeah, these people wanted, these
Speaker 1: people are saying they want to do their own January six.
Speaker 1: That has obviously physical implications for all these people trying
Speaker 1: to drive to Ottawa um do either blocking off roads
Speaker 1: or just like making the government inoperable. Yeah, a coat
Speaker 1: streamer or a streamer in what's called the plat Army.
Speaker 1: And now that's sometimes kind of just being rebranded as
Speaker 1: like Diagalon network quote unquote, which we can get into more,
Speaker 1: but it's it's gonna be sillier. Yeah, they're they're kind
Speaker 1: of their own they're their own issue for later. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're their own issue. But it was one of their
Speaker 1: streamers who is very tangently connected to like a lot
Speaker 1: of the the far right people that are involved in
Speaker 1: this protest movement, leaning up to an in fact, Pat King,
Speaker 1: who is officially one of the organizers of the convoy
Speaker 1: until he wasn't and then he was again. That was
Speaker 1: a whole dramatic thing for a like he streamed alongside
Speaker 1: Plaid Army guys before um so someone on Plaid Army said,
Speaker 1: and I would quote, I would like to see r
Speaker 1: O in January sixth event see some of those truckers
Speaker 1: plow right through that sixteen football and on January that
Speaker 1: was put up on CTV News made it live, and
Speaker 1: it's kind of scare a lot of people. I think
Speaker 1: at that point, former Conservative leader Andrew Sheer had already
Speaker 1: voiced support for the convoy. There's been a lot of
Speaker 1: other like members of parliaments voicing support for the convoy.
Speaker 1: H some of whom really didn't seem to know like
Speaker 1: what was involved and really just kind of heard like
Speaker 1: in passing, Oh it's against these mandates and I opposed
Speaker 1: these mandates too, and it's like, if it think it's true,
Speaker 1: DEALU based well side out, it's gonna help you. You're
Speaker 1: gonna help your political career. Yeah, yeah, it's completely true.
Speaker 1: So have they actually started like blocking roads or is
Speaker 1: it just a bunch of random people driving down to
Speaker 1: like driving. So there's there's a few different like converging
Speaker 1: points of the convoy. I think I would say probably
Speaker 1: the biggest one. Um, but it's it's hard to kind
Speaker 1: of keep track. Started in British Columbia and it's going
Speaker 1: so for this, I'm sure not everyone knows like math
Speaker 1: for Canada. So like Burtish Columbia is like our west coast,
Speaker 1: that's our our California. UM, and Ottawa is it's close
Speaker 1: to the west and it's in Ontario, but it's on
Speaker 1: the border of Quebec and Ontario and that's where our
Speaker 1: parliament is. That's our capital city. So it's coming from
Speaker 1: every which way, but I think the largest contingent comes
Speaker 1: from British Columbia and it just basically goes eastward to Ottawa,
Speaker 1: picking up people along the way. Yeah, yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's it's it's heading in that direction. Um, how do
Speaker 1: we know about I know some people have kind of
Speaker 1: already some people have kind of already sort of arrived
Speaker 1: in Ottawa, but most mostly people are expected to more
Speaker 1: arrive in the next Like, well, we're recording this Thursday night,
Speaker 1: so this episode will probably come out on Monday. Um,
Speaker 1: people are expected to arrive on Saturday is the day
Speaker 1: that expt people expecting like everybody to be there at
Speaker 1: least that the understanding of it. The convoy itself arrives Saturday. Um,
Speaker 1: there are people like coming from further east who are
Speaker 1: like staying overnight in town and kind of just showing
Speaker 1: up the parliament event. So like, by by all accounts,
Speaker 1: the parliament show will probably be a lot bigger than
Speaker 1: the so far. Yeah, I guess we haven't mentioned numbers yet. Sorry, numbers,
Speaker 1: nor like what what they actually really plan on doing
Speaker 1: once they get there, because it's it's been so much
Speaker 1: talking about like why this got started and what's the
Speaker 1: like driving motivational factors. But yeah, like their their goal
Speaker 1: is to get to a place and do a thing,
Speaker 1: and that's the Yeah, the thing is that thing? It's
Speaker 1: mostly unclear. I have seen discussions about like blocking on
Speaker 1: like doing like trying to assemble like a trucking strike, um,
Speaker 1: and then like blocking off accesses so that the everyone
Speaker 1: is forced to obey their demands or else like the
Speaker 1: country will shut down. UM. Then some people maybe are
Speaker 1: just kind of doing it as a one day protest.
Speaker 1: It's it's it again. It is it is. It is
Speaker 1: pretty unclear, but people are headed to their UM. What
Speaker 1: what is the what is the numbers? At least from
Speaker 1: where we can see, like online and stuff. So their
Speaker 1: numbers have been the number of fifty tucks people became
Speaker 1: trucks very quickly. Um, and that same number. I think
Speaker 1: Rogan repeated it, I know said it. Yeah, yeah, Joe
Speaker 1: Rogan said it. THEO Fleury went on Laura Ingram and
Speaker 1: repeated the fifty thou numbers. He said, fifty thousand truckers,
Speaker 1: not trucks specifically. Um. As far as I know, THEO
Speaker 1: Fleury has no official involvement Convoy and it's just a
Speaker 1: fan and it's just repeating some numbers that like organizes
Speaker 1: themselves have kind of echoed. Um. This is also complicated
Speaker 1: for me because this is very troubling in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways. But also I'm a huge fan of the
Speaker 1: song Convoy, so this is really devastating. Please continue, It's
Speaker 1: all right. Yeah, So Canada spurr It protests movement has
Speaker 1: kind of habited doing this in February of Kelly and Farcas,
Speaker 1: who's like a mainstay of the anti mask anti backs movement. Uh,
Speaker 1: and in between when I'm talking about and right now
Speaker 1: actually dated Pat King for a while, who's kind of
Speaker 1: the most outspoken person organizing The current convoy claimed that
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand people were coming to Parliament for what
Speaker 1: was then like an anti mask demonstration. Before the event,
Speaker 1: data will look changed to fifty uh. And I was
Speaker 1: actually there, it looked closer to like two people. I
Speaker 1: had friends that had counted like a hundreds and seventy people,
Speaker 1: so not quite fifty uh. For all intents and purposes,
Speaker 1: the current one will be longer. Reporters doing great journalism
Speaker 1: along the way have estimated up to like four hundred
Speaker 1: people so far um, including I think fifteen trucks outside
Speaker 1: the Bass Pro shop in Toronto this afternoon. I was counted.
Speaker 1: Side note, if nothing else, got to give them points
Speaker 1: for stopping at Bass Pro in Toronto. It's a pretty
Speaker 1: sweet bass do little good bass Pro shop. My favorite
Speaker 1: is the one they built into the Giant Pyramid. Yeah
Speaker 1: obvious Nashville baby, so the best pro in Toronto if
Speaker 1: you're ever in town, Robert, it's the only place around
Speaker 1: that I've been told it sells sub Sonic twenty two rounds.
Speaker 1: So if you're like in the woods, so I feel
Speaker 1: like in the woods, but like you don't want to
Speaker 1: like scare your neighbors because the woods aren't bad. Big. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I used to have some friends and I used to
Speaker 1: go shooting in a suburban neighborhood with two because it's technical,
Speaker 1: don't don't do you can definitely it was there was
Speaker 1: it was legal. Oh right, Canada doesn't I do not.
Speaker 1: I don't endorse the you might have might have to
Speaker 1: cut this part out for regional sharing. Go leave this
Speaker 1: all late, just a bunch of words, make it nonsense
Speaker 1: with bleeping please continue. Yeah, so only fifteen trucks were
Speaker 1: counted by CBC at that point. Um, and like videos
Speaker 1: and stuff have been yeah, yeah, slightly short. But I
Speaker 1: think by the time by Saturday, I think there's a
Speaker 1: decent chance that there might be maybe around fifty trucks
Speaker 1: to a hundred trucks. If there's anything more than like
Speaker 1: five hundred, all of the media footage will look like
Speaker 1: there's fifty. That's enough trucks, Like nobody's cameras going to
Speaker 1: be able to show the extent of them realistically. And
Speaker 1: then yeah, once they're there, it's unclear what they want
Speaker 1: to do. Some people just want to do the function
Speaker 1: up thing. Some people want to carry on the tradition
Speaker 1: of like what the most of the anti like vacs
Speaker 1: anti mass protests in Canada have been which have been
Speaker 1: pretty big, but it's been, it's been, it's been mostly
Speaker 1: standing with signs UM. So it is, it is. It
Speaker 1: is really unclear because again most of the truckers in
Speaker 1: Canada probably are not going to be there nor to
Speaker 1: necessarily endorse this idea. UM nor is like right because
Speaker 1: they're pressing the they're they're initial issues, not even based
Speaker 1: on an actual like thing. So it is. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure how many people are really gonna show up because
Speaker 1: I don't know even how specific it is to an issue.
Speaker 1: UM one one just really interesting, funny, interesting thing that
Speaker 1: I thought about is like with with some of these
Speaker 1: people UM you know talking about you know, going to
Speaker 1: Ottawa and not leaving until the mandates are dropped with
Speaker 1: the entire government resigns. Like these people who are talking
Speaker 1: about this like block engine shortage and stuff are also
Speaker 1: like the same people who get very angry and indigenous
Speaker 1: people for blocking off roads and trails um for like
Speaker 1: oil and like pipeline protests. A lot of them, Yeah,
Speaker 1: some of them. Some of them are indulged in pretending
Speaker 1: and stuff like pat king back in September, um kind
Speaker 1: of went on like a kick where he just let
Speaker 1: a lot of people believe he was indigenous and claimed
Speaker 1: someone not correct then that is that is weird, and
Speaker 1: a family member of him went on Facebook and like
Speaker 1: bombarded people with information that he was not in fact indigenous,
Speaker 1: and it was all very weird and a lot of
Speaker 1: people held them to comments in the past where he
Speaker 1: talked about Anglo Saxon's having the strongest bloodlines. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: that is I think Pat Pat King probably deserves his
Speaker 1: own little deep dive on one of the pods. But
Speaker 1: but yeah, like it's it is like with all the
Speaker 1: people talking about blockads and stuff all you most of
Speaker 1: them coming from like the western side of Canada. Um
Speaker 1: it is it is uh yeah, like you're you're talking
Speaker 1: about all these things, and like there's really big pro
Speaker 1: oil sentiments and all of the in all of this
Speaker 1: crowd because a lot of it is connected to financial
Speaker 1: and political stuff, not necessarily even this vaccine issue. It's
Speaker 1: been more like a symbol to represent their general kind
Speaker 1: of upsettedness at the way at the way things are
Speaker 1: going for them. It's interesting to me. So when I
Speaker 1: first heard about this, my I was. I was like, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: so this is gonna be like the Chilean truckers. And
Speaker 1: I was like, okay, well this is really bad. But
Speaker 1: it's like it's interesting to me, like how you people
Speaker 1: they've been able to mobilize, Like that's like not a
Speaker 1: large number of truckers, Like HiT's yeah, it looks like
Speaker 1: a lot of like vehicles when you when you see
Speaker 1: like footage photos and videos like like in I'm gonna
Speaker 1: like a lot of like Telegram and Facebook groups of
Speaker 1: just people just like sharing pictures and photos of the
Speaker 1: rally of the convoy passing through their talent and like
Speaker 1: it's like what Robert said, like it's here when it
Speaker 1: fills out both sides of the camera and you have
Speaker 1: a wide depth of field, it looks huge and it's
Speaker 1: it's really hard to count. Uh. The money is preposterous,
Speaker 1: also said note on on the money um. The funds
Speaker 1: were frozen a few days ago on the twenty five,
Speaker 1: but today one million dollars was released back to them
Speaker 1: because they gave go fund me a pretty clear plan
Speaker 1: allegedly according to go fund me, for for how they're
Speaker 1: gonna distribute it. The rest of the it's it's I
Speaker 1: think it's like six point seven million. Now, so the
Speaker 1: rest of the five point seven million I think is
Speaker 1: still frozen. Okay, it is, it is, so it is
Speaker 1: so much money. Uh, yeah, we should do something like that.
Speaker 1: They could They could actually buy truck nuts for fifty
Speaker 1: tho truckers, which is the most I've seen them. Guests
Speaker 1: truckers are coming. They could buy twenty truck nuts off
Speaker 1: Amazon for all of them and still have the vast
Speaker 1: majority of their funds left over. Yeah, but see, that
Speaker 1: would be an act of actual heroism, and they're not
Speaker 1: going to do that. The reason why I wanted to
Speaker 1: talk about this is one to like acknowledge that it's happening, right,
Speaker 1: acknowledge the tactics that they're using in terms of trying
Speaker 1: to go into an urban area and block off like
Speaker 1: trade routes essentially um, And then I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about like, first of all, it doesn't matter that like
Speaker 1: the fact that this is happening is divorced from any
Speaker 1: kind of direct cause, right because they're they're actual grievance
Speaker 1: is false and their grievance doesn't really actually matter. It
Speaker 1: just needs there needed to be some kind of cultural
Speaker 1: or propaganda push in order for this physical action to happen.
Speaker 1: And that's been done. It doesn't even need to be
Speaker 1: like coherent. Um. And then escalation people driving here doing
Speaker 1: this thing. And then I know there was this one interview,
Speaker 1: UM I forgot on what news channel, but the interviewed
Speaker 1: this one trucker guy part of a part of this
Speaker 1: part of this convey in my hometown of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
Speaker 1: Um and he's he said, UM, I advocate civil war.
Speaker 1: If people don't want to step up, we have guns,
Speaker 1: will have some we'll stand up and we'll bring them out.
Speaker 1: But like, so that's the quotes, Like in the fact
Speaker 1: that you're just openly saying I advocate civil war in
Speaker 1: relation to this movement is like my goals. My goal
Speaker 1: here is being like people fantasize about Canada as being
Speaker 1: a place to escape, you know, like Canada is like
Speaker 1: the other from the States, and like, no, it's the same,
Speaker 1: like we are like where you cannot escape away from fascism.
Speaker 1: There is no really there's no real away at right
Speaker 1: now in terms of there's no safe ground. It can
Speaker 1: spread to where you are and for people living in Canada,
Speaker 1: when you have people on the news on like Global
Speaker 1: News saying I advocate civil war within the context of
Speaker 1: this of this like, um, you know, a convoy movement,
Speaker 1: it is, it is an actual thing worth paying attention to.
Speaker 1: It is an actual problem. It's it's huge and earlier
Speaker 1: today and I might pronounce his name on but del MANUK,
Speaker 1: doc from CBC Toronto tweeted a story because he on
Speaker 1: behalf of CBC contacted an actual organizer of the convoy.
Speaker 1: They have different regional organizers and and their website list
Speaker 1: them all um and it had Patking funny side done,
Speaker 1: It had pack King listed as an organizer while they're
Speaker 1: go fund me had a statement saying they had no
Speaker 1: connection to him, which was very funny. But yes, so
Speaker 1: CBC Toronto pack contacted them and the guy responded enough
Speaker 1: lies you quote slave blooded trader, evil will get its
Speaker 1: due in the end. And after a little yeah after yeah,
Speaker 1: after it back, yeah after it, back and forth, very
Speaker 1: brief back and forth. Uh and just like a couple
Speaker 1: of questions, uh, the organizer ended with, you know, you
Speaker 1: toe the line for the global corporate coup taking place
Speaker 1: under the guys of public health. You can't be that
Speaker 1: dumb traders will swing in time. Oh boy, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: do think Americans don't fully understand how much the anti
Speaker 1: vax movement is tied to far right politics with in
Speaker 1: Canada and it's like been like the driving force of
Speaker 1: far right politics for the past two years and it's
Speaker 1: gotten so much larger. Um it is, like it is,
Speaker 1: it is. It is a thing like when when you
Speaker 1: have when you have people on camera saying we want
Speaker 1: to January six, I advocate a civil war, talking about
Speaker 1: not leaving until the government either resigns or mandates are dropped,
Speaker 1: and then threatening physical violence on top of that. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: like it's it is. It is a thing that could
Speaker 1: happen there, and that's kind of why I wanted to
Speaker 1: talk about it is like yeah, when I have my
Speaker 1: mother calling me dozens of message just from random people
Speaker 1: like worried about this, then yeah, it is an issue, like, um,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's not it's not not a thing, No,
Speaker 1: it it is. And the rhetoric is so universal against
Speaker 1: anyone they perceived to be leftist too, that it is
Speaker 1: really dangerous. Like there's been a little bit of talk
Speaker 1: of like counters in Ottawa. Um, when the numbers are
Speaker 1: this big, like there's no safe weight for people to
Speaker 1: to stop that sort of thing, especially when all all
Speaker 1: the vehicles are on that side, Like it's a it's dangerous.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of violent stuff, um even uh, like
Speaker 1: I was looking today the People's Party of Canada's they
Speaker 1: got like five percent of votes in our last selection.
Speaker 1: They had a little bit of a scandal during our election,
Speaker 1: which is at the end of last year. UM, where
Speaker 1: a writing director for I think it's uh, it's the
Speaker 1: Great Area of London is Elgin, Middlesex, London, so they're
Speaker 1: they're writing directors and not their member of parliament writing
Speaker 1: um was revealed to uh post like sculpt mask Nazi
Speaker 1: memes and memes comparing Bernier, the leader of his own party,
Speaker 1: to Hitler, so like probably not a negative comparison, um.
Speaker 1: And he was not fired for it, but he was
Speaker 1: fired after it came out that he was being charged
Speaker 1: for throwing rocks at our prime minister. Yeah, he actually rely,
Speaker 1: he recently said on a live stream. He was asked
Speaker 1: he was currently on trial, and he said, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean as far as I know, Like he's been posting
Speaker 1: images of like trucks running people over and that's just
Speaker 1: like one connection to h to the legitimacy of it all, um,
Speaker 1: like you I mean the plat army guys, the ones
Speaker 1: who talked about driving the truck sixteen feet. They're also
Speaker 1: connected with Bernier. They've had Randy Hillier on their podcast before,
Speaker 1: who's a sitting politician, remember provincial parliament which is kind
Speaker 1: of like our state senate equivalent over here. Um, They've
Speaker 1: they've had him on and like there's some like legitimacy
Speaker 1: to it getting on and when you just talk about
Speaker 1: the broad movement in general. Former um Conservative Party of
Speaker 1: Canada leader Andrew Shear, who had kind of a rocky
Speaker 1: departure from the party because he allegedly his campaign funds
Speaker 1: to pay for his kids private school. So I note
Speaker 1: like he had already signed on and endorsed and been interviewed.
Speaker 1: Erin O'Toole, the current leader of the of the Conservative Party,
Speaker 1: uh just today actually said he was going to engage
Speaker 1: with them. Earlier this evening, Sergeant in Arms Packnents McDonald
Speaker 1: sent an email to our parliamentarians ahead of Saturday's trucker
Speaker 1: convoy protests and quoting Justin Link's twitter here. There have
Speaker 1: been attempts to collect MP's home addresses. As such, the
Speaker 1: Sergeant at arms is advising to avoid the rally and
Speaker 1: go somewhere safe. That apparently wasn't listened to Erin O'Toole,
Speaker 1: who said to do it anyways, and Justin Link tweeted
Speaker 1: later tomorrow, I will be meeting with truckers to announces,
Speaker 1: right after Parliamentary Security warned MPs to avoid the protests entirely.
Speaker 1: So it's not great. Yeah, I mean again, this will
Speaker 1: probably come out after Saturday, So if we don't talk
Speaker 1: about this again, then that means probably it's good. I mean,
Speaker 1: they showed up, they protest, and they kind oficipated if
Speaker 1: we're following this up in a few days with another episode,
Speaker 1: that that be something bad happen. But again, even even
Speaker 1: at this point, it is still worth talking about in
Speaker 1: terms of like the generally like this is like the
Speaker 1: kind of like the net of why this is so
Speaker 1: important for everybody is what you were saying about, Like,
Speaker 1: when you've got this many people, this many trucks coming
Speaker 1: from an outside and moving into a city, there's very
Speaker 1: little that can be done against them. Um, like there's
Speaker 1: not there's not really much of an effect the counter
Speaker 1: other than trying to get another massive people in cars
Speaker 1: to confront them, and that's um, you know, potentially dicey situation.
Speaker 1: So this remains a very powerful tactic. We've seen it
Speaker 1: used all over the United States too, like, and it's
Speaker 1: this idea of like blockading a city. Even though this
Speaker 1: is kind of the earliest step in taking that is
Speaker 1: this is gonna be the last time people try to
Speaker 1: extend to this logic. Yeah, So that's that's kind of
Speaker 1: the surrounding cultural reasons and shifts and rhetoric and like
Speaker 1: applicable nous as like an act of like an act
Speaker 1: of like protest or like like revolt or insurgency whatever
Speaker 1: whatever you want to use. Is there's interesting because like
Speaker 1: a lot of these other interesting thing about the States
Speaker 1: compared to Canada is like the States we have like
Speaker 1: we have like an actual like far right movement, like
Speaker 1: we have like we have like conservatives, when then we
Speaker 1: have like the far right movement in Canada. That that
Speaker 1: distinction is not much of a thing. A lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of there is there is some far right
Speaker 1: figures trying to push stuff for it, absolutely, but a
Speaker 1: lot of like the space in between conservative and far
Speaker 1: right is kind of a little bit more fluid. A
Speaker 1: lot of these people who are showing up are not
Speaker 1: like far right protesters. They are kind of regular conservatives,
Speaker 1: but they're still getting sucked into saying I advocate a
Speaker 1: civil war like that is just a regular conservative dude.
Speaker 1: He's not a member of any kind of political thing.
Speaker 1: He's It's like, it's that is just that is just
Speaker 1: kind of what this culture on the western side of
Speaker 1: Canada really really like a kind of defaults to almost
Speaker 1: when when you start going into this kind of like
Speaker 1: anti Trudeau territory, because that's the their their their main
Speaker 1: their main politics is anti Trudeau. Like that is that
Speaker 1: is what they are. So anything that gets to that
Speaker 1: point is allowed, whether that is conservative or that is
Speaker 1: like more far right, as long as it's anti Trudeau,
Speaker 1: then it's it is a valid politic. And that's another
Speaker 1: distinction in the State that that's a thing in the
Speaker 1: Canada that I don't really see as much in the States.
Speaker 1: It's very familiar to me when you talk about how
Speaker 1: anti Clinton is um fed into Trump is um like
Speaker 1: that that is I think a worthwhile comparison to me,
Speaker 1: because there were a lot of American conservatives who could
Speaker 1: get in bed with anybody if they were staying against
Speaker 1: Hillary or Bill. Um, cool stuff. Well, this is all fun.
Speaker 1: I hope to not talk with you about this again. UM,
Speaker 1: but there is a chance, there is a chance people
Speaker 1: have conversations, um, if you wouldn't want to after af
Speaker 1: this episode airs, if people want to see what happened,
Speaker 1: right because this this air is probably Monday, UM, and
Speaker 1: the convoys set to arrive on Saturday. Where can they
Speaker 1: find work talking about that, whether that be like your
Speaker 1: Twitter feed or um, if you know if any articles
Speaker 1: are planned. Yeah, so I'm planning on live tweeting. UM.
Speaker 1: I can't make any promises because safety is always a
Speaker 1: thing and I want to know what it looks like
Speaker 1: until Saturday happens. But I'm planning on live tweeting. My
Speaker 1: twitter is a at spineless L. That's the words by
Speaker 1: Less and then just the letter L. So yeah, you
Speaker 1: can check in on his account to see if he
Speaker 1: has a thread by the time this episodes out. Um,
Speaker 1: And yeah that's how that's how you can kind of
Speaker 1: figure out what happened if you're just listening to this
Speaker 1: now and then in the meantime, there'll be a lot
Speaker 1: of attawa media covering it. If you just want to
Speaker 1: see the fallout, I imagine the Canadian Antia New Work
Speaker 1: might talk about it more. They put an article today
Speaker 1: on it that that covers more of the kind of
Speaker 1: problems that the far right that we talked about today.
Speaker 1: Then the most other media will go into they did. Uh,
Speaker 1: that was a very good article. And then also today
Speaker 1: um I Elon Musk tweeted and support of the Canadian truckers.
Speaker 1: So just in terms of let's just as as a
Speaker 1: good example, I think this situation is a really great
Speaker 1: way to start thinking about politics and culture um and
Speaker 1: how they relate to each other, and how this type
Speaker 1: of thing succeeds, and how it succeeds um and why
Speaker 1: this rhetoric is so successful in bringing in so many
Speaker 1: people in Canada, uh and raising six million dollars almost
Speaker 1: seven million dollars. But anyway, that is that is the show.
Speaker 1: One more plug dance so people know where to find you. Uh.
Speaker 1: I only really am active on Twitter, so again it's
Speaker 1: at spineless LU. The word spineless is then I don't
Speaker 1: have a spine. And then the letter L on Twitter,
Speaker 1: you plug your getter account, You're you're getting Wow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: real Real get her user vibes coming off of Dan
Speaker 1: on social media platform that Joe Rogan looked at and said,
Speaker 1: Robert's just trying to get me to plug my stock
Speaker 1: puppet accounts. Yeah, everyone, this is fucking off. You could
Speaker 1: follow all my sock puppets at Fascist Wizard dot c
Speaker 1: a of anyway, that is uh that that doesn't for
Speaker 1: our show. Thank you for listening, and yeah, convoys, Canada
Speaker 1: can't can't escape? Excellent, Thank you. It's the New Year's again. Whoa, Yeah, welcome,
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Year the Tiger. This is a special
Speaker 1: special lunar New Year's edition of It could Happen here,
Speaker 1: a podcast that he is today just about well it's
Speaker 1: still about sort of things falling apart and things being rebuilt.
Speaker 1: But I wanted to specifically, you know, do do it
Speaker 1: do it do a special luniar New Year's episode and
Speaker 1: spend some time, I think talking about Chinese nous and
Speaker 1: how what sort of being a part of the Chinese
Speaker 1: diaspora in sort of in the US and Canada is
Speaker 1: like and you know how how that how the influence is,
Speaker 1: how we organize, how what what we're afraid of, what
Speaker 1: we're sort of proud of um and with me to
Speaker 1: talk about this. We have j n who I think
Speaker 1: first time I ever returning guests. Yeah, who is it works?
Speaker 1: With laus On? Hello j n Oh what an honor.
Speaker 1: Thanks thanks for inviting me back. Yeah, thank you for coming.
Speaker 1: And we also have Jane She who is a queer
Speaker 1: Chinese settler living in unseated traditional and ancestral territories and
Speaker 1: the Mosquian Sasquamish and slave with tooth nations in what
Speaker 1: is falsely and fakely considered Canada. Um. She is a poet, writer, editor,
Speaker 1: and an organizer and does many other cool things. Hello Jane, welcome,
Speaker 1: welcome to the show. Hello, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: UM just wanted to share that it's musquam, squamish and tooth. Yeah. Sorry,
Speaker 1: I Fortunately I do not live up and so my
Speaker 1: my pronunciations of tribal names are even worse than they
Speaker 1: are for the tribal days that are around me. So
Speaker 1: my apologies. Now. So al right, before we get into
Speaker 1: a bunch of extremely grim stuff, I wanted to because
Speaker 1: this is the this if you will be listening to well, okay,
Speaker 1: unless listening to this on Monday night, in which case, uh,
Speaker 1: congratulations on beating time. But most of you're probably gonna
Speaker 1: listen to listening to this on on lunar New Years,
Speaker 1: and so I wanted to before, yeah, before we think
Speaker 1: it's completely dark. I want you to know what you
Speaker 1: choose favorite Chinese New Year's food is, because this is
Speaker 1: like maybe my favorite holiday, and it's basically my favorite
Speaker 1: holiday because in in Grand Chinese tradition, it's just an
Speaker 1: excuse to eat a lot. So yeah, opening the floor up, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you're the expert here, Jane, so feel free
Speaker 1: to I am not like to laid down the knowledge.
Speaker 1: I am not an expert just because uh I full
Speaker 1: dumplings does not mean I'm an expert. But I mean
Speaker 1: I haven't spent like lunar New Year's with really that
Speaker 1: many other people in a very long time. So my
Speaker 1: sense of like breath of food has really really narrowed
Speaker 1: to what is available to me. Um. And I also
Speaker 1: have been really struggling with the dumplings that I've been
Speaker 1: making because of like carpal tunnel issues. But I've been
Speaker 1: thinking a lot about jellyfish lately, Like I keep thinking
Speaker 1: about jellyfish, and I keep thinking about like the sesame
Speaker 1: anything with sesame in it. Yeah, and like just boil
Speaker 1: dumplings I feel like are really great for me at
Speaker 1: this particular moment. Yeah, my favorite is uh in Cantenese,
Speaker 1: it's called nan go, which is it's really yes um.
Speaker 1: And the way my mom used to make it all
Speaker 1: the time was like dipping it in an egg first, um.
Speaker 1: And so it has this kind of like eggy crust
Speaker 1: on it, which is really really awesome. And I've been
Speaker 1: making up of the past couple of years myself where
Speaker 1: I am and I can't get to go to the
Speaker 1: grocery store and grab some because it's only available around
Speaker 1: this time. I guess they don't really produce it any
Speaker 1: other time. And last time I went to visit my mom,
Speaker 1: she like loaded my suitcase full of them and that
Speaker 1: was able to eat them fast enough, unfortunately, and some
Speaker 1: of them went fast. Oh no, we have we have
Speaker 1: one in our refrigerator. I think it's I think it's
Speaker 1: it was in the freezer. It's now I think in
Speaker 1: the refrigerator and all incredibly excited to cut into it
Speaker 1: New Year's Yeah, do you do you guys do the
Speaker 1: because I know so we don't really have red bean
Speaker 1: ones I know there's like brown sugar ones or something
Speaker 1: that are like plain. Wait, I just wanted to check,
Speaker 1: like is it nanongal Yeah, or at least so like
Speaker 1: the sort of like flower thing that is like shaped
Speaker 1: like a semicircle. Yeah. Wait, yeah, I feel like there's
Speaker 1: different circle. Yeah. We usually cut them into like like
Speaker 1: square strips, but I think that's just like a cooking
Speaker 1: ease of cooking thing. Yeah, and it usually comes up
Speaker 1: like a date or something on top. Yeah, when it's packaged.
Speaker 1: That's so interesting because I feel like the nanal that
Speaker 1: I grew up with doesn't usually have a lot of
Speaker 1: things on it. It's kind of like sticky and kind
Speaker 1: of plain, and I'm just this is this is a
Speaker 1: new thing. Yeah. Yeah. The ones we usually get just
Speaker 1: has red beans in it, and then there's like the
Speaker 1: one day on the top. Oh, I don't know if
Speaker 1: you're thinking of like towning Go, which is like a
Speaker 1: different type of dish um where it's like white rice
Speaker 1: cakes and then you you can like it's like saucy
Speaker 1: and then yeah, like different ingredients in it. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think it's a different Ours are just that they're like
Speaker 1: they're they're pretty close to the yeah, I think I
Speaker 1: think I'm talking about the just regularly and golic. They're
Speaker 1: just like like they're they're they're they're basically plain, but
Speaker 1: there's some red bean like stirred into the dough and
Speaker 1: then it's just like the flat brown thing that you
Speaker 1: like fry. Yeah, all right, this is we've now done
Speaker 1: dessert chat. I would honest, honestly much much less grim
Speaker 1: time than most of the stuff that happens on here,
Speaker 1: and you have all been now subjected to it. I
Speaker 1: go eat Chinese New Year's food, it's great. Ah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So on two things that are somewhat more grim um.
Speaker 1: I think there's there's two big things I wanted to
Speaker 1: talk about that's sort of related to, like, I guess
Speaker 1: Chinese diaspora nous um. I guess we can start with
Speaker 1: talking a bit about anti asition violence and police violence,
Speaker 1: because I mean, it's not like so my sort of
Speaker 1: into this is that my my someone Okay. So one
Speaker 1: of the things that's happened in the past about two
Speaker 1: years was this the huge sort of spike and anti
Speaker 1: aition violence. But then you know, part of what happens
Speaker 1: politically around that was there was a huge attempts to
Speaker 1: essentially turn antiation violence as you I guess like the
Speaker 1: anti PLM, like especially in the US, but I think
Speaker 1: I think this happened elsewhere too, where there was as
Speaker 1: it didn't I don't know, it worked in some places
Speaker 1: and didn't work in other places. So I went to
Speaker 1: the Research Chicago and a few is a few months
Speaker 1: ago now maybe it's a couple of a month that
Speaker 1: you ago, a Asian Chinese international student like got shot
Speaker 1: on campus and this turned into a huge sort of
Speaker 1: like bring more cops on campus. That there was a
Speaker 1: huge petition that got signed that was that people were
Speaker 1: like asking for security cameras and asking for our cops
Speaker 1: and like the u c p D like a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks later just like shot a dude, and so
Speaker 1: that there there's been I've been seeing this tension a lot.
Speaker 1: I was wondering if YouTube had also sort of run
Speaker 1: into similar stuff and what your thoughts. We're on it, um.
Speaker 1: I mean, I feel like, unfortunately with Canada, there's like
Speaker 1: this dynamic where we looked to the States for news
Speaker 1: and validation in this weird way that I find really
Speaker 1: delegitimizes the unique struggles that are here, that are different
Speaker 1: um there are there's a different kind of police system.
Speaker 1: There's like the politcal police like Vancouver Police Apartment UM.
Speaker 1: But then there's also the RCMP, the Royal Mountain Canadian Police,
Speaker 1: which are in other the municipalities. And the RCMP was
Speaker 1: created specifically UM as a tool of settler colonialism to
Speaker 1: enforce the Indian Act, which is UM, I guess the
Speaker 1: most succinctly way I can put it as segregation UM
Speaker 1: of Indigenous peoples from settlers. And there's a lot of
Speaker 1: displacement of black communities across Canada. But and there was
Speaker 1: also slavery in Canada, even though we like to pretend
Speaker 1: that there wasn't. And so against this background, I guess
Speaker 1: UM and ongoing like police brutality, whether it's in what's
Speaker 1: atten territories or just the police killing people. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of mainstream Asian Canadian and Chinese Canadian institutions that
Speaker 1: are very very much complicit in the system. Like there
Speaker 1: is an organization, an immigrant Chinese Canadian organization in Vancouver
Speaker 1: who one of the board members is a cop who
Speaker 1: is married to a a city councilor. And a lot
Speaker 1: of the discourse that institutions not people themselves necessarily, but
Speaker 1: institutions create around. For example, the revitalization of Chinatown or
Speaker 1: the preservation of the culture is around Oh, there's graffiti
Speaker 1: in the neighborhood Chinatown, and Vancouver is in the downtown
Speaker 1: Eyside was just considered UM, the poorest post is considered
Speaker 1: the poorest post a cold in Canada, and it's like
Speaker 1: a tight knit community with a lot of Indigenous people's,
Speaker 1: black people, people in poverty, struggling against the poisoning massacre UM.
Speaker 1: Wherein the government is not providing UM safe supply and
Speaker 1: where the police just kind of like are everywhere pointing
Speaker 1: guns and everyone displacing the tens cities and so when
Speaker 1: there is an easy and not an easy but just
Speaker 1: like a demonized group of people that UM, the general
Speaker 1: public doesn't know enough about UM. If you walk through
Speaker 1: the downtowning Side and talk to people, you would talk
Speaker 1: to people about their experiences with residential school, their experiences
Speaker 1: with missing family members, experiences with poverty and in the
Speaker 1: in the broadest terms, it's like the way that try
Speaker 1: and Town is being gentrified. People tend to blame the
Speaker 1: poor UM and there's like this divide and conqueror mentality
Speaker 1: within the Asian diaspora, whin the Chinese diaspora specifically, and
Speaker 1: so similar to what happened with Um Michelle Go. Similar
Speaker 1: to her UM, there was a South Asian elderly woman
Speaker 1: who a group of people who lived in the tensity
Speaker 1: had killed pretending to be cops when they knocked on
Speaker 1: her door, and the council, one of the city councilors
Speaker 1: UM in Vancouver was like this, we need to stop
Speaker 1: indulging in these tense cities. Um. Meanwhile, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of like marginalized people in these tense cities who who
Speaker 1: who can'ts UM, who need to live there because it's
Speaker 1: COVID times, and society has abandoned them. So it's like
Speaker 1: anti Asian racism and violence has also the hate, the
Speaker 1: so called hate crime thing has so apparently increased, UM.
Speaker 1: And I don't think that it's hasn't increased. It's just
Speaker 1: that like the way that the media, the way that
Speaker 1: the institutions within Canada is also jumping onto the police wagon,
Speaker 1: the police the hate crime angle, rather than learn from abolitionists. Rather, Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a long way I'm putting it. It's like similar,
Speaker 1: it's similar, and I know a lot of details. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think that, Yeah, I think that tracks.
Speaker 1: I mean the targets are slightly different just based on
Speaker 1: such a snears, but on the sort of local context.
Speaker 1: But I think that, yeah, that tracks a lot with
Speaker 1: what we've been seeing here, as I think there's a
Speaker 1: there's another thing that I don't know, so I I
Speaker 1: really don't like the term like because the did the
Speaker 1: Twitter hashtag is stop Asition hate, Like I hate that
Speaker 1: framing of it as sort of hatred and not racism.
Speaker 1: But even the sort of the anti Asian violence framing,
Speaker 1: which I've been used a lot, I think has problems
Speaker 1: because you know, I mean, this is one of the
Speaker 1: things you were talking about, one of the things that
Speaker 1: I've seen a lot. It's just you know, any time,
Speaker 1: like you know, there are genuine sort of racism attacks, right,
Speaker 1: but then there's also just like I mean, one of
Speaker 1: the sort of scare things that happened here was it
Speaker 1: was like a bunch of people's, like a bunch of
Speaker 1: restat Chinese restaurants got broken into and robbed, and everyone
Speaker 1: was like, well, this is anti Asian violence, and it's like, well, no,
Speaker 1: like this is just theft and and there there's there's
Speaker 1: been this sort of like collapsing of something bad happens
Speaker 1: to an Asian person with specifically sort of like targeted
Speaker 1: racist attacks, and I think that's been well, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's been a problem. And there's also the secondary problem
Speaker 1: of you know who even who even gets included in
Speaker 1: this in the first place. Like one of one of
Speaker 1: the biggest things I've been frustrated about is, you know,
Speaker 1: the sort of the selective inclusion of South Asian people,
Speaker 1: like I there there was there was a shooting at
Speaker 1: the fed X facility last year by a guy who
Speaker 1: was like very much, very far right, kind of like
Speaker 1: pilled online guy, and it killed a bunch of Seak workers,
Speaker 1: and there was never there was just nothing, even like
Speaker 1: no one talked about his anti Asian violence. But then,
Speaker 1: you know, selectively, you get inclusions to South these Asian
Speaker 1: people when it's like it's it's it's like people get
Speaker 1: folded into being Asian when it's like useful to call
Speaker 1: from war police. But then when it's you know, not
Speaker 1: useful for that, or when it's you know, especially when
Speaker 1: it's working class people getting killed, there's just sort of nothing.
Speaker 1: And I've been I don't know. I've been really frustrated
Speaker 1: by this dynamic a lot. Um. Yeah, And Jan, I
Speaker 1: want to know what you think about this too, because
Speaker 1: I have no talks slong enough about Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, wasn't there there was a hate crime build
Speaker 1: that was passed in Congress, right, uh, And there was supposedly,
Speaker 1: quote unquote supposed to be addressing all this quote unquote
Speaker 1: anti Asian eight stuff. And you know the only thing
Speaker 1: that accomplished was it created like some some government organ
Speaker 1: to like oversee these efforts to address hate crimes and
Speaker 1: then more funding for the police. Right. So I think
Speaker 1: it was it was a very kind of direct impact.
Speaker 1: We could just see how this discourse transformed into exactly
Speaker 1: what a lot of you know, organizers had said would happen,
Speaker 1: which is more funny for the police and not making
Speaker 1: communities safer. Right. So, Um, I think the real conendrum
Speaker 1: for me, and I think that really kind of you know,
Speaker 1: I spent a lot of time thinking about this, and
Speaker 1: I get I get kind of frustrated. Is um you know,
Speaker 1: whenever these these attacks happen on you know, Asian heritage
Speaker 1: or Asian identified people. Um, the response, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: it's a good natured and it's well meaning, and I
Speaker 1: agree with it, but you know, the response is always
Speaker 1: like the telling folks who have been victimized or those
Speaker 1: who know them, um, that more police is not the answer, right,
Speaker 1: And you know, I think that's true. But then I
Speaker 1: think what I'm struggling with is how to make this
Speaker 1: message resonate with those folks, right, because I think there's
Speaker 1: a way that in some ways that can alienate them
Speaker 1: even more and make them even more reaction right, because
Speaker 1: that's you know, the media has often spun that argument. Uh,
Speaker 1: they use further instances of violence to spin that argument
Speaker 1: of like when when people say the answer is not
Speaker 1: more cops, it doesn't make it safer, the media is
Speaker 1: able to spend that to say, look, this isn't working, right,
Speaker 1: It's that things are actually getting more dangerous all the
Speaker 1: kind of like scaremongering tactics with crime statistics and all
Speaker 1: that stuff, which are usually false anyway. So I think
Speaker 1: that's what I'm trying to figure out now, is like,
Speaker 1: you know, because in in Chinatown, l A, where you know,
Speaker 1: where I've done some work, there was community meetings with
Speaker 1: c c D, the Chinatown Committee for equitable. Uh, what's
Speaker 1: what's the de stand for? I always forget development. Um.
Speaker 1: They had some meetings with community folks to kind of
Speaker 1: like you know, hear what hear what they wanted to
Speaker 1: do to address this, and they kind of like a
Speaker 1: lot of those organizers had, um, you know, they're coming
Speaker 1: from that viewpoint that calling for more cops is not
Speaker 1: the answer, and so some of the mail they're from
Speaker 1: the community, but they're not. They weren't part of the
Speaker 1: kind of like senior population of Chinatown, which is you know,
Speaker 1: it's like what incomes seniors is kind of like are
Speaker 1: the folks that are being pushed out and by developers
Speaker 1: and all the gentrification happening as well. Um, some of
Speaker 1: some men were kind of like, okay, well we should
Speaker 1: start kind of like arnged neighborhood watch um. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think in some way that taps into this kind
Speaker 1: of like we protect us type of ethos, right, It's
Speaker 1: it's not relying on a state or government or whatever
Speaker 1: police paramilitary force. UM. But then I think the question
Speaker 1: that some folks had I heard the secondhand, was that, um,
Speaker 1: you know, are are these people actually from the community
Speaker 1: and are they actually doing this to address the needs
Speaker 1: of the folks who are most affected by it, right,
Speaker 1: And so I think some folks were uncomfortable with the
Speaker 1: idea that there should be these kind of like street patrols, UM.
Speaker 1: And so there's there's just so many different ways to
Speaker 1: approach this, and I haven't you know, I'm not laying
Speaker 1: way or anyone, but I just haven't seen an effective
Speaker 1: way to counteract that call for more police. Yet. That's
Speaker 1: a really good point because I feel like in when
Speaker 1: especially um Asian women, people who experience like various forms
Speaker 1: of sexual violence or um street harassment, UM, that sense
Speaker 1: of unsafety is amplified when we witness other people getting
Speaker 1: murdered in public spaces. And so I think in a
Speaker 1: way it's like understandable why people want to grasp for
Speaker 1: any kind of solution and and also why that kind
Speaker 1: of trauma can be weaponized or like taken advantage of immediately,
Speaker 1: Like just because I'm like, who asked for you to
Speaker 1: be street criptials of Chinatown? Who decided that you make
Speaker 1: the communities safer? Have you consulted the seniors? Have you
Speaker 1: have you talked with all of the seniors, all of
Speaker 1: the elders to ask them like how would you feel
Speaker 1: if I did that? Like where is that suggestion coming from?
Speaker 1: And I think that like the other argument is that
Speaker 1: like mental health resources is an alternative to policing, even
Speaker 1: though UM, policing and mental health systems are very, very
Speaker 1: very connected. UM Edward Wong has an article about that
Speaker 1: in Upping the Antie And I don't know. I just
Speaker 1: think that, like there has to be like a way
Speaker 1: to talk about this without invalidating each other's trauma and
Speaker 1: invalidating UM people survival instincts as well, because I feel
Speaker 1: like UM, for years, as someone who's done work in
Speaker 1: the anti violence sector, it's not that I wanted there
Speaker 1: to be more police. It's just that like a lot
Speaker 1: of survivors might be like, hey, I actually do want
Speaker 1: to use the court system because this person is dangerous.
Speaker 1: Like that's like, as somebody supporting a survivor, I can't
Speaker 1: just go up, no, you're wrong, less cops, right, Like
Speaker 1: that's that's not a compassionate response. And it's also not
Speaker 1: a compassionate response to go, hey, you're making this like
Speaker 1: all about yourself and you should likely be talking about
Speaker 1: like black and indigenous people like like like that's that's
Speaker 1: also really insensitive. So it's like, I feel like there's
Speaker 1: a way that there there is like a way to
Speaker 1: talk about abolition that really needs to respect every survivor
Speaker 1: or every like communities like trauma. And it's not an
Speaker 1: easy thing because it's not like our communities have had
Speaker 1: a good way to respond to trauma, like we haven't
Speaker 1: really like we're still breaking the cycles of intergenerational trauma. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think this this kind of comes back to
Speaker 1: another sort of difficulty of this whole project because you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of the sort of the abolitionist framework is
Speaker 1: about like transitioning things towards community solutions, but like what
Speaker 1: is that you know, like, what does that even mean
Speaker 1: when you're dealing with you know this this is this
Speaker 1: is part of the problem with well, okay, you have
Speaker 1: armed self defense groups, but you know what happens when
Speaker 1: inevitably and this is this is just something that happens
Speaker 1: just you know, this is this is this is the
Speaker 1: nature of security forces, right is eventually you're going to
Speaker 1: get abuters in it. And it's like, okay, well what
Speaker 1: happens then, and what happens when you know, like the
Speaker 1: abuses of people inside the community and and this is compounded,
Speaker 1: I think by this problem of like what like what
Speaker 1: even you know the I think I think there's there's
Speaker 1: there's there's a broader problem of like what Asian nous is,
Speaker 1: And there's a broader and this is this is also
Speaker 1: sort of localized problem of like what even like is
Speaker 1: the Chinese community at all? Because you're dealing with something
Speaker 1: that's incredibly fragmented, You're dealing people speak differ languages, You're
Speaker 1: dealing with people who have been in these places for
Speaker 1: you know, some people have been here for century, some
Speaker 1: people who have been here like two months. And I
Speaker 1: think that makes it really difficult in a lot of
Speaker 1: ways to sort of like even even just bring together
Speaker 1: something that could be a community. And I know, I
Speaker 1: know what happens, and I know you know, there's there's
Speaker 1: there's lots of different sort of like fragmented communities. But
Speaker 1: but I think it makes this harder because there isn't
Speaker 1: a sort of like ready made thing you can turn
Speaker 1: to and go, Okay, well this is how we're going,
Speaker 1: like this is a group of people and this is
Speaker 1: the sort of like social sphere, and this is the
Speaker 1: community that we're going to turn into sort of deal
Speaker 1: with this stuff. There's just this kind of a bunch
Speaker 1: of amorphous different groups. And then also you have the
Speaker 1: problem that like you know, if you're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: like political forces, nation communities, like the business associations are
Speaker 1: extremely powerful and you know, we have different objectives and
Speaker 1: they do, but they're also like extremely well organized in
Speaker 1: a way that most other sort of like Chinese groups aren't.
Speaker 1: I don't know that that's that's that's been where my
Speaker 1: thinking has been going on this. Yeah, I think, um,
Speaker 1: this there's some residents with what you're saying and the
Speaker 1: kind of dynamics that you're identifying and what I've kind
Speaker 1: of witnessed and experienced in like Hong Kong asport organizing
Speaker 1: and which I think, you know, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: overlap with that same type of like small business organization
Speaker 1: type of thing that usually dominates China towns across North America,
Speaker 1: which is the case in l A. And actually c
Speaker 1: CD spends a lot of time fighting the small business
Speaker 1: organizations UM because they are very friendly with developers UM
Speaker 1: and they're usually pro um you know, pro securitization and
Speaker 1: anti for folks and all that kind of stuff. So
Speaker 1: there is that that element right where a lot of
Speaker 1: the times, you know, you are fighting against people who
Speaker 1: might have to like same heritages for example, UM. And
Speaker 1: you know, for me personally, that's that's very much the
Speaker 1: case with Hong Kong aspert groups, right because you know,
Speaker 1: many of them are very conservative, are right wing and
Speaker 1: not only just kind of held personal beliefs, but advocate
Speaker 1: a lot for these kind of you know, these policies
Speaker 1: and politicians and all these different things that I really
Speaker 1: can't stand and I'm aligned against um. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think it's a lot of folks want to take
Speaker 1: the kind of pregnantious root of like we'll work with
Speaker 1: you on things that we where we have points of unity,
Speaker 1: otherwise we don't, Whereas you know, I guess some people
Speaker 1: see me as as a little bit more rigid in
Speaker 1: the sense that like, I don't want to work with
Speaker 1: these folks at all, because um, I see them as
Speaker 1: kind of themselves as as a force that is causing
Speaker 1: more hard than good, especially if with these Hong Kong
Speaker 1: aspert groups, the usual mantra is like Hong Kong first,
Speaker 1: like everything that we do is is serving Hong Kong um,
Speaker 1: and that you in the desper that usually means kind
Speaker 1: of like non partisanship, lobbying, congress, all those different things, UM,
Speaker 1: and then kind of like completely ignoring or being agnostic
Speaker 1: of local and domestic issues. UM to oversimplify a little bit. So,
Speaker 1: you know, I think it's been on my mind a lot.
Speaker 1: I know your question was about Chineseness, but I guess
Speaker 1: for me that that kind of filters a little bit
Speaker 1: further down to like what is being a Hong Kong. Right.
Speaker 1: It's really difficult to organize with your specific quote unquote
Speaker 1: ethnic or diaspora community, and the the meaning of diaspora
Speaker 1: is not a cohesive community but people's memories of home. UM.
Speaker 1: It's like a difficult thing to kind of but I
Speaker 1: butt your head against because it's like you have your
Speaker 1: UM diversity, equity, inclusion framework of organizing, and then you
Speaker 1: have the every day like what what what these frameworks
Speaker 1: can't simplify, which is the tensions between your communities. Like
Speaker 1: I didn't grow up it experiencing overt racist violence when
Speaker 1: I grew up in Richmond. UM. Richmond is an extremely
Speaker 1: East Asian and Chinese suburb UM that saw first Um,
Speaker 1: not first, but just like at some point a wave
Speaker 1: of Hong Kong diaspora because of and then afterwards more
Speaker 1: like mainlanders UM, and so on the playground, somebody was like,
Speaker 1: are you from Taiwan mainland or or Hong Kong? And
Speaker 1: that was when I was like seven, And that was
Speaker 1: my introduction to what it means to be in diaspora
Speaker 1: in this particular kind of way, and UM being like
Speaker 1: just right like in that and in that, and and
Speaker 1: figuring yourself out within that and seeing how there was
Speaker 1: just an absence of community me because of how like
Speaker 1: these different geopolitical experiences have like separated us UM and
Speaker 1: made it more difficult. UM Like when we filter our
Speaker 1: parents political beliefs onto each other, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: this awkward thing. But but I think that like UM
Speaker 1: in in trying to contend with that in the in
Speaker 1: the present, it's sort of like, um, we have these
Speaker 1: older institutions that other people that that the older generations
Speaker 1: have built. What new things can we build? What things
Speaker 1: can we um? Because I feel like I'm I'm really
Speaker 1: rigid too, I'm like really not great at talking across
Speaker 1: the stile, and when I do, it's not it's not
Speaker 1: really about anything substantive it's like, hey, like, hi, it's
Speaker 1: good to see you know, Like, when you live in
Speaker 1: a place you you don't want to make like make enemies,
Speaker 1: but like, it's it's a really hard thing. Um, and
Speaker 1: it's even more heartbreaking when you find out slowly that
Speaker 1: people are just taking advantage of you, right like and
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's it's a it's a really difficult
Speaker 1: thing to organize against when you're like you all hate me,
Speaker 1: great love it. This has been they could Happen Here.
Speaker 1: Join us for part two of this discussion tomorrow. We're
Speaker 1: going to more detail on the state of the left.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, you can find us That Happened Here
Speaker 1: pod on Twitter, Instagram, and check out the Cool Zone
Speaker 1: for other shows that we need. Welcome Day Could Happen
Speaker 1: Here podcasts are recognizes that Lunar New Year's is not,
Speaker 1: in fact just one day, and in that spirit, our
Speaker 1: special New Year's episode is going on for a second day.
Speaker 1: So there's the rest of our conversation with Jane and Jane.
Speaker 1: You know. The other thing I wanted to script touch
Speaker 1: on like this is I think kind of deferenting off
Speaker 1: the topic, but I think is also something that I've
Speaker 1: been running into a lot, which is that like, you know,
Speaker 1: you have this kind of like you know, you have
Speaker 1: this kind of bind, right because on the one hand,
Speaker 1: you're stuck between you know, like a lot a lot
Speaker 1: of the organizing and sort of in Asian communities has
Speaker 1: all of these problems. And then you know, okay, well,
Speaker 1: you know the other thing that's happening is is the
Speaker 1: sort of mainstream American left and the mainstream American left.
Speaker 1: I think the Canadian left has problems similar problems with
Speaker 1: this is that like it's a bunch of just like
Speaker 1: it's a bunch of tankies, it's a bunch of people
Speaker 1: who love the CCP, it's a bunch of just we
Speaker 1: are genocide deniers and like people who think that every
Speaker 1: Asian person who like doesn't like the government is a
Speaker 1: cia psi op. And I don't know. This is something
Speaker 1: that I've like, I mean, I've I ran into a
Speaker 1: lot trying to i mean help people do in Hong Kong.
Speaker 1: Organizing is something I've run into just in like every organize,
Speaker 1: like I've run, I run into this an anarchist spaces
Speaker 1: to like it's it's just I don't know, it feels
Speaker 1: really bad because it's like like you're you're just sort
Speaker 1: of caught between and I guess it's sort of this
Speaker 1: is three way triangulation, right, because on the one hand,
Speaker 1: you have this sort of like you have the local
Speaker 1: dynamics with you know, the sort of the sentence of
Speaker 1: the sort of reactionary small business owners. You have this,
Speaker 1: you know, the Chinese community also being sort of split
Speaker 1: in between like pro and anti CCP factions, both of
Speaker 1: whom have like are absolutely chock full of fanatical right wingers.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, okay, it's like the CCP verse epoch times,
Speaker 1: and it's like I don't want any of them to
Speaker 1: win and then use them out, and you're caught in
Speaker 1: the middle of this sort of they're caught in the
Speaker 1: middle of this sort of I don't know, I think
Speaker 1: it's sort of like a fox geopolitical struggle, but like
Speaker 1: one of one of the big sort of ideological conflicts
Speaker 1: being between both the CCP in the US sort of
Speaker 1: like using the specter of each other to sort of
Speaker 1: like disturb their basis. And I don't know, I am
Speaker 1: incredibly frustrated by I'm incredibly frustrated by the way that
Speaker 1: these groups have expected like the ant CCP, like the
Speaker 1: pro CCP groups are sort of selectively been using and
Speaker 1: like selectively been using anti Asian violence, as you know,
Speaker 1: they basically making the reguments of the importance of anti
Speaker 1: Asition violence. Is that while this only happens because people
Speaker 1: say many things about the CCP, and if no one
Speaker 1: didn't like the CCP, then there wouldn't be any violence,
Speaker 1: even though like anti Asian violence here predates the existence
Speaker 1: of a communist party in China by centuries, like we
Speaker 1: we like the we we invaded, we invaded China, like
Speaker 1: how many times? At least twice, maybe three I think
Speaker 1: at least twice and maybe three times, like before there
Speaker 1: was a communist party, And so I don't know. I
Speaker 1: I feel trapped a lot between these dynamics and ways
Speaker 1: that are very frustrating. And yeah, I guess I want
Speaker 1: to open the floor to talk about that. I guess
Speaker 1: I see it as like co optation partly um, but
Speaker 1: I guess I also see it as how power works.
Speaker 1: Like I there's like this local paper and I was
Speaker 1: researching sort of the history of Chinese diaspora organizing locally,
Speaker 1: and there was a spat in the paper between two
Speaker 1: people who one of whom is from UM, a newer
Speaker 1: Hong Kong diaspora. There was like a whole spat um
Speaker 1: in the paper about his history, and there's the history
Speaker 1: of like those tensions are like written in the community itself,
Speaker 1: Like it's it's it's not a new thing that people
Speaker 1: argue about what happened on June four. It's not new
Speaker 1: that people are really mistrustful each other and that there
Speaker 1: are actual like government forces that infiltrate and create a
Speaker 1: like basically deny other people's struggles like UM when that
Speaker 1: the that government is themselves perpetuating it. And I guess
Speaker 1: it just is really hard when fellow organizers that you
Speaker 1: otherwise really like I want to get along with our
Speaker 1: our like uncritical of the state that has oppressed your family,
Speaker 1: because you're just kind of like you're kind of like, wait,
Speaker 1: so are we have we had a conversation about this,
Speaker 1: Like we clearly haven't talked eno if this is what
Speaker 1: you believe in. And it's just a little bit hard
Speaker 1: because it's like community building is not assuming that we're
Speaker 1: in solidarity. Community building is actually like doing that hard work,
Speaker 1: like what is your community experiencing and what is my
Speaker 1: community experiencing? How are we being like weaponized against each other?
Speaker 1: Like yeah, how are these governments like manipulating like communities?
Speaker 1: But that's like really hard when trust has been probably
Speaker 1: broken like the immediate Yeah, I think you're so right
Speaker 1: that it's it's really about cauotation and a lot of it,
Speaker 1: like what I've witnessed as really so much about UM.
Speaker 1: And this is like, like you're saying, Jane, this is
Speaker 1: a much older dynamic than you know just the past
Speaker 1: couple of years. Is like, uh, states being able to
Speaker 1: use this kind of home and desper of framework to
Speaker 1: um demand loyalty through like targeting desperate people's guilt UM.
Speaker 1: And so there's so many like guilty desper people I
Speaker 1: know who are like you know, usually from usually from
Speaker 1: a class perspective, right because they had the their family
Speaker 1: had the resources to leave or uh they were not
Speaker 1: born in the home country or whatever because of their
Speaker 1: family background, that type of thing, and they want to
Speaker 1: subsume that by taking this radical you know, anti U
Speaker 1: s anti Canada stands um, which is fine, Like obviously
Speaker 1: being anti us and anti Canada is a good thing,
Speaker 1: but um, the thing that's really kind of frustrated me
Speaker 1: the most is seeing these kind of like radical folks
Speaker 1: in North America, especially queer folks who are like they'll
Speaker 1: take the most reactionary positions against women and queer and
Speaker 1: you know LGBT folks in China, for example, by supporting
Speaker 1: a state that is repressing them. Right. So it's it's
Speaker 1: such cognitive dissonance to me, Like, I don't understand why
Speaker 1: these folks can't see, um that they're kind of perpetuating
Speaker 1: this violence in the service of this kind of overarching
Speaker 1: imperative of not ever saying anything bad about China because
Speaker 1: it will help, it'll it'll bolster the US propaganda war machine,
Speaker 1: which is like, there's absolutely a way that I mean
Speaker 1: that absolutely happens if you do that uh un carefully, right,
Speaker 1: if you just kind of repeat um us media narratives
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. But I think there's absolutely a
Speaker 1: way to do both right and um. To me, the
Speaker 1: way to do that is to not um support the
Speaker 1: state discourses that demand loy else from the dask broke,
Speaker 1: but to actually, you know, it's the grassroots thing, right,
Speaker 1: It's just kind of like we support career folks around
Speaker 1: the world who are struggling under oppression from their governments
Speaker 1: and that type of thing. Um, and being able to
Speaker 1: very carefully say that with nuance, UM, and to be
Speaker 1: against both at the same time, for example, UM, well
Speaker 1: that's really really difficult, right, um. And people have very
Speaker 1: kind of the triolic reactions when you try and do that. Um.
Speaker 1: As you know, she set up talk Chris, So I
Speaker 1: don't know this. This is still the contrum for me
Speaker 1: because I tend to take the more rigid stance against
Speaker 1: against these folks, but I know people who are very
Speaker 1: kind of they take a more compassionate stance, which is
Speaker 1: like these these are newly plus politicized youth. Um, they're
Speaker 1: just coming to a lot of these politics and positions. UM.
Speaker 1: And you know, being anti us is better than not
Speaker 1: being anti us, is It's what a lot of folks say,
Speaker 1: And you know, I agree to a certain extent. But
Speaker 1: then it's also like if they're being miseducated in these histories, UM,
Speaker 1: that's okay to a certain point when you're exploring and
Speaker 1: discovering these things and becoming radicalized. But you know, like
Speaker 1: Jane said, there's also these kind of material, direct impacts
Speaker 1: that you have on people that you work with, that
Speaker 1: you organized with, that that are your friends or loved ones,
Speaker 1: um that you know. That kind of explanation of like oh,
Speaker 1: they're just learning is like it's insufficient in that kind
Speaker 1: of individual way because you're still hurting people and threatening
Speaker 1: people around you, right, So I think there has to
Speaker 1: be a balance and like being able to steer folks
Speaker 1: in into these like non Stalinist, non statist directions even
Speaker 1: while they're discovering. I hate how we're even having to
Speaker 1: be like steering people into a non sell list perspective.
Speaker 1: I'm just like, I'm not a horny for stalent I
Speaker 1: like to think that pisces me off about this. It's
Speaker 1: just like like they're not even Illinist, Like this is
Speaker 1: the thing that's frustrating, Like if if, if if they
Speaker 1: were merely twentieth century Stalinists, we wouldn't be having this argument,
Speaker 1: because you know, twenty century Stalinism is like well, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: like twenty centy Stalinist or anti market economy, and it's
Speaker 1: like no, they've they've somehow found a way to take
Speaker 1: literally the worst aspects of Stalinism and then be like okay,
Speaker 1: but what is what if what is stalinism but also
Speaker 1: capitalism good at the same time. And it's just like,
Speaker 1: how how did you do this? Like how how did
Speaker 1: you come up with an ideology that like I don't know,
Speaker 1: I mean, I I think I think also I think
Speaker 1: that's been frustrating to me about this is like it's
Speaker 1: a way of sort of of of it becomes this
Speaker 1: way of channeling you know, you have the diaspora guilt
Speaker 1: in the one hand, that you have just random sort
Speaker 1: of like white leftists sort of white guilt, and it
Speaker 1: becomes this way of like channeling that into this sort
Speaker 1: of follow anti racism where you know, you get you
Speaker 1: get people who are like actual professional like hacks, right
Speaker 1: like Roger Day for example, being like, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: to doing things like wow, if you, if you, if you,
Speaker 1: if you criticize this time you state it all that
Speaker 1: sinophobia and like you're directly leading to people getting killed.
Speaker 1: And it's like, no, that's not how this works. And
Speaker 1: there's this kind of it's it's it's it's this problem
Speaker 1: of they have this this fundamental inability to see Chinese
Speaker 1: people as people and not a sort of undifferentiated mass
Speaker 1: that can be sort of rallied behind in ideology, And
Speaker 1: I don't know that's been I think weird to deal
Speaker 1: with because you know, like yeah, like you you're always
Speaker 1: just in in the Chinese communities, like you're always just
Speaker 1: you're just gonna have like you know that there's gonna
Speaker 1: be a few people who are just sort of like
Speaker 1: pro CCP right wingers. Right, that's just that's just a
Speaker 1: sort of defelo political position. But there's there's this way
Speaker 1: in which you get this, you know, people adopting I
Speaker 1: mean just things that like if you said this about
Speaker 1: any like white American for example, if you if you
Speaker 1: argued that any like a white American making a thousand
Speaker 1: dollars a year wasn't in poverty, like you just couldn't
Speaker 1: do it, you like, you know, it's it's it's literally impossible,
Speaker 1: like you you'd be laughing out of the room or
Speaker 1: you know, like you're you would you would you'd be
Speaker 1: like ratioed until the cows come home. But you can
Speaker 1: just but everyone and people just say this constantly, like
Speaker 1: this is just just a thing that was like well,
Speaker 1: if you look at poverty production, it's like, well Chinese
Speaker 1: China's eliminated absolute poverty. It's like, yeah, Okay, they a
Speaker 1: thousand dollars a year is outside of this now. And
Speaker 1: I think there's these ways in which it it'd be
Speaker 1: comes hard to intervene in this stuff because like every
Speaker 1: every Asian person, specifically we're Chinese person just becomes a
Speaker 1: sort of token that like you know, you just sort
Speaker 1: of like throw at each other as just like oh, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: here's the Chinese person who says that the CCP is good.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, here's another Chinese person who says that
Speaker 1: it's bad. And it's like you never It's like on
Speaker 1: both sides, whether whether the process people realize it or not,
Speaker 1: it's their agencies being sort of stripped by them, and
Speaker 1: they've they've been turned into this sort of instrumentalized like
Speaker 1: you know in the in the same thing that they're
Speaker 1: also doing to us is that they're turning into sort
Speaker 1: of these instruments that you can use to like back
Speaker 1: your own sort of brought in political agenda. And this,
Speaker 1: I don't know, like this has gotten me to just
Speaker 1: I I just don't work with these people anymore. Like
Speaker 1: we tried it, it was a disaster. They screwed us over.
Speaker 1: It's oh, I don't know, but but but I think
Speaker 1: that's that's a that's a lonely stance in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways. Like you know, if you take this kind
Speaker 1: of like hardline position, you're not gonna most people, even
Speaker 1: other people who don't support it, probably won't follow you there.
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's weird because I find a lot
Speaker 1: of organizing is really lonely. It's like it's not like
Speaker 1: like I want to boast around being like why aren't
Speaker 1: you all donatings? But that's not that's also guilt, right,
Speaker 1: that's like projecting guilt onto other people, um, and that's
Speaker 1: not an effective tool. And I think that like like
Speaker 1: so right, and addressing both the white guilt but also
Speaker 1: the diaspora guilt, and also just how frustrating it is
Speaker 1: to organize against the state when it's like two people,
Speaker 1: like three people doing it in a little group project
Speaker 1: for lack of a better word. But it's sort of like,
Speaker 1: how do we make this sustainable when it's so lonely?
Speaker 1: And how do we use the resources that are available
Speaker 1: to us two not replicate these systems yet again? And
Speaker 1: I guess when it comes to the left or progressive
Speaker 1: in Canada, it's like so frustrating because it's like there
Speaker 1: isn't actually a lot of community outreach to like racialized communities.
Speaker 1: There's no translation. There's a lot of like nonprofit work
Speaker 1: that is frankly very draining and co optive themselves. Um Like,
Speaker 1: it's it's a bunch of social service organizations in a
Speaker 1: trench code and a bunch of political organizations that don't
Speaker 1: work together or talk to each other in a trench coat.
Speaker 1: And um so I understand why youth would join like
Speaker 1: leftist like radical organizing, but it it's just really heartbreaking
Speaker 1: when it's you're they end up reading in reading groups
Speaker 1: where they're reading historical or so called historical texts that
Speaker 1: erase your histories. Like it it's just such a like
Speaker 1: like reading is great, like political education is incredible, um
Speaker 1: but I'm like it's hard not to grow resentful. So
Speaker 1: when the guy at the top is a university educated
Speaker 1: white dude and they're reading texts that literally erase your
Speaker 1: entire family, and it's, um that like yeah, for me,
Speaker 1: it's like just really personal that way. It's like there
Speaker 1: are people who are suffering in the present and you're
Speaker 1: reading a text by a white sociologist from the eighties,
Speaker 1: like like not like I'm like, it's not that like
Speaker 1: I I don't think that we should do that political education.
Speaker 1: It's just that like at a reading group, will you
Speaker 1: listen to me when I call you out? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: definitely you know, both of you saying that this work
Speaker 1: is really lonely, especially if you take if you stand
Speaker 1: up for yourself, for you you really kind of stand
Speaker 1: by your principles. It's I think that's so true. And um,
Speaker 1: you know, not to speak for everyone in laws on,
Speaker 1: but just my experience has been like you know, everyone
Speaker 1: just everyone hates us, like it's you know, we got
Speaker 1: hate from the right, we got hate from the left,
Speaker 1: um and from Hong Kong, asper from Hong Kong locals
Speaker 1: like it. It's just sometimes it's really hard to see,
Speaker 1: you know, because we're we're trying to stay true to
Speaker 1: our principles, but it's hard to see sometimes whether there's
Speaker 1: an impact or whether we're just kind of like in
Speaker 1: a little echo chamber with twenty other people, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean. And um, it's hard to find that
Speaker 1: balance because I don't want to become more and more
Speaker 1: pragmatists where I'm just like, all right, well you know,
Speaker 1: I'll work with these people, but I don't agree with
Speaker 1: them on these fundamental issues just on this one campaign
Speaker 1: or whatever happens to be. I don't know. I know
Speaker 1: that's a part of like building power quote unquote like
Speaker 1: that a lot of uh, certain socialist groups like to
Speaker 1: do or they're they're really focused on that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: But I don't know if it's too much of an
Speaker 1: academic view too, to be like, if you're going to
Speaker 1: do it that way, you're you're you're changing the outcome already,
Speaker 1: right because you're not addressing these kind of fundamental issues
Speaker 1: from the start um. And I think that view can
Speaker 1: sometimes lead to like a lot of non starters where
Speaker 1: you're just like things don't ever get off the ground
Speaker 1: because you insist on whatever fundamental principle that you that
Speaker 1: you want to stick to, uh like anti nationalism for example.
Speaker 1: So yeah, just just kind of reiterating and commiserating with
Speaker 1: you all on the long laitness of that. People think
Speaker 1: that like not working in these sort of united different
Speaker 1: things is this like sort of purityological position. But like
Speaker 1: you know, I mean so when when Occupy Ice was happening, right,
Speaker 1: Occupy Ice wound up being a kind of big friend thing,
Speaker 1: and one of the groups involved with it was was
Speaker 1: the Party for Socialism Liberation, who are this sort of
Speaker 1: like very much sort of like the basic tanking cult.
Speaker 1: Like there's not a lot of other horrible stuff that
Speaker 1: we will talk about at some point, but I mean,
Speaker 1: one of the things that happens, you know, Occupy ICE
Speaker 1: is that they you know, in Philadelphia, they destroy the
Speaker 1: atmant like they convince enough people to just leave and
Speaker 1: do this completely pointless like march they can do a
Speaker 1: photo op of like people in front of the Mayor's
Speaker 1: office and they do it, and they camp collapses because
Speaker 1: suddenly there's not enough people. You know, they don't even
Speaker 1: get a majority of the people, but it doesn't matter
Speaker 1: because they pulled enough people out that you know that
Speaker 1: the camp couldn't be held against the cops anymore. And
Speaker 1: I think that in some senses this is kind of
Speaker 1: microcosm of what they what these people actually do, which
Speaker 1: is that you know that these people will never have
Speaker 1: any actual institutional power, right you know that they're they're
Speaker 1: never going to create their like salentist state or whatever
Speaker 1: like that, They're never going to get this. They're they're
Speaker 1: never gonna hold any power. What they can do is
Speaker 1: there are enough of them, they can they can siphon
Speaker 1: off enough people from actual leftist movements into this sort
Speaker 1: of just like white room pro capitalist stuff that they
Speaker 1: can they can cause Peopen's to collapse. And I mean
Speaker 1: they've done this. They did a lot of this stream
Speaker 1: the uprising, and there is a lot of them, you know,
Speaker 1: intentionally leading people on pointless marches. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: cop werting with the police and stuff like that. And
Speaker 1: I think that, you know, it's it's it's like having
Speaker 1: seen that like multiple times, right I I you know,
Speaker 1: I you know, for me, like not working with him
Speaker 1: is an incredibly pragmatic position because we tried it and
Speaker 1: they blew it up. But it's this problem especially you know,
Speaker 1: you have people who are radicalized in and it's like,
Speaker 1: well yeah, I mean, I don't know, like a lot
Speaker 1: of them never saw this stuff, right, don't know who
Speaker 1: these people are, and their first instruction to the left
Speaker 1: is just like incredibly well financed I like media blitz,
Speaker 1: and I think that has you know, I think that
Speaker 1: has consequences both for us as sort of like people
Speaker 1: on the left doing like Chinese people on the left
Speaker 1: doing our own desport organizing, and it has consequences for
Speaker 1: the broader left, and like you you can see other
Speaker 1: sort of versions of this right where you know, you
Speaker 1: have a sort of right wing we've been infiltrating left
Speaker 1: to spaces and destroying them like they're they're like there
Speaker 1: were there was thing do cream Resistance basically blew up
Speaker 1: a like an anti lithium protest of the u S
Speaker 1: by just like going there and just hammering transphobia constantly.
Speaker 1: And so I don't know, I think there's there's this
Speaker 1: sort of dilemma because fundament like they will say a
Speaker 1: lot of the same things we do, but we have
Speaker 1: fundamentally different goals and that manifests itself at you know,
Speaker 1: on the level of of of organizing individual campaigns. But
Speaker 1: it's something that's really hard to get people to see.
Speaker 1: I think we've lost a lot of movements because of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And not to be you know, not to pile on
Speaker 1: the synicism or anything, but I think I honestly do think, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, as all those new Cold War stuff brants up,
Speaker 1: which is like completely independent of what a lot of folks,
Speaker 1: like grassroots folks are even thinking or advocating. It's all
Speaker 1: is kind of up to the the two uh, you know,
Speaker 1: Chinese and US governments as they ramp up their own tensions.
Speaker 1: I think it's really going to start, like people are
Speaker 1: going to start these people who are um, you know,
Speaker 1: tankys or whatever, are going to start narrowing our choices
Speaker 1: further and further, right, like, you know, as soon it's
Speaker 1: going to be an athema to to not you know,
Speaker 1: take the into us position. And that's it, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean. And I think that's really scary to me.
Speaker 1: I don't I last year, I thought there was still
Speaker 1: room for intervention, but things are closing so quickly. And
Speaker 1: you know, my personal opinion is that a lot of
Speaker 1: these kind of bigger groups like No Cold War UM
Speaker 1: and others like Code Pink are are definitely being you know,
Speaker 1: they have much more funding than a lot of other
Speaker 1: groups who are boarding more nuanced positions. And so like
Speaker 1: you're saying, it's just like these media blitz is that
Speaker 1: these shiny events and all those different things are very
Speaker 1: appealing to newly radicalize folks, right because I think that
Speaker 1: this this is where the power is and this is
Speaker 1: where we can actually make a difference, um and yeah,
Speaker 1: things to meet things look pretty bleak in the near future.
Speaker 1: I mean, it just takes one. Yeah, yeah, I will
Speaker 1: say I think I think they made one major Sita's mistake,
Speaker 1: which is they tried to do the the push the
Speaker 1: giant like new cold warward China thing at the exact
Speaker 1: moment of the US and Russia were like heating up
Speaker 1: in actually, and this left them like kind of off
Speaker 1: balance because they've been for the last two years the
Speaker 1: whole things when the US is going to accelerate tensces
Speaker 1: with China, usentions with China, and then it turns out
Speaker 1: that they're not doing that and in fact, like they're
Speaker 1: gearing up for just more proxy word stuff with Russia,
Speaker 1: which the thing they've been doing for the past decade.
Speaker 1: So I think, like, I don't know, like I think
Speaker 1: they their problem essentially is that they run into reality
Speaker 1: and there are certain points at which, like, you know,
Speaker 1: you you can lie a lot, right, but when when
Speaker 1: when the lie that you're pushing is about what the
Speaker 1: mainstream media is going to say, and the mainstream if
Speaker 1: you just pivots and it's just completely about something that's
Speaker 1: entirely unrelated, Like I think I think that hurts, and
Speaker 1: I think the everything that the other problem they have
Speaker 1: that that makes me hopeful is that the way there
Speaker 1: their base is getting split by just the anti vax grifters,
Speaker 1: because so many of their media people just you know,
Speaker 1: are just are just full on drifters, and you know,
Speaker 1: and you're you're seeing splits right now and gray zone
Speaker 1: about like basically between pro and anti vax factions. And
Speaker 1: I think that also will help us in the long run,
Speaker 1: because you know, say what you want about most leftists
Speaker 1: and even most tankies, like anti vax is like a
Speaker 1: bit far even for them, and because you know, and
Speaker 1: the other things like the the it's it's hard to
Speaker 1: do t vacs without beginning to take positions that just
Speaker 1: like it's been baked into just sort of anti Chinese
Speaker 1: racism in so many ways that like you can't really
Speaker 1: like you know, like you can't simultaneously be pro incredibly
Speaker 1: CCP and then also be talking about how the US
Speaker 1: is trying to implement social credit, right, you know, these
Speaker 1: are these these positions are just contradictory, and I think
Speaker 1: that's something that plays to our advantage and I think
Speaker 1: is weakening them to some extent because they've they tried
Speaker 1: to have their cake and eat it too, and now
Speaker 1: they're sort of I don't know, they're they're their conspiracy
Speaker 1: theory base is interfering with their like left base in
Speaker 1: ways I think you're helpful for us. It's just so
Speaker 1: interesting how like the anti vax position is literally rooted
Speaker 1: in races um and ableism like. Um there's an article
Speaker 1: in The Conversation called the inherent racism of the anti
Speaker 1: vax movement that has like really good history around white
Speaker 1: settlers being afraid of African medicine um um. And then
Speaker 1: there there's also just the able ism of assuming that
Speaker 1: your kid will get autism if you get vaccinated. That
Speaker 1: was that that's been a huge thing before the pandemic,
Speaker 1: and that was part of how this was effective in
Speaker 1: the first place. And um yeah, and obviously the anti
Speaker 1: Chinese um like uh anti Asian like scapegoating as well.
Speaker 1: But um, I guess that also ties into just how
Speaker 1: broadly ablest the left is and how like disability justice
Speaker 1: is not something that a lot of people know about
Speaker 1: um or care about. And it's yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's a huge problem for me as a disabled person. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wanted to add really quickly too. I mean, I
Speaker 1: totally agree with you, and you know, I think one
Speaker 1: of the pernicious things that I've noticed though, is like
Speaker 1: these kind of big, you know, quote unquote anti imperialist accounts,
Speaker 1: like on Instagram for example. Um, they take this anti
Speaker 1: vax position precisely by saying that it's anti racist to
Speaker 1: take that position, which is like, it sounds that sounds
Speaker 1: very count intuitive. It is not that does not reflect reality.
Speaker 1: But they will point to instances of you know, anti
Speaker 1: black us um US medicine for example, bowl you know,
Speaker 1: like the Tusky experiments, and then say this is why
Speaker 1: we shouldn't trust the U. S. Government on any of this, right,
Speaker 1: because look what they've done in the past. And it's
Speaker 1: like that logic makes a lot of sense in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways, right, But you know, they obviously ignore
Speaker 1: the impacts that you know, anti vax UH and COVID
Speaker 1: has had on you know, black and other POSD populations. Right.
Speaker 1: So I think I don't know if it's exactly like,
Speaker 1: I don't know if it is appearing as hypocrisy to
Speaker 1: those people and then their audiences too, right, because I
Speaker 1: think they're able to spin it in this in this way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I think I think my my my argument here
Speaker 1: is I don't think those are the same. I don't
Speaker 1: think those are the same basis, Like, I don't I
Speaker 1: don't think that the majority of the Tanky base are
Speaker 1: people who are anti factors. And you know that you
Speaker 1: can see a line of this right of of you know,
Speaker 1: like one of the big things that like they're they're
Speaker 1: they're obsessed with sort of like with the Cuban health
Speaker 1: care system, right and like Cuba's Cuba vaccines. You see
Speaker 1: this stuff from them a lot, and you know, and
Speaker 1: they also talk about like, yeah, like China's doing really
Speaker 1: well accating COVID, And I don't think those positions are
Speaker 1: like I don't think those people are the same people
Speaker 1: who are also turning around and then talking about how
Speaker 1: like you know, talk doing the experiments the vaccines are
Speaker 1: actually like racism thing. I think I think there's some
Speaker 1: overlap between them, but but I don't think that those
Speaker 1: basses line up enough for it to you know, not
Speaker 1: have the effect of just kind of like tearing them apart.
Speaker 1: As their media people flip into into one of the
Speaker 1: sort of camps. And I think the other thing like
Speaker 1: you know, if if you look at what's happening with like,
Speaker 1: uh like Max Bluemadal right now, is that he's just
Speaker 1: like full on like like he's just full on touring
Speaker 1: with like just straight up right wingers to an extent
Speaker 1: that even like even people being habituated by the sort
Speaker 1: of like Syria false flags stuff into sort of working
Speaker 1: with right wingers, Like you can't look at these people
Speaker 1: that you know, there's just these actually just like Republican
Speaker 1: and operatives and be like, well, okay, we're we're on
Speaker 1: the side of these people and also like support Cuba.
Speaker 1: I just I don't know, I I have I have
Speaker 1: some faith in these groups being separate and they're being
Speaker 1: there being a point of cognitive dissonance where the system
Speaker 1: braced beause I guess I've seen people who have gotten
Speaker 1: out of tanky is M by having to interact with
Speaker 1: the actual CCP, and and that that that that gives
Speaker 1: me hope that there's there, there's there's a point of
Speaker 1: cognitive dissonance at which it falls apart. And I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe I'm just sort of like hope am in here,
Speaker 1: But I feel like it's so interesting how like there
Speaker 1: are a lot of people for whom politics is a
Speaker 1: parlor game and not their every day like lived experience,
Speaker 1: Like I would not be so like like if I
Speaker 1: see my communities struggling, um, and when people are dying
Speaker 1: or people are really like struggling with intragenerational trauma, I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna sit here and pontificate and theorize about like, um,
Speaker 1: things that don't impact my communities. Um. And yeah, Like
Speaker 1: the angle about classes so important here because it's like
Speaker 1: a lot of people can't insulate themselves from like the
Speaker 1: broader communities around them. Like if you're going around saying
Speaker 1: untruths in the media and your communities are like, hey,
Speaker 1: that that makes no sense, Like, um, if you're actually
Speaker 1: connected to both, like like you would hopefully unless you're
Speaker 1: just a big asshole, um, you would hopefully take some
Speaker 1: accountability for what you're saying. Um. And yeah, I just
Speaker 1: I just worry because this pandemic has also like really
Speaker 1: isolated people, like they people are not like talking to
Speaker 1: each other, and that makes it more easy for people
Speaker 1: to to be like, oh, I'm I'm just right, like
Speaker 1: this is my perspective, and I just yeah, I think
Speaker 1: about that the conditions in which we come to certain conclusions,
Speaker 1: like the conditions under which we become more vulnerable to
Speaker 1: culti type things or like oversimplified like understandings of history.
Speaker 1: Because like, I feel like the the anti vax uh
Speaker 1: like not taking the vaccine being uh anti racist is
Speaker 1: a very like manipulative like argument because it ignores the
Speaker 1: fact that these experiments um on black and indigenous people
Speaker 1: in North America and beyond, or like about neglect and
Speaker 1: are about um deliberately deliberate ongoing genocide and how like
Speaker 1: it's completely understandable for for people to not trust the government.
Speaker 1: But but like when the vaccine is actually a tool
Speaker 1: of protecting people, Like, there's not a lot of like
Speaker 1: campaigns other than people who are uh rooted in disability
Speaker 1: justice saying, hey, vaccines are like here to protect us,
Speaker 1: and how can we make how can we make like
Speaker 1: a like, how can we resist the medical industrial complex
Speaker 1: enough such that we can make people feel safer taking
Speaker 1: them at vaccine? How can we bring people in as
Speaker 1: opposed to fearmongering? Because I think that fear is so powerful.
Speaker 1: It's like, once you're afraid, you're you're not gonna You're
Speaker 1: not going to even look into the research, right, So
Speaker 1: I don't know. For me, I just think of all
Speaker 1: of this as like manipulation and human psychology on a
Speaker 1: on a like broad social basis, because it's like the
Speaker 1: stage is a big cult and these little groups are
Speaker 1: little cults. Yeah, do you have any other things you
Speaker 1: want to say before we head out? Happy new here? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're the Tiger. I'm looking forward to retweeting art like
Speaker 1: actually Obruary not January one. Yeah, yeah, we should, I
Speaker 1: think my okay, okay, closing less depressing question. Yeah what
Speaker 1: what what do you think is the etiquette I'm retweeting?
Speaker 1: I like you every retweeting like you're the Tiger art
Speaker 1: before the actually before like Lunar New Year's. I've been
Speaker 1: torn on it because I just I like the art,
Speaker 1: but also I'm like, it's not the years yet, I
Speaker 1: haven't seen any I guess. I guess I'm lucky. I
Speaker 1: have been either guilty or just not guilty, depending on
Speaker 1: how you see it. Like I have retweeted all of
Speaker 1: the tiger art on January first because I did not care.
Speaker 1: I wanted to see the tigers, um. But I hope
Speaker 1: that I see more tigers like in the coming days,
Speaker 1: because if the tigers aren't coming or if we aren't
Speaker 1: retweeting it, that that is an issue. Like there needs
Speaker 1: to be like a second like a like a like
Speaker 1: a like like a like a second wave of the
Speaker 1: tiger art sure to all of the artists. Well alright,
Speaker 1: So if if people want to find you or work
Speaker 1: that you have that you want people to find where
Speaker 1: where where can they do that? Or if you also
Speaker 1: do not want them to find you, that is completely
Speaker 1: also valid. The Internet is terrible and a mistake. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mostly and do not perceive me mode um completely valid.
Speaker 1: If you want to check out a low song stuff
Speaker 1: feel free Low song collective dot com, it's good work.
Speaker 1: My social media is um keipakal poetry um on Instagram.
Speaker 1: I uh um. I have this graphic that I've turned
Speaker 1: into a sticker and it's raises funds for families who
Speaker 1: were affected by the fires and floods. Um. It's a
Speaker 1: sticker that says, immunocompromise people are worth protecting and it
Speaker 1: went viral multiple times. So I guess I cannot help
Speaker 1: but be perceived objections. So yeah, I don't know, Yeah, petreat, Yeah,
Speaker 1: this this is what happens when you create things that
Speaker 1: are both incredibly politically powerful and also gorgeous. So yeah,
Speaker 1: be be be cursed with the reward for good work,
Speaker 1: which is also being perceived. Yeah. Yeah, well you can
Speaker 1: you can find you can find us at Happened here
Speaker 1: pod on Twitter and Instagram. There's the cool zone. You
Speaker 1: can find it. Yeah, go go, go, go retweet Tiger Art,
Speaker 1: I go throw a brick at your sheriff non actionable
Speaker 1: and yeah, destroyed the American and Chinese States. Happy two years? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it could happen. Here is the podcast that This is
Speaker 1: about things falling apart and how to, how to, how
Speaker 1: to maybe unfollowing apart. I'm Robert Evans. Your your your host,
Speaker 1: and your other hosts are Christopher and Garrison and our
Speaker 1: producers Sophie. How's everybody doing today? Great? How's every how's
Speaker 1: everybody feel about war? Oh? Yeah? Now, if you were
Speaker 1: to get us, based on your knowledge of history, what
Speaker 1: generation of war we're in right now? What would you? What?
Speaker 1: What would y'all guess? I feel like war isn't it's
Speaker 1: it's it's newer in relation to like human beings, like
Speaker 1: the idea of war. I'm guessing like there's been like battles,
Speaker 1: but like the idea of like war, I feel like
Speaker 1: isn't super old compared to how long there's been humans
Speaker 1: walking around, So I don't know this is maybe I mean,
Speaker 1: I know the answer, but like it's it's like I
Speaker 1: don't like that's that's definitely we definitely passed through like
Speaker 1: at least a couple of stages, and we're at least
Speaker 1: a couple Chris, like gotta be at least twelve twelve.
Speaker 1: At least twelve you were way ahead of William s Lynd,
Speaker 1: who spoilers is the guy who came up with the
Speaker 1: concept of fourth generation war, which is what this episode
Speaker 1: is about. Right. One of the things when we talk
Speaker 1: about things falling apart is um the unsettling growth of
Speaker 1: a number of different hybrid conflicts, Ukraine being the most
Speaker 1: like blatant modern example, Syria being the deadliest example in
Speaker 1: our lifetimes, but like these weird hybrid conflicts that are
Speaker 1: a mix of shit happening on the Internet and like
Speaker 1: disinformation going out all over the world. You could even
Speaker 1: think to like what was happening in Bolivia a year
Speaker 1: or so back, and like all those weird accounts that
Speaker 1: were like based around Langley, Virginia claiming to support the
Speaker 1: military coup. And you can look at like from the
Speaker 1: same this disinformation brought out by like the Russian state
Speaker 1: that is usually as part of like a conflict either
Speaker 1: you know, they have disinfo operations and Syria disinfo operations
Speaker 1: around the conflict in Ukraine that are kind of designed
Speaker 1: to muddy the issues and to detract international support and
Speaker 1: also to like drum up support within for like in
Speaker 1: the in the case of Ukraine, you had like this
Speaker 1: media blitz against the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state in
Speaker 1: favor of like a more UH like traditionally Russian um
Speaker 1: UH style of government in the East, and like that
Speaker 1: led to this breakaway republic that was supported by the
Speaker 1: Russian government. And like so these are like hybrid conflicts,
Speaker 1: is kind of how these are referred to. And there's
Speaker 1: a guy named William S. Lynd who in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: nine wrote a book with a couple of US military analysts,
Speaker 1: Like he was an analyst for the military. He was
Speaker 1: not serving in the military. The other guys he wrote
Speaker 1: this this thing with we're serving at the time, and
Speaker 1: they wrote this this book kind of trying to be
Speaker 1: basically what Lynde was doing. He was very influenced by
Speaker 1: our loss in Vietnam when I say, are here, like
Speaker 1: the loss of the American state in Vietnam, and he
Speaker 1: was trying to determine, like number one, kind of like
Speaker 1: find a way to codify and explain the changes that
Speaker 1: were happening to warfare in this period. Was also influenced
Speaker 1: about what was happening in Afghanistan with the Russians were
Speaker 1: experiencing UM and find a way to like move forward
Speaker 1: and allow the United States to win wars again, right,
Speaker 1: Like that was William S. Lynd's goal UM, And so
Speaker 1: he came up with this concept of four or he
Speaker 1: and some other guys came up with what they called
Speaker 1: fourth generation warfare UM, and first generation warfare is like
Speaker 1: Napoleonic Arab warfare. So like as Garrison was saying, he
Speaker 1: may note that he kind of starts his pretty that's
Speaker 1: pretty late we had. Yeah, that's this's a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff that leads up to like, yeah, if I was
Speaker 1: going to try to categorize front types of warfare, that
Speaker 1: would not be the one I start with. Well, and
Speaker 1: like the reality of course, as we'll talk about like
Speaker 1: when you start looking at different kinds of warfares, there's
Speaker 1: wars that look remarkably like the ship going on in
Speaker 1: Afghanistan and Ukraine that are occurring like several thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: um like like like in the same places to like
Speaker 1: it's just like if you wanted to if you wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about like kind of the modern style of
Speaker 1: wars that we saw on that we've seen really in
Speaker 1: the last like hundred and fifty years. They're not all
Speaker 1: that dissimilar in a lot of ways from like the
Speaker 1: kind of conflicts you saw between Rome and Carthage um,
Speaker 1: which are these really like big nation states style conflicts
Speaker 1: and and have a lot of similarities. But but William S.
Speaker 1: Lynn described the first generation of warfare is beginning after
Speaker 1: the Peace of Westphalia in sixty eight that ended the
Speaker 1: Thirty Years War UM. And it's the kind of warfare
Speaker 1: where you have these like big, tightly ordered groups of
Speaker 1: men marching towards each other and like firing very inaccurate
Speaker 1: weapons and mass together. Right. Uh. This is ended by
Speaker 1: the era of the machine gun and the semi automatic
Speaker 1: rifle UM or on the bolt rat can rifle. I
Speaker 1: should say that leads us to second generation warfare, which
Speaker 1: is linear fire and movement with heavy reliance on indirect fires.
Speaker 1: That's still huge groups of guys charging, but they're not
Speaker 1: marching in close order, they're not like firing in volleys um,
Speaker 1: and they're supported by heavy artillery like World War one
Speaker 1: kind of ship right um. Really we start to see
Speaker 1: this in eighteen seventy and then World War One is
Speaker 1: kind of the height of this kind of warfare, and
Speaker 1: over the course of World War One were merge in again.
Speaker 1: This is William S. Len's way, we merge from second
Speaker 1: generation to third generation warfare, which is where you've got
Speaker 1: infiltration tactics to bypass enemy defensive lines and collapse it,
Speaker 1: which is kind of the Germans and their altrugs tactic
Speaker 1: and stormtrooper tactics are really kind of pioneering that you've
Speaker 1: got the idea of defense in depth um, and so
Speaker 1: this need to bypass the enemy and like this leads
Speaker 1: to blitzkrieg and leads to all sorts of ship um
Speaker 1: and then that kind of starts to collapse and Len's
Speaker 1: estimation around Vietnam and you get what's called fourth generation warfare.
Speaker 1: Fourth generation I'm actually just going to read a quote
Speaker 1: from a military history wiki that I thought had a
Speaker 1: pretty good description of all of this. Fourth generation warfare
Speaker 1: is normally characterized by a violent non state actor fighting
Speaker 1: a state. This fighting can be physically done, such as
Speaker 1: by modern examples Hezblah or the liberation Tigers of Tamil
Speaker 1: illam Um. In this realm, the v N essay, these
Speaker 1: violent nonstate actors use all three levels of fourth generation warfare.
Speaker 1: These are the physical actual combat, which is considered the
Speaker 1: least important, mental the will to fight, belief in victory, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And the moral, which is the most important. LYND says
Speaker 1: and includes cultural norms, etcetera. Um, So obviously I think
Speaker 1: that this is kind of nonsense. There's a lot of people,
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of folks, the people who buy
Speaker 1: into this, and it's very popular on the right. Well,
Speaker 1: we'll look at like what's happening in Ukraine. It's a
Speaker 1: perfect example of fourth generation warfare because you have Russia
Speaker 1: flooding the zone using spot Nick and a bunch of
Speaker 1: other kind of media organizations to drum up um discord
Speaker 1: and like anger between East and West and Ukraine and
Speaker 1: support for potential Russian action at the same time as
Speaker 1: you have them backing this dictator um, and then you
Speaker 1: have like the West sort of supporting the people protesting
Speaker 1: against those dictators, and like so you've got like this
Speaker 1: this digital conflict, this information conflict that eventually leads to
Speaker 1: fighting on the ground. One of the areas in which
Speaker 1: I think Lynda is really off is talking about like
Speaker 1: the physical as the least important, especially if you're going
Speaker 1: to consider Ukraine an example of fourth generation warfare, because
Speaker 1: if the Russian military had not intervened, there would not
Speaker 1: still be a conflict in Ukraine, the separatists would not
Speaker 1: still hold land, and in fact, the separatists were on
Speaker 1: the edge of getting completely wiped out by the Ukrainian
Speaker 1: military because they were a bunch of nonstate actors with
Speaker 1: minimal support and minimal weaponry before the Russians moved in
Speaker 1: brigades of active duty combat troops and armor um, including
Speaker 1: like gigantic fucking missile launchers which they used to shoot
Speaker 1: down that Malaysian airlines flight like that. It's it's just
Speaker 1: not I I don't think that that. What what Linda
Speaker 1: is saying is very um very well describes what's actually
Speaker 1: going on in the world. But it is important to
Speaker 1: understand the concept of fourth generation warfare and fifth generation warfare,
Speaker 1: which we'll talk about in a bit um, because it
Speaker 1: is so useful in the way in which particularly guys
Speaker 1: like Steve bannon Um conceive of conflict, because that you
Speaker 1: will hear the term fourth generation warfare constantly, and it's
Speaker 1: also something that has used a lot within our military establishment.
Speaker 1: Now a lot of people hate it, and within you
Speaker 1: can fight a lot of papers buy dudes writing like
Speaker 1: analysts who are working for the Defense Department for the
Speaker 1: army actively like shipping on Lynd and talking about how
Speaker 1: he's at best is kind of like reinvented ideas that
Speaker 1: have existed in warfare for thousands of years, and he's
Speaker 1: kind of summarized things in a way that that is
Speaker 1: needlessly flattening, and like some people will say, you basically
Speaker 1: like ripped up like added the Internet to Klauschwitz, uh
Speaker 1: and pretended that you'd invented a new style of conor
Speaker 1: that you defined a new style of conflict. Anyway, that's
Speaker 1: like an introduction to the idea of fourth generation warfare, right,
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of things that he gets again
Speaker 1: like if you're if you're a history, a military history look,
Speaker 1: which Lynde pretends to be a lot of ship that
Speaker 1: he gets wrong. Um. So one of the things that
Speaker 1: he says, like one of his famous phrases, that every
Speaker 1: military eventually craps in its own mess kit. Um, the
Speaker 1: idea that like every military that that is great eventually
Speaker 1: like has a gigantic funk up because they get too
Speaker 1: used to doing the same thing, which is true. Um.
Speaker 1: And he describes it as like um. The Prussians did
Speaker 1: in eighteen oh six, after which they designed and put
Speaker 1: into service a much more improved model mess kit mess
Speaker 1: kit through the Sharnhorst military reforms. The French did in
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy, after which they took down from the shelf
Speaker 1: and old model messket the mass draft Army of the
Speaker 1: First Republic and put it back into service. The Japanese
Speaker 1: did it in five after which they threw their messket away,
Speaker 1: swearing they would never eat again. And we did it
Speaker 1: in Korea, in Vietnam, and now in four new wars
Speaker 1: so far we've only we've had the only military that's
Speaker 1: just kept on eating. And that's a really dumb statement.
Speaker 1: That's all really historically inaccurate. So for example, it's true
Speaker 1: that like the Prussians had a great military which then
Speaker 1: got its butt kicked by Napoleon and they had to
Speaker 1: completely redesign it, and by the time eighteen seventy came around,
Speaker 1: they were extremely dominant in the battlefield against the French.
Speaker 1: Number One, he's crediting the military reforms of like tactics
Speaker 1: and strategy and ignoring things like Krupp inventing an entirely
Speaker 1: new kind of cannon that was utterly dominant on the battlefield. Um.
Speaker 1: He's also ignoring the fact that this Prussian army. Um.
Speaker 1: He's saying, like the US is the only army that
Speaker 1: does the same thing over and over again and fails
Speaker 1: and keeps on eating. Well, the Prussian Army is the
Speaker 1: army the Germans took into battle in World War One
Speaker 1: and two and spoilers, they didn't learn enough from either
Speaker 1: of those wars. Um. He also talks about how like
Speaker 1: the French had their you know, crapping in the mess
Speaker 1: kit moment in eighteen seventy after the Franco Prussian War,
Speaker 1: and they changed their army and it was much better. Like, well,
Speaker 1: they didn't win World War one, like they were on
Speaker 1: the side that one, but if it had been them
Speaker 1: against Germany, they would have gotten fucking steamrolled. Like it
Speaker 1: was not going well for them for quite a while,
Speaker 1: and they lost a whole generation of young men. So
Speaker 1: maybe and and again this is like what he's saying
Speaker 1: is basically we because we're losing so constantly. The reason
Speaker 1: that we're losing is not because we are picking bad conflicts.
Speaker 1: It's not because we're picking to engage in conflicts when
Speaker 1: we shouldn't at all be engaging in conflicts. It is
Speaker 1: not because we use military force and like a fundamentally
Speaker 1: venal and corrupt way in order to benefit a small
Speaker 1: cabal of military industrial corporations. It's because we we don't
Speaker 1: have good battle doctrine, and that's why we're not winning
Speaker 1: in these conflicts, which ignores everything about the reality of
Speaker 1: the conflicts that like he's talking about, Like the problem
Speaker 1: is not a lack of combat dominance, which is is
Speaker 1: what you were seeing with like the Prussians fighting Napoleon.
Speaker 1: It's what you're seeing with the French fighting the Germans
Speaker 1: in eighteen seventy, right, Like in those cases, the Prussians
Speaker 1: had a massive failure of combat dominance against the French,
Speaker 1: and the French had a massive failure in combat against
Speaker 1: the Germans. Their doctrine was just worse. Um. US soldiers
Speaker 1: are great at getting into gunfights and great at winning
Speaker 1: gun fights. The problem is not a lack of combat ability.
Speaker 1: The problem is that there's no way to win the
Speaker 1: conflicts that we're getting into. They are unwinnable wars that
Speaker 1: were never things that like, no amount of change in
Speaker 1: doctrine would have made Afghanistan a success because it was
Speaker 1: stupid war like its like if if that were true,
Speaker 1: like coin would have worked. And yeah no, like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: just complete total and utter failure, like enormous numbers of
Speaker 1: people dead, enormous numbers of like people traumatized for generations,
Speaker 1: and the U S still just lost both wars. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just and and and and if you really dig into
Speaker 1: Lynd and others like him, what they're actually saying when
Speaker 1: they say that, like we need to reform like the
Speaker 1: way the military works with new battle doctorents. We need
Speaker 1: to be killing even more people. We just didn't kill
Speaker 1: enough in Vietnam, like the five million we bombed or
Speaker 1: so that wasn't enough. People like that that's the reform
Speaker 1: that he's really talking about. UM. And when one of
Speaker 1: those people who like rants a up the like the
Speaker 1: the the al Salvadorian option, UM, I'm sure he does.
Speaker 1: I don't know exactly what he said about al Salvador.
Speaker 1: He's a fascinating kind of fascist. Um. He is absolutely
Speaker 1: a fascist. He was the director of the Center for
Speaker 1: Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation. UM. He wrote
Speaker 1: a or he helped to popularize a Declaration of Cultural
Speaker 1: Independence by Cultural Conservatives, UM, which is like these there's
Speaker 1: a lot of the seeds of the ship that we're
Speaker 1: seeing today, right that like American culture institutions are being
Speaker 1: collapsed because of like liberal decadence and conservatives. Cultural conservatives
Speaker 1: should separate themselves and like set up parallel institutions where
Speaker 1: Bannon comes in. And that's where Bannon comes in. That
Speaker 1: where like fucking Andrew Torba and gab come and they
Speaker 1: all advocate this ship. Yeah, because they're all they all
Speaker 1: adhere to that kind of uh. Yeah, like politics has
Speaker 1: culture and and like there's downstream. Yeah. And there's some
Speaker 1: weird differences with Lynd Like he's a huge mass transit
Speaker 1: and urban ray advocate, which I guess I agree with
Speaker 1: every once in a while a bad person does have
Speaker 1: a good opinion. He loves he loves him some fucking
Speaker 1: city trains and stuff. Um, but he's also he was
Speaker 1: a major factor. He was one of the earliest, like
Speaker 1: prominent conservatives who was like yelling about cultural Marxism and
Speaker 1: kind of the modern political period. I mean that makes
Speaker 1: sense because he was real into it. Sounds like he's
Speaker 1: real into metapolitics. So yeah, that's super in the metapolis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so like all of this stuff makes a whole lot
Speaker 1: of sense if you're yeah, if you're if you know what,
Speaker 1: if you know what metapolitics are, it's also kind of
Speaker 1: explains how he developed the different generations of warfare using
Speaker 1: it through a framework of metopolitics. Actually, if you believe
Speaker 1: like Breitbart famously stated that like politics is downstream from culture,
Speaker 1: and if you also believe what Claus I think it
Speaker 1: was class wits that said that like war is politics
Speaker 1: by other means than like you can make cultural can
Speaker 1: cause wars, and like, yeah, like that's a lot like
Speaker 1: kind of I think the thought process behind Lynn. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because this this really defines what he means by fourth
Speaker 1: generation warfare of war being handed out specifically by the
Speaker 1: culture instead of having it be abstracted to be like
Speaker 1: people marching towards each other with guns, because he's, he's, he's,
Speaker 1: he's putting the he's putting the culture kind of back
Speaker 1: into it. Yeah, and he and he's and he's and
Speaker 1: and obviously culture was never not a factor, and of
Speaker 1: course not like every single war has been a major factor.
Speaker 1: Like all of this ship he talks about is being
Speaker 1: characters to go. Fourth generation warfare has been happening in
Speaker 1: one way or another for thousands of years. But it's
Speaker 1: not that these things are done in like temporal succession.
Speaker 1: It's like because because like a lot of the stuff
Speaker 1: that makes up fourth generation warfare, like the more like
Speaker 1: guerrilla warfare aspects, come way before people with guns marching
Speaker 1: towards each other, Africans doing that to Alexander the goddamn
Speaker 1: group for the Birth of Christ. A lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of this fourth gender stuff is actually like kind
Speaker 1: of more similar to what original warfare probably would have been,
Speaker 1: Like Yeah, which I think I think to to his credit,
Speaker 1: I think he does actually reckon as at some point
Speaker 1: in his writing now and and and the thing about
Speaker 1: this is, well, we can pick at it, and I
Speaker 1: think there's a lot that's ridiculous in his attitude. It's
Speaker 1: it's close enough to the way that reality works that
Speaker 1: if you're going if you're thinking about conflict in this framework,
Speaker 1: you can be very successful. It's not like it's inaccurate
Speaker 1: in some ways because he's he is wrongly describing why
Speaker 1: certain things work. I think is a lot of what
Speaker 1: he's doing. And he's wrong about winning wars. I'll say that, um,
Speaker 1: if if the American military were to make the fucking
Speaker 1: lend the Secretary of Defense and give him total power,
Speaker 1: like he would keep on losing wars as hard as
Speaker 1: we've been losing wars for everyone listening to this is lifetime. Um.
Speaker 1: But in a cultural sense, the kind of culture jamming,
Speaker 1: which is a term we'll talk about more in the future,
Speaker 1: and but the kind of like the propaganda arms and
Speaker 1: stuff in order to the the the the media warfare
Speaker 1: in order to either insight or justify real conflict or
Speaker 1: or and this is one of the areas in which
Speaker 1: they have been really effective to alter the dimension, to
Speaker 1: alter how internationally a conflict has responded to. So one
Speaker 1: of the big successes of people like this has been
Speaker 1: effectively eliminating any kind of left wing support for liberatory
Speaker 1: movements in the Middle East, UM, for liberatory movements or
Speaker 1: for like just like what's happening in Ukraine. That's kind
Speaker 1: of like reflexive. Well, if there's uh, if there's a
Speaker 1: movement for liberation among the people of a country, it's
Speaker 1: probably the c I a like like carrying out some
Speaker 1: sort of op UM. That's Lynda and his people, UM
Speaker 1: and people influenced by him have been a big part
Speaker 1: of pushing that. UM. It's why Steve Bannon is in
Speaker 1: and is so friendly with like some guys on like
Speaker 1: chunks that they call themselves the left and whatnot. It's
Speaker 1: because um, there's there's a lot of uh, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of ties there, and that is an area in
Speaker 1: which they've been successful because international support really matters. UM.
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's it's uh. And I think like
Speaker 1: the death of internationalism is one of the bigger successes
Speaker 1: that these these thinkers have kind of had. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. That's that's that's that's a chunk of
Speaker 1: what I had to say. You guys want to know
Speaker 1: more about William S Lynd because he's I certainly want
Speaker 1: to learn more about William william S Lynd cultural conservative,
Speaker 1: right big on the traditional Christian values of America. You
Speaker 1: want to guess who he considers his ideal leader. Uh
Speaker 1: jfk No, the House of Hohan's all learned. He's a
Speaker 1: Prussian monarchist. Wait oh yeah, politics. He's certainly into Hegel,
Speaker 1: and he thinks that the Prussian the Prussian monarchy was
Speaker 1: the best government there ever was and was like unfairly
Speaker 1: crushed by the rest of the world and like should
Speaker 1: have won World War One and everything would like he's
Speaker 1: he's and so he's he's very much like a conservative
Speaker 1: monarchist um and a weird kind because like, my god, dude,
Speaker 1: if you're looking at like monarchs who were like the
Speaker 1: Hogan's Allerns had like in the modern era, like the
Speaker 1: first Kaiser Wilhelm was broadly competent, but like it went
Speaker 1: to ship as soon as the second and he blames
Speaker 1: all of World War One on the fucking Tsars like
Speaker 1: it's it's very silly, Like his ideas of history are
Speaker 1: like very stupid. I have an incredibly silly theory of
Speaker 1: history based on Hagel, which is that like every everything Hagel. Briefly,
Speaker 1: for the listeners I know, do not, this is this is,
Speaker 1: this is, this is the thing. Okay, okay, this this
Speaker 1: is this is. This is my crank theory of history
Speaker 1: based on Hagel, which is that every about forty years
Speaker 1: someone attempts to apply Hagel. Someone like takes charge of
Speaker 1: an incredibly large state and tries to use Hagel to
Speaker 1: run it, and every single time they don't understand the dialectic.
Speaker 1: It doesn't work. So this, for example, like if if
Speaker 1: you can take this at a very sort of grandy level,
Speaker 1: right you have Mao Mao has no idea what a
Speaker 1: dialectic is. You can you can read Mao's work. He
Speaker 1: has no clue, Like he just doesn't he like, he doesn't.
Speaker 1: He doesn't get it. He thinks of a dialectic is
Speaker 1: when one person with a bat hits the other hits
Speaker 1: the other side, and then when you destroy the other side,
Speaker 1: the dialectic is resolved. Right like that That's not what
Speaker 1: it is, right, maw like. Because of this, the entire
Speaker 1: Chinese revolution just implodes. Everyone dies, It returns to capitalism.
Speaker 1: Is a complete failure, right, you know, and and like
Speaker 1: a lot of the Nazis are very much into Hagel.
Speaker 1: They have again incredibly similar failures. The other group, people
Speaker 1: like Lynda think is part of this is that all
Speaker 1: of the people who planned the Iraq War were like
Speaker 1: enormous Sigelians, right, but they've gotten to Hagel through this
Speaker 1: weird like they they've been doing this, they've been doing
Speaker 1: these kind of insurgency stuff and so but they're kind
Speaker 1: of insurgency stuff. Was they read Mao and you know,
Speaker 1: so that they're so they're they're they're reading Hagel, but
Speaker 1: then they're also reading Hagel through Mao and now doesn't
Speaker 1: understand what's going on either. And so when they try
Speaker 1: to apply the Hegelian dialectic and they're like, okay, well,
Speaker 1: at the end of the end of the end of history,
Speaker 1: the end of the Higgelian dialectic is the United States
Speaker 1: were just going to impose this on a rock and
Speaker 1: catastrophic failure. So the war listening is, do not attempt
Speaker 1: to apply Hagel. You will completely annihilate your entire political movement,
Speaker 1: like every every everything, everything you love and dream of, everything,
Speaker 1: like every ideology you've ever had. Uh, it will it
Speaker 1: will crumble beneath you. And yeah, you will watch your
Speaker 1: cities and you watch your cities and armies burn. That's
Speaker 1: that's fine because the last time my resistance movement, we're
Speaker 1: just gonna be postcanty and object oriented on ontologists. Throw
Speaker 1: a bunch of names, and I'm gonna get like eight
Speaker 1: of people are just the funk am I hearing about
Speaker 1: these dead people? The thing I actually wanted to to
Speaker 1: bring up on this is like how fourth and fifth
Speaker 1: gen are the idea of the fourth and fifth gen
Speaker 1: get applied onto like more insurrection based um like revolts
Speaker 1: or groups. Right, you can see like groups like the
Speaker 1: Earth Liberation Fund and Animal Liberation Front of Pick and Shoose,
Speaker 1: elements of the fourth and fifth generation were fair to
Speaker 1: kind of to see how their groups formed or were
Speaker 1: operated um and even you could argue that like Ted
Speaker 1: Kaczynski was like a fifth generation warfare because he was
Speaker 1: completely autonomous and the actions. Let's let's introduce the idea
Speaker 1: of fifth generation because we just talked about fourth generation warfare,
Speaker 1: which was Lynn's idea. Fifth generation warfare is a concept
Speaker 1: that has come up. I believe Daniel Abbott is his name,
Speaker 1: UM and The idea was that, like, it's a new
Speaker 1: type of warfare that like characterizes a lot of conflicts
Speaker 1: in the modern era where almost everything is non kinetic UM,
Speaker 1: but it is still military action UM, so military social engineering, misinformation,
Speaker 1: storry or attacks, not just like decentralized, but like states
Speaker 1: actually using UM organized and often fighting non state actors
Speaker 1: who are using kind of the singing yeah. And this
Speaker 1: in a lot of this would involve artificial intelligence, fully
Speaker 1: autonomous systems, systems not just botan nets, but like algorithms
Speaker 1: that can like handle a out of the quote unquote
Speaker 1: fighting UM. William S Lynd hates the idea of fourth generation,
Speaker 1: fifth generation warfare because he's a narcissist and he doesn't
Speaker 1: like anyone using the head of the dialectic it keeps going.
Speaker 1: So what I was what I was thinking, is like
Speaker 1: is like a lot of you can apply fifth generation
Speaker 1: warfare to like these types of groups who are mostly
Speaker 1: like they do some they do some fourth gen tactics
Speaker 1: in terms of like terrorism, right, like they try to
Speaker 1: make political statements through terrorism and have terrorism an influential thing,
Speaker 1: but they're demands like you rarely like fifth generation stuff
Speaker 1: has not been around a long enough and no one's
Speaker 1: really been super successful at it in the past enough
Speaker 1: time for us like to like recognize that, right, because
Speaker 1: you can look at a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: like an instructionary type stuff around like the Again, I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna use the Earth Liberation Front as an example
Speaker 1: of like a group that attempt to kind of these
Speaker 1: types of tactics, um and they may have succeeded in
Speaker 1: the physical sense, but they did not succeed in like
Speaker 1: the cultural sense. Really um So trying to like look
Speaker 1: at these types of things and how they relate to
Speaker 1: like specific you know, if you're gonna use like the
Speaker 1: Ta Kazinski example, same thing, except he's not a group.
Speaker 1: He's just one person, which is kind of more of
Speaker 1: a fifth gen thinks he's like fully autonomous, whereas I think, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, stuff like the ELF tried to have that
Speaker 1: kind of militant group dynamic that is more similar to
Speaker 1: fourth generation warfare. So it's like this picking and choosing
Speaker 1: of like trying to trying to do physical action than
Speaker 1: trying to do cultural action. And it's it's not like
Speaker 1: the things that have succeeded. Let's take for instance, some
Speaker 1: the defend the Cascadian forest thing who just got just
Speaker 1: got um this the specific action they were working on
Speaker 1: to protect a specific chunk of the forest. Uh. The
Speaker 1: judge of approved their approved their motion because they were
Speaker 1: they actually were sick sucessiful because they did not form
Speaker 1: this militant thing right now, they were just doing the
Speaker 1: cultural and it actually really succeeded um as opposed to
Speaker 1: just you know, burning down buildings and stuff to try
Speaker 1: to get your action forward. So just trying to look
Speaker 1: at like examples of when when like the goal is
Speaker 1: kind of the same and certain times succeeds, certain certain
Speaker 1: types don't. How that might influence like organizing and how
Speaker 1: to selectively use like insurrection, but have it not be
Speaker 1: like a default mode for like always your group is
Speaker 1: better if it's insurrectorary. Mhm. Yeah. And I one of
Speaker 1: the things that does characterize that I think is useful
Speaker 1: if we're because again I have my criticisms of the
Speaker 1: value of any of these like phrases as kind of
Speaker 1: discreete concepts. But one of the things that I think
Speaker 1: is useful about the concept of fifth generation warfare that
Speaker 1: does talk about something that is legitimately new to conflict,
Speaker 1: that has not really existed before before. The Internet is
Speaker 1: omnipresence UM. That that the inflicts are not limited in
Speaker 1: geographical space or in time, and in fact, it is
Speaker 1: like a constant factor all around you at all times
Speaker 1: because of the way the information sphere kind of actually functions. UM.
Speaker 1: You know, you can look at kind of like the
Speaker 1: mix of street fights and information warfare, doxing and whatnot
Speaker 1: between fascists and anti fascist for the last few years.
Speaker 1: It's omnipresent. It's always going on UM. And the battle
Speaker 1: space is kind of potentially everywhere, even though it's fairly
Speaker 1: rarely kinetic or physical UM. And I do think that
Speaker 1: that's an area in which, UM, it is really worth
Speaker 1: having a new term, in kind of defining a new term,
Speaker 1: because that's one of the few things I think that
Speaker 1: has legitimately changed. The Internet has made all of this
Speaker 1: stuff that's been happening for thousands of years faster UM.
Speaker 1: But the thing that it's really created that was not
Speaker 1: present before is this the this omnipresence UM. So I
Speaker 1: do think that that's really useful when we like I
Speaker 1: would like to on how conflict is different. I would
Speaker 1: like to kind of like think about like January six
Speaker 1: with in these frameworks, right of how of how disinformation
Speaker 1: and information was used relatively successfully to get a lot
Speaker 1: of people to actually move towards the more of you know,
Speaker 1: kind of backed by half the state, backed you know,
Speaker 1: not backed by well the larger majority. And yeah, how
Speaker 1: like it's a it's like a synthesis of the fourth
Speaker 1: generation of fifth generation ideas, which is why you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of overlap with these terms specifically, um,
Speaker 1: but seeing how like one leads to another, and it's
Speaker 1: not they're not necessarily inclusion exclusionary. Yeah, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: like the result is whether they win or lose. Right,
Speaker 1: that's that's like that that's what makes it a war.
Speaker 1: Is is the is the is like you decide afterwards
Speaker 1: based on the result. Yeah, I mean it kind of Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's certainly like how more modern wars happened, Like with Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: it wasn't so much like a clear like World War One,
Speaker 1: there's an armistice and like negotiated end of the war
Speaker 1: and at a certain date at all ends. It was
Speaker 1: a lot we haven't done that since we haven't done
Speaker 1: that for the state, Like you know, I've never known
Speaker 1: the States to do that for a month, because if
Speaker 1: you don't do that, you don't have to admit you lost,
Speaker 1: right if you just kind of like leave and ship
Speaker 1: gets real fucked up. Um, you can just be like,
Speaker 1: for one thing, you can say like, if we'd stayed
Speaker 1: and spent more money on that war, we could have
Speaker 1: we could have pulled it out, um, which is one
Speaker 1: of my like there's a lot of great criticisms of
Speaker 1: how the Biden administration handled things in Afghanistan last year,
Speaker 1: a thousand of them. But at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: it's like it was never kind to be good, like
Speaker 1: it was always it was this horrible war. We were
Speaker 1: killing way too many people. Um, we weren't achieving anything.
Speaker 1: And that fact was made really clear by the fact
Speaker 1: that as soon as we pulled out our guns, um,
Speaker 1: everything collapsed. And that was always going to happen. And
Speaker 1: you can needle around the edges of how we could have,
Speaker 1: you know, better taken care of people who had made
Speaker 1: promises to or whatever. At the end of the day,
Speaker 1: it was always going to be fucked because it was
Speaker 1: a thing we never should have done. And that's that
Speaker 1: like this idea that Lynd has that like, no if
Speaker 1: we fix our doctrine, we have better tactical doctrine. We
Speaker 1: have matter like we have that. One of his big
Speaker 1: ideas is um he came up with this concept called
Speaker 1: movement warfare that's been hugely influential in the way the
Speaker 1: Marine Corps functions. UM. And the idea behind movement warfare
Speaker 1: is like you should always have a bias towards action,
Speaker 1: and Lynda is very consciously UM trying to make this
Speaker 1: basically the evolution of of a German tactic called alf
Speaker 1: Strug's tactica, which is like individual unit tactics basically. So
Speaker 1: it's like midway through World War One, the Germans start
Speaker 1: to realize, like, all these mass wave human charges aren't
Speaker 1: working great, UM, and we should probably like figure out
Speaker 1: a way to get around these defenses. So they start
Speaker 1: training what are kind of the prototype of special forces,
Speaker 1: these like stormtroopers whose job is to like sneak in
Speaker 1: and not be seen and jump into the trenches and
Speaker 1: like you know, fucking axes and clubs and automatic handguns
Speaker 1: and UM fight in a way that like soldiers had
Speaker 1: not really fought in a long time. A lot of
Speaker 1: it was like melee, It was this really and there
Speaker 1: were a lot of technical things had to get around,
Speaker 1: barbed wire had to not be seen, how to like
Speaker 1: deal with machine gun nests um. And one of the
Speaker 1: keys to it was like the German started to retrain
Speaker 1: their soldiers to were like you have to have like
Speaker 1: these individual units of five and ten men have to
Speaker 1: have like total autonomy. And then unit commanders have to
Speaker 1: have autonomy, and they need to be will able to
Speaker 1: like We'll tell them, we need you to be in
Speaker 1: this this place at this point in time. But it's
Speaker 1: up to you to figure out how to do that.
Speaker 1: Because if you're if you've got this one guy who's
Speaker 1: three miles back giving the commands, everyone's just gonna get
Speaker 1: mow down by machine gun fire. Needs to be more
Speaker 1: nimble UM. And that's part of why in World War One,
Speaker 1: in and World War two, because the rest of the
Speaker 1: people fighting the Germans, like even the US, had not
Speaker 1: caught up to this kind of battle doctrine by the
Speaker 1: time World War Two was over um to the extent
Speaker 1: that the Germans had. And it's part of why there's
Speaker 1: such a lopsided casualty ratio in favor of the Germans
Speaker 1: in that war is they had what is very close
Speaker 1: to because all modern combat tactics are based on what
Speaker 1: the Germans started doing at the end of World War
Speaker 1: one UM and had really like nailed down to a
Speaker 1: science in World War two UM. And Lynda is saying that,
Speaker 1: like we need to extend that and like that's the
Speaker 1: thing we've gotten too far away from and we need
Speaker 1: to have You need to have like this bias towards
Speaker 1: movement and this the like officers need to be super
Speaker 1: aggressive and like always pursuing these kind of kinetic options.
Speaker 1: And again, as the Marine Corps battle record will show,
Speaker 1: this is very effective when you were getting into gunfights.
Speaker 1: But when was the last time the Marine Corps was
Speaker 1: on the side of a winning war? Like again, it
Speaker 1: doesn't we can all needle about how to make our
Speaker 1: troops better at like killing people, but at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, we're losing wars because we're getting into
Speaker 1: wars that are not winnable and that's not something you're
Speaker 1: going to fix with battle doctrine. And and Lyn doesn't
Speaker 1: understand that because he's a fascist. And I think it's
Speaker 1: just like this, this is the real like weakness of
Speaker 1: their politics, which is that was like, yeah, well, like
Speaker 1: it's they're they're they're trying. It's like they can't tell
Speaker 1: the difference between war and like they don't think there's
Speaker 1: a difference between war and politics, right, and that means
Speaker 1: that they think that there's a military solution to every
Speaker 1: political problem. And it's like, no, there's not, and like
Speaker 1: this is this is how and this is why is
Speaker 1: how they keep destroying themselves, right is that they you know,
Speaker 1: like like this is what happened to the neo cons.
Speaker 1: I mean, the neo cons a sort of held on
Speaker 1: in this kind of rump shell. But it's like neo
Speaker 1: conservatism project. Yeah. But but it's like, you know, like
Speaker 1: they don't they don't have like like even the people
Speaker 1: who used to be their base, like aren't there base anymore?
Speaker 1: Like those those people are all moving yeah yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's it's it's like maybe they could have maintained
Speaker 1: it if they hadn't just like literally blown it apart
Speaker 1: like trying to conquer a rock. And it's like they
Speaker 1: all do this. They all eventually are like, well, Okay,
Speaker 1: well we'll find a military solution to this, and it
Speaker 1: blows up in their face because it turns out that no,
Speaker 1: you can't actually do this. I mean, I think all
Speaker 1: this syndicates a general progression into the more meta politics
Speaker 1: idea and culture as politics ideas that we're trying to
Speaker 1: solve all these political problems at least like locally within us,
Speaker 1: you know, we're trying to be trying to do them
Speaker 1: culturally and choosing them in selectively in other countries. Right
Speaker 1: because the more kind of the idea of like let's
Speaker 1: just keep entering wars, which we're also doing the same time,
Speaker 1: only for very very very like like very specific regions.
Speaker 1: But I mean the trend of like first, you know,
Speaker 1: like Trump's not necessarily and like Trump's notn't really cannogn
Speaker 1: He preferred the cultural jamming like that was that was
Speaker 1: his preferred method, and I got him relatively far in
Speaker 1: four years. And there there's an argument that Lynde is
Speaker 1: a big person who that he learned a lot from Lynda,
Speaker 1: even though I don't think he ever read his books.
Speaker 1: All the people he surrounded him with where fans of Lend.
Speaker 1: There's a picture of Trump and Lend together and like
Speaker 1: a copy of or at least Trump together with a
Speaker 1: copy of his book UM, which is titled Uh, the
Speaker 1: Next Conservatism Um and I'm gonna read a quote at
Speaker 1: this point from The American Conservative, which Lynde has written for,
Speaker 1: that describes this book because it's it's it's uh useful. Um.
Speaker 1: The Next Conservatism offers a comprehensive agenda of what Lyndon Wayrich,
Speaker 1: who's his co author on this, call a cultural called
Speaker 1: cultural conservatism. While the book aims higher than mere policy,
Speaker 1: the specifics mentioned are Trumpian reductions in legal and illegal
Speaker 1: immigration in America, first trade policy, and robust investments and
Speaker 1: domestic infrastructure, particularly street cars and trains in a less
Speaker 1: Trumpi in vain. It also promotes homeschooling and incorporates some
Speaker 1: ideas of from the New Urbanism as part of a
Speaker 1: broader program called retro culture. Of its connection with Trump,
Speaker 1: lynd says the book runs parallel to what he has
Speaker 1: been saying, but he doubts the billionaire's familiarity with its
Speaker 1: more philosophical ideas. Now here's the part that is going
Speaker 1: to be really unsettling, and this, I think is what
Speaker 1: lynd may actually be going for, rather than any kind
Speaker 1: of reform in the military to improve its ability to
Speaker 1: win foreign wars. Quote. In nineteen ninety four, an article
Speaker 1: appeared in the Marine Corps Gazette by Lynde and two
Speaker 1: of the authors of the nineteen eighty nine piece where
Speaker 1: he introduced the concept of fourth generation warfare. It ended
Speaker 1: on a dire note. The point is not merely that
Speaker 1: America's armed forces will find themselves facing non nation state
Speaker 1: conflicts and forces overseas. The point is that the same
Speaker 1: conflicts are coming here. The next real war we fight
Speaker 1: is likely to be on American soil. So that's what's
Speaker 1: going on here. Like, and that's the thing where biased
Speaker 1: towards action and increased killing power. If all you're really
Speaker 1: trying to do is murder everyone who disagrees with you
Speaker 1: using the military very quickly, well that might work for you.
Speaker 1: People should know about this. He has a fucking fiction
Speaker 1: book called Victoria, which actually if you go to like
Speaker 1: TV tropes, um the there's a TV it's not just
Speaker 1: TV tropes anymore, but like there's a trope page from
Speaker 1: my book After the Revolution, and it's directly compared to Victoria,
Speaker 1: as like they're the opposites of each other, because Victoria
Speaker 1: is like a book about a civil war in the
Speaker 1: US that these like weird fascist uh like monarchists win
Speaker 1: and like it's, uh, it's pretty fucked up. Like the
Speaker 1: problem is that like like like all of these like
Speaker 1: the Northwest is controlled by like environmentalists, like leaders who
Speaker 1: get like eaten by these animals like wolves that they
Speaker 1: reintroduced to the to the society. And like California is
Speaker 1: so feminist that it's illegal to have sex and make babies, um.
Speaker 1: And the South fails because it's it's too multicultural um.
Speaker 1: And yeah, like it's it's all so the person who
Speaker 1: wins the war is like the governor of Maine who's
Speaker 1: a retro culture practitioner um and considers himself a subject
Speaker 1: of the Kaiser. I maybe getting a couple of details wrong,
Speaker 1: but not that part I know. But it's it's a
Speaker 1: fucking nuts nuts So I've only read like little bits
Speaker 1: of it. Maybe one day I'll get through the whole thing.
Speaker 1: But that's that's the thing with all with all of
Speaker 1: these like cultural gambers, like they try to put on
Speaker 1: like war aesthetics, but all of them were the nerdiest fuckers.
Speaker 1: He'll ever he's so stupid, and I like he's to
Speaker 1: All these guys are so is so nerdy, all of them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and like lend. Everything about him makes sense when you
Speaker 1: understand that his primary guiding directive is anger over the
Speaker 1: fact that there's no longer a kaiser Um. He's a
Speaker 1: little but also like again, he was not lying about
Speaker 1: there's a picture of like Trump of this fucking book.
Speaker 1: He's not lying that. Like fucking everybody who was like
Speaker 1: pilled in that White House knew about Lynn's ideas and
Speaker 1: have been He's been hugely influential, and not just among
Speaker 1: like the American right. His books have been found in
Speaker 1: like al Qaeda hideouts and ship like. He makes sense
Speaker 1: though that that that that like all of all of
Speaker 1: that really tracks because yeah, like the barrier between like
Speaker 1: terrorist action as a part of fourth generation and in
Speaker 1: some ways fifth generation warfare and then the type of
Speaker 1: like culture jamming, those things go hand in hand. Like
Speaker 1: that is like that is the goal of it is
Speaker 1: to make it work that way. So that doesn't surprise
Speaker 1: me that those types of terrorist groups would be reading
Speaker 1: his books for advice so or for like to like
Speaker 1: figure out how the other side thinks. Yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: well that's probably enough talking about william S. Lind for
Speaker 1: today and cultural and the fourth generation. We'll talk there's
Speaker 1: a lot to dig into about how these ideas have
Speaker 1: influenced chunks of the right and now they're currently still
Speaker 1: being used for like these omnipresent conflicts that are going
Speaker 1: on right now. And again I do think particularly the
Speaker 1: idea of omnipresence is really useful for understanding modern conflict.
Speaker 1: I would I would go as far as to say,
Speaker 1: like crucial. Um, so this is necessary background information to
Speaker 1: people to have, for people to have for like some
Speaker 1: of the other ship. We're going to be continuing to
Speaker 1: talk in this about in this series as we you know,
Speaker 1: as we talk more about kind of kinetic conflicts or
Speaker 1: at least building towards kinetic conflicts. Um. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: think this is this is a useful kind of grounding.
Speaker 1: And now I'm going to send Chris and Garrison off
Speaker 1: to write an episode explaining who Hegel is and everything
Speaker 1: he believed. I Yeah, it's gonna be great. You're gonna
Speaker 1: you're gonna hear you. You will watch me go mad
Speaker 1: in real time. It's gonna be great. Yeah. The other
Speaker 1: option is I can just read the Wikipedia page for
Speaker 1: Hegel with like a really offensive German accent. That's better
Speaker 1: than that, Actually better I'm gonna go to I promise
Speaker 1: you one thing, which is that I will wind up
Speaker 1: either Russian or Australian by the end. I can't stop
Speaker 1: that drift when I whenever I start doing you know,
Speaker 1: Oh I am a good German. Yeah, my name is
Speaker 1: Mr Hegel. The absolute that happen here, we're in follow
Speaker 1: up cool zone media. We're gonna stop that right now.
Speaker 1: I probably should Oh my Crown, great timing. M hmm,
Speaker 1: I love oh my Crown. I'm Robert Evans. This is
Speaker 1: it could happen here a podcast about Greek numbering schemas. Garrison,
Speaker 1: What do you? What do you? How do you? How
Speaker 1: do you feel about? Oh Macron? This has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with the topic we're talking about, So this is
Speaker 1: this is an update. A few of right last week
Speaker 1: were earlier this week we discussed the the trucker Convoy
Speaker 1: scheduled our episode recorded before the truck convoy for after
Speaker 1: the truck Convoy had already done a bunch of things,
Speaker 1: which was really good. So we we recorded to talk
Speaker 1: about the trucks that were that we're going to show
Speaker 1: up at Ottawa and the thing things did happen. Maybe
Speaker 1: not that not because like I've been listening. Some of
Speaker 1: their claims are like and Alex Jones is parenting there
Speaker 1: now that it was like eight hundred thousand to a
Speaker 1: million truckers and there's three hundred thousand truckers in all
Speaker 1: of Canada, like, but it was, it was. It was
Speaker 1: a lot of people like not to not to downplay
Speaker 1: what happened. So we're to give an update on what
Speaker 1: happened there and kind of discussed maybe any ramifications that
Speaker 1: stuff like this could have going forward. But to help
Speaker 1: with that, um, we have Dan who came on last
Speaker 1: time to help discuss Hello, thank you for coming on
Speaker 1: again to talk about the same thing. Thank you for
Speaker 1: having me. We last less off with you saying that
Speaker 1: you hope I don't come back on again because that
Speaker 1: would be a good thing and it would mean that
Speaker 1: the bad things did not happen. So sorry to be
Speaker 1: here under such circumstances. Yeah, you want to go over
Speaker 1: the bad Yeah, So let's let's briefly do like a
Speaker 1: recap of like what this thing was like, like why
Speaker 1: why was it happening, and like what was the idea?
Speaker 1: When we last left Canada, a bunch of truckers were
Speaker 1: angry that they had to present evilations evidence of vaccination.
Speaker 1: This spiraled and as I'm understanding it, at some point
Speaker 1: then rejecting all public health measures. Yes, actually the the
Speaker 1: exact demands are for the federal and provincial governments to
Speaker 1: quote terminate the vaccine passports and all other obligatory obligatory
Speaker 1: vaccine contact tracing programs uh, to terminate COVID vaccine mandates UH,
Speaker 1: and quote respect the rights of those who wish to
Speaker 1: remain unvaccinated. UH. And here's where it gets weird. UH
Speaker 1: See a good devisive rhetoric attacking Canadians who disagree with
Speaker 1: government mandates. Kind of hard to say when that one's
Speaker 1: fulfilled and finally ceased to limit debate through coercive measures
Speaker 1: with the goal of censoring close who have varying or
Speaker 1: incorrect opinions. That's what the convoys for. I mean, do
Speaker 1: you all know what a government is? Evidently I was
Speaker 1: at some debates in with the state that went a
Speaker 1: lot uglier than it looks like this. One went oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we we we can talk about that. This this the
Speaker 1: stand off has been well, there's been just that it's
Speaker 1: been a standoff in that regard. So it seems like
Speaker 1: they've kind of hooligan around a bunch of towns and
Speaker 1: threatened a homeless shelter if they didn't give them food,
Speaker 1: and that they left trash everywhere and set up a
Speaker 1: checkpoint on the border or just a blockade on the border.
Speaker 1: I think it's probably more accurate. There's been blockades going
Speaker 1: on and up the border. I think the most noteworthy
Speaker 1: is an Alberta and coop right now. But I might
Speaker 1: be pronouncing that wrong. And what was the police It
Speaker 1: was something along the lines of we don't think there's
Speaker 1: like a policing solution to this problem. Oh yeah, so
Speaker 1: you're totally up to date that that happened today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so a little after two pm t D. On lafter
Speaker 1: two pm today, the Ottawa Police Chief Pewter slowly said
Speaker 1: in a press conference that quote, there may not be
Speaker 1: a policing solution to this demonstration. Is it really that easy?
Speaker 1: It's evidently it's that easy if you wait till kind
Speaker 1: of like the media has had a few days and
Speaker 1: most of the coverage is just like breaking bad things
Speaker 1: still happening. Uh so it's it's not great. So what
Speaker 1: what was the lead upon set? Right? Because they were all.
Speaker 1: They were all all the trucks and caravans and stuff.
Speaker 1: We're supposed to rive on Saturday. What was the lead
Speaker 1: up on Saturday like and like what what what happened
Speaker 1: like the actual first day. Yeah, so Saturday was technically
Speaker 1: the first day, actually Friday. Throughout the day a lot
Speaker 1: of people started arriving. So the occupation has been we're
Speaker 1: recording now Wednesday. Um, it started on Friday and the
Speaker 1: main like the largest contingent of the convoy was staying
Speaker 1: overnight Friday night in a nearby town called Armfire west
Speaker 1: of Ottawa, and they moved in from Armpire to Ottawa
Speaker 1: on Saturday morning. At the same time, people converged from
Speaker 1: other parts of Canada. UM to Ottawa's east is Quebec
Speaker 1: and to Quebec's east of the Maritime provinces, and three
Speaker 1: thousand people at least came from Quebec and met with
Speaker 1: the convoy to on Saturday, kind of coming in from
Speaker 1: different parts the day between Friday night and Saturday afternoon,
Speaker 1: and Saturday was kind of the big day, the big party, Uh,
Speaker 1: the main point of contention, and the main thing that
Speaker 1: happened was some major streets are gridlocked by vehicles moving
Speaker 1: into the city, into the very crowded core of Otto
Speaker 1: of my hometown and staying stationary on busy roads. Both
Speaker 1: commercial and residential roads are part of this. Driveways for
Speaker 1: both businesses and residences were blocked off, fire roads are
Speaker 1: blocked off, and Wan's routes are blocked off. Local businesses
Speaker 1: that stayed open had to close throughout the day Saturday,
Speaker 1: largely UH, some managed to not, and many of just
Speaker 1: stayed closed already because they knew what was going to happen,
Speaker 1: and this happened. Closures that happened on Saturday are mostly
Speaker 1: still going on today as I'm speaking to you. Wednesday night.
Speaker 1: UH closures followed patterns of harassment, some alleged assaults which
Speaker 1: I ever mentioned before else happened at a homeless shelter
Speaker 1: in downtown Ottawa, and pretty much everyone I've spoken to
Speaker 1: I've I've been in Ottawa, visiting it to my hometown,
Speaker 1: and pretty much every what I've spoken to who lives
Speaker 1: in the downtown core is that a slew of story
Speaker 1: since Saturday of either harassment at work or just harassment
Speaker 1: walking through the streets. And the worst part of it
Speaker 1: all is that right now there's not a clear ending
Speaker 1: in sight. What is it like on the ground there
Speaker 1: in terms of I know, there's like kind of like
Speaker 1: a blockade around the border. But they're like, what else
Speaker 1: is like around Ottawa? What's like? What like? What what
Speaker 1: is what's it like to walk around in these places?
Speaker 1: And like how big is the area that these people
Speaker 1: are staying at? Like where are they staying at? Are
Speaker 1: they all sleeping in their trucks? Who staying at hotels?
Speaker 1: What's like? What's like the It's an excellent question. There's
Speaker 1: there's a mix of hotels were booked up the week
Speaker 1: leading up to the weekend. As as the new cycle
Speaker 1: kind of exploded, more and more people called into hotels
Speaker 1: in Ottawa. A lot of people actually brought tractors. People
Speaker 1: are also sleeping in their trucks. Uh. Of course people
Speaker 1: have like family and stuff staying in Ottawa. Sometimes they're
Speaker 1: staying with them. Um, it's a mix of everything. Actually,
Speaker 1: I know a guy who even his car was like
Speaker 1: blocked off in the parking lot. He has to parking
Speaker 1: because he's downtown. He doesn't have street parking or driveway parking,
Speaker 1: Like it's in a public lot and he couldn't get
Speaker 1: his car out for over a full day because an
Speaker 1: RV camper set up near him and just blocked him off.
Speaker 1: So it's a mix of everything. Uh. Starting on Saturday,
Speaker 1: there's like a lot of partying, a lot of music,
Speaker 1: a lot of kids. Uh. It's gotten a little bit
Speaker 1: more chaotic and less condensed since then. And also the
Speaker 1: area is hard to gauge because streets are actually constantly
Speaker 1: as vehicles move out for one reason or another. Streets
Speaker 1: are kind of being re taken back organically of the city,
Speaker 1: but then sometimes throughout the day getting retaken again back
Speaker 1: by the convoy. So the occupation has been a little
Speaker 1: fluid on some of the outside streets. Wellington Street, which
Speaker 1: is the street outside of Parliament in Ottawa, has been
Speaker 1: consistently occupied, to my knowledge, blocking off kind of not
Speaker 1: actually blocking off, but you have to walk past them
Speaker 1: as a pedestrian to get onto Parliament Hill. So that's
Speaker 1: where the kind of the core is, the action of
Speaker 1: the action is, and everything else spreads out from that.
Speaker 1: And near hotels, uh, there's a little more action because
Speaker 1: that's generally where people are staying. How has members of
Speaker 1: Parliament and like local politicians has been reacting since Saturday.
Speaker 1: I know there was there was some videos of like
Speaker 1: I think one of the MP's from Alberta was giving
Speaker 1: an interview that gained some traction online. Um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of curious, like how the like different government
Speaker 1: officials are talking about this. I'm actually so glad you
Speaker 1: asked that because as of today, the divide in member
Speaker 1: of Parliament has actually led to some pretty incredible political ramifications.
Speaker 1: So last time we spoke, I think Erin O'Toole had
Speaker 1: just earlier in the day endorsed conpoints that he'd be
Speaker 1: coming down. Erin o't tool, for those unaware, is the
Speaker 1: leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. He's a real,
Speaker 1: real o'tool. Wow, whoa mind blown? No one, No one
Speaker 1: could have seen that joke coming. Every every Canadian listener
Speaker 1: just like collectively rolled there. Yeah, so Erin o'tool and
Speaker 1: just endorsed the convoy. He'd been getting some tough questions
Speaker 1: about it. Following everything we just talked about and more,
Speaker 1: Erin o't too will walk that back and said, you know,
Speaker 1: he didn't approve of the way that the convoy was
Speaker 1: acting in Ottawa. This led to a swift referendum on
Speaker 1: his leadership and earlier today, Erin o'tool was voted out
Speaker 1: as the Conservative leader in Canada and that does have
Speaker 1: pretty big ramifications. I know I talked about Erin o
Speaker 1: tool a decent amount in my previous Canada episodes for
Speaker 1: cadapin here. Um, so, yeah, that'll be really interesting to
Speaker 1: see who uh what's do you have any idea of
Speaker 1: when the new person is going to try to get
Speaker 1: noted it? Like, when when do you think that process
Speaker 1: is going to happen to fill that spot. I'm actually
Speaker 1: not sure. I haven't looked up when it's gonna happen.
Speaker 1: It feels like there's been months before where there's an
Speaker 1: intimaters of the Conservative Party. The main concern right now
Speaker 1: for those outside of Conservative politics is because Erin o'
Speaker 1: tool was considered relatively moderate. That you talked about in
Speaker 1: the Fascism Canada episode, how Erin o'tool kicked out Darren
Speaker 1: Sloan from the party for being pretty coy on donations
Speaker 1: from neo Nazi Paul Front on his campaign. Uh. Overall,
Speaker 1: like that's a pretty great thing that Erino tool that
Speaker 1: kicked him out of the caucus. Like, regardless of other
Speaker 1: elements of leadership. Uh, there's worrying that that kind of
Speaker 1: there will be continued forward, especially because Sloan was also
Speaker 1: in the leadership race and Sloan has only gone further
Speaker 1: right since then. Yeah, it is just despite air no tools,
Speaker 1: not great aspects, which there are lots of. He did
Speaker 1: he did, he did take it. He did kind of
Speaker 1: hold back some of the more problematic uh conservative like elements,
Speaker 1: whether that be you know, people from you know, from
Speaker 1: his own party, like like Derek, and then also keeping
Speaker 1: kind of the people's party stuff at Bay Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that will be an interesting kind of power struggle now,
Speaker 1: that will be something to observe. I think the thing
Speaker 1: that concerns me most about all of this is the
Speaker 1: implication of the implications for this is a tactic. We
Speaker 1: saw a version of this that was more limited in
Speaker 1: scope and time in Portland when this huge Trump caravan
Speaker 1: rolled through downtown, blocked off big chunks of downtown and
Speaker 1: like just maced and shot people with paintball guns at random,
Speaker 1: and it was kind of like, I think everyone there
Speaker 1: was surprised at how many folks they got for it. Um.
Speaker 1: This is a much more evolved version of the same
Speaker 1: tactic and it's kind of stuff we talked about in
Speaker 1: the season one of it could happen here. This idea
Speaker 1: of like people coming from these conservative majority areas in
Speaker 1: a place where the vast majority of people are liberal
Speaker 1: but centralized in the cities UM and blocking those cities
Speaker 1: off or otherwise disrupting their ability to transit UM, potentially
Speaker 1: their ability to get things shipped in like food UM,
Speaker 1: like their ability to use free movement UM. And we've
Speaker 1: seen pieces of this again in a bunch of places,
Speaker 1: and in Oregon during the wildfires, you had these rural
Speaker 1: communities setting up checkpoints and stuff looking for people from
Speaker 1: the cities that they could bill as Antifa. And it's
Speaker 1: this it's this world worrying trend for a couple of reasons.
Speaker 1: Number One, when you get people to do something like this,
Speaker 1: even if the city has hundreds of thousands of people,
Speaker 1: that's effectively too large a group to police UM. And
Speaker 1: the police don't want to police it anyway, so there's
Speaker 1: not even really an attempt to stop them UM. And
Speaker 1: it's a way in which the vast majority of Canada,
Speaker 1: at least based on the polling i'm aware of UM,
Speaker 1: is not in support of the causes these guys are backing.
Speaker 1: Was it of the country supports some level of like
Speaker 1: vaccine mandates. Um, if I'm remembering correctly the last one
Speaker 1: I read. So this is not a popular movement. It's
Speaker 1: not even super popular among the truckers. Like the actual
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter how many people in the cities you
Speaker 1: can get. If you can get fifty six people to
Speaker 1: do something like this, the police won't will not take action,
Speaker 1: and you can negatively impact the lives of a huge
Speaker 1: number of millions before it gets radical, right. That's when
Speaker 1: these guys are not coming in with guns with the
Speaker 1: express plan to eliminate people or trying to specifically block
Speaker 1: up food. They're just kind of sucking around now. But
Speaker 1: it's this kind of is this thing we've talked about
Speaker 1: where you have this is the thing in Canada and
Speaker 1: the United States, you had liberals kind of outsourcing the
Speaker 1: protection of society to this group of increasingly heavily armed
Speaker 1: and radicalized people who are now in a lot of
Speaker 1: cases fascists. Um. And that means that when there's a
Speaker 1: problem with a large chunk of people who hate everything
Speaker 1: you stand for, the people that you have completely outsourced
Speaker 1: protection to are all unfavor of fucking with you because
Speaker 1: they hate you. And it's it's a problem in Oregon,
Speaker 1: It's going to be a problem in fucking New York
Speaker 1: City or whatever at some point, it's a problem in Ottawa. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know, Am I am I off base here?
Speaker 1: Am I am? I am You're not on base at all?
Speaker 1: And uh, like there isn't there isn't anything to to
Speaker 1: really elaborate on pass what you said the last time
Speaker 1: we spoke. I think Robert, you said there's not a
Speaker 1: whole lot. It was what you said that could really
Speaker 1: really be done with the vehicle occupation actic and unless
Speaker 1: a lot of people are willing to meet them with
Speaker 1: an equal force, which unfortunately Ottawa didn't have. Like it's
Speaker 1: an Ottawas. Ottawa's a relatively large city in Canada. It's
Speaker 1: there's over a million people that live here. It's also
Speaker 1: by land mass, I think, the largest city in Canada,
Speaker 1: like east to west. It's it's very spread out, so
Speaker 1: it's a low population density. So even the affected area
Speaker 1: downtown is actually like pretty small in relation to the
Speaker 1: city itself, which is pretty unfortunate. And like it's not
Speaker 1: a particularly packed downtown for a large SCE downtown. I am,
Speaker 1: I am curious kind of on the violence aspect um
Speaker 1: has Like I know, there's been like um increase in
Speaker 1: the death threats to members of parliament, like specifically liberal
Speaker 1: members of parliament, specifically liberal members of parliament who are
Speaker 1: women who are maybe not white of So I would
Speaker 1: curiously if if you have any more kind of information
Speaker 1: on that side of thing this and then how how
Speaker 1: violence has popped up in a few places throughout the
Speaker 1: past like a week. Basically, yeah, there's been a lot.
Speaker 1: So I mean, even if you're going by what's reported
Speaker 1: like right now, there is by most estimates under a
Speaker 1: thousand maybe at most a few thousand, very far spread
Speaker 1: out people as part of the convoy. As of yesterday,
Speaker 1: there's thirteen active police investigations, the police of the city,
Speaker 1: the City of Ottawa said in the An Oppressor. We
Speaker 1: obviously know when there's like thirteen active investigations in anything
Speaker 1: this big, there's way more that's not being reported, not
Speaker 1: being investigated. Um, like they took you know, like these
Speaker 1: things are going to thirteen is going to be resultful
Speaker 1: of something bad. So some of the things that happened
Speaker 1: Robert mentioned before the alleged assault on a houseless person
Speaker 1: inside of Shepherds of Good Hope in which a security
Speaker 1: guard was also called a racial slur. Uh. There was
Speaker 1: a house that played displayed a rainbow flag outside of
Speaker 1: it that had harassment and poop thrown at it. Um.
Speaker 1: They have been we need to get a hundred thousand
Speaker 1: people together to throw their own poop back at these people.
Speaker 1: It's the only way they'll learn. Yeah, fighting fire with
Speaker 1: fire is that that expression? I'm sure just emerged from
Speaker 1: just tossing poop at each other's strategy. It's meant for this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there've been suggestions all of our social media channels on
Speaker 1: like here's how you can poop in snowbanks without getting caught.
Speaker 1: Businesses have been harassed, they've been violence, So like what
Speaker 1: I think maybe some context uh that isn't always known.
Speaker 1: In Ottawa on Saturday and until recently, dining in in
Speaker 1: restaurants wasn't allowed. We were actually in relatively strict lockdown
Speaker 1: following around the chron wave and a lot of people
Speaker 1: even coming like didn't know that. Like I spoke to
Speaker 1: people on Saturday who were like, hey, do you know
Speaker 1: like when the restaurants around here opens so we can
Speaker 1: like sit down for a meal. And I was like,
Speaker 1: there's no sitting down on auto this So what people
Speaker 1: were mean they were going inside cafes like two burns
Speaker 1: and stuff, and they were just refusing to leave and
Speaker 1: eating their food there anyways, And if there was no seats,
Speaker 1: they were just like eating in line. It was also
Speaker 1: minus twenty eight degrees in Ottawa on Saturday and very
Speaker 1: very cold on Sunday. There was an extreme cold weather warning,
Speaker 1: so especially when people brought their kids, there wasn't a
Speaker 1: lot of other options other than like swarm the malls
Speaker 1: and swarm restaurants. And even then the mall, the main
Speaker 1: mall downtown Rito Center, was closed part way throughout the
Speaker 1: day because it was not a safe place. So I
Speaker 1: already talked before about routes getting blocked. Also not physical violence,
Speaker 1: but honking has been keeping people awake. There's been endless
Speaker 1: honking if you watch video footage from it, and even
Speaker 1: in the background right now I'm coming from Ottawa, like
Speaker 1: I can hear honking in my background. Um, some people
Speaker 1: allegedly parked and then urinated on the tomb of an
Speaker 1: unknown soldier, which is yeah, this isn't political, is even
Speaker 1: the wrong way to describe a lot of the what's
Speaker 1: fun about this these people, it's that they suck. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fucking it's just silly. It's just fucking hooliganism. Uh.
Speaker 1: And that's yeah, it's it's fucking cooliganism. There's gonna be
Speaker 1: a lot more stories coming out, for sure. Uh as
Speaker 1: things progress, um of stories of arassment. Like I've talked
Speaker 1: to people who have gotten a cat call in the night.
Speaker 1: People getting violent altercations, street fights, and I'm sure are
Speaker 1: going to break out. It's kind of at a very
Speaker 1: tense point right now. And auto we're at that point,
Speaker 1: we're like, Okay, we're seeing some signs like coops getting
Speaker 1: thrown at the houses. What's gonna happen next? Because the
Speaker 1: police are saying they don't have a plan, and the
Speaker 1: truckers are saying they're not leaving. What's it like outside
Speaker 1: of Bottle Wall, across across all the other places where
Speaker 1: there's like similar activity happening. They're all looking to us
Speaker 1: and being concerned. From what I'm talking to, Uh, anti
Speaker 1: fascists and Alberta are are particularly concerned right now with
Speaker 1: the Goop protests. There's ongoing to uh, it keeps seeing
Speaker 1: popping up like US Canada border activities. In the same
Speaker 1: there's a few attempted convoys by Americans and even before
Speaker 1: in Europe there was a few attempts. Some got turned away.
Speaker 1: Some Americans got turned away at the Canadian borders. They
Speaker 1: weren't vaccinated. M Yeah, which is you know, like it's
Speaker 1: like you think, because that's the reason they're saying they're protesting,
Speaker 1: they would have remembered that and thought maybe that's gonna
Speaker 1: like come into play, But I don't. Yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 1: because there is a certain point where if you get
Speaker 1: enough people going, it would be interesting to see people
Speaker 1: really do just try to like drive through the border. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I mean there's been people like you look at
Speaker 1: social media channels, a lot of them saying like the
Speaker 1: borders are blocked right now with thousands of truckers supporting
Speaker 1: our cause. So if you saw that and you believed it,
Speaker 1: and then you went to the border and your turn
Speaker 1: away reading vaccine, you meant thought, well, I thought I
Speaker 1: had you know, nine people the same causes being we're
Speaker 1: ready to use worst, which begs the question, well, what
Speaker 1: happens when you do exactly? I don't want to find out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's yeah. That's the thing is like if if if
Speaker 1: they do, if they did have what they say they had,
Speaker 1: would they just start doing those things and not even
Speaker 1: think about it and not even think about like the
Speaker 1: politics of it. They're just doing it to do it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I should also mention too, we talked last time about
Speaker 1: a Plaid Army slash Diaglon members comments. Uh. They were
Speaker 1: broadcast on the news about doing another quote January six, uh,
Speaker 1: and it came out the news to do was first
Speaker 1: reported by Frank magazine and I think by the Canadian
Speaker 1: Anti eight network that he was arrested on fire up
Speaker 1: stridges in the Scotia before coming here. Worth noting he
Speaker 1: was reporting live on Info Wars on the Alex Jones
Speaker 1: Stones Saturday before this came out and Derek Skid coverage. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Derek Sloan and Nazrael event were also on the same program,
Speaker 1: So I mentioned Info Wars before. That's that's great. That's
Speaker 1: what's going on there. Can you see any like beyond
Speaker 1: the conservative leadership, what other kind of political implications are
Speaker 1: people thinking about in Canada. It's really tense seeing what's
Speaker 1: gonna come for other cities. Also, Otto was expecting a
Speaker 1: second wave some other people in other places that kind
Speaker 1: of didn't think the first one is going to be
Speaker 1: duge eccess. We're saying, well, now that it's an occupation,
Speaker 1: we're coming, and police are even saying there's a second wave.
Speaker 1: It's a very tense place right now. We don't really
Speaker 1: know what to do. Community places are taking direct community
Speaker 1: members are talking about taking direct action because it's been
Speaker 1: so long. This isn't something that the City of Ottawa
Speaker 1: is particularly used to, unfortunately in my lifetime, and so
Speaker 1: the ramifications of the future pretty jarring. But what's alarming
Speaker 1: is how successful this occupation was with a relatively small number.
Speaker 1: I think the highest estimate it was eighteen thousand people
Speaker 1: into a city of over a million, which isn't really
Speaker 1: that many when you think about it, but the strategy
Speaker 1: was very very effective. Do you think about how many
Speaker 1: fighters it took for Josh to take control of mozl
Speaker 1: if people if there's not resistance, like, there's only really
Speaker 1: a few areas of a city that you need to
Speaker 1: occupy in order to have a great deal of control
Speaker 1: over what can be done. Yeah, And that's the tough
Speaker 1: part is they have a lot of control over that
Speaker 1: small area in residents lives. They don't have a lot
Speaker 1: of control over Parliament, which is what they're protesting for. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm also just to see has the Canadian military said
Speaker 1: anything about these protests and the situation. So the Autawa
Speaker 1: police chief in his pressure day was asked a lot
Speaker 1: about that, and he's still shying away. He's still saying
Speaker 1: he doesn't think military is the only option, which if
Speaker 1: you're an activist on the other side of things and
Speaker 1: worried about police escalation hurting you in the future, that
Speaker 1: might be a good thing to hear. Yea an a
Speaker 1: see of shitty news. I'm not convinced that the military
Speaker 1: would fix the problem. I'm not either. And also Ottawa
Speaker 1: had other police forces coming to They said they're spending
Speaker 1: eight hundred thousand dollars a day, uh initially to just
Speaker 1: cost of policing. Yeah. They also said they've only, like bylaws,
Speaker 1: only had a hundred fifty tickets since this whole thing
Speaker 1: started in the occupied zone. So it's it's unclear what
Speaker 1: a lot of them did other than you know, keep
Speaker 1: up appearances. Uh. Like I was walking around I saw
Speaker 1: York Region police officers walking around with their patches. That's
Speaker 1: hundreds of kilometers away from Ottawa. So the police presence,
Speaker 1: especially on the weekend, was not low. We we had
Speaker 1: plenty mhm. They either didn't know what to do, I
Speaker 1: thought it would die later, or a mixture of all
Speaker 1: the above. And there's been talked to mixtures of Some
Speaker 1: police officers have not been happy with it, but there
Speaker 1: hasn't been really anything in the news yet because no
Speaker 1: one's come forward. A lot of like tweets of like
Speaker 1: from reporter saying I have an anonymous source in the
Speaker 1: auto police. It says they wish more actions were taken,
Speaker 1: some saying otherwise, it's not really united it right now,
Speaker 1: And yeah, it's scary. Is there any counter protests being
Speaker 1: planned for Ottawa? If I knew, i'd say so, because
Speaker 1: by the time this error is it would have happened,
Speaker 1: so I could be safe to talk about. But fortunately
Speaker 1: I'm not really insure. I'm not actually sure, but it
Speaker 1: might not be the best person to ask. Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're keeping an eye out. Well. The good news is
Speaker 1: that all men die, and so long as men die,
Speaker 1: liberty will never perish. Right, that's good. It's an upside.
Speaker 1: That is an upside, it's an up positive shot. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: that's gonna do it for us. We'll keep an eye
Speaker 1: on this and um what what results from it, because
Speaker 1: it's all pretty concerning, um and worth having having an eye.
Speaker 1: And I'm particularly curious is to just like what kind
Speaker 1: of direct community responses to this develop because I think
Speaker 1: that's gonna wind up being the only long term solution.
Speaker 1: You know. It's kind of what people saw in Portland
Speaker 1: that there's a there's a degree to which like the
Speaker 1: only thing that really works as a response is is
Speaker 1: out numbering them. Yeah. On on that note, it might
Speaker 1: be maybe not the smoothest transition, But there are actually
Speaker 1: some Autowa Mutual Aid funds and then Advocate Secrets that
Speaker 1: are doing some some cool stuff. And there's that there's
Speaker 1: too many of the list for everyone, but others have
Speaker 1: compiled lists, and I'm gonna point to you there So
Speaker 1: ROSE Ottawa which stands for Rainbow Autowa Student Experience as
Speaker 1: serves two s l G B t q I A
Speaker 1: plus post secondary students on unseated algonquin on a Shnave territory. No,
Speaker 1: they have closed op donations for themselves following a wonderful
Speaker 1: spike recently. They have a list of black lead and
Speaker 1: black empowering organizations on their website with donation links and
Speaker 1: you can reach that at Rose Ottawa dot org slash donations. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's a cool little Instagram account called Transit is Beautiful
Speaker 1: O T T O T T stands for Ottawa and
Speaker 1: that's all one word. It's been plugging small fundraisers for
Speaker 1: queer folks affected by the Convoy, including housing support on
Speaker 1: their Instagram. Again, that's trans is Beautiful O T T
Speaker 1: on Instagram. Uh. Something we didn't get to talk about,
Speaker 1: which is ram Ranch Ram Ranch dot c A r
Speaker 1: A n dash Ranch dot c A a website was
Speaker 1: set up in the name of trolling the convoy zelo
Speaker 1: chats and has been doing a fantastic job about There's
Speaker 1: a whole army of trolls in the truckers Ello chats
Speaker 1: and it's been really entertaining to tune into. They've compiled
Speaker 1: the list of charities on their website. You can check
Speaker 1: that out at ram dash Ranch dot c A and
Speaker 1: clicking on the Rancher's donation zone. And yeah, where can
Speaker 1: where can people find you? On the internet? People can
Speaker 1: find me on the internet some super active on Twitter
Speaker 1: at at spineless L where it spineless the letter L fantastic. Well, hopefully,
Speaker 1: hopefully this gets all resolved and I don't need to
Speaker 1: fly up to Canada to go to a protest, and
Speaker 1: if if we do, that'll be fun. I've been wanting
Speaker 1: to go to Canada for a minute. Yeah I can,
Speaker 1: we can. We can take drugs at tim Morton's. That
Speaker 1: would be fun. Yeah. God, you know, I haven't vomited
Speaker 1: in a Tim Horton's bathroom in a long time. Our
Speaker 1: local McDonald's that got famous on the internet for a
Speaker 1: fistfight that someone pulled a raccoon out of their backpack
Speaker 1: during had to actually stop being twenty four hours after
Speaker 1: the mayor pleaded with them because it was using up
Speaker 1: too many police resources. That is the best kind of
Speaker 1: place in a year. That's so dope. Oh god, yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to I want to set up somewhere on
Speaker 1: the border in the East coast to tim Horton's, directly
Speaker 1: across the street from a waffle house and just let
Speaker 1: them fight. Uh well, yeah, we we do. We we
Speaker 1: do miss that here. That's that's in the year. You'll
Speaker 1: have to bring that for you have to bring that over,
Speaker 1: bring a waffle Houst finds. Over all you need to
Speaker 1: do is watch a man get stabbed and then spiritually
Speaker 1: you're at a waffle house. That that that ties back
Speaker 1: to the future of the Convoy. You're right, Well, that
Speaker 1: does it for us today, everybody, We will see you later. Hey,
Speaker 1: We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
Speaker 1: now until the heat death of the Universe. It Could
Speaker 1: Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. Or
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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.