Speaker 1: Cool Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. Last Friday,
Speaker 3: I teamed up with Lance from the Canadian based politics
Speaker 3: show The Serfs to talk about the tragic events of
Speaker 3: last week in tumblr Ridge, British Columbia. On Tuesday, February tenth,
Speaker 3: an eighteen year old named Jesse Van Rutzler killed her
Speaker 3: mother and stepbrother in their home, then took two guns
Speaker 3: and went to tumblr Ridge Secondary School, where she killed
Speaker 3: five students, one teacher, and finally her self. Two other
Speaker 3: kids were critically injured with gunshot wounds but have survived.
Speaker 3: The shooter did attend tumblr Ridge Secondary School years ago,
Speaker 3: but dropped out for the past three to five years.
Speaker 3: It's kind of unclear. Jesse identified as a transgender girl.
Speaker 3: Tumblr Ridge is a very small town with just twenty
Speaker 3: four hundred residents in northeastern British Columbia. This was the
Speaker 3: worst school shooting in Canada since nineteen eighty nine. The
Speaker 3: sequence of events during this incident were very similar to
Speaker 3: the Lelouche shooting in Canada ten years ago, where the
Speaker 3: gunman killed two family members at home before going to
Speaker 3: a school. During our conversation, Lance and I discussed the
Speaker 3: spread of misinformation, how the online writers tried to weaponize
Speaker 3: the deaths of these people for their own political agenda,
Speaker 3: and how the shooter's online activity shows a growing fascination
Speaker 3: with mass shootings this past year. Here's that conversation.
Speaker 4: I'm sure everyone knows that right now in canada's a
Speaker 4: nation in mourning. And I also did probably want to
Speaker 4: start this out by reading the names of the deceased,
Speaker 4: because it's one of the things that the families have
Speaker 4: been asking for. So the victims from the tumbler Ridge
Speaker 4: Secondary School shooting are Abil Wanza who was twelve, Ezekiel Schofield,
Speaker 4: who was thirteen, Kylie Smith who was twelve, Soey Benoit
Speaker 4: who was twelve, Takaria Lampert who was twelve, Shanda avey
Speaker 4: Iguanda Duran who's thirty nine, Emmitt Jacobs who was eleven,
Speaker 4: and Jennifer Jacobs who was thirty nine years old. So
Speaker 4: I guess I'll start with Garrison. How have you been
Speaker 4: processing and or tracking the story since it happened.
Speaker 3: Yeah, pretty horrifying incident that happened last Tuesday. Very soon
Speaker 3: after it happened, there was like right wing narratives trying
Speaker 3: to use the deaths of these children and family members
Speaker 3: for their own political agenda, and I started tracking that
Speaker 3: pretty soon, and then also trying to verify as much
Speaker 3: information about the actual circumstances of the shooting and who
Speaker 3: the shooter was, you know, around that same time. Things
Speaker 3: have gotten pretty clear now a few days later, but
Speaker 3: I mean, it's been a nightmare to sort through all
Speaker 3: this stuff, especially all of like the political opportunism being
Speaker 3: done by a variety of right wing influencers and you know,
Speaker 3: quote unquote news agencies.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I was doing the same thing, like right after the
Speaker 4: event happened. I noticed that there was a lot of
Speaker 4: for people who don't know, right wing online operatives like
Speaker 4: the plub Reporter and Tuno News and cat Canada and
Speaker 4: these are all very popular right wing social media accounts
Speaker 4: on Twitter in Canada or at least based in Canada
Speaker 4: for their origins, but then they usually get retweeted, quote
Speaker 4: tweeted and amplified eventually by the far right in the
Speaker 4: which has a very corrosive effect. And I think but
Speaker 4: like by the time we're talking about this right now,
Speaker 4: I saw that like Donald Trump Junior, the son of
Speaker 4: the presidents of the United States, is doing an entire
Speaker 4: I assume, blowed out of his mind rumble special on
Speaker 4: the shooting just uniquely going after trans people the entire time.
Speaker 5: For a small little.
Speaker 4: Town of what like just over twenty four hundred people,
Speaker 4: it has to be beyond like a shell shock to
Speaker 4: first have to go through something that's horrifying and then
Speaker 4: deal with the international right wing apparatus.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they're going through the motions right like, this
Speaker 3: is not the first time, it won't be the last
Speaker 3: time that they try to do something like this. It's
Speaker 3: not getting as much traction I think as it used to.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of other stuff happening in the States
Speaker 3: around the time. Like news was breaking in the States
Speaker 3: about the shooting that happened, it was Wednesday during Pam
Speaker 3: Bondi's Epstein hearing. So there's been a lot of other
Speaker 3: stuff happening, So I don't think they've gotten as much
Speaker 3: like concentrated attention on this as some of the online
Speaker 3: right has like wanted to, or you know, like the
Speaker 3: Matt Walsh types, lips of tech talk that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: But they're definitely giving it a go. It's gross, right,
Speaker 3: It's it's gross to use the deaths of all these people.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely, not to mention the way the entire thing's
Speaker 4: been framed is abhorrent. I mean, obviously, you know, we're
Speaker 4: speaking from a perspective where we don't want to vilify
Speaker 4: an entire group based on one like, you know, horrifying
Speaker 4: monster's actions kind of thing, right, because that doesn't happen
Speaker 4: in the other direction for cist people. And that's what
Speaker 4: you gotta be quick to point out. But I feel
Speaker 4: like the Matt Walshes and the libs of TikTok have
Speaker 4: and it's a horrifying thing to say, but like they're
Speaker 4: perfect narrative, right. It's it's kind of like a twisted
Speaker 4: way something that're actually quite pleased about.
Speaker 3: It almost seems like, yeah, they make a lot of
Speaker 3: money off this.
Speaker 5: Yes, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: They've profit off of human suffering and they try to
Speaker 3: spread as much of it as possible.
Speaker 4: The first aspect I was trying to look at the
Speaker 4: story from was what it was early, What are the
Speaker 4: families themselves asking for? What does the you know, town
Speaker 4: need long terms of support, that kind of stuff? Can
Speaker 4: you move on from that? And then immediately it was well,
Speaker 4: now there's just an overwhelming, very apparent right wing mechanism
Speaker 4: gearing up, and it's going to be kind of devastating
Speaker 4: for a country like Canada that doesn't really have maybe
Speaker 4: or isn't as used to having the eyes of the
Speaker 4: world from the transphobic, you know, turf side of the internet.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I want to talk a little bit about Jennifer Strang,
Speaker 3: the mother of the shooter. Despite being a self described
Speaker 3: you know, conservative libertarian, Jesse's mother publicly supported her transition
Speaker 3: made posts in supported trans people. In July twenty twenty four,
Speaker 3: she shared a LGBTQ pride graphic reading good people don't
Speaker 3: spend their time harassing marginalized communities and wrote quote as
Speaker 3: a conservative leaning libertarian who lives in the North and
Speaker 3: loves living in a small town. I really hope the
Speaker 3: hate I see online is just bored old people and
Speaker 3: not true hatred. Do better and educate yourself before spewing
Speaker 3: bullshit online makes you look dumb evolve. I normally don't
Speaker 3: say anything. I normally don't go on shit book to
Speaker 3: see the keyboard warriors. And I know I can't control
Speaker 3: or shield my kids from everything, but please, for the
Speaker 3: love of fuck, can you get your shit together so
Speaker 3: we don't have to bring our kids up in a
Speaker 3: world full of hatred. Do you have any idea how
Speaker 3: many kids are killing themselves over this kind of hate?
Speaker 3: Please stop the bullshitunquote. So pretty soon after the shooting,
Speaker 3: based on an early active shooter report describing the shooter
Speaker 3: as a quote unquote female in address with brown hair,
Speaker 3: online right wing accounts started trying to identify who this
Speaker 3: possible shooter was by looking at trans people in the
Speaker 3: area of Tumbler Ridge. They misidentified one person who is
Speaker 3: a relative of this shooter, but put out photographs of
Speaker 3: them claiming that she was the shooter. This person is
Speaker 3: now having to like lock down all of their accounts
Speaker 3: and is scared to go outside do the horrific wave
Speaker 3: of harassment they're facing.
Speaker 5: What is wild about that?
Speaker 4: As the story is, I've seen accounts like the Blood
Speaker 4: Reporter who popularized, you know, publishing that photo, but I
Speaker 4: think Rachel Gilmore is the one who also pointed out
Speaker 4: that there was the misuse of a photo in an
Speaker 4: actual CBC Radio broadcast image thumbnail as well, which is
Speaker 4: also kind of just shocking to hear because these are
Speaker 4: again innocent people who might have targets now put on
Speaker 4: their back because they're being directly identified as some kind
Speaker 4: of a mass shooter or monster. And then in addition
Speaker 4: to that, like now, I'm wondering how much of this
Speaker 4: is going to be something that they're capable of containing,
Speaker 4: especially considering that it's been still proliferated. Like I saw
Speaker 4: an account called bricks News, which I assumed would be
Speaker 4: about bricks, you know, the economic lines between a number
Speaker 4: of different nations, and instead was publishing the false photo
Speaker 4: of again a completely innocent person and sad like I
Speaker 4: think at the time, seventeen thousand likes, you know, hundreds
Speaker 4: of thousands of impressions. It's really dangerous.
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, I mean that's part of the intent here.
Speaker 3: You know, places like kibiforms, Trailblazer a lot of this
Speaker 3: quote unquote early research, and the point is to cast
Speaker 3: as large of it as possible to damage as many
Speaker 3: trans people as they can using horrific events like this.
Speaker 3: The cruelty is part of part of the point, and
Speaker 3: you know, blame gets laid at a you know, a
Speaker 3: combination of trends enabled mental delusion SSR rise and hormones,
Speaker 3: saying that those things are causing the shooting, well before
Speaker 3: we have any evidence to determine what types of medications
Speaker 3: someone could be on who they actually are, or any
Speaker 3: possible motive. One kind of crude thing that I've seen
Speaker 3: a lot is right wing accounts like you know, end wokeness,
Speaker 3: allegedly Jack Posovic saying that you know, the shooter qute
Speaker 3: unquote gunned down thirty five kids to make it seem like,
Speaker 3: you know, massacre of such a such a large magnitude,
Speaker 3: right The number of kids that have been killed and
Speaker 3: other other people as well obviously is like horrific. Thirty
Speaker 3: five people were not shot in this shooting, though there
Speaker 3: was twenty five people with non gunshot related injuries as
Speaker 3: a result of the incident, and that is the number
Speaker 3: that that people are framing as being you know, total
Speaker 3: number of people shaw, which just isn't true. And then
Speaker 3: they also very quickly start sharing you know, unsourced graphs.
Speaker 3: I'm sure you've seen stuff like this, right, saying that
Speaker 3: you know, trans girls make up the highest demographic of
Speaker 3: mass shooters per capita. You see these things go all
Speaker 3: over the place.
Speaker 4: By the world's richest man. He's he's sharing that a
Speaker 4: lot online right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, and this is this has been a
Speaker 3: thing the past three years, right, this is something they've
Speaker 3: been doing well before any any actual incident can be
Speaker 3: even used to create data. They've they've created fake graphs
Speaker 3: that show this. There's factors that get people to you know,
Speaker 3: believe these sorts of things, right. There is certainly a
Speaker 3: selection bias that determines which types of shootings gets like
Speaker 3: a lot of media attention. And the other issue that
Speaker 3: I've talked about a lot in previous shootings is there's
Speaker 3: a lot of different definitions of a mass shooting, you know,
Speaker 3: mass shooting versus a mass killing versus like a school shooting. Right,
Speaker 3: all these are different terms. Even the term school shooting
Speaker 3: can be used to refer to a variety of very
Speaker 3: different incidents revolving around gun violence.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: There could be gang related violence at a school. There
Speaker 3: could be shots fired as an escalation of a physical fight.
Speaker 3: Students bringing guns to school and accidentally firing them, which
Speaker 3: happens more often than what you would think, like as
Speaker 3: someone who just brings the gun in their backpack, not
Speaker 3: intending to do a shooting, but it accidentally fires it
Speaker 3: into school. This happens multiple times a year. There's you
Speaker 3: know shootings there dormitories, right, those get counted as mass
Speaker 3: shootings at like you know, a college dormitory. It's interpersonal violence.
Speaker 3: There's you know, neighborhood shooting set effect, but aren't targeting
Speaker 3: the school like drive by shootings or even something like
Speaker 3: the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which some people have categorized
Speaker 3: as a school shooting because was on a college campus. Right.
Speaker 3: But these are all very different types of violence, right.
Speaker 3: These aren't like you know, intentional you know, mass shooting
Speaker 3: violence where someone who's trying to shoot as many people
Speaker 3: as possible and then usually kill themselves.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: That's that's it's a different thing than a lot of
Speaker 3: these other other things that I mentioned, But they all
Speaker 3: get lumped under this one label of school shooting, and
Speaker 3: all these different you know, data collection criteria could produce
Speaker 3: very different stats. And depending whether you're measuring your injuries
Speaker 3: versus deaths, you know, specific weapons like knives versus guns,
Speaker 3: and how many years are being sampled, or if there's
Speaker 3: connections to other violent activity, there could be very very
Speaker 3: different results in how you categorize, you know, mass killings
Speaker 3: or mass shootings. The Mass Killing Database has six hundred
Speaker 3: and thirty one incidents in the United States since two
Speaker 3: thousand and six, of which about one to three gets
Speaker 3: kind of unclear. One to three are done by people
Speaker 3: who have been reported as transgender, which is an under
Speaker 3: represented ample size. The Violence Project has one transgender mass
Speaker 3: shooter in their database of about one hundred and ninety
Speaker 3: five mass shootings, and according to the Gun Violence Archive,
Speaker 3: which also measures gunshot injuries not just deaths, fewer than
Speaker 3: one in one thousand mass shooters over the past decade
Speaker 3: have been identified as transgender. According to a Gallop poll
Speaker 3: for twenty twenty three, about two percent of gen Z
Speaker 3: identify as transgender, and if you also count like non
Speaker 3: binary people, it brings it up to four percent. But
Speaker 3: you can have all those stats on hand, if that
Speaker 3: doesn't really do very much. Once you're arguing about statistics
Speaker 3: and like semantics of terms, when kids have died, you're
Speaker 3: kind of already starting to lose the emotional battle, right,
Speaker 3: Like I can say all of that, but like that's
Speaker 3: not actually going to be helpful, right, Like fact checking
Speaker 3: doesn't work to dissuade disinformation, And when you're dealing with
Speaker 3: such an emotionally charge incident like kids being murdered, having
Speaker 3: to read off a paragraph like that just doesn't really help.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: Parents just want to know why this is happening and
Speaker 3: what can be un to stop it. And all they
Speaker 3: know is that, you know, since twenty twenty three, there
Speaker 3: has been a series of shootings done by young people
Speaker 3: who either attempted to or did transition genders. Right, That's
Speaker 3: what they know, and they want to know, you know,
Speaker 3: why this is happening and how to stop it.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: One of the things that I've tried to push up against,
Speaker 4: because you are getting a lot of Americans who are
Speaker 4: pushing that narrative right now, is to point out, because
Speaker 4: I've seen people saying, like this epidemic of trans mass
Speaker 4: violence is a scorge and I think they're blending Canada
Speaker 4: in the US into one nation because I was like,
Speaker 4: just to be clear, this is the first mass shooting
Speaker 4: committed by a transperson in Canadian history ever.
Speaker 3: And there's a lot of trans people in British Columbia.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well across the country. I mean it's one of
Speaker 4: those things for him like this, this is not an
Speaker 4: epidemic of which like, oh my god, you have a
Speaker 4: high probability of being hurt by a transperson in your life.
Speaker 4: It couldn't be further from the truth, right, Like the
Speaker 4: stats are still overwhelmingly in the other direction. You're more
Speaker 4: likely to be the victim of physical or sexual violence
Speaker 4: if you're transperson then if you're this person.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, that is another problem here is Yeah, a
Speaker 3: lot of these you know, data collection tools aren't counting
Speaker 3: balancing Canada. These are all stuff based into states. But
Speaker 3: for you know, the culture war, it's not that hard
Speaker 3: to you know, move that border up five hundred miles
Speaker 3: to include things that are happening in Canada in a
Speaker 3: rhetorical sense, for you know, your Matt Walsh's wokenesses, even
Speaker 3: you know your Fox News anchors, right, yeah, this thing
Speaker 3: that people are talking about on the right about this,
Speaker 3: you know, epidemic of trans violence. What this is also
Speaker 3: done is created like a counter reaction from trans influencers
Speaker 3: to whenever something horrible happens like this, to blame these
Speaker 3: other groups like you know nine A or seven six four. Right,
Speaker 3: this has become something that's also now been very consistent.
Speaker 3: You know, there is a kernel of truth in this.
Speaker 3: This is based on a real thing that has happened before,
Speaker 3: but the invocation of this has often you know, expanded
Speaker 3: greatly beyond it's actual Like, can you explain.
Speaker 4: It for people who are completely unfamiliar because I remember,
Speaker 4: like even the year ago, I had just started reading
Speaker 4: up I like, what is what is all this satanic
Speaker 4: cult rituals with participation requirements of self harm and all
Speaker 4: this stuff.
Speaker 3: Like Okay, yeah, you see a lot of people now
Speaker 3: when there's new coverage, you know, a lot of trans
Speaker 3: people who have you know, accounts online, you know, talking
Speaker 3: about how quote unquote satanic nazi pedophiles have groomed another
Speaker 3: vulnerable queer kid into doing a mass shooting. There's a
Speaker 3: viral tweet on semi viral tweet on Twitter right now
Speaker 3: that reads, quote fuck anyone talking about trends and not
Speaker 3: to Adam Waffin, this includes the cops and the media
Speaker 3: like the CBC and BBC unquote. So yeah, what are
Speaker 3: they talking about here? You know, Adam Waffin Satanic Nazi
Speaker 3: pedophile cults. I said, you know nine A seven six
Speaker 3: four right, these are originally you know, Ninea is this
Speaker 3: older group, but as as contemporary Internet lore, it is
Speaker 3: seen as this neo Nazi occultic organization that grooms people
Speaker 3: into sexual exploitation or into doing violence like mass shootings.
Speaker 3: Seven six four is a extortion ring that operated mainly
Speaker 3: on Telegram and Discord, which tried to get kids to
Speaker 3: do self harm produce.
Speaker 5: Black mail room. Since is that true?
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're active across a lot of places, but like
Speaker 3: the organizing hubs were on Discord and Telegram and they
Speaker 3: you know, attempted to get childs a tripbuse material out
Speaker 3: of these kids and then use that to blackmail them
Speaker 3: to get even more material than also encouraging self harm
Speaker 3: and acts of violence. These have been real groups historically.
Speaker 3: They are getting cracked down upon pretty heavily, at least
Speaker 3: in seven six four's case. Oh nine is not really
Speaker 3: a real group anymore. Arguably, but it exists as like lore,
Speaker 3: and there has been no instances of A seven six
Speaker 3: four affiliated people doing public acts of violence. So in
Speaker 3: this case there's been people who have you know, trans
Speaker 3: people online or you know allies who have have said
Speaker 3: that this shooting is another one of these instances where
Speaker 3: these online groups of you know, Nazis and pedophiles have
Speaker 3: you know, groomed someone into doing violence, and they have
Speaker 3: produced some evidence for this. There was a Twitter account
Speaker 3: that allegedly belonged to the shooter that had a profile
Speaker 3: picture of a son and rat on top of a transflag,
Speaker 3: as well as the face of the christ Church shooter.
Speaker 3: This account had posts glorifying white supremacist mass killers and
Speaker 3: promoting the idea of creating a white homeland in the
Speaker 3: Pacific Northwest. This was a Canada based account, but in
Speaker 3: reality this was actually just another Nazis account who changed
Speaker 3: their user name to match that of the Tumblr Ridge shooter.
Speaker 3: And this was an attempt to troll people and just
Speaker 3: spread disinformation, and this even fooled the ADL, whose research
Speaker 3: standards have dropped dramatically the past three years. But a
Speaker 3: few days ago, the ADL put out an article where
Speaker 3: They credited posts made by this Twitter account to the
Speaker 3: tumblr ridg shooter and claimed that a quote unquote preliminary
Speaker 3: investigation showed that the shooter had showed interest in white supremacy.
Speaker 3: But this was not their real account. This was just
Speaker 3: someone who also is a fan of mass shootings like
Speaker 3: the shooter was, as we'll soon discuss, But this was
Speaker 3: someone who was just trying to troll other other you know,
Speaker 3: researchers on Twitter and see how far their disinformation can spread.
Speaker 3: This is the consequence of an organization like the ADEL
Speaker 3: doing preliminary research based on Kiwi of arms posts and
Speaker 3: not actually verifying the information.
Speaker 4: I mean, the fact that I think they're actively pursuing
Speaker 4: Hassan Piker more than Elon Musk is pretty much all
Speaker 4: I need to know in terms of where where they're prioritizing,
Speaker 4: you know, the search for racism.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I can.
Speaker 3: Get into the actual like online footprint of the shooter,
Speaker 3: which we we do have a decent idea of actually.
Speaker 4: Before you get to that, because I think that's what
Speaker 4: everyone is kind of interested in. I just want to
Speaker 4: wrap up that last part, so just to be clear,
Speaker 4: when you were mentioning those groups, you know, seven six four,
Speaker 4: et cetera. There is no actual history of the shooter
Speaker 4: having been into the Nazi the occults that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: Based on their presence, they have not been active in
Speaker 3: like specific seven six four communities or have showed interest
Speaker 3: in like you know, white prea to see neo Nazism
Speaker 3: or you know, the the occult pedophile Nazism of O.
Speaker 3: Nine A. This is not observable in the online for
Speaker 3: print that they have left, which is which is not
Speaker 3: to say the online foot print they have left is
Speaker 3: you know, normal and good. If anything, it does point towards,
Speaker 3: you know, significant factors that are causing kids to do
Speaker 3: shootings like this, and we can trace it to a
Speaker 3: number of shootings that have happened. But the O nine
Speaker 3: A seven six four thing is more so like a
Speaker 3: meme at this point that people similarly deploy the same
Speaker 3: way that you know, the right deploys, you know, this
Speaker 3: epidemic of trans violence. This has to become like a
Speaker 3: counter meme to say that every time a trans person
Speaker 3: does something bad, it's actually the fault of nine A
Speaker 3: seven six.
Speaker 4: Four, right, because there has been incidences in the past
Speaker 4: that can point.
Speaker 3: Towards that, Yeah, there could be there could be suggestions
Speaker 3: in the past, and and certainly when seven six four
Speaker 3: was more active years ago. I mean a lot of
Speaker 3: the kids they were grooming for child sexual abuse material
Speaker 3: were all a lot of queer kits because those kids
Speaker 3: are uniquely vulnerable and are looking for community. But I
Speaker 3: mean that is the majority of kids affected by seven
Speaker 3: six four are people who have been groomed into self
Speaker 3: harm or producing a child techtropies material to circulate among
Speaker 3: like the organizers of these of these groups.
Speaker 4: So it turns out that there isn't really a connection
Speaker 4: in those two directions. You're correct in putting out there.
Speaker 4: There's a counter push like I did the same thing
Speaker 4: with Charlie Kirk, right like I remember when the first
Speaker 4: image of the Charlie Kirk shooter being in a crouper
Speaker 4: hitba the frog style jumper. I was like, oh, this
Speaker 4: has to be a grouper, right like this immediately where
Speaker 4: my brain went because they do have a history of
Speaker 4: targeting that community. So you know, you can understand why
Speaker 4: there's a pushback.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think people feel like they understand ideological
Speaker 3: violence easier, like like violence caused by political ideology, and
Speaker 3: are uncomfortable with the increasing amount of horrific public violence
Speaker 3: that is seemingly linked to no political ideology. It's much
Speaker 3: more like like nihilistic and scattershot, and that's like a
Speaker 3: comfortable it's harder to understand like the causal forces producing
Speaker 3: that rather than just saying, you know, oh, it's another Nazi, right,
Speaker 3: that's easy and at this point sadly easy thing for
Speaker 3: people to understand because of you know, a very high
Speaker 3: number of neo Nazi mass shootings that happened in the
Speaker 3: past ten years. But it is not twenty seventeen anymore,
Speaker 3: and the circumstances that are inducing shootings like this have
Speaker 3: have changed.
Speaker 4: Can you talk about that, because, like you said, it's
Speaker 4: a conversation that people don't want to have. Is it
Speaker 4: because we are uncomfortable with the conversation itself or because
Speaker 4: there's not enough information available yet to truly understand what
Speaker 4: is leading these super online shooters slash nihilistic you know,
Speaker 4: deep in the memes style stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think a mix of both. It is both
Speaker 3: an emerging phenomenon so that people have to observe it
Speaker 3: for a certain amount of time to see the pattern,
Speaker 3: and then also it's it's uncomfortable and it sucks. It
Speaker 3: sucks to be in these places and like and like,
Speaker 3: look at all this stuff, right Like I've been the
Speaker 3: past few days, have been looking at you know, these
Speaker 3: horrible forum posts and reading about all kinds of like
Speaker 3: you know, bad stuff, and it sucks and no one
Speaker 3: wants to do that. So I think it's a mix
Speaker 3: of factors. But uh yeah, I do want to talk
Speaker 3: about that. That's the kind of the I've kind of
Speaker 3: like two sections that get into that, the first one
Speaker 3: based on her actual online footprint, the second one on
Speaker 3: more like you know, basic societal forces. I think is
Speaker 3: getting people to go so far to the social like
Speaker 3: margins that pushes them to places like where the shooter
Speaker 3: hung out online. So in twenty twenty one, Jesse's mom
Speaker 3: shared a link to her kids YouTube channel where quote
Speaker 3: he posts about hunting, self reliance, guns and stuff he
Speaker 3: likes to do on quote. This YouTube account shared the
Speaker 3: user name as Jesse's Reddit account. The earliest posts from
Speaker 3: twenty nineteen were about like roadblocks gaming. Then in twenty
Speaker 3: twenty one, Jesse started posting about firearms and shared a
Speaker 3: photo of her Chinese sks, which is kind of like
Speaker 3: an a case forty seven style gun, which she used
Speaker 3: for hunting. Around twenty twenty three, she started posting about
Speaker 3: quote unquote, starting MTF transitions soon and as well as
Speaker 3: her phobia of needles. The police say that she started
Speaker 3: transitioning before this, but the early syndication we have from
Speaker 3: her online activity plus this around twenty twenty three. On
Speaker 3: other posts on our slash Trends, she asked for advice
Speaker 3: on girl's clothing, what to expect from HRT, and talked
Speaker 3: about body dysmorphia. Her very last gender related post on
Speaker 3: Reddit still refers to herself as pre HRT. Jesse made
Speaker 3: a single post on our slash trans Guns in October
Speaker 3: twenty twenty three, sharing a video of her firing a
Speaker 3: Desert eagle handgun at a shooting range. At this point,
Speaker 3: around like the end of twenty twenty three, almost all
Speaker 3: of her posts switch to being about psychedelic drug abuse,
Speaker 3: asking how to vape or smoke weed without leaving a
Speaker 3: smell in the house, being scammed by an online psychedelic
Speaker 3: seller in Canada, and and asking if you can get
Speaker 3: high off drinking the urine from a drug addict, and
Speaker 3: asked on Reddit if it's safe to do five neo
Speaker 3: DMT alone after she returned from the quote unquote psych ward.
Speaker 3: She was admitted to a psychiatric facility after attempting to
Speaker 3: burn down her home with account of aerosol while on
Speaker 3: three grams of mushrooms. Jesse also said that she was
Speaker 3: diagnosed with ADHD, autism, major depressive disorder, and OCD, and
Speaker 3: it was prescribed a mix of different SSRIs, as well
Speaker 3: as an antipsychotic for sleep. In one comment on one
Speaker 3: of her multiple Reddit posts asking about trying five MEODMT
Speaker 3: after being arrested for arsen she wrote, quote, it is
Speaker 3: a wonder I'm still alive yet I am speaks volumes,
Speaker 3: But how much I've been trying to keep breathing when
Speaker 3: all my effort goes towards keeping alive unquote. Her Reddit
Speaker 3: activity drops off in April of twenty twenty four. This
Speaker 3: could mean that she just stop using Reddit around then,
Speaker 3: or that she has deleted a whole bunch of posts.
Speaker 3: She did scrub some of her online activity prior to
Speaker 3: the shooting.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 3: In the aftermath of the shooting, the police have said
Speaker 3: that they made multiple mental health related visits to the
Speaker 3: shooter's home the past few years and had previously confiscated
Speaker 3: guns from the home, but the owner of the guns
Speaker 3: it's unclear who exactly successfully petitioned for their return, and
Speaker 3: Jesse did have a miner's firearms license, but that expired
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty four. It's unclear if the guns that
Speaker 3: were confiscated with the same ones used in the shooting.
Speaker 3: Jesse has posted a number of different photos of guns,
Speaker 3: and we still don't know which exact ones were used.
Speaker 3: We just know that there was a long gun and
Speaker 3: a handgun recovered. So though the shooters like Reddit activity
Speaker 3: ceases in early twenty twenty four, her online presence moved
Speaker 3: to darker corners of the Internet, which demonstrate a declining
Speaker 3: mental well being and a growing fascination with mass shootings.
Speaker 3: The past year, Jesse was active on an Internet form
Speaker 3: called Watch People Die, which is pretty much what it
Speaker 3: sounds like. It's the website to host footage of real
Speaker 3: life gore.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was like, is that what it sounds like?
Speaker 5: It is?
Speaker 3: Okay, right, you know, like snuff like real gore is
Speaker 3: hosted there and shared, as well as a lot of
Speaker 3: you know, like edits of mass shooter footage of people
Speaker 3: filming themselves doing mass shootings that then circulates This forum
Speaker 3: is is way more of like a social orbit around
Speaker 3: this recent wave of mass shootings than seven six four is.
Speaker 3: And you know, there is there is some crossover, you know,
Speaker 3: there is some seven six for people who are also
Speaker 3: you know, active on this form, people who used to
Speaker 3: be seven and six four, because that group is also
Speaker 3: you know, not really what it used to be, but
Speaker 3: this form is its own thing rather than being linked
Speaker 3: to you know, explicit Nazi groups, you know, the occultic
Speaker 3: O nine A or the child's exploitation rings like seven
Speaker 3: six four. That the shooter is verifiable online footprint suggests
Speaker 3: much more of a nexus of involvement with what I've
Speaker 3: been calling the school shooter fandom. They call it tease
Speaker 3: or the true crime community. And in the past two
Speaker 3: years we've seen an increase in shootings based on this,
Speaker 3: like Neo columnbiner variety Right people doing copied cats of
Speaker 3: other school shootings. The Abundant Life Christian school shooting in
Speaker 3: December twenty twenty four by Columbine caused player Natalie simitha Upnow,
Speaker 3: who the Right falsely labeled as trans. There was also
Speaker 3: the Catholic school shooting in August twenty twenty five by
Speaker 3: Robin Westman, who did at one point attempt gender transition
Speaker 3: but later regretted it and originally planned to attack an
Speaker 3: LGBTQ music venue. Westman was similarly obsessed with mass killers
Speaker 3: and wrote the name of Repnow on one of their rifles.
Speaker 3: Last April, a twenty two year old man in Florida
Speaker 3: was arrested for threatening to commit a mass shooting on Discord.
Speaker 3: The FBI believes that he was in communication with Samantha
Speaker 3: Repnow prior to her shooting, and they both discussed with
Speaker 3: each other plans for their mass killing attacks. In September
Speaker 3: twenty twenty five, a sixteen year old named Desmond Holly
Speaker 3: two kids before killing himself at Evergreen High School in Colorado.
Speaker 3: He also idolized Samantha Rupdown, replicated her selfies, and was
Speaker 3: active on the same forum Watch People Die that rep
Speaker 3: Noow herself was active on, so Jesse was on this form,
Speaker 3: but Jesse also displayed other traits similar of the TCC group.
Speaker 3: Jesse created a mass shooting simulator game on Rodblocks, which
Speaker 3: was set in a mall where you act out a
Speaker 3: shooting and killing people in the mall. I'll talk a
Speaker 3: little bit about this this forum specifically now right like,
Speaker 3: this forum essentially exists to desensitize people to extremely violent
Speaker 3: content that glorifies mass killings. Jesse's very first comment on
Speaker 3: Watch People Die was on a compilation video of mass
Speaker 3: shooter footage, and she wrote quote, I appreciate this post.
Speaker 3: She also commented on another thread of mass shooting footage quote,
Speaker 3: I love these first person perspective type videos. When a
Speaker 3: shooter records his or her own actions, it's always the
Speaker 3: most worrying. Comment is something that you know, if police
Speaker 3: were aware of, should have should have been cause to
Speaker 3: prevent this from happening. Came about five months ago. In
Speaker 3: a thread on Watch People Die about the psychology of
Speaker 3: watching Gore, she wrote quote, I find it addictive. It's
Speaker 3: hard not to watch violent content. I'm just drawn to it.
Speaker 3: I don't think much of it, though to say it
Speaker 3: doesn't affect me is likely naive. I'm sure maybe subconsciously
Speaker 3: it does. It just doesn't feel like a big deal.
Speaker 3: I'm drawn to substances too. It's easy to get high
Speaker 3: and just to zone out into videos of this stuff.
Speaker 3: Does it impact my mental health? Eh? Mine's probably already fucked.
Speaker 3: I tried to stay away from watching this type of
Speaker 3: thing before because it really sucks me in and it's
Speaker 3: a massive useless time dump, but I never really saw
Speaker 3: any benefit. I think the r words in the comment
Speaker 3: section are more father some mentally than the videos, so
Speaker 3: I try just not interact with dorks x D. And
Speaker 3: these sorts of these types of sentiments are not, like
Speaker 3: uncommon among people who regularly engage with this type of content.
Speaker 5: I think it's an inevidual thing to ask you.
Speaker 4: But at this point, it almost seems as if like
Speaker 4: the two biggest things that are often blamed for mass
Speaker 4: shooting that I have to push up against and I
Speaker 4: have been due to my whole life drugs and in
Speaker 4: the other case, hyper online radicalization. Right, the history that
Speaker 4: you're painting here kind of seems like someone who needed
Speaker 4: a variety of health.
Speaker 3: I'll reiterate that in like a sec Okay, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 3: as I was reading this, this reminded me a little bit.
Speaker 3: There was a shooting a few years ago at a
Speaker 3: Fourth of July parade, the Highland Park mass shooting. The
Speaker 3: sort of like writing that Jesse did in his post.
Speaker 3: It reminds me of a bit of the writing done
Speaker 3: by this this this other mass shooter to talk about
Speaker 3: like getting like sucked into like like violent content or
Speaker 3: this like this idea of like it like beckons you
Speaker 3: further into the concept. It's like almost like hypnotic. Very
Speaker 3: similar writing done by this other other shooter. So one
Speaker 3: other post I'll reference that she made on this forum
Speaker 3: was a video of a father hanging himself in front
Speaker 3: of his children, and she claimed that her stepdad attempted
Speaker 3: the same thing, trying to kill himself in front of
Speaker 3: her when you know, she was just a little kid,
Speaker 3: and she wrote, quote, I wish his bitch ass would
Speaker 3: have died on the noose then, and there probably better
Speaker 3: than beating your kids unquote. So obviously, you know this
Speaker 3: person had like long standing issues that at certain points
Speaker 3: seems like better, right, Like around twenty twenty one, they
Speaker 3: seemed to be doing better, right they were they were
Speaker 3: making you know, YouTube content at about guns and hunting,
Speaker 3: and felt like they had some more of like a
Speaker 3: had more of a stable social outlet. And then around
Speaker 3: twenty twenty three, with you know this this like abuse
Speaker 3: of psychedelic drugs leading to this mass shooter obsession it's
Speaker 3: like a pretty a pretty clear picture of like a
Speaker 3: mental spiral. Two months before Jesse's own shooting, she did
Speaker 3: visit the Watch People Die profile for Samantha Ruppnow, and
Speaker 3: if we're going to talk about like a causal factors, right,
Speaker 3: and especially like in reference to you know this this
Speaker 3: this idea that you know, parents have where you know
Speaker 3: there there has been a sequence of trans people doing shootings.
Speaker 3: You can argue about you know, the per capita percent
Speaker 3: rates or like stats again, but that doesn't go so far.
Speaker 3: But at a certain point, I mean, we have to
Speaker 3: all be comfortable or maybe comfortable is the wrong word,
Speaker 3: but we have to like, you know, realize that like,
Speaker 3: as more people, you know, transition right genders, is not
Speaker 3: this like immutable thing. As more people attempt transitioning, there's
Speaker 3: gonna be some trans people who do bad things. This
Speaker 3: happens with every social.
Speaker 7: Group of people.
Speaker 3: To borrow from sociologist Mark Worrel, who wrote about the
Speaker 3: social phenomenon of mass shootings, like destruction of others is
Speaker 3: the means towards another end, the desire for self destruction
Speaker 3: that the self was incapable of inflicting in isolation. A
Speaker 3: lot of the mass shootings and with suicide or trying
Speaker 3: to get the police to kill you through through suicide,
Speaker 3: like like the public shootings like this have a very
Speaker 3: strong suicidal component, and some people might not be able
Speaker 3: to do that themselves, so they need to create a
Speaker 3: social context in which they feel like they can. And
Speaker 3: at least in terms of the States and to a
Speaker 3: smaller degree in Canada, like these shootings like exist as
Speaker 3: like this like cultural ritual, this like ritual of destruction
Speaker 3: of the self, and destruction of the self can include
Speaker 3: the social apparatus that makes up the self. And for
Speaker 3: like a young person, that's what that's that's their family
Speaker 3: in school, the two things that were targeted in this shooting. Right,
Speaker 3: this this network that makes up like my sense of
Speaker 3: self as a seventeen year old, eighteen year old, that's
Speaker 3: going to be my family, which is you know, uh
Speaker 3: for Jesse, that's that's her mom. She's been separated from
Speaker 3: her father for a while as well as her stepbrother.
Speaker 3: And then also this school that she used to used
Speaker 3: to go to. Right, that's the sort of that's the
Speaker 3: network that makes up your idea of this social and
Speaker 3: like I said before, like as the trans community, grows,
Speaker 3: there's gonna be some overlap between antisocial you know, mentally
Speaker 3: unwell individuals who act out a mass killing as a suicide,
Speaker 3: and disintegrated and socially underregulated people who try transitioning as
Speaker 3: a way to ease tensions, both internally and externally. And
Speaker 3: if anything, I think transitioning can often be maybe one
Speaker 3: of the healthiest ways to attempt to relieve some of
Speaker 3: these tensions. But like being trans is like a marginal
Speaker 3: position in society, right, and the people who commit school
Speaker 3: shootings and suicide through mass shootings are at like the
Speaker 3: very very extreme end of social dysregulation and like marginal isolation,
Speaker 3: and some people in those latter categories will also try
Speaker 3: transitioning as a method of social regulation. And in Jesse's case,
Speaker 3: like considering all their posts about like mental health and drugs,
Speaker 3: never once is being trans cited as like a point
Speaker 3: of their distress, Like that's the thing that's causing them
Speaker 3: the distress. It is it is a method of relief,
Speaker 3: at least according to like their own writing on Reddit,
Speaker 3: like this the cause of the distress or all these
Speaker 3: are these other things, and like people can blame mass
Speaker 3: shootings or mass killings on like any number of specific factors, right,
Speaker 3: such as access to weapons, whether that's knives, firearms, bullying,
Speaker 3: substance abuse, mental health and lacking mental health services and
Speaker 3: like mental health oversight. But like the common base factor
Speaker 3: across you know, most of those things is that there's
Speaker 3: like social disintegration and deregulation happening. That that's like a
Speaker 3: failure to balance like egoism and altruism, right, like a
Speaker 3: healthy individual sense of self as well as a place
Speaker 3: of belonging within a larger social group, and like we
Speaker 3: need a mix of freedom and available structured paths for
Speaker 3: social life. Ritualistic outbursts of suicidal violence against society happen
Speaker 3: when these things are extremely unregulated and someone falls out
Speaker 3: of the social fabric. And like marginal classes like trans
Speaker 3: people can be particularly affected by social disintegration and deregulation.
Speaker 3: And like it's important to note here, like this isn't
Speaker 3: caused by some like vague medical condition like gender dysphoria,
Speaker 3: Like that that's not causing the violence, right, prescribed estrogen,
Speaker 3: it's not a causal forcedness. We don't even know if
Speaker 3: Robin Westman or or Jesse was even on estrogen. We
Speaker 3: don't know, but these things aren't aren't causal, but you know,
Speaker 3: these are social positions that include you know, these larger
Speaker 3: social factors that affect large populations. One of those populations
Speaker 3: can be trans people. There's a lot of social disintegration
Speaker 3: that affects the cists men currently, they do a lot
Speaker 3: of shootings and yeah, the overwhelming majority. You can also
Speaker 3: graph these things on class lines. Lots of people who
Speaker 3: go and do public shootings either themselves or their families
Speaker 3: are suffering from economic instability or or people in like
Speaker 3: the middle class as well, which it has this this
Speaker 3: this other problem in like Durkheim's med methodology of suicide,
Speaker 3: which I'm kind of pulling from a little bit here,
Speaker 3: is like this thiss, this sense of like overregulation can
Speaker 3: also produce in unhealthy balance. So it's either you know,
Speaker 3: very overregulated people you know, like like Elon Musk has
Speaker 3: too much freedom, has too much too much like access
Speaker 3: to like money and possibilities, that he's then a very
Speaker 3: dysfunctional person. This can happen you know with some probably
Speaker 3: like you know, like middle class kids as well. Uh,
Speaker 3: that can produce violent outbursts. But a lot of the
Speaker 3: time it's you know, lower middle class or lower class
Speaker 3: conditions that can lead to violence, and sometimes sometimes it
Speaker 3: does not go to the extreme of doing you know,
Speaker 3: a mass killing. It can often just result in like
Speaker 3: petty crime, which is do you arguably a more healthy
Speaker 3: method of regulation compared to something like a mass shooting,
Speaker 3: which is like, you know, the most desperate, the most marginal,
Speaker 3: like active suicide that we could like envision as a society.
Speaker 4: I just wanted to specifically say when it came to factors,
Speaker 4: you're distinctly not saying that video games where we're in
Speaker 4: any way responsible, and then I know you're not, But
Speaker 4: I just like people should know that when you mentioned Roadblocks,
Speaker 4: people like I had I think my mom and someone
Speaker 4: else asked like, oh, well, what's the storyline for Roadblocks?
Speaker 4: And I was like, it's like asking what's the story
Speaker 4: for Minecraft? Right, I was like, yeah, I was like,
Speaker 4: these these are world building. It's it's it's similar to
Speaker 4: seeing someone basically trying journal out their thoughts, right. I
Speaker 4: think in that she was building these these mass shooting simulators,
Speaker 4: that wasn't her being influenced I say, by some kind
Speaker 4: of like template that Roadblocks had. That was her showing yeah,
Speaker 4: creating something to express something else.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and and that sort of like like cause player
Speaker 3: replication very common among this you know growing community of
Speaker 3: did the true crime community that the school shooter fandom,
Speaker 3: which which attracts a lot of people in marginal populations, right,
Speaker 3: Like the fact that Samantha Rupp now is like one
Speaker 3: of the first like you know, assists female school shooters,
Speaker 3: like is notable here and like a lot of like
Speaker 3: the early like Columbine fandom on Tumblr was was young girls.
Speaker 3: The fact that TCC is attracting like a wider net
Speaker 3: than just cis males, I think is interesting, but it
Speaker 3: points to these other social forces. I think condensing it
Speaker 3: down to being like a certain mixture of SSRIs and
Speaker 3: HRT is what's causing this.
Speaker 5: Like there's psychedelics for that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or psychedelics, right, I mean, like anything, these things
Speaker 3: can exist within a healthy equilibrium, Right, Psychedelics can be
Speaker 3: a very healthy tool for people to deal with like
Speaker 3: mortality and yeah, no, absolutely right, you know, whether that's
Speaker 3: you know, MDMA, ketamine or like mushrooms, Like mushrooms are
Speaker 3: being used to treat people who have cancer, right, to
Speaker 3: help them get comfortable with with this idea of their
Speaker 3: own mortality. These things can exist within a healthy equilibrium
Speaker 3: of the social but they can also exist in an
Speaker 3: unhealthy non equilibrium, right. And I think the types of
Speaker 3: ways that Jesse was writing about psychedelics online, I think
Speaker 3: demonstrates a very unhealthy use of these drugs, especially as
Speaker 3: like you know, like a sixteen year old, right, Like.
Speaker 4: It's well, it sounds like self medication. It sounds like
Speaker 4: unsupervised medication. And it also sounds like something that was
Speaker 4: most likely acting as an accelerant. Right, Like, if you
Speaker 4: already have a host of other problems, if you are
Speaker 4: introducing a very large amount of incredibly powerful like you know,
Speaker 4: psychostimulants into you know what you're in ingestine every day,
Speaker 4: then it's going to have potentially very very dangerous outcomes.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Again, these are largely correlating factors, not cause, not causal forces.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 3: The causal forces is this like social disintegration and deregulation,
Speaker 3: of which, you know, abuse of psychedelics can do a
Speaker 3: lot of damage to your sense of self and your
Speaker 3: sense of self within like a larger a larger community.
Speaker 3: And the fact that I think like specifically, you know,
Speaker 3: the lacking mental health services lacking like oversight of these
Speaker 3: things in terms like a palsy outlook, Like these are
Speaker 3: things that we as a society should be putting more
Speaker 3: work into. If you actually want to start solving this problem,
Speaker 3: you can get into you know, larger, larger things about
Speaker 3: you know, the alienation of like quote unquote late stage capitalism,
Speaker 3: which you know also can be a factor in this.
Speaker 4: Another accelerant, right, Like, I think a lot of these
Speaker 4: are accelerants, right, every other thing that you've been listening,
Speaker 4: and then it seems to me like you know, this
Speaker 4: compounded upon this, which compounded upon this and eventually led
Speaker 4: you know, someone to looking up more and more extreme content.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, one thing that I do want to mention, which
Speaker 3: i've i've kind of seen seen discussed, is like that
Speaker 3: this term like radicalization saying that you know, she was
Speaker 3: like radicalized into this like violent content. This is more
Speaker 3: of like a like a semantic note. I'm not sure
Speaker 3: how useful like the term radicalization is in this case.
Speaker 3: If anything, I think she was like desensitized to horrific
Speaker 3: acts of violence through repeated viewing, and was in within
Speaker 3: communities that encouraged this sort of thing. I think that's
Speaker 3: the way that I'm framing it as opposed to you know,
Speaker 3: radicalization makes makes you think of politics and like ideology.
Speaker 4: Right right or not, Nazism or white supremacy or something
Speaker 4: like that, right, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's like it's not that they're getting like
Speaker 3: politically radical, it's that they're they're dropping out of the
Speaker 3: social fabric and desensitizing themselves to this concept of like,
Speaker 3: you know, horrific like societally targeted violence.
Speaker 4: I know now that like obviously the right wing is
Speaker 4: decided that they're uniquely going to be attacking trans people.
Speaker 4: I'm not sure if you're aware of the shooter's father's
Speaker 4: statements that were just made recently. The father intentionally uses
Speaker 4: terms like I am the biological father, refers to her
Speaker 4: with him pronouns, says that he was allowed to raise her,
Speaker 4: that she was taken from him. Part of me is
Speaker 4: also really fearful that this is going to be maybe
Speaker 4: the future of the the Matt Walsh lips at TikTok circuit.
Speaker 4: Right here, we have the case, like the number one
Speaker 4: horror story that every right wing you know, personality always
Speaker 4: talks about, right.
Speaker 5: Or that myth that Elon musk perpetuates.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, that this is somehow negatively impacting their children.
Speaker 3: No, Yeah, that's a good thing to keep an eye on.
Speaker 3: I haven't have not seen that in.
Speaker 4: Terms of like, you know, your analysis, and I appreciate it,
Speaker 4: by the way a lot. I hadn't thought of it
Speaker 4: that in those terms, in terms of like disconnecting from
Speaker 4: the social fabric itself? Is there things that can be done?
Speaker 4: Like is the recommendations beyond like obviously you know, late
Speaker 4: stage capitalism and mass alienation and not solving that.
Speaker 5: To more sure?
Speaker 3: So yeah, I mean I'm not sure if I'm gonna
Speaker 3: be able to solve that on a stream.
Speaker 5: No, you have to. Isn't it called that could happen here?
Speaker 5: Let's let it happen.
Speaker 3: I mean yeah, Like there's a lot of things that
Speaker 3: we can do, like even just like increasing like social services, right,
Speaker 3: like the like fun funding social services can be a thing,
Speaker 3: Like what what can we do to strengthen the social fabric?
Speaker 7: Right?
Speaker 3: Give people available paths for their life? You know that's
Speaker 3: through you know, education, free college, make make life actually
Speaker 3: feel like you have a way to exist within a
Speaker 3: social matrix. Canada already has you know, comp the state's
Speaker 3: fairly restrictive gun laws. Those are a factor, but there's
Speaker 3: even mass killings like this that happen, you know in
Speaker 3: Europe where people find other means of enacting them besides guns.
Speaker 5: Japan that sits swords and knives oftentimes. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, So like these things have some based social
Speaker 3: social aspects that are going to be the things that
Speaker 3: you're solving. Is is kind of more challenging rather than
Speaker 3: just you know, taking away guns, making drugs that are
Speaker 3: already illegal harder to get right. These things aren't aren't
Speaker 3: going to actually eliminate this problem, but I mean, funding
Speaker 3: social services can can be an aspect of this. Having
Speaker 3: more comprehensive mental health care, you know, free healthcare check ins,
Speaker 3: you know, if that's a big thing in the States.
Speaker 3: Canada has that to some degree, but still there's obviously
Speaker 3: room for improvement. But I mean, yes, solving these like
Speaker 3: larger social problems, that's like it's the question of the
Speaker 3: twenty first century.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I mean, you know, based on the story
Speaker 4: that you're telling and the research you did, it does
Speaker 4: really seem like this is one of those cases where
Speaker 4: this doesn't happen off but when you see it get
Speaker 4: to that end state this this is pretty much right,
Speaker 4: the patterns become a lot more evident, the obsession with
Speaker 4: the prior shootings, the mental health episodes, and now the
Speaker 4: combining that with you know, very very prolific psychedelic drug use,
Speaker 4: and then here we are.
Speaker 3: I mean, this person should not have had guns right
Speaker 3: at a certain point. Their guns were taken away, our
Speaker 3: guns and haus were taken away. If police knew about
Speaker 3: their activity on these forums, I'm sure this wouldn't have
Speaker 3: been returned. So there's there's there's certain things like you know,
Speaker 3: parents being more aware of these sorts of like online spaces,
Speaker 3: the school shooter fandom, you know, picking up signs of
Speaker 3: you know, social isolation. How much how much time your
Speaker 3: kid is just spending alone on the internet and you
Speaker 3: might not be knowing what they're doing. So solving that's
Speaker 3: you know hard because because the solution for a lot
Speaker 3: of a lot of you know states is just like
Speaker 3: increased surveillance on platforms like you know, discord age verification.
Speaker 3: But those types of you know, guardrails don't exist on
Speaker 3: a forum site like watch People Die, right, you can
Speaker 3: you can have a very you know, safe regulated discord
Speaker 3: which just pushes people to you know, even more niche
Speaker 3: even more dangerous parts of the internet. You know, Watch
Speaker 3: People Die started as a Reddit page that was you know,
Speaker 3: taken down like seven years ago. Now it's you know
Speaker 3: a far a far less regulated, you know, thing that
Speaker 3: that kids are spending a decent amount of time on.
Speaker 3: But you know, being aware of you know, the risks
Speaker 3: of this type of like social isolation, you know, is
Speaker 3: also also a start. And ideally we do not have
Speaker 3: a forum site, you know, dedicated to glorifying mass killings.
Speaker 3: But banning a website is not so simple. It's easier
Speaker 3: than done, you know, figuring out a way to take
Speaker 3: that down, right, I mean, same problem with you know,
Speaker 3: like eight kun or like you know eight chan back
Speaker 3: in the day four chan.
Speaker 4: And eventually, but this one seems blatant to the point
Speaker 4: of illegality, and I don't, I know, you don't have
Speaker 4: time for me to start a topic.
Speaker 5: But like other things, I.
Speaker 3: Mean, like eight qun's also illegal, right, they host a
Speaker 3: lot of illegal content there. Finding a way to take
Speaker 3: it down is still tricky. You know, there's a lot
Speaker 3: of websites host illegal stuff just because it's you know illegal,
Speaker 3: does does does not mean it's gonna it's gonna be solved.
Speaker 3: Like the legal pathway there is is tricky.
Speaker 4: But isn't the rule of some typically that if a
Speaker 4: lot of those companies that provide them with the necessary
Speaker 4: like d DOS security, they're like through line seems to
Speaker 4: be as long as it's not illegal, right, Like if
Speaker 4: you're not running a child poor or sorry child sexual
Speaker 4: abuse material website, if you're not running like an assassination
Speaker 4: or cryptocurrency like drug site, you're fine.
Speaker 5: Like, but that just does in practice doesn't work.
Speaker 3: I'm unsure of the current hosting situation of Watch People Die,
Speaker 3: but I wouldn't be surprised if they went through the
Speaker 3: same kind of loopholes by registering at like a certain
Speaker 3: foreign country with has that had that that's very loose guidelines,
Speaker 3: like you know, that was the thing with like a
Speaker 3: KUN for a while. But yeah, I'm actually unsure if
Speaker 3: the current the current like setup that Watch People that
Speaker 3: has Yeah, I've been talking about you know TCC and
Speaker 3: this the school should defand them increasingly the past two years.
Speaker 3: And it's really tragic that it is something that i've
Speaker 3: that is you know, a pattern that is that is
Speaker 3: continuing right, this is like the really the main force
Speaker 3: across these shootings, whether you're you know, assist girls, this boy,
Speaker 3: a trans girl, trans guy, whatever, whatever demographic you know, racial.
Speaker 3: You know, there was the the Antioch school shooting in
Speaker 3: January twenty twenty five that was done by this like
Speaker 3: black ironic neo Nazi, similarly linked to TCC as well,
Speaker 3: Like whatever the demographic is. The through line that we're
Speaker 3: seeing is this is this just like nihilistic obsession with
Speaker 3: like the act of school shooting and this like fandom
Speaker 3: that has developed around it.
Speaker 4: Do you find the media picks up on that at all?
Speaker 4: Like like no, You've done a lot of research into
Speaker 4: do they reach out to you?
Speaker 5: Like do they never say?
Speaker 3: Every every once in a while. But it takes them time.
Speaker 3: It took them about three years after like the peak
Speaker 3: of seven six four to start reporting on seven six four,
Speaker 3: And now there's seven six four articles all the time,
Speaker 3: but it took them about three years to like ketch
Speaker 3: up to it. I wouldn't be surprised if in a
Speaker 3: year and a half we get tons of articles about TCC,
Speaker 3: But a lot of legacy media is very slow to
Speaker 3: this sort of thing. My own internet presence also exists
Speaker 3: kind of in the margins. My monitoring is is in
Speaker 3: the margins, but those margins can have you know, very
Speaker 3: very uh destabilizing social effects. But it does take a while.
Speaker 3: I mean, same thing with the FBI, right, It took
Speaker 3: them years to get on top of seven six four,
Speaker 3: even though people were like reporting this stuff in like
Speaker 3: twenty nineteen, twenty twenty, But before seven six four was
Speaker 3: even that organization. There was previous iterations called the CVLT.
Speaker 3: But like you know that that style of thing was
Speaker 3: was was a problem for years, and the FBI did
Speaker 3: not really get on it until much later, and the
Speaker 3: media then followed suit. Right, I do think I just
Speaker 3: don't have trust in you know, the current the current
Speaker 3: American enforcement that retty to really be on it right now.
Speaker 3: You know, I can't. I'm unsure of how that works
Speaker 3: in Canada at this point, but certainly certainly I don't
Speaker 3: think Cashputel's FBI is going to be you know, on
Speaker 3: this one super super well, even though they been trying to,
Speaker 3: you know, push some stuff like the nihilist violent extremism label,
Speaker 3: which does cover stuff like this.
Speaker 4: But I know this is controversial, but in my opinion,
Speaker 4: it almost feels as if Cash Mattel is actively trying
Speaker 4: to push narratives that will benefit this entire story that
Speaker 4: we're talking about in the opposite direction, right, like if
Speaker 4: you're trying to push the narrative that Charlie Kirk's shooter
Speaker 4: and we're not going to change topics, but I'm just
Speaker 4: you know, bring this up because you mentioned Cashptel. You're
Speaker 4: trying to push that narrative that he was in fact
Speaker 4: trans or inspired by trans ideology or inspired by furries
Speaker 4: or furry culture, et cetera. They've tried everything, and now
Speaker 4: now we're at the point where it's like the loosest
Speaker 4: of connections. It's like, well, there may have been a
Speaker 4: lover who is or is not may or may not
Speaker 4: be trends or non binary.
Speaker 5: We're not sure, but that's enough. We got it. Cash
Speaker 5: Hotel will push the story.
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, this is this administration comes out of
Speaker 3: the same kind of network of influencers who try to
Speaker 3: grossly use horrific events to their own ideological advantage, including
Speaker 3: too you know, attack groups of people that they find
Speaker 3: to be bad as.
Speaker 5: Wild because it turns out they're all pedophiles.
Speaker 4: They're all part of an elite group of insiders, and
Speaker 4: so let's start talking about.
Speaker 5: The fscene files for next time. My brain, Like, I know,
Speaker 5: I'm just joking. I'm just joking.
Speaker 4: Where can everyone find you and your incredible work outside
Speaker 4: of listening to the amazing it could happen here podcast?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I mean, I occasionally post about Yawi on
Speaker 3: on x the Everything app at by shown in type.
Speaker 3: I'm trying to post more about Yaowe on Blue Sky.
Speaker 3: There's just just not as much of it. But you know,
Speaker 3: maybe I should be the change I want.
Speaker 5: To see the environment.
Speaker 3: It's more so that there's just not as many Yawi
Speaker 3: artists on Blue Sky. A lot of Yawi artists are
Speaker 3: shockingly Japanese, and this Japan has a very large presence
Speaker 3: on next Everything app at least at the moment. I
Speaker 3: know some of their like AI image stuff is pushing,
Speaker 3: is pushing people to other platforms, but it's slow. But yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm on, I'm on. I'm on those two places. I
Speaker 3: also occasionally post photography at Instagram also by shown end type.
Speaker 4: And I suppose if you enjoyed listening to me getting
Speaker 4: informed by the only information you heard here today, you
Speaker 4: should check out YouTube dot com slash at the Surf
Speaker 4: Times where I post videos, and this one too will
Speaker 4: be there.
Speaker 3: Hey you can look at uh yeah, me in a
Speaker 3: black turtle neck talk about sad things.
Speaker 4: There you go if you If you enjoyed the audio
Speaker 4: version and you want to see the the visual version
Speaker 4: of it, head on down to YouTube dot com slash
Speaker 4: at the Surf Times.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much for joining us today. Okay, I
Speaker 5: appreciate it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Speaker 4: It was it was a ton of fun. Well actually
Speaker 4: it was sad, but it was. It was very informative.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the that's the needle I'd try to threat absolutely.
Speaker 6: Hello, everyone, welcome to it could happen here.
Speaker 9: My name is Mink.
Speaker 6: I'm here with Shames and At Georgio and we're going
Speaker 6: to be talking about the documentary Isa Safari.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Hi Mick, thanks for thanks for having us.
Speaker 9: Hi everyone, good to be here. Georgia. Do you want
Speaker 9: to introduce yourself.
Speaker 10: I am Georgio. I am a Bosnian genocide researcher. I'm
Speaker 10: also the founder of the educational tool Voices from Ladrina,
Speaker 10: which is a new educational resource on the genocide in
Speaker 10: Eastern Bosnia in particular, which allows researchers to follow the
Speaker 10: events of the genocide through a simulated social media style
Speaker 10: news feed, so the words of the survivors and the
Speaker 10: perpetrators come to life via the medium of social media.
Speaker 10: I'm also a member of the fantastic mutual aid group
Speaker 10: Lambeth Mutual Aid in South London. You can follow us
Speaker 10: on Instagram at Lambeth Mutual Aid and you can follow
Speaker 10: me on the Hellhole that is ex at Georgio con
Speaker 10: conn is Ko and not conn as in a conman. Yeah,
Speaker 10: that's I think the key information.
Speaker 6: Okay, great, then we're going to do the following. I've
Speaker 6: prepared roughly one page of context here for those of
Speaker 6: you who remember a few months ago it was announced
Speaker 6: that the Italian prosecutors want to try and find the
Speaker 6: people who participated in the Sarajevo safari, and we'll be
Speaker 6: talking about the a documentary that highlights and tries to
Speaker 6: shed the lights on what happened there. The main accusation
Speaker 6: is that the Army of Republica Srbska, which is an
Speaker 6: entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina, that they charged lots of
Speaker 6: moneies for tourists to come over and shoot at civilians,
Speaker 6: which is yeah, obviously horrible, Yeah, horrific. Nowadays, Bosli in
Speaker 6: Herzegovina has divided into two parts, which is like the
Speaker 6: Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the republic A serb Ska,
Speaker 6: which is essentially the territory that the republic A Cerviska
Speaker 6: Army gained during the war. Because I don't want to
Speaker 6: be there any confusion as to who the parties are,
Speaker 6: but it's pretty much two entities living in one nation state. Yes, So,
Speaker 6: after I've given some context on what happened during the
Speaker 6: Balkan Wars which led up to this event, we're going
Speaker 6: to be talking with Georgio about the documentary. Unfortunately, the
Speaker 6: documentary is not available with English subtitles, so I'm glad
Speaker 6: we were having you with us, Georgio, to illuminate us
Speaker 6: a bit more So, I also want to preface that
Speaker 6: obviously it's not a thorough history of what happened there.
Speaker 6: That would be way too much information to condense into
Speaker 6: one episode. Also, while this episode will focus on the
Speaker 6: plight of the Bosnian people, I do want to note
Speaker 6: that pretty much every site in this entire conflict did
Speaker 6: horrendous things committed atrocities, and I think I would be
Speaker 6: britmiss if I didn't mention that. So we're going to
Speaker 6: start with, like so many things. The Second World War
Speaker 6: around the formation of Yugoslavia as a communist state, with
Speaker 6: the Serbian city of Belgrade being the center of power.
Speaker 6: The Balkans were a major point of conflict during World
Speaker 6: War II, with a lot of different parties and state
Speaker 6: actors trying to gain control over the region. Germany, Italy, Hungary,
Speaker 6: Bulgaria and Albania as some of the main actors. A
Speaker 6: variety of alliances and other entities were formed, which will
Speaker 6: later be used in ethnic and ethnic nationalist discourse as
Speaker 6: a way to highlight the specific ethnic grievances. As a federation,
Speaker 6: Yugoslavia contained multiple ethnicity Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrants, and Muslims,
Speaker 6: which would later become the called Bosniaks. And that's how
Speaker 6: I will be referring to them. So at the end
Speaker 6: of World War two, Joseph Tito would be the dictator
Speaker 6: of Yugoslavi Ivia and he would try to counteract all
Speaker 6: this ethnic descent and friction by promoting something that he
Speaker 6: called brotherhood and unity, which sort of buot Tito on
Speaker 6: a pedestal as a fatherly figure under whom everyone from
Speaker 6: all the different factions and ethnicities would be equal as
Speaker 6: Yugoslav people. This was only partially successful. The friction was
Speaker 6: never really resolved, and after the death of Tito in
Speaker 6: the eighties marked the beginning of the end. It coincided
Speaker 6: with an economic crisis that sort of made all the
Speaker 6: different republics where all the different ethnicities were centered beholden
Speaker 6: to themselves became a bit of a free for all.
Speaker 6: So after that point, like ethno politics and nationalism became
Speaker 6: the focus.
Speaker 9: Of all politics.
Speaker 6: Just to be really concrete, like with ethno nationalism, we
Speaker 6: mean like a form of nationalism that is based solely
Speaker 6: on ethnicity, not on citizenship or participation in a community.
Speaker 6: It's a lighter version of the blood and soil politics
Speaker 6: that became very synonymous with a certain German period of time.
Speaker 6: So what happened with this ethnic centric discourse is that
Speaker 6: perceived and real grievances became central to almost all politics,
Speaker 6: most notably, but not certainly exclusively under a Slobodon melosophych
Speaker 6: who came to power late eighties in Serbia. Ethnic rhetoric
Speaker 6: would be the focal point for his politics and a
Speaker 6: sense to power. He would say things that would turn
Speaker 6: into slogans, and with that kept sure the vital part
Speaker 6: of the the animosity that a large part of the
Speaker 6: Serbian population would feel phrases like a weak Serbia means
Speaker 6: a strong Yugoslavia, hinting at the decline of Serbian power
Speaker 6: and the way they perceived this sort of slow fracturing
Speaker 6: that Yugoslavia was going through. Another one was in response
Speaker 6: to a Kosovari Serp was allegedly beaten by a Kosovari Albanian,
Speaker 6: and Melosovitch said, no one should dare beat you, meaning
Speaker 6: that by virtue of being a Serbian they should be
Speaker 6: granted some sort of additional status or some sort of
Speaker 6: untouchability because they were ethnic Serbs.
Speaker 9: These examples served.
Speaker 6: To make clear that the changing and growing public opinion
Speaker 6: among the Serbs was that the only way for them
Speaker 6: to be secure and say was as a national state
Speaker 6: controlled by the Serbs. So the whole idea was that
Speaker 6: they would control the entirety of Yugoslavia and that their
Speaker 6: ethnic group would be in control of the majority of
Speaker 6: the political institutions that were present there. As I think
Speaker 6: you both can imagine, this did not go over well
Speaker 6: with other ethnic groups.
Speaker 9: Yeah, so we're just.
Speaker 6: Not very keen on being part of the federation controlled
Speaker 6: by the Serbs. In March of nineteen ninety eight, the
Speaker 6: Croatian War of Independence started, and later that year Slovenia
Speaker 6: did the same. Both decents that sparked the war already
Speaker 6: with the Serbs. Bosnia and Herzegovina followed later. A referendum
Speaker 6: was held in early nineteen ninety two on whether or
Speaker 6: not they were going to secede. They chose to secede,
Speaker 6: and in March of that year, Serbian forces attacked Bosnia
Speaker 6: and claimed towns in terrain that they deemed to be
Speaker 6: Serbian territory. Near the end of May, the Yugoslav People's
Speaker 6: Army attempted to gain control over the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo,
Speaker 6: but filled to do so completely at this when the
Speaker 6: battle became a prolonged siege that would last until February
Speaker 6: of ninety six. Just to add a little bit more
Speaker 6: about the location, Geographically speaking, defending sa Rijevo was really difficult.
Speaker 6: The city lies between several mountains, which made it very
Speaker 6: easy for Serbine forces to set up artillery, ordinance and snipers.
Speaker 6: These would have very long lines of sights and greater
Speaker 6: range due to the elevated positions that they were set
Speaker 6: up in. If you look at a map of Sarajevo
Speaker 6: with like the terrain a for Google Maps or something,
Speaker 6: you can see how much elevation there is all around
Speaker 6: the city. Roads and passes leading out of the city
Speaker 6: were blocked by Serbian forces, and once they had full
Speaker 6: control of the airport, there was little to no way
Speaker 6: for foods, medicine, or reinforcements to be deployed there. Within
Speaker 6: the city itself, Serbine forces also controlled a majority of
Speaker 6: major military positions, with additional sniper's being positioned around them.
Speaker 6: Multiple areas became incredibly dangerous to cross or approach, particularly
Speaker 6: the main road leading towards the air courts. It became
Speaker 6: known as sniper Alley. And I think it is in
Speaker 6: this context that we should start to discuss the documentary allegations. So, yeah,
Speaker 6: anything to add from either of you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it might.
Speaker 11: It might serve to explain how in the greater European
Speaker 11: political landscape, entities on the right. I guess in the
Speaker 11: global North generally it began to sympathize with actors in
Speaker 11: the former Yugoslavia, right, And how like maybe we can
Speaker 11: draw some lines between them based on their definition of nation,
Speaker 11: what they considered the nation to be. If that's something
Speaker 11: you'd like to explain to people.
Speaker 9: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 10: I think what's really important to stress is that when
Speaker 10: it came to Bosnia, and it's still the case to
Speaker 10: this day, to a lesser degree, the Bosnian Muslims, the
Speaker 10: Bosniacs found themselves at this very peculiar intersection of oppression
Speaker 10: in which you had the Western European right framing the
Speaker 10: war against Bosnia as a restoration of Christian Europe. This
Speaker 10: was what John Major, how John Major was talking about it,
Speaker 10: who was then the Prime Minister of the UK. It's
Speaker 10: also the kind of language we heard from mitteent in
Speaker 10: France and to some extent in the Clinton administration. After
Speaker 10: Bill Clinton read that horrendous book Balkan Ghosts by Kaplan,
Speaker 10: his administration's rhetoric began to change and sort of framed
Speaker 10: this as this inevitable, you know, claud between these perpetually
Speaker 10: fighting tribes in the Balkans. You know, the legacies of
Speaker 10: that rhetoric are still heard in today's journalism. You know,
Speaker 10: I can't count the amount of times in even left leaning,
Speaker 10: supposedly Western journalistic publications, I've seen the word Balkanization being
Speaker 10: thrown around, you know. And this is what I'm talking
Speaker 10: about in terms of the intersection of dehumanization, exoticization, and
Speaker 10: oppression that particularly Bosnia and the Muslims of Bosnia Bosniacs
Speaker 10: have found themselves at. And so you had that on
Speaker 10: the one side coming from the right. And by the way,
Speaker 10: the Serbs nationalists knew this. They tailored their rhetorics so
Speaker 10: so so effectively to present this case of we are
Speaker 10: fighting Europe's battle again Islamist extremists. But at the same
Speaker 10: time you had the Western European political left, and by
Speaker 10: political left, I mean your Marxist Leninists, that sort of
Speaker 10: tradition within the political left in Western Europe, sort of
Speaker 10: buying into this co opting of anti fascist discourse from
Speaker 10: the Miloshevich regime. Yeah, you know, Mike reference the Noah
Speaker 10: Wunschel dare Vitu speech in Kosovo, which was actually in
Speaker 10: response to a at best hyperbolized, at worst fictitious claim
Speaker 10: that the Kosovo Serbs were basing this institutional violence, and
Speaker 10: that co opting of that rhetoric that the Milashovich regime
Speaker 10: did so well as these anti imperialists fighting against the
Speaker 10: the you know, evil acxis of the West did kind
Speaker 10: of work to some degree when we're thinking about the
Speaker 10: response of the political parties on the left in Western
Speaker 10: Europe that were very sort of anti any intervention. And
Speaker 10: we can have a conversation about you know, NATO intervention
Speaker 10: and how problematic that was. But this very black and
Speaker 10: white thinking, very black and white rhetoric coming from those
Speaker 10: political actors in the West, well, this has nothing to
Speaker 10: do with us. Don't buy into the rhetoric that there
Speaker 10: are bad things happening. Is you know, everyone's doing bad things.
Speaker 10: Therefore we shouldn't do anything to put any pressure on
Speaker 10: the Muoshevich regime. And so the reason why I'm bringing
Speaker 10: this all up is because if people can understand that,
Speaker 10: then it becomes more understandable how Bosnia was left to burn,
Speaker 10: how the Bosnian Muslims in particular, who are being targeted
Speaker 10: by sub forces and Croat forces both on the basis
Speaker 10: of their religious and ethnic identities. They found themselves completely abandoned,
Speaker 10: and obviously that abandonment really is embodied.
Speaker 9: In the arms embargo that served none of the victims.
Speaker 10: It only served the Yugoslav army, which was effectively funding
Speaker 10: and sponsoring the Serb forces who were committing genocide in Bosnia,
Speaker 10: and of course the Krowat forces Zagreb had the Croatian
Speaker 10: regime funding them. So this arms embargo, which was supposed
Speaker 10: to be this, you know, for want of a better word,
Speaker 10: neutral stance for the world to take, was not neutral
Speaker 10: at all. Of course, as we know, there's no such
Speaker 10: thing as neutrality, blah blah blah. But this was really
Speaker 10: how it became possible for such a high number of people,
Speaker 10: the vast majority Muslim people, to be killed while the
Speaker 10: genocide was being televised.
Speaker 7: Yeah, super important.
Speaker 9: You brought up Bill Clinton reading that book.
Speaker 6: I thought of putting it in there, but I didn't
Speaker 6: want to smirch Bill Clinton's good name here. Essentially, what
Speaker 6: the book does is it's sort of correct me if
Speaker 6: I'm wrong. It sort of puts forth this clash of
Speaker 6: civilizations kind of rhetoric where these two people are so different,
Speaker 6: are so different, they will always inevitably clash and fight
Speaker 6: and kill each other as sort of a biologically determined factors.
Speaker 2: Almost.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean we see a similar sort of thing.
Speaker 10: I mean, there were specificities to Palestine, but we see
Speaker 10: a similar sort of thing with the sort of liberal
Speaker 10: humanistic rhetoric of let's view the whats happening in Gaza
Speaker 10: as beyond ethnic labels, you know, and we're going to
Speaker 10: see the humanity behind everyone, and you know we you know,
Speaker 10: I saw as a German comedian who was putting up
Speaker 10: posters of Palestinians who had been killed and Israelis who
Speaker 10: had been killed, and removing the ethnic labels and just
Speaker 10: putting human killed. And it's going back to this what
Speaker 10: you're talking about in terms of here are two communities
Speaker 10: that are already fighting each other, and we lose sight
Speaker 10: of everyone's humanity as a result. And if they would
Speaker 10: just stop fighting, if they were just you know, stopped
Speaker 10: for a second and look beyond the labels, then the
Speaker 10: world would be a better place. And it's all, in
Speaker 10: my opinion, tied up in the same illogic as that
Speaker 10: book was getting it.
Speaker 6: It's sort of I don't see color yes approach, but
Speaker 6: the conflicts yes, yes, yes, Oka, Yeah yeah, a similar
Speaker 6: narrative that's deployed in Syria and mean marriagely like to
Speaker 6: go to response of neoliberalism when they have absolutely no
Speaker 6: understanding of a situation beyond that there is conflict there
Speaker 6: and people are dying, right Like, It's a very easy
Speaker 6: response for anyone in a politician or an indio or
Speaker 6: who wants to write a ship book.
Speaker 11: It's very easy to do that and to sell that
Speaker 11: narrative right for rerapeeding to people who don't.
Speaker 7: Know fuck all about it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, And I also want to add another thing
Speaker 6: because nowadays Bosnian Herzegovina as a is divided into two parts,
Speaker 6: which is like the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and
Speaker 6: the republic A serb Ska, which is essentially the territory
Speaker 6: that the republic A Cerviska Army gained during the war.
Speaker 6: Because I don't want to be there any confusion as
Speaker 6: to who the parties are, but it's pretty much two
Speaker 6: entities living in one.
Speaker 9: Nation state.
Speaker 6: Yes, this was also like a recurring theme when I
Speaker 6: was in Bosnia. From my mastrtisis that there is a
Speaker 6: deep sentiment with the people, but also politically that Bosnia
Speaker 6: X were left to their faith because Bosnian hearts giving
Speaker 6: us the only Muslim majority country in Europe, and there
Speaker 6: is a very.
Speaker 9: Deep feeling of like, the reason that we were left
Speaker 9: out in the colt.
Speaker 6: That we were abandoned is because it was a Muslim
Speaker 6: majority country. And I think that's just a very important
Speaker 6: thing to highlight, because that is also a starting point
Speaker 6: of the vilification of Muslims by virtue of being Muslim,
Speaker 6: that sort of ideological war of the West versus the
Speaker 6: Eastern Muslims that sort of started to coalesce at around
Speaker 6: that time.
Speaker 10: I think I don't know if i'd say it was
Speaker 10: the start, but what I would say is the legacies
Speaker 10: of Europe's obsession with the Ottoman Empire really came to
Speaker 10: the fore in Bosnia because because a lot of the
Speaker 10: rhetoric and the discourses that were being produced by Serb
Speaker 10: forces hinged around this idea that we, the Serbs, are
Speaker 10: finishing the job that we started in the Balkan Wars
Speaker 10: of the eighteen hundreds and nineteen hundreds. We are finishing
Speaker 10: the job of getting rid of this remnant of the
Speaker 10: Ottoman Empire. The Muslims in Bosnia, And in fact, you know,
Speaker 10: I always go to a piece of footage from the
Speaker 10: eleventh of July nineteen ninety five when the General of
Speaker 10: the Army of the Republic Assavska Ratkomladic, who is serving
Speaker 10: a life sentence for genocide, his forces entered. They invaded
Speaker 10: sore Brnitza, Serebrenitza had fallen, and he says to the camera,
Speaker 10: we have come here to take revenge on the Turks.
Speaker 10: And I think that really embodies what I'm trying to
Speaker 10: say here, which is that these legacies of this clash
Speaker 10: of civilizations that were sort of prominent in the various
Speaker 10: wars against the Ottomans came back and they were redeployed.
Speaker 10: They were reactivated by sub forces in particular, but also
Speaker 10: crap forces to a lesser degree. And you know, I
Speaker 10: go back to what I was saying before, John Major, saying,
Speaker 10: this is a painful but inevitable restoration of Christian Europe
Speaker 10: on some level. On some level, Western Europe was buying
Speaker 10: into it on some level. So yeah, I don't think
Speaker 10: it was the start of the vilification of Muslims, but
Speaker 10: I think that it was intertwined with previous legacies that
Speaker 10: were reactivated.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and this was very much like the zeitgeist at
Speaker 11: that time, right, like Huntington's writing Clash of Civilizations. Then,
Speaker 11: seems like a lot of the response in much of
Speaker 11: the world to the end of the Cold War was
Speaker 11: to we ate another enemy, and that became Islam. That's
Speaker 11: sort of the discourse after Fukuyama. Sorry to mention Fukuyama,
Speaker 11: but like people didn't want there to be apart from him,
Speaker 11: like an end to the conflict of how to organize
Speaker 11: our societies and because that's a ludicrous thesis, and so
Speaker 11: they they're very much I think a lot of the
Speaker 11: sort of fear that plays such an important role in
Speaker 11: politics in many of our countries was remobilized in this
Speaker 11: orientalist packaging towards most of the people that, as you say,
Speaker 11: built on centuries of bigotry. My only engagement with the
Speaker 11: conflict when I was much younger was that somebody who
Speaker 11: I knew through cycling had previously been a football hooligan.
Speaker 11: I think that's probably how we would describe himself. There
Speaker 11: was a great deal of exchange in fan violence, I
Speaker 11: guess would be the academic between the former Yugoslavia and
Speaker 11: the rest of Europe, which is so interesting and not
Speaker 11: a great way to learn about things.
Speaker 2: I mean, what's.
Speaker 10: Interesting is that there has been a direct connection between
Speaker 10: the far right nationalist gangs, the paramilitaries that committed a trustees,
Speaker 10: and some of the Serbian football clubs, and in particular
Speaker 10: the ultras in those.
Speaker 9: Clubs, because those football clubs were the sort of.
Speaker 10: Gateway for mafia bosses to transition back into normal society.
Speaker 10: So yeah, it's a very interesting area of the of
Speaker 10: the broader conflict.
Speaker 6: I think at this point we should get back on
Speaker 6: back on track a bit. Yes, let's talk about the
Speaker 6: thing we came to talk about. Yeah, well, we're going
Speaker 6: to talk about the siege of Sarajevo and the documentary
Speaker 6: Sarajevo Safari. But first we should experience the prolonged siege
Speaker 6: of advertisements.
Speaker 11: And we're back, as we said before we left to
Speaker 11: bestias with advertisements. We should talk about this, the Sarajevo Safari.
Speaker 11: I guess maybe should we just begin by summarizing the
Speaker 11: the maybe allegation is still the correct word. I don't
Speaker 11: know the events that are documented in the film.
Speaker 7: Let's say that.
Speaker 10: Yeah, so the Sarajevo Safari Documentary was a is a
Speaker 10: documentary that was made by Slovenian filmmaker Miran and it
Speaker 10: presents longstanding allegations that there was a form of war
Speaker 10: tourism taking place during the Siege of Sarajevo, in which
Speaker 10: affluent non Bosnians paying very high fees to shoot at
Speaker 10: civilians from sniper positions being held by the Army of
Speaker 10: the public. These allegations and the narrative of the documentary
Speaker 10: is presented through witness testimony, including an anonymous former intelligence agent,
Speaker 10: and the film and the sort of the testimonies that
Speaker 10: are part of the film claim that this war tourism,
Speaker 10: or this safari, this hunting human hunting game effectively business,
Speaker 10: was a sophisticated, organized and secret operation. One of the
Speaker 10: most shocking allegations that the documentary brings to light is
Speaker 10: that these non Bosnian forists want of a better words,
Speaker 10: would pay even more money to shoot at children. Now
Speaker 10: in total, I mean that we don't have exact figures
Speaker 10: for various reasons that are very complicated. It's estimated that
Speaker 10: over eleven thousand people were murdered in Sarajevo from these snipers.
Speaker 10: So the fact that this documentary is presenting these allegations
Speaker 10: that it wasn't just a Serb affair and that there
Speaker 10: were other nationals taking part in these crimes is huge.
Speaker 9: It is huge.
Speaker 10: Yeah, So that's kind of the gist of what the
Speaker 10: documentary is trying to put across. Obviously, there's more that
Speaker 10: I could say about the context and about sort of
Speaker 10: the context of the of the case that has been
Speaker 10: taken up in Italy, but you know, we can talk
Speaker 10: about that as we as we go go along.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I think one of the allegations is also that there's
Speaker 6: like tourists from the United States, from Canada, from Russia
Speaker 6: and also from Italy to not go down the rabbit
Speaker 6: hole instantly, I just want there to ask you, Giorgio,
Speaker 6: because I first heard about this film.
Speaker 9: When I was in Sarajevo, and back then, well, my first.
Speaker 6: Instinct was that this has to be some sort of
Speaker 6: conspiracy theory, and that is partly to do with the
Speaker 6: person I interviewed back then and the way it was
Speaker 6: presented to me during that interview, but also because I
Speaker 6: don't think any of us is shocked that the atrocities
Speaker 6: and the crimes against humanity of war. But this somehow
Speaker 6: feels like another level. So what was your first impression
Speaker 6: Bosnian genocide researchery to something like this happening.
Speaker 10: My first reaction was, I mean, I don't want to
Speaker 10: take away from the gravity of the documentary. I was shocked,
Speaker 10: but not surprised. So it is shocking that this sort
Speaker 10: of spectacle of violence was happening to that extent. In
Speaker 10: the same way that it's shocking that the concentration camps
Speaker 10: of Omasca, all of those concentration camps were being televised
Speaker 10: and were still in operation. I mean, yes, eventually the
Speaker 10: international pressure shut them down, but it took a long time.
Speaker 10: That is all shocking. It is shocking that the peace
Speaker 10: agreement that brought a formal end to the conflict legitimized
Speaker 10: simultaneously the political project of the Republicaska by recognizing the entity.
Speaker 10: All of these things are shocking. So for me, the
Speaker 10: allegations of the documentary all into this broader abject failure
Speaker 10: and complicity of so called international community in the crimes
Speaker 10: that were being committed in Bosnia. So that is why
Speaker 10: I'm not surprised. I was shocking. The content is shocking.
Speaker 10: The fact that it was able to happen is not surprising,
Speaker 10: and I think the documentary speaks to the broader complicity
Speaker 10: of so many layers of society in the atrocities that
Speaker 10: were being committed. You know, let's be real, let's be
Speaker 10: really really blunt here. The countries from which the tourists
Speaker 10: came are not the only countries that are implicated in
Speaker 10: the atrocities of the war and genocide in Bosnia. You
Speaker 10: had far right volunteers from Greece who were being trained
Speaker 10: by Ratko Mladtch's army, who.
Speaker 5: Were in.
Speaker 10: On the eleventh of July, that the Greek state has
Speaker 10: never investigated. You had banks in Cyprus that were allowing
Speaker 10: Miloshevich to funnel his money into them during the embargo.
Speaker 10: You know, there are so many states who on some
Speaker 10: level have played a role in the atrocities that have
Speaker 10: not held themselves or their nationals accountable. So, yeah, that
Speaker 10: is my reaction, if that makes sense to you guys.
Speaker 11: You know, yeah, we live in a in a age
Speaker 11: where they get most people's thoughts are directly transcribed to
Speaker 11: their social media profiles at all times, right, and I
Speaker 11: think it is probably easier than it has ever been
Speaker 11: for us to bear witness to it genocide as multiple
Speaker 11: genisides are recurring, like at the time that we're recording, right,
Speaker 11: But obviously that's the most I wouldn't even say the
Speaker 11: most well documented, the one that certainly gets the most
Speaker 11: social media attention. It's the one happening in Gaza for
Speaker 11: pretty obvious reasons. People are probably better placed now to
Speaker 11: understand this in the context of a genocide than they
Speaker 11: would have been five years ago, even right that the
Speaker 11: project of a genocide has happened so in the open,
Speaker 11: and then they have seen nations which claim to be
Speaker 11: opposed to these things, and institutions which were created to
Speaker 11: stop genocides do nothing. So I think it's probably easier
Speaker 11: than ever for people to understand the dehumanization that happens
Speaker 11: and the way that these things progress. But I wonder
Speaker 11: like it's just such a like you said, make like
Speaker 11: it's one thing to go to war, right, and it's
Speaker 11: another thing to have war come to you, Like I
Speaker 11: have traveled to report on wars, but the you said, like,
Speaker 11: war isn't trying to be violent, and in this particular war,
Speaker 11: acts of inhuman violence happened often and from a great
Speaker 11: deal of actors, right, but like, it's one thing when
Speaker 11: it is your community that is under threat, your family
Speaker 11: have been killed, and then you respond with violence, Like
Speaker 11: it doesn't make it right, but that is how war is.
Speaker 11: It's another thing to pay to hop on a flight
Speaker 11: and go and shoot a child like that is particularly craven.
Speaker 11: So I wonder, like it seems like the cases that
Speaker 11: the prosecutions are mostly focusing on, like people from the
Speaker 11: Italian far right, do you have an idea of like
Speaker 11: this was for them part of that project of like
Speaker 11: like doing a second a conquista right for want of
Speaker 11: a better term, like purging Muslim people from Europe, or
Speaker 11: if it was simply the thrill of killing other humans.
Speaker 10: I think it would be remiss to try and detach
Speaker 10: the thrill of killing humans from who those humans are.
Speaker 10: That's my honest opinion.
Speaker 5: That's fair.
Speaker 9: I think, you know, I.
Speaker 10: Know less about the granular details of these people from Italy,
Speaker 10: from the far right who were going to do this,
Speaker 10: But if I think about what I know about the
Speaker 10: Greek far right volunteers, where we have a bit more
Speaker 10: information to go on and why they were going to Bosnia.
Speaker 10: This was all about fighting the Turks. This was all
Speaker 10: about helping our Christian brothers, the Serbs, in their fight
Speaker 10: against the Muslims. And I suspect that it wasn't too
Speaker 10: dissimilar in the political imaginary of the Italian far rights,
Speaker 10: and not just the Italian far right, I mean, as
Speaker 10: we said, from all the other countries where they were
Speaker 10: coming from. So yeah, I think there was a framing
Speaker 10: that was behind a lot of this international participation that
Speaker 10: the Serb nationalists were very aware of, and they were
Speaker 10: very deliberate in the discourses that they were producing. I'll
Speaker 10: give another example. When I was working at the Memorial Center,
Speaker 10: I was read in Cere. I was reading the transcripts
Speaker 10: of the Assembly of the Publicska during the war, and
Speaker 10: in those transcripts I can count on one hand the
Speaker 10: amount of times that Serb nationalist officials referred to Bosnian.
Speaker 9: Muslims as Bosnian Muslims.
Speaker 10: They were, in the vast majority of cases referred to
Speaker 10: as either Turks or Islamists, or terrorists or even Ustasia,
Speaker 10: who for anyone listening who may not be aware, were
Speaker 10: the Croatian See aligned regime that took control of what
Speaker 10: is today Bosnia Herzegovina and also what is today Croatia
Speaker 10: during the Second World War. And so you know, this
Speaker 10: course is they are produced for a reason. And I
Speaker 10: know I'm going a little bit, you know, sort of
Speaker 10: full core and whatever. I don't like talking in that way,
Speaker 10: but I will try to keep it as accessible as possible.
Speaker 10: When people produce discourses, it's to create not only a
Speaker 10: sense of what is true and what is false, but
Speaker 10: also it's to create this feeling of truth.
Speaker 9: It's what feels right.
Speaker 10: So you know, it felt right to so many members
Speaker 10: of the far right to take up arms and hop
Speaker 10: on a plane or whatever and go to Bosnia to fight,
Speaker 10: you know, without questioning what actually the war in genocide
Speaker 10: was about.
Speaker 9: It felt right.
Speaker 10: And so that's how these discourses, that's what they served
Speaker 10: to create this feeling of this is the truth and
Speaker 10: this is the right thing for us to do.
Speaker 9: Yeah, that was a very long winded answer. I apologize,
Speaker 9: no you doing it.
Speaker 11: It reminds me a lot of the discourses that we
Speaker 11: saw in Myanmar preceding the genocide of the Hina people, right, like,
Speaker 11: very rarely did we see them referred to by that
Speaker 11: name or as of them being natives of me and
Speaker 11: maa right or them having been there for centuries. They're
Speaker 11: referred to as terrorists. They're referred to as bangladeshues. They're
Speaker 11: referred to as illegal immigrants. They're often referred to as
Speaker 11: members of the Islamic state for Iraq and al Sham,
Speaker 11: which shows a fundamental misunderstanding of those last two words.
Speaker 11: But it's important, I think, to see these commonalities because
Speaker 11: we should be able to identify these things and then
Speaker 11: like see how dangerous they are.
Speaker 9: Yeah. Absolutely, you know.
Speaker 6: Who doesn't produce discourses that make people hope on flights
Speaker 6: to other countries. I'm not sure we can say that
Speaker 6: these days, let's hope. Yeah, that's true, But we have
Speaker 6: to think of something, so I guess this will do it. Yeah,
Speaker 6: I can't have golden pivots all the time.
Speaker 7: All right, we are back.
Speaker 11: Should we talk a little more in depth about like
Speaker 11: this practice of human safaris, right, or at least the
Speaker 11: allegations that are made so well.
Speaker 6: I am curious Georgia, because I was still reading into
Speaker 6: this a bit earlier today. And one of the testimonies
Speaker 6: that popped up during the trial of Dragolosch not Slowbodone.
Speaker 9: I'm not sure if they're related. To be honest, probably not.
Speaker 6: But there's an American called Sean Jordan who testified at
Speaker 6: the International Criminal Courts. He led a volunteer fighter fighter
Speaker 6: units during the siege, but he also says that some
Speaker 6: of the people he worked with also had seen tourists
Speaker 6: in other areas and most stars named specifically. Is there
Speaker 6: any more detail in there about this happening in other
Speaker 6: areas of Bosnia or other places.
Speaker 10: Well about most that in particular, I am not sure
Speaker 10: because I've not heard myself of those allegations. Obviously, there
Speaker 10: was the Greek Volunteer Guard who were in places like Cerebronitza,
Speaker 10: but also with sche Grad. They went on after the
Speaker 10: war to become well, actually sorry, I'll correct myself. Even
Speaker 10: at that time they were part of the what later
Speaker 10: became Golden Dawn, the far right now criminal organization was
Speaker 10: a political party, so that you know, you had that
Speaker 10: happening in terms of tourists non combatants. I am not
Speaker 10: aware of other places where it was happening on a
Speaker 10: large scale, like in Sarajo, So yeah, I'm not perhaps
Speaker 10: the best place to go into more detail about that,
Speaker 10: but I will definitely talk to my contacts in Mostad
Speaker 10: about the allegation any allegations there.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I guess one thing that I want to ask is,
Speaker 11: like we're seeing a very limited persecution right in Italy,
Speaker 11: and I think maybe also in somewhere in like is
Speaker 11: it in Belgium or the Netherlands? I thought I read
Speaker 11: that there was another prosecution, not not to confuse its
Speaker 11: few countries make sorry, but for the people who survived
Speaker 11: the genocide, right, what does this You can't speak on
Speaker 11: their behalf, of course, but like, on the one hand,
Speaker 11: it is some very small move towards justice, but at
Speaker 11: least it's a movement. But on the other hand, right,
Speaker 11: like the deaths of their family members have been played
Speaker 11: out in this documentary and it must be very difficult
Speaker 11: to understand just just how like, I don't know, casually
Speaker 11: like life was taken during the this genocide. Yeah, do
Speaker 11: you think it helps healing? Like I guess I'm struggling
Speaker 11: to phrase out as a question, but you know, like
Speaker 11: I'm interesting to know how this this this lands. From
Speaker 11: that perspective, I guess.
Speaker 10: The general mood among survivors in Bosnia is that no
Speaker 10: one cares about what happened to us.
Speaker 9: These films that go on.
Speaker 10: To get awards potentially, and they know, the filmmakers get
Speaker 10: a pat on the back and all of that. They
Speaker 10: sort of there's a lot of cynicism around that. And
Speaker 10: we saw this in particular in regard to cor Valdis
Speaker 10: either I'm not sure if you both watched that, but
Speaker 10: that recent one was that twenty twenty one, maybe a
Speaker 10: few years ago, which if anyone who hasn't watched it
Speaker 10: is a film that depicts the genocide Insteadza and you know,
Speaker 10: and that won some awards that I can't remember the
Speaker 10: titles of them, but you know, the sort of response
Speaker 10: among particularly the Bosniak community was one of mixed emotions. Yes,
Speaker 10: on the one hand, it was, you know, something that
Speaker 10: they were willing to support, you know, they would hold
Speaker 10: screenings of the film, they would you know, collaborate with
Speaker 10: the director. But on the other hand, there was this
Speaker 10: sense of okay, and now what. And I think from
Speaker 10: the conversations that I've had with Bosniaks and from the
Speaker 10: articles that I've read in response to this documentary, there's
Speaker 10: a similar sort of mood of yeah, this is really important,
Speaker 10: and we have been making these allegations for a long time.
Speaker 10: Or we've been aware of the allegations for a long time.
Speaker 10: Why is it getting attention now? What's going to happen now?
Speaker 10: Can we trust that the Italians will that Italy will
Speaker 10: actually carry on with this investigation and that justice will
Speaker 10: be had? And also, you know, the notion of justice
Speaker 10: is so fraught in Bosnia as well. I think that
Speaker 10: sort of to imagine that we are on this path
Speaker 10: towards you know, this linear path towards absolute healing and
Speaker 10: absolute justice and reconciliation, I think is a sort of
Speaker 10: a notion that that comforts a lot of wet an NGOs.
Speaker 10: It's not necessarily reflective a reality on the ground. So yeah,
Speaker 10: I don't think I would reconnecting this with any sense
Speaker 10: of healing at this stage.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think that makes sense.
Speaker 11: It can be easy to see it as like, well,
Speaker 11: it's out in the open now. People have watched a
Speaker 11: film about it, right, you know, like I think a
Speaker 11: lot about the genocaid these are UCD people, and how
Speaker 11: like it essentially just has been liting what twelve years
Speaker 11: ago now and it's been entirely forgotten. Yeah, but most people,
Speaker 11: many of those people, you know, I have been to
Speaker 11: where they are and in terrible condition to refugee camps
Speaker 11: in Iraqi court. It is done right, and yeah, people
Speaker 11: are aware of it. Every now and again someone writes
Speaker 11: something about it. But like those people are no closer
Speaker 11: to any form of healing. You know that they still
Speaker 11: kin't of even many cases have not returned to their homes.
Speaker 10: I mean, this is the thing in you know, particularly
Speaker 10: in the in the Publicska entity. You know, bosniactual living
Speaker 10: in that entity, they face material procarity on an everyday basis.
Speaker 10: They face threats, they face genocide, triumphalism every year when
Speaker 10: the celebrates the bounding of the entity, all of these
Speaker 10: everyday violences don't go away because of a film. And
Speaker 10: I think that Bosniacs that I have come to know
Speaker 10: in living in the entity of the public Aska really
Speaker 10: carry that sense of we're dealing with shit every day.
Speaker 10: Every day, we are facing material battles, and we're doing
Speaker 10: it alone most of the time. So yeah, it's very
Speaker 10: difficult to put an optimistic, hopeful twist on on these things.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I remember I was one year later than you
Speaker 6: were there. I was also at the memorial in Serberditza Potochari,
Speaker 6: and I remember I'm not going to name a name,
Speaker 6: but there was someone who was living in the area
Speaker 6: who spoke to us, and someone from my group wanted
Speaker 6: to film that. And I remember that the men was
Speaker 6: very very adamant that, hey, I do not want to
Speaker 6: be filmed.
Speaker 7: I already need to walk these streets. That is enough.
Speaker 6: You should have asked for permission. I also remember like
Speaker 6: put in posters when walking through through Cerebit nizza and
Speaker 6: on certain windows. Yeah yeah, yeah, But I also want
Speaker 6: to cut in with something else, because after James mentioned
Speaker 6: that other countries were prosecuting as well, I quickly googled something.
Speaker 6: Apparently Italy has already named a suspect in the investigation. Interesting, Yes,
Speaker 6: now eighty year old man. Yeah, yeah, who was a
Speaker 6: truck driver. Yes, this is something that that had come up.
Speaker 6: When I was writing everything.
Speaker 11: I had assumed that this was something that was extremely
Speaker 11: I don't know, expensive, I suppose just because it's so
Speaker 11: fucked up and that yeah, like it's that once it
Speaker 11: was someone who they're eighty now would have been fifty
Speaker 11: at the time, so someone who was not young, and
Speaker 11: I had a relatively working class profession, like it's it's
Speaker 11: that's that just isn't the profile I had in my head,
Speaker 11: and I just wanted if you knew any more about
Speaker 11: developments in the case that might like.
Speaker 10: I mean, to be really honest, I don't have much
Speaker 10: more to contribute in terms of that of the suspect
Speaker 10: and what this what's going on? Yeah, you know, I
Speaker 10: think it was he was summoned to testify last week.
Speaker 10: I think were going to tetify on the eleventh, or
Speaker 10: maybe the ninth. I think maybe the ninth, but I
Speaker 10: haven't heard anything beyond that. So I mean, in terms
Speaker 10: of what you were saying about the profile of the suspect,
Speaker 10: I mean, yes, on the one hand, it goes against
Speaker 10: the whole idea that it was wealthy tourists only. But
Speaker 10: let's also remember that in terms of domestic participation, there
Speaker 10: was a lot of capital to be gained by serving
Speaker 10: the publica Sakska project. I mean, you had everything from
Speaker 10: civilian Serb civilian truck drivers who helped to deport civilians
Speaker 10: Bosnia activilians. You had Serb civilians who were hired to
Speaker 10: dig secondary and tertiary graves, mass graves. There was an
Speaker 10: array of positions capital that was created for people who
Speaker 10: had very little and I think that's important to bear
Speaker 10: to bear in mind. Obviously that's what that's in reference
Speaker 10: to the domestic to the participation of civilians within.
Speaker 9: The former Yo Slavia.
Speaker 10: What the story behind this Italian truck driver is remains
Speaker 10: to be seen, but that's where my mind goes when
Speaker 10: you were talking about, you know, his profile.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I mean there is there are things to be
Speaker 11: gained internationally through that same participation in that same project, right,
Speaker 11: like not necessarily like from the Serbian project, but like
Speaker 11: in terms of one's status in groups, in terms of
Speaker 11: like social capital on the right. I guess we shouldn't
Speaker 11: ignore that. I don't maybe it should just remind us,
Speaker 11: like especially these struggles can all seem so disparate, right,
Speaker 11: but they're not. Like the struggle against a domestic right
Speaker 11: in Italy was basically the same thing as the or
Speaker 11: at least you know, shared the shared shared an enemy
Speaker 11: with the attempts to fight back against this genocidal violence there.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think it is important to keep in mind that.
Speaker 6: I think when we all initially thought of the type
Speaker 6: of person who would do something like this and pay
Speaker 6: money for this, we all had an image in our
Speaker 6: head of the type that type, and I do think
Speaker 6: it's very important to then take into account that it
Speaker 6: can also be everyday people who are who can be
Speaker 6: capable and willing to do something like this.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Also another suspect who is not named but is mentioned
Speaker 6: in this article.
Speaker 9: It's from the.
Speaker 6: Study with times just to be transparent. It's a banker
Speaker 6: and so fits a lot better with like the image
Speaker 6: we had in our heads.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah, something to add about the documentary's context. One of
Speaker 10: the people who testified in the documentary is a man
Speaker 10: called Eddin Subashich, who was a former Bosnian intelligence agent.
Speaker 10: Now the reason why I'm bringing him up is because
Speaker 10: he actually says I believe he says it in the
Speaker 10: documentary or he may have said it in a subsequent
Speaker 10: interview or double check. He has said that himself and
Speaker 10: the Bosnian Intelligence Agency first informed the Italian Intelligence Service
Speaker 10: about what they believed what they had evidence was happening
Speaker 10: in terms of the Sarierisafari. They first informed them in
Speaker 10: nineteen ninety three, and then a few months later, in
Speaker 10: March nineteen ninety four, the Italian Intelligence Service informed them
Speaker 10: that the matter had been closed. So that's just some
Speaker 10: interesting context to sort of think about in terms of
Speaker 10: perhaps some of the skepticism and cynicism that Bosniacs have
Speaker 10: about where this is going and the potential for change
Speaker 10: that could come as a result.
Speaker 11: Are there projects into solidarity with the people and the
Speaker 11: tendance of people who survive this you think people can
Speaker 11: engage with.
Speaker 10: I think that I would encourage people to follow Bosnians
Speaker 10: for Palestine on Instagram because what they are doing is
Speaker 10: that they are being very intentional in highlighting the commonalities
Speaker 10: between the violence against Palestinians and what Bosniacs in particular
Speaker 10: endured during the war and genocide.
Speaker 9: Cool.
Speaker 10: I would also point people towards a very interesting grassroots
Speaker 10: I don't know exactly what they are in terms of
Speaker 10: are there non I don't know if they're an association
Speaker 10: or just a grassroots initiative. They're called it's a Bosnian title.
Speaker 10: They're called oshtra nola o str a new word m
Speaker 10: u la, and they are based in the Publicska entity.
Speaker 10: But they are a group of young activists from all
Speaker 10: ethnic backgrounds, all of the three major ethnic groups in
Speaker 10: Bosnias that Serb Croat in Bosnia, who take an explicitly
Speaker 10: anti capitalist approach to their work, so they are very interesting.
Speaker 10: And the fact that they're doing what they're doing to
Speaker 10: fight against the corruption of the PUBLICABSKA authorities and ethno nationalism,
Speaker 10: and they're doing that within the entity, I think it
Speaker 10: is really quite extraordinary. So you can also follow them
Speaker 10: on Instagram and keep up to date with what they're doing.
Speaker 10: I mean, they're always there's always either a march happening
Speaker 10: in solidarity with Palestine, or there was recently a reading
Speaker 10: of names of all the murdered children of Sarah or
Speaker 10: alongside all of the murdered children of Gaza in the
Speaker 10: recent wave of the genocide in Gaza. So there's a
Speaker 10: lot of very interesting stuff happening which people from all
Speaker 10: around the world can at least follow on social media.
Speaker 10: And if you're in or around Bosnia then of course
Speaker 10: you can meet some of these people in person, which
Speaker 10: is great.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yes, for closing thoughts, I was splicitly surprised to read
Speaker 6: that they have suspects, so I'll take this win. And
Speaker 6: I also feel I should have seen this earlier. But Georgia,
Speaker 6: thank you for for coming on and having a chat
Speaker 6: with us about horrifying stuff.
Speaker 9: Thank you for inviting me our pleasure let's go.
Speaker 7: Pet puppy, we get a feed white chickens.
Speaker 12: All right, Welcome to it could Happen here podcasts about
Speaker 12: things falling apart and how to put them back together again.
Speaker 12: I'm your host, Mia Wong. Over the course of about
Speaker 12: a month, the general strike went from a pipe dream
Speaker 12: that even the most optimistic organizers didn't think could happen
Speaker 12: until potentially maybe twenty twenty eight to something that happened.
Speaker 8: Here.
Speaker 12: We saw a one day general strike in Minneapolis, and
Speaker 12: everything is different now. People from SEIU are calling for
Speaker 12: general strikes. It's become a demand, it's become a tactic,
Speaker 12: and it's become a term that is on the tongues
Speaker 12: of people who never would dare speak of it before.
Speaker 12: And on this show, we are going to talk about
Speaker 12: the history of general strikes, how they happen, how they're organized,
Speaker 12: how they succeed, how they fail, and what the contemporary
Speaker 12: history of the tactic looks like.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 12: When I originally planned this first episode, I was going
Speaker 12: to do a overview of about one hundred years of
Speaker 12: the history of general strikes to try to get us
Speaker 12: roughly to the modern era. And then as soon as
Speaker 12: I said, well, not as soon as I started writing
Speaker 12: that deeper into the process than it should have been,
Speaker 12: I realized there was absolutely no way I could cover
Speaker 12: one hundred years of general.
Speaker 5: Strikes in one episode.
Speaker 12: What I kept coming back to was one specific strike,
Speaker 12: a strike that most of you have never heard of,
Speaker 12: so the general strike in Shanghai in nineteen twenty five,
Speaker 12: what became known as the May the thirtieth Movement. I
Speaker 12: want to begin here because intellectually most of you have
Speaker 12: never heard of it. Emotionally you already know everything about it.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 12: I have written about this strike before. It was, in
Speaker 12: fact the first thing I ever wrote about for Behind
Speaker 12: the Bastards, an episode about a Chinese warlord named Jong
Speaker 12: zhong Chong. But about a quarter of those episodes were
Speaker 12: about what became the May the thirtieth Movement. And so
Speaker 12: I am going to recap a little bit of what
Speaker 12: I talked about in that episode and talk about some
Speaker 12: different stuff. And yeah, we're going to get you introduced
Speaker 12: to how you get a general strike, and you know
Speaker 12: how the course of these things can go. With a
Speaker 12: strike that will look shockingly familiar to anyone who has
Speaker 12: lived through this year, which is to say, this is
Speaker 12: a strike that starts when an occupying army has taken
Speaker 12: over a city and starts fucking killing people. So a
Speaker 12: little bit of background about what is going on in
Speaker 12: China in the nineteen twenties. Nineteen twenty five is in
Speaker 12: the middle of what is called the warlord period in China,
Speaker 12: which is a period where I don't go listen to
Speaker 12: the Bastard's episode. The short version of this is that
Speaker 12: after the nineteen eleven revolution that had overthrown this Chinese
Speaker 12: imperial system, China became split between a bunch of warlords
Speaker 12: composed out of different sort of parts of the armies.
Speaker 12: Now also in this period, large parts of China are
Speaker 12: under the direct control of foreign occupiers. These are countries
Speaker 12: like Japan, the UK, France, Russia. I think there's an
Speaker 12: American concession sort of in there somewhere, and these countries
Speaker 12: just own parts of China and for our purposes, they
Speaker 12: also own parts of Shanghai and these things both the
Speaker 12: territories they occupy sometimes literally, you know, the occupation is
Speaker 12: they own a rail line. When I say they own
Speaker 12: a rail line, it's not just a company or even
Speaker 12: the country owning the rail line. They physically own the territory,
Speaker 12: so it's theirs. Like this rail line belongs to Japan,
Speaker 12: and so the land around the rail line belongs to Japan,
Speaker 12: and they can enforce their laws in it. And this
Speaker 12: is how it works. Also in Shanghai, inside of these
Speaker 12: concessions there is an armed occupation. And in Shanghai there
Speaker 12: are British or friends or Japanese police and military personnel
Speaker 12: there who do law enforcement and we'll just kill you
Speaker 12: where my dear listener, have we seen this before? I
Speaker 12: leave that as an exercise to the reader. Listener, Yes,
Speaker 12: I guess, I guess you're the listener. Now, this state
Speaker 12: of affairs came to a head in May nineteen twenty
Speaker 12: five when a Japanese foreman was meeting with Chinese union
Speaker 12: organizers and what was basically supposed to be a contract
Speaker 12: negotiation session. There's a team of Japanese foremen and business
Speaker 12: people there and a group of Chinese union organizers, and
Speaker 12: the details of what exactly happened are very very sketchy,
Speaker 12: but a brawl broke out, and the conclusion of the
Speaker 12: brawl was that a Japanese foreman killed a fairly well
Speaker 12: known local union leader. Now, the police had also arrested
Speaker 12: several of the workers who have been in the negotiations,
Speaker 12: and continued to hold them even after a massive demonstration
Speaker 12: for the Chinese organizer who'd been killed funeral so on
Speaker 12: May the thirtieth, protesters gathered outside of a police station
Speaker 12: run by the British to demand the release of their comrades.
Speaker 12: This set off a climac to confrontation that changed the
Speaker 12: face of Chinese history forever. The British open fire on
Speaker 12: the crowd killed ten people and wounded fifty more. Now
Speaker 12: half a decade ago, when I first wrote about this
Speaker 12: for a Cool Zone, I read a quote from the
Speaker 12: great Chinese author and anarchist bad Jin. This is quoted
Speaker 12: from author Waldron's book from Warden Nationalism, China's Turning Point
Speaker 12: nineteen twenty forty nineteen twenty five, and I want to
Speaker 12: return to it now for reasons that I think will
Speaker 12: immediately become a parent. This is about a student who
Speaker 12: witnessed the killings at the entrance to Union Road. He
Speaker 12: saw the child who had been killed a short while
Speaker 12: before he thought about half an hour ago, the crowd
Speaker 12: was marching peacefully towards the police station to ask the
Speaker 12: police to set free students who had been unjustly arrested.
Speaker 12: They thought the police were human beings, endowed with reason
Speaker 12: and human sympathy, that human blood flowed in their veins.
Speaker 12: They thought that uniforms and weapons could not have destroyed
Speaker 12: their human nature. But reality proved they were bloodthirsty beasts.
Speaker 12: On the most crowded street of the city, they deliberately
Speaker 12: slaughtered unarmed people. For this, there was no precedent in
Speaker 12: Chinese history. The imperialist oppression that had endured for so
Speaker 12: many years ached like a deep wound in his heart.
Speaker 12: He struggled inwardly. He felt the time for patience was over.
Speaker 12: He felt he wanted to spill his blood, to sacrifice
Speaker 12: his young life, that he might show that not all
Speaker 12: among his people were lambs that allowed themselves to be
Speaker 12: led without resistance to slaughter. He looked again at the
Speaker 12: corpse of the murdered child. His eyes shone with fire.
Speaker 12: His whole body began to burn, as though on fire,
Speaker 12: his heart be violently. You, dear listener, understand this. When
Speaker 12: I first quoted this passage in twenty twenty one, it
Speaker 12: was about George Floyd. Now it's about Renee Good and
Speaker 12: Alex Pretty you understand the horror, the suffering, the rage,
Speaker 12: the overwhelming fire to do something. You understand that they
Speaker 12: are like us, and you understand why they fought. What
Speaker 12: followed was the largest to that point general strike in
Speaker 12: the history of Shanghai. Two hundred thousand people walked off
Speaker 12: the job almost immediately in the first wave of strikes.
Speaker 12: The strike spread to almost every major city in China
Speaker 12: in some form or another. Massive student protests began tire
Speaker 12: cities Roses one, two hundred and fifty thousand people went
Speaker 12: on strike. In Hong Kong, students, workers, business owners, and
Speaker 12: gangsters stood precariously as one to drive out the armed
Speaker 12: men occupying their cities. In an instant, the world changed.
Speaker 12: Things that were impossible the day before suddenly began commonplace.
Speaker 12: People flooded the streets, they were attacked by cops, fought back,
Speaker 12: and for three months they held on. Now this was
Speaker 12: a much rougher time than even contemporary twenty twenty six America.
Speaker 12: We are in a little bit going to get to
Speaker 12: the part where a bunch of people's heads get put
Speaker 12: on spikes by the government. And you know, unlike nineteen
Speaker 12: twenty five Shanghai, for example, American cities are not, contrary
Speaker 12: to the beliefs of a significant portion of the American
Speaker 12: conservative population, run by networks of organized crime who control
Speaker 12: every facet of political life and also economic life and
Speaker 12: also social life, to the extent that if you're a
Speaker 12: union organizer in nineteen twenty Shanghai, you are effectively a
Speaker 12: mob organizer, both in the sense that you probably have
Speaker 12: to belong to one of the organizations and to the
Speaker 12: extent that the people you are actually organizing this time
Speaker 12: are like you're organizing the mob guys who bring in
Speaker 12: workers to serve as the mirgant worker population. This is
Speaker 12: also actually an important aspect of the strikes nineteen twenty five,
Speaker 12: which is that much of the labor population in Shanghai
Speaker 12: are mirgrant workers have been brought in from other parts
Speaker 12: of the country by organized crime. Now obviously that's not
Speaker 12: it is not really how migrant labor works in the
Speaker 12: United States, but you know, to some extent, the pressures
Speaker 12: of the labor discipline are very similar in that right,
Speaker 12: the threat that has held over the heads of migrant
Speaker 12: workers is that armed men will come in the night
Speaker 12: for you. And right now what we are witnessing is
Speaker 12: the armed men coming into the night. But you know,
Speaker 12: as much as I talk about sort of the differences
Speaker 12: between these movements, I think the immediate question for our
Speaker 12: purposes is are there things that we can learn from
Speaker 12: this movement? And I think the answer is yes. But
Speaker 12: in order to get to the what can we learn
Speaker 12: from this? We have to talk a bit about how
Speaker 12: the movement collapsed. So I said that the movement held
Speaker 12: on for about three months. That was in Shanghai. The
Speaker 12: history of some of the other cities is different, and
Speaker 12: we kind of don't have time to. For example, divert
Speaker 12: talk about general strike in Hong Kong, where the primary
Speaker 12: method that people used was they simply left the city
Speaker 12: and went back home, which solved some of the problems
Speaker 12: that we're going to be talking about in a little bit.
Speaker 12: But okay, in Shanghai, what happened to this movement and
Speaker 12: why did it fall apart? So I think there are
Speaker 12: roughly three factors, and I think the first two are
Speaker 12: actually more important than the third one, which might be
Speaker 12: surprising when we get to them. But the first two
Speaker 12: factors were people being able to eat and the pressure
Speaker 12: that that put on the unions, and secondarily, betrayal from
Speaker 12: the business elites that they had allied with to get
Speaker 12: the strikes to work. And the third is pere repression.
Speaker 12: And the scale of the peer repression here is astonishing.
Speaker 12: I mean some of the like one of the guys
Speaker 12: who runs this strike is just executed by the state. Again,
Speaker 12: we're going, I'm promising we're gonna get to the heads
Speaker 12: on pikes in a bit.
Speaker 3: But the repression isn't.
Speaker 12: What killed the strike. It was the problem of how
Speaker 12: do people eat? And it was the pressure from the
Speaker 12: business elite. So we're going to talk about the business
Speaker 12: elite first. Now, when I say the business elite here
Speaker 12: in the early days of the movement, and this is
Speaker 12: a tension that's going to sort of haunt the Chinese
Speaker 12: Nationalist Party for its entire existence until it splits from
Speaker 12: the Communist completely and even later than that. They're in
Speaker 12: a very very uneasy alliance with left wing student and
Speaker 12: workers who are rapidly becoming left wing, because this is
Speaker 12: also a city that was not enormously politicized until now
Speaker 12: and suddenly becomes politicized in ways it seemed impossible like
Speaker 12: a few years before. But there's a tension between them
Speaker 12: because initially these sort of patriotic business owners are really
Speaker 12: really pissed off that the foreign occupiers are murdering people
Speaker 12: in their city, and sort of nationalists and communist leaders
Speaker 12: are able to sort of broker alliances with them, and
Speaker 12: they're able to broke her alliances with organized crime, which
Speaker 12: is less important for our purposes. I cannot emphasize enough
Speaker 12: how important the organized crime people are in the history,
Speaker 12: to the extent that like Chen Kai Shek, who you
Speaker 12: may know as like the leader of the Nationalist Party
Speaker 12: and the guy who's eventually going to run Taiwan after
Speaker 12: losing the Civil war, Chenkai Shek was an organized crime
Speaker 12: guy like he was in the Green Gang, So, like
Speaker 12: you know, very important to their story, less important to
Speaker 12: our story. But they act in a very similar way
Speaker 12: shoot the business owners, which is that in the beginning,
Speaker 12: and this is something that we saw in Minneapolis too,
Speaker 12: tweing their one day general strike, which is that a
Speaker 12: lot of business owners, either out of you know, just
Speaker 12: actual genuine rage and grief over just the raw fucking
Speaker 12: horror of these monsters grabbing people from their homes and
Speaker 12: shooting people in the streets, cooperated and shut their businesses
Speaker 12: down for the day. Now obviously there are other business
Speaker 12: owners who do this because they are producers? Am I
Speaker 12: allowed to say that? They look that side and were like,
Speaker 12: it doesn't take a weatherman to see which way the
Speaker 12: winds are blowing, right, you know, they saw what was
Speaker 12: going on, and we're like, Okay, either my workers aren't
Speaker 12: going to show up, or if I don't publicly support this,
Speaker 12: it's gonna get real fucked for me, because everyone else
Speaker 12: around does. And that meant that there was a lot
Speaker 12: of cooperation from businesses. But we also saw very quickly
Speaker 12: after like a kind of a whole bunch of businesses
Speaker 12: and like sports organizations too, like signed a thing that
Speaker 12: was like, ah, we need to restore order, do do
Speaker 12: do do do maybe and the occupation, but also please
Speaker 12: stop causing disruptions protesters.
Speaker 5: Now, in the Chinese.
Speaker 12: Case, what we see as the strike goes on is
Speaker 12: that the business elites began to see the the strikes themselves,
Speaker 12: and the marches and the fighting with the police, and
Speaker 12: particularly the fact that they were also not making money
Speaker 12: and they were also putting their own money into keeping
Speaker 12: the strikes going as a problem because they are business
Speaker 12: people and the only thing that they really care about
Speaker 12: fundamentally is making money. There's a Marx line I wish
Speaker 12: I had here about like what the national character of
Speaker 12: Britain was, that it turned that it's only fundamental principle
Speaker 12: is land rent, and that that's like this, right, Like,
Speaker 12: at some point these people are like, okay, well, given
Speaker 12: the choice between imperialist occupation and me losing money and
Speaker 12: my workers gaining power, I will choose imperialist occupation. And
Speaker 12: this is something that in cross class movements like this, specifically,
Speaker 12: if you are trying to do a general strike, you're
Speaker 12: eventually going to have to deal with this, which is
Speaker 12: that a lot of particularly large businesses, and you know,
Speaker 12: some small business owners will fall in line with this too, right,
Speaker 12: will eventually get to a point where they're like, I
Speaker 12: would rather keep making money than you know, not have
Speaker 12: my neighbors taken away. And that is unbelievably fucking bleak.
Speaker 12: But that's you know, like that's one of the things
Speaker 12: that killed this general strike in China. And eventually, in
Speaker 12: the face of this, right, we come to the second problem,
Speaker 12: which that people needed to eat. So the union federation
Speaker 12: that's set up had been just sort of giving people
Speaker 12: money so that they could eat but they eventually start
Speaker 12: to run out of money, and they don't really have
Speaker 12: a way to organize the sort of production movement and
Speaker 12: logistics of providing ifone with food without relying on the
Speaker 12: bankrolling of those business owners. You know, this becomes a
Speaker 12: problem because it means that they're suddenly getting attacked by
Speaker 12: portions of the workers who aren't supposed to be their
Speaker 12: base because they don't have food. And those people also
Speaker 12: just start like walking up the Chamber of Commerce meetings
Speaker 12: and walking in and beating up the Chamber of Commerce
Speaker 12: people for not paying them, and then like eating the
Speaker 12: banquet food the cheap room commerce is a great story
Speaker 12: in the book called Shanghai on Strike. While Elizabeth Ferry,
Speaker 12: who's the renowned scholar of Chinese labor history, about this
Speaker 12: very funny. There's lots of absolutely wild stories from this strike.
Speaker 12: What are the sort of recurring themes of this period
Speaker 12: of union organizing it? Again, this is a really rough time, right,
Speaker 12: Imagine like gangster movie nineteen, like twenties New York, and
Speaker 12: like that's Shanghai, but like the gangs are way way,
Speaker 12: way way stronger. So like the way politics works to
Speaker 12: a large extent is that people beat the share out
Speaker 12: of each other, and like hall hits on each other,
Speaker 12: and the city is technically speaking, it's run by like
Speaker 12: what is a warlord army, and then beneath the warlord
Speaker 12: army there are all of these organized criminal organizations. But like,
Speaker 12: you know, the unions have this thing called dog beating brigades,
Speaker 12: where the dog beating brigades, like if you like publicly
Speaker 12: started scabbing you very publicly were standing against the strike,
Speaker 12: Like the dog beating brigade would show up in the
Speaker 12: middle of the night and it was just like a
Speaker 12: bunch of guys with hatchets and it would just like
Speaker 12: beat the shit out of you. And this was just
Speaker 12: like a normal thing that was happening between these strikes.
Speaker 12: So this whole period of Chinese history is nuts.
Speaker 5: It's wild. There's so much shit going on.
Speaker 12: That's just I don't know, they had the dog beating brigades.
Speaker 12: I guess in the American context we'd call them like
Speaker 12: like the scabby beating brigades or whatever. But you know,
Speaker 12: it's a rough time for everyone. But what they kind
Speaker 12: of don't have Without sort of business owners, they're never
Speaker 12: really able to sort of seize control of production and
Speaker 12: repurpose it towards you know, keeping everyone fed. And I
Speaker 12: will say this is something that actually I think we
Speaker 12: are better at than they were in the sense of
Speaker 12: we are better at running to logistics of getting a
Speaker 12: bunch of people's food and the stuff that they need
Speaker 12: to survive. And that's something we can look at in
Speaker 12: Minneapolis where and this is obviously coming from people's money,
Speaker 12: but a lot of the organizing in Minneapolis is about
Speaker 12: getting people who can't leave their homes food. We've also
Speaker 12: seen in the last day or so tenant and labor
Speaker 12: union leaders are talking about a rent strike in Minneapolis,
Speaker 12: which can help people, you know, not get effected because
Speaker 12: they can't go to work. But it's also something that
Speaker 12: if you're going to do a general strike, yeah, you
Speaker 12: probably also have to do a rent strike, but if
Speaker 12: you want to keep a general strike going, and this
Speaker 12: is something that we're going to get to a lot
Speaker 12: more in later episodes, the Seattle general strike is a
Speaker 12: very large.
Speaker 5: Example of this.
Speaker 12: If you want to keep this thing going, you have
Speaker 12: to take control of the places where you're working and
Speaker 12: you know, have them provide the food for people and
Speaker 12: have them provide the resources that people need. But in
Speaker 12: this sort of context, almost everyone who's involved in this,
Speaker 12: this is their first general strike. What really happens here, right,
Speaker 12: is that the unions are forced to call off the strike.
Speaker 12: They get minor concessions in exchange from the foreign bosses.
Speaker 12: But what it does is politicize the entire city, and
Speaker 12: it politicizes all of China in a way that is
Speaker 12: going to shape all of the politics in the country forever.
Speaker 12: I guess, like it's the thing that creates modern China
Speaker 12: is the politicization that comes out of this period. You know,
Speaker 12: it's what sort of transforms Chinese politics or something that
Speaker 12: was purely the almost purely the domain of worldlords into
Speaker 12: something that's now the domain of the nationalists and the communists.
Speaker 12: And obviously, you know, the military conflict is a large
Speaker 12: thing in this that we don't really have time to
Speaker 12: get into. But you know, this period transforms the entire
Speaker 12: politics of China. Right, People who had never thought about
Speaker 12: politics before, people who had never you know, who had
Speaker 12: never like heard the words imperialism or like heard the
Speaker 12: words like militarism, right, are suddenly in the streets talking
Speaker 12: about it, and they're talking about general strikes, and they're
Speaker 12: talking about how how can we run these occupying armies out?
Speaker 12: And I want to sort of mention how this whole
Speaker 12: thing ends, right, which that people keep organizing and they
Speaker 12: keep fighting. And one year later, in nineteen twenty six,
Speaker 12: the first of the uprisings begins, now, the first uprising,
Speaker 12: and these three uprisings are all sort of like hauled
Speaker 12: by the Chinese Communist Party and their unions.
Speaker 5: The first, this one.
Speaker 12: Fails horribly, and the warlords put the heads of workers
Speaker 12: they'd killed on pikes. They have these squads where there's
Speaker 12: two guys with broadswords and a guy with like a
Speaker 12: sheriff's badge effectively, who go door to door and if
Speaker 12: they find someone who they think had like handed out leaflets,
Speaker 12: they would execute.
Speaker 2: Them on the spot.
Speaker 12: This is the kind of repression that they're dealing with.
Speaker 12: And they did it again. They tried again in nineteen
Speaker 12: twenty seven, and that one failed. And at the second time,
Speaker 12: by the way, it's worth mentioning was supposed to be
Speaker 12: a general strike coordinated with an uprising, and they fucked
Speaker 12: up the coordination of it, but it did also. The
Speaker 12: second one was a three hundred thousand strong general strike,
Speaker 12: and the third stry was an eight hundred thousand strong
Speaker 12: general strike, and they stays the intrection and they run
Speaker 12: the warlord armies out of the city, and for a
Speaker 12: sort of brief glorious moment, Shanghai is in the hands
Speaker 12: of its workers, and theyre subsequent betrayal and slaughter by
Speaker 12: the USSR and Shang Kai Shack, mostly Shang Kai Shak.
Speaker 5: The USSR is also.
Speaker 12: At fault here for telling them to keep allying with
Speaker 12: Shan Kai Shak and the nationalists. That's the story for
Speaker 12: another time. But I think to close we are used
Speaker 12: to thinking that the times that we live in our unprecedented,
Speaker 12: and in some ways they are. But people have fought
Speaker 12: our struggles before. People have fought and died and won
Speaker 12: to stop the brain of men with guns over our cities.
Speaker 12: And if we learn the lessons of both their time
Speaker 12: and ours, if we use that knowledge to act in
Speaker 12: the moment of crisis, we can win conscience, history, and
Speaker 12: the cries of the suffering demanded. So let's go win
Speaker 12: the war. We have a world to win and nothing
Speaker 12: to lose but our chains.
Speaker 3: This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder our weekly
Speaker 3: newscast covering What's happening in the White House, the Crumbling World,
Speaker 3: and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis to Dame,
Speaker 3: joined by James Stout, Mia Wong, and Robert Evans. This
Speaker 3: episode recovering the week February eleventh to February eighteenth. Some
Speaker 3: small news items up top. Last week, the FDA declined
Speaker 3: to review a new flu vaccine from Maderna. In February twelfth,
Speaker 3: Tom Homan announced that Operation Metro Surge has concluded and
Speaker 3: quote significant drawdown has already been underway this week and
Speaker 3: will continue through the next week un quote. Zarmmdani has
Speaker 3: ordered a new audit of city agencies to ensure compliance
Speaker 3: with sanctuary city laws in New York. And Stephen Colbert
Speaker 3: says that CBS refused to air his interview with Texas
Speaker 3: Democratic Senate James Tellerico, citing the FCC's equal time rule.
Speaker 3: Despite this rule historically having an exception for late night
Speaker 3: talk show interviews. Last month, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatened
Speaker 3: to enforce the rule regardless of the well established president
Speaker 3: that excluded talk show interviews. And finally, the owner of
Speaker 3: a warehouse facility in Hutchins Texas so so that they
Speaker 3: won't sell or lease the building to the federal government
Speaker 3: as a detention facility. The city's mayor and council all
Speaker 3: opposed the project. Seizure by eminent domain is still possible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I guess with that, there's been campaigns in
Speaker 2: a couple of other small, traditionally conservative rural areas to
Speaker 2: not lease facilities for ICE. And it's still a little unclear,
Speaker 2: and I suspect it's kind of column A Columbie. How
Speaker 2: much of this is, you know, nimbiism and how much
Speaker 2: of this is resistance to ice specifically.
Speaker 11: Yeah, we covered a little of that in the episode
Speaker 11: I did on Social Circle, which is in Georgia last week.
Speaker 7: But I think it's fair to say both.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And obviously when I say nimbism, I don't mean
Speaker 2: it in a bad way. It's bad to have this
Speaker 2: in your back yard. But like their issue wasn't a
Speaker 2: moral one in some cases.
Speaker 7: Yeah, in some cases.
Speaker 11: I think in some cases it's their little columny, little
Speaker 11: column B.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's hard to tell.
Speaker 11: Yeah, And I think like it's worth noting, for instance,
Speaker 11: hearing in southern California, right a town called Dulzura, pretty
Speaker 11: small town. Maybe you've heard of it from when the
Speaker 11: KKK did border patrols there back in the day. But
Speaker 11: the Border patrol are trying to build a big new
Speaker 11: facility there and have been for some time called New
Speaker 11: brown Field.
Speaker 3: There has been local opposition to that among people.
Speaker 11: Who are very like people who I have spoken to
Speaker 11: are otherwise conservative, and like, some of it is, yeah,
Speaker 11: I don't want this changing the character of the town.
Speaker 11: I don't want a giant detention center that would eclipse
Speaker 11: the population of this very small town.
Speaker 7: Some of them is also like, I don't want them
Speaker 7: to be locking up people out here.
Speaker 11: We have a nice life out here, and you know,
Speaker 11: we have little lots of fields and horses and space,
Speaker 11: and it seems like it would be really fucked up
Speaker 11: to have people detained out here.
Speaker 7: Like I think that that.
Speaker 11: Nimby impulse can sometimes like could still combine with even
Speaker 11: people who are not, you know, abolitionists. They don't want
Speaker 11: to be confronted with the horrors directly next to them.
Speaker 2: Yep. And we'll talk a little bit more about the numbers,
Speaker 2: like ICE's polling numbers, like how popular they are with Americans.
Speaker 2: But one of the things we've seen this year. Is
Speaker 2: that like they've been shedding support even from Republicans, So like,
Speaker 2: you know, whatever debate we have here, that's like certainly
Speaker 2: not a non factor.
Speaker 7: Definitely.
Speaker 2: I think it's now time for us to talk about
Speaker 2: the biggest news story this week, which is that Shilah
Speaker 2: buff was arrested in New Orleans during Marty Grab after
Speaker 2: getting into a series of fights. Who he was in
Speaker 2: the movie Holes? Oh yeah, he was also in a
Speaker 2: different production called Holes, but not based on a book.
Speaker 3: He was in Holes. I forgot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was in both Holes.
Speaker 7: So I don't know who I've never Yeah, he's a he's.
Speaker 2: A child actor who was a who was very popular
Speaker 2: during the early two thousands and has gone. He played
Speaker 2: the Indiana Jones's son in the reboot event or in
Speaker 2: the new in the fourth Indiana Jones movie God and
Speaker 2: then he is he has He has since kind of
Speaker 2: fallen into madness and disrepute. He's a spousal abuser. He's
Speaker 2: repeatedly assaulted people in public. He showed up on that
Speaker 2: webcam White supremacists were drinking milk on once for reasons
Speaker 2: that are still to this day somewhat unclear to me.
Speaker 2: And he got into a fight in Marty Gras, which
Speaker 2: is just just just a fun little bit of news.
Speaker 2: My favorite part of this is that he assaulted a guy.
Speaker 2: He was repeatedly restrained by members of a bar, and
Speaker 2: whenever they would let him go because they just wanted
Speaker 2: him to leave, they didn't want to call the cops,
Speaker 2: he would then continue to attack the guy he was
Speaker 2: assaulting until they forced to. They were forced to call
Speaker 2: the police and have him arrested. And I've been in
Speaker 2: Marty Gras over the last few days, and let me
Speaker 2: tell you, getting arrested by the police during Marti Gras
Speaker 2: not easy. I don't have a lot to say about
Speaker 2: that other than I was surprised by the number of
Speaker 2: very political floats that I saw, particularly at least one
Speaker 2: that was entirely paper mache ice GY's in a very
Speaker 2: like non flattering way. There were a lot of like
Speaker 2: costumes and a number of references on floats. There's a
Speaker 2: couple of pretty hideous caricatures of Trump on floats, and
Speaker 2: they all got like a widely positive reaction. And I
Speaker 2: find this interesting. And I'm bringing this up because the
Speaker 2: research that I've largely been doing for the EV this
Speaker 2: week is trying to get a handle on, like where
Speaker 2: Americans are polling right now and how popular or unpopular
Speaker 2: is the president and his agenda, because like we see
Speaker 2: articles every week about like Trump's polls hit a new low,
Speaker 2: or the most recent article that I think it's gallup
Speaker 2: is no longer going to be doing presidential like popularity polling.
Speaker 2: But I wanted to get a look at, like how
Speaker 2: the actual like part and their agendas are holding up.
Speaker 2: And it's a pretty shocking gap between September October, like
Speaker 2: fall of last year and today. So in September of
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five, per Yugov, the Democratic Party had about
Speaker 2: a sixty four percent unfavorable so like sixty four percent
Speaker 2: of polled Americans didn't like the Democratic Party and a
Speaker 2: little less than thirty four percent of Americans had a
Speaker 2: favorable opinion of the Democratic Party. And if you actually
Speaker 2: look at the graphs for those that you GOV presents,
Speaker 2: they're basically making like a wineglass shape, right, So what
Speaker 2: that means is unfavorability is moving up and favorability is
Speaker 2: moving down rapidly, Like at the time at which those
Speaker 2: bulls were taken in September of last year, Meanwhile, the
Speaker 2: Republican Party. Neither party was popular, but the Republican Party
Speaker 2: the wineglass shape was a lot more muted, more like
Speaker 2: a shot glass. Fifty five point four percent of Americans
Speaker 2: pulled by Yugov expressed a unfavorable opinion of the Republican Party,
Speaker 2: at about forty two point three expressed a favorable opinion.
Speaker 2: You can compare this to October twenty twenty five polling
Speaker 2: by Pew Research, which showed something similar. Sixty four percent
Speaker 2: of Americans were frustrated with the Republican Party, seventy five
Speaker 2: percent of Americans reported being frustrated with the Democratic Party.
Speaker 2: Forty nine percent of Americans polled replied that they were
Speaker 2: angry at the Republican Party, fifty percent reported being angry
Speaker 2: at the Democratic Party. Similarly, Republicans, thirty six cent of
Speaker 2: Americans felt hopeful about the Republican Party, twenty eight percent
Speaker 2: of Americans felt hopeful about the Democratic Party, and then
Speaker 2: twenty seven percent of Americans were proud of the Republican
Speaker 2: Party sixteen percent Democratic Party. Those are pretty bleak numbers
Speaker 2: for the Democrats coming in the fall of twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: Like that is kind of black pilling. Stuff. Right, This
Speaker 2: was in the fall of last year, pretty rapid change
Speaker 2: from where things had been about four years ago. For example,
Speaker 2: in September two, only twenty one, about sixty four percent
Speaker 2: of Americans had expressed frustration with the Democratic Party as
Speaker 2: opposed to seventy five percent four years later. So that's
Speaker 2: all fall of last year. Now, between when the polls
Speaker 2: that I read to you came out and now we've
Speaker 2: had a cup several major things happen. One of the
Speaker 2: more significant was the long shutdown, which was disasters for
Speaker 2: Republican favorability and for Trump's own favorability. And we also
Speaker 2: had a significant I mean, obviously in LA and in Chicago,
Speaker 2: Ice had been doing very terrible and very like you know,
Speaker 2: I guess I should say, like documented crimes, like horrible
Speaker 2: things that were spread widely on social media. But that
Speaker 2: has also accelerated massively in the first couple of weeks
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty six. And what we're seeing now in
Speaker 2: more recent polls taken in late January and from anywhere
Speaker 2: from like kind of early January to late January and
Speaker 2: early February is a significant reversal. So NBC News is
Speaker 2: Decision Desk coalated a bunch of different polls like Daily Mail, Marquette,
Speaker 2: Wall Street Journal, Yahoo, YouGov, Fox News, Emerson, and over
Speaker 2: the last month or so, you're looking at an average
Speaker 2: spread of all of these polls of about negative nineteen
Speaker 2: point nine percent favorability for the Republican Party and about
Speaker 2: negative twelve point eight percent favorability for the Democratic Party.
Speaker 2: So when you think back to those numbers from last fall,
Speaker 2: that's a pretty dramatic change, and it kind of correlates
Speaker 2: to a dramatic change in Trump's own favorability, which has
Speaker 2: gone down by about twelve percent per the average of
Speaker 2: those polls that kind of aggregated by NBC News Desk
Speaker 2: their article notes quote. Ipso's polling released in late January
Speaker 2: found fifty one percent of Americans say Trump' immigration policy
Speaker 2: is on the wrong track. Amazingly, just a year ago,
Speaker 2: American said Republicans have a better plan, policy, and approach
Speaker 2: than Democrats on immigration by a twenty two point margin.
Speaker 2: Now that advantage is down to five points pints. So
Speaker 2: while Trump is underwater with immigration, his and the Republican
Speaker 2: Party's policies towards immigration are still more popular than the
Speaker 2: Democratic Party's response. Is to immigration, but they have also
Speaker 2: collapsed in terms of like. The gap between those two things, again,
Speaker 2: twenty two point margin to a five point lead is
Speaker 2: a is a pretty dramatic narrowing. And one of the
Speaker 2: things that has come along with this is an increasing
Speaker 2: agreement among Americans that ICE has not only gone too far,
Speaker 2: but needs to be if not abolished entirely, then severely curtailed,
Speaker 2: and a lot of Americans, this shocking amount, currently support
Speaker 2: abolishing ICE entirely. A PBS News, NPR Merist poll released
Speaker 2: recently found that a majority of Americans feel ICE is
Speaker 2: making the country less safe and has gone too far.
Speaker 2: Six in ten Americans disapprove of what ICE is doing,
Speaker 2: only about three and ten approve of it, So by
Speaker 2: a two to one margin, Americans disapprove ICE's operations to
Speaker 2: approve of their behavior. This is a very like political breakdown.
Speaker 2: About ninety one percent of Democrats disapprove of Ice, sixty
Speaker 2: cent of Independence disapprove of ICE. Meanwhile, seventy three percent
Speaker 2: of Republicans approve of ICE, but even that number has
Speaker 2: dropped fairly recently. Right In fact, the percentage of Americans
Speaker 2: that believe ICE hasn't gone far enough dropped from eighteen
Speaker 2: percent to twelve percent over the last year, and only
Speaker 2: about twenty two percent of Americans feel like Ice is
Speaker 2: doing a good job compared to twenty six percent of
Speaker 2: Americans a year ago. So we're seeing like pretty unequivocally
Speaker 2: Americans rejecting the Republican tactics on immigration, and they tend
Speaker 2: to be blaming Ice for it, right, Like, That's one
Speaker 2: of the things that's most interesting to me is that
Speaker 2: both Ice and President Trump have seen the most dramatic
Speaker 2: collapses in public support. Would suggests to me that, like
Speaker 2: Americans are kind of tying these two things together. Currently,
Speaker 2: per Yugov, as of January twenty fourth, twenty twenty six,
Speaker 2: more Americans support abolishing ICE than oppose it. Now, this
Speaker 2: is not mean a majority of American support abolishing Ice.
Speaker 2: I've seen some people mistate that forty six percent of
Speaker 2: US adults, as pulled by Yugov, somewhat or strongly support
Speaker 2: abolishing Ice, twelve percent are not sure. Forty one percent
Speaker 2: somewhat or strongly oppose abolishing Ice. Yeah, that's still pretty striking.
Speaker 7: Yeah, say yeah, a plurality.
Speaker 11: Right, Maybe now would be a good time to talk
Speaker 11: a little bit about like where Democrats, different Democrats are,
Speaker 11: different wings of the Democrat Party are on abolishing ice,
Speaker 11: because I think it's one of these areas where like
Speaker 11: the further up the party you go, the more detached
Speaker 11: from that public opinion you get. So maybe you will
Speaker 11: start the Keem Jeffries, Democrat leader in the House, hit
Speaker 11: him on the Joy Read Show on the topic of
Speaker 11: abolishing ice.
Speaker 13: Why not lead and say abolish ice, because what you're
Speaker 13: telling us is you want our taxpayer dollars to pay
Speaker 13: for a lawless, massed, armed agency to continue terrorizing our cities.
Speaker 13: And I'm trying to figure out how you, as a
Speaker 13: leader can be telling Americans that their taxpayer dollars should
Speaker 13: be going twice.
Speaker 14: I don't understand anything that you just said. When I've
Speaker 14: loved English well, I don't understand anything that you've just
Speaker 14: said to me when I've made clear that taxpayer dollars
Speaker 14: should be used to make life more affordable for the
Speaker 14: American people, not brutaliza kill them. That's the whole reason
Speaker 14: we're in this fight right now. That's the whole reason
Speaker 14: the DHS is getting ready to shut down.
Speaker 3: That's abolish me, Joy, abolish Ice.
Speaker 14: That is a Listen, I'm going to use the language
Speaker 14: that I want to use. You can use the language
Speaker 14: that you want to use.
Speaker 11: You can see Jeffries visibly kind of tense when the
Speaker 11: phrase abolish ice is use right, like he's yeah, he
Speaker 11: wants nothing to do with it. His immediate responses is
Speaker 11: to go to affordability. I do want to note that
Speaker 11: when he was previously asked if he would use the
Speaker 11: appropriations process to rain in ice, he did exactly the
Speaker 11: same thing.
Speaker 12: But why not use the appropriations to rain in ice
Speaker 12: leader for an operation?
Speaker 15: No, what I'm what I'm focused on right now, Chad
Speaker 15: is to make life better for the American people by
Speaker 15: extending the affordable care and tax credits, which, by the way,
Speaker 15: a lot of folks in this institution believe was not possible.
Speaker 2: But Democrats made clear before the.
Speaker 15: Government was shut down that we were in this fight
Speaker 15: until we win this fight on behalf of the American
Speaker 15: lower the costs, save health care.
Speaker 2: That's our objection.
Speaker 11: Why not that he does the same thing, right, he
Speaker 11: goes back to affordability, which is something that Democrats have
Speaker 11: done for the last year and a half. Right, when
Speaker 11: asked to take a strong leadership stance and ice. Far
Speaker 11: too much of their leadership has instead like tried to
Speaker 11: deflect to affordability. I do want to note that, like
Speaker 11: they are now doing exactly what he was deflecting from there, right, Yeah,
Speaker 11: and that was only less than a month ago.
Speaker 3: It's interesting because it's like this cowardice on like specific
Speaker 3: terms and messaging. Yeah, even though they are using the
Speaker 3: probations process to try to rain an ice like that
Speaker 3: is that, Yeah, that is what they are doing now,
Speaker 3: But it's like a complete complete cowardice or actually like yeah,
Speaker 3: trying to like use like public pressure to your advantage
Speaker 3: at the moment.
Speaker 11: Like, yeah, he's doing the thing and almost like failing
Speaker 11: to It's not that he's doing the thing, you know,
Speaker 11: as many of us would wish he did, but like
Speaker 11: he's failing to take the easy win. Yeah, like because
Speaker 11: of like you say this like institutional cowardice or like
Speaker 11: these It's like there's some kind of red line rhetorically
Speaker 11: for jeffrees and other leadership Democrats that they will not cross.
Speaker 11: And I have to believe that some of that comes
Speaker 11: from what they see as like the long legacy of
Speaker 11: twenty twenty or.
Speaker 3: Like perceptions of the democratic party is like too far
Speaker 3: to the left, is too extreme or something.
Speaker 11: Yeah, they that like specifically the perception that they like
Speaker 11: attempted to abolish the institution of policing, which was not
Speaker 11: really anything that they had. There was not in their
Speaker 11: policy platform. Right, they were not Democrat leaders saying We're
Speaker 11: going to do away with the cops. In fact, Biden
Speaker 11: was talking about how we need to fund the police,
Speaker 11: not defund the police in twenty twenty.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 11: Yeah, but nonetheless, like that, there seems to be this
Speaker 11: real legs. It's very hard for them to break that
Speaker 11: rhetorical boundary. It's not entirely just jeffreyes on this. Seven
Speaker 11: Dems cross party lines in late January to vote for
Speaker 11: a DHS funding bill. So we've got Representative Henry Quella
Speaker 11: of Texas.
Speaker 12: Worst the worst Democratic congressman.
Speaker 2: Yeah, shit, fucking.
Speaker 11: Texas stems hit different and like specifically like Rio Grande
Speaker 11: Valley Democrats are a different breed.
Speaker 5: God, he sucks so much.
Speaker 11: There's Jared Golden of Maine, Mary Glusen camp Perez Washington,
Speaker 11: Laura Gillen, John Davis of North Carolina, Laurie Gillen is
Speaker 11: New York, Tom Swosey of New York and Vicente Gonzales
Speaker 11: of Texas.
Speaker 5: This is it.
Speaker 3: There's not a position that he's unique to.
Speaker 11: Jeffrey's right, Like, this's this idea that like, perhaps there
Speaker 11: needs to be some reform of ICE, but bit abolishing
Speaker 11: it would go far too far. Other Democrats have introduced
Speaker 11: an act which would essentially move funding from ICE to
Speaker 11: local law enforcement. So it would take that seventy five
Speaker 11: billion dollar budget allocation to ICE and move it to
Speaker 11: local cops.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 11: This is called the Providing Useful Budgets for Localities to
Speaker 11: invest in cops by substituting six appropriations from federal enforcement
Speaker 11: to yield results Act.
Speaker 3: Holy shit, what are.
Speaker 5: These people's favorabilities? Like negative one.
Speaker 11: Trillion for sent Yeah, it's what we call a backronym
Speaker 11: in that they have started with the word public safety
Speaker 11: and then made a really horrendous attempt turning that into
Speaker 11: an acronym. There is also like a wing of the
Speaker 11: Democratic Party right there on the left which is more
Speaker 11: forthright about abolishing ICE. His clip of AOC talking about
Speaker 11: why I should be abolished, and this is at an
Speaker 11: event in Queen's Yeah, ICE is.
Speaker 8: A very young agency relative to many others enforcements of
Speaker 8: people who committed crimes that were undocumented or had visas
Speaker 8: used to be under the Department of Justice. And in
Speaker 8: the Department of Justice, if someone wants to come to
Speaker 8: your house, you need a judge. You mean, you need
Speaker 8: an entire judicial process, You need a warrant to ensure
Speaker 8: that your constitutional liberty should take are respected.
Speaker 12: You need all of it.
Speaker 8: What they did was that they took ICE out, well,
Speaker 8: they took Immigration Enforcement out of the DOJ, which had
Speaker 8: very tight rains on what you're allowed to do. They
Speaker 8: take that they put it into this new agency that
Speaker 8: they put at the time, which is a Department of
Speaker 8: Homeland Security. First of all, in what world does FEMA
Speaker 8: belong under the same umbrella as ICE. It makes no
Speaker 8: sense at all, no sense at all. And what happened
Speaker 8: is that once you take that enforcement piece out of
Speaker 8: that agency, they then start to answer to nobody, even
Speaker 8: though ICE technically, statutorily their responsibility is just supposed to
Speaker 8: be on immigration enforcement. They are now expanding their data
Speaker 8: collection to US citizens, to everyone on this soil. They
Speaker 8: are waiving these phones around and saying that they're implementing
Speaker 8: facial recognition technology to a centralized database. We have to
Speaker 8: fight this tooth and nail. We need to defund We
Speaker 8: need to not allow this to be collected by private companies.
Speaker 8: A lot of what we need to do is not
Speaker 8: just revisit Section seven oh two. We need to abolish ICE,
Speaker 8: and we need to have comprehensive.
Speaker 9: Changes block that up.
Speaker 3: One thing I do want to note about her statements
Speaker 3: is that during the appropriations process, she did give statements
Speaker 3: about how she was pushing to defund ICE as an agency,
Speaker 3: and this did cause a reaction from some i'll call
Speaker 3: them over the online leftists, claiming that it had changed
Speaker 3: positions from wanting to abolish to defund, that this is
Speaker 3: some sort of slide, And then she then had to
Speaker 3: follow up with saying, well, currently, the way to restrict
Speaker 3: ICE and lead to abolishing it is through defunding it.
Speaker 3: So that's what we're doing through the appropriations process. No,
Speaker 3: my position has not changed. I still think that the
Speaker 3: agency should be abolished.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: There's a broad issue we had, which was that at
Speaker 2: the end of twenty twenty, as a result of all
Speaker 2: of the federal agents that were in American cities and
Speaker 2: had been video brutalizing citizens and places like Portland, there
Speaker 2: was a lot of anger about DHS. In particular, I
Speaker 2: wrote a column for Business Insider about like, look, this
Speaker 2: agency is going to remain under Biden, but if we
Speaker 2: don't cut the legs out from under the entire agency,
Speaker 2: it's basically set up to be the president's secret police.
Speaker 2: And broadly speaking, the Democrats didn't do anything to stop it.
Speaker 2: But I also, like, I guess where I am on
Speaker 2: this is I think it's kind of counterproductive at this point.
Speaker 2: The failures of the Biden administration, I think are quite
Speaker 2: manifest in what the Trump administration is doing right now.
Speaker 2: And what I want to focus on is the fact
Speaker 2: that we've had, in the space of several months, Americans
Speaker 2: become more than twice as likely to support abolishing ICE,
Speaker 2: which is both a fragile coalition because the fact that
Speaker 2: the number has changed so rapidly means that it could
Speaker 2: potentially change back. Like, I don't feel solid in counting
Speaker 2: on that to be the permanent state of affairs, but
Speaker 2: it introduces an opportunity, and it's an opportunity to build
Speaker 2: support to destroy this agency. And I think it's probably
Speaker 2: too much to hope for DHS as a whole and
Speaker 2: anything close to the near term. But the fact that
Speaker 2: during the Biden administration so much got punted on. I
Speaker 2: don't know, like we're past that. We have the opportunity, now,
Speaker 2: we have the anger. Now I do I retain my
Speaker 2: worry And I would say almost one of my biggest
Speaker 2: political fears is that twenty twenty six and twenty twenty
Speaker 2: eight go well for Democrats. They do again what happened
Speaker 2: under the Biden administration.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and they leave all these things intact.
Speaker 2: But one of the big differences that we haven't right
Speaker 2: now is that at no point was abolishing ice polling
Speaker 2: the way it is right now during the Biden or
Speaker 2: the first Trump administration. Yeah, And I think we have
Speaker 2: to take advantage of that. There's momentum right now, Like
Speaker 2: this is a crucial.
Speaker 11: Time, not just like we're talking here in terms of
Speaker 11: like abolishing ice moves us back to the two thousand
Speaker 11: and three norm right, Like what it doesn't do is
Speaker 11: fixed the fundamental issue here, which is that there are
Speaker 11: not legal pathways for people to come to the US,
Speaker 11: and there need to be. And like I think like
Speaker 11: now is the time for people who are involved in
Speaker 11: democratic politics right to agitate for like a genuine reform package.
Speaker 11: I don't think we will ever see support like this
Speaker 11: again for legalization of undocumented people, for dreamers, right, or
Speaker 11: people who are impacted by deferred action for childhood arrivals,
Speaker 11: which is a policy that became to place under Obama. Like,
Speaker 11: now is the time for substeps actual immigration reform. I
Speaker 11: say this knowing that this will not fix a problem.
Speaker 11: Like more than most people you know, I have seen
Speaker 11: the horrors of our immigration system firsthand, but like there
Speaker 11: is a moment right now that we could change things.
Speaker 7: For the better.
Speaker 11: And I share roberts worry that if Democrats get like
Speaker 11: an easy win even in the midterms, that we might
Speaker 11: not get that. And like what we saw rounder Biden
Speaker 11: was a big pointer to what we're seeing under Trump
Speaker 11: that essentially the DHS was almost impossible for him to control. Yeah,
Speaker 11: in that he acquiesced to oads, he is still responsible
Speaker 11: for them, like the buckstops with him.
Speaker 7: He's president.
Speaker 11: I'm not certain that he planned it, but nonetheless it
Speaker 11: continued to happen for months and months and months out
Speaker 11: of his presidency, right, Like it was very obvious the
Speaker 11: way this was going to go if we got another
Speaker 11: Trump presidency, and if they do that again, we're just
Speaker 11: setting the table for things to get worse again.
Speaker 2: Right, And I think James, the task before us is twofold, right,
Speaker 2: because on one hand, we have to reform the system
Speaker 2: by which people gain legal acceptance to live in this country,
Speaker 2: and that also includes I think there needs to be
Speaker 2: a push for some sort of federal law that will
Speaker 2: make it impossible or at least much harder, to reverse
Speaker 2: these acceptances and to do things like nullify or cancel
Speaker 2: green cards and permanent residency like the administration is doing
Speaker 2: right now. Like both, we need increased pathways and we
Speaker 2: need increased resilience to promise people that hey, if you
Speaker 2: go through all of these hoops to become a legal
Speaker 2: resident or a citizen or whatever, it can't just get
Speaker 2: pulled away the next time a Republican wins office.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And then on the other side of things, you have
Speaker 2: this vast, uncontrollable militant agency built as the armed wing
Speaker 2: of the president. And see that has to be destroyed
Speaker 2: because it can't exist in a democracy.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's no compatible.
Speaker 2: And then you have I mean, I would extend that
Speaker 2: to DHS as a whole, but it's my same issue
Speaker 2: with like if we can defund ICE. Right now, I'm
Speaker 2: always in favor of taking away some of their money.
Speaker 2: That's not the extent of what I think should happen
Speaker 2: to ICE. It's just a yeah, like it's a salient, right,
Speaker 2: Like you have to look at it that way. Like
Speaker 2: it it would be as if you're you're like, well,
Speaker 2: it's not worth winning the Battle of Stalingrad because that
Speaker 2: doesn't give us Berlin. It's like, well, but these are steps,
Speaker 2: you know, you try to damage and reduce the agency's
Speaker 2: power and ability to function, Yeah, while you're continuing. And
Speaker 2: I guess the worry about that too is that if
Speaker 2: you do defund ICE, if they because we've had some
Speaker 2: Trump has made a couple comments about worrying that, like
Speaker 2: we need to reduce kind of the tempo at which
Speaker 2: ICE is operating because it's bad for them. So that
Speaker 2: is kind of one of my concerns that maybe if they,
Speaker 2: if they pull back on the throttle a little bit,
Speaker 2: the rage will decline enough that there's not this kind
Speaker 2: of motivation behind abolishing. But I feel like that's just
Speaker 2: a fear you kind of have to eat, as opposed
Speaker 2: to not trying to stop and reduce the harms the
Speaker 2: agency does in the immediate term while you're working long
Speaker 2: term for abolition. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did want to
Speaker 2: talk a little about other numbers, because immigration is obviously
Speaker 2: a major issue for American voters. It's an issue people
Speaker 2: pick who they're going to vote for the presidency on.
Speaker 2: It's one of them, but it's not the main one.
Speaker 2: As a general rule, throughout most of modern political history,
Speaker 2: the kind of the top issue for Americans is the economy.
Speaker 2: And if the economy is bad, it is very hard
Speaker 2: for your party to stay in power. If the economy
Speaker 2: is good, it is a lot easier for your party
Speaker 2: to stay in power. Right, Like, these are fairly basic
Speaker 2: facts of political life in the United States, always with
Speaker 2: some caveats, but that it bears looking at how do
Speaker 2: Americans feel about the economy and who do they blame
Speaker 2: for the fact that they feel badly about the economy?
Speaker 2: And per Politico, which carried out a recent survey, about
Speaker 2: forty six percent of Americans say the cost of living
Speaker 2: is the worst they can remember it ever being. This
Speaker 2: includes thirty seven percent of people who voted for Trump
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty four and Americans pretty like significantly agree
Speaker 2: that this is a Trump problem. Inflation, the fact that
Speaker 2: they can't afford things is on him because he's the present. Again,
Speaker 2: forty six percent of Americans say it's Trump's economy and
Speaker 2: his administration is responsible for rising costs. And this is
Speaker 2: true both among Republicans and Democrats, which is very interesting
Speaker 2: to me. A percentage of Americans, based on the vote
Speaker 2: in the twenty four election, fifty three percent of Harris
Speaker 2: voters in twenty twenty four say the cost of living
Speaker 2: is the worst they've seen it, and again, thirty seven
Speaker 2: percent of Trump voters in twenty twenty four feel the
Speaker 2: same way. So that is it's an example of something
Speaker 2: that we've talked about and wondered about on the show
Speaker 2: a lot, which is like how much does reality break
Speaker 2: through the fever swamps? And this is suggesting that, like
Speaker 2: to a pretty solid degree, that actually Trump is I
Speaker 2: still think he's got a floor of somewhere around thirty
Speaker 2: percent of Americans who will follow him into the pits
Speaker 2: of hell, even if it means shoveling themselves into it.
Speaker 2: But that number used to be like forty percent, right,
Speaker 2: and it does seem to be declining. This is being
Speaker 2: treated as a five alarm fire among the Trump White House,
Speaker 2: which is interesting me for a couple of reasons. You know,
Speaker 2: anytime you talk with especially people and left about but
Speaker 2: also increasingly a lot of Democrats about the midterm elections
Speaker 2: in the twenty twenty eight elections, I think you have
Speaker 2: to deal with his people saying, but are there going
Speaker 2: to be elections?
Speaker 11: Right?
Speaker 2: And you know it's I don't dismiss those concerns out
Speaker 2: of hand, obviously in part because the administration is talking
Speaker 2: right now about having ice agents and polling places, right,
Speaker 2: you do have to acknowledge that as a con But
Speaker 2: at the same time, I think if you're looking at
Speaker 2: this rationally, you have to note that the Trump administration
Speaker 2: internally is acting as if there will be elections and
Speaker 2: that those will be competitive elections. They are worried about
Speaker 2: the economy, they are worried about their polling, and they
Speaker 2: are taking actions to try to mitigate the worries that
Speaker 2: they have, which they wouldn't be doing if they were
Speaker 2: already sure there's never going to be another election, right,
Speaker 2: And that is important to remember. It doesn't mean there's
Speaker 2: not a danger, doesn't mean they won't try shit if
Speaker 2: they lose but it does mean that they are treating
Speaker 2: these political issues as political issues that they have to
Speaker 2: deal with via messaging. There was an article in Fox
Speaker 2: News recently about Trump's team huddling to decide on midterm messaging.
Speaker 2: I'm going to quote from that now. The meeting, which
Speaker 2: was confirmed to Fox News by sources familiar with the gathering,
Speaker 2: was hosted by White House Chief of Staff Susie Wilds
Speaker 2: and Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair, who is steering
Speaker 2: Trump's political strategy. According to sources, the message during a
Speaker 2: slide presentation by chief polster and Chief Strategists and strategist
Speaker 2: Tourney Fabrizio, was that the economy will be the top
Speaker 2: issue in the minds of voters, and the White House
Speaker 2: needs to spotlight its efforts on easing affordability. The meeting
Speaker 2: was held as the GOP ares to defend their control
Speaker 2: of the Senate and their razor thin House majority in
Speaker 2: November's midterm elections. Republicans are also dealing with the presidents
Speaker 2: continued underwater approval ratings and a slew of surveys, including
Speaker 2: the latest Fox News pulling, that indicates Americans are pessimistic
Speaker 2: about the economy and publicly. The administration's claim is that
Speaker 2: Americans are happy with the economy. The economy is the
Speaker 2: best it's ever been. Look At how good the doo is.
Speaker 2: It's over fifty thousand, right. But everything we're hearing internally,
Speaker 2: like all of the reports that from people inside the
Speaker 2: administration about like what's going on day to day, is
Speaker 2: that they're wide awake and worried over the fact that
Speaker 2: their economic numbers are completely fucking dog shit. Now, what
Speaker 2: does this mean for the midterm elections? Well, very few
Speaker 2: people that I have found who are like credible analysts
Speaker 2: don't expect the Democrats to retake the House, right.
Speaker 3: Meaning, most credible analysts do think the Dems are likely
Speaker 3: to retake the House.
Speaker 2: That said, there's a fairly few people who expect a
Speaker 2: twenty eighteen style Democratic blowout among the professional bull watchers
Speaker 2: and stuff, which is, if you remember the Democrats flipped
Speaker 2: about forty one seats. There's a couple of reasons for this, right,
Speaker 2: And I found a good article in The Hill that's
Speaker 2: kind of analyzing like why we shouldn't be expecting some
Speaker 2: of the exuberants that you're seeing on social media about
Speaker 2: like early elections and how bad Trump's numbers are is
Speaker 2: maybe making people overly optimistic about like flipping all of
Speaker 2: Congress to Democratic control, which is not currently the likeliest outcome.
Speaker 2: And there's a couple of reasons for this. One of
Speaker 2: them is that as unpopular as Trump is, and I've
Speaker 2: hit on that quite a lot, the Democratic Party's overall
Speaker 2: favorability is at about thirty three percent, which is nine
Speaker 2: points lower than the Republican parties reability and you know,
Speaker 2: depending on the poll, five to ten points lower than
Speaker 2: Trump's own favorability. This is based on a Marquette Law
Speaker 2: School poll. Right, So Trump is very unpopular, so with
Speaker 2: the Republican Party. But people don't like the Democrats the
Speaker 2: Democratic Party as a whole. People like individual Democrats, a
Speaker 2: lot of people like their Congress person, a lot of
Speaker 2: people like whoever it is they want to see as
Speaker 2: the presidential candidate. You know, you can look at you know,
Speaker 2: you've got folks who really like Mamdani, are really like
Speaker 2: pritzkerp But as a whole, voters, including Democratic voters, don't
Speaker 2: feel very positively towards the Democratic Party, in many cases
Speaker 2: more negatively still than they feel about the Republican Party
Speaker 2: that started to turn around. But if you're kind of
Speaker 2: hoping that there's going to be like a full on
Speaker 2: switch that makes it immediately possible to successfully impeach President Trump,
Speaker 2: that is extraordinarily unlikely to come in twenty twenty six, right,
Speaker 2: which doesn't mean that it's unlikely to have a good result.
Speaker 2: Republicans losing control of Congress is a good result.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 2: There's just a lot less. I mean, there's a lot less.
Speaker 2: Even if you're kind of taking the unfavorability of the
Speaker 2: Democratic Party out of it. There's a lot fewer seats
Speaker 2: up for grabs right now. In twenty eighteen, and when that,
Speaker 2: you know, the Democrats flipped forty one seats. There were
Speaker 2: seventy five competitive races this year. Heading into the midterms,
Speaker 2: there were only eighteen. Right, there's a lot less that
Speaker 2: can flip. And I don't think Republicans are likely to
Speaker 2: lose control of the Senate, right, And the polling shows
Speaker 2: things being pretty razor thin there. Democrats have about a
Speaker 2: four percent advantage according to economist you gov polling right
Speaker 2: now in the congressional midterms, and there's a three point
Speaker 2: margin of error, so you're looking at like a lead,
Speaker 2: but not enough of one for a complete fucking blowout, right,
Speaker 2: there has been some more positive data, like kind of
Speaker 2: right before we came on to record this, Like I
Speaker 2: looked at some charts by Focal Data that was kind
Speaker 2: of breaking down midterm voting and tensioned by groups and
Speaker 2: looking at like likely voters, And this is always kind
Speaker 2: of a little bit like voodoo, right in terms of
Speaker 2: how you're trying to, like, well, how likely is a
Speaker 2: likely voter and how do we like factor in realistically
Speaker 2: are they going to show up anyway? If you're kind
Speaker 2: of assuming that like people who self report as likely
Speaker 2: voters will only actually vote about a third of the time.
Speaker 2: Per this study, Democrats are ahead by about seven points
Speaker 2: in a generic house ballot. So you know, that's kind
Speaker 2: of where we are right now. I think we're looking
Speaker 2: at a midterm season that's going to go well for
Speaker 2: the Democrats. But I don't think we're looking at a
Speaker 2: midterm season that delivers us from the Republican Party being
Speaker 2: able to ram through legislation. I think our kind of
Speaker 2: best case scenario is one in which they have to
Speaker 2: give major concessions because the Democrats have you know, flipped
Speaker 2: the House at the very least like and that's big,
Speaker 2: but I don't think. I don't think Trump's going to
Speaker 2: get impeached starting January of next year.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 12: The one thing I will say about the polling data
Speaker 12: is that so obviously Democrats tend to perform better in
Speaker 12: special elections because to vote in a special election, you
Speaker 12: have to be a higher interest voter. And that also
Speaker 12: special election cycles get driven by immediate like anger over stuff,
Speaker 12: and there's a bunch of different factors that dry special
Speaker 12: election turnout. And also the Democrats have been absolutely obliterating
Speaker 12: the Republicans in all the special elections that have been
Speaker 12: happening recently, or even in the cases where they're lose,
Speaker 12: they're losing by very small margins in.
Speaker 5: Places where Trump was winning blowouts.
Speaker 12: Yeah, so I think if you want to be optimistic,
Speaker 12: I think that's the case for optimism. But also, yeah, like,
Speaker 12: we're not going to have all of our problems magically
Speaker 12: solved by the mid terms.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yes, to specify on that what you were saying,
Speaker 2: there was a special election in Tennessee and Republican Matt
Speaker 2: Van Epps beat the Democrat Often Bane by nine points,
Speaker 2: but Trump had won in twenty twenty four there by
Speaker 2: twenty two points.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and like like a few we talked about this
Speaker 5: on the show.
Speaker 12: But like last year there was there was an election
Speaker 12: in like a special election in western Iowa that Trump
Speaker 12: had won by double digits and the Democrats won by
Speaker 12: double digits, and that kind of thing shouldn't be happening.
Speaker 2: It sure shouldn't.
Speaker 5: No it is, And yeah, you know, so that's that's
Speaker 5: the optimistic case.
Speaker 2: And hey, like I've just come in saying like, hey,
Speaker 2: don't expect Congress to be completely flipped, but like, you know,
Speaker 2: it's the times are crazy. Who knows what else? Who
Speaker 2: knows how many more people Ice is going to murder?
Speaker 2: Who knows like what other like how bad the economy's
Speaker 2: going to get.
Speaker 5: We might have invaded Canada by then, Like who knows.
Speaker 2: Anything's on the table, anything's still on the table. We're
Speaker 2: just kind of looking at shit from February.
Speaker 11: Yeah, yeah, and some of this shit will depend on
Speaker 11: like what atrocities they commit in the week and days
Speaker 11: before the midterm election. Right then, I think we see
Speaker 11: surges around certain the killing of Rene Good, the killing
Speaker 11: of Alex pretty right. We see those things shift public
Speaker 11: opinion dramatically, and the ongoing snatching of immigrants and deportations
Speaker 11: and sending people back to places where they be tortured
Speaker 11: and killed. Like that's kind of the background and it
Speaker 11: makes people angry, but like it's these these these specific
Speaker 11: actions which seem to shift public opinion dramatically. All Right,
Speaker 11: So on that topic, I guess we should talk about
Speaker 11: the quote unquote shutdown, and specifically the shutdown of the
Speaker 11: Department of Homeland Security. Right. I guess the first thing
Speaker 11: to clarify is this isn't a government shut down in
Speaker 11: the sense of the shutdown we saw last year, right
Speaker 11: that lasted like forty plus days.
Speaker 2: Right, It's a partial shutdown.
Speaker 7: It's a partial shutdown.
Speaker 11: What's happening right now is the Democrats are holding up
Speaker 11: further funding for DHS until the administration agrees to some.
Speaker 7: Concessions that they have asked for.
Speaker 11: This is unlikely to impact ICE and CBP a very
Speaker 11: great deal for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the Tax
Speaker 11: and Spending Cuts Bill right, twenty twenty five bill funded
Speaker 11: them to an absolutely unfathomable degree, I think sixty five
Speaker 11: and seventy million, respectively. More quickly, it will affect other
Speaker 11: agencies under DHS Those includes Transport Security Administration, Federal Emergency
Speaker 11: Management Administration, the Secret Service, and the Coast Guard. Some
Speaker 11: TSA workers will be working that they will likely not
Speaker 11: be receiving pay. This is pretty common right that they're
Speaker 11: deemed does quite unquite essential workers, and that means that
Speaker 11: they will be expected to work. What we saw last
Speaker 11: time was that as the shutdown dragged on, people were
Speaker 11: calling in sick or not coming into work because they
Speaker 11: were taking other jobs right because they had bills to pay.
Speaker 11: The reason this is happening is because Democrats successfully managed
Speaker 11: to get Trump to separate DHS funding from another spending
Speaker 11: bill which passed through and founded the rest of the
Speaker 11: federal government. They are demanding an end to masking. I
Speaker 11: should clarify specifically like masking in the dents of law
Speaker 11: enforcement officers wearing gators over their faces, a return to
Speaker 11: opposites displaying their name, badge, and ID number, increased oversight
Speaker 11: of detention conditions, coordination with local law enforcement, and end
Speaker 11: to the detention of US citizens, targeted enforcement and not
Speaker 11: roving patrols, and a unified use of force and uniform
Speaker 11: conduct policy for CBP and ICE. And then an end
Speaker 11: to raids using Form two point fifteen and just going
Speaker 11: to note here them moving before we're going to refer
Speaker 11: to that using it it's that name, and not call
Speaker 11: it an administrative warrant because an administrative warrant like kind
Speaker 11: of implies the action of a judge. But these are
Speaker 11: forms that are filled out right that it is not
Speaker 11: the same early aspected as a warrant, and that's a
Speaker 11: judicial warrant. The Republican counterproposals so far have shown pretty
Speaker 11: little common ground on this, aside from other body cameras
Speaker 11: where Gnome did implement body cameras. As I said, ICE
Speaker 11: and CBP will continue doing what they do right. I
Speaker 11: was at the border on Saturday and I saw tons
Speaker 11: of CBP patrols. They do not seem to have slowed
Speaker 11: down with their wall construction. That that may overtime slow down.
Speaker 11: They won't be paying like the workers week by week
Speaker 11: on those contracts. They will be paying a contractor who
Speaker 11: might be paying a subcontractor, so that would take time
Speaker 11: to slow down. The things that will slow down are
Speaker 11: things like the oversight functions to DHS, potentially administrative and
Speaker 11: hiring functions, things like that, right.
Speaker 7: But the actual like on the ground patrolling.
Speaker 11: Most of those people are deemed as essential workers, so
Speaker 11: it seems so undlikely that we will see, for instance,
Speaker 11: fewer CBP patrols at the border or fewer ero iscera
Speaker 11: agents like tasked with doing these ongoing raids. So yeah,
Speaker 11: talking about DHS, I want to talk a little bit
Speaker 11: more about the Coast Guard. I think it's likely that
Speaker 11: some people won't be aware that the Coast Guard is
Speaker 11: an element of the DHS. They're also a branch of
Speaker 11: the military, right they're the only branch of the military
Speaker 11: that's under the DHS. Yes, so they like considered veterans,
Speaker 11: but they're not on the DoD or the DOW as
Speaker 11: you can now call it. The NBC has a piece
Speaker 11: suggesting that there is, I guess a split in the
Speaker 11: Coast Guard between lower ranks and higher ranks, and specifically
Speaker 11: they're talking about feeling that Coast Guard is moving away
Speaker 11: from its court mission, which is search and rescue. They
Speaker 11: highlight one incident in February of last year when a
Speaker 11: Coast guardsman went overboard and a Coast Guard See one
Speaker 11: thirty was detailed to participate in the search for that
Speaker 11: Coast guardsmen.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 11: It had previously been detailed for a deportation flight, but
Speaker 11: it was really tasked to assist with the search. According
Speaker 11: to the Peace quote, non verbally instructed the acting Commandant
Speaker 11: of the Coast Guard, Admiral Kevin Lunday, to pull the
Speaker 11: plane off the search and rescue mission so it would
Speaker 11: not miss the immigrant flight as part of DHS's so
Speaker 11: called alien expulsion operations. According to two US officials and
Speaker 11: a Coastguard official, as a result, what happened is that
Speaker 11: local Coast Guard officials in San Diego scrambled to find
Speaker 11: two C twenty seven's that could fulfill that deportation flight.
Speaker 11: In doing so, that freed out the sea one thirty
Speaker 11: to then go return to participate in the search.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 11: They did continue searching, I believe, for one hundred and
Speaker 11: ninety hours, but they never found the missing Coast guardsmen.
Speaker 11: Right cannot and will never be able to conclusively prove
Speaker 11: that all of this back and forth with this C
Speaker 11: one thirty had any impact on that. But this incident
Speaker 11: has clearly had an impact on morale, and it suggested
Speaker 11: general shift in priorities away from search and rescue and
Speaker 11: towards doing more border enforcement. Right under NOME seven hundred
Speaker 11: and fifty flights have been redirected from their regular work
Speaker 11: to instead deport migrants. This comes after she removed a
Speaker 11: high ranking Coast Guard official from her house so that
Speaker 11: Nope could live at the house. Wait what Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 11: she kicked the Coastguard person out of their house.
Speaker 7: Yeah, this was last year.
Speaker 11: She moved with like very short notice she moved onto Ah, yeah.
Speaker 7: She moved onto a base.
Speaker 3: Yeah with Lewandowski right, that might be the case, goes
Speaker 3: there was like a few people in like the cabinet
Speaker 3: or orbit.
Speaker 11: Yes, yes, I thought you meant like they were cohabiting.
Speaker 11: Oh no, no, no, okay, yeah, okay, a full domestic life. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 11: I was. I don't want to doubt you, but that
Speaker 11: would have been in news to me. Yes, a number
Speaker 11: of Trumps, like executive officials, are living on bases more
Speaker 11: than is usual.
Speaker 7: I think the Millers maybe do as well.
Speaker 5: But yeah.
Speaker 11: She also purchased two Gulf Stream jets to fly her around.
Speaker 11: Unlike most government jets, which tend to be returned towards
Speaker 11: what's called a sterile state after use. That just means
Speaker 11: that they go back to being completely clean, like they're
Speaker 11: like a generic jet. They're not your jet. Nome prefers
Speaker 11: to keep some personal items aboard the Gulf streams, but
Speaker 11: one of these items, a heated blanket, was left behind
Speaker 11: after her jet broke down she had to switch planes.
Speaker 11: Coylewandowski reportedly sheltered at the Coast Guard flight staff and
Speaker 11: demanded they turn around before attempting to fire the pilot,
Speaker 11: who fused to do so.
Speaker 3: Jesus right, I need I need my blanky.
Speaker 5: I need my blanky.
Speaker 2: Turn around.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think she'd she had a rough week. I
Speaker 7: guess one of the blankets.
Speaker 12: These are absolutely just like the softest fascists that have
Speaker 12: ever ruled the country. Like it, turn off flight around
Speaker 12: because I left my beaby blanket.
Speaker 7: Like yeah, right, like I oh god.
Speaker 11: Fortunately, I guess they de escalated that one and continued
Speaker 11: the flight blanket free, trying to fire the fi.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 11: I think it is interesting to look at coast guards morale, right, Like,
Speaker 11: Coast Guard's traditional mission has been search and rescue and
Speaker 11: then the interdiction of like drug vessels, and they have
Speaker 11: been doing a great deal of border enforcement stuff and
Speaker 11: removal stuff. And it is obviously like people who have
Speaker 11: been at the Coast Guard for a long time not
Speaker 11: what they joined the Coast Guard to do. I will
Speaker 11: just say that there are very few areas in which
Speaker 11: the United Kingdom has worked shit out, but the lifeboats
Speaker 11: are one of them. They are mentioned in Mutual Aid.
Speaker 11: The Royal National Lifeboat Institute has an article on for
Speaker 11: Popkin on their website incredible and it is. It is
Speaker 11: one of the really genuinely good things about Britain. By contrasting,
Speaker 11: they are not part of our government security apparatus.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because that makes no sense. The entire agency of
Speaker 3: DHS makes no sense whatsoever.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's just.
Speaker 7: Because, Yeah, there are better ways to do this.
Speaker 2: I mean it makes again, it makes a lot of
Speaker 2: sense as the president's private army.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: For our final segment in this episode, some tragic news.
Speaker 3: On Monday afternoon, February sixteenth, two people were killed in
Speaker 3: a shooting at a hockey game in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Speaker 3: Before the shooter died by suicide. Three others were shot
Speaker 3: but survived their injuries. In the aftermath of the strategy,
Speaker 3: people across the right and the left have both used
Speaker 3: this shooting offensively and defensively in the culture war because
Speaker 3: of the shooter's general identity and far right conspiratorial politics,
Speaker 3: even though evidence points to wards this being targeted domestic violence.
Speaker 3: The deceased or the shooter's ex wife and eldest son,
Speaker 3: and the deceased ex wife's parents were critically wounded but survived,
Speaker 3: as did a family friend. The shooter's other son was
Speaker 3: on the ice playing hockey while the shooting took place. Ordinarily,
Speaker 3: we would not talk about an instant like this in
Speaker 3: the news because there's a lot of domestic violence shootings
Speaker 3: that happened across the United States every week, and not
Speaker 3: all of them become national news stories. This is news
Speaker 3: because of its weaponization in the political culture war, but
Speaker 3: under most methodologies like this incident would not even be
Speaker 3: categorized as a mass shooting. Yeah, because less than four
Speaker 3: people died, it does qualify under the Gun Violence Archive criteria,
Speaker 3: which counts injuries not debts, in which this would be
Speaker 3: the forty first shooting in the US this year. But
Speaker 3: after the shooting took place, right wing accounts and influencers
Speaker 3: started using this as a part of their trans mass
Speaker 3: shooter narrative. On Monday night, the Pawtucket Police that they
Speaker 3: believed the shooting stemmed from a family dispute. The shooter
Speaker 3: was fifty six years old with six kids. About ten
Speaker 3: years ago, the shooter started identifying as a transgender woman
Speaker 3: and used the name Roberta Espisito. The legal last name
Speaker 3: is Dorgan.
Speaker 5: They're not hispanic oh.
Speaker 3: The shooter was divorced about five to six years ago,
Speaker 3: and Dorgan's ex wife lists the grounds for divorce in
Speaker 3: the documents as quote, gender reassignment surgery, narcissistic and personality
Speaker 3: disorder traits. Then she crossed that out and instead wrote
Speaker 3: quote irrevocable differences which caused the remediable breakdown of the
Speaker 3: marriage unquote. The shooter was extremely active on Twitter, made
Speaker 3: anti semitic and conspiratorial posts, and frequently interacted with a
Speaker 3: large assortment of mega influencers, as well as far right,
Speaker 3: neo Nazi, and conspiracy theory influencers like Nick Fuentes and
Speaker 3: Alex Jones. Dorgan also shared pictures of a massive like
Speaker 3: ss toten CoV tattoo on their right arm and wrote
Speaker 3: on Twitter quote postop trans to the right of Hitler
Speaker 3: and quote you can be pro LGBT and pro Trump unquote.
Speaker 3: From looking through their Twitter, it it mostly appears to
Speaker 3: be someone who is suffering from extreme mental distress. It's
Speaker 3: hard to, you know, chart how much of the political
Speaker 3: beliefs that can be just split on Twitter are like
Speaker 3: genuinely held versus how much they relate to long standing
Speaker 3: mental health issues this person suffered from, which I'll get
Speaker 3: into in a sec I'm still a little hung up
Speaker 3: on the name. The name also, I think relates to
Speaker 3: just this person's very very not well.
Speaker 7: Okay, they're just trying to pace people off flick with correct.
Speaker 3: I think everything about this person can be seen as
Speaker 3: an expression of like antisociality, politics, their presentation, their name.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 3: While right wing news agencies and influencers have used this
Speaker 3: horrifying instant of domestic violence for their trans mass shooter
Speaker 3: narrative framing every transperson is at risk of randomly becoming
Speaker 3: a mass killer while ignoring this shooter's own extremist politics,
Speaker 3: people on the left have blamed this strggedy on the
Speaker 3: shooter being a quote unquote far right Trump supporter or
Speaker 3: a quote unquote Nazi groper, and this is in part
Speaker 3: a defensive reaction against the right zone like misleading and
Speaker 3: non source claims about a statistical epidemic of trans violence.
Speaker 3: But laying blame on Make America Great Again and the
Speaker 3: MAGA movement doesn't really get us much closer to understanding
Speaker 3: this violence. We're so used to defaulting to this heartizan
Speaker 3: culture war like ideological explanation for the cause of public violence,
Speaker 3: whether that's you know, for the right, trans ideology or
Speaker 3: neo Nazism, even though both in this case and the
Speaker 3: shooting in Canada last week, which I talked about a
Speaker 3: few days ago on the show, this was like anti social,
Speaker 3: unstable and self destructive individuals who killed family members and
Speaker 3: then created a deadly public situation leading them to kill themselves.
Speaker 3: Despite Nazi tattoos and Twitter posts, this hockey game shooting
Speaker 3: was not ideologically motivated violence. This was targeted interpersonal violence
Speaker 3: against family stemming from extreme mental health issues. This goes
Speaker 3: beyond like right left politics. This shooter just seemed to
Speaker 3: be drawn to anything seen as extreme or anything that
Speaker 3: produced anti social effects. The daughter of the shooter briefly
Speaker 3: spoke to local news on Monday, saying that the shooter
Speaker 3: was her father and that the shooter had quote unquote
Speaker 3: mental health issues and was quote unquote very sick. The
Speaker 3: Rhode Island Coalition Against Mister Violence said in a statement
Speaker 3: Monday night. Quote, while details are still emerging, we know
Speaker 3: that violence within families and intimate relationships can have devastating
Speaker 3: and far reaching out impacts. Domestic violence does not stay
Speaker 3: behind closed doors. It affects children, extended family members, and
Speaker 3: entire communities.
Speaker 5: Unquote.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I mean, I guess if you want to do
Speaker 12: analysis of it, it's that the thing that's actually a
Speaker 12: predictive for violence is domestic violence. And this is another
Speaker 12: really horrible to mastic violence incidents.
Speaker 3: But yeah, it's pretty tragic.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Interestingly, there was some news that came out today, which
Speaker 3: is Wednesday, that one of the other sons of this
Speaker 3: shooter was arrested a few years ago in North Providence
Speaker 3: for setting fires to a black church, which did appear
Speaker 3: to be ideologically motivated violence. Police found notebooks inside of
Speaker 3: this person's home filled with hateful writings quote, gutten down
Speaker 3: everyone that isn't white. If one is white, spread the gospel,
Speaker 3: always give our bloodline a chance unquote. So this incident
Speaker 3: of arson the black church is definitely ideologically motivated.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's been a great, extremely normal country, and this person
Speaker 3: was sentenced to six years in prison.
Speaker 7: Oh wow, So the person that's the son of the person, the.
Speaker 3: Son of the shooter, one of the sons of the shooter.
Speaker 7: Yeah, they had several sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just a.
Speaker 3: Pretty tragic series of incidents with this family.
Speaker 11: I do find it really disturbing that the thing that
Speaker 11: you mentioned here where people just kind of drop into
Speaker 11: a channel when it comes to responding to a tragedy
Speaker 11: like this, like and I find it really upsetting when
Speaker 11: I see it from like yeah, left and progressive organizations
Speaker 11: that promote firearms training or like.
Speaker 7: I just find it really kind of.
Speaker 11: Disappointing, I guess, to see people dropping into these same
Speaker 11: kind of callous and dismissive responses. It's just something that's
Speaker 11: been weighing on me recently. I am a person who
Speaker 11: owns guns, but it's still I don't know, I'm disappointed,
Speaker 11: I guess.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: All right, well we reported the news.
Speaker 12: Put a transcroll on your couch, yeap.
Speaker 11: And if you have some news that you think we
Speaker 11: should report, tips, you can do so by emailing Cool
Speaker 11: Zone Tips at proton dot me. If you have someone
Speaker 11: that you would like to be a guest on our
Speaker 11: show or topic that you think Roberts should cover from
Speaker 11: behind the bustards. We will make another email for that,
Speaker 11: but if you could just not email the tip line.
Speaker 11: If you're a publicist and you email, I will block you.
Speaker 2: We reported the news. Hey, We'll be back Monday with
Speaker 2: more episodes every week from now until the heat death
Speaker 2: of the Universe.
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