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 gotta be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. Welcome to it could happen
Speaker 1: here a podcast that, for the first time ever, is
Speaker 1: being recorded on an earth that I no longer have
Speaker 1: to share with that fascist rap baster chinzawabe. And with
Speaker 1: with me, with me to celebrate this occasion is Garrison Davis. Hi, Hello,
Speaker 1: and James, have have we actually have we like introduced you?
Speaker 1: Introduced you? Yet I didn't think so. No, I just
Speaker 1: pop up talking about three D printed guns and people
Speaker 1: who hate butterflies. Yeah, this is this is truly a
Speaker 1: dark day for democracy. I am saddened by the horrible
Speaker 1: loss of a great leader, UM, A hero to feminism
Speaker 1: and women UM, and I guess a hero to those
Speaker 1: who defend war crimes. So I guess before heard before
Speaker 1: before Wefore we get into one of the funniest things
Speaker 1: that has happened in maybe twenty years. Um, you do
Speaker 1: you want to like talk about who you are? Because
Speaker 1: you are now one of us and I'm very excited
Speaker 1: about it. Yeah, I'm wanted. Yeah, I'm now a podcast. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Um so who I am? I am a journalist, I guess,
Speaker 1: uh and a historian and I wrote a book about
Speaker 1: the first week of the Spanish Civil War. And my
Speaker 1: PhD is in the history of international anti fascism, building
Speaker 1: international anti fascist alliances through physical culture, which is very nerdy,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I love that stuff with else I'm British
Speaker 1: if that had not been made abundantly clear but accent.
Speaker 1: And I live in southern California, which means this is
Speaker 1: a Now this episode is a majority Commonwealth episode. Really exciting.
Speaker 1: We made it. Yeah, well we do in the national
Speaker 1: anthem in a minute here and we'll just stand up.
Speaker 1: Uh so, ex Prime Minister kind of he's not around anymore,
Speaker 1: is he? No? He is dead as fuck? So all
Speaker 1: right we should I guess I guess we should explain
Speaker 1: who Shenzo Abe is. Yeah. Okay, if if you want
Speaker 1: a really really long account of what the Japanese Liberal
Speaker 1: Democratic Party is because they are some of the worst
Speaker 1: people who've ever existed democratic How can this be? So?
Speaker 1: The very short version of this is that the Liberal
Speaker 1: Democratic Party is a party that was founded by Nobusuke Kishi,
Speaker 1: who is one of history's worst war crimin les person
Speaker 1: like personally responsible for enslaving hundreds of thousands of people
Speaker 1: in China. Uh. He's the guy who basically he's the
Speaker 1: guy who was in charge of the economy of the
Speaker 1: fascist war machine, like like in Japan Jua War two.
Speaker 1: He was the guy who ran like the sort of
Speaker 1: fascist puppet state called Manchuqua that was run by Japan
Speaker 1: after they conquered it. Uh. Real war criminal also just
Speaker 1: like personally raped a like extremely large number of people.
Speaker 1: I think that, like I was almost never discussed when
Speaker 1: people talk about him, almost like like a shockingly high
Speaker 1: white number. Yeah. It's of sex crimes. It's wild. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And he's also mean. He's involved with the Japanese military
Speaker 1: sex slave program, which he referred to as comfort women.
Speaker 1: And I refused to call the comfort women because that
Speaker 1: is a fucking horrifying euphemism for again, a program of
Speaker 1: military sex slavery. Uh. He also was one of the
Speaker 1: people who signed off on Unit seven thirty one, which
Speaker 1: was Japan's chemical weapons testing unit where they fucking like
Speaker 1: purposely infested, in facted and tested chemical weapons on prisoners. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's one of the worst people ever. And then he
Speaker 1: got a bunch of CIA backing and so backing from
Speaker 1: the Aukuza because the CIA is working with the Yakuza
Speaker 1: on early uh fifty Japan. And she's able basically to
Speaker 1: force all of the other conservative like people to join
Speaker 1: his party, and the sort of the merger of the
Speaker 1: of the Liberal Party, Liberal Party and the Democratic Party
Speaker 1: is now the Liberal Democratic Party. This is Keishi's party.
Speaker 1: He founded it. Uh, he drags everyone else into it.
Speaker 1: He does an immense amount of corruption. He tries to
Speaker 1: bring fascism back. He narrowly fails. Shinzo Abe is his grandson. Uh.
Speaker 1: The LDP Liberal Democratic Party, Yeah has Yeah, it sucks.
Speaker 1: It's like like the way that I've been thinking about,
Speaker 1: like how do you explain this to people who don't
Speaker 1: who don't have like a background in like Japanese like
Speaker 1: war crime stuff. Is like imagine if like one of
Speaker 1: Hitler's generals had like survived World War Two and then
Speaker 1: the CIA made him made him the Prime Minister of Germany,
Speaker 1: and then and he got more fascist because people were
Speaker 1: saying mean things about his grandpa. He's like, oh, I
Speaker 1: don't like that they're calling him bad names. I'm going
Speaker 1: to get more fascist down. So, like ill Be, Abbe himself,
Speaker 1: he's carried he's been carrying out a lot of the
Speaker 1: same things that that she was trying to do. Kishi
Speaker 1: was trying to sort of restore the sort of full
Speaker 1: fascist power of the police. Abe has been doing a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of shifts of centralizing power in the executive
Speaker 1: and spanning the police's power to just arrest whoever the
Speaker 1: funk they want. Um. So, one of one of the
Speaker 1: other things about Japan is that like legally in their
Speaker 1: constitution they can't go to war. And like both Kishi
Speaker 1: and Abbe like this is like they're big fucking things
Speaker 1: that they want. They want to fully rearm Japan and
Speaker 1: they want Japan be able to go to war because
Speaker 1: they want to do the fucking empire again. And you know,
Speaker 1: so this has led. Yeah, Abe has been doing fat um.
Speaker 1: He also the thing he's probably most famous for in
Speaker 1: terms of like the reasons people think he's bad because
Speaker 1: he is he's like just actually a monster. Is he's
Speaker 1: just like a like unfathomable degree of war crime denial,
Speaker 1: like he he pulled. So Japan in the nineties had
Speaker 1: admitted that they fucking kidnapped and enslaved like an enormous
Speaker 1: number of people from of people from Korea, people from China.
Speaker 1: I think they also did. They did in the Philippines
Speaker 1: and Indonesia too, although there's less sort of coverage of that,
Speaker 1: and like tourn them into military sex slaves, did things
Speaker 1: to them that are like, I fucking unspeakable. Um. And
Speaker 1: so the Japanese government in the nineties had admitted they
Speaker 1: did this and apologized for it, and Abe was like, no,
Speaker 1: funk that that's that's wrong. He's also a part of
Speaker 1: this group called Niponka Guy, which is like a fascist group.
Speaker 1: And okay, so this this is, this is according to
Speaker 1: a US congressional report, what they believe quote Japan should
Speaker 1: be applauded for liberating must of East Asia from western
Speaker 1: colonial powers, that the ninety eight Tokyo War crivate stripe
Speaker 1: unials were illegitimate, and that the killings by Japanese troops
Speaker 1: through the nineteen thirties seven Nunjing massacre were exaggerated or fabricated.
Speaker 1: Oh boy. They also openly yeah yeah, yeah, they also
Speaker 1: saw the nudging denialists. They're they're they're sex slave denialists.
Speaker 1: They openly call for the restoration of the monarchy and
Speaker 1: the institution of Shinto as a state religion. Umb like
Speaker 1: a like has continuously said that the sex slave like
Speaker 1: did it were like, did were there voluntarily? Does another
Speaker 1: thing that but but but but Hillary Clinton just tweeted
Speaker 1: that preg Minister was a champion of democracy and a
Speaker 1: firm believer that new economy, society, country can achieve its
Speaker 1: full potential if you leave women behind. What you know,
Speaker 1: she to be fair, to be fair, to be fair,
Speaker 1: both abbe and nobody. She did, in fact believe in
Speaker 1: using women to fuel the economy, just not in that way.
Speaker 1: He also, there's there's neverthing that so probably these most
Speaker 1: like famous most controversial thing was. So there's the shrine
Speaker 1: called the um Yasukuni Shrine, which is is the shrine
Speaker 1: is dedicated to soldiers who like died serving the Japanese
Speaker 1: emperor and in in this so there's this thing called
Speaker 1: the Book of souls that has like lists of names
Speaker 1: right of just like the other people who died, and
Speaker 1: a thousand sixty eight of the people who were of
Speaker 1: the people in that book are people who were who
Speaker 1: were convicted of war crimes. And there are also at
Speaker 1: fourteen Class A war criminals who either died or were
Speaker 1: executed who are considered martyrs there and Abe fucking like
Speaker 1: visited there and like brand and ship and this piste
Speaker 1: off everyone, any I mean, this is like there are
Speaker 1: lots of people who have gotten mad and me already
Speaker 1: for celebrating Abbe's death, and my, my, my, My official
Speaker 1: line on this is, if ab didn't want me to
Speaker 1: celebrate his fucking death, maybe he shouldn't have celebrated the
Speaker 1: lives of the people who killed my fucking family, So
Speaker 1: fuck them. Yeah, so he's not not not a great dude,
Speaker 1: This real pack an automatic. The other thing we should
Speaker 1: mention too before we go into sort of like the
Speaker 1: details of the shooting is that there is an election actually,
Speaker 1: but by by the time this episode drops, I think
Speaker 1: the election will have happened, um, where there is a
Speaker 1: real chance that the Liberal Democratic Party is going to
Speaker 1: sort of like just fucking sweep it. Because Liberal Democratic
Speaker 1: Party immediately start to blame me the left for this. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's a whole bunch of i mean, just absolutely horrifying
Speaker 1: stuff where they're blaming Korean people who live in live
Speaker 1: in Japan, which, if you know anything about Japanese history,
Speaker 1: when that stuff starts happening, like in in after the
Speaker 1: Canto earthquake, h a bunch of people just started blaming
Speaker 1: Koreans for the whole thing, and they fucking literally exterminated
Speaker 1: almost the entire Korean population in several major Japanese cities.
Speaker 1: And so this stuff is very scary. Uh, it's possible
Speaker 1: that this is going to set off like an incredible
Speaker 1: right wing lyrici of Japanese politics, and there's a chance
Speaker 1: that this this this could be the actual thing that
Speaker 1: like full on triggers Japan like we are being and
Speaker 1: you know, going back into sort of just being a
Speaker 1: pure fascist empire. So this is not Yeah, that that
Speaker 1: part is really bad. The motivation for the assassination is still,
Speaker 1: at least at time of recording, still slightly unclear, very
Speaker 1: uncle according according to some politicians and news media, we
Speaker 1: do know the suspect is Hito Kojima. That you can
Speaker 1: you can infer a little bit fased on. So yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's like French politicians and a Greek news channel
Speaker 1: who are you see pictures of video developer Hideo Kojima
Speaker 1: and passing them off as the shooting suspect, which is
Speaker 1: really funny. It is funny. Pictures of Kachima like inside
Speaker 1: like a Russian like communist hat fucking thing, pictures of
Speaker 1: him wearing a joker shirt and standing in front of
Speaker 1: a Jacobara picture and there you see this as proof
Speaker 1: that it's via left wing terrorist and it's actually video
Speaker 1: game developer Tokajiba. It's yeah, So like I guess what
Speaker 1: we know about the actual shooter, Um, we don't know
Speaker 1: that much. Is a forty two year old guy who
Speaker 1: was a former veteran of the of the Japanese Self
Speaker 1: Defense Force. He was he was a Navy guy, which
Speaker 1: I guess partially explains why he can shoot a gun. Um,
Speaker 1: But yeah, the details are really murky. What what we've
Speaker 1: got at time of recording is the Japanese police saying
Speaker 1: that it wasn't because of a political thing, and that
Speaker 1: it was because of a group that he was that
Speaker 1: I was a member of who the funk knows what
Speaker 1: that means. That can mean any number of things. I
Speaker 1: I'm not going to speculate live on here because I
Speaker 1: I don't know. Uh yeah. But also it was extremely
Speaker 1: funny and we should we should talk about the weapon
Speaker 1: that was. Yeah, this is why. This is one of
Speaker 1: the reasons why it's extremely funny and we we should
Speaker 1: probably gonna hand this over to James because James is
Speaker 1: a bit a bit more of an expert in this
Speaker 1: type of uh d I Y weapon rate. So what
Speaker 1: what the fund is going on with this homemade gun? Yeah?
Speaker 1: This ship, Yeah, this ship is fucking this ship. This
Speaker 1: is crazy. Um, yeah, it's extremely funny. It's extremely funny
Speaker 1: that all these people with fifty thou followers on Twitter
Speaker 1: who quote and quote do Ocean like immediately label this
Speaker 1: is a three D printed gun, which is not. It
Speaker 1: does not look this gun is being held together with
Speaker 1: duct tape like that. That is that. That is the
Speaker 1: kind of weapon that we're dealing with. You. This is
Speaker 1: this is a homemade gun like held together with fucking
Speaker 1: duct tape. It is extremely It is like he got
Speaker 1: blown up by an electric blunderbuss. It is Yeah, like
Speaker 1: there they're gonna be well, be three D printed parts
Speaker 1: in like around it. But it is, but it's not
Speaker 1: it's not looking it's it's it's not like it's not
Speaker 1: like a neducite or anything. Um, it's it's a weird
Speaker 1: like electronic pipe duct taped together shotgun. Yeah, it's I
Speaker 1: think perhaps if people don't understand, we should like break
Speaker 1: down how firearms work broadly and then how this one
Speaker 1: works specifically. Sure, right, so like and there's no reason
Speaker 1: why you should be familiar with this, but like you
Speaker 1: need something to explode, something to make it explode, and
Speaker 1: something to go at the end, and a way to
Speaker 1: make sure it only goes in one direction. Right. Uh
Speaker 1: So what this character has done is seemingly it's yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like a blunderbuss or a musket in that it
Speaker 1: seems to be like muzzle loaded from the front. Uh
Speaker 1: And uh, I'm looking at it now and it really
Speaker 1: is just covered in duct tape. I tweeted a picture
Speaker 1: of it. It's a gay. Yeah, this ship is is
Speaker 1: very old fashioned. He seems to have made his own
Speaker 1: powder to like it was very very smoky, which you
Speaker 1: can do. I'm not gonna tell you how to do it,
Speaker 1: but it's the thing that is possible, and so essentially
Speaker 1: from what I'm seeing here, it looks like it's like
Speaker 1: a piezo electric ignition which then ignites his homemade powder
Speaker 1: that he had, uh, and then he's put something in
Speaker 1: a shotgun. Means it doesn't have rifling right, so it
Speaker 1: doesn't impart spin on the projectile. So he's basically got
Speaker 1: two pipes, a piezo electric ignited some homemade powder, and
Speaker 1: then he could have put nails in there. He could
Speaker 1: have put a cast lead ball, anything, bolts. And this
Speaker 1: wasn't the only homemade weapon he had. The police rated
Speaker 1: his house. He had a whole bunch of supplies that
Speaker 1: looks it looks out of like it looks like it's
Speaker 1: out of like fallout or something. It is like there
Speaker 1: was one like blunderbust that had nine different barrels all
Speaker 1: duct tapes together. It's like exposed wiring, exposed circuit boards,
Speaker 1: like it's it's like it's extremely JANKI yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: I'm not entirely sure that the nine barrel one the
Speaker 1: central barrel isn't touched by the by the structural duct tape,
Speaker 1: and I'm not sure that it wouldn't have moved in
Speaker 1: one direction or the other when he fired it in Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's a there's like a yoga. I can't
Speaker 1: see what he's put something on the He's made a
Speaker 1: butt stock with that one, so like he can be
Speaker 1: shoulder it, I guess. And I don't know if that's
Speaker 1: like a piece of tire or what, but yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is not a precision weapon. Wooden boards. There's like
Speaker 1: some type of like reflective it looks almost like a
Speaker 1: smartphone's attached to some of the wiring or there's something
Speaker 1: reflective screen that looks like it's like like an electronic
Speaker 1: control box, which could could just be like an old
Speaker 1: smartphone or something. Yeah, I wondered if he could, because
Speaker 1: that's what you use for for an improvised explosive device, right,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a cell phone to actuate it. So
Speaker 1: it could be maybe he had a plan to just
Speaker 1: put it near where are they going to be and
Speaker 1: then call it and then think that would be well,
Speaker 1: I mean, no, this this is a this is a
Speaker 1: much better assassinated has the stock, So I'm guessing. I'm
Speaker 1: guessing would he beginning to hold it because otherwise there's
Speaker 1: no reason to put the butt stock there. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: who knows this guy is operating a different level. We
Speaker 1: have no way to know what he was thinking, at
Speaker 1: least at least at least not at the moment. What
Speaker 1: he was thinking was I want to kill Shinzo Abbe
Speaker 1: with my pipes and planks. He did it. He's exactly
Speaker 1: whatever you think of him. This man didn't successfully kill
Speaker 1: Shenzo Abbe with a gun held together by duct tape.
Speaker 1: It's it's pretty impressive, Like I think the everything about
Speaker 1: this is kind of impressive. A he so so there
Speaker 1: were there were two barrels on it that each fired,
Speaker 1: and he managed to hit him from like a pretty
Speaker 1: good distance away, Like we don't have there's there's no
Speaker 1: video that directly well at least not that's out yet
Speaker 1: that's like directly shows the shooting. We have a lot
Speaker 1: of video because I was giving a speech, right, so
Speaker 1: we have a bunch of video of like filming Abbe,
Speaker 1: and it's and because of where it is coming from
Speaker 1: off screen, like that was a pretty good distance. And
Speaker 1: as best I can tell, he only hit Abbe. I
Speaker 1: don't I don't think. I haven't seen any reports of
Speaker 1: anyone else getting hit, So I yeah impressed. That is
Speaker 1: actually that is actually kind of slightly surprising. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: was there was no one else hit. It's like he
Speaker 1: just got the guy. He was that that that is
Speaker 1: genuinely pretty rare and assassinated, like like basically like a
Speaker 1: homemade blunderbust cannon was like surprisingly surprisingly controlled and accurate. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I just found a picture of it with the Cyberpunk
Speaker 1: seven logo underneath you, which is pretty great. Yeah, this rule.
Speaker 1: Yeah he did manage to cause it kind of just
Speaker 1: put like a large, massive lead ball in it, I guess,
Speaker 1: And yeah, whatever, because I don't think it I don't
Speaker 1: think it was one thing. So that one of the
Speaker 1: one thing I could say about the that we guys
Speaker 1: we know about the EMMA was that like there they
Speaker 1: were like a bunch of like they're they're one of
Speaker 1: the munch of the reports about the injuries that he suffered.
Speaker 1: We're talking about like he got hit in the back,
Speaker 1: but they're also holes in his neck. So my guests
Speaker 1: from a lot of there's a lot of blood from
Speaker 1: a lot of different places. Yeah, I guess it wasn't
Speaker 1: one thing then, but I don't know everything that was
Speaker 1: kind of interesting about this is like the extent to
Speaker 1: which Okay, so like he was like was like very
Speaker 1: clearly dead, like people people had like reported him at
Speaker 1: the scene is having no vitals and they were like, yeah,
Speaker 1: his heart stopped, and they had like coptered at him
Speaker 1: to like what tokyo, Yeah, tokyo. But the Japanese government
Speaker 1: did a very good job of making sure the press
Speaker 1: had like no information, and so there was just like
Speaker 1: there was like many many many hours where they were
Speaker 1: like pretending that he wasn't dead and like wouldn't confirm
Speaker 1: that he was dead. And he's like this, this man
Speaker 1: is clearly dead as shit, like he has gotten blown
Speaker 1: up by a blunderbus like in the back. His next gone.
Speaker 1: He's like, I mean he's not not gone, Like his
Speaker 1: his neck is next been shot, his heart is stopped
Speaker 1: and they just sort of like keep it there for
Speaker 1: for a pretty impressively long long time. And that's the
Speaker 1: only thing we we we know very little about what
Speaker 1: happened and why um the pressidmen keeping the government's been
Speaker 1: keeping a very tight lid on information about the shooting
Speaker 1: so far. Yeah, I guess we want to pivot into
Speaker 1: the gun control side of this sure, Um I guess okay,
Speaker 1: so the I mean like there was a mayor shot
Speaker 1: a few years ago. Yeah, justin seven Yaka is a
Speaker 1: guy shot the mayor of Nagasaki. So like, and like
Speaker 1: there's a there's been a lot of people, like journalists,
Speaker 1: people who are like supposedly japan experts who are like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is really rare in Japanese culture. Is like, no,
Speaker 1: it's not. People get assassinated, like like the Japan has
Speaker 1: a very low rate of gun violence, but of that
Speaker 1: gun violence and the number of politicians gonna get assassinated
Speaker 1: is like unbelievably high. And you know, I mean like
Speaker 1: that there have been there there have been a lot
Speaker 1: of I mean like Abe's like grandfather, it was a
Speaker 1: yakishi like got stabbed right after we left office, like
Speaker 1: and he only didn't die because the guy who stabbed
Speaker 1: him claimed that he wasn't trying to kill him, he
Speaker 1: was just stabbing him, which is one of the weirdest
Speaker 1: things I've ever heard. I don't know, I I suspect
Speaker 1: some yakuza bullshit was going on there, but yeah, like
Speaker 1: Japan has assassinations, um it. There's there's this weird thing
Speaker 1: where people think Japan is this place that's like like
Speaker 1: no violence happens, like it's a completely orderly society. It's
Speaker 1: like all this all this like weird stuff. Famously, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like this this is a country. Like this is
Speaker 1: a country where people like like even in like the
Speaker 1: seventies and like through the eighties, people would charge like
Speaker 1: RB convoys with sticks and like fight them. Like this
Speaker 1: is a country that like like people they have a
Speaker 1: sort of ape ship switch that just like yeah, they
Speaker 1: have their fair share of like cults that do activite,
Speaker 1: like the fair share of political extreamers that do exilence
Speaker 1: like this and like everywhere else in like like everywhere
Speaker 1: else in the world, stuff just happened sometimes. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it is interesting that like Japan has extremely
Speaker 1: strict gun control, right like licenses, test background checks, prohibitions,
Speaker 1: and most people learning and carrying. But like it's kind
Speaker 1: of interesting that this is more of a like a
Speaker 1: First Amendment question, I guess in American terms, right, Like,
Speaker 1: if you're on the internet enough, I'm sure it looks
Speaker 1: like this person has just googled how to make gun
Speaker 1: and like this is what came up. And so I
Speaker 1: think it's kind of fascinating that that this person has
Speaker 1: been like aside from their possible connection to any criminal networks,
Speaker 1: but like I know the Yakuza were selling guns to
Speaker 1: people in me and Mark pretty recently, so they have
Speaker 1: access to this. Yeah, and like the mayor who got
Speaker 1: whacked by yaks A guy, like if the Arkansa is
Speaker 1: going to do like I don't know if yours is
Speaker 1: going to do a killing like they like they they
Speaker 1: have access to weapon, they would use a real gun
Speaker 1: active together. Okay, so like probably, but also like I
Speaker 1: wouldn't completely rule it out because I wouldn't rule out
Speaker 1: them just finding some guy and doing this thing the
Speaker 1: FBI does and it's like, hey, you're gonna go do
Speaker 1: an attack now, Like it wouldn't It wouldn't surprise me
Speaker 1: if that if they did that as like a possible
Speaker 1: ideally thing, but like we don't know. Um, I still
Speaker 1: don't think we can rule out that head out. Kajima
Speaker 1: is the mastermind behind this, um and it's all I mean,
Speaker 1: it's I know right, it's it's just employed to play
Speaker 1: his next game. UM just have to add a few
Speaker 1: like nonsense names to the all the all the people involved,
Speaker 1: like blunderbustman. And then it's just it's it's easy, easy.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's fascinating that this person was seemingly like
Speaker 1: maybe had other plans or had tried several other like
Speaker 1: craft firearms, and settled on this one. But yeah, they
Speaker 1: had access to a lot of pipes, that's for sure.
Speaker 1: Did you guys see the yuk As a guy who
Speaker 1: was arms dealing to me and Ma? No, no, oh,
Speaker 1: for fucking wild. So he he was like extensively stung
Speaker 1: by the Feds to this guy he was yuk As.
Speaker 1: He was part of it, like an ongoing sting operation
Speaker 1: for like several years where he was selling like basically
Speaker 1: like trading guns for drugs, trading guns to buy drugs.
Speaker 1: He was selling to a couple of groups in Me
Speaker 1: and Ma. He was two groups in the Tamil region
Speaker 1: and a couple of other people and he uh, he
Speaker 1: was at least one of the people he thought was
Speaker 1: a buyer was actually a fed. And they've captured all
Speaker 1: of these amazing conversations where they call the guns like
Speaker 1: cake and ice cream. Like one of the one of
Speaker 1: the things in the the criminal complaint, it's a picture
Speaker 1: of him just with like a a law like an
Speaker 1: anti tank weapon, and he's just like giving it like
Speaker 1: the V sign, and he's wearing these like yellow aviators
Speaker 1: and a leather jacket. Like the way they arrested him
Speaker 1: was at a steakhouse I think either in New York
Speaker 1: or New Jersey, but like they lured him into a
Speaker 1: steakhouse meeting and then he got busted by the FEDS.
Speaker 1: But yeah, these guys were trafficking like serious stuff like
Speaker 1: surface to our missiles some things. They have access to
Speaker 1: some pretty heavy equipment. Yeah, that's a that's a pretty
Speaker 1: old Like the officer has been sort of like I
Speaker 1: don't know how you describe it, like a kind of
Speaker 1: like para arm of the Japanese state in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways for a very very long time. Like there
Speaker 1: are there have been like because of people with basically
Speaker 1: special forces training. Um, they they at one point like
Speaker 1: kidnapped and killed the Empress of Korea as part of
Speaker 1: like a thing to like justify started a or so
Speaker 1: they are they're very well hooked up. I I I
Speaker 1: don't know, it's still unclear to be because like that's
Speaker 1: the obviously everything again, like they're the LDP has a
Speaker 1: lot of the Akasa connections because kind of okay, partially
Speaker 1: kind of everything is, but partially also because the accusae
Speaker 1: were like a sort of founding like political block of
Speaker 1: the l d P in the first place. So who knows,
Speaker 1: like LDP people have gotten like attacked by Akas people before.
Speaker 1: It could be that, it could be something else. We
Speaker 1: sort of just don't know yet. Um. Yeah, there's nothing
Speaker 1: identifying this guy. Like I'm just looking at a picture
Speaker 1: of him and there's nothing particularly sort of identifying his
Speaker 1: clothing or anything like that. Yeah, I guess, I guess
Speaker 1: that's the deficitions of extremely funny critical support to Hideo
Speaker 1: Kajima and all of the other freedom fighters. Oh, I
Speaker 1: guess guess when you talk a little bit about the
Speaker 1: international response to this, Yeah, because people have no idea
Speaker 1: what's ethnic. Yeah, I mean, like so like all the
Speaker 1: Americans are sorry of like are doing the all American
Speaker 1: liberals deserve of doing that, Like, oh my god, he
Speaker 1: was a good guy. It's like, no, he wasn't. This
Speaker 1: guy was a monster. Um Okay, I will say this,
Speaker 1: Both the Chinese and the Korean embassies are being surprisingly
Speaker 1: diplomatic about it, as in no one they haven't no
Speaker 1: one has actively insulted him yet social media wise. Likely
Speaker 1: that's a good move for like inter country relationship, but like, okay,
Speaker 1: like try Japanese relationships with Korea with South Korea and
Speaker 1: North Korea are really bad, and a lot of the
Speaker 1: reason why they're really bad is specifically because of Chanawabe
Speaker 1: and because of all of his bullshit. Happy but they're
Speaker 1: not going to like Rubb it. I mean, it's not
Speaker 1: clear to me that they wouldn't have done this if
Speaker 1: this had happened like the two Tho tangs, Like these
Speaker 1: guys really hate each other. Um. Yeah, there's been some
Speaker 1: sort of like people people are trying to do a
Speaker 1: Taiwan angle on this because Obb is like a Taiwan supporter,
Speaker 1: But I don't Yeah, I don't think there's actually that much.
Speaker 1: The people want this to have much more geo political
Speaker 1: like significance than it probably actually will. Um yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: well it's meantime. Yeah, fascist is dead. That's always funny.
Speaker 1: It happened, Uh it did in fact happen here. Well,
Speaker 1: it happened over there, but you know what I mean, Um,
Speaker 1: it could happen here. Sertain statistically we are we are
Speaker 1: about to do based on. Yeah, yeah, you wouldn't need
Speaker 1: to to deductate model in America. No, with the amount
Speaker 1: of firearms here, it is kind of a little is
Speaker 1: sometimes a little surprising how little stuff like this actually happens.
Speaker 1: There's obviously a lot of work that goes into like
Speaker 1: preventing it, but but still sometimes it's it's kind of
Speaker 1: it's kind of shot king. Um. Yeah, like I think,
Speaker 1: I think. I think if you look at the last
Speaker 1: twenty years, I think more Japanese politicians have been assassinated
Speaker 1: to American politicians. Like I'm trying to think of an
Speaker 1: American politician because because they do a lot more American
Speaker 1: politicians and a lot of guns they killed, they killed
Speaker 1: when when they went after Gabby giffordge they killed someone,
Speaker 1: I think, But yeah, I don't I'm trying to think
Speaker 1: of anyone else other than that, um not in recent memory.
Speaker 1: The guy who showed Reagan is now touring. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: he didn't even kill him. That's not even assassination. That's
Speaker 1: just an assassination attempts like a very bouched one. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeahs that crossover between John Hinckley and Hideo Kajima, It's
Speaker 1: possible that will be the game. I'm just gonna keep
Speaker 1: referring to the suspect of Hideo Kajima. It's worth noting
Speaker 1: that like he did have armed God, so were um
Speaker 1: God's president. That you can see their guns in their
Speaker 1: whole services. They take down the person who shot him,
Speaker 1: but they they were not on their A game that day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that you can see in the video. There's like one
Speaker 1: of the guys, I think, trying to like get a
Speaker 1: bulletproof briefcase in between Abe and the guy and just
Speaker 1: doesn't work. It just it just it just fails completely.
Speaker 1: They had one job they didn't Yeah, like the operation
Speaker 1: meat Shield. They weren't just on they weren't just not
Speaker 1: on their A game. They completely feel that they're over. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's not like the guy even tried to run away.
Speaker 1: He just like stood there and got arrested. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he did not really put much of a did not
Speaker 1: put up much of a fight. Yeah, yeah, he know
Speaker 1: he didn't. Yeah, he he went down pretty fast. I
Speaker 1: guess he went with like this small again, maybe to
Speaker 1: conceal it, because it looks like he was pretty close. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is that is very likely. Well, a very dark
Speaker 1: day for democracy, um dark day for feminism um as
Speaker 1: Hillary Clinton said, Ah anyway, yeah, yeah, Luckily they have
Speaker 1: RAMA Manual as a bastard to your pan to come
Speaker 1: to them in it's difficult. The the the l d
Speaker 1: P are the only people on earth who does who
Speaker 1: actually deserve RAMA Manual. So look, if if you, if
Speaker 1: you didn't want to have to deal with RAMA Manual,
Speaker 1: you should have taken all that's your money. Is this
Speaker 1: is this is now their curse. Well, I'm sure we'll
Speaker 1: talk more about these types of holmemade weapons and all
Speaker 1: that kind of kind of stuff in the future because
Speaker 1: it is. It is interesting. And you know, places where
Speaker 1: places where like actual firearms are hard are harder to get.
Speaker 1: We're seeing more and more ship like this popping up.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and that'll that would definitely be worth be
Speaker 1: worth getting into, along with three D printed weapons. All right,
Speaker 1: anything else to add? Does that? Does Does that? Do it? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I think that's a wrap. All right? Well, follow the
Speaker 1: show on Twitter, Instagram. But happened here pod and cools
Speaker 1: the media, Uh, see you next time? Even critical support
Speaker 1: to Hideokachima, welcome to it could happen here the podcast
Speaker 1: that just happened here? All right, that's my by part done, Chris,
Speaker 1: What are we What are we talking about today? I
Speaker 1: I have brought you all here today to discuss one
Speaker 1: of the most sacred and variable of our political institutions,
Speaker 1: an institution whose words echo through history and carved the political, legal,
Speaker 1: and economic framework of our world. I am referring, of course,
Speaker 1: to the bread riot. Hey, there we go. I love
Speaker 1: good bread riot. I do too. This is this is
Speaker 1: a good a non zero part of why I wrote
Speaker 1: this episode. How how is this? How is this relatable?
Speaker 1: The grain supplies seems really stable right now? It's all
Speaker 1: what everyone says about the grain supply. No one. No
Speaker 1: one has thrown a ball top through a bank window
Speaker 1: in two hundred years. I was. I was reliably informed
Speaker 1: by several Marxist historians that that bread riots were over.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna google Ukrainian wheat harvest, as I
Speaker 1: do every exactly five years. The moment just now came
Speaker 1: up where where I check it every five years. Let
Speaker 1: me just uh, is there a problem? Well, let me
Speaker 1: go eat my fifth wonder bread slice of the day
Speaker 1: and not think about it. Good stuff, all right? So yeah,
Speaker 1: let's talk bread riots. Yeah, we're talking bead riots. So
Speaker 1: prep riots are an ancient institution. Um, you can, I mean,
Speaker 1: you can find them like very easily as far back
Speaker 1: as the Roman Republic, of Roman Republican policy bread like Okay,
Speaker 1: if you wanted to go further back than that, I
Speaker 1: have no doubt you could like spend probably ten minutes
Speaker 1: and find bread rioting in like Sumeria or something. I
Speaker 1: didn't do this. And the reason I didn't do this,
Speaker 1: even though I'm talking about the history of the bread riot,
Speaker 1: is that the sort of the structure of the bread
Speaker 1: riot is shaped inexorably by the sort of political and
Speaker 1: economic conditions around it, and the political and economic condition
Speaker 1: of ancient Rome are somewhat similar to us, but not really.
Speaker 1: So instead of doing that, we're starting in the late
Speaker 1: seventeen hundreds, where there are a lot of bread riots,
Speaker 1: but particularly there's a lot of very well documented bread
Speaker 1: riots in the UK and France. And I guess but
Speaker 1: before we actually like talk about the specific riots, we
Speaker 1: should you should talk about what a bread right actually
Speaker 1: is because okay, so I mean, on a very superficial level,
Speaker 1: of bread riot is when people don't have bread and
Speaker 1: they riot, But the actual response to that and what
Speaker 1: the riots look like are interesting and sort of complicated. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote now from the book Free Markets
Speaker 1: and Food Riots. This is just talking about specifically the
Speaker 1: seventeen hundreds riots. But yeah, food riots took several forms.
Speaker 1: A the blockader and trade that prevented the export of
Speaker 1: grain from an area in which shortages existed. Be the
Speaker 1: price riot or taxation popularity in which food was seized
Speaker 1: by protesters, a just price set and the lot sold.
Speaker 1: See a grarian demonstrations in which farmers destroyed their own produces,
Speaker 1: a dramatic protest. Indeed, the market right, in which the
Speaker 1: crowd took me retribute of action against commercial agents, bakers
Speaker 1: and millers and local magistrates in the form of looting
Speaker 1: or tumultuous assembly to force dealers and local authorities to
Speaker 1: reduce prices. So, okay, there's a lot of different things
Speaker 1: going on here. We're going to get back to the
Speaker 1: farmer's protest stuff like a lot later because the specific
Speaker 1: kind of like rural like versions of this kind of
Speaker 1: fading into the background for a couple of centuries. Um,
Speaker 1: what's happening the urban centers. That was really interesting in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways, and it gets at the core
Speaker 1: of what's going on in these sort of like late
Speaker 1: santeen hundreds riots. Notably, the crowds who are doing the
Speaker 1: rioting are just like they're not just like seizing the
Speaker 1: bread and eating it, which is a thing that like
Speaker 1: you would assume they would be doing if they were
Speaker 1: you know, it's a bunch of people who are starving
Speaker 1: and there's bread and they take it, right, But that's
Speaker 1: that's actually not what they're doing. What they're doing is
Speaker 1: essentially negotiating over price. You see this in the sort
Speaker 1: of price riot thing, right. You know. The thing that
Speaker 1: they actually do is they see a bunch of grain
Speaker 1: and then they sell it off at what they sort
Speaker 1: of like and what they deem a fair price is.
Speaker 1: And you know what what this is the something to
Speaker 1: do basically is it's it's a it's a very very
Speaker 1: direct way of trying to get bakers to lower their prices.
Speaker 1: And the other thing that's about these riots is that
Speaker 1: they are they're they're very politically sophisticated, and they're they're
Speaker 1: very targeted. Um, there's the thing you hear a lot,
Speaker 1: and if if you ever read anything about any modern riot,
Speaker 1: you will hear just people ranting about how people are
Speaker 1: destroying blindly destroying their own neighborhoods, and it's it's just
Speaker 1: like not true. Riots tend to have sort of riots
Speaker 1: tend to have a sort of political specific political focus
Speaker 1: and attacking specific targets, which is why, like, you know,
Speaker 1: the first things that go up in a riot are pawnshops,
Speaker 1: liquor stores, police stations, and now stores that think they're
Speaker 1: employed employees badly They literally have specific targets. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like it it's you know, it's it's it's very like
Speaker 1: all all of all of the stuff that's happening is
Speaker 1: stuff that has like it's the result of political grievances
Speaker 1: that people have sort of been accumulating for a long time.
Speaker 1: And this is also true of these sort of of
Speaker 1: these early bread riots too. Going back to the book,
Speaker 1: free Markets and food rights, protesters did not rampage indiscriminately,
Speaker 1: but focus their wrath in particular individuals and institutions whom
Speaker 1: the crowd held responsible for unjust practices. Typically, it was
Speaker 1: not the producers or retailers of food, but the middlemen
Speaker 1: who were seen as responsible for shortages and price raises.
Speaker 1: The grain dealers wholesalers, speculators, and mills. Grain shipments by
Speaker 1: wagon ship and canal bars were seves and distributed among
Speaker 1: participants are sold at a just price. Warehouses were rated
Speaker 1: with similar results. Textile workers in seventeen seventy reams quote
Speaker 1: sees the talents of our gets proceeded to sell all
Speaker 1: the grain in the market at three quarters of the
Speaker 1: current price. They then turn their attention to the warehouse
Speaker 1: into the grainaries of numerous religious houses, which they treated
Speaker 1: in a similar fashion. Yeah, and so you know, like this,
Speaker 1: this this is like this is a pretty remarkable degree
Speaker 1: of political sophistication right there. They're not targeting sort of
Speaker 1: farmers or bakers, and especially not targeting people who are
Speaker 1: like well known election the community. They're targeting people who
Speaker 1: they can directly tie it toto grand price speculation. And
Speaker 1: this is, you know, in someone sense like this this
Speaker 1: is a demonstration of the kind of like basic contradiction
Speaker 1: of the market. Right on the one hand, you have
Speaker 1: bread as this like physical thing that you need to survive.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, you have bread as this market commodity,
Speaker 1: and the market you know, as a market commodity. It's
Speaker 1: a sort of speculative asset which people are like buying
Speaker 1: and selling and hoarding like stocks, because not because they
Speaker 1: actually eat it, but because they're interested in its sort
Speaker 1: of market value. And you know, the Marxists will call
Speaker 1: this the difference between the use value or like the
Speaker 1: value you get from eating a piece of bread, and
Speaker 1: the exchange value, which is like the bread is a
Speaker 1: commodity that can be traded for the commodities. And you know,
Speaker 1: I like this is this isn't sometimes like this is
Speaker 1: behind a lot of like the housing crisis. Right now,
Speaker 1: you have a bunch of people who buy houses and
Speaker 1: apartment buildings that you know, not because they need to
Speaker 1: live on them, but as an asset that will appreciate
Speaker 1: over time, you know, like appreciating value over time like
Speaker 1: stocks do. But this means that people who like need
Speaker 1: houses to like live in them, like, don't get a
Speaker 1: house because they're being held by people who are trying
Speaker 1: to get the value to appreciate. And the goal of
Speaker 1: these riots is basically to prevent bread from becoming an
Speaker 1: exchange value, that is, to sort of like market commodity
Speaker 1: user speculation and turn them back into use values. But
Speaker 1: even again here this is interesting, right, because it's not
Speaker 1: like these people are like like like anti market, anti capitalists, right,
Speaker 1: they tend not to sort of just seize the bread
Speaker 1: out right. What they're doing is they they're insisting on
Speaker 1: buying it at a specific quote unquote just price. And
Speaker 1: this this sort of gets into the question of, like,
Speaker 1: why are these riots happening in the first place. Um,
Speaker 1: The obvious explanation like, Okay, the people are rioting because
Speaker 1: the price of bread is increasing, But that's that's not
Speaker 1: actually like an explanation, right, It's just it's a precondition.
Speaker 1: But there's a lot of places where bread prices rising,
Speaker 1: you'd never get a riot. So a lot of of
Speaker 1: people have studied this and try to figure out what
Speaker 1: is happening. The second explanation that historians come up with
Speaker 1: is something called the moral economy, um and and and
Speaker 1: in this bottle, people aren't just reacting to like a
Speaker 1: price increase, but what they're actually reacting to is what
Speaker 1: becomes known as the entitlement gap, which is this gap
Speaker 1: between people what people think they're entitled to based on
Speaker 1: the morality and how hard they work, etcetera, and like
Speaker 1: what they actually get. And so you know, in less
Speaker 1: academic language. It's people going like I'm getting price gouged.
Speaker 1: This is bullshit. Bring the prices down that what they're
Speaker 1: supposed to be. And you know that's part of it.
Speaker 1: That there's there's another theory that argues that food riots
Speaker 1: are different by these like really complicated or like webs
Speaker 1: of horizontal social relations and like things like a networks
Speaker 1: of wives and like political organizations and sort of like
Speaker 1: alliance is to happen inside of villages stuff like that,
Speaker 1: and that, you know, and these groups sort of like
Speaker 1: react to price increases by banding together and voicing people
Speaker 1: are lower prices. Um. Now, notably, I want one of
Speaker 1: the like the things I listed in those that like
Speaker 1: web of things right as wives, net works as the
Speaker 1: sort of like first community widly as the food riots. Um.
Speaker 1: And this is this is turns out to be important.
Speaker 1: Women are often like the leaders an initiator of bread riots,
Speaker 1: and the sort of theory behind it is that they're
Speaker 1: actually the ones like buying the bread and so they're
Speaker 1: sort of they're more in tune with disturbances of food prices, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And you know, the food price increases are a threat
Speaker 1: to what academics called social reproduction or an essence like
Speaker 1: taking care of yourself, your family and your household, like
Speaker 1: making sure you can sort of support and raise your children.
Speaker 1: So there's well, so the the good version of it
Speaker 1: is it's you're taking care of the people around you.
Speaker 1: The cynical version of it is it's social. It's real,
Speaker 1: it's social reproduction because you're creating another generation of workers
Speaker 1: for capital, all right, but because women end up doing
Speaker 1: like enormously disapportionate amount of that work. Uh, they you know,
Speaker 1: they wind up in the streets first because they are
Speaker 1: the people who are most acutely sort of like sensitive
Speaker 1: to this stuff happening. Um, yeah, what's what's you know?
Speaker 1: The and and the other thing is sort of worth
Speaker 1: noting here is that riots are these these kind of
Speaker 1: bread riots are usually urban affairs, and they're sort of
Speaker 1: they're the product of people who live in cities, right,
Speaker 1: It's sort of artisans and industrial workers. There's this like
Speaker 1: fighting corps of teenagers who seemed to show up in
Speaker 1: all of these bread riots, and thankfully that that that
Speaker 1: never happens today. We do not have a bunch of
Speaker 1: teenagers show up any time to fight the cops. And
Speaker 1: something bad happens. No experience with this. Yeah, I've certainly
Speaker 1: never seen anything like that happened these other countries. Have
Speaker 1: the FEDS put piles of bricks out on the street, Well,
Speaker 1: you know this is we have. We haven't. They haven't
Speaker 1: gone to that level of entrapman yet. They're right, they're
Speaker 1: not powerful enough that this. This is before the development
Speaker 1: of the police state. Yeah, they didn't have an FBI
Speaker 1: to burn down the Third Precinct. Yeah, they haven't devented
Speaker 1: the agent provocatury yet. A cunning false flag. So what's
Speaker 1: interesting about the eighte century riots? Those I've been talking
Speaker 1: a lot about how these are live women, and that's true,
Speaker 1: but specifically the age ones tend to be more gender
Speaker 1: balanced and later riots. And I'm going to read this
Speaker 1: from the historian Lynn Taylor because it's it's one of
Speaker 1: the funniest things I've ever read in my life, and
Speaker 1: I love it. Cynthia Bolton's study of the French Flower
Speaker 1: War of seven of seventeen seventy five makes clear the
Speaker 1: mixed nature of traditional food riots. Indeed, the number of
Speaker 1: men involved had increased significantly in the Flower Wars due
Speaker 1: to the changing male economic social including familial and political status.
Speaker 1: During thecon regime, there's was a life of precarious and
Speaker 1: declining social economic position. This equilibrium in the family structure
Speaker 1: of political alienation, one that left them in position similar
Speaker 1: to those of mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. The men
Speaker 1: who rioted had in crucial ways been feminized. Oh boy,
Speaker 1: they before they're writing, because I mean, this is a
Speaker 1: thing that literally happened in uh in Myanmar during the uprising.
Speaker 1: That there are kind of local, local cultural sort of
Speaker 1: attitudes there that make it that have made it for
Speaker 1: a long time, like essentially considered like shameful to touch
Speaker 1: women's clothing um or particularly like there's certain things that
Speaker 1: like you don't wear and that you're not supposed to
Speaker 1: look at if you see someone dressed that way, um
Speaker 1: that are like traditional women's clothing. And so a bunch
Speaker 1: of male protesters would dress that way and form up
Speaker 1: and like ranks at the protests because it made the
Speaker 1: police like uncomfortable and sometimes like back off. That's extremely cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's like some literal examples of that very recent riots. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think that gets at one of the things
Speaker 1: that's sort of happening is happening in this period too,
Speaker 1: which is that like one of the kinds of things
Speaker 1: that gen raise these bread riots is this kind of
Speaker 1: is this instability and gender roles and is this sort
Speaker 1: of instability in in what the role of a person
Speaker 1: in society is going to be and that I don't know,
Speaker 1: it has a lot of interesting effects. And when those
Speaker 1: effects are riots, the stuff that stuff that happens is
Speaker 1: really cool because you get a lot of sort of
Speaker 1: like gender roles getting messed up, you get a lot
Speaker 1: of like social ties being broken. I guess. So the
Speaker 1: other thing that's going on in this period, um that
Speaker 1: is is important because because it's sort of like foreshadows
Speaker 1: a lot of what the sort of later bread riots
Speaker 1: are going to be about. Is that and this is
Speaker 1: this is like the fourth theory of bread riots. If
Speaker 1: you sort of like go through your economic historians of
Speaker 1: this stuff. Um they're talking about basically the late Senti
Speaker 1: hunters are are one of the sort of key moments
Speaker 1: in like the formation of the modern state. And what
Speaker 1: this means in terms of food is that control the
Speaker 1: food supply is mood from these this sort of like
Speaker 1: parentalistic like feudal state thing where on a local level
Speaker 1: you have guaranteed prices and access to food, and this
Speaker 1: has shifted to laws for capitalism in which there is
Speaker 1: there there are there are no price controls, there's there's
Speaker 1: no guarantee you can get food. And subsequent to this,
Speaker 1: also at the same time is the centralization of the
Speaker 1: military bureacracy. And cent relation to the military bureaucracy means
Speaker 1: that they're taking more control of the food supply um
Speaker 1: here here from few markets and food riots. Again, older
Speaker 1: parent realistic models operating at the local level and assuring
Speaker 1: a prentiful supply of necessaries at a low price were
Speaker 1: undermined by new national policies aimed at greater efficiency and
Speaker 1: market regulation. Spanning a century and more. The policies included
Speaker 1: such varied activities as enclosure, land concentration, capital, intensification of farming, proletarianization,
Speaker 1: grain exports, taxes, tariffs, and other government efforts to regulate
Speaker 1: the food supply. Price riots were simply one expression of
Speaker 1: popular grievances stemming from this broader change. And this is something,
Speaker 1: this is something that that's very common. Bread riots are
Speaker 1: are like deeply an intimate linked in the with the
Speaker 1: ways that food, food product the food production process is changing,
Speaker 1: and specifically linked to the link to the ways of
Speaker 1: the food production process is changing because of the state
Speaker 1: and markets. But we're sort of leading into the late
Speaker 1: seventeen hundreds, and at this point something happened that no
Speaker 1: one expected. A bread riot went completely the other direction.
Speaker 1: It irrevocably changed the state in the market itself. Um.
Speaker 1: And I am talking about histories maybe most famous bread riot.
Speaker 1: That's right, it's the French Revolution baby, liberty, egality, fraternity,
Speaker 1: han han and this is this is this is you
Speaker 1: mean to tell me that the French had a revolution.
Speaker 1: I mean it's kind of it's kind of marginal. Admittedly,
Speaker 1: the fame that doesn't sound like the French that I know.
Speaker 1: That's true. The modern French have replaced revolution with racism unfortunately.
Speaker 1: But you know, look, look we're we're we're we're in
Speaker 1: the seventeen hundreds. Things are different. Um. Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: we're we're we're in in a secondary going to talk
Speaker 1: about the Red riot that changed the history of bread
Speaker 1: rights and the course of world history forever. But first,
Speaker 1: do you know who doesn't love bread riots? Yeah? Who
Speaker 1: is the primary sponsor of this show? She realized the
Speaker 1: whole cake thing didn't work out great. So now she's saying,
Speaker 1: let him have podcasts, let them cast pods. We're back in.
Speaker 1: Our primary sponsor has been executed by a mob. So
Speaker 1: if you are a member of European nobility, maybe you're
Speaker 1: a Habsburg you know, um hit us up and uh
Speaker 1: offer us a sponsorship. Yeah, well, okay, we we We're
Speaker 1: going to rewind a little bit before they kill Mary
Speaker 1: Antoinette to get to how that happened. So one of
Speaker 1: the things if you read the sort of literature on
Speaker 1: bread rights, one of the things bread right people will
Speaker 1: talk about over and over again is bread rights being
Speaker 1: a political and they kind of like stretch this to
Speaker 1: a point, well because I mean okay, so like like
Speaker 1: there's a couple levels which doesn't make any sense, right, Like, okay,
Speaker 1: if you think that bread is being sold at too
Speaker 1: high a price because people are are gouging you, that
Speaker 1: is political, right, and then you go out and make
Speaker 1: them nott do that. Yeah, that's politics. People love to
Speaker 1: say things aren't political when they don't align with like
Speaker 1: a simple political party, like if it if it doesn't
Speaker 1: line up directly with the kind of approved debate topics
Speaker 1: between the political parties that dominate things. They like to
Speaker 1: say ship is a political but you know, starving because
Speaker 1: of the tax decisions or whatnot is is an inherently
Speaker 1: political thing. Yeah, and and and and deciding that you're
Speaker 1: not going to starve and taking bread from people, it's
Speaker 1: an incredibly political thing. Yeah, that's the politics. You have
Speaker 1: done a politicy, I've done, You've done a lot of politics,
Speaker 1: and you know, but but one of one of the
Speaker 1: things that that and the other thing this leads to
Speaker 1: is if if if a thing that involves bread suddenly
Speaker 1: like turns into capital p politics, and suddenly you have
Speaker 1: people doing things that are like well understood as like
Speaker 1: conventional political gestures, immediately everyone stops calling it a bread right.
Speaker 1: And if but like, if you look at what's actually happening,
Speaker 1: it's here's a bunch of people who are mad about
Speaker 1: the price of bread. Uh, they went to change the
Speaker 1: price of bread. It kind of didn't work, and so
Speaker 1: instead they oversee the government and this is this is
Speaker 1: this is this is uh, this is the bread right
Speaker 1: that that we're getting to now up until you know,
Speaker 1: up until nine, like you can argue that like people
Speaker 1: historians will argue that oh it's bad rights a political
Speaker 1: that just ends in I think it's October five. But
Speaker 1: but by this point the French Revolution is like, well underway. Um,
Speaker 1: they've stormn the Bistell. There's a bunch of people in
Speaker 1: a parliament writing a constitution. But like in October of nine,
Speaker 1: it's still unclear, like how radical any of this is
Speaker 1: going to be? Right, Um, at this point it still
Speaker 1: seems likely that there's going to be a king. And
Speaker 1: not only is there gonna be a king, the king
Speaker 1: is Cearlialy gonna be pretty strong. And then yeah, in October, uh,
Speaker 1: maybe history's most same as bread right breaks out? So
Speaker 1: seven thousand women who are like incredibly piste off at
Speaker 1: the high price of bread and Paris march on Versailles,
Speaker 1: which is where the Royal family of France had been
Speaker 1: like governing France from for like a hundred years. And
Speaker 1: these women are really really angry and they they they
Speaker 1: basically forced the royal family to come back within to Paris.
Speaker 1: And I guess it's it's important to note here that
Speaker 1: Paris and versided like twelve miles apart, so this isn't
Speaker 1: like a multi day journey. They just like get mad
Speaker 1: one day and they wake up and they walk to
Speaker 1: the next city over, and this radically changes the entire
Speaker 1: direction of the French revolution because once, if the royal
Speaker 1: family is in Versailles, right like, the Parisian mob doesn't
Speaker 1: have direct access to them. But once that, once they're
Speaker 1: in Paris, and once once once this bread riot like
Speaker 1: brings the king to Paris. Suddenly the entire, like, the
Speaker 1: entire concentrated political power of the French system is now
Speaker 1: centered in Paris and is now in a place where
Speaker 1: subsequent bread riots can actually do stuff. And this directly
Speaker 1: leads to the King's being executed, This leads to our
Speaker 1: sponsors getting guillotined, and it basically it's it's it completely
Speaker 1: cements bread as sort of like the central part of
Speaker 1: of like one of the central aspects of what the
Speaker 1: French Revolution is about. Like by by, by the end
Speaker 1: of the revolution, that the that the slogan of the
Speaker 1: sort of revolutionary French working class is bred in the
Speaker 1: Constitution of seventee. So you know, you can you can
Speaker 1: you can you can look at the priorities there and
Speaker 1: look at like all of this is sort of and
Speaker 1: a sort of extended rolling bread riot um unfortunately for
Speaker 1: us uh and spoilers to everyone who has not caught
Speaker 1: up on the end of the French Revolution. The revolution loses,
Speaker 1: Napoleon takes power, and this is where we enter the
Speaker 1: era of what's going as the bourgeois revolution. This is
Speaker 1: this is the modern era. And if you if you've
Speaker 1: read your like your like Arab cops swam, you're like,
Speaker 1: you're you're sort of very conventional like march historians, you're
Speaker 1: conventional sort of liberal historians. They will all tell you
Speaker 1: that the bread riots ort of dies in nearly eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: and that's replaced by like strikes and political protests organized
Speaker 1: by unions and parties, because like the rural class has
Speaker 1: been like displaced at the center of history by the
Speaker 1: industrial working class. And that's just like not true, um.
Speaker 1: And it's not true in two senses. One, it's in
Speaker 1: the sense that like we have bread riots now, but
Speaker 1: it's also not true because there's another wave of bread
Speaker 1: riots that are that are very very conventional and very
Speaker 1: much sort of in the classic Sampion Hunter's bolt. Here
Speaker 1: is here's Lynn Taylor again. It is true that the
Speaker 1: proactive form of protests became common, even predominant by the
Speaker 1: early twentieth century. However, scatitude the periodical literature are accounts
Speaker 1: of twentieth century food riots, which looks surprisingly like those
Speaker 1: of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, something not expected
Speaker 1: in modern industrialized nation states. Food riots occurred in northern
Speaker 1: France in nineteen eleven, in Britain during the winter of
Speaker 1: nineteen sixteen, nineteen seventeen in New York and nineteen seventeen
Speaker 1: in Toronto and BOTHWY three in Barcelona in nineteen eighteen,
Speaker 1: in Vichy, France in nineteen forty two, and in northern
Speaker 1: France throughout the German occupation. The form of protests was
Speaker 1: remarkably consistent in each and reminiscent of traditional food riots
Speaker 1: of earlier centuries. And these are these are these are
Speaker 1: very conventional sort of eighteenth century bread riots. They're led
Speaker 1: by women. They refuse that they're led by women who
Speaker 1: are refusing to pay a higher price for food. And
Speaker 1: in some sense they kind of are a political in
Speaker 1: that there are various attempts in like basically all of
Speaker 1: these protests by like organized political organists to take that over,
Speaker 1: and basically every single time the women who were involved
Speaker 1: are like, no, absolutely not uh, there's there. There's a
Speaker 1: very funny one where I think this is the the
Speaker 1: I think this is the British one in seventeen were
Speaker 1: like a bunch of men show up and the women
Speaker 1: are like, no, go home, you can't riot with us.
Speaker 1: This is this is our riot now. Yeah. Then the
Speaker 1: British case in particular was also interesting because this is
Speaker 1: the middle of World War One, and so you know,
Speaker 1: this is a sort of giant presence looming over these
Speaker 1: these these bread riots, and you know the government sort
Speaker 1: of like that. The government, in response to this, or
Speaker 1: sponsor to widespread hunger, like, decreased these price controls on food,
Speaker 1: but farmers are just refusing to obey them, and so
Speaker 1: women in Mayport organized and the result was quote when
Speaker 1: one farmer said he did not care what the government
Speaker 1: said about price controls, there was bedlamb The women rushed
Speaker 1: the farmer's cart, and the street was quote filled with hooting, yelling,
Speaker 1: women and young people while potatoes, cabbages and turn ups
Speaker 1: were flying through the air. The example of Mayport soon
Speaker 1: spread to other parts of the country. These riots are
Speaker 1: led by housewives who had filled the front line and
Speaker 1: did much of the fighting. Although the miners of Cumberland
Speaker 1: were also active in supporting their wives efforts, both as
Speaker 1: added bodies strengthening the crowds, but also through the Minors
Speaker 1: Association other working class institutions. So A, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I had to include this specifically because the image of
Speaker 1: a bunch of people throwing cabbages at farmers is extremely
Speaker 1: funny to me. Oh, but the other thing I think
Speaker 1: is interesting here is you can serve to see the
Speaker 1: shifts from the sort of eighteenth century like riots to
Speaker 1: these ones on on a social level, where you know,
Speaker 1: in the eighte hundreds you're dealing with sort of like
Speaker 1: town and sort of peasant cultural groupings thur s approaching
Speaker 1: the protest, but by the nineteen hundreds bread riots are
Speaker 1: being backed by like organized political institutions. Um, there's another
Speaker 1: one in New York in ninteen seventeen, which is remarkable
Speaker 1: for being it's self organized by Like it's remarkable because
Speaker 1: it's it's self organized by women, even though this is
Speaker 1: like the part of New York they're in is a
Speaker 1: Socialist Party stronghold, But the Socialist Party isn't there people
Speaker 1: who do it. It's the women who are like married
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases the Social Party or in
Speaker 1: to some excenter in it, but are sort of operating autonomously,
Speaker 1: and they do this thing where they sort of like
Speaker 1: they start setting and forcing these boycotts of like shops
Speaker 1: that are deemed to be at like price gouging levels,
Speaker 1: and they fight the cops and they do a bunch
Speaker 1: of stuff. Um. And the ones I mentioned in Toronto
Speaker 1: earlier interesting because those ones actually do like have an
Speaker 1: organization in the beginning, but in keeping with sort of
Speaker 1: the tradition of of of the bread right, the organization
Speaker 1: was the Jewish Women's the Jewish Women's Labor League. And
Speaker 1: these are these are remarkably effective political movements. They win
Speaker 1: their demands really quickly. I'm going to read one more
Speaker 1: account because it just rules. Uh. Lester Golden and Temma
Speaker 1: Caplan have both examined food riots in Barcelona in nineteen,
Speaker 1: part of a wave of riots which occurred between June nine,
Speaker 1: seventeen and March nine throughout Spain. As in previous cases,
Speaker 1: these riots arounted because of devastating price inflation I think
Speaker 1: we know nothing about now this time, resulting from the
Speaker 1: post war collapse of the economy. The participants were all women.
Speaker 1: They forbade men's participation, and the actions were led first
Speaker 1: by radical Republicans and then by a small group of
Speaker 1: female and arco syndicalists. The women's demands were simple and straightforward.
Speaker 1: They demanded lower prices for foods. They attacked bread shops
Speaker 1: and cold wag as it took over a ship laden
Speaker 1: with fish. When police and civil guard attempted to break
Speaker 1: out the women crowds of women on the street, the
Speaker 1: woman turned on them, stripping some of the officers of
Speaker 1: their pants, spanking or thrashing them, and sending them home. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: that's that's it's so good, perfect, perfect, This is the
Speaker 1: energy we need in every century that human beings have
Speaker 1: ever inhabitants. Amazing that the historians are parent parenthetical note
Speaker 1: after that is quote, rather undermining their authority in the process,
Speaker 1: which yes, I would imagine. So, yes, if you are
Speaker 1: if you are being spanked by a crowd, you have
Speaker 1: lost control of that crowd. That that that is that
Speaker 1: is fair to say. And so they it takes about
Speaker 1: three weeks and they win and prices drop thirty So
Speaker 1: good for them. That's a pretty solid look. Hey, I
Speaker 1: think I think most of the people listening would do
Speaker 1: some hardcore spanking if they could get at cut on
Speaker 1: their grocery bill. Yeah, it's it's look, I'm just saying
Speaker 1: it is much harder to pull down a modern cops
Speaker 1: trousers because they're wearing like so much weird ship on
Speaker 1: top of it. But belt technology has improved tremendously since then. Yeah, however, Comma,
Speaker 1: where there is a will, there's a way. Yep. If
Speaker 1: I learned one thing from high school, if that anyone
Speaker 1: can be pantsed just you just you just have to.
Speaker 1: You just have to. You just have to want it
Speaker 1: hard enough. You have to want it more than the
Speaker 1: person wants to be wearing their pants. That's right, that's right,
Speaker 1: you have to believe. So there's one more of these
Speaker 1: bed right since we're talking about, which also is not
Speaker 1: conventionally framed as a bread right, but is entirely keeping
Speaker 1: with everything I've said here, the February Revolution in Russia.
Speaker 1: Um So, the February Revolution is the revolution that actually
Speaker 1: overthrows there. There's another revolution, which is the act Revolution,
Speaker 1: which is one of the bullshers come to power. But
Speaker 1: that's a that's that's a separate one. They're fighting a
Speaker 1: completely group of people. The February Revolution has all of
Speaker 1: the sort of key factors of a bread right right.
Speaker 1: There's these massive bread lines. Women are piste off by
Speaker 1: lack of food. The revolution itself is led by women
Speaker 1: whose like male comrades had literally told them, don't, like,
Speaker 1: don't go out and do a protest on that day
Speaker 1: because this is International Women's Day. But the like all
Speaker 1: all of the men who are like doing this are
Speaker 1: are convinced that, like the conditions aren't right for revolution,
Speaker 1: so they try to get everyone to stay home, and
Speaker 1: everyone's like no. And you know, like the sort of
Speaker 1: key difference between the like this bread right and the
Speaker 1: other bread rounds we were talking about is that, you know,
Speaker 1: the the demands of the of the the march in
Speaker 1: International Women's Day, United seventeen are overtly political, like they
Speaker 1: they are chanting down with the czar and they're trying
Speaker 1: to overthrow the government. And this, you know, this is
Speaker 1: another thing that has this sort of like incredible impact
Speaker 1: on on how the bolshot revolution is is sort of working. Right,
Speaker 1: Like Lenin winds up using peace bread in land as
Speaker 1: one of the sort of like central like Bolshevik slogans
Speaker 1: because part of it, because a huge part about the
Speaker 1: revolution is is just a bread riot, and that that
Speaker 1: that's where where we're that's that's where we're gonna leave
Speaker 1: it today, with the world just completely and utterly transformed
Speaker 1: by another bread riot. And next episode we're going to
Speaker 1: get to the modern bread riots because those are also interesting.
Speaker 1: And yeah, we're gonna once again prove everyone who insists
Speaker 1: that bread riots don't happen anymore wrong, A thing that
Speaker 1: I didn't know existed until I started reading this and
Speaker 1: then now incredibly mad about. Yeah, So go out there
Speaker 1: and have a bread riot, pants a cop or a
Speaker 1: mother kind of riot, you know, a guacamole riot um,
Speaker 1: a mate riot um, you could have You could have
Speaker 1: some kind of corn riot um. You could have a
Speaker 1: riot over order Lan. That would be a unique kind
Speaker 1: of riot. Don't think anyone's ever rioted over that. That
Speaker 1: bird that that's such a beautiful songbird. That eating it
Speaker 1: as a sin, so you have to like hide your
Speaker 1: shame underneath a sheet so God doesn't see you eat it.
Speaker 1: Have a riot over one of those, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I do that. I love how often the Holocaust has
Speaker 1: been trending over the last year. Um, that's good. That's
Speaker 1: the thing you want to see trending in um It's
Speaker 1: it could happen here, all right, Chris, continue with your
Speaker 1: bread riots. Yeah, we're back. There's more riots. Uh now.
Speaker 1: Last episode we talked about historians declaring the end of
Speaker 1: the bread death of the bread riot, and like in
Speaker 1: the sixties and early seventies, Like I think that this
Speaker 1: is this is one of the ways you can tell
Speaker 1: that period people genuinely thought the world was going to
Speaker 1: get better. It was that like they genuinely believed that
Speaker 1: like the centralized state and like capitalism can always provide foods.
Speaker 1: You want u bread riots anymore you get market You
Speaker 1: if you were born in that period, you like grew
Speaker 1: up and people were fleeing from dynonic as is in
Speaker 1: the street and like getting getting eaten by woolly mammoth's
Speaker 1: And then by the time you're forty, you've got the telegraph.
Speaker 1: So I get it, right, I get why people think
Speaker 1: that that progress was really go back in those because
Speaker 1: they got they wiped out the dynonic as. This is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you have seen how wear'd taff building the pyramids exactly
Speaker 1: exactly exactly you have you have you have seen the
Speaker 1: future rise up literally and rent of view, and they
Speaker 1: went from eating mud to Hershey's chocolate. It's it's an
Speaker 1: incredibly impressive sort of sort of period of modern historical evolution.
Speaker 1: And you know, and one one of the things you see,
Speaker 1: like like you'll see like Marxists calling bread rice primitive
Speaker 1: rebels doing like populist mob politics that's been like displaced
Speaker 1: by proper Marxist class politics. And then like every single
Speaker 1: one of these people was like the most wrong anyone,
Speaker 1: like basically from that period until until the moment the
Speaker 1: end of history. Guy starts writing, they are the most
Speaker 1: wrong people like on the planet. Well, it's also funny
Speaker 1: to hear that idea that like there was something primitive
Speaker 1: about these people's class analysis, because like the Brothers Gracky
Speaker 1: and Ancient Republican Rome a lot of this ship they're saying,
Speaker 1: it's not at all primitive class analysis like this, it's
Speaker 1: it's pretty developed. Yeah, And I mean, like the Marxist
Speaker 1: will do some long argument about how like oh they
Speaker 1: they have they have false consciousness, they're not trying to
Speaker 1: abolish the class system or whatever, and it's like, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, like I look at the Martin the Marxist
Speaker 1: in demolish classist them either. So like yeah, like yeah,
Speaker 1: like that these are these are very The's something we're
Speaker 1: gonna be coming back to a lot this episode is
Speaker 1: that the people doing this are incredibly sophisticated political actors.
Speaker 1: And one of the sort of modern version of this
Speaker 1: is in the nineteen seventies, not only did bread riots
Speaker 1: not and there's a new kind of bread riot and
Speaker 1: these riots are collectively known as the I M. F
Speaker 1: Riots um. From from from January nine, seventy six to
Speaker 1: October nineteen ninety two, there are riots in Peru, Egypt, Ghana, Jamaica, Liberia,
Speaker 1: the Philippines, a year, Turkey, Morocco, Sierra Leon, Sudan, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil,
Speaker 1: Panama to Tunisia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, El Salvador, Costa Rica,
Speaker 1: Guadibala in Mexico, Yugoslavia, Zambia, Poland, Algeria, Romania, Nigeria, Hungary, Venezuela, Jordan,
Speaker 1: the Avery Coast, nigeri, Ron, Albania, India, and Nepal. Were
Speaker 1: you just do like the wacko the whacko Warner's song,
Speaker 1: It's that's literally all the play I found the chart
Speaker 1: that has all of them is like, there's just so many.
Speaker 1: They just keep happening. And again that's only like they
Speaker 1: they're they're still happening. And the ever thing I should
Speaker 1: mention is those are just the ones that are called
Speaker 1: the I m F riots. There's a bunch of other riots,
Speaker 1: some of which are bred riots, that aren't called the
Speaker 1: I m F riots because they're not really sort of
Speaker 1: like directly involved with the I m F. And and
Speaker 1: that that this raises the question of what the fund
Speaker 1: is an IMF riot? Uh, And the answer is that, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: to to understand why people are throwing ball atops through
Speaker 1: bank windows, we have to talk about banking a little bit. Um.
Speaker 1: I I have talked, I guess at length. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: I apologize, but we will we will get back to
Speaker 1: the riots, damn, But I promise we just have do
Speaker 1: a little bit of banking. So yeah, I've talked extensively
Speaker 1: on the show about the crisis of the seventies. And
Speaker 1: you know, the short version is that in a thing
Speaker 1: that is completely unrecognizable today, the global economy collapses, inflation skyrockets,
Speaker 1: countries across the global South start taking out these suggestable
Speaker 1: right that they've been taking out these suggestable right owns,
Speaker 1: and then suddenly the interest rate spike and they started
Speaker 1: faulting on these loans. Here's our free markets and food
Speaker 1: riots talking about it. Although the causes of the crisis
Speaker 1: run deeper, by the nineteen seventies, many smaller nations began
Speaker 1: to feel the strains of insolvency as a result of
Speaker 1: a world wide recession, successive oil price shocks, declining world
Speaker 1: commodity prices, and accelerating debt service obligations. So but basically,
Speaker 1: like if you're a small country, right, the price of
Speaker 1: everything you need to buy, like oil, is going up,
Speaker 1: and the price of what you can sell, which is
Speaker 1: like commodities like copper tin, is collapsing, and these lead
Speaker 1: to what are like these massive what are called balance
Speaker 1: of payments crises, And so we should we talk about
Speaker 1: what about what a balance of payments crisis is? And
Speaker 1: this one is up being really important here there's the
Speaker 1: story about che Guevara, like right after like literally right
Speaker 1: after the Cuman revolution, is he so he goes to
Speaker 1: the US and he's in a he sits he's in
Speaker 1: this meeting with a bunch of bankers, and he's trying
Speaker 1: basically to get Cuba's gold reserves and cup us sort
Speaker 1: of like foreign exchange reserves out of the S. The
Speaker 1: U S doesn't steal it. And it was funny about
Speaker 1: it is all the bankers who are talking to him,
Speaker 1: like all of them report afterwards like, woll wow, this
Speaker 1: guy talks like a banker, not a communist. And the
Speaker 1: specifically the reason they were like, oh hey, this guy
Speaker 1: talks like a banker is that he knew what balance
Speaker 1: of payments was. Um. The short answer is at a
Speaker 1: balance of payments crisis is when there's more money flowing
Speaker 1: out of the country than there is coming into it.
Speaker 1: And the results of this is that you run out
Speaker 1: of money, and particularly the thing you run out of
Speaker 1: as American dollars, which is the thing that you need
Speaker 1: to like buy oil. So you get these countries that
Speaker 1: are massively in debt and they run out of money,
Speaker 1: and the only thing they could do is turn to
Speaker 1: like is turn to the International Monetary Fund and the
Speaker 1: i m F, who like the only description of the
Speaker 1: i m F that I have is that like they're
Speaker 1: they're they're basically like if the cartoon Bank of Evil
Speaker 1: from Despicable me like ran the entire world economy. They
Speaker 1: you know, so the I m F shows up to
Speaker 1: these countries and is like loll lamau each ship, and
Speaker 1: they forced these countries to implement like in order to
Speaker 1: get loans. They forced him to implet what are called
Speaker 1: stabilization programs because of the quote conditionality of the loans
Speaker 1: that they have. All these like this really technical boring
Speaker 1: like neoliberal like legal language for it, the like the
Speaker 1: this this is all sort of banker speak for if
Speaker 1: you wanted other loans you can buy food, You're gonna
Speaker 1: have to rob every single person you know and hand
Speaker 1: them and hand us all your money. Uh. This eventually
Speaker 1: becomes now to structural adjustment programs. There's all of this
Speaker 1: sort of technical language disguise what's going on. But what's
Speaker 1: actually going on is that in order to pay off,
Speaker 1: in order to pay the bankers for these loans, they
Speaker 1: are taking food for the moles of children. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: here's a more technical, I guess explanation of what's happening here.
Speaker 1: Austerity programs include stern measures or shock treatments that trigger
Speaker 1: market mechanisms to stimulate export production and increased government for
Speaker 1: exchange reserves. So, according to the theory, currency devaluation make
Speaker 1: three world exports more competitive in the international market. Reduced
Speaker 1: public spending curbs inflation and saves money for debt repayments.
Speaker 1: Privatization of state owned corporations generated more productive investment and
Speaker 1: reduce public payrolls. Elimination of protectionism and other restraints on
Speaker 1: foreign investment lurns more more efficient export firms. Cuts in
Speaker 1: public subsidies for food and basic necessities helped to get
Speaker 1: prices right, benefiting domestic producers. Wage restraints and higher interest
Speaker 1: rates reduce inflation and enhance competitiveness, and import restrictions can
Speaker 1: serve form exchange for debt servicing. So this has winners
Speaker 1: and losers, and the losers are like everyone in the
Speaker 1: country that is happening to and this is and this
Speaker 1: is pretty cost cross class. Like these policies they hir workers,
Speaker 1: the hir peasants, the hair small shopkeepers, the middle classes
Speaker 1: annihilated just like people who are consumers you buy goods,
Speaker 1: and even the sort of like the local capitalists just
Speaker 1: get screwed by this because what the I m F
Speaker 1: is doing is forcing everyone to have lower wages, taking
Speaker 1: massive benefit cuts and massively spiking the price of food.
Speaker 1: And you know, I I I want to get remind
Speaker 1: everyone that this this is explicitly what the Federal Reserve
Speaker 1: is trying to do to us right now, Like this
Speaker 1: is this is the kind of stuff that they're talking
Speaker 1: about in order to curb inflation, is to just make
Speaker 1: the pay everyone less, make everyone take benefits cuts, and
Speaker 1: then increase the price of ship. So the winners of
Speaker 1: this are like six bureaucrats, international investors, and like a
Speaker 1: class of like absolutely horrific large agricultural landowners. And this
Speaker 1: this has about the effect that you would expect it
Speaker 1: to um. Between nineteen seventy six and late nine two,
Speaker 1: some a hundred and forty six incidents of protests occurred,
Speaker 1: reaching a peak from nineteen eight three to nine, continuing
Speaker 1: to the present without attenuation. Now, the authors who are
Speaker 1: writing this right, they're writing this in nineteen four So
Speaker 1: when they say they continue to the present without tentation,
Speaker 1: they four, The thing is the last one of those
Speaker 1: riots ended like a week ago. Oh yeah, yeah, they're
Speaker 1: still they're still going um so, and you know, and
Speaker 1: these these riots are slightly different than the the sort
Speaker 1: of like classical bread riots, right, because they are about
Speaker 1: the increasing price of food, it's also about the increasing
Speaker 1: price of fuel or sort of broader austerity measures or
Speaker 1: cuts to services and stuff like that. Um here, here's
Speaker 1: there's a quote about like what these things actually look like. Um.
Speaker 1: Demonstrations and riots typically target specific institutions perceived as responsible
Speaker 1: for the depredations. Marches and protesting crowds converge on major
Speaker 1: thoroughfares and government buildings, such as the treasury or the
Speaker 1: national bank, or the legislature, the presidential palace. Looters attack
Speaker 1: supermarkets and clothing stores. Where fuel and transportation subsidies are
Speaker 1: part of the austerity package, busses and gasoline stations are burned.
Speaker 1: The international dimension of austerity are recognized symbolically in attacks
Speaker 1: on travel agencies for and automobile's, luxury hotels and international
Speaker 1: travel agencies or all that too, but also international agency offices.
Speaker 1: And you know this is gonna sound familiar from the
Speaker 1: last episode. It turns out that just like the eight
Speaker 1: Touch of People, that the attacks of these things are
Speaker 1: are very targeted. The sort of like forms of resistance
Speaker 1: have changed over time, because you know, this is now
Speaker 1: we we we do have modern political organizations. Right, Like
Speaker 1: we get general strikes, you get sometimes you get just
Speaker 1: noble bread riots. Sometimes you get these just things that
Speaker 1: are like large protests and then they turn into riots.
Speaker 1: And what's interesting about them is that these are very
Speaker 1: sort of these are very sort of cross class movements. Right.
Speaker 1: You have your sort of classical sectors of the urban poor.
Speaker 1: You have, like particularly in the global South, you can
Speaker 1: you have your shanty dwellers, you have unemployed youth, you
Speaker 1: have small street vendors or like a crucial sort of
Speaker 1: element of these things you have like just your guy
Speaker 1: selling cigarettes on the street. Um, you get you also
Speaker 1: get like parts of the industrial working class. You get
Speaker 1: sometimes you get unions. A lot of times you get students,
Speaker 1: you get public employees. Sometimes you get professional groups. One
Speaker 1: of one of the interesting things that's reading about this,
Speaker 1: I've read like a few books in this EREA who
Speaker 1: were talking specifically and this this isn't like the nineties, right,
Speaker 1: We're specifically talking about professional groups in Sudan. And it's
Speaker 1: like it's like, Okay, it's it's people are talking to
Speaker 1: professional groups and Sudan backing rioters against the government. It's
Speaker 1: two thousand and nineteen. People are talking about professional groups
Speaker 1: backing protests against the government. It's like it's I don't know,
Speaker 1: Like there's this extent to which all of these things
Speaker 1: that the I m F riots have just been happening
Speaker 1: over and over and over again for about fifty years,
Speaker 1: and a lot of the elements are incredibly similar. One
Speaker 1: of the other things that's going on here is that
Speaker 1: these protests are driven are driven by mass organization. Typically,
Speaker 1: austerity protests were precipitated by dramatic overnight price heights resulting
Speaker 1: from the termination of public subsidies on basic goods and services,
Speaker 1: proclaimed by the government as a regrettably necessary reform, urged
Speaker 1: by the I m F and international lenders as conditions
Speaker 1: for new and renegotiated loans. Five deaths in the first
Speaker 1: Peruvian protests to get a pattern of violence. Peru remained
Speaker 1: a hotbed of austerity protest, with students and workers demonstrating
Speaker 1: against increased food prices in followed by followed in by
Speaker 1: a march of public employees over state layoffs. This protest,
Speaker 1: so cheered by other public workers watching from surrounding the
Speaker 1: office buildings, was dispersed by police tear gas. So like
Speaker 1: that that's that's a very sort of yeah, yeah, like
Speaker 1: we did. I mean, this is this was happening. This
Speaker 1: is happening in Peru like last year, right, actually was
Speaker 1: it last year? Was it earlier this year? I don't know.
Speaker 1: Time is fake. And that's actually like the other thing
Speaker 1: that sort of startling about this is like the places
Speaker 1: that riot are still the places that are rioting, and
Speaker 1: like it in an enormous number of cases, it's it's
Speaker 1: the same places sometimes it's the same people. Um. I
Speaker 1: think probably the most famous protests of the sort of
Speaker 1: era is it's called the caracaso I'm pronouncing nice really badly,
Speaker 1: by my apologies in Venezuela, which is reaction to a
Speaker 1: nine like increase in train and bus fairs. And there
Speaker 1: are these are like these are massive riots. Um at
Speaker 1: least a hundred and probably like a couple of thousand
Speaker 1: people are like gunned down by the army. And three
Speaker 1: years later, a relatively unknown colonel named Hugo Chavez tried
Speaker 1: to overthrow the government that had carried out the price increases. Travis,
Speaker 1: you know, Travis is better known for his other works,
Speaker 1: but he's the sort of tie between the I M.
Speaker 1: F Riots and the sort of next phase of political
Speaker 1: resistance to this stuff, which is called the antique, which
Speaker 1: is like known as the anti globalization movements in sort
Speaker 1: of the nineties and nearly two thousands. And the thing
Speaker 1: that's interesting about these things is that I don't know,
Speaker 1: the I m F rights don't go very well, like
Speaker 1: either they lose or at best, what they were able
Speaker 1: to get was like temporarily stall some of these reforms,
Speaker 1: and I say like reforms quote unquot like the serve
Speaker 1: and the olive old like slashing benefits. So they were
Speaker 1: able to pause them a bit and then they would
Speaker 1: sort of get restarted after people left the street. But
Speaker 1: in the late nineties and the thousands, people start winning
Speaker 1: um Argentina is sort of famously forced to like tell
Speaker 1: the I m F to funk off and they default
Speaker 1: on their loans. After this like enormous autonomous uprising two
Speaker 1: thousand one that like very nearly overthrows the government enforces
Speaker 1: that like five heads of state. There's the whole sort
Speaker 1: of pink tide in Latin America. The I m F
Speaker 1: gets like driven out of a bunch of countries in
Speaker 1: East Asia, and then she doesn't eight the entire world
Speaker 1: economy collapses, which it turns out is bad for everyone.
Speaker 1: And this does This does two things for our story.
Speaker 1: The first is that like countries are suddenly going broke again,
Speaker 1: and because they're like just completely broke, the I m
Speaker 1: F is just back and is able to sort of
Speaker 1: enforce programs on places like Greecent Spain. And the second
Speaker 1: thing it did was set off an enormous wave of
Speaker 1: bread riots and uprisings. And I think, like most people,
Speaker 1: if if you tell them that two eight set off
Speaker 1: like an enormous wave of like protests, they're They're immediately
Speaker 1: going to go, oh, you mean the Arab Spring And
Speaker 1: I am talking about that, But that's actually not specifically
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about here. There there's there were like
Speaker 1: immediately in twos and immediately after there was another massive
Speaker 1: wave of bread riots that every like just everyone is
Speaker 1: completely forgotten unless the thing that you do specifically is
Speaker 1: study bread riots. Um. Here here's from. Here's from the
Speaker 1: piece called a Political Economy of the Food Riot. In
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven and two, the world witnessed a
Speaker 1: return of one of the oldest forms of collective action,
Speaker 1: the food riot. Countries were protests occurred range from Italy,
Speaker 1: where pasta protests in September seven were directed at a
Speaker 1: failure at the failure of the Prodi government to prevent
Speaker 1: a thirty percent rise in the price of pasta. To Haiti,
Speaker 1: where protesters railed against presidents provolves impassive response to the
Speaker 1: doubling of the price of rice over the course of
Speaker 1: a single week. Other countries in which riots were reported
Speaker 1: including the Uzbekistan, Morocco, guianam Are, Titania, Senegal, India, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Burkina,
Speaker 1: Fossil came Ruined, Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Mexico, and Argentina,
Speaker 1: and some commentators have estimated that thirty countries experienced some
Speaker 1: sort of fruits some sort of food protests over the period.
Speaker 1: Now we've been talking a lot about like food consumers
Speaker 1: in this because that's mostly the people who are involved
Speaker 1: in bread riots. But you know, as was happening in
Speaker 1: seventeen huntres with this sort of original stuff like this
Speaker 1: whole time this is going on, there's there's a sort
Speaker 1: of massive shift in the global food economy happening where
Speaker 1: and this has been happening for a long time now,
Speaker 1: but it's it's sort of it's been accelerating the last
Speaker 1: about half a century, which is that the number of
Speaker 1: people who are like peasants and who produced food for
Speaker 1: themselves has been massively declining, and people are getting forced
Speaker 1: into cities. And this means that there's you know, there's
Speaker 1: there's been a number of other things that have gone
Speaker 1: along with this. Uh, there's been this massive increase in
Speaker 1: like cattle production, for example, you get all these monocol
Speaker 1: yours um. And another thing I think I've mentioned before
Speaker 1: is that the World Trade organizations like Agreement on Agriculture
Speaker 1: like outlaws agricultural subsidies for the global South, but you know,
Speaker 1: the US is still allowed to have like farm subsidies,
Speaker 1: which means that you know, if when you're when you
Speaker 1: enter these free trade agreements, you get all of this
Speaker 1: like enormously cheap food from the U. S has dumped
Speaker 1: into all these other countries, and you know, if you're
Speaker 1: a Mexican farmer, suddenly you can't compete with all of
Speaker 1: this food from the US because the food from the
Speaker 1: US is cheap because the American government subsidizing it, but
Speaker 1: the Mexican government can and this just like absolutely annihilates
Speaker 1: any attempt by a country to maintain food security by
Speaker 1: like producing food for themselves. And this this sort of
Speaker 1: class of like self sufficient peasant farmers who had been
Speaker 1: you know, they support themselves by producing their own food
Speaker 1: and selling to the market. These people just can annihilated
Speaker 1: and they get forced into what's called sort of casualized
Speaker 1: labor that they you know, they the later version of
Speaker 1: this is like uber right, but that they're forcing to
Speaker 1: gig work. They're kicked out of sort of the noble economy,
Speaker 1: and you know, because they don't have sort of fixed
Speaker 1: contracts or you know, it's a lot of people are
Speaker 1: working with for no contract with with no contracts at all,
Speaker 1: they're enormously insecure. And once the people are forced into
Speaker 1: the labor market, like changes in the global economy can
Speaker 1: make them like almost immediately unable to afford food because
Speaker 1: you know, like if the less sort of economic and
Speaker 1: secure you are, the more the more you're affected by
Speaker 1: price increases. Which is obvious, but it's worth saying because
Speaker 1: it dictates a lot of like who does bread riots
Speaker 1: and yes, and so governments are not entirely like blind
Speaker 1: to this, and they're concernings that they're gonna get overthrown,
Speaker 1: and so you see a bunch of governments trying to
Speaker 1: respond with sort of price stabilization stuff. I think the
Speaker 1: most famous example of this is that like the Egyptian
Speaker 1: army like literally controls like an enormous number of easips
Speaker 1: bakeries and they like directly run them, and they directly
Speaker 1: run them, so like you control the price of bread
Speaker 1: to try to like stop revolutions from happening. But and
Speaker 1: she doesn't. Eight they just kind of stopped working. Um,
Speaker 1: here's the political economy of the food riot. Again, over
Speaker 1: the year between two thousand and seven and two eight
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty increase in the global price of maze
Speaker 1: and the sevcent increase in the price of rice, with
Speaker 1: similar price increases and soybeans and other major food commodities. Um, yes,
Speaker 1: there there are these massi food price increases, and this,
Speaker 1: you know, this does the thing that massive food price
Speaker 1: increases does. Right, there's there's and there's immediately enormous riots,
Speaker 1: and there's the cycle that happens where the protesters, you know,
Speaker 1: the protesters immediately blamed the government for the crisis, and
Speaker 1: then the government is like, well, it's actually not our
Speaker 1: fault because you know that it's happening because the things
Speaker 1: outside of our control, and the protesters are like, oh,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter who we elect, they do the same things,
Speaker 1: and like they're both kind of right, Like the government
Speaker 1: is just like sucking these people. But it's also true
Speaker 1: that the sort of like the whole food system is
Speaker 1: designed to take like the means of food production out
Speaker 1: of the hands of like the workers who need the
Speaker 1: food and putting them in the hands of like, you know,
Speaker 1: enormous corporations and as people in places like Sri Lanco,
Speaker 1: which you're gonna talk more about later, continually emphasize like this,
Speaker 1: this food sovereignty issue is as much as a political issue,
Speaker 1: Like it's an incredibly political issue, and it's it's it's
Speaker 1: as much like what's at steak in these bread riots
Speaker 1: as the sort of imfinosterity stuff. Okay, this is probably
Speaker 1: a good place for an ad break, but I can't
Speaker 1: think of a transition. Uh yeah, you know who isn't
Speaker 1: allowed to eat is the products and services that support
Speaker 1: this podcast, all actively starving to death. So get these
Speaker 1: deals now while you still can, and we're back. So
Speaker 1: all right now we're gonna talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: the Arabs Spring. We're not gonna talk an enormous amount
Speaker 1: about it because that's the whole thing. Um. But if if,
Speaker 1: if you've been following like the stuff people have written
Speaker 1: about the Arab Spring, there's an enormous number of people
Speaker 1: who spend like a lot of their time arguing about
Speaker 1: whether or not it was actually sparked by food prices.
Speaker 1: And you know, you'll get a lot of analysts to
Speaker 1: argue that like food prices in Tunisia where the air
Speaker 1: spring starts, like, weren't really higher than normal, And what
Speaker 1: you're seeing instead is like, well, it's not actually food prices.
Speaker 1: It's just that there's a generation of people who've been
Speaker 1: farmers but like can't support themselves anymore, who've been forced
Speaker 1: into like fighting non existent wage labor in cities and
Speaker 1: like that. That is part of what's happening. But I
Speaker 1: think there's there's a sort of like fundamental misunderstanding if
Speaker 1: what causes a bread right, right, Like you know, as
Speaker 1: as you talked about like in the first episode, one
Speaker 1: of the things that causes bread riots is it's not
Speaker 1: actually necessarily the magnitude of the price increase that causes them, right,
Speaker 1: What sets What sets off bread riots is people is
Speaker 1: people feeling like they're not getting what they deserve. Now. Obviously,
Speaker 1: like if the price of bread increases, you're going to
Speaker 1: get a lot of people going like, fun, this, I
Speaker 1: work my ass off and now I can't feed my family.
Speaker 1: We deserve better in this is time to riot. But
Speaker 1: sometimes even if red prices are stable, you can you
Speaker 1: can get it. You can get a thing where everyone, like,
Speaker 1: you know, the amount of bread is bad, everything is expensive,
Speaker 1: and one day someone wakes up and just goes funk,
Speaker 1: this I deserve better and they do a bread riot
Speaker 1: and and this is the case. And you know, and
Speaker 1: when when that kind of thing is happening, right when
Speaker 1: when when you're dealing with you know what like moral
Speaker 1: economy stuff, when you're dealing with with this gap between
Speaker 1: like what people think, like like what people think their
Speaker 1: life should be versus the fact that their lives which
Speaker 1: is absolutely terrible. Even if you like decrease the price
Speaker 1: of bread, that's not actually necessarily going to like stop
Speaker 1: people from rioting. And if you look at like occupy
Speaker 1: for example, to like you know, that's also happening in
Speaker 1: this period, like what brings people there isn't necessarily strictly
Speaker 1: the price of food. It's the sense that like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've been screwed by and I've been screwed by the
Speaker 1: ruling class, and I deserve better than this, and and
Speaker 1: this is this is what you see Indonesia. And one
Speaker 1: of the things what you see in sort of Phoenicians
Speaker 1: Syria is that like a lot of the uprisings, like
Speaker 1: they have this huge sort of rural core with with
Speaker 1: this population of the population to people who've been kicked
Speaker 1: out the agricultural sector, and you know, and like that
Speaker 1: that is a bread riot, right, And it's a bread
Speaker 1: right in the sort of double sense of like it's
Speaker 1: the people who are involved who used to be involved
Speaker 1: in in grain production and now can't be. And then
Speaker 1: also that like you know, people, people have hit the
Speaker 1: sort of expectation gap thing. And what I think is
Speaker 1: sort of interesting about this is that these bread riots,
Speaker 1: these rural bread riots, are like they're they're the closest
Speaker 1: thing we have to sort of the classical twenty century revolution, right,
Speaker 1: Like that that's one of that's the thing that causes
Speaker 1: like the twenty century revolutions are the first generation of
Speaker 1: people who are like but maybe in the first like
Speaker 1: two or three generations, people who come from the countryside
Speaker 1: into the factories of the people who do revolutions um.
Speaker 1: And but the thing is this is this is this
Speaker 1: is the century, not the twentie century. Like if you
Speaker 1: get kicked out of your farm, there's there's no job
Speaker 1: in a factory, like you're just unemployed, and you know,
Speaker 1: and this changes the dynamics of of sort of everything.
Speaker 1: And I think, okay, like people like broadly know the
Speaker 1: course of like the Arab Spring and a teen wave
Speaker 1: of uprisings, they happen, they get crushed largely. But there
Speaker 1: was another wave of these sort of riots, protests and
Speaker 1: uprisings that started in Haiti and like in eighteen over
Speaker 1: this massive field price hike. And here is a partial
Speaker 1: list of places that like people have like rioted in
Speaker 1: in large numbers since a dozen in eighteen Haiti, Sudan, Algeria, Hunduras, Chile,
Speaker 1: and Rock, Hong Kong, Iran like four times, Lebanon, like
Speaker 1: three times, Columbia, like three times. A couple of things
Speaker 1: happen in France. There was Puerto Rico, there was popular
Speaker 1: There's there was Indonesia, where in our second Ecuador one.
Speaker 1: Now there's Catalonia. Like people righted in the US there
Speaker 1: there were massive digits, roadblocks like in Canada, ukimedia Kampa
Speaker 1: went up where there was stuff. It's a culture. Like
Speaker 1: there were two different ways of protests. In India, there
Speaker 1: was like Belarus, there's Kazahstan, there's Kyrgystan, there's Usbekistan. There's Molly.
Speaker 1: There's stuff in Nigeria or stuffing o Libya, like there's
Speaker 1: stuff in Sri Lanka. We're about to get to this.
Speaker 1: This whole thing has has been happening like everywhere, and
Speaker 1: it's been intensifying the lasting the last year of like
Speaker 1: three or four years. Um, we're not basically like year
Speaker 1: four of this cycle. And and you know, obviously, like
Speaker 1: every single one of these protests has their own like
Speaker 1: local political conditions, and like a lot of these aren't
Speaker 1: even sort of loosely about the price of bread. They're
Speaker 1: just about sort of other stuff that's happening. But like
Speaker 1: like of the operations that I mentioned, like something like
Speaker 1: fifteen of them are directly about the price of food
Speaker 1: or the price of like transitive fuel. And we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about sort of two of the
Speaker 1: most recent like protest waves. We're gonna talk about equa word.
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about Sri Lanka because they're there are
Speaker 1: two very different kinds of protests, even though they're both
Speaker 1: kind of bread riots or at least there, I mean,
Speaker 1: they're both very much the modern equivalence of it. Um
Speaker 1: but they look very different. And there there's just I
Speaker 1: think and I don't know, I think it's like interesting
Speaker 1: reasons why. Um yeah. So so we're gonna start with,
Speaker 1: like with Sri Lanka um on. On a very basic level,
Speaker 1: of Sri Lanka has a giant balance of payments crisis.
Speaker 1: This is you know, it's just like that. This is
Speaker 1: a sort of like large scale political version of famines. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: there's plenty of food and fuel in the world, but
Speaker 1: the government sharlocket does not have dollars to buy it with. Now,
Speaker 1: the reason the government doesn't have dollars to buy fuel
Speaker 1: with is because the government is basically like an incredibly
Speaker 1: corrupt sctatorship that keeps like imputting lujury goods it didn't need.
Speaker 1: And they did a bunch of like tax breaks at
Speaker 1: rich people, and suddenly the government was broken. Everyone was
Speaker 1: like wow, how did that happen? It must have just
Speaker 1: been the pandemic and it was like no, you like
Speaker 1: you gave all the money to rich people. And then
Speaker 1: as the crisis sort of went on, um, they the
Speaker 1: government decided to ban fertilizery imports and so this just
Speaker 1: meant that people couldn't get fertilizers. So it's like farmers
Speaker 1: just didn't plant food because curious decision. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: it's it's one of those things you look at it.
Speaker 1: It's just like like like who thought this was a
Speaker 1: good idea? Yeah, what was the positive end of that
Speaker 1: game in here? I mean it's like the only like okay,
Speaker 1: So like I I think what they were thinking is that, like,
Speaker 1: fertilizer costs dollars, right, we're running out of dollars, so
Speaker 1: we're gonna stop people from spending their dollars like on
Speaker 1: buying this stuff so we can keep more dollars in
Speaker 1: the economy. But like, what what are you what is
Speaker 1: your long term plan here if you don't have like
Speaker 1: anything to get dollars with or and you also don't
Speaker 1: have food. So this, to the surprise of exactly zero people.
Speaker 1: Lookcept I guess the government of Sri Lanka causes a
Speaker 1: food crisis, food shortage. Um. And this is a kind
Speaker 1: of classic like this is the kind of classic like
Speaker 1: situation in which the I m F we intervene in
Speaker 1: the seventies and they're interviing now and you know this,
Speaker 1: this is a classic like struggle against this starting right,
Speaker 1: you have the ruling class blowing up the entire economy
Speaker 1: by like fueling debt money into pointlet's infrastructure projects. And
Speaker 1: now they're doing these like massive austerity measures and trying
Speaker 1: to get loans to b I MF. This is you know,
Speaker 1: this is this is this is this, this is this
Speaker 1: is this is stuff we understand that we've seen before. Um.
Speaker 1: But this is also this is also a food softigy problem, right.
Speaker 1: The SriLankan government has just completely screwed their farmers, which
Speaker 1: means you have to import even more food and and
Speaker 1: you know the result of this is months and months
Speaker 1: and months a very impressive sort of clock cross class
Speaker 1: protests with like basically every social sector in the streets.
Speaker 1: And that's both a good thing and also a thing
Speaker 1: that is kind of a mess because you know, like
Speaker 1: there's civil war. The civil war ended like less than
Speaker 1: a decade and a half ago. Right, so you have
Speaker 1: people in the streets from sectors who like do not
Speaker 1: like each other at all, and I don't know, and
Speaker 1: you know, you get the thing that happens here, right,
Speaker 1: You get these moments of like incredible solidarity and then
Speaker 1: moments of incredible like what the funk are you guys doing?
Speaker 1: And you know, like one of the things that happens
Speaker 1: a lot in these protests, like in all all protests,
Speaker 1: like this is like okay, the protests are like pre
Speaker 1: tame for literally months, right, Like it's just people doing protesting,
Speaker 1: and then I cops and and people like allied with
Speaker 1: the government start attacking their testers, at which point people
Speaker 1: like burned down the house of the ruling family. They
Speaker 1: start throwing people. I think people probably saw the videos
Speaker 1: people like throwing cars of like government ministers in the rivers,
Speaker 1: which was a good time, and like yeah, like that
Speaker 1: that stuff was, you know, a direct reaction to sort
Speaker 1: of like the government's violence. Right. Um, you know, okay,
Speaker 1: I can't give like a full, like detailed political history
Speaker 1: here because, like dear god, it is incredibly complicated and
Speaker 1: I don't understand it very well because you know, I
Speaker 1: don't study Sri Lanka. Um, if you want to go
Speaker 1: to account of this. Brohini Hensman's political dimensions of the
Speaker 1: crisis in Sri Lanka is a really good sort of
Speaker 1: like short like look at what's going on here, um,
Speaker 1: And and this is the sort of like this is
Speaker 1: you know, this is a broader trend and like all
Speaker 1: these protests right, like like every single bread right takes
Speaker 1: place in its own unique context, Like Sri Lanka, for example,
Speaker 1: Like Sri Lanka used to have the world's best and
Speaker 1: largest like mass Trotskyite party, like they were the Trotskyites
Speaker 1: is like the only place on earth the Trotskates like
Speaker 1: a real like mass political party, and they were like
Speaker 1: a part of the real political process. And then they
Speaker 1: like sold out the working class and entered a bunch
Speaker 1: of governments that like did terrible stuff. And you know,
Speaker 1: okay that that that's like a local context, doesn't happen
Speaker 1: anywhere else. But you know, every single one of these states,
Speaker 1: right is embedded in global capitalism. And that means that
Speaker 1: every state is affected by the sort of like broader
Speaker 1: economic trends and sort of beerocratic structures to hold everything together.
Speaker 1: They're affected by the i m F, the World Trade Organization,
Speaker 1: the World Bank. And the thing that this means is
Speaker 1: that the timings of uprisings and riots tend to synchronize
Speaker 1: with each other, and we actually just sort of brought
Speaker 1: her up like economic forces. And the product of this
Speaker 1: is way is these sort of like periodic ways of uprisings.
Speaker 1: And so the closest out we're gonna talk about the
Speaker 1: most recent of these. Well, it might actually not be
Speaker 1: the most recently these by the time this goes up,
Speaker 1: but yeah, yeah, we're we're gonna talk about Ecuador. Um.
Speaker 1: The situation Ecuador is very different from what's happening in
Speaker 1: Sri Lanka. The biggest difference, I guess is that instead
Speaker 1: of sort of like waiting for conditions to get bad
Speaker 1: enough that like an uprising happens like more or less spontaneously,
Speaker 1: which is kind of what happened he doesn't nineteen an Ecuador.
Speaker 1: There there's a there's a there are huge protests there, um,
Speaker 1: but they were largely spontaneous. But instead of like waiting
Speaker 1: for people were just like what if we just called
Speaker 1: one of these And by by people here, I specifically
Speaker 1: mean the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador or Kona,
Speaker 1: and you know, okay, okay. As we've seen through this
Speaker 1: whole sort of thing, right like bread riots like adapt
Speaker 1: to the political organizations around them. And in Ecuador we're
Speaker 1: dealing with a quick essentially modern form political organization, which
Speaker 1: is the Indigenous Confederation. And I guess I should sort
Speaker 1: of like preface this a bit with like the specific
Speaker 1: form of indigenous confederation in in Latin America that emerges
Speaker 1: in this period is like a different thing than older
Speaker 1: ones because there have been indigenous confederation for a long time.
Speaker 1: This is like a this is this is a very
Speaker 1: specific like political thing that emerged across Latin America in
Speaker 1: in sort of the seventies, and the really really started
Speaker 1: string up in the eighties as results of like a
Speaker 1: lot of things, one of which was like how shitty
Speaker 1: the old like Marxans lends vanga groups like we're on
Speaker 1: indigenous issues. And one of the one of the groups
Speaker 1: that forms in this period is kana and Kanae is
Speaker 1: one of the world's most bilitants like indigenous federations, and
Speaker 1: since they're founding in in six they've called half a
Speaker 1: dozen uprisings against neoliberal governments, and I think I think
Speaker 1: they knocked off like three presidents, which is a pretty
Speaker 1: impressive track record. And on July two, faced with skyrocketing
Speaker 1: inflation on like basic consumer goods and a like really
Speaker 1: shitty like far right government, they stage another one um
Speaker 1: and this is another sort of I don't know. The
Speaker 1: thing is interesting about this is that it's it's part
Speaker 1: general strike, like part street protests, part riot, and part
Speaker 1: just like mass mark for the from the sort of
Speaker 1: periphery of Ecuador to the core. And by periphery and cora,
Speaker 1: I mean in the sort of metaphorical sense, like it's
Speaker 1: a bunch. It's a bunch of indigenous peasant groups from
Speaker 1: all over the country, just like marching on descending on
Speaker 1: the capital Keto. And this is a this is a
Speaker 1: complicated process like that, you know. Okay, like the left
Speaker 1: everywhere has like political divides and mostly they're kind of
Speaker 1: nonsense in a lot of way, like okay, like that
Speaker 1: there's ideological divides and this personal divides and whatever. But
Speaker 1: like Ecuador's left has has real political divides, and these
Speaker 1: aren't these aren't like sort of petty ideological like personal stuff,
Speaker 1: like they're like they were caught under the sort of
Speaker 1: previous like old like leftist, pink tight governments of Raphael Carrera.
Speaker 1: Like there are like soldiers and cops who are beating
Speaker 1: the ship out of indigenous echological protesters. And you know
Speaker 1: this means that like yeah, you know, okay, So so
Speaker 1: Carrera is like parties running for president again. Careers are running,
Speaker 1: but careers parties like running in an election, right, And
Speaker 1: you know this means it's like, yeah, okay, like maybe
Speaker 1: you're both leftist right, but you know a lot of
Speaker 1: people who are like, oh, fun, no, like I'm not
Speaker 1: voting for these guys. These are the guys who like
Speaker 1: sent the army against our anti mining protests. And so
Speaker 1: you know, the thing the thing that is interesting here
Speaker 1: is like like these protests don't even pull together the
Speaker 1: entire recordorian left. Um, there's like other stuff going on
Speaker 1: here too, like the there there's some of the unions
Speaker 1: that went on strike in nineteen, like don't go on
Speaker 1: strike this time because of some political stuff that's happening.
Speaker 1: But the thing, the thing about KNA that's really impressive
Speaker 1: is that they're still organized enough and they still like
Speaker 1: they're organized enough that they're able to just take control
Speaker 1: of parts of cities and they have a lot of
Speaker 1: allies supporters amongst the students and workers and keto. And
Speaker 1: this means that when the government makes this enormous mistake
Speaker 1: and arrests karas like kind of Newish leader. Ah okay,
Speaker 1: this guy's name. This guy's name, I guess in Spanish,
Speaker 1: it's like Leonidas is that. This guy's name is leonitis Um.
Speaker 1: He's the head of I use the Distance Federation Um
Speaker 1: and he sees a protest leader. He was protested leader
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen. That's how we got elected to like
Speaker 1: head this organization. And they arrest him on day two
Speaker 1: of the protests. And this is a catastrophic mistake. The
Speaker 1: protests just like explode and you know, bye bye bye
Speaker 1: by like a week in. I think that the government's
Speaker 1: claiming they were doing fifty million dollars a damage a day,
Speaker 1: which I'm not actually sure I believe that because governments
Speaker 1: and corporations to this too, and they're talking about like
Speaker 1: losses from like strikes as they tend to overra emphasize
Speaker 1: how much damage has done because it makes them like
Speaker 1: look better in the press, and that makes the protesters
Speaker 1: look worse. But they they they they're able to damage
Speaker 1: like significant parts of the economy, and by June, like
Speaker 1: they kind of win. Basically, the government's forced to negotiate
Speaker 1: with them, and they don't get all of their demands,
Speaker 1: but they get price decreases for like fuel and gasoline,
Speaker 1: which is like a huge part of why this happened
Speaker 1: in the first place. They get bans on mining and
Speaker 1: drilling and indigenous and protected areas. They get like strength
Speaker 1: and price controls. They it likeal rural loan forgiveness, like
Speaker 1: interest rate decreases. They get subsidus for farmers, they get
Speaker 1: subsdues for families, they get they manage to get the
Speaker 1: government to declare a state of health emergency over COVID.
Speaker 1: It's like this is this is impressive stuff, and you know,
Speaker 1: and the other part of this is that they're like, Okay,
Speaker 1: the agreement is that we will stop protesting if you
Speaker 1: do this, and if you don't do this, we're gonna
Speaker 1: do this again. So yeah, I guess I guess my
Speaker 1: sort of wrap this up. There's there there's an American
Speaker 1: proverb that is really common amongst sort of like American
Speaker 1: China watchers, which is that I so supposedly the Chinese
Speaker 1: word for crisis is composed of two characters, danger and opportunity.
Speaker 1: And it's like not true, as likes to get at
Speaker 1: the polo logical analysis of China that that's not what
Speaker 1: that's not what the characters made. But everyone, like everyone
Speaker 1: in the US, like political stamishment, like believes this right,
Speaker 1: and you know, but like as as an analysis of China,
Speaker 1: it is completely useless. As an analysis of the US
Speaker 1: of the American psyche, it's incredibly valuable, right because this this,
Speaker 1: this is the way the American ruling class thinks. It's
Speaker 1: it's every single crisis is both a danger and an opportunity.
Speaker 1: And that's something that we in some sense also have
Speaker 1: to do because that's you know, these are the sort
Speaker 1: of situations that we're in, right, bread, riots are a
Speaker 1: thing that just they happen, Right, they will continue to happen.
Speaker 1: They have been happening for thousands of years, like presumably
Speaker 1: they will happen for thousands of more years. And there's
Speaker 1: no use sort of like either pretending that they don't
Speaker 1: happen or making these sort of moral or tactical arguments
Speaker 1: like for against them, because they just happen. And the
Speaker 1: question that we're that we're faced with is what are
Speaker 1: we actually going to do about it? Right? Are we
Speaker 1: going to set them out? Are we gonna side with
Speaker 1: the state and repressing them in the name of sort
Speaker 1: of like stamping out color revolutions, are like providing order
Speaker 1: a stability, or like protecting small businesses? Or are we
Speaker 1: going to you know, take to the streets and fight
Speaker 1: alongside them to sort of break the system that creates them.
Speaker 1: And this is the second question from here is if
Speaker 1: we're going to do this, how what what what we've
Speaker 1: seen from Ecuador in the past month or so is
Speaker 1: that if you take the fight to them and you're
Speaker 1: sufficiently organized, you can win. And that means the question now,
Speaker 1: as our food prices continued to increase, as food prices
Speaker 1: are only going to continue to increase, what are we
Speaker 1: going to do? And Yeah, that that's all I got.
Speaker 1: I have. I have a single question, yep, what are
Speaker 1: we going to do? Well? I'm kind of bummed we
Speaker 1: never brought up are good friend Pete Buddha j Edge
Speaker 1: in his uh bread his bread preci fixing ordeals? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that that that that's kind of a sign
Speaker 1: of just like how kind of like I guess you
Speaker 1: could say masculalized, like our culture has been that people
Speaker 1: didn't riot over that because like that is a thing
Speaker 1: like if if if if if you said, Pete Buddha
Speaker 1: jedge back to like a late Frets village and she
Speaker 1: tries to do this thing like he does the systematic
Speaker 1: like bride bread price fixing, right, like all of these
Speaker 1: people would have been getting hit by rocks. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I do that again. Yeah, do that again. Wow, Barons,
Speaker 1: this brazen incitement. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Well that is
Speaker 1: it for us today. We love to incite things, folks.
Speaker 1: Until next time, go incite yourselves. Welcome to it could
Speaker 1: happen here. The podcast that's increasing about things that are
Speaker 1: actually kind of already happening of and today it's gonna
Speaker 1: be it's gonna be one of those. And we're talking
Speaker 1: about in the kind of the uptick in rhetoric around
Speaker 1: queer exterminationism that's happened. Most of the stuff is what
Speaker 1: this is discussions and legislative proposal and rhetoric that was
Speaker 1: really kicked off last month during Pride months, specifically because
Speaker 1: of the Rovy Wade ruling that really opened the door
Speaker 1: on a few not good possibilities. UM. But because we're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about some more grim stuff today, we're
Speaker 1: gonna we're gonna open with something slightly more funny. Um
Speaker 1: And that's a friend of the Pod, Dr Jordan B. Peterson.
Speaker 1: UM now with with me today is is Chris and
Speaker 1: James greetings? All right, So Peterson, he got he got
Speaker 1: really mad at Elliott Page. Um and now does not
Speaker 1: really have a Twitter account. And it's pretty funny. Uh And,
Speaker 1: a few days after he was banned for continuing to
Speaker 1: miss gender Elliott Page, he released a video that can
Speaker 1: only be described as a super villain monologue um as
Speaker 1: as a part of his new partnership with Daily Wire Plus,
Speaker 1: the hit new streaming service. Um And, just because I
Speaker 1: think it's funny, We're just gonna we're just gonna play
Speaker 1: a few clips of of this of this evil supervillain
Speaker 1: monologue because it's really funny, and then it'll circle back
Speaker 1: to kind of our topic towards the end. So ah speaking,
Speaker 1: speaking a friend of the Pod, Peterson, here's here's our
Speaker 1: here's our one of the clips that's you've probably already
Speaker 1: heard if you're if you're terminally online. But it's incredibly funny.
Speaker 1: If I'm required to acknowledge that my tweet violated the
Speaker 1: Twitter rules? What rules you songs of good old, good
Speaker 1: old Peter said, You know the thing, I've always been
Speaker 1: sort of like that clip in particular, It's like, I
Speaker 1: don't know if I was trying, I don't know if
Speaker 1: I could emulate just the it's sounding like you've edited
Speaker 1: together sixteen clips. If you my tweet violated that Twitter rules,
Speaker 1: that's like it's his speech pattern is so bizarre. And
Speaker 1: also like in the the video was like nine minutes long,
Speaker 1: like proceeding that line, he explained what rule he broke
Speaker 1: around miss gendering and harassment, so like he explained the
Speaker 1: exact rule. Ah, but we always get more, Peter said,
Speaker 1: if you ask for it, yours woke moralists, we'll see
Speaker 1: who cancels. Who like funny. He's actually sneering as well.
Speaker 1: If you watched the video, like yeah, yeah, he's he is,
Speaker 1: he's he's going all in on the bit. He's doing
Speaker 1: like Ozzi Mandius but hammed up. It's it's frankly impressive.
Speaker 1: This is this one's also also a decent one. I
Speaker 1: am employing this awkward and impossible naming style because it
Speaker 1: is now apparently mandatory and and probably doing it wrong. Nonetheless,
Speaker 1: as you're doing it wrong is the whole point of
Speaker 1: what has been made mandatory. But also I'm trying to
Speaker 1: make a point. I've essentially been banned from Twitter as
Speaker 1: a consequence. I say banned, although technically I have been suspended,
Speaker 1: but the suspension will not be lifted unless I delete
Speaker 1: the hateful tweet in question, and I would rather die
Speaker 1: than do that. That means that you have a healthy
Speaker 1: relationship to the platform of Twitter. Um. There's also this
Speaker 1: this great clip of him talking about, like, I'm actually
Speaker 1: happy how my Twitter account has gone. Now Twitter is
Speaker 1: insignificant in the final analysis, and you're like, what the
Speaker 1: fund does that mean? What? What fun What final analysis
Speaker 1: are you talking about? What do you what do you mean?
Speaker 1: The final analysis analysis of what? Like? What is? Oh uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty funny. There's there's two more clips from
Speaker 1: this rent that I want to do, which kind of
Speaker 1: are going to get more to the heart of our
Speaker 1: issue today. Um, They're they're not great. They actually are
Speaker 1: kind of they kind of suck. So without further ado,
Speaker 1: here's their good doctor friend. And finally with regard to
Speaker 1: the final phrase criminal physician, I must say that I've
Speaker 1: had some postcoital so to speak, regrets about that phrase.
Speaker 1: It is clearly the case that the surgical operation performed
Speaker 1: by the butchers who butchered Elliott slash Ellen was legal.
Speaker 1: So was it criminal or not? Were the operations undertaken
Speaker 1: by the fascist physicians who carried out the Nazi medical
Speaker 1: experiments legal Yes, under the laws of the time, But
Speaker 1: were they criminal? I'll leave that question up to you
Speaker 1: to answer. So that's pretty gross for a lot of reasons.
Speaker 1: Um One, the kind of historical context of using Nazis
Speaker 1: too compare to your own transphobia is a little dicey
Speaker 1: when you consider how with the Nazis did to trans
Speaker 1: people into like queer books. Like, yeah, he's advocating for
Speaker 1: the Nazi position here. Yeah, there's been so many bands
Speaker 1: on queer books this Like just in the past two years, Uh,
Speaker 1: the Library Association tracked almost six d books that were challenged,
Speaker 1: in the highest number since the organization began tracking book
Speaker 1: bands in the past twenty years. So talk talking about
Speaker 1: like the Nazi scientists, they're like you like you have
Speaker 1: is his his historical context of obviously is incredibly lacking,
Speaker 1: or he's just or he's just a grifter. I think, honestly,
Speaker 1: he's just kind of I think he's just kind of
Speaker 1: lost it. I think I don't even think he's fully
Speaker 1: a grifter. I think he's just kind of not understanding
Speaker 1: what's going on anymore. Of because you can watch like
Speaker 1: interviews and stuff where people can try to use reasoning
Speaker 1: and logic with him, and you can watch his brain
Speaker 1: start to process it. But it's just like otherwise, he
Speaker 1: just doesn't think in any sort of logical manner, put
Speaker 1: his words or his like stream of consciousness into any
Speaker 1: historical context. He just says what he wants, and he's
Speaker 1: used to people just taking that as a fact. Um,
Speaker 1: he's used to like regurgitating bad Joseph Campbell and people
Speaker 1: be like, oh, yeah, you sound smart. Would know he's
Speaker 1: actually not, he's of but man, it's it's yeah. The
Speaker 1: whole Germany Nazi scientist experimentation thing is incredibly incredibly frustrating. Um.
Speaker 1: I don't even know what else to like say about
Speaker 1: a say about that, because I mean even that that
Speaker 1: line you could focus on for a while, like compare
Speaker 1: how like the history of medical documentation of like transitis
Speaker 1: and the Nazis. How that's like such a big thing
Speaker 1: is that the Nazis destroyed so much medical research on
Speaker 1: gender transitions, losing like like decades and decades of research
Speaker 1: that we're only now starting to regain. Incredibly incredibly gross.
Speaker 1: But there's this one, one, one, last one, last clip.
Speaker 1: I wanted to play of of of our of our
Speaker 1: good doctor and are we degenerate, you know, profoundly threatening manner?
Speaker 1: I think the answer to that may well be yes.
Speaker 1: So that's not great. He really is like just advocating
Speaker 1: for the Nazi position every turn, Like, yes, he's just
Speaker 1: continuing to advocate for fascistic reasoning of fascistic views of
Speaker 1: decadence and degeneracy insomuch as it is a threat to
Speaker 1: civilization and a threat to Western society. And then he
Speaker 1: goes on in this clip to justify Russia's invasion of
Speaker 1: Ukraine because the US is helping Ukraine, which makes Ukraine
Speaker 1: degenerate by proxy, so Russia is doing a war on degeneracy.
Speaker 1: And that's like, that's his arguments, Like that's his level
Speaker 1: of logical reaciting yea, which which is funny because it's
Speaker 1: like if if you ever heard any of the like
Speaker 1: radio because every wants a while, there will be radio
Speaker 1: clips are just like Ukrainian Russian soldiers yelling at each
Speaker 1: other and it's just both of them calling each other
Speaker 1: gay over and over again. It's just like, we like
Speaker 1: bring back that level of discourse to America. Well, um,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break and then we will
Speaker 1: come back to talk about our other really close friend
Speaker 1: of the pod, uh Matthew Walsh. So stay stay tuned
Speaker 1: for that. God Okay, I have I have one question
Speaker 1: for everyone here. Um what what? How? How? Woman? What?
Speaker 1: What is? What is that featherless biped? Okay, behold. So
Speaker 1: when we're talking about Matt Walsh, obviously, last month he
Speaker 1: released a pretty poorly made transphobic documentary that was basically
Speaker 1: just a clipse of him getting owned by like actual
Speaker 1: doctor there for not understanding like basic ontology and medical reasoning. Um,
Speaker 1: the documentary was just uh. Other friend of the po,
Speaker 1: JK Rolling, just expressed support for the documentary. So if
Speaker 1: that's if that's on an indicator that like turfism is
Speaker 1: just like a direct preamble to open fascism. I don't
Speaker 1: know what is because I mean, Matt. Matt Walsh jokingly
Speaker 1: describes himself as a fascist, but that's because his his
Speaker 1: beliefs actually are fascistic. Like he said, it's one of
Speaker 1: those jokes that only is funny because everyone agrees on
Speaker 1: the central premise, like it's it's that, it's that, it's
Speaker 1: that type of humor. Um so like J. K. Rowling
Speaker 1: just endorsing an open fascist. So I'm not going to
Speaker 1: talk about the documentary in depth here because it's not
Speaker 1: that good and it doesn't really make any points that
Speaker 1: need to be refuted. It it talks about how like
Speaker 1: it talks about how how puberty blockers are um sterilization
Speaker 1: uh drugs, which is not the case long term when
Speaker 1: you're on them, Yes you cannot, you cannot do that
Speaker 1: because it's obviously inhibiting your your hormones. But once you
Speaker 1: go off puberty blockers you can procreate again, which which
Speaker 1: also I just want to take a second here to
Speaker 1: to look at this position, which is that, Okay, so
Speaker 1: puberty blockers are sterilization things, right, I like, okay, so
Speaker 1: this is the arguments and sterilization, right, Who are you
Speaker 1: giving puberty blockers to children? Why the fuck do you
Speaker 1: care well like children, and it's like, wait, I mean
Speaker 1: they arguing it's like that, but it'll make them, it'll
Speaker 1: make them permanently sterilized, like like you're castrating these kids
Speaker 1: by giving them pumanity blockers, which no, that's not how
Speaker 1: that works. You're you're just arguing in bad faith. It
Speaker 1: doesn't matter. But anyway, I don't want to talk about
Speaker 1: documentary in length because it's not interesting enough to talk about.
Speaker 1: But this the documentary real quick? Is this the one
Speaker 1: way he like goes to like quote unquote the country
Speaker 1: of Africa asks people translates extremely racist. Yeah, great to
Speaker 1: see j k Rowling, like known non racist lining up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like behind the descentitist tropes of African creator the creator
Speaker 1: Kingsley shackle Bolt. Yeah, just the most cringe. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: what we call a rich white woman moment um. Yes,
Speaker 1: all right, So but we are to talk about some
Speaker 1: other things Matt Walt has been doing, specifically how he
Speaker 1: has increased exterminationist rhetoric into his discussions around trans people.
Speaker 1: So we're open to talking about de transition ers. So
Speaker 1: the vast majority of real de transitions, which are very rare,
Speaker 1: like there's very few of them, especially considering there's already
Speaker 1: very few numbers of trans people but like or something, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's very very few. Um But the vast
Speaker 1: majority of people who do make the choice to de
Speaker 1: transition are usually due to experiencing aggressive transphobia. Um and
Speaker 1: and the idea of the de transition or has been
Speaker 1: inflated and used as a straw man to attack the
Speaker 1: trans community just by and large, with with many documented
Speaker 1: cases of turfs or far right activists creating like fake
Speaker 1: stalk Papa accounts pretending to be de transition ers to
Speaker 1: write horrifying but fictional stories that that that happens a lot.
Speaker 1: There's a really famous case on Reddit of an alleged
Speaker 1: de transition er who has found out to just be
Speaker 1: like an alt right troll. Um And this all really
Speaker 1: sucks because the people who do de transition because they
Speaker 1: realize it's just not for them are generally pretty rad
Speaker 1: people who continue to be very much pro trans because
Speaker 1: they do understand the fluid nature of gender and gender
Speaker 1: expression through this entire process. Like but and anyways, when
Speaker 1: quote tweeting an alleged de transition or expressing regret medical
Speaker 1: decisions that they made, Matt Walsh said this quote, we
Speaker 1: can't just oppose the transition of children. Yes, that's particularly evil,
Speaker 1: but it's also evil to do it to anyone of
Speaker 1: any age. This young woman was nineteen, a legal adult
Speaker 1: when she was mutilated. Does that make it okay? Obviously not.
Speaker 1: Put it another way, it should be illegal for doctors
Speaker 1: to do this to anyone of any age. It should
Speaker 1: be illegal for anyone of any age to transition period.
Speaker 1: So this demonstrates the jump from no one's like that,
Speaker 1: that the rhetoric of no one should transition until they're
Speaker 1: an adult, to no one should be allowed to transition
Speaker 1: at all. And it came just as quickly as the
Speaker 1: trans community was telling you it would. This This jump
Speaker 1: is not a big one. It is very easy to
Speaker 1: say no no hormones until you're eighteen to saying no
Speaker 1: no hormones at all, um. And that's that's what we're
Speaker 1: entering into. Walsh's rhetoric is increasingly exterminationist, um and eliminationist,
Speaker 1: just saying that, like his all of his preferred policies
Speaker 1: would result in the total prohibition of trans identity and
Speaker 1: the criminalization of any gender firm in care. Um. These
Speaker 1: people are fundamentally opposed to having any agency of your
Speaker 1: own body, whether that's hormones, whether whether that's abortion, right, Like,
Speaker 1: all of these people get mad just when they see
Speaker 1: someone with colored hair, Like they don't like someone's ability
Speaker 1: to have bodily autonomy. That's there, that's one of their
Speaker 1: core politics. And you see this a lot, especially when
Speaker 1: it comes to like trans men, because there's this notion
Speaker 1: that there that their bodies exist in service of SIS
Speaker 1: straight men, right, and anything that gets in the way
Speaker 1: of that is an attack on SIS men in general
Speaker 1: and all the patriarchal society. It's like very very very
Speaker 1: much like regular misogyny, but with an added bonus of transphobia.
Speaker 1: Conservative activist Christopher Ruffo made a tweet a few days
Speaker 1: ago with a picture of Elliott Page pre transition, with
Speaker 1: the caption that says, this is what they took from you, right.
Speaker 1: It's it's like this notion that their bodies belong to
Speaker 1: you assists man, and by them choosing to change their
Speaker 1: bodies as they see fit, that's an attack on their
Speaker 1: body's access to you. Um, it's it's it's it's it
Speaker 1: redes a whole bunch of misogyny. Does. It does a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of really bad transphobia. Um, it's a really
Speaker 1: gross package, but it it It hits on a lot
Speaker 1: of points of like this type of patriarchal conservative brain.
Speaker 1: And I think this this this even carries out into
Speaker 1: like hatred of trans women, as you know, as trans
Speaker 1: women are seen as predators, so they hate trans women
Speaker 1: to protect siss women, right, like you it's all of
Speaker 1: this like possession, right, It's it's it's this possession of
Speaker 1: the body of a female, so you need to protect
Speaker 1: it against the creepy trans women. Right, It's like it's
Speaker 1: it's all of this idea of like owning women's bodies
Speaker 1: is central to a lot of these ideas of transphobia.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna see a lot more stuff about how
Speaker 1: it's going to change from no hormones, no transition until
Speaker 1: you're eighteen, to no hormones, no transition until you twenty five,
Speaker 1: to no hormones and no transition at all. This past year,
Speaker 1: we've seen many proposed felony healthcare bands for trans youth.
Speaker 1: Um said bills have passed in multiple states like Alabama,
Speaker 1: which means that it's going to forcibly de transition teens
Speaker 1: across the state. In Missouri, there's a similar bill in
Speaker 1: the works titled the Save Adolescence from Experimentation Act Um,
Speaker 1: which currently applies to individuals younger than eighteen, but Missouri
Speaker 1: physicians and healthcare providers under the bill would be prevented
Speaker 1: from recommending gender firm in care to patients who are
Speaker 1: under eighteen, and there's already been discussion in legislative sessions
Speaker 1: to extend the bill past the age of eighteen. While
Speaker 1: debating the bill, seeking to restrict access to gender firm
Speaker 1: and care, so lawmakers suggested that the medical interventions like
Speaker 1: hormones be withheld from transgender and non barinary individuals until
Speaker 1: they're twenty five years old. And during a public hearing
Speaker 1: for the House Bill to six nine, a psychologist, Lorie
Speaker 1: Hayes testified that she believes in adults under the age
Speaker 1: of twenty five are unable to fully comprehend the traumatic
Speaker 1: and drastic and irreparable quote unquote changes to their bodies
Speaker 1: that will they will undergo if they receive gender affirming
Speaker 1: medical treatments like puberty blockers and hormone therapies also will testifying,
Speaker 1: hay Is uh the psychologist said that she supported conversion therapy.
Speaker 1: So that's surprising too, nobody, Uh, or it shouldn't be.
Speaker 1: It also takes those people to the point where they're
Speaker 1: not necessarily edigible for their parents healthcare. Right, So, like
Speaker 1: I think twenty six is the time when you can
Speaker 1: do when your to you age out. Yeah, so it's
Speaker 1: it's again like it's a backdoor like prohibition on transitioning
Speaker 1: for other people. Yeah, yes, it's it's just trying to
Speaker 1: stop it at all. It's you can't you can't take
Speaker 1: their word for it. They just they just don't want
Speaker 1: you around. That's it. Like they want you to to
Speaker 1: kill yourself. They or they want you just to go
Speaker 1: away or not be tread like that's that's that's what
Speaker 1: they want. It's obviously I'm gonna do a few just
Speaker 1: Journal of American Medical Associations found the gender affirming healthcare
Speaker 1: include including puberty blockers and hormones between the ages of
Speaker 1: thirteen and twenty, was associated with lower odds of moderate
Speaker 1: or severe depression and seventie lower odds of suicidality. Now.
Speaker 1: They study published last year by the Trevor Project found
Speaker 1: that among transgender non binary miners hormone therapy associated with
Speaker 1: nearly lower odds of recent depression and suicide attempts. So
Speaker 1: they just want to ban the things that make you
Speaker 1: more likely to live, right. They just don't want you around.
Speaker 1: That's the actual message. So back back to just kind
Speaker 1: of extra speaking of just not wanting you around. UM
Speaker 1: that we're gonna do some updates on Protect Texas Kids.
Speaker 1: The extremely open, extremely transphobic, openly Christian fascists that there
Speaker 1: are words not mine group based in Texas who organized
Speaker 1: a lot of events to harass either drag shows or
Speaker 1: harass Pride events last month. It's leader Kelly Needered. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna that's what I'm gonna say it, um tweeted a
Speaker 1: few weeks ago. Quote let's start rounding up people who
Speaker 1: participate in Pride events. I wonder what she means by that.
Speaker 1: I wonder, I wonder what. I wonder what that means.
Speaker 1: Surely doesn't mean she just wants to kill all gay people.
Speaker 1: Oh oh it does, okay, um And another tweet from
Speaker 1: the main Protect Texas Kids account was today's protest went.
Speaker 1: No children seemed to be in the drag show, but
Speaker 1: there were a bunch of adults wearing mouse ears and
Speaker 1: watching the men dressed up as Disney princesses dance around
Speaker 1: totally normal and not weird. Right, So it's obviously not
Speaker 1: about protecting kids, right, Like, it's they that's not the focus.
Speaker 1: That's not even that's not the focus of their tweet.
Speaker 1: That's not the focus of what they want, right, Protecting
Speaker 1: kids quote unquote is a cheap excuse just to want
Speaker 1: to hate gay people and want gay people to go away.
Speaker 1: That's that's all. That's all it is. We've been like,
Speaker 1: it's we're kind of retrunning the same ground here, but man,
Speaker 1: it's it's so it is still frustrating how many people
Speaker 1: like fall for the bit it's not. It's not not
Speaker 1: about protecting kids, not about saving kids from groomers. You
Speaker 1: can look at all of the sexual abuse in Evangelical churches,
Speaker 1: Catholic churches, it's Christian summer camps. Whatever, it's not it's
Speaker 1: not about protecting kids. They don't give a single fuck.
Speaker 1: It's about wanting gay people to go away. Now. But
Speaker 1: with Kelly Needers and protect Texas Kids accounts, which they
Speaker 1: used to organize their Christian fascist events, both of those
Speaker 1: got banned in mid June Kelly has got banned for saying,
Speaker 1: let's start rounding up people who who participate in Pride events.
Speaker 1: But this, this extends beyond Texas, extends beyond Twitter dot com. Right,
Speaker 1: Obviously these people were just using Twitter to organize, so
Speaker 1: it are already stended out into the real world. But
Speaker 1: it's not it's it's not It's not just Texas either.
Speaker 1: See I think it's A congressional candidate Mark Burns, who
Speaker 1: is a pro Trump pastor, was running for South Carolina
Speaker 1: House district. He called for the execution of LGBTQ and
Speaker 1: trans people by using grooming rhetoric, and then he laid
Speaker 1: out exactly how executions could legally be done. So this
Speaker 1: type of like state enforced a genocide. Let's let's play this.
Speaker 1: Let's play clip. The lgbt transgender grooming our children's minds
Speaker 1: is a national security threat because it is ultimately the
Speaker 1: zigon to destabilize the republic we called the United States
Speaker 1: of America. That's why when I'm elected, I don't want
Speaker 1: to just vote. I want to start holding people accountable
Speaker 1: for treason to the Constitution. I am going to push
Speaker 1: to reenact WHUAC. WHOAC is the House of an American
Speaker 1: Activities Committee. It was a real committee that was formulated
Speaker 1: back in the fifties, and it's a committee that we
Speaker 1: should re enact that starts holding these people accountable for treason.
Speaker 1: You need to hold people for treason, start having some
Speaker 1: public hearings, and start executing people who are found guilty
Speaker 1: for their treasonous acts against the Constitution of the United
Speaker 1: States of America, just like they did back in seventeen
Speaker 1: seventy six. You know what, South Carolina, this is our guy.
Speaker 1: It was an amazing the way he misspoken called it
Speaker 1: the House off on American Activities. It's like a fun place.
Speaker 1: So that's not ideal, is it? Of that kind of stuck. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was really out there. He's yeah, kid advocating. It's
Speaker 1: just it's just it's mainstream. It's trying. They're trying to
Speaker 1: mainstream the political ability to advocate genocide, right, and some
Speaker 1: of them it's not some of them, it's not fully
Speaker 1: catching on yet. Right, It's we're on the on ramp
Speaker 1: to this um. The South Carolina pastor was defeated by
Speaker 1: the incumbent Representative William Timmins in the GOP primary for
Speaker 1: the state's fourth congressional district. But Pastor Mark Burne's still
Speaker 1: received of the vote, So that's still a lot of people.
Speaker 1: That's still a lot of people voting for that, and
Speaker 1: that number, I don't think it's gonna shrink. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: like and it's also it's also worth doing that, like
Speaker 1: everyone loses him, Like it is so unbelievably hard to
Speaker 1: beat an incumbent in Yeah, i'mory, Like it's just it's yeah,
Speaker 1: so like even even if he was just a normal
Speaker 1: guy with like regular politics, you would have lost the election.
Speaker 1: So still, yeah, it's not actually a referendum on his popularity,
Speaker 1: like the popularity of what you're saying, it's percent of
Speaker 1: the vote. Yeah, it's worth noting that. Like even here
Speaker 1: in southern California, right where it's supposedly like very liberal,
Speaker 1: we had a candidate for sheriff's office who is that
Speaker 1: was a deputy city attorney and was endorsed by the
Speaker 1: Union Tribune just openly spewing like transphobic groom of stuff
Speaker 1: yeah a public meetings and getting endorsed by the local newspaper.
Speaker 1: They were rescinded their endorsement later. But this isn't just
Speaker 1: like a red state thing. If people think that that
Speaker 1: is that No, that's obviously there'd be a lot more
Speaker 1: common the people who run for sheriff, who generally tend
Speaker 1: to be more conservative because they're running for sheriff. Yea true.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, let's let's have an add break and
Speaker 1: then we'll come back to talk about Wait, talk about
Speaker 1: Roe v. Wade and the attack on future rights, including
Speaker 1: the ability to have same sex relationships. Oh wow, what
Speaker 1: a fun time we have today. All right, we are
Speaker 1: we are back. So after the Supreme Court overturned a rov.
Speaker 1: Wade last month, there was an immediate push for anti gain,
Speaker 1: anti trans legal challenges using the same legal logic against
Speaker 1: the right to privacy based off of the the traditions
Speaker 1: deeply rooted in our nation's history quote unquote. So this
Speaker 1: was like undoubtedly gonna happen, right, we've been We've been
Speaker 1: proposing that this was a possibility for a while, but
Speaker 1: it was definitely made worse by Justice Clarence Thomas front
Speaker 1: of the Pod, who argued in a concurring opinion that
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court should quote reconsider its past rulings quodifying
Speaker 1: rights such as the right to use contraception, the right
Speaker 1: to have a same sex relationship, and same sex marriage.
Speaker 1: Invoking Griswold, Lawrence and Oberfeld, three cases having to do
Speaker 1: with americans fundamental right to privacy, due process, and equal protection,
Speaker 1: Thomas wrote, quote, we have a duty to correct the
Speaker 1: error regarding these established in those precedents, which pretty grim,
Speaker 1: pretty grim framing there, because that's a bad sign um,
Speaker 1: and we are already seeing stuff like this in effect. Actually,
Speaker 1: we don't need to wait for the Supreme Court to
Speaker 1: make rulings states that are starting to do this exact thing. Uh.
Speaker 1: In an ongoing Alabama lawsuit that cites dabs overturning Roe v.
Speaker 1: Wade about medically detransitioning all trans teenagers, there is this
Speaker 1: deeply threatening turn of phrase quote, no one adult or
Speaker 1: child has the right to transitioning treatments not deeply rooted
Speaker 1: in our nation's history and tradition. Ha ha, interesting how
Speaker 1: they put adult or child there? Isn't that isn't that intriguing?
Speaker 1: And it's also fun and how the deeply red our
Speaker 1: nation's history thing is now just sort of like here
Speaker 1: here is the word that you say to let you
Speaker 1: do fascism, And it's like oh, hey, do you know
Speaker 1: what it is deeply rooted in our in our nation's
Speaker 1: uh traditional history, shooting congressman. This is the thing that
Speaker 1: has been done many times, like I mean again, like
Speaker 1: like this, it's like like this is this is the
Speaker 1: whole like this whole thing. It's just like it's it's
Speaker 1: so the whole thing is it's so incredibly sort of
Speaker 1: nakedly transparent and cynical and like this is you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's a centerd fascist thing, right. We're like we're
Speaker 1: going to create some sort of mythical past and then
Speaker 1: we're gonna like resurrect whatever fucking things existed back then.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh, hey, what actually existed back then? I
Speaker 1: don't know. People try to kill the government all the time.
Speaker 1: They're really they're really playing from like the lower Keith
Speaker 1: t traditionalist framework here. Um, They're they're doing all the
Speaker 1: bits we thought they would do. It's not great. Uh.
Speaker 1: Late last month, during the end of Pride, Texas Republican
Speaker 1: Party unveiled it's updated official position on lgbt Q issues,
Speaker 1: definding homosexuality as quote an abnormal lifestyle choice unquote and
Speaker 1: also opposing quote all efforts to validate transgender identity. The
Speaker 1: party's new official stance on lgbt Q issues wasn't veiled
Speaker 1: during Pride Month and as advocates fight against record number
Speaker 1: of anti lgbt Q bills introduced in states across the
Speaker 1: country this year, more than three hundred and forty bills,
Speaker 1: according to the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest lgbt
Speaker 1: Q advocacy group on the legal front. Thousands of Republican
Speaker 1: activists met at the party's biennial convention in Houston in
Speaker 1: mid June to agree to the party's platform on a
Speaker 1: range of issues, including the rejection of the election results
Speaker 1: and a call to a repeal the nineteen Voting Rights Act,
Speaker 1: which was in acted to prevent discrimination against black voters. Ah,
Speaker 1: this is I would say this is a mask off moment,
Speaker 1: but they've never had the mask on in the first
Speaker 1: People like, that's that's like that that's specific one. That
Speaker 1: is a thing, like like half of the Republican Party's
Speaker 1: platform has been people suing about the Voting Rights Act
Speaker 1: exact exactly. It's not actually a mask off. It's just
Speaker 1: that they're doing it louder than they were doing it before.
Speaker 1: The section titled Homosexuality and Gender issues, UM had the
Speaker 1: party stating that LGBTQ people should have no legal protection
Speaker 1: from discrimination and in fact suggested intent to ensure people's
Speaker 1: ability to do hate speech and hate crimes. Part of
Speaker 1: the forty page resolution reads, quote, homosexuality is an abnormal
Speaker 1: lifestyle choice. We believe there should be no granting of
Speaker 1: special legal entitlements or creation of special status for homosexual behavior,
Speaker 1: regardless of state of origin. And we oppose any criminal
Speaker 1: or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith, conviction,
Speaker 1: or belief in traditional values. Ha. I just I just
Speaker 1: want to put it on the record here that like
Speaker 1: the number of a number of my friends who have
Speaker 1: been attacked like in the last three months is it's
Speaker 1: a lot. I got, I got called I got, I
Speaker 1: got called a faggot for the first time in the
Speaker 1: Straights of Portland a few months ago. It's it's, it's,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's accelerating, it's it's going, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's going. Um. But yeah, I mean, specifically, I think
Speaker 1: a lot of this, the last part of that resolution
Speaker 1: there about you know, opposing any civil penalty is against
Speaker 1: those who oppose homosexuality out of faith. I think that's
Speaker 1: that's probably definitely a referencing Steadfast Baptist Church, the church
Speaker 1: that just opens that openly advocates the genocide of queer people,
Speaker 1: which we've talked about in our in our last City
Speaker 1: of Hate episode. I think I think they're also trying
Speaker 1: to go back to like the whole like cake bullshit thing.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, obviously stuff like that. It's like, it's we honestly,
Speaker 1: we are so past the cake problem now because now
Speaker 1: they just want to know there's murder. They just wanted
Speaker 1: to like mass, they just want to do mass. Gend
Speaker 1: as side, like, I'm so overcakes. Like and in the
Speaker 1: trend of increasing the age barrier of gender affirming healthcare
Speaker 1: into adulthood, the Texas Republicans called for the ban of
Speaker 1: gender affirming healthcare, including the distribution of huberty blockers or
Speaker 1: hormone supressing therapies and the UH and the performance of
Speaker 1: gender affirming surgeries to anyone under the age of twenty one.
Speaker 1: So that is the new Texas Republican official position is
Speaker 1: that these things should be banned UH for under the
Speaker 1: age of one. And that's not a that's not a
Speaker 1: hard cap. They're gonna keep raising that cap as often
Speaker 1: as they can, and as proof, I will offer up
Speaker 1: the past thirty five minutes an episode, like everything we've
Speaker 1: said in the past thirty five minutes is supporting the
Speaker 1: opinion that that cap they wanted to go up. Yeah. Uture.
Speaker 1: They also simultaneously advocate for like heterosexual relationship age of
Speaker 1: consent to just dromp oh yeah, like twelve years old.
Speaker 1: Yeah um. Speaking of speaking of Texas, near the end
Speaker 1: of June, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who sent us
Speaker 1: office home in the celebration of the overturning of Roe v. Wade,
Speaker 1: said that he will defend Texas anti sodomy law. It's
Speaker 1: a Supreme Court revisit's lawrence view Texas. I'm gonna play
Speaker 1: extremely frustrating clip here, here's a fun time. I'm sure
Speaker 1: you read uh Justice Thomas's concurrence where he said that
Speaker 1: there were a number of other of these issues grizz wald,
Speaker 1: uh lawrence and ogofell that he felt needs to be
Speaker 1: looked at again. Obviously, the lawrence case came from Texas.
Speaker 1: That was the what outlawed sodomy? Would you, as Attorney
Speaker 1: general be comfortable defending a law that once again outlawed
Speaker 1: sodomy that questioned Lawrence again, or Griswold, or gay marriage
Speaker 1: that came from the state legislature to put to the test.
Speaker 1: With Justice Thomas said, yeah, I mean, there's all kinds
Speaker 1: of issues here, but certainly the Supreme Court has stepped
Speaker 1: into issues that I don't think there was any constitutional
Speaker 1: provision dealing with. They were legislative issues, and this is
Speaker 1: one of those issues, and there may be more. So
Speaker 1: it would depend on the issue and depending on what
Speaker 1: state law it says at the time, And just just
Speaker 1: for the sake of time here, you wouldn't rule out
Speaker 1: that if the state legislature passed the exact same law
Speaker 1: that that Lawrence overturned on sodomy, you wouldn't have any
Speaker 1: problem then defending that and taking that case back to
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court. Yeah. Look, my job is defend state
Speaker 1: law and I'll continue to do that. That is my
Speaker 1: job into the Constitution, and I'm so First of all,
Speaker 1: in this clip of Kenpacton, he looks like a zombie.
Speaker 1: I don't know what's going on with his face, but
Speaker 1: his ECUs twitching in a way that looks really uncanny.
Speaker 1: He looks like he like, look at look at this
Speaker 1: man's face, Look at what is going on. That's an
Speaker 1: unfortunate pause. No, he looks aet in motion too. It's
Speaker 1: not an unfortunate pause. He just looks. There is something
Speaker 1: going wrong with Ken Paxton. We need you to the
Speaker 1: bottom of this. But also all of that stuff about
Speaker 1: make enforcing laws against sodomy, making gay sex illegal, they
Speaker 1: don't want gay people to find because what they're actually saying, um,
Speaker 1: and if you do, they want to send you to jail. Um.
Speaker 1: So that's something that Ken Paxton wants wants to do
Speaker 1: um wrapped in very flowery language about defending the laws
Speaker 1: on record, that laws that you are enforcing, therefore you're
Speaker 1: making the laws in effect. Um ha. So one one
Speaker 1: aspect of this that I want to touch on again
Speaker 1: before we close out in our in Our City of
Speaker 1: Hate episodes about the Christian fascists in Dallas attacking drag
Speaker 1: shows and Steadfast Baptist Church, and even in some of
Speaker 1: the stuff that we've gone over in this episode, right,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of talk about like government approved extermination um,
Speaker 1: whether that be like for treason, for Unamerican acts, executions
Speaker 1: based off Biblical law, rounding up people for degenerate or
Speaker 1: deviant behavior, arresting doctors for performing gender affirming surgeries. There's
Speaker 1: there's a lot of like talk around, like the government's
Speaker 1: ability to legally gen side people. Um. But the other
Speaker 1: aspect of this is like the vigilante justice angle of
Speaker 1: people wanting to just do physical violence themselves. And there's
Speaker 1: a way that these two things can intersect in a
Speaker 1: really interesting way. I'm gonna play one one last clip here.
Speaker 1: You know some teachers pushing X values on your third grader.
Speaker 1: Why aren't you going to thrash the teacher talk to
Speaker 1: an orongal person's kids about sex in kindergarten? You get
Speaker 1: beaten up. You should be beaten up. Please. If I
Speaker 1: was a parent and my fifth grade daughter had had
Speaker 1: to sleep and shower in some kind of cabin at
Speaker 1: some summer camp that I paid money to send my
Speaker 1: child to, and there was a man calling himself a
Speaker 1: woman sleeping in her cabin, my husband would have beat
Speaker 1: him into the ground. Where are the men actually standing
Speaker 1: up against these men who think they are women that
Speaker 1: are trying to compete in these females. Sports shouldn't put
Speaker 1: up with it anymore. You need to intervene. You need
Speaker 1: to show up to the sporting like this is not happening. Actually,
Speaker 1: there is almost nothing that can be done. Uh that
Speaker 1: is uh, that is over the line to stop that.
Speaker 1: It's disgusting. There was a time in this country of
Speaker 1: just a little more decency where if someone even voiced
Speaker 1: the idea of taking your kid to a drag show
Speaker 1: to be arrested, they are underqualified to have children. They
Speaker 1: should have their children taken away from them because it's
Speaker 1: child abuse. So that's a lot of stuff, but rent
Speaker 1: you know, it fluctuates between talking about people taking this
Speaker 1: into their own hands in a very like obviously like
Speaker 1: misogynistic and transphobic way. Again, it's about like the access
Speaker 1: to you know, protecting access to the feminine body um,
Speaker 1: and then a lot of other stuff around, you know,
Speaker 1: the government arrested people and try it's about it. It's
Speaker 1: a mix between like doing stuffy yourself, you know, in
Speaker 1: a form of like the vigilante um um or you know,
Speaker 1: eventually advocating for the for the government's ability to do this. Now,
Speaker 1: we we've covered a number of incidents of like a
Speaker 1: violence or of things that that we're escalating to the
Speaker 1: point of that right before it stopped. UM. Across you know,
Speaker 1: the Dallas area, we talked about stuff in Boise, Idaho
Speaker 1: with Patriot Front. We talked about the Proud Boys who
Speaker 1: stormed the library outside of San Francisco. UM, I think
Speaker 1: those are in our in our I think I talked
Speaker 1: about most of those across a few of the city
Speaker 1: of haid episode. UM. Then we have uh there's but
Speaker 1: there there is other incidents outside of just those cities. UM.
Speaker 1: In Atlanta, a youth justice group was forced to cancel
Speaker 1: their rally in support of trans rights after an organizer
Speaker 1: received a specific quote vulgar death threat. In Calama, Washington,
Speaker 1: a school was put on lockdown after an anti transit
Speaker 1: student threatened a mass shooting following a broad student walkout
Speaker 1: in support of a trans classmate who had been assaulted. UM.
Speaker 1: People graffited pervs work here on an elementary school in
Speaker 1: Venture County, California, following a local right wing papers story
Speaker 1: about a third grade teacher who affirmed a trans students
Speaker 1: name and pronouns. In the lead up to Pride Month,
Speaker 1: and anti LGBTQ activist named Ethan Schmidt Crockett vowed to
Speaker 1: hunt gay people and trans people and their allies at
Speaker 1: target stores um following the story's decision to celebrate Pride.
Speaker 1: He made the same threat a month before. In June,
Speaker 1: he attended the counter protest of a pro gun control
Speaker 1: March of Our Lives demonstration carrying an a R fifteen.
Speaker 1: In Kiel, Wisconsin, schools are forced to shut down and
Speaker 1: go virtual after bomb threats were made in response to
Speaker 1: the district's investigation of anti trans harassment by three students.
Speaker 1: Something I've been thinking about a lot the past few
Speaker 1: weeks is that even before Roevwade was overturned, multiple states
Speaker 1: enacted laws for like vigilante bounty hunters to do the
Speaker 1: work of the state that the state wasn't legally allowed
Speaker 1: to do yet like directly right, And so they were
Speaker 1: getting regular people to combat and intimidate providers into not
Speaker 1: doing abortion procedures. And we're already seeing an increase in
Speaker 1: physical attacks targeting queer people. And I think many more
Speaker 1: regular people are waiting for the state government's permission to
Speaker 1: do the same thing. We don't need to wait for
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court to say gay sex can be made illegal, right.
Speaker 1: States can already start doing this stuff now. And there's
Speaker 1: already people waiting in the wings, and as soon as
Speaker 1: they get to go ahead, they will jump at this opportunity.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna play one final clip that is pretty pretty grim.
Speaker 1: I just said a man tell me in public that
Speaker 1: he can't wait until he's legally able, until he's legally
Speaker 1: able to hunt me. Now, I had a man in
Speaker 1: public he can't wait until he can legally hunt us down.
Speaker 1: This is not okay. This is not okay. So that
Speaker 1: was a queer person who lives in Oklahoma talking about
Speaker 1: something that happened to them last month. M and I
Speaker 1: try to when I make these episodes, I try to
Speaker 1: not just lay out a whole bunch of bad things
Speaker 1: to be like, here's a problem, all right by everybody,
Speaker 1: like because that sucks, but also I don't know what
Speaker 1: the solution here is, because this sucks. Of The California
Speaker 1: House and Senate just passed bill uh S B one
Speaker 1: oh seven. This bill would provide many protections for families
Speaker 1: fleeing states like Texas and Alabama. It would protect them
Speaker 1: from extradition, from out of state investigations and from out
Speaker 1: of state custody judgments based on providing gender affirming healthcare.
Speaker 1: The bill is currently in review by the California Committee
Speaker 1: on Appropriations, and then it would need to be signed
Speaker 1: by the governor. If your state doesn't have a trans
Speaker 1: sanctuary law on the docket, maybe it's time to ask
Speaker 1: your representative about that. UM, preferably maybe when they're like
Speaker 1: out at dinner or at church. UM. But also like
Speaker 1: even getting to the point where we're making plans to
Speaker 1: flee to other states, when trans people are forced to
Speaker 1: make plans to flee out of country, when you're investigating
Speaker 1: what kind of citizenship you can get based on your
Speaker 1: ancestral family history. Once we're at that point, it's really hard,
Speaker 1: like it's it's and in my discussions with queer friends
Speaker 1: the past few like the past few weeks, we've been
Speaker 1: having more and more conversations about that, more and more
Speaker 1: plans about when things really do fully breakdown, where do
Speaker 1: we go what do we do? Like and it sucks
Speaker 1: because there's so many people who live in states like Oklahoma,
Speaker 1: like Texas right where that's people's homes, that's where that's
Speaker 1: where these queer people are living, and they shouldn't be
Speaker 1: forced to leave like they that that shouldn't happen. And
Speaker 1: we have great folks like the Elm Fork John Brown
Speaker 1: Gun Club, to think, are providing a really good example
Speaker 1: of how queer people can work together to start doing
Speaker 1: community defense your own areas. Uh to say no, this
Speaker 1: is our home too, and we're gonna fucking walk around
Speaker 1: with rifles to defend it if we have to. Um. Obviously,
Speaker 1: not everyone mentally is able to do that, right, but
Speaker 1: there's there's there's other ways to get in, get more
Speaker 1: connected to your local community, to strengthen like queer areas
Speaker 1: inside you know states where these things are happening. The
Speaker 1: other thing I see a lot with queer people that
Speaker 1: makes me really sad is that fighting the state right,
Speaker 1: fighting these types of big homophobic institutions who want to
Speaker 1: kill us, that's hard and scary. We feel so powerless.
Speaker 1: We we want to feel like we have any agency,
Speaker 1: want to feel like we have any power at all,
Speaker 1: because there's so many people with power who are hurting us,
Speaker 1: and it's hard to actually fight back against those. But
Speaker 1: we feel powerless, so we want to feel like we're able.
Speaker 1: So instead we turn on other people who are within
Speaker 1: our own communities because it's easier to attack people who
Speaker 1: are like us. It's it's it's it's easier to to
Speaker 1: to do to do that, right, it still gives you
Speaker 1: a sense of having agency. But they're trying to murder
Speaker 1: us all like personally disagreements on politics or whatever aside,
Speaker 1: Like it would be really nice if we stop just
Speaker 1: doing nonsense fighting with each other and doing dumb like
Speaker 1: click drama, dumb discourse like they're trying to they're trying
Speaker 1: to kill us. Can we not? Can we not do that?
Speaker 1: I know you want to find some way to push
Speaker 1: back on something so you feel like you have an
Speaker 1: ability to do anything. And doing it against the police,
Speaker 1: doing against your state governments, doing it against the Supreme Court,
Speaker 1: that's much harder, right, It's easier to do it against
Speaker 1: you know, a friend of yours or someone who used
Speaker 1: to be friends with that's so much easier. But that's
Speaker 1: not helping in their attempts to just do genocide. So
Speaker 1: I think making plans to get out of where you are,
Speaker 1: if you have to, making plans is necessary. Sometimes I've
Speaker 1: I've thought of this, I've been even me in the
Speaker 1: Pacific Northwest have had have have had many thoughts about that.
Speaker 1: It's also very important to start strengthening your relationships with
Speaker 1: other queer people in your communities and starting to put
Speaker 1: together ways to work with them. UM, to make a
Speaker 1: show for uce and say hey, we're here, We're not
Speaker 1: gonna we're here to stay right now. You can't you
Speaker 1: can't scare us out right now, because there needs to
Speaker 1: be some way to combat it, because these people they're
Speaker 1: trying to do they're trying to be regressive right like there,
Speaker 1: we are already at a point that we progressed far
Speaker 1: enough that there. They are scared of how much progress
Speaker 1: has happened, so they're trying to turn the clock back.
Speaker 1: Our challenge is to keep the change coming and push
Speaker 1: back against these people who are trying to hold on
Speaker 1: to the dead twentieth century. Right. The fear of change
Speaker 1: and the fear of the future is driving their return
Speaker 1: to the asked, we don't need to just run away,
Speaker 1: because we should. We should be winning this fight in
Speaker 1: some ways because we already hold We already hold the
Speaker 1: ground that they want to take away from us. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: bad stuff is coming, but just because bad things happened
Speaker 1: in history doesn't mean they need to happen again, like
Speaker 1: we there is ways to intervene to stop this, UM,
Speaker 1: should you keep your passports renewed? Yes, you obviously should. Um,
Speaker 1: But we don't just need to run away because we
Speaker 1: actually have ground to stand on here. So yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think I think one thing is also important to
Speaker 1: remember is that the people who got us here we're
Speaker 1: facing way way worse solids than we are. Yeah, people
Speaker 1: who had to do this. Yeah, And so like, like
Speaker 1: the job that we have is incredibly intimidating, it is
Speaker 1: also easier than the stuff that has already been done.
Speaker 1: We already we already got to this point facing extremely
Speaker 1: harsh condition and we already got there. Um. I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's just it's always struggling to try to find ways
Speaker 1: to think about this that gives you a little bit
Speaker 1: of like, you know, it's just like it's so easy
Speaker 1: to be a duomer. It's so easy just to say
Speaker 1: we're all funk, we all need to move away. That's
Speaker 1: the simple solution. But there's most simple things are also
Speaker 1: usually incomplete and wrong. So just trying to find other
Speaker 1: ways to think about this problem. Because we don't need
Speaker 1: to tell for people to run away, um, and you
Speaker 1: don't need to tell them they have to fight either. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, people can make their own decisions and offer
Speaker 1: their own resources and start operating in a network that
Speaker 1: helps the survival of all of us and increasingly challenging times.
Speaker 1: And I should also say, like non queer people like,
Speaker 1: look that the defining characteristic at this moment is that
Speaker 1: there is a silent, silent majority that supports crew rights. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if if the the the the the only way
Speaker 1: that we actually lose this is if is if that
Speaker 1: majority does nothing. But if that, if that majority moves,
Speaker 1: if this is people who actually believe in this stuff,
Speaker 1: and if the non queer people who actually believe that
Speaker 1: we should have rights and we should be able to
Speaker 1: live our lives do stuff, we will fucking crush these people.
Speaker 1: They will be remembered as a fucking grain of dust
Speaker 1: in the sand that was crushed by the tide of history.
Speaker 1: And we can do that. We can destroy them. We can,
Speaker 1: we can, we can, we can make it for we
Speaker 1: can make this moment in history a incredibly brief blip
Speaker 1: where people are like, oh, hey, that was wasn't it
Speaker 1: weird when homophobia came back for like three years and
Speaker 1: then it was just gone again. That that that that
Speaker 1: is in our power. We just have to do it yep,
Speaker 1: all right, well, strength and community relations. Stop stop doing
Speaker 1: nonsense in fighting for no good reason because you want
Speaker 1: to feel powerful, put that effort into actually finding the
Speaker 1: people that are trying to hurt you, or put that
Speaker 1: effort into making friends. That does it for us today.
Speaker 1: That was my episode on the increase in queer extermination.
Speaker 1: Is um um Yeah, see you on the other side. Hello,
Speaker 1: and welcome to it could happen here a podcast about
Speaker 1: things that could happen, or, in today's case, are about
Speaker 1: to happen. I want to talk to you today about
Speaker 1: the Friendship Park, which exists between San Diego and Tijuana.
Speaker 1: If you haven't spent time at the border, it's difficult
Speaker 1: to understand how, despite getting bigger and uglier every year,
Speaker 1: it feels at once omnipresent and non existent. Friendship Park
Speaker 1: was always one of the places where the boarder loomed,
Speaker 1: but it never quite managed to beat out the tremendous
Speaker 1: feelings of goodwill you could experience there on a Saturday morning,
Speaker 1: on a piece of sand next to a steel fence
Speaker 1: that demarcates the end of the United States. Boarders exist
Speaker 1: to control us, not to protect us, and it is
Speaker 1: never more apparent than it was at Friendship Park, where
Speaker 1: you could watch grandparents meeting grandkids, dreamers checking in with
Speaker 1: their parents. A Friendship Park, half century old institution that
Speaker 1: allowed family divided by the border to meet across the
Speaker 1: French The borders certainly didn't make anyone feel safer, but
Speaker 1: over time, people who had never set foot on the
Speaker 1: two miles of sand and Imperial Beach that many families
Speaker 1: walked across weekly to be together made laws that would
Speaker 1: make it even harder for those families to be together.
Speaker 1: For decades, the park was the only places mixed immigration
Speaker 1: status families could come together. People flew from across the
Speaker 1: US to meet relatives who are trying to make the
Speaker 1: crossing north to join their friends and loved ones. It
Speaker 1: was an emotional place, but most of the time it
Speaker 1: was a happy place. You could see kids having parties
Speaker 1: on the Mexican side, and sometimes concerts would take place
Speaker 1: with the band split between two countries, with playing one
Speaker 1: tune on the Tijuana side, the fences covered in murals.
Speaker 1: At moments it felt like a small victory over the
Speaker 1: pointless cruelty that happens here on a daily basis. The
Speaker 1: park itself was opened by pat Nixon in At the time,
Speaker 1: she said, I hope there won't be a fence here
Speaker 1: too long. Since then, the US government has built a
Speaker 1: secure fence in the nineteen nineties under Bill Clinton, then
Speaker 1: are supposedly more secure fence following nine eleven. Then it
Speaker 1: built the secondary wall. In two thousand nine, gate was
Speaker 1: installed to allow people to enter at certain times on
Speaker 1: weekends and meet their families, separated by just one barrier.
Speaker 1: Now there are plans to replace that secondary war by
Speaker 1: building a thirty ft wall under the pretense that the
Speaker 1: current structure is unsound. This new wall made it a
Speaker 1: Trump design, but built under Biden's instruction, will not have
Speaker 1: a gate, and the last place in the country that
Speaker 1: families could touch and heal will be gone forever. Customs
Speaker 1: and Border Protection blocked access to Friendship Park in February.
Speaker 1: Have you reigned? That year fourth State officials to temporarily
Speaker 1: closed border Field State Park, the larger park in which
Speaker 1: Friendship Path is nestled. Since then, Border patrol has not
Speaker 1: opened the gate that lets people unite briefly with their families,
Speaker 1: they claim, and influx of migrants has prevented them from
Speaker 1: having the staffing required to open the park, but on
Speaker 1: weekends agents are posted up right by where the park
Speaker 1: gate is anyway, in case people try and make the
Speaker 1: crossing without permission in order to see the families that
Speaker 1: many of them have been separated from for over two years.
Speaker 1: Throughout those two years, I've crossed the Tijuana and to
Speaker 1: report on the growing number of people come around the
Speaker 1: world from Haiti, from Central and South America, or Ethiopia,
Speaker 1: and recently Ukraine, to name but a few countries. Despite
Speaker 1: the heartbreaking stories of danger, fear and loss, and separation
Speaker 1: from the people they love, they haven't been able to
Speaker 1: file asylum claims due to the Trump administration's spurious use
Speaker 1: of public health laws to severely and illegally limit asylum.
Speaker 1: I don't have time here to explain the entirety of
Speaker 1: the Migrant Protection Protocol and Title forty two, and I
Speaker 1: don't really want to either, because the justification behind them
Speaker 1: isn't what's important. The cruelty they manifest is what's important.
Speaker 1: Joe Biden, who came to office promising a kind of approach,
Speaker 1: has defended some of these policies in court with his
Speaker 1: Department of Justice, and a particular cruelty of Title forty two,
Speaker 1: which allowed authorities to expel migrants who arrived at uth
Speaker 1: Land borders, has persisted despite Biden's recent change of heart,
Speaker 1: because several states managed to sue successfully to keep it
Speaker 1: in place. In the midst of all this, more and
Speaker 1: more people have been separated by the border. Now the
Speaker 1: Biden administration is looking to permanently close the wantedtle island
Speaker 1: of Hope that remained on a beach at the end
Speaker 1: of America. Obviously, a park with a massive fence doesn't
Speaker 1: solve a broken system or make the cruelty any less cruel.
Speaker 1: But it was a place for healing and kindness and
Speaker 1: love and families, and now that place, too is under threat.
Speaker 1: I cut up with Robert Vard, friends of Friendship Park,
Speaker 1: to talk about the park, the threats to it, and
Speaker 1: what you can do to help. Robert, would you like
Speaker 1: to start off just by introducing yourself and explaining sort
Speaker 1: of where you fit in this uh, in the Friendship
Speaker 1: Park world and in the world of the border more generally. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: my name was Robert. We're in a part of the
Speaker 1: friends or friendship or leadership group. And you know the
Speaker 1: reason I'm so involved with Friendship parking Bay Friendship Piker
Speaker 1: so important to me, uh is because I was actually
Speaker 1: one of those uh family members uh that at one
Speaker 1: point in my life I was deported and the only
Speaker 1: way that I was able to see some of my
Speaker 1: family um was through the border wall there at Friendship Park.
Speaker 1: In particular my son, who is active duty military, and
Speaker 1: because of the military status, um, you know, I was
Speaker 1: not able to come across the border, or it was
Speaker 1: very difficult for him to secure authorization from his command
Speaker 1: uh to be able to cross the border, and therefore
Speaker 1: the only type of visit um that I could have
Speaker 1: with my son and my my granddaughters was through that
Speaker 1: border wall. So firsthand I understood very well, uh the
Speaker 1: importance of allowing on the weekends, uh at least for
Speaker 1: you know, a few hours on the weekend, that opportunity
Speaker 1: for families to uh to be able to uh to
Speaker 1: meet there at Friendship Park. Yeah. So perhaps we should
Speaker 1: explain for people who aren't here in San Diego what
Speaker 1: the what Friendship Park is, right, or perhaps what it
Speaker 1: was in say before it was shot absolutely uh back
Speaker 1: prior to COVID. Friendship Park is a by national park
Speaker 1: separated by a border while actually by two border walls
Speaker 1: on the southwestern tip of the United States bordering Mexico.
Speaker 1: It's a border between Imperial Beach and Tijuana Beach. And
Speaker 1: the Friendship Park is actually a strip of land inside
Speaker 1: Borderfield State Park. And that strip of land is in
Speaker 1: between UM two border walls boarder fences, if you if
Speaker 1: you say so, UM, and that part is considered to
Speaker 1: US friendship part, which is the area where UH person's
Speaker 1: families uh mixed status families from both sides of the
Speaker 1: border with meat. But it wasn't only a place for
Speaker 1: families to meet. There's also a place for people of
Speaker 1: good nature of the United States and Mexico to be
Speaker 1: able to meet and UH and also extend their friendship
Speaker 1: between the two countries and the two communities. UH. You know,
Speaker 1: back up fifty almost fifty one years ago. This is
Speaker 1: the area that then First Lady pat Nixon UM actually
Speaker 1: inaugurated as International Friendship Park and actually went as far
Speaker 1: as cutting a part wire or having the Secret Service
Speaker 1: at the barbed wire there at the park so she
Speaker 1: could reach across to the Mexico side and hug the
Speaker 1: people of Mexico. UH. Because of the the you know,
Speaker 1: the sentiment, the feeling of of that friendship between the
Speaker 1: two countries, and you know her very famous words, uh,
Speaker 1: that she wished that there would no longer be a
Speaker 1: fence here to separate these two great countries. And of
Speaker 1: course we know that fifty one years later, almost fifty
Speaker 1: one years later, Uh, that has taken an opposite course
Speaker 1: of direction, where we now have two border walls. Plans
Speaker 1: are to direct to even higher, uglier eight walls to
Speaker 1: divide our two great countries. Yeah. So perhaps again, I
Speaker 1: think people have a very uh the way that people
Speaker 1: see the border when they don't live on the border
Speaker 1: is very different to the way we see the boarder
Speaker 1: when we live on the border, right, And I think
Speaker 1: part of that is in this understanding of walls and
Speaker 1: fences and barriers and the various things which we have
Speaker 1: already along the border. Right. So, um, maybe you could
Speaker 1: give us a little sort of potted history of the
Speaker 1: different Uh. I think you're right there secure fences right
Speaker 1: that were built through the Friendship Park and across the
Speaker 1: sort of San Diego Tijuana area. Right. Well, Uh, you know, again,
Speaker 1: for the longest time, the only fence that used to
Speaker 1: separate the two countries was that that strand of barb
Speaker 1: wire UH. However, after Operation that Gatekeeper nine eleven UM,
Speaker 1: it was decided to to build the sturdier fence and
Speaker 1: then in two thousand and eleven the secondary fence UH
Speaker 1: was erected and at that time the threat of the
Speaker 1: being closed again because of the advocacy of friends or
Speaker 1: Friendship part UM, it was negoty negotiated with with Order
Speaker 1: Patrol UH that the the park would continue to remain
Speaker 1: open with a limited access of at that time persons
Speaker 1: UM at a time on Saturdays and Sundays from ten
Speaker 1: o'clock in the morning to two o'clock in the afternoon. UH.
Speaker 1: That second wall was erected when the federal government um
Speaker 1: UH claimed eminent domain from the state of California and
Speaker 1: acquired that piece of land UH which is UH now
Speaker 1: considered the enforcement area and to us UH is the
Speaker 1: area that were better known as Friendship Part right, and
Speaker 1: so UM, what's see, there's a threat to the park now, right,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a new threat, and I think people
Speaker 1: UH again it might not have realized that we're continuing
Speaker 1: to build border wall, border barrier order DIKE. It's sometimes
Speaker 1: called UH depending on which part of the country you're in.
Speaker 1: But can you explain how, despite Joe Biden having signed
Speaker 1: this executive order saying what he claims saying not one
Speaker 1: more mile of wall, how are we still having this
Speaker 1: threat of building a bigger, uglier wall, right, And you know,
Speaker 1: I think that's uh, that's precisely the question, Uh that
Speaker 1: French or Friendship park paracity that why is it that Uh?
Speaker 1: If President Biden has stated that he would not build
Speaker 1: one more intro Trump's border wall, all of a sudden
Speaker 1: now has decided uh to finish the construction of Trump's border, Well,
Speaker 1: it's a question that that that we all ask, uh.
Speaker 1: And there's part of the the petition that we have
Speaker 1: reached out to uh Border Patrol as to the inclusion
Speaker 1: of the public and in those plans on continuing the
Speaker 1: replacement of the that while with thirty foot fallered fencing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that thirty footballered fencing, that's what people will be
Speaker 1: familiar with as the Trump wool, right, That is correct,
Speaker 1: something that you know, the fenishing that exists right now. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's there. And I guess even though
Speaker 1: we we may not like what it is and what
Speaker 1: it represents. Um, you know, but it is there. But
Speaker 1: now to go even further and further desecrat our part
Speaker 1: with two thirty foot walled style defenses just completely uh
Speaker 1: obstructs the the aesthetics of the park, desgrades our part.
Speaker 1: Yeah and so yeah, with this sort of further threat
Speaker 1: to the park cluoming you touched on it earlier, but
Speaker 1: I'd like to go back to like what the park means,
Speaker 1: especially to families who are separated by the border right
Speaker 1: and can't cross to see each other. Oh absolutely, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, on on when the part was open on
Speaker 1: on a weekly on a weekend basis. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: we would have families, uh you know, for example, grandmothers
Speaker 1: that had never met their their grandchildren, you know, meet
Speaker 1: their grandchildren for the first time route across that border wall.
Speaker 1: You know, mothers that hadn't seen their their kids in
Speaker 1: twenty thirty years. Uh, you know, the joy of you know,
Speaker 1: of being able to at least see them across that
Speaker 1: border all and just you know, a couple inches away
Speaker 1: from them. And even though you know, nothing could pass
Speaker 1: through through that barrier. Um. The only thing that was
Speaker 1: able to pass through the um the orifice there on
Speaker 1: the wall or the fencing was the tip of your finger,
Speaker 1: which is why uh we kind of uh uh created
Speaker 1: what we call the peak kids because that's the only
Speaker 1: thing that would reach across and that's the only way
Speaker 1: we would be able to hug and kiss our loved
Speaker 1: ones on the other side of the border. UM very significant.
Speaker 1: And you know something that uh that we hope more
Speaker 1: people would understand is that you know, by heavy the
Speaker 1: part open and families allowed to be able to visit
Speaker 1: across that fence, it would allow people, even though it's
Speaker 1: not the best scenario, but at least it would give people.
Speaker 1: It would give families the opportunity to remain being a family,
Speaker 1: to have a little bit of contract with their loved ones.
Speaker 1: Something very important. We keep hearing about reasons for you know,
Speaker 1: a border walls and more uh check h TEG and
Speaker 1: and security and so forth, because incursions, Well, Todd, this
Speaker 1: is one of the reasons why, uh, you know, we
Speaker 1: have more incursions because people get desperate from losing contact
Speaker 1: with their loved ones that they're willing to risk their
Speaker 1: own life to be able to reach their loved ones.
Speaker 1: That's why you have increase in people trying to swim
Speaker 1: across the border. Wall. That's why you have people reaching
Speaker 1: out to further points in the desert trying to reach
Speaker 1: their loved ones. That's why you have people climbing, uh,
Speaker 1: some of these thirty foot walls and falling and uh
Speaker 1: uh you know, bravely injuring themselves out because you get
Speaker 1: to the point that your family is everything in your
Speaker 1: life and you're willing to risk your life to reach
Speaker 1: that family. When uh order uh, when Friendship Part was open, Uh,
Speaker 1: we had a lot of conversations with a lot of
Speaker 1: people that came to the part to visit their families,
Speaker 1: and in speaking to them, uh, they would tell you that,
Speaker 1: you know, being able to see their their families, their
Speaker 1: loved ones and sharing those moments together with very comforting
Speaker 1: and bettery energizing and motivating to continue to fight to
Speaker 1: search for a legal opportunity to be being able to
Speaker 1: reunite what their loved ones. Yeah, and I think we
Speaker 1: should point out that, like, since since the park has
Speaker 1: been closed, it's not just the park being closed which
Speaker 1: has created like a hostile environment for people seeking asylum
Speaker 1: or seeking to reunite with their family in the United States,
Speaker 1: where we've had the Migrant Protection Protocol, which is better
Speaker 1: known as Remain in Mexico, and we've had titled forty two,
Speaker 1: sometimes called catch and Release, both of which do the
Speaker 1: same things that you say, which is increased the amount
Speaker 1: of people who cross in higher risk areas and increase
Speaker 1: in danger to migrants chiefly. So there's this there's this
Speaker 1: perception I think that things changed in January, but they didn't.
Speaker 1: I think for most people, certainly people I've met, trying
Speaker 1: to come to the United States to be safe, they
Speaker 1: still can't. And as you say, they they still can't
Speaker 1: see their families. And perhaps we should also mention that,
Speaker 1: like sometimes we talk about um Friendship Park being binational,
Speaker 1: but it's more than that, right, Like, it's not just
Speaker 1: people from Mexico who come to meet their families of
Speaker 1: Friendship Park. It's it's there's people from all around the
Speaker 1: world who are unable to come to the United States
Speaker 1: but are in on it right right absolutely, And uh,
Speaker 1: you know it's not just you know, families that gather there. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's friendships. It's an opportunity, um for people from any
Speaker 1: part of the world to be able to make a connection,
Speaker 1: make a friend right across that border while without actually
Speaker 1: having to across the border. Uh if for whatever reason
Speaker 1: they may be, they cannot uh come across to the
Speaker 1: Mexico or to the Mexico site. Uh. You know, the
Speaker 1: part is all about friendship. That's what why Uh to
Speaker 1: first Lady Pat Dixon, We're so important the decks and
Speaker 1: nation of the part in consideration of the great friendship
Speaker 1: that existed and has always existed. And and you know what,
Speaker 1: no matter what happens, UH, that is going to continue
Speaker 1: because uh, in particular San Diego and Tijuana, we really
Speaker 1: want to be unity. Um. There's a tremendous population in
Speaker 1: San Diego that have relatives in Defuana and vice versa.
Speaker 1: And it's not only you know, the family, but commerce. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, we're one community and one way or another,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, people are are gonna stay connected. Uh
Speaker 1: always figure out different ways to be able to to
Speaker 1: remain connected and have that friendship. UM. And I think
Speaker 1: part of uh the reason for that is because uh,
Speaker 1: you know a lot of people see that that border
Speaker 1: fence and they see a barrier, but uh, we see
Speaker 1: that much more than that barrier is the barrier in
Speaker 1: our heart and with you know the people of our community.
Speaker 1: That barrier doesn't exist. The only barrier to us is
Speaker 1: that that friends. The barrier in our heart does not
Speaker 1: exist because we have respect for each other and we
Speaker 1: consider ourselves friends and one community on both sides of
Speaker 1: that border will yeah, yeah, definitely. I think it's yeah,
Speaker 1: the border exists a lot more sort of on the ground,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't in the community here. And I think
Speaker 1: so many thousands of people cross every day, it's really
Speaker 1: odd to have it presented as this hard, impenetrable thing.
Speaker 1: And then it's also just an annoyance and the reason
Speaker 1: that we set in our cars for hours trying to
Speaker 1: cross north. I wonder if we can talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about Because there's a Friendship Park, and then there's
Speaker 1: the southern side, right part lamy Stad. What's the official
Speaker 1: sort of set up in Mexico with regards to the park.
Speaker 1: It's a little different from the US, right, Uh yeah, well,
Speaker 1: you know, the big difference on the Mexico side is,
Speaker 1: like our pastor John Fantasy says, on the Mexico side
Speaker 1: is one big party, you know, one one big uh
Speaker 1: friendly happy atmosphere, just like what you would expect to
Speaker 1: find in any part where families gather on on the
Speaker 1: weekend and now you know during summer vacation even during
Speaker 1: the week UH, you know, a bustling UH beach city
Speaker 1: with a magnificent friendly part, family oriented UH, family friendly
Speaker 1: part where where people go to enjoy a a beautiful part. Um. Unfortunately, UH,
Speaker 1: our our friends on the U S side, I cannot
Speaker 1: enjoy the part as uh as much as UH our
Speaker 1: friends on the Mexico side do because of these limitations
Speaker 1: on the part. Yeah, it's it's a shame. Like you said,
Speaker 1: it's very contrasting like the U. S side, it's kind
Speaker 1: of difficult to get to and it's only open and
Speaker 1: set now is It's what it's not open at all
Speaker 1: post and we should explain that, right. So it was
Speaker 1: closed in UH for COVID and then if I understand
Speaker 1: right following that it remained close because border patrol were understaffed.
Speaker 1: They claim, right, that is where we have been told
Speaker 1: that Friends of Friendship part originally that it was close
Speaker 1: because of COVID UH, and the understanding was that UH
Speaker 1: when the COVID situation UH was over, then that their
Speaker 1: plan was to reopen Friendship Part. However, now we're being
Speaker 1: told that because of a lack of personnel that they're
Speaker 1: not able to staff it accordingly to be able to
Speaker 1: open it. Uh. You know you judged a little bit
Speaker 1: earlier on the MPP program. Uh. You know, if there
Speaker 1: has been increased in incursions into the US, a lot
Speaker 1: of it has to do with the asylum process UH
Speaker 1: that has been halted for so many for the last
Speaker 1: couple of years. That uh, you know, forces people in
Speaker 1: desperation uh to take their life at risk and try
Speaker 1: to gain entry into the US. You know, UH, it's
Speaker 1: not that difficult to understand if if you're living in
Speaker 1: a country where crime and violence is widespread, and you
Speaker 1: have a choice whether you leave your country and travel
Speaker 1: three or four thousand miles to reach some kind of safety, uh,
Speaker 1: to protect the life of your of your loved ones,
Speaker 1: of your family. UH. You know, you're you're going to
Speaker 1: You're gonna if you risk that, You're gonna you're gonna
Speaker 1: risk you know, your life trying to get across it
Speaker 1: and protect your family. And if the only way you
Speaker 1: can do it is by jumping over that fence or
Speaker 1: streaming around that ocean, uh, you know, that's what we've
Speaker 1: seen happening, and a lot of that has got to
Speaker 1: do with uh the asylum process. Uh that is been
Speaker 1: shut down and continues to be shut down. Um, people
Speaker 1: are gonna continue to try to to to save their
Speaker 1: life and their life and their their family. Uh. That's
Speaker 1: why we're hoping that, um the asylum process can be
Speaker 1: reinstated as an international law requires calls for it. Uh
Speaker 1: and UH that would would definitely uh show a decrease.
Speaker 1: And now in incursions, um again you know a lot
Speaker 1: of these incursions, uh are people trying to reach safety
Speaker 1: for themselves, their in their loved ones. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: been a very difficult situation in Tijuana for a lot
Speaker 1: of people, a lot of people who have arrived since
Speaker 1: MPP started. Like for a while people were camping at
Speaker 1: the at the at the border crossing right but in
Speaker 1: town like a head west they got cleared. Yeah. It's
Speaker 1: it's also sort of forcing the all these shelters and
Speaker 1: nonprofits in Tijuana to saddle the burden, which that they
Speaker 1: do a very good job with largely. But this you know,
Speaker 1: with this massive, richest country on the on Earth, and
Speaker 1: we just could have should have shutting the door at
Speaker 1: a minute and saying like you're not welcome, right that
Speaker 1: that that is absolutely correct. So I know that you
Speaker 1: you've been doing some events at the Friendship Park, right,
Speaker 1: You've got a concert coming up. Could you tell us
Speaker 1: about that? Yes, absolutely, we have a concert coming up
Speaker 1: about four our fifty first anniversary. And the headliner for
Speaker 1: the concert is a gentleman known as the the father
Speaker 1: of Mexican rock and roll, uh, which begun here here
Speaker 1: I'm saying here would be begun in Tijuana, Mexico, Vier
Speaker 1: Baptist And uh. You know what what is really neat
Speaker 1: is that Javier Batiez was actually the the mentor of
Speaker 1: Carlos Santana. And you know we all love the music
Speaker 1: of Carlos Santana, incredible performers. Uh. Well, he had his
Speaker 1: start with Javier Baptiz. Uh at one point here in Tijuana, Mexico.
Speaker 1: I keep saying here, I'm in San Diego, uh in Tijuana, Mexico.
Speaker 1: And you know, Javier is is an icon of rock
Speaker 1: and roll music, uh and of Tijuana. And you know what, uh,
Speaker 1: what I think is really special about this concert UH
Speaker 1: is speaking to Javier. Um. You know, his ideals are
Speaker 1: very much along the ideals of uh what Friendship part
Speaker 1: is all about. And you know friendship puts a smile
Speaker 1: on people's face. And that was something that that you're
Speaker 1: told me personally, Um, I love to play my music
Speaker 1: because my music puts a smile on people's face, and
Speaker 1: I like to make people happy. That's great, and and
Speaker 1: you know that's the whole idea behind friendship, part to
Speaker 1: make people happy, to have people enjoy a beautiful part,
Speaker 1: enjoy their families, enjoy the friendship across the border that
Speaker 1: we have. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's very sad.
Speaker 1: The whole set of Cannad is very sad, right, like
Speaker 1: the idea that, um, we don't have it. We have
Speaker 1: enough money to build a giant steel barrier, but not
Speaker 1: enough money to open this place up for you know,
Speaker 1: a few hours a week for people to see their
Speaker 1: families and enjoy themselves, enjoy that time to get it
Speaker 1: just seems almost that pointlessly cruel, I guess, and which
Speaker 1: I don't know. Sometimes a lot of the immigration system
Speaker 1: seems pointlessly cruel to me. Yes, yes, absolutely, Uh, when
Speaker 1: you separate a mother from a child, that is cruel.
Speaker 1: When you won't allow a mother and a child to
Speaker 1: even be able to gather for a couple hours a week,
Speaker 1: separate from a barrier. That's very cruel. When you don't
Speaker 1: allow people of good nature, of good will to visit
Speaker 1: even though it is across a barrier, that is not good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's important that people across the country like obviously,
Speaker 1: like it can be really difficult to care about everything, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it's it's a pretty difficult time, and with Supreme Court
Speaker 1: decisions and the seemingly sort of NonStop mass shootings, it's
Speaker 1: a difficult time for everyone, I think. But like, um,
Speaker 1: I think it's important that people realize that the border
Speaker 1: is where a lot of these policies get tried for
Speaker 1: the first time. Right, these these things which like if
Speaker 1: we look at the way that like privacy of people
Speaker 1: living on the board has been eroded for a very
Speaker 1: long time, and that's happening to other people. Happened, right,
Speaker 1: It was a border patrol drone that was flying over
Speaker 1: Minneapolis during the protests. And so if people want to
Speaker 1: push back and to show solidarity and support, how can
Speaker 1: they support the park and how maybe can they support
Speaker 1: the people who are stuck in in Tijuana and want
Speaker 1: to cross but are allowed to cross because of of
Speaker 1: mp P or Title forty two or restrictive asylum sort
Speaker 1: of legislation. Well, you know we're asking people to do it. Well, uh,
Speaker 1: you know you're in the southern California area. UM, you
Speaker 1: know rain or shine. Uh, we go ahead and continue
Speaker 1: having events that Friendship Park on the U S side,
Speaker 1: like our bike rides, our Native Flora workshops, our Border
Speaker 1: Church on on Sundays at one thirty in the afternoon. UM,
Speaker 1: we invite people to come and join us. Uh, come
Speaker 1: and join us on a bike ride, come and join
Speaker 1: us on border church and show your your support for
Speaker 1: the need uh to continue uh the work that had
Speaker 1: been done for so many years. That friendship part in
Speaker 1: some port of our by national families and our by
Speaker 1: national community. Also very important. Contact your your congressman, contact
Speaker 1: your your senator, and if you're in California, of course
Speaker 1: your your California senators. UH. Assembly persons. UM. We need
Speaker 1: to urge them to uh uh to advocate for us
Speaker 1: before Homeland Security, UM, before the Secretary of Homeland Security,
Speaker 1: so they may understand the importance of the Friendship Park
Speaker 1: offers not only to the families, but to to our communities.
Speaker 1: You can secure a border a lot better through friendship
Speaker 1: then through Uh, you know border walls that at a
Speaker 1: given moment can be breached. Uh as we have seen
Speaker 1: they have occurred. Um, the strongest security that anybody can
Speaker 1: ever have is a good, strong relationship on both sides
Speaker 1: of the border. Yeah. I think that's that's that's very
Speaker 1: well well said. And so if people want to come
Speaker 1: to Friendship Park, can you just explain how they would
Speaker 1: get to one of these events and where they have
Speaker 1: to go? Absolutely? Uh, but I would recommend is follow
Speaker 1: us on We have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram accounts Friendship Part
Speaker 1: and also saw our website friendship part dot org where
Speaker 1: we have information on all the different events on our border.
Speaker 1: Church on this way, you can join us uh on
Speaker 1: on the U side, or do you want to come
Speaker 1: to the Mexico side. Uh is wide open. You can.
Speaker 1: You can go directly right to the monument area where
Speaker 1: you can enjoy this, uh this great beautiful monument to
Speaker 1: commemorate out uh the demarcation of the of the of
Speaker 1: the two countries. You know, you can you can enjoy
Speaker 1: it either either way. But we we do like uh
Speaker 1: and we stress people that come out and join us
Speaker 1: on the U s side. Uh, so that uh, you
Speaker 1: know we're not forgotten, So that there's a beautiful piece
Speaker 1: of land um on Borderfield State Park known as Friendship
Speaker 1: part uh is not forgotten. And not only that, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: enjoy the beauty of of of the park. We have
Speaker 1: a beautiful park their Borderfield State Park uh adjacent to
Speaker 1: Friendship part Um, something that very a few people are
Speaker 1: being taken advantage of. Lately, We've had quite a few
Speaker 1: more visitors out there, horseback riding, bicyclinge uh, a few
Speaker 1: families out uh, you know, taking gift in the ocean. Uh.
Speaker 1: But this is a beautiful pub beach that that we
Speaker 1: have there on the U S side and welcome, you know,
Speaker 1: our our community, We're San Diego to community to come
Speaker 1: and enjoy it as well. And you know, as you
Speaker 1: come and enjoy it, you support our efforts to demonstrate
Speaker 1: the need to keep our part open. Yeah. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that's a very uh. Yeah, it's not hard for
Speaker 1: people to help, and I hope they will. How long
Speaker 1: do we have? Do you think? How long do we
Speaker 1: have before they break ground on this new wall? Right?
Speaker 1: We're not sure how long we have. We were told
Speaker 1: that it was a matter of weeks. Uh. Does that
Speaker 1: mean two weeks, three weeks. It's hard to say, but
Speaker 1: we know that it could happen at any at any time,
Speaker 1: Uh lady, We've observed several uh crews out there doing
Speaker 1: uh surveys and such of the area, so we know
Speaker 1: that it's uh any moment they should be breaking ground,
Speaker 1: and we hope that before that ground breaks that they
Speaker 1: will consider our request and uh you know, uh public
Speaker 1: uh uh for public support, for public input as to
Speaker 1: what the park should look like. Uh you know, give
Speaker 1: that consideration. Uh too. You know, if you're gonna you're
Speaker 1: going to replace walls to make sure that uh you know,
Speaker 1: the that gates are a lotted uh so that these
Speaker 1: visits can continue, because we understand there's no provision at
Speaker 1: this point for any kind of uh of gate for
Speaker 1: uh you know, for person access for people access uh
Speaker 1: into the area. Uh. That of course tells you that
Speaker 1: there's no intention of continuing at one point to open
Speaker 1: the park for the visits. UH. And of course that's
Speaker 1: extremely concerning, yeah, especially for people separated by the border. Okay, UM,
Speaker 1: so just to finish up, can you give us those
Speaker 1: social media's and web addresses again where people can find
Speaker 1: you and help Sure? Absolutely uh. We're website is www.
Speaker 1: Friendship part dot org. Um the Facebook, you can find
Speaker 1: us under friendship Art. You can also find information under
Speaker 1: ordered Church. Great. All right, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: your time. I really appreciate you taking the time to
Speaker 1: talk and it's a busy time for you. You're very welcome.
Speaker 1: Thank you for the opportunity to be here with you today.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes
Speaker 1: every week from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 1: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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