Speaker 1: Cool Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
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Speaker 3: Welcome back to you could happen here here daily dose
Speaker 3: of something a little unsettling. I'm Molly Conger, your occasional
Speaker 3: host here on this feed, and the host of a
Speaker 3: new weekly show from Cool Zone Media called Weird Little
Speaker 3: Guys that I think you'll probably like. Today, I'm a
Speaker 3: little shamelessly promoting my own show by giving you a
Speaker 3: little taste of the kinds of stories I like to
Speaker 3: dig into over on the Weird Little Guys feed. So
Speaker 3: remember last month when Donald Trump got shot? I kind
Speaker 3: of don't. It feels like it was years ago. I
Speaker 3: barely remember who I was during those tense few days
Speaker 3: where it seemed possible Trump would ride that momentum to victory.
Speaker 3: Imagining posters of that photo of Trump with blood dripping
Speaker 3: down his face, fist raised, and then kind of didn't
Speaker 3: matter at all anymore. The shooter wasn't a Biden sleeper
Speaker 3: agent sent to take down the opposition. He was just
Speaker 3: some kid with a rifle and the kind of uniquely
Speaker 3: American desire to cause chaos with it. And that was
Speaker 3: really hard for a lot of people to swallow. What
Speaker 3: do you mean it doesn't seem like he was politically motivated.
Speaker 3: He shot the former president. He shot him while he
Speaker 3: was on stage at a rally for his campaign to
Speaker 3: retake the presidency. Everything about the situation is political. How
Speaker 3: could the shooter have had any other motivation? Thomas Crooks
Speaker 3: wouldn't be the first guy to take a shot at
Speaker 3: a president or a presidential candidate for no reason at all.
Speaker 3: Far from it. While I was doing research for the
Speaker 3: first episode of my show, which theoretically you could pick
Speaker 3: up your phone and subscribe to right now while you're
Speaker 3: listening if you wanted to, it got lost on a
Speaker 3: few side quests. That's always happening to me. But as
Speaker 3: I breezed past a quick mention of George Wallace, the
Speaker 3: four term governor of Alabama, best remembered for his rallying
Speaker 3: cry of segregation now, segregation, tomorrow, segregation forever. I'm not
Speaker 3: going to do it in his accent. I'll spay that.
Speaker 3: I remember that he got shot while running for president too,
Speaker 3: during the primary in nineteen seventy two. He was paralyzed
Speaker 3: after surviving an attempted assassination on the campaign trail. Surely,
Speaker 3: whoever shot a man like George Wallace did it out
Speaker 3: of a deep ideological commitment to something right. Maybe a
Speaker 3: civil rights activist opposed to Wallace's views on race, or
Speaker 3: a McGovern voter concerned that Wallace's cynical attempt to gain
Speaker 3: the Democratic Party nomination after winning five states as a
Speaker 3: third party candidate in sixty eight might actually work. Or
Speaker 3: maybe he was a diehard Nixon supporter who saw Wallace
Speaker 3: as a spoiler, siphoning conservative votes away from Nixon. But
Speaker 3: that's not what happened. When Arthur Bremer shot George Wallace
Speaker 3: four times in the chest and stomach on May fifteenth,
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy two. It had nothing at all to do
Speaker 3: with Wallace's policy positions, or Nixon's or McGovern's. It didn't
Speaker 3: even have really anything at all to do with George
Speaker 3: Wallace Bremer had been planning for months to assassinate Richard Nixon,
Speaker 3: but it turned out that was too hard. He just
Speaker 3: wanted to shoot somebody important. I hesitate to draw too
Speaker 3: many comparisons to the Trump shooter because there's a lot
Speaker 3: we still don't know and may never know. But it
Speaker 3: did come out early on that Crooks was equally interested
Speaker 3: in shooting Joe Biden. Trump just happened to have a
Speaker 3: campaign rally close to where he lived in Pennsylvania, and
Speaker 3: that rally happened to have weak perimeter security. Crooks had
Speaker 3: also looked into how to get close to FBI Director
Speaker 3: Christopher Ray, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and inexplicably, Kate Middleton. Yes,
Speaker 3: that Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales. If Biden had
Speaker 3: been campaigning in western Pennsylvania, or if Richard Nixon's security
Speaker 3: hadn't been so tight, Crooks may have shot Biden and
Speaker 3: Bremer may have killed Nixon. It doesn't seem like it
Speaker 3: really mattered to either of them who they shot, as
Speaker 3: long as they shot somewhat important. One of the funny
Speaker 3: things about history is realizing that we've always been the
Speaker 3: way that we are now there. Truly is nothing new
Speaker 3: under the sun, because within hours of the attempt on
Speaker 3: George Wallace's life, before any information was clear at all,
Speaker 3: Nixon was demanding his aides put in a call to
Speaker 3: the White House Deputy director of Communications, Kenneth Clawson, to
Speaker 3: put out a statement that the shooter was a supporter
Speaker 3: of George McGovern that was the front runner and the
Speaker 3: Democratic primary, whom Nixon would go on to trounce terribly
Speaker 3: at the election at the end of that year. So
Speaker 3: Nixon saying, just say, we've got evidence, We've got unmistakable evidence.
Speaker 3: Of course, they didn't have evidence of any kind, unmistakable
Speaker 3: or not. And when the evidence did emerge, it certainly
Speaker 3: didn't show the shooter working on the McGovern campaign, which
Speaker 3: is the rumor Nixon was hoping to spread in those
Speaker 3: early hours.
Speaker 4: Bob, definitely, day person, you know what I mean, put
Speaker 4: it right away that you put it to get that
Speaker 4: before they hit on the way.
Speaker 3: Now, we don't have thousands of hours of secret recordings
Speaker 3: from inside the offices of today's Republicans, but we did
Speaker 3: see something really similar in the immediate aftermath of the
Speaker 3: Trump shooting. He's a Biden voter. He's a Democrat, he's
Speaker 3: a radical leftist, he's Antifa. We can already tell. We
Speaker 3: just know it's obvious. We have proof. The fact that
Speaker 3: there was no proof of anything on day one doesn't matter.
Speaker 3: It matters even less than no proof ever materialized. You
Speaker 3: just have to get the rumor out first. You have
Speaker 3: to make an impression while the cement is wet, and
Speaker 3: sometimes that's permanent. One thing that is not on the
Speaker 3: Nixon tapes, though, is a conversation that allegedly occurred that
Speaker 3: afternoon in May nineteen seventy two that was reported by
Speaker 3: Seymour Hirsh twenty years later in nineteen ninety two. Despite
Speaker 3: a Supreme Court ruling in the seventies the tapes belonged
Speaker 3: to the National Archives, the full volume of the Nixon
Speaker 3: tapes were not made available to the public until two
Speaker 3: thousand and seven. Now, Seymour Hirsh is not a making
Speaker 3: stuff up kind of guy. I don't think he was
Speaker 3: fabricating any part of this story. He's still alive and
Speaker 3: has a sub stack at eighty seven years old. So
Speaker 3: I don't want any beef with Seymour. That's not what
Speaker 3: I'm saying. He has a decade's long career as an
Speaker 3: investigative journalist and has a Pulitzer for exposing the cover
Speaker 3: up of the Myli massacre. I don't think he's patting
Speaker 3: the truth here. But in his nineteen ninety two New
Speaker 3: Yorker piece called Nixon's Last cover Up, the Tapes he
Speaker 3: wants the Archives to suppress, Hirsch wrote that the unreleased
Speaker 3: tapes from the afternoon of the wall Is shooting contained
Speaker 3: recordings of Nixon directing E. Howard Hunt, the retired CIA
Speaker 3: officer who headed his White House plumbers, to break into
Speaker 3: Bremer's apartment before the FBI could search it and to
Speaker 3: plant McGovern campaign literature. Hunt's own autobiography admits only that
Speaker 3: at Nixon's direction, Nixon advisor Charles Coulson did ask Hunt
Speaker 3: to take a look around Brehmer's apartment. Even that this
Speaker 3: is all taking place just a month before Hunt did,
Speaker 3: in fact play a key role at the Watergate break in,
Speaker 3: this isn't exactly unbelievable. I can absolutely believe that Richard
Speaker 3: Nixon would ask E. Howard Hunt to break into a
Speaker 3: building for some nefarious purpose, because we know he did
Speaker 3: that at least once. And one thing the varying accounts
Speaker 3: seemed to agree on is that Hunt was unable to
Speaker 3: complete the assignment because the FBI had already sealed off
Speaker 3: Bremer's apartment in Milwaukee before he got there. Hersh's peace
Speaker 3: claimed the tapes contain recordings of Coulson breaking this news
Speaker 3: to Nixon, that Hunt arrived too late and the apartment
Speaker 3: was already under police guard, and further claims that on
Speaker 3: the recordings, Nixon can be heard berating Coulson for not
Speaker 3: doing more to slow down the FBI. Again, all completely
Speaker 3: believable if you have even a passing knowledge of Richard Nixon,
Speaker 3: and Colson himself related this account to Hirsh in nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety two. The problem is we have the tapes now,
Speaker 3: fifteen years after Hirsch's article was published. Researchers scoured the
Speaker 3: newly released recordings for proof of this version of events,
Speaker 3: and it isn't there. It's entirely possible that Colson is
Speaker 3: recalling conversations that occurred outside the presence of the tape machine,
Speaker 3: or is misremembering how much of this was actually spoken
Speaker 3: aloud in what was simply understood. It's not out of
Speaker 3: the realm of possibility that Colson is recalling something Nixon
Speaker 3: definitely desired. It's just not all the tapes. Absence of
Speaker 3: proof isn't proof of absence, of course, but we do
Speaker 3: have a pretty complete record of Nixon's conversations on the
Speaker 3: afternoon of May fifteenth, nineteen seventy two. Those missing eighteen
Speaker 3: minutes are from a different frantic afternoon that summer. But
Speaker 3: before we get to the rest of Richard Nixon's no good,
Speaker 3: very bad day, here are some products and services. So
Speaker 3: on May fifteen, Nixon got out of a budget meeting
Speaker 3: around four pm, which was shortly after the shooting, and
Speaker 3: that's when he first got the news. And we know
Speaker 3: from the tapes that his first phone call was to
Speaker 3: his own wife, pat and then he called George Wallace's wife, Cornelia.
Speaker 3: He then asked Secretary of the Treasury John Connolly to
Speaker 3: call Ted Kennedy to offer him full Secret Service protection,
Speaker 3: which is not allowable under the structure of how that works,
Speaker 3: but he wanted it done, presumably out of some combination
Speaker 3: of the idea that Kennedy would be McGovern's vice presidential pick,
Speaker 3: and maybe just the general idea that if people are
Speaker 3: getting assassinated, you need to account for all your Kennedy's.
Speaker 3: It's actually kind of wild to dig into the tapes
Speaker 3: and see where everyone's heads were at that afternoon in
Speaker 3: the Oval office. A recording from around seven pm captures
Speaker 3: speculation that the shooting may have been a false flag
Speaker 3: by Wallace's own people, but the idea is quickly dismissed.
Speaker 3: He wouldn't have his own peace pople shoot him in
Speaker 3: the stomach. That could kill you. They would have gone
Speaker 3: for something less dangerous, like shooting him in the foot,
Speaker 3: Which is a conversation we all had after the Trump shooting,
Speaker 3: isn't it. Oh, maybe this is a stunt. Wait, why
Speaker 3: would he have them fire at his head? That's so crazy, right,
Speaker 3: it's I mean, it's the same conversation with different names
Speaker 3: and body parts. Subbed him and this recording to captures
Speaker 3: Nixon's top aids hoping that whoever did it was a
Speaker 3: left wing NUTT.
Speaker 5: Would be one of his own people to whatever to
Speaker 5: shoot that man off, and.
Speaker 6: They would have shot him in the foot or something.
Speaker 6: Oh I haven't.
Speaker 7: Wouldn't be is not one of then of people shoot
Speaker 7: him on the store to kill him?
Speaker 8: Oh?
Speaker 5: I think the guy. The guy has to be a
Speaker 5: nut of some kind. I just told the left wing right, Yeah,
Speaker 5: I silly, I think I could ken it was really
Speaker 5: elaborating now rather than the writing. And I tried to
Speaker 5: bring out the ring the writing crack.
Speaker 9: How hell to do that?
Speaker 5: It showed him twisted the.
Speaker 9: Start of plum people.
Speaker 3: So Nixon tried to put a thumb on the scale
Speaker 3: after the fact, But the exact nature of his meddling
Speaker 3: will forever be up for debate, I guess, and the
Speaker 3: Nixon tapes aren't the only unique primary source for in
Speaker 3: down that day. In the early months of nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 3: as Arthur Bremmer prepared to shoot Nixon, gave up on
Speaker 3: shooting Nixon and ultimately shot George Wallace, he was keeping
Speaker 3: a diary, and in nineteen seventy three Harper's Magazine Press
Speaker 3: published that diary. I couldn't find a physical copy of
Speaker 3: the original bound book published by Harper's for less than
Speaker 3: a small fortune, but it did find an archival scan
Speaker 3: of the diary that was produced as evidence, and the
Speaker 3: diary is a strange and fascinating document. Only the latter
Speaker 3: half was published. He'd thrown away the first one hundred
Speaker 3: and forty eight pages of fact. He notes on the
Speaker 3: first page of the version that we have. In nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty a construction worker named Sherman Griffin found those first
Speaker 3: one hundred and forty eight pages, so this again, eight
Speaker 3: years after the shooting. He found them wrapped in plastic
Speaker 3: inside of a backpack underneath the twenty seventh Street Viaduct
Speaker 3: in Milwaukee. From prison, Arthur Remmer tried to sue Griffin
Speaker 3: for ownership of the document, saying it would only be
Speaker 3: used to embarrass him and it was his. He owned it.
Speaker 3: I need back, But in nineteen eighty one a court
Speaker 3: ruled that Griffin could keep it. I'm sure it was
Speaker 3: more complicated in the end, all the back and forth
Speaker 3: in court, but ultimately Finder's Keepers. The portion we do
Speaker 3: have is a lot of things. It's full of typos
Speaker 3: and disorganized thinking, and sexual fantasy and the mundane rambling
Speaker 3: stream of consciousness of a guy going about his day
Speaker 3: to day life as he tries to figure out how
Speaker 3: to shoot the president. A few months after it was published,
Speaker 3: The New York Review published an essay by Gorvadal speculating
Speaker 3: that Brehmer hadn't written the diary at all as a
Speaker 3: literary critic it was his professional opinion that Brehmer could
Speaker 3: not have written such a document, so it was riddled
Speaker 3: with typos. The doll believes they come and go and
Speaker 3: are not believable in their structure and format, as though
Speaker 3: the writer is remembering as he writes that he's supposed
Speaker 3: to be a twenty one year old bus boy of
Speaker 3: mediocre intelligence. He also doubts that Bremer was well read
Speaker 3: enough to make reference to Soljhanitsyn's day in the Life
Speaker 3: of A von Denisovich or quit as he crossed the
Speaker 3: Great Lakes call me Ishmael. Both Denisovich and Ishmael are misspelled,
Speaker 3: but that could be intentional, he says.
Speaker 10: No.
Speaker 3: Gore Vadahal believes or perhaps would only like you to think.
Speaker 3: He believes it's hard to say that the diary was
Speaker 3: falsified in its entirety by E. Howard Hunt. Nixon Spook
Speaker 3: and Hunt was a prolific writer, giving Vidal a large
Speaker 3: volume of material for comparison, and he claims there are
Speaker 3: similarities in the writing styles, and also notes that both
Speaker 3: Bremer and Hunt use the phrase Harry hippies. They have
Speaker 3: a distaste for Harry hippies. I wasn't alive in nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy two. Maybe a lot of people hated Harry hippies.
Speaker 3: But again, just as Hirsch's claims what the secret apes
Speaker 3: in nineteen ninety two were called into question when we
Speaker 3: got the tapes in two thousand and seven, but All's
Speaker 3: essay was published in nineteen seventy three, seven years before
Speaker 3: the first half of the diary was found. So even
Speaker 3: if you're inclined to believe Hunt was crafty enough to
Speaker 3: construct this elaborate plot with a fake diary and a
Speaker 3: patsy shooter, it's a real stretch to think he would
Speaker 3: even bother writing one hundred and forty eight pages, wrapping
Speaker 3: them in plastic, hiding them inside of a backpack, and
Speaker 3: tucking that backpack into a little nook under a bridge
Speaker 3: in Milwaukee to be found by a construction worker a
Speaker 3: decade later. That part just doesn't make a.
Speaker 10: Lot of sense.
Speaker 3: But maybe Gorbadal was just doing an elaborate bit that
Speaker 3: I don't understand. The legacy of that diary lives on
Speaker 3: in some surprising ways. In those early days after the
Speaker 3: Trump shooting, before we all forgot what ever happened, I
Speaker 3: did see a lot of people point out that the
Speaker 3: last time a president took a bullet it wasn't over politics.
Speaker 3: John Hinckley Junior shot Reagan to impress Jodi Foster. Remember, Okay,
Speaker 3: here's where I admit something kind of embarrassing. I've always
Speaker 3: just accepted that statement at faceback. It makes no sense,
Speaker 3: but he wasn't acting rationally, so it's not something I
Speaker 3: felt like I needed to make sense of. He shot
Speaker 3: Reagan to impress Jodi Foster. I guess he thought she'd
Speaker 3: find that impressive. No need to interrogate that further. I
Speaker 3: mean a lot of women might find it impressive if
Speaker 3: you shot Ronald Reagan, so there's not a lot of
Speaker 3: follow up to do on that. The thing is, i'd
Speaker 3: never seen the movie Taxi Driver. I never pieced together
Speaker 3: that he thought shooting the president would impress Jodi Foster
Speaker 3: because she starred as the child sex worker in the
Speaker 3: movie Taxi Driver, in which the protagonist Travis Bickle plans
Speaker 3: to shoot a presidential candidate named Charles Palatine. Hinkley shot
Speaker 3: Reagan to impress Jodi Foster makes I guess like a
Speaker 3: little more sense if you have that cultural context, and
Speaker 3: I fear I may have been the very last person
Speaker 3: in America to find that out. So maybe everybody else
Speaker 3: already knew this next part too. I don't know, but
Speaker 3: Taxi Driver owes a lot to Arthur Bremmer, the guy
Speaker 3: who shot George Wallace. Screenwriter Paul Schrader has always denied
Speaker 3: that he based any part of the movie on Bremer's diary.
Speaker 3: In a nineteen seventy six interview, Schrader says he was
Speaker 3: inspired by the shooting itself in nineteen seventy two, but
Speaker 3: that the script was actually finished before the diary was
Speaker 3: published in seventy three, and he registered the script with
Speaker 3: the WGA, So that is provably true, right. But he
Speaker 3: told film comments Richard Thompson in seventy six, I want
Speaker 3: to emphasize that the script was written before any of
Speaker 3: the diary was published. After I read the diary, I
Speaker 3: was very tempted to take some of the good stuff
Speaker 3: from it and add it to Taxi Driver, but I
Speaker 3: decided not to because of legal ramifications. Bremer is sitting
Speaker 3: there in jail with nothing better to do than sue us,
Speaker 3: which is why I made certain the script was registered
Speaker 3: before the diary came out, and that nothing was changed
Speaker 3: after the diary's publication, And that's actually kind of prescient
Speaker 3: of him, come to think of it. He's saying this
Speaker 3: in seventy six that Bremer could file some kind of
Speaker 3: nuisance lawsuit from prison, and that's years before Bremer tried
Speaker 3: to get half a million dollars and his diary back
Speaker 3: from that construction worker. And I'm obviously not a film buff.
Speaker 3: We all just found out that I've never seen a movie.
Speaker 3: So he won't say Schrader is not telling the truth here.
Speaker 3: And maybe somebody who knows more about film would say, well,
Speaker 3: there's a difference between a script and a screenplay, right,
Speaker 3: those are different things. The script was done, but he
Speaker 3: still could have changed the look and feel of how
Speaker 3: it was shot. Because there are some scenes in Taxi
Speaker 3: Driver that, unless Scorsese and Trader had some kind of
Speaker 3: deep psychic connection to whatever forces in the universe motivated
Speaker 3: Arthur Bremmer, they absolutely came from the diary. I read
Speaker 3: the diary before sitting down to see what the movie
Speaker 3: was all about. So when Travis Pickele, the titular taxi driver,
Speaker 3: pulls up outside of a building with his fare, Martin
Speaker 3: Scorsese himself in the back seat. I was doing the
Speaker 3: Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme at my TV because the camera
Speaker 3: pans to a woman in a window smoking a cigarette,
Speaker 3: partially obscured by a gauzy curtain, And just a few
Speaker 3: pages into Bremmer's diary, he describes a really similar scene
Speaker 3: before he flew back to Milwaukee to try to cross
Speaker 3: the border into Canada to shoot Richard Nixon in Ottawa.
Speaker 3: He wrote this in his diary, My last night at
Speaker 3: the Howard Johnson's in the Jamaica area in New York City.
Speaker 3: I didn't sleep much. A beautiful naked lady across a
Speaker 3: parking lot on the next motel out by her window
Speaker 3: Florida ceiling, smoking cigarettes, and I had to watch her.
Speaker 3: Her table room light was on and a thin veil
Speaker 3: of curtain allowed me to watch her as she passionately
Speaker 3: kissed a man who wore clothes. I never saw them
Speaker 3: in each other's arms for more than a minute at
Speaker 3: a time. They must have been fighting through binoculars. I
Speaker 3: saw them gesture like Italians and open their mouths very wide,
Speaker 3: very often. So maybe he finished the script before he
Speaker 3: read the diary, but the diary absolutely influenced the way
Speaker 3: the film was shot. According to Andrew Rausch's book on
Speaker 3: the films of Bartin Scorsese, de Niro prepared for the
Speaker 3: role by getting a New York taxi license and driving
Speaker 3: around the city listening to a cassette tape of someone
Speaker 3: reading the Diary aloud. The Diary is genuinely oh normally,
Speaker 3: I'm firmly in the camp of please do not read
Speaker 3: or recommend that others read the manifestos left behind by shooters.
Speaker 3: There's not much to gain from it. It's what they
Speaker 3: want with that and the other. There's plenty of writing
Speaker 3: on the topic, but I don't really think anyone will
Speaker 3: read Arthur Bremer's diary entry about leaving a nude massage
Speaker 3: parlor frustrated that he's still a virgin, and feel inspired
Speaker 3: to follow in his footsteps. But I do think it's
Speaker 3: a fascinating document. I learned more about what's inside the
Speaker 3: mind of a nihilist aspiring shooter from Bremer's diary than
Speaker 3: I've learned from any self indulgent little manifesto left behind
Speaker 3: by a mass shooter after failing to get his shot
Speaker 3: at Nixon at the appearance in Ottawa in April, he wrote,
Speaker 3: I just need a little opening and a second of time.
Speaker 3: Nothing has happened for so long three months. The last
Speaker 3: person I held a conversation with in three months was
Speaker 3: a near naked girl rubbing my erect penis, and she
Speaker 3: wouldn't let me put it through her failures. A few
Speaker 3: pages later, he writes that he thought about getting really drunk,
Speaker 3: but quote decided against it. Just wanted to pick a
Speaker 3: fight with a bartender somewhere or someone get arrested, and
Speaker 3: then where am I? I got something to do something
Speaker 3: big before I ever get arrested again. He writes that
Speaker 3: he's getting tired of writing he wants to be a
Speaker 3: madman who kills, and then abruptly transitions to saying he
Speaker 3: goes crazy when hears Johnny Cash's new single, quoting the
Speaker 3: lyrics I shot you with my thirty eight and now
Speaker 3: I'm doing time, before noting that a baseball game had
Speaker 3: been canceled that day due to rain. Honestly, the document
Speaker 3: it reminds me the most of is the diary kept
Speaker 3: by Franklin Seacrest, the young man who set a synagogue
Speaker 3: on fire in Austin in twenty twenty one. Large portions
Speaker 3: of his diary were produced as evidence in his trial,
Speaker 3: and his diary is sort of similar in that it's
Speaker 3: a strange stream of consciousness accounting his frustrations with women,
Speaker 3: his daily activities, going to class, arguments with his mother,
Speaker 3: interspersed with these strange outbursts of violent desire, and they're
Speaker 3: just sort of mixed in without any recognition that these
Speaker 3: things are congruous. After taking two weeks away from his
Speaker 3: diary to deal with the tragedy of failing to kill
Speaker 3: Richard Nixon, remember went to see Clockwork Orange. As he
Speaker 3: watched the movie, he decided he would kill George Wallace instead,
Speaker 3: though he lamented that this was a second rate target, writing,
Speaker 3: I won't even rate a TV in terruption in Russia
Speaker 3: or Europe. When the news breaks, they never heard of Wallace.
Speaker 3: If something big and nom flares up, I'll be at
Speaker 3: the bottom of the first page. In America, the editors
Speaker 3: will say Wallace dead. Who cares? He won't get more
Speaker 3: than three minutes on network TV news. I don't expect
Speaker 3: anybody to get a big, throbbing erection from the news.
Speaker 3: You know, a storm in some country we never heard of,
Speaker 3: kills ten thousand people, Big deal, Pass the beer? What's
Speaker 3: on TV tonight? I hope my death makes more sense
Speaker 3: than my life. And just days before he finally took
Speaker 3: his shot, he wrote, yesterday I even considered McGovern as
Speaker 3: a target. If I go to prison as an assassin,
Speaker 3: solitary forever, guards in my cell, etc. Or get killed
Speaker 3: or suicided, what difference to me? Ask me why I
Speaker 3: did it, and I'd say I don't know, or nothing
Speaker 3: else to do, or why not? Or I have to
Speaker 3: kill somebody. It bothers me that there are about thirty
Speaker 3: guys in prison now who threatened the pres and we
Speaker 3: never heard a thing about him except that they're in prison.
Speaker 3: Maybe what they need is organization. Make the first lady
Speaker 3: a widow incorporated, chicken in every pot and a bullet
Speaker 3: on every head, committee incorporated the whole to national convention
Speaker 3: every year to pick the executioner. A winner will be
Speaker 3: chosen from the best entry in forty thousand words or less,
Speaker 3: preferably less on the theme how to do a bang
Speaker 3: up job getting people to notice you? Or get it
Speaker 3: off your chest, make your problems Everybody's On May thirteenth,
Speaker 3: two days before the shooting, Brehmer attended a Wallace rally
Speaker 3: in Kalamazoo, Michigan. There are photographs of Bremer at the
Speaker 3: rally that day, and he even spoke to a police
Speaker 3: officer who responded to a call about a suspicious vehicle
Speaker 3: park near the venue. Brehmer told the officer he just
Speaker 3: wanted to be early to get a good spot at
Speaker 3: the rally and complied when asked to move his car.
Speaker 3: His loaded thirty eight was in his jacket potet. He
Speaker 3: writes in his diary that he could have taken his
Speaker 3: shot that day, but at the last minute two teenage
Speaker 3: girls caught between him and his target, and he thought
Speaker 3: they'd be disfigured or blinded if he fired through the
Speaker 3: glass they were pressed up against, writing, I let Wallace
Speaker 3: go only to spare these two stupid, innocent, delighted kids.
Speaker 3: His final entry, made the night before the shooting ends
Speaker 3: with got a sign from campaign headquarters here to shield
Speaker 3: the gun. Is there anything else to say? My cry
Speaker 3: upon firing will be a penny for your thoughts. Round
Speaker 3: four pm on the fifteenth, after Wallace finished addressing a
Speaker 3: crowd in Laurel, Maryland, Bremer pushed his way through the
Speaker 3: people hoping to shake Wallace's hand and unloaded his thirty eight.
Speaker 3: He struck Wallace four times and wounded four others, a
Speaker 3: state trooper, a campaign volunteer, Wallace's personal bodyguard, and a
Speaker 3: secret Service agent. He was convicted and sentenced to sixty
Speaker 3: three years, later reduced to fifty three years on appeal.
Speaker 3: He was denied parole in nineteen ninety six after arguing
Speaker 3: it as hearing that shooting segregationist dinosaurs wasn't as bad
Speaker 3: as harming mainstream politicians, but it was released in two
Speaker 3: thousand and seven. George Wallace wrote to Bremer in prison
Speaker 3: in nineteen ninety five, telling him that he forgave him
Speaker 3: for the shooting and hoped to correspond a bit to
Speaker 3: get to know one another. Bremer never responded, and George
Speaker 3: Wallace died in nineteen ninety eight. So we shot George
Speaker 3: Wallace for no reason, and Robert de Niro's study of
Speaker 3: the diary he left behind inspired the performance that made
Speaker 3: Hinckley shoot Reagan. There's really nothing hard to believe at
Speaker 3: all in the idea that Thomas Crooks wanted to shoot
Speaker 3: the president just to be remembered as anyone at all.
Speaker 1: Hi and Welcome to the podcast. It's b James and
Speaker 1: today I am joined by Nick. Been doing some reporting
Speaker 1: on a forest occupation in Hint, which is a place
Speaker 1: I used to live. Actually, Mick, would you like to
Speaker 1: introduce yourself and sort of explain a little bit about
Speaker 1: what you've been doing.
Speaker 9: Of course, Hi, I'm Meck. I am incidentally reporting on
Speaker 9: stuff and I thought this was a pretty neat thing
Speaker 9: to report on that I think people should know more about,
Speaker 9: and it's also kind of a fun thing.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's very accessible for people, Like if you
Speaker 1: want to do like little forest occupying over the summer,
Speaker 1: this is one that you can do pretty easily.
Speaker 9: Yeah. Yeah, you can skip your European festival season and
Speaker 9: just go help at the forest occupation, which is cheaper
Speaker 9: and much more memorable.
Speaker 1: Yeah you can. God, they used to have one of
Speaker 1: those near the little town I lived in when I
Speaker 1: was racing in Belgium, and it was a scene.
Speaker 9: Yeah, just lovely times.
Speaker 1: Yeah, great times. We should maybe explain like a little
Speaker 1: bit about Hunt as a city, because I think if
Speaker 1: people have seen it, or they've maybe visited, like they've
Speaker 1: been to the middle of town, right and they've they've
Speaker 1: seen the castle and then the waterhouse bar or whatever,
Speaker 1: and they've been one of those sugar noses, but like
Speaker 1: they may not have seen the whole city. So can
Speaker 1: you sort of characterize the city.
Speaker 9: Of course, it's very diverse in the sense that the
Speaker 9: scenery changes a lot. You've got some of these like
Speaker 9: really old buildings that are just like speaking to your imagination.
Speaker 9: But then there's also almost like concrete deserts. Yeah, I
Speaker 9: would almost call them, where like the view on the
Speaker 9: street is just an incredible amount of gray in varying colors. Yeah,
Speaker 9: thats it was a beautiful city. I don't mean to
Speaker 9: thresh talk cantier at all, but at times it's just
Speaker 9: really gray.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've lots of memories of springtime and Flanders and
Speaker 1: like gray sky and gray buildings and gray roads and yeah,
Speaker 1: but also some very beautiful areas. So yeah, why did
Speaker 1: you go ahead and explain to us a little bit
Speaker 1: about this forest occupation?
Speaker 9: Okay, it's an occupation that's happening to a little north
Speaker 9: of the city center. In terms of forest occupations, it's
Speaker 9: remarkably accessible. So it's called the Womblehems Meson or ponds
Speaker 9: for you English speakers. Out there, and it's part of
Speaker 9: an industrial area called the Dauci, which is located just
Speaker 9: west of the canal the Lever, which connects the port
Speaker 9: of Hant, the third largest port in Belgium. The area
Speaker 9: itself is about fourteen to fifteen hectares. I'm not sure
Speaker 9: how to translate that to US numbers.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, Yeah, neither terriblated American, doesn't matter.
Speaker 9: There's internet, Yeah, and the ar area is largely been
Speaker 9: left to its own for a pretty significant amount of
Speaker 9: time past twenty years now. There's two areas within the ponds,
Speaker 9: as I'm going to call them, a northern part and
Speaker 9: a southern part, and later down the line i'll explain
Speaker 9: why that is important before I continue further on the highlight.
Speaker 9: I went there mainly as a form of solidarity and support.
Speaker 9: I had asked if people would be willing to talk
Speaker 9: to me about in a journalistic or reporting capacity, and
Speaker 9: they agreed to that. But I'm not a local, and
Speaker 9: I also don't want to pretend i am, although any
Speaker 9: listener will hear my accent and know that. So yeah,
Speaker 9: we'll be mainly talking about the southern area, and there's
Speaker 9: destination plans before this area there's essentially two parties that
Speaker 9: are working together to turn these green areas into the
Speaker 9: gray concrete deserts that we just talked about. These parties
Speaker 9: are the municipality of Kent and the Lane, a government
Speaker 9: organization that handles public transport and Flanders. So over the years,
Speaker 9: there have been several plans to build or develop the ponds,
Speaker 9: but up until last week. We're recording this in the
Speaker 9: week of August eighth, but up until last week, no
Speaker 9: permits were issued to actually finalize or realize these plans.
Speaker 9: The northern part was supposed to be turned into a
Speaker 9: sort of training area for bus drivers, while the southern
Speaker 9: part is intended to be a parking lot for public
Speaker 9: transport buses. The activists currently residing in the forest are
Speaker 9: by no means against the idea of public transport, but
Speaker 9: do think that the destruction of this piece of datuare
Speaker 9: is counterproductive for both the locals and for climate change reasons.
Speaker 9: There is enough concrete in the city already, and they
Speaker 9: argue that alternative solutions have not been giving the attention
Speaker 9: they deserve.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it seems like it wouldn't be hard to find.
Speaker 1: Like I think they call it like a brown field
Speaker 1: site like a former industrial site or in that area
Speaker 1: of Flanders, to redevelop an old factory or a warehouse
Speaker 1: complex or something. To do this rather than taking one
Speaker 1: of the green spaces and destroying it and paving it over.
Speaker 9: You know, I don't know what the municipality was thinking,
Speaker 9: but I'm sure there is like barren areas elsewhere that
Speaker 9: can just as easily be repurposed in a way that
Speaker 9: doesn't destroy nature. So the part that was most surprising
Speaker 9: to me, and at the same time not at all,
Speaker 9: is how this is being played out politically. To give
Speaker 9: everyone a quick timeline, about twenty years ago, the municipality
Speaker 9: designated these two zones that I talked about as to
Speaker 9: be used for common use. I'll reumain it for those
Speaker 9: speaking Dutch or Flemish well. At the same time the
Speaker 9: ground was being bought by the public transport company the
Speaker 9: lane plans for development started. There is even like an
Speaker 9: unused tram bridge just outside the green zone and the occupation.
Speaker 9: But for one reason or another, the permit to build
Speaker 9: on the ground itself had expired, during which time nature
Speaker 9: took it upon herself to reclaim the area. Now, what
Speaker 9: I mentioned earlier is this difference between the north and
Speaker 9: the south part. These are separated by train tracks, making
Speaker 9: a very clear distinction between the two areas. The land
Speaker 9: originally wanted to use the north part to make a
Speaker 9: sort of training area, as I just said, but these
Speaker 9: plans never materialized. At the same time, about three years ago,
Speaker 9: another action group prevented the destruction of the northern part.
Speaker 9: Now this is where I find it really interesting. The
Speaker 9: terrain is still owned by the line and the municipality,
Speaker 9: but they intend to give custody to a local environmental
Speaker 9: group called Naturepunt, but only if the plans for the
Speaker 9: southern part, where there's an occupation right now, are completed.
Speaker 9: Oh yes, yes, interesting. Yeah. While I was talking to
Speaker 9: my source, I was reading between the lines there as
Speaker 9: a sort of an attempt to play these multiple environmental
Speaker 9: organizations against each other, a sort of divide and conquer.
Speaker 1: M Yeah, very new theorious.
Speaker 9: When I asked my source about that, they said that
Speaker 9: it was up to mediate whether or not I would
Speaker 9: call it that, but that the existence of these plants
Speaker 9: is just a reality.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 9: I will not claim, probably for legal reasons, that there's
Speaker 9: definitely some attempt to set these parties up against each other.
Speaker 9: But from the information that I have, like if I
Speaker 9: were a betting man, I know where i'd put my money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's really interesting, So like not true to put
Speaker 1: it is not present in the forest occupation on the
Speaker 1: southern side, is that right? Not that I'm aware of,
Speaker 1: And so they'd stand to like they'd gain custody of
Speaker 1: the northern society of the people on the southern side failed.
Speaker 9: Exactly, how anfair he is, exactly, And if the southern
Speaker 9: side now succeeds in preventing like the tearing down of
Speaker 9: the trees, then the northern side could become you know,
Speaker 9: threatened again, and then this whole circus starts all over again.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, So both of them have the avested interest
Speaker 1: in one of these well, in theory, the municipality maybe
Speaker 1: would like them to think that both of them have
Speaker 1: an interest in the paving over of one of these areas.
Speaker 9: But exactly, like someone has to lose in this equation.
Speaker 9: And I find it interesting that that it's happening like this,
Speaker 9: especially because hands kind of promotes itself on these green
Speaker 9: zones that are mixed throughout the city and that are
Speaker 9: then accessible for people by bike or for running or walking,
Speaker 9: And then in that same breath there's also still the
Speaker 9: oh yeah, one of these species of nature we need
Speaker 9: to tear down because we need more concrete. Yeah, those
Speaker 9: two views just don't align.
Speaker 1: Right, And like we said, there's no shortage of Concretely,
Speaker 1: this is a very sort of post industrial area. It's
Speaker 1: not like this is like a public facing thing that
Speaker 1: needs to be in one area to be accessible to people, right,
Speaker 1: Like they could store their buses, train their bus drivers,
Speaker 1: you know, somewhere else in Flanders. It's not like it
Speaker 1: needs to be right in town.
Speaker 9: Now. I'm certain there are other areas where you could
Speaker 9: just as easily make a parking lot for buses. Yeah.
Speaker 9: As for like a training grounds, I'm not sure how
Speaker 9: that would work. But then again there I think there's
Speaker 9: roads enough in the city for people to practice, like
Speaker 9: even like industrial areas not to have very much traffic,
Speaker 9: so that could still work without having to like again
Speaker 9: get rid of a piece of forest just so people
Speaker 9: can drive around in buses.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 9: But again, this is not an argument against public transport,
Speaker 9: more in the like hypocrisy and senselessness of the plans
Speaker 9: that are on the table right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and kind of trying to make people choose between
Speaker 1: two things when they should be perfectly possible to have.
Speaker 9: Both, right exactly. I'm guessing it would also be more
Speaker 9: cost effective if you take some other parts, because I'll
Speaker 9: dive into that later. But there's also like pollution in
Speaker 9: these areas that needs to be taken care of. So
Speaker 9: just from a cost effective standpoint, I think there should
Speaker 9: be alternative options that will keep everyone happier.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, described me your visit there, like, describe how
Speaker 1: it was and what you winness there?
Speaker 9: Okay, Well I went there at the end of July.
Speaker 9: I stayed a few days and it was really weird
Speaker 9: because you're coming from again a tram stop, then you
Speaker 9: have to walk for a bit and all of the
Speaker 9: sudden it's like you're in a forest. It was. It
Speaker 9: was really surreal almost to know that you're in the
Speaker 9: middle of a big city but also have that kind
Speaker 9: of like isolation from the sounds of traffic.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean that's lovely, right, It's nice that's that's
Speaker 1: available at least for now.
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, I understand one hundred percent why people want
Speaker 9: to keep that green space close to their homes.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 9: So the ponds are a mix of terrain like there's
Speaker 9: like water hungry, like swampy areas when the ring has
Speaker 9: been falling. There's lush grass fields with like little curvy
Speaker 9: impromptu paths to take. And there's some parts where the
Speaker 9: trees have been growing for long enough that people can
Speaker 9: now build treehouses in them, which to me is quite
Speaker 9: a good indicator that not much development or care has
Speaker 9: been done in this terrain. There's an absolutely insane amount
Speaker 9: of BlackBerry bushes, much to mydy light. And yeah, it's
Speaker 9: just for an area that is relatively small in the
Speaker 9: bigger picture. It just surprised me how many different faces
Speaker 9: it has. It was a delight to be there. Locals
Speaker 9: tend to use the area for walks or picnics, or
Speaker 9: to take their dogs out. I've seen multiple people stopping
Speaker 9: by just to pick the blackberries. The city itself calls
Speaker 9: this entire area a green zone and a climate access
Speaker 9: their words. What can has done is trying to create
Speaker 9: a network of zones and roads that are accessible by car,
Speaker 9: but not so much that there is a lot of
Speaker 9: traffic on these roads, which makes them ideal for cycling, running, recreation,
Speaker 9: or even transports if you would so choose. The website
Speaker 9: of can itself promotes these areas is good for the
Speaker 9: flora and fauna, for the environment, and subsequently for residents.
Speaker 9: Then you need to be thinking of absorption of rainwater,
Speaker 9: or keeping local populations of animals and plants healthy, or
Speaker 9: just the cooling effect that nature has.
Speaker 1: Yeah, compared to black top.
Speaker 9: Exactly like fully, concrete cities tend to like not really
Speaker 9: release their warmth as quickly as nature does it. And
Speaker 9: it was surprising because it was really hot when I
Speaker 9: was there, but in the shade of the trees, it
Speaker 9: was perfectly doable up until the point where you actually exercised,
Speaker 9: and then suddenly it was less cool. But different story again.
Speaker 9: The website from the municipality itself acknowledges the importance of
Speaker 9: the area for an endangered species of lizard and the
Speaker 9: efforts that the city took to make sure that it
Speaker 9: can still thrive there. More concretely, one person I spoke
Speaker 9: to said that there are thirty nine protected species of
Speaker 9: plants and animals living there, protected under both Flemish and
Speaker 9: European law. So I'm not really sure why that's discarded
Speaker 9: into the calculation. I'm not a municipality person. I don't
Speaker 9: know also, I believe there have been sightings of foxes there,
Speaker 9: mainly because we were told by the activists not to
Speaker 9: eat the blackberries that are too close to the ground
Speaker 9: due to the parasites that foxes may carry and can
Speaker 9: subsequently like infect.
Speaker 1: People with Oh wow, yeah interesting.
Speaker 9: You know what else carries parasites, James?
Speaker 1: Is it the goods and services that we rely on
Speaker 1: to pay for this podcast?
Speaker 9: Exactly, there's a fifty percent chance that these products and
Speaker 9: services will give you one or another incurable parasite.
Speaker 1: Wonderful, and we're back. And you mentioned that there was
Speaker 1: a problem with pollution in the wilderness space, you can explain,
Speaker 1: like what kind of pollution then entails.
Speaker 9: Of course, in the past there has been like a
Speaker 9: pollution of both the groundwater and the soil in and
Speaker 9: of itself. That's not that remarkable. I've been told by
Speaker 9: someone that Flanders has multiple spots where you can come
Speaker 9: into contact with different forms of pollution. In the ponds,
Speaker 9: there is both pollution in the soil and in the groundwater.
Speaker 9: The soil itself contains asbestos, although it should be noted
Speaker 9: that that is within like the acceptable regulatory norms. As
Speaker 9: a refresher for listeners. Asbestos danger lies mainly in the
Speaker 9: breaking or fracturing of the material, and the fibers that
Speaker 9: release through that process is what makes asbestos so hazardous.
Speaker 9: An effective way to mitigate is to make sure that
Speaker 9: these fibers do not get into the air, for which
Speaker 9: water tends to work. Wonders so, at least in terms
Speaker 9: of asbestos, it seems very simple and cost effective to
Speaker 9: just leave it undisturbed, because it's already an area that
Speaker 9: likes to swallow up water, which then will isolate the
Speaker 9: asbestos from the air and thus make it less harmful.
Speaker 9: The water is contaminated with vocis. That's an acronym for
Speaker 9: a variety of volatile organic compounds with some chlorine attached
Speaker 9: to it. I don't know. I'm not a chemist. These
Speaker 9: chemicals have several uses and applications in a variety of industry.
Speaker 9: One of my sources told me that the specific chemical
Speaker 9: is one point for dioxane, which is used as a solvent.
Speaker 9: It's not the type of stuff you want to drink
Speaker 9: or inhale, but serious exposure from contaminated soil or water
Speaker 9: is pretty rare from what I've read. As my source
Speaker 9: pointed out to content eminence in the water will overtime
Speaker 9: degrade organically, a process called phytoremediation, where the presence of
Speaker 9: plants and microorganisms and fungi will degrade the material and
Speaker 9: reduce the toxicity. While reading into this, I found that
Speaker 9: the same is true to an extent for asbestos, which
Speaker 9: can be a source of like inorganic nutrients for these microorganisms.
Speaker 9: So while you could point out that phytoremediation is a
Speaker 9: longer process than sanitation, I personally think that it's just
Speaker 9: common sense that letting nature do its work understir might
Speaker 9: be significantly cheaper and more sustainable compared to putting additional
Speaker 9: chemicals and substances in the ground to neutralize these vocis
Speaker 9: also just a fun little side quest here. But in
Speaker 9: order to monitor the area, the line employed a concierge
Speaker 9: to walk the terrain on a daily basis. I'm unsure
Speaker 9: if you can spot upcoming or in merging contamination with
Speaker 9: the naked eye, but not my money that they used
Speaker 9: to pay the guy.
Speaker 1: So this guy just his job was to walk around
Speaker 1: the ponds.
Speaker 9: Yeah, pretty much. I'm told he had like a little
Speaker 9: hut or a little shack from which he worked. The
Speaker 9: guy was still working there at the time the activists
Speaker 9: moved in, but the shack is gone, and so is
Speaker 9: the gonecierge. I'm not sure about the details of what
Speaker 9: happened there, but what I do find extremely funny is
Speaker 9: that now officials and spokespersons from the development site are
Speaker 9: claiming that the area is dangerous and that it is
Speaker 9: for their own well being that the activists leave as
Speaker 9: soon as possible, which doesn't really make sense to me,
Speaker 9: Like either this argument is like incredibly disingenuous, or they
Speaker 9: fucked over someone by paying them to take this incredibly
Speaker 9: the risky job of walking over contaminated terrain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and not to mention like all the people who
Speaker 1: they allowed toward their dogs and click blackberries there and things.
Speaker 9: Exactly if it was that dangerous that people should not
Speaker 9: be there, then I'm fairly certain they could muster better
Speaker 9: fences than they did at the moment. Like I'm not
Speaker 9: sure on offense economy in the broader sense, but there
Speaker 9: should at least have been signs on the fences, and
Speaker 9: there were none. So yeah, we're getting to the octupist groups.
Speaker 9: The group that is currently occupying the trees is an
Speaker 9: assembly of people who care deeply about the area itself.
Speaker 9: I spoke on the record with one of them and
Speaker 9: I would like to play this clip to let them
Speaker 9: introduce themselves.
Speaker 11: I'm Elvid and one of the activists of the Window
Speaker 11: Myths occupation which he occupied since the twenty of June,
Speaker 11: and we occupy this because it's endangered. Is the lend,
Speaker 11: which is the public transports company in Flanders, wants to
Speaker 11: destroy this fifteen hector of nature for building a bus
Speaker 11: deput so like a parking for buses.
Speaker 9: Okay, do you want to tell us about what what
Speaker 9: you you and the group of activisties have done here.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 11: So we live in the trees as much as possible,
Speaker 11: and we we sleep there to make an eviction harder
Speaker 11: and to have more power in our in our action,
Speaker 11: like it's way more difficult for them to get us
Speaker 11: out if we are on height and use other tactics
Speaker 11: to to block them. And they also kndot start cutting
Speaker 11: trees when we are in in the trees another trees?
Speaker 9: How is that for you?
Speaker 8: It's intends.
Speaker 11: Always and occupation of course, but also places of where Yeah,
Speaker 11: very experiment with living together and where everyone's welcome.
Speaker 8: There are no door bells no walls.
Speaker 11: Furst are very open place where everyone can just come
Speaker 11: in and feel like they are welcome, and it's not
Speaker 11: owned by someone.
Speaker 2: It's not.
Speaker 11: Yeah, it doesn't feel like it's belonging to someone, which
Speaker 11: you can easily.
Speaker 8: Have with the house, I think.
Speaker 11: But here there's all the space to make stuff, to live,
Speaker 11: to take time for yourself, which makes it very healthy,
Speaker 11: I think to live here by being in nature, people
Speaker 11: are just more happy I think in general than in
Speaker 11: the city and in the house. And yeah, we are
Speaker 11: mainly building three houses. As you can hear, maybe probably.
Speaker 9: So as you've heard that was it's one of the
Speaker 9: activists that I spoke to. As you've also probably heard,
Speaker 9: is that there is construction going on in the trees.
Speaker 9: There's multiple treehouses there at the moment, and that's where
Speaker 9: they sleep. When I spoke further to our vidz, he
Speaker 9: made clear like the demands that activists have, which is
Speaker 9: mainly that they don't want the needless destruction of this area.
Speaker 9: There's intention is to remain in the trees and make
Speaker 9: it hard, if not impossible, for the trees to be felt.
Speaker 9: There are multiple treehouses with enough stability and space for
Speaker 9: multiple people on top of that they are preparing for
Speaker 9: a possible eviction, all while also living happily and communally,
Speaker 9: like every night they cook together, they're having dinner together.
Speaker 9: I found it incredibly healing and wholesome to just have
Speaker 9: a meal around a small fire with like a group
Speaker 9: of like minded people, not hearing traffic or other urban noises.
Speaker 9: A bright spot was one evening where someone played a
Speaker 9: Dutch protest and just on the guitar satirizing an unamed
Speaker 9: US president for his role in the Vietnam War, which
Speaker 9: can't escape US politics even in the middle of a forest.
Speaker 9: So then I would like to play a second clip,
Speaker 9: and how do you want to talk about how your
Speaker 9: relationship is with the neighbors around here?
Speaker 11: Yeah, the neighbors they started their own action committee for
Speaker 11: more than three years ago, I think, and they have
Speaker 11: already saved one piece of the Wildenhelm's myths, which is
Speaker 11: on the north part of the training will. So this
Speaker 11: one is now safe. It's only three hectors. But it
Speaker 11: was also the land who wanted to destroy it for.
Speaker 8: Making a say, a place to practice to drive with the.
Speaker 9: Bush like a training ground for bus drivers exactly.
Speaker 11: So just put concrete on this swampy area to them
Speaker 11: once in a while drive for the bus there as
Speaker 11: if there is no other.
Speaker 8: Concrete in the city to practice d.
Speaker 11: But this is no safety and now the neighbors are
Speaker 11: also for this big piece of the Williams Myths are
Speaker 11: now going to start the court case against the decision
Speaker 11: because the Ministry of thout the the Ministry of Environment,
Speaker 11: they approved the permits for the style plants for the business.
Speaker 9: Okay, uh, that was yesterday that that was announced. So
Speaker 9: how are you feeling. How are you feeling right now?
Speaker 9: Do you have any plans on how to continue to
Speaker 9: fight against the bulldozing of this place.
Speaker 11: Yeah, we are not surprised that she approved it. It
Speaker 11: was we saw it coming a bit. But it's just
Speaker 11: very ridiculous. And we will keep fighting, of course, because
Speaker 11: this is a very Hypocrates and saying that we have
Speaker 11: to save that nature. But in the meantime she proved
Speaker 11: decisions to destroy them this kind of nature. So we
Speaker 11: just continue to fight and the neighbors do it.
Speaker 8: With the court case. We keep yeah, we stay here
Speaker 8: and we keep building and pepre for an eviction.
Speaker 1: That's really interesting. That diversity of taxet cooperation, I think
Speaker 1: is really valuable in these kind of struggles. Can you
Speaker 1: explain a little bit more about that, like how that works.
Speaker 9: Well, I think it was just the stars that aligned
Speaker 9: for this particular goal. There is a neighborhood committee that's
Speaker 9: also heavily opposed to the destruction of this area, but
Speaker 9: it's mainly a well, a neighborhood committee. These are people
Speaker 9: who will stand up to like the municipality, but entirely
Speaker 9: through the legal system or the judicial system. And I
Speaker 9: think this committee was like at least a year or
Speaker 9: two maybe even more old before the occupation happened. And
Speaker 9: the occupation also happens separately from the committee, So you
Speaker 9: kind of have this, you know, alliance now between like
Speaker 9: a group of people who will take more direct action
Speaker 9: against the plans to destroy the place and this group
Speaker 9: who is going to do that by filing court cases
Speaker 9: against the plans that the land and the municipality are
Speaker 9: trying to realize right now. It's really funny always because
Speaker 9: one of my sources said, the people who are occupying
Speaker 9: for us came down like angels. The activists really don't
Speaker 9: like to be called that, but it's sort of yeah,
Speaker 9: just they have a common they have a common goal
Speaker 9: and for that, they're working together, and from what I've seen,
Speaker 9: there is very warm and friendly contact between the groups.
Speaker 9: I've seen multiple neighbors come by with like food or
Speaker 9: building materials, like think of screws or nails, or like
Speaker 9: wooden beams for construction. I think there was one person who,
Speaker 9: like every Sunday, brings pancakes. I'm not sure if.
Speaker 1: They still do that, but it's pretty cool.
Speaker 9: Yeah, exactly. I've seen people come by and drop off
Speaker 9: like bags of like dried beans and lentils. I think
Speaker 9: it's really fascinating that how organically these two groups sort
Speaker 9: of come together and in their common goal, but also
Speaker 9: that the two different strategies kind of strengthen.
Speaker 1: Each other, right, Yeah, Like obviously you've got people who
Speaker 1: wouldn't think of occupying forests, but then they find themselves
Speaker 1: in solidarity with people who do. And I think that's
Speaker 1: really cool that, like you said, there was no prior communication.
Speaker 1: These folks just arrived, began the occupation, and the locals
Speaker 1: will like, guess, this is exactly what we needed. Thank you.
Speaker 9: In so far as I understood it, that's how it happened.
Speaker 9: As I said earlier, like the combination of text tactics
Speaker 9: just make their path towards their goal so much more
Speaker 9: tangible because by occupying the forests, they can't start like
Speaker 9: early construction in the area, or I know some municipalities
Speaker 9: or cities kind of begin with the with the destruction
Speaker 9: prior to having permission. But then it's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 9: we've already started, so it's of no use anymore. Which
Speaker 9: I'm not sure how common it is in other countries,
Speaker 9: but I've heard of that in a with an activist
Speaker 9: circles in the Netherlands and all the wild Is committee
Speaker 9: is like doing the court cases and filing legal motions
Speaker 9: and yeah, I think I think it's a really warm
Speaker 9: and friendly contact.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's so it's kind of nice to see exactly.
Speaker 9: Okay, I have one other clip. How does it make
Speaker 9: you feel that the neighbors are so supportive as you
Speaker 9: said that they're bringing food on a regular basis. I've
Speaker 9: seen I think a few who brought materials even like
Speaker 9: screws or nails. What does that do with your morale
Speaker 9: or your motivation?
Speaker 11: Yeah, I think we wouldn't really be here if they
Speaker 11: would be broad the busy puts, But of course they
Speaker 11: are not because It's just a very stupid idea to
Speaker 11: destroy this valuable nature fruit. But yeah, we we help
Speaker 11: each other a lot, and we yeah, we keep each
Speaker 11: other strong by supporting each other. And they were very
Speaker 11: moved by us being here. And they even cats, they're angels,
Speaker 11: which you don't like to be good.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that's it, Okay.
Speaker 9: Is there anything else you would like to share or
Speaker 9: to have on on the record.
Speaker 11: Yeah, we would like to invite everyone to come here.
Speaker 11: There's more inforant wonder mist and that snow blocks that
Speaker 11: are and yeah, there will still be the whole court case,
Speaker 11: so there was a chance we stay longer. But they
Speaker 11: also have the legal right to to evictors.
Speaker 8: Which would also be paying for it.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Obviously people who share will be familiar with Like for
Speaker 1: ourt occupation in Atlanta, what's the state respond to this
Speaker 1: look like?
Speaker 9: For a long time, there has been very little state response.
Speaker 9: While I was there, the permit to develop the area
Speaker 9: was granted, but for the most part, there's occasional a
Speaker 9: car that drives by. I did receive word that a
Speaker 9: few days ago, a few cops came in onto the terrain,
Speaker 9: took pictures of everything, and the next morning there was
Speaker 9: a drone flying over the camp. Yeah. Yes, so things
Speaker 9: are like tensing up a bit and we'll have to
Speaker 9: see how We'll have to see how it goes. Obviously,
Speaker 9: like the case is still like in the judicial so
Speaker 9: we'll have to see what comes from that. But up
Speaker 9: until now, things have been quiet and peaceful.
Speaker 1: Okay, Yeah, because I think people sometimes obviously make the
Speaker 1: US really strive to lead the world in police violence,
Speaker 1: but I think that those people underestimate the capacity of
Speaker 1: European dates stay violent.
Speaker 9: That's definitely true. Like our lack of guns makes it
Speaker 9: that not many people are getting shot by police, but
Speaker 9: against activists or protests, police can be pretty pretty violent.
Speaker 9: I don't have much experience with Belgium police myself. I've
Speaker 9: heard conflicting stories about them. I was at the May
Speaker 9: first celebration in Brussels, became incredibly prepared, and then it
Speaker 9: was all okay, literally nothing note worthy to mention. But
Speaker 9: then when I speak to other people, I hear like, oh,
Speaker 9: you know, Belgium police worse than the Dutch. But then
Speaker 9: that very also varies from city to city, and that's
Speaker 9: a whole nother rabbit hole to go down into. Yeah,
Speaker 9: so for now, not much police action against the activists.
Speaker 9: Not sure if or when that will.
Speaker 1: Change, right, So if people wanted to they said everyone
Speaker 1: was welcome. Yes, and I presume they can drop in
Speaker 1: for the day, or they can go and stay ruperiod,
Speaker 1: or they can you know, commit staying until the forest
Speaker 1: to say, is it easy to access? Can you walk there?
Speaker 1: Could you like I take I guess ironically maybe could
Speaker 1: you take a bus?
Speaker 9: And there is a trem that stops pretty close by.
Speaker 9: They have an Instagram account that I don't know from
Speaker 9: the top of my head because I don't use Instagram.
Speaker 1: We'll link in the notes.
Speaker 9: I think if you just search for like a woomble
Speaker 9: mesa or womble hemp meths and you'll find something. You
Speaker 9: can contact them there and they can give you more
Speaker 9: details on how exactly to get there. Yeah, you can
Speaker 9: come by for a day, you can comby for two weeks,
Speaker 9: that's up to you. You're welcome there. What I would
Speaker 9: like to urge everyone is if you plan on going there,
Speaker 9: contact them about the supplies they need. When I arrived there,
Speaker 9: I got some like some small kitchen knives and like
Speaker 9: literally for cutting veggies, and some canned foods and some
Speaker 9: first aid supplies because it is largely donation based what
Speaker 9: they're doing there. So yeah, anything that you can spare
Speaker 9: or can purchase for them would be greatly appreciated. To
Speaker 9: check the website, check their Instagram. There might be a
Speaker 9: Facebook page. I think there is a Facebook page for
Speaker 9: those still using Facebook, So yeah, I would recommend it, like,
Speaker 9: go over there, help out. They're very friendly people if
Speaker 9: you're interested in doing something like this. This is like
Speaker 9: a very entry level thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like you said, it's not just like a good
Speaker 1: thing to do, it's also a nice fun thing to do.
Speaker 1: Like it's these spaces could be really healing, just live
Speaker 1: being among like minded people like you said, and in
Speaker 1: nature exactly.
Speaker 9: And like when I was there, they gave like a
Speaker 9: climbing workshop, so they taught me how I should climb
Speaker 9: a tree with like gear around my waist and everything.
Speaker 1: It's cool.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and follow the agreements that people make between each
Speaker 9: other site that there's not really any rules. You're free
Speaker 9: to come for a day, you're free to stay for
Speaker 9: two weeks, that's entirely up to you. Just it's nice
Speaker 9: to help out, and even if it's just help with
Speaker 9: cutting vegetables for dinner. Yeah, that's already incredibly appreciated. And
Speaker 9: in the meantime people can do other stuff that needs
Speaker 9: to happen around the camp. And yeah, in terms of activism,
Speaker 9: this is a small step to do, but it can
Speaker 9: also just be a really good experience for yours, for
Speaker 9: you and all the while helping the locals and helping
Speaker 9: the activists, which is the sort of mutual aid that
Speaker 9: I would prefer to see a lot more.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's great that it's integrated with the community,
Speaker 1: and I think it's great that it's accessible for people
Speaker 1: and hopefully folks will go bring something that they need.
Speaker 1: It's cool that they can, you know, share skills. I've
Speaker 1: learned a lot in different activist spaces. I think that's
Speaker 1: really cool. Mick, is there anywhere that people can follow
Speaker 1: you if they'd like to.
Speaker 9: Yes, I have a Twitter account now because I don't
Speaker 9: see enough horrible shit. It's at two Sober Possums or
Speaker 9: under the name Mick Smith, m I c K S
Speaker 9: M I T. I don't think i've posted anything yet,
Speaker 9: so I'll think of something funny. But feel free to
Speaker 9: reach out there if for reasons. Yeah, I'm cool with that.
Speaker 1: Great well, thank you very much. I was. I think
Speaker 1: that's really interesting. I hope people will go. If you go,
Speaker 1: you know, send us a little message, let us know
Speaker 1: how your experience was in the forest.
Speaker 3: I'd love that.
Speaker 1: It would make me happy.
Speaker 2: Likewise, what's jd My advances? This is it could happen
Speaker 2: here a podcast that's not Behind the Bastards. But today
Speaker 2: we're doing a little mini episode on our future possible
Speaker 2: vice president JD Vance Garrison. How are you feeling today,
Speaker 2: Welcome back to the program.
Speaker 9: Thank you.
Speaker 7: I'm feeling pretty good.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I got a great five hours of sleep. I'm
Speaker 7: good to go.
Speaker 2: Oh, I slept eleven Good for you.
Speaker 7: No, I've also been in the researching bad people whole
Speaker 7: which keeps me up late at night.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I have to do the Walls episodes tonight so
Speaker 2: we can go back to back on the vps. But
Speaker 2: I decided to start with JD. Vance, And you know,
Speaker 2: I had debated with myself is this guy worth a
Speaker 2: full bTB episode? And I decided ultimately like no, you know,
Speaker 2: I just don't think there's enough to him yet that
Speaker 2: he deserves that. Perhaps that will change in the future.
Speaker 2: But what I wanted to do was give the listener,
Speaker 2: who I'm guessing has mostly just heard a few disjointed
Speaker 2: things about JD.
Speaker 7: A few few things, one or two things, maybe one specific.
Speaker 2: Thing, one specific They probably they're probably aware of Hillbilly Elogy.
Speaker 2: That was like a pretty pretty big book in the day,
Speaker 2: and the movie was panned and that was kind of news.
Speaker 2: They probably heard the couch fucking stuff. And then they've
Speaker 2: heard allegations that he's like a straight up fascist, and
Speaker 2: you know, he thinks that single women should be dragged
Speaker 2: out into the street and shot or something like that.
Speaker 7: If you have a cat and you're a single woman,
Speaker 7: you are onto logically evil.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, a sociopath. And so I wanted to
Speaker 2: provide some context for how he went from if you
Speaker 2: can remember back to twenty sixteen, he was a liberal
Speaker 2: darling for having written Hillbilly Elogy.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 2: He was this guy, this like never Trump conservative who
Speaker 2: was explaining to everyone how the evil of trump Ism
Speaker 2: had infested and you know, latched onto the minds of
Speaker 2: small town Americans. Right, That's kind of how he was
Speaker 2: framed today, where he's like this hard right maga guy,
Speaker 2: literally Trump's you know, future right hand man, with what
Speaker 2: sounds like explicitly dictatorial ambitions, and the mystery of this story,
Speaker 2: all of it comes down to Peterteel Right. Many such cases, Yeah,
Speaker 2: as is often the case, he's a major part of
Speaker 2: life why things wind up where they are. The bones
Speaker 2: of JD's background story are kind of important, so I'm
Speaker 2: just going to give them rapidly. He was born in
Speaker 2: August nineteen eighty four in Middletown, Ohio, born under the
Speaker 2: name James Donald Bowman, but his parents divorced when he
Speaker 2: was a toddler. His dad, his biodad, is pretty much
Speaker 2: out of the picture right away. He is eventually adopted
Speaker 2: by his mother's third husband, whose last name is Hamil,
Speaker 2: and that's the name he's going to serve in the
Speaker 2: Marines under. His mother was not very together. There's a
Speaker 2: lot of neglect and poverty and some drug abuse in
Speaker 2: his early life before his grandparents moved him from Kentucky
Speaker 2: to Ohio. Now a lot of ink has been spilled
Speaker 2: when the subject of Vance's supposedly autobiographical book, Hillbilly Elegy,
Speaker 2: which paints him as a member of the aggrieved and
Speaker 2: abused white underclass, the forgotten men of American politics, I'm
Speaker 2: not interested in relitigating this stupid book, except to say
Speaker 2: that I had a kind of similar background. My dad
Speaker 2: was in the picture, but socioeconomically it was kind of similar.
Speaker 2: We grew up in a very poor and troubled small town.
Speaker 2: Eventually my caretakers got me out of there into a
Speaker 2: more functional part of the country. And I can see
Speaker 2: I see JD's book as kind of cynically positioned to
Speaker 2: take advantage of the liberal outpouring of sympathy for rural
Speaker 2: whites that followed Trump's twenty sixteen victory, an attempt to
Speaker 2: position himself as someone who can explain why this part
Speaker 2: of the country swept Trump into power. Now, the reality
Speaker 2: is that this part of the country did not sweep
Speaker 2: Trump into power. The core of Trump support in twenty
Speaker 2: sixteen were aggrieved, but financially comfortable, suburban white people. Vance
Speaker 2: did not write about poor folks addicted to oxy in
Speaker 2: the hollers with any real empathy. He painted them as
Speaker 2: helpless fools and mental children, in himself as better for
Speaker 2: getting out. And that's really all I have to say
Speaker 2: on the matter. To me, his early life suggests a
Speaker 2: young man who wanted to set himself up for a
Speaker 2: career in public life and took the most expedient actions
Speaker 2: to do so. And that is the context in which
Speaker 2: I see his service in the US Marine Corps. He
Speaker 2: joined the Marines and got himself the job that would
Speaker 2: get him as close to action as possible without requiring
Speaker 2: that he actually do anything. His specific gig was public
Speaker 2: affairs for a marine aircraft wing, So he is writing
Speaker 2: about the shit that this aircraft wing is doing, which
Speaker 2: is about the least job that you can actually have
Speaker 2: in the military. He wrote that he was quote lucky
Speaker 2: to escape any real fighting. After finishing his term, he
Speaker 2: got a BA in polysci And I'm not saying that
Speaker 2: you have to fight for you know, most of what
Speaker 2: the military does is not literally fighting. I'm just saying
Speaker 2: I see his specific positioning himself with this job as
Speaker 2: him wanting to have Marine on his CV when he
Speaker 2: goes into politics. Right, that's my allegation, right, not that
Speaker 2: there's anything wrong with not.
Speaker 7: Fighting, sure, I mean, and it's also just good to
Speaker 7: point out considering most of the rights attacks against Walls
Speaker 7: right now are also about him not actually like seeing combat,
Speaker 7: and Advance has gone after him for that specifically. Yeah,
Speaker 7: trying to like allude to like Advance having more combat experience. Yeah,
Speaker 7: both men did not like fire bullets at enemy combatants.
Speaker 2: No, and most people don't. But what I see with
Speaker 2: Vance's service is I did this because it was a
Speaker 2: line in my resume, whereas you don't do twenty four
Speaker 2: years in the National Guard like just to set up
Speaker 2: your political career. Now, you do that because you want
Speaker 2: to be in the National Guard.
Speaker 7: Yes, Waltz was definitely more like a career man in
Speaker 7: that sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. After finishing his term, he got a
Speaker 2: BA in polysci and philosophy from Ohio State and during
Speaker 2: his first year in college he worked for a Republican
Speaker 2: States senator. He's going to work for a couple of
Speaker 2: Republicans in his college in grad school, you know, law
Speaker 2: school years. Then he attended Yale Law School, where he
Speaker 2: made friends with Jamil Giovanni, who would go on to
Speaker 2: be a Conservative parliamentarian in Canada. He was mentored by
Speaker 2: Professor Amy Chua, who wrote a book about being a
Speaker 2: Tiger mom that made a lot of people angry and
Speaker 2: was beloved by the chunk of the country who thinks
Speaker 2: the children have it too easy. Chua helped to convince
Speaker 2: him to write Hillbilly Elegy, which might be her worst sin,
Speaker 2: almost definitely is her worst sin. I can forgive some
Speaker 2: terrible acts towards children if you don't write the book
Speaker 2: Hillbilly Elogy. It was when Vance graduated from Yale that
Speaker 2: he first made contact with the man who would come
Speaker 2: to define his adult political journey. Peter Teel, the PayPal
Speaker 2: co founder and serial entrepreneur investor, had taken a rapid
Speaker 2: turn from his earlier libertarian politics thanks to a growing
Speaker 2: interest in a line of political philosophy known mostly as
Speaker 2: neo reactionary or NRX thought, although today you'll more often
Speaker 2: hear it described as the new right. I'm not in
Speaker 2: love with either of those terms for this particular chunk
Speaker 2: of the right, But I think neo reactionary is better
Speaker 2: than new.
Speaker 7: Right, not as bad as dark Enlightenment.
Speaker 2: It's not as bad as dark and we'll talk the
Speaker 2: worst of these three terms, by far the worst of
Speaker 2: the three terms. So I tend to stick with neo reactionary.
Speaker 2: Although if you hear new right being used' that's also
Speaker 2: what this refers to.
Speaker 7: That's a term I've used sometimes. Yeah, yeah, what time
Speaker 7: period is is is this like twenty seventeen, like where
Speaker 7: are we at here?
Speaker 2: Twenty eleven is when he sees Peter Teal speak at Yale,
Speaker 2: which he describes as like the moment around which his
Speaker 2: life pivots.
Speaker 7: So this is pre the publishing of his book.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes, he publishes he'llbilli Elogy in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 7: Okay, so he kind of got in on the ground
Speaker 7: floor of some of this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: Yes, he is very early in Teal world. He is
Speaker 2: one of the first, He's going to be one of
Speaker 2: We're getting to that. But I want to talk about
Speaker 2: what neo reactionaries are because the rest of this isn't
Speaker 2: going to make sense unless we go into that.
Speaker 7: So sure.
Speaker 2: Vanity Fair writer James Pogue rather ably described the New
Speaker 2: Right as a worldview in direct competition to the liberal
Speaker 2: idea that economic growth and technological innovation would lead us
Speaker 2: to a better future. Instead, the growth of big tech surveillance,
Speaker 2: nanny state governance, and social justice culture war dominance has
Speaker 2: created a system of oppression that will destroy everything good
Speaker 2: in the world if not stopped. The primary high priest
Speaker 2: of this fool of thought is Curtis Yarvin. Who in
Speaker 2: the early aughts from about two thousand and seven twenty fourteen,
Speaker 2: blogged prolifically as Mincius Moldbug. Now Yarvin is a computer programmer.
Speaker 2: He is this guy who has had for most of
Speaker 2: his career this desire to create a new computer operating
Speaker 2: system that would like fix the way in which knowledge
Speaker 2: is disseminated in a way that sounds kind of magical
Speaker 2: to me. He never quite gets it working. And he
Speaker 2: blogs about political philosophy the same way he talks about programming,
Speaker 2: which he has this dream for a way to reorient
Speaker 2: society after a soft, kind of peaceful coup. He always
Speaker 2: emphasizes how peaceful it needs to be, that will be,
Speaker 2: you know. Again, it's his way if he wants to
Speaker 2: program society to make it work perfectly, you know, based
Speaker 2: on his sort of set of values. And he writes
Speaker 2: a series of essays about how he wants to reorient society.
Speaker 2: And these essays become kind of the central underpinning ethos
Speaker 2: of the messi assortment of philosophies that we call neo
Speaker 2: reactionaries the new right.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: The basic idea is that this liberal nightmare healthscape can
Speaker 2: only be stopped and turned back by replacing democracy with
Speaker 2: an essentially monarchic system. Pogue describes Jarvin as arguing for
Speaker 2: quote a Caesar like figure to take power back from
Speaker 2: this devolved oligarchy and replace it with a monarchical regime
Speaker 2: run like a startup. As early as twenty twelve, he
Speaker 2: proposed the acronym rage retire all government employees as a
Speaker 2: shorthand for a first step and the overthrow of the
Speaker 2: American regime. What we needed, Yarvin thought, was a national
Speaker 2: CEO or what's called a dictator. Now. A lot of
Speaker 2: guys in the aughts become enraptured by Jarvin's ideas because
Speaker 2: the way Jarvin writes, he spends most of his free
Speaker 2: time because he gets bought out of a company he's in,
Speaker 2: and he doesn't wind up like super rich, but he
Speaker 2: winds up comfortable enough that he's for a while just
Speaker 2: spending like five hundred bucks a month on books and
Speaker 2: reading like old reactionary tracts, like books from the eighteen
Speaker 2: hundreds of like monarchists arguing against the Enlightenment and socialism alike.
Speaker 2: And so he peppers his essays with a lot of
Speaker 2: different kind of archaic flourishes a lot of Latin, a
Speaker 2: lot of like references to Greek and Roman philosophical figures,
Speaker 2: and that is fucking catnip for a certain kind of guy.
Speaker 7: No, it makes it makes it seem like esoteric. It's
Speaker 7: like it's kind of like, yes, liked hidden knowledge. It's
Speaker 7: being like rediscovered that like holds the key to fix
Speaker 7: all of our problems.
Speaker 2: Yes, he is. If you've read Enders game, he's doing
Speaker 2: what Ender's brother does an Enders game, where he's writing
Speaker 2: his little essays for the Internet, trying to like overthrow
Speaker 2: the government using them. And there's a certain certain kind
Speaker 2: of guy who is just deeply attracted to that idea.
Speaker 2: One of those kinds of guys is a philosopher called
Speaker 2: Nick Land. Land is an interesting character. We talk about
Speaker 2: him a little during our AI Cult episodes. He's a
Speaker 2: dude who comes out of academia and kind of has
Speaker 2: has now moved around to essentially like fascist political philosophy
Speaker 2: would be kind of the quickest way to describe Land today.
Speaker 2: Although he's a complicated fellow. But he is the guy
Speaker 2: who who comes up with the term dark enlightenment for
Speaker 2: Curtis's writing. And this is the way in which a
Speaker 2: lot of these guys, A lot of the guys especially
Speaker 2: who are going to come into Jarvin's work around, you know,
Speaker 2: the mid aughts are going to think about it right
Speaker 2: where it's this, he has pulled the wool from my eyes. Right,
Speaker 2: he has made it clear how doomed democracy is, that
Speaker 2: it's fundamentally evil. And now that I've had this dark revelation,
Speaker 2: I can never look at the world the same way again.
Speaker 7: Right, And like Land was trying to do the same
Speaker 7: thing for like the previous like fifteen years, and he
Speaker 7: attracted a small batch of like kind of like academic followers,
Speaker 7: A whole bunch of his colleagues kind of got more
Speaker 7: popular than him because they were slightly more reasonable in
Speaker 7: many ways.
Speaker 2: Because Lance writing is never going to be like the
Speaker 2: most viral thing on earth, right, like no, yeah, and
Speaker 2: mode Bugs is a little better written for that, although
Speaker 2: both of them are too dense. The guys who are
Speaker 2: going to, like like Vance is going to be the
Speaker 2: guys who are going to take his theories into like
Speaker 2: mainstream politics, are going to need to trim the fat off.
Speaker 2: You know. It's also worth noting Jarvin is the guy
Speaker 2: who introduces the term the red pill to right wing politics.
Speaker 7: Right, Oh, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2: Yes, as far as I've ever seen, Jarvin is the
Speaker 2: guy who like starts using the red pill in like
Speaker 2: a really concerted way to describe, like coming to these
Speaker 2: understandings about you know, race science has a decent amount
Speaker 2: to do with it earlier in Yarvin's writing career. But
Speaker 2: like all of these ideas that we now call neo reactionary,
Speaker 2: like that's that's a Jarvin original. He thinks the matrix
Speaker 2: is a work of genius, of course, which it is,
Speaker 2: but maybe not in the way that he thinks slightly. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So anyway, Peter Teel falls in love because Teal is
Speaker 2: by by two thousand and nine, Teal's writing stuff about
Speaker 2: how he thinks democracy is incompatible with liberty. Right, And
Speaker 2: when Peter Teel refers to liberty, he's not talking about
Speaker 2: like your freedom to like to love the people that
Speaker 2: you want to love, or do with your body what
Speaker 2: you want to do with your body, talking about his
Speaker 2: freedom as a guy with a lot of money to
Speaker 2: not have to pay taxes. Right, that's primarily what all
Speaker 2: of these guys mean by freedom. So Teal by two
Speaker 2: thousand and nine is already enraptured with these anti democratic ideas,
Speaker 2: and he finds Jarvin. It's kind of unclear to me,
Speaker 2: does Jarvin actually start him on that road or I
Speaker 2: think it's more that he has started down that road,
Speaker 2: and he thinks Jarvin is doing a really good job
Speaker 2: of setting up what he's been thinking. So he starts
Speaker 2: pumping money into Jarvin. He funds some of his like
Speaker 2: software ambitions. He's just kind of generally supporting him, and
Speaker 2: he begins pumping money increasingly over the early to mid
Speaker 2: aughts into an array of influencers and thinkers who are
Speaker 2: in alignment with what we might call mold buggy in
Speaker 2: thought right, and he's doing that up to this present day,
Speaker 2: Pog writes. Teal has also funded things like The Edge
Speaker 2: Lordy and Post Left. Infected New People sent him a
Speaker 2: film festival which ended his week long run of parties
Speaker 2: and screenings in Manhattan just a few days before nat
Speaker 2: Con began. He's long been a big donor to Republican
Speaker 2: political candidates, but in recent years has grown increasingly involved
Speaker 2: in the politics of this younger and weirder world, becoming
Speaker 2: something like an afarious godfather or genial rich uncle, depending
Speaker 2: on your perspective. Podcasters and art world figures now joke
Speaker 2: about their hope to get so called Teal bucks. And
Speaker 2: if you're familiar with like the Red Scare podcast and
Speaker 2: those ladies you're familiar with, like the Dime Square set,
Speaker 2: a lot of them are into neo reactionary thought and
Speaker 2: are the people that that paragraph is referring to right now.
Speaker 2: While podcasters and cultural influencers have long been useful to Teal,
Speaker 2: he's also tried to collect up and coming politicians with
Speaker 2: uneven success. In twenty eleven, he gave a talk at
Speaker 2: Yale while Vance was still a student, and discussed the
Speaker 2: stagnation of technological progress in the United States. Vance wrote
Speaker 2: that Teal was then quote possibly the smartest person I'd
Speaker 2: ever met, And this moment is the moment that his
Speaker 2: whole life pivots around meeting Peter Teal at Yale in
Speaker 2: twenty eleven. We're going to talk about what comes after,
Speaker 2: But Garrison, you know what isn't receiving any money from
Speaker 2: Peter Teal.
Speaker 7: We also can say that there's no way to know
Speaker 7: what he's doing.
Speaker 2: Right, It's entirely possible. It's entirely possible that we are
Speaker 2: funded one by Peter Teal, And if so, thank you.
Speaker 7: Got to get those Teal books.
Speaker 2: And we're back. I've just uncovered that Peter Teal is
Speaker 2: the mind behind Chumba Casino Garrison. This goes so much
Speaker 2: deeper than I thought.
Speaker 7: What if Peter Tiel instead just got really into sports betting,
Speaker 7: you know, instead of dealing with all this weird like
Speaker 7: esoteric traditionalist, like like eighteen eighties racism philosophy. What what
Speaker 7: if instead he just got really into I don't know,
Speaker 7: the Bucks that's probably a sports team, right.
Speaker 2: He put eight billion dollars on the Raiders.
Speaker 7: He took a bath.
Speaker 2: He's fucked.
Speaker 7: He got addicted to it too, gone. We can save
Speaker 7: so many lives. Sports betting really couldn't save lives.
Speaker 2: I've always said that Vance decided to abandon his planned
Speaker 2: career in law, although I'm not sure I believe that
Speaker 2: was ever his intended path.
Speaker 7: Absolutely not.
Speaker 2: No, he does a couple of years in law, and
Speaker 2: he claims that Teal also is who made him decide
Speaker 2: to convert to Christianity by defying the social template. I
Speaker 2: had constructed that Christians were dumb and atheists were smart.
Speaker 2: I don't know how much to believe that he's actually
Speaker 2: a Catholic.
Speaker 7: Maybe I don't know, but like there's this whole new
Speaker 7: batch of like yes people who are like a philosophically
Speaker 7: Catholic or like yeah, they're Catholic in like a quote
Speaker 7: unquote Hegelian sense when when they instruct these like larger
Speaker 7: models of like human evolution and they view like Christianity
Speaker 7: as this like yes, sing that will drive the human
Speaker 7: species towards its like perfected form. And definitely the dark
Speaker 7: Enlightenment to people are a significant chunk of kind of
Speaker 7: what caused you to develop. And we're seeing that now
Speaker 7: with like these fake movements like the Hegelian egirles, which
Speaker 7: are kind of like with the like weird step child
Speaker 7: of some of these like Dimes Square like influencer philosophy stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I would say he's definitely not a Catholic
Speaker 2: in the sense that your aunt is right.
Speaker 7: No, no, no, no, no, no no no.
Speaker 2: He is a Catholic in the sense that, like he
Speaker 2: believes there are things about social order and the roles
Speaker 2: that people should have in society that Catholicism gets right.
Speaker 2: And that's the sense in which he's a Catholic. Right,
Speaker 2: So in twenty sixteen, the same year that Vance publishes
Speaker 2: Hillbilly Elegy and becomes a liberal darling, he joins Mythral Capital,
Speaker 2: a venture capital firm founded by Teal Peter Teel Advance.
Speaker 2: All of these guys pretty much every time they create
Speaker 2: a company, it's named after something in the Lord of
Speaker 2: the Rings.
Speaker 7: Fucking A. J. R. R. Tolkien bullshit.
Speaker 2: He would be so unhappy with this.
Speaker 7: Because Tolkien was also a Catholic monarchist, but in a
Speaker 7: very different.
Speaker 2: Way, in a super different way. Yes. So the two
Speaker 2: young men that Teal adopts that he makes what are
Speaker 2: called generational bets in is Blake Masters and JD. Vance.
Speaker 2: And his bet is that if I really bankroll and
Speaker 2: back these guys, they are going to be major figures
Speaker 2: in US politics right for decades to come. And his
Speaker 2: first step is he makes them rich. He helps them
Speaker 2: get jobs and stuff that they get wealthy in. You know,
Speaker 2: Masters is recruited in the same way as Vance. He's
Speaker 2: given a cushy job in venture capital. He's handed a
Speaker 2: shitload of Teal books to see what he can make
Speaker 2: of them. And Vance is, you know, both of them
Speaker 2: are decent enough at this Vance is okay at it,
Speaker 2: and within two years he gets hired for one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty million dollar fund out of Washington that focuses
Speaker 2: on finding young companies and overlooked US cities, places that
Speaker 2: weren't seen as traditionally tech hups. Soon after this, he
Speaker 2: goes into business on his own, if we can call
Speaker 2: it on your own when Peter Teal is the guy
Speaker 2: who backs your new company entirely, right.
Speaker 7: Sure, I do love that that Peter Teel somehow picked
Speaker 7: the two most uncharismatic up and coming dudes.
Speaker 2: I mean, look at Peter, what does he know about charisma?
Speaker 7: Yeah, but like it is fun that he made these
Speaker 7: two bets, and Mark Kelly just destroyed one of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, criticize the bad for what you will, but one
Speaker 2: of these weirdos go up against an astronaut on a
Speaker 2: public debate.
Speaker 7: Jesus Christ, you know, say what you will about electoralism.
Speaker 7: I'm excited to see the Walls Vance debate because I
Speaker 7: think it'll be funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, because Vance has big daddy issues and Walls
Speaker 2: has strong daddy energy, so we could be in for
Speaker 2: a very interesting night. So Vance forms his own venture
Speaker 2: capital form Narya Capital. This is another lord of the
Speaker 2: Rings reference. Narya is one of the rings of power,
Speaker 2: which the rings of power are bad, very famously. You're
Speaker 2: part of a con. An evil monster creates them to
Speaker 2: enslave you. If you are wearing one of the rings
Speaker 2: of power, you have been enslaved by Saarron. That's the point.
Speaker 7: They're very famously bad.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And of course one of the major investments Naria
Speaker 2: Capital makes is into Pallentier, which is also named.
Speaker 7: Also famously used by the Evil Wizard.
Speaker 2: Yes, famously used by the Evil Wizard. Now, in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: Vance portrayed himself as a never Trumper, calling the future
Speaker 2: president want to be dictator? Well, ye know how many
Speaker 2: people in America didn't he Rape is one of the
Speaker 2: things Vance says about Trump. So he is like not
Speaker 2: holding his punches against the man broken clock. But behind
Speaker 2: the scenes he is in the process of being anointed
Speaker 2: by the teal crowd, who again see him as a
Speaker 2: bet in the future of American politics. Now, this is
Speaker 2: not something I can claim to know with confidence, but
Speaker 2: it seems to me from the extant information that Vance's
Speaker 2: anti trumpism was performative, calculated to sell books. When he
Speaker 2: thought he might have a future with a new more
Speaker 2: conservative Democratic Party triangulating to battle populous trump Ism. The
Speaker 2: fact that he remained close to Teal during this whole period,
Speaker 2: and that Teal spoke at the twenty sixteen RNC strikes
Speaker 2: me as evidence of a lack of any core political
Speaker 2: beliefs beyond a personal desire for power. Now, it is
Speaker 2: worth noting that, as a younger man, none of the
Speaker 2: signs of social conservatism. He is always an economic conservative.
Speaker 2: He's willing to work with Republicans right. He's one of
Speaker 2: these guys who you could definitely see economically being in
Speaker 2: line with their Republicans. But he does not evince any
Speaker 2: kind of bigotry in his early life, particularly towards LGBT people.
Speaker 2: One of his best friends from law school is a
Speaker 2: transgender woman, Sophia and Nelson. He describes her in Hillbilly
Speaker 2: Elogy as an extremely progressive lesbian and wrote in an
Speaker 2: email to her, I recognize now that this may not
Speaker 2: accurately reflect how you think of yourself, and for that
Speaker 2: I am really sorry. I hope you're not offended, but
Speaker 2: if you are, I'm sorry. Love you, JD. Sophia responded
Speaker 2: the next day, saying if you had written gender queer,
Speaker 2: radical pragmatist, nobody would know what you mean.
Speaker 7: Many such cases, right.
Speaker 2: The text of their emails has been shared with The
Speaker 2: New York Times by Nelson. After Vance took a hard
Speaker 2: turn to lean into the rights anti trans bigotry. This
Speaker 2: was a move that pleased Teel himself, who has a
Speaker 2: very law He has been anti trans and pushing anti
Speaker 2: trans rhetoric for years before this was a mainstream thing
Speaker 2: on the right, before the Matt Walsh types really started
Speaker 2: pivoting Republican messaging around it. Right, Yeah, And I'm going
Speaker 2: to quote from the Times here. Nelson, now a public
Speaker 2: defender in Detroit, said they visited each other's homes, talked
Speaker 2: on zoom during the pandemic, and exchanged long emails discussing
Speaker 2: a range of subjects, from minutia of daily life to
Speaker 2: weighty discussions of current events and public policy issues. Nelson
Speaker 2: attended mister Vance's wedding in Kentucky in twenty fourteen. They
Speaker 2: pondered doing a podcast together. He suggested they call it
Speaker 2: The Lunatic Fringe, but Nelson and mister Vance had a
Speaker 2: falling out in twenty twenty one when Vance said he
Speaker 2: publicly supported an Arkansas ban on gender affirming care from minors,
Speaker 2: leading to a bitter exchange that deeply hurt Nelson. He
Speaker 2: achieved great success and became very rich by being a
Speaker 2: never Trumper who explained the white working class to the
Speaker 2: liberal elite. Nelson said, now he's amassing even more power
Speaker 2: by expressing the exact opposite. And I think that's interesting.
Speaker 2: It does kind of point to the whole There's no
Speaker 2: core to this guy. There's nothing that he has ever
Speaker 2: really cared about other than positioning himself most advantageously. And
Speaker 2: I really do think that that gets at what actually
Speaker 2: is inside JD. Vance.
Speaker 7: I mean, I mean, a proximity to political power is
Speaker 7: the driving force for a lot of yeah, a lot
Speaker 7: of like people who get into politics.
Speaker 2: Yes, frankly, yes, like yes, yeah, that's that's it. Now,
Speaker 2: it's relevant that twenty twenty one was the year Vance
Speaker 2: chose to pivot away from never Trump rhetoric and lean
Speaker 2: into the right wing culture war bullshit. Narya had been
Speaker 2: founded in twenty nineteen. It had been backed by one
Speaker 2: hundred million dollars from Peter Teal, as well as funding
Speaker 2: by Eric Schmidt and Mark Andresen. Their investments included Strive
Speaker 2: asset management and investment funds started by Vivek Ramashwami, who
Speaker 2: was Teal's classmate at Yale.
Speaker 7: Oh I did not know they were classmates.
Speaker 2: Uh huh, oh, yeah, it's the class the shit fell on.
Speaker 2: For two years, he'd been allowed to keep up the
Speaker 2: fiction of a principled economic conservative who was horrified by
Speaker 2: the bigotry and corruption of Trump World. But by twenty
Speaker 2: twenty one, with Trump out of office and Biden's presidency underway,
Speaker 2: Teal made it clear that he needed something else from Vance.
Speaker 2: We get our best texture of what Vance believed by
Speaker 2: late twenty twenty one from Pogue's Vanity Fair piece, which
Speaker 2: was written about a neo reactionary summit in October of
Speaker 2: twenty twenty one. Quote. Vance believes that a well educated
Speaker 2: and culturally liberal American elite has greatly benefited from globalization,
Speaker 2: the financialization of our economy, and the growing power of
Speaker 2: big tech. This has led an ivy League intellectual and
Speaker 2: management class a quasi aristocracy. He calls the regime to
Speaker 2: adopt a set of economic and cultural interests that directly
Speaker 2: opposed those of people in places like Middletown, Ohio, where
Speaker 2: he grew up in the vancy. In view, this class
Speaker 2: has no stake in what people on the new right
Speaker 2: call the real economy, the farm and factory jobs that
Speaker 2: months disdained class life in Middle America. This is a
Speaker 2: fundamental difference between New right figures like Vance and the
Speaker 2: Reaganite right wingers of their parents' generation. To Vance, and
Speaker 2: he said, this culture war is class warfare. Vance recently
Speaker 2: told an interviewer, I got to be honest with you,
Speaker 2: I don't really care about what happens to Ukraine, a
Speaker 2: flick at the fact that he thinks the American led
Speaker 2: global order is as much about enriching defense contractors and
Speaker 2: think tank types as it is about defending America's interest.
Speaker 2: I do care about the fact that in my community
Speaker 2: right now, the leading cause of death among eighteen to
Speaker 2: forty five year olds is Mexican fentanyl. His criticisms of
Speaker 2: big tech as enemies of Western civilization often get lost
Speaker 2: in the run of Republican outrage over Trump being kicked
Speaker 2: off Twitter and Facebook, although they go much deeper than this.
Speaker 2: Dance believes that the regime has sold an elusive story
Speaker 2: that consumer gadgets and social media are constantly making our
Speaker 2: lives better, even his wages stagnate and technology feeds an
Speaker 2: epidemic of depression. Now he is backed entirely by social
Speaker 2: media money. Sure Teel is one of the major backers
Speaker 2: of Facebook. Right, of course, he is supported entirely by
Speaker 2: the money of the people he claims to hate, who
Speaker 2: he claims are destroying America.
Speaker 7: I do find this to be really interesting because it's
Speaker 7: like a more conservative right reaction to like right wing neoliberalism. Right,
Speaker 7: this is so different. Even though all these guys like
Speaker 7: kind of talk about how they're like they're like Reaganites, right,
Speaker 7: They're really not. Now they're going back to a much
Speaker 7: more nineteen like twenties style of conservatism. Almost yes, before
Speaker 7: like the Southern split before like like a new Deal
Speaker 7: and we solidified more of like the Democrats being this
Speaker 7: liberal party, this this more fiscally conservative party on the right,
Speaker 7: and then that kind of gave way to like Thatcher
Speaker 7: right England and the neoliberal takeover of the entire world.
Speaker 7: It's like they're looking at how like neoliberalism has been
Speaker 7: totally subsumed even by like the Democrats and like you know,
Speaker 7: centrist left liberals, and they're reacting to it with this
Speaker 7: much more socially conservative backlash. Yes, and that is really
Speaker 7: the entirety of what's happened to the Republican Party the
Speaker 7: last the last four years. And Trump's only a small
Speaker 7: part of that, because even Trump doesn't really care about
Speaker 7: some of these types of like culture war issues now
Speaker 7: that these guys care about, Like these guys are even
Speaker 7: like further to the right of Trump on like most
Speaker 7: things in this kind of social vein and like where
Speaker 7: you're viewing like you said, like a like culture war
Speaker 7: is class war in terms of like this culture war
Speaker 7: is like beating down like the poor white working class.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, these small.
Speaker 7: Town farms aren't the real economy. They simply aren't. The
Speaker 7: real economy is cal of Ornia and Texas.
Speaker 2: These beliefs, there's an element to which they sound compelling
Speaker 2: because parts of this are the stuff that everyone on
Speaker 2: the left has complained about neoliberalism, but like his solutions
Speaker 2: are fantasies. Like, for one thing, the people who are
Speaker 2: backing him are the same kinds of people and often
Speaker 2: the same people who were very much gung ho behind
Speaker 2: getting rid of American factory jobs in order to maximize
Speaker 2: their profits and the consolidation of farmland into these giant
Speaker 2: agricultural conglomerates, right, Like.
Speaker 7: He abandoned this part of the country because yes, because
Speaker 7: he knows it sucks. Like, yes, it's not like a
Speaker 7: pleasant place to live, like a decent life. It's very hard,
Speaker 7: it's very difficult.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's in part because these kind of people
Speaker 2: who came out of the Reagan era, like have no
Speaker 2: use for factory workers or farmers in the United States.
Speaker 2: All of that can be consolidated into these vast enterprises
Speaker 2: that when there are human workers necessary, we can just
Speaker 2: grab undocumented people from across the border. Right anyway, speaking
Speaker 2: of grabbing people, these ads will grab you. Dah, We're back.
Speaker 2: So by late twenty twenty one, Curtis Jarvin is still
Speaker 2: a major figure in the neo reactionary movement. Vance has
Speaker 2: started quoting him kind of obliquely, and in fact, during
Speaker 2: this twenty twenty one National Conservative Conference that Pogue pivots on,
Speaker 2: Vance makes direct reference to something that Yarvin has written
Speaker 2: his ideas about, like we need this red Caesar when
Speaker 2: he says during an interview, we are in a late
Speaker 2: Republican period. If we're going to push back against it.
Speaker 2: We're going to have to get pretty wild and pretty
Speaker 2: far out there and go in directions that a lot
Speaker 2: of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with. And you know
Speaker 2: what that means is this late Republican he's talking about
Speaker 2: Republican Rome before Caesar, you know, makes his play for power.
Speaker 2: Like that's explicitly what he is comparing it to. And
Speaker 2: it's because Jarvin's big thing is, we don't I don't want
Speaker 2: a left or a right wing dictator. We want a
Speaker 2: king for the whole country right that's going to represent everybody,
Speaker 2: which is just not what kings do, It's not what
Speaker 2: dictators do.
Speaker 7: This is so clearly there's also just like a fascist
Speaker 7: line of argument, like an actual like actual like like
Speaker 7: ideologically fascist, and no people call like, you know, Reagan
Speaker 7: a fascist, but like he's not, He's a neoliberal. Neoliberals suck. Yes,
Speaker 7: these guys are going back like actual like fascist political theory.
Speaker 7: That's what Mullbug is reading, that's what he's writing about.
Speaker 2: And in twenty twenty one, Vance is saying this, I
Speaker 2: think Trump is going to run again in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: I think that what Trump should do if I was
Speaker 2: giving him one piece of advice, Fire every single mid
Speaker 2: level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace
Speaker 2: them with our people. And when the courts stop, you
Speaker 2: stand before the country and say the Chief Justice has
Speaker 2: made his ruling, now let him enforce it. Which he's
Speaker 2: quoting Andrew Jackson there, But he's describing like the end
Speaker 2: of democracy, a.
Speaker 7: Dictatorial takeover, right, and laying out with a plan that
Speaker 7: is very similar to a Project twenty twenty five y which
Speaker 7: I know Vance does have something small connections too, because
Speaker 7: a lot of his friends were involved in the planning
Speaker 7: of that.
Speaker 2: But you can see Project twenty twenty five and what
Speaker 2: Vans is saying here, These are all downstream of what
Speaker 2: Jarvin's saying in twenty twelve of this rage acronym, replace
Speaker 2: all government employees, right to retire all government employees. You know,
Speaker 2: by the way, you will be glad to know that
Speaker 2: by twenty twenty one, Yarvin has stopped openly using the
Speaker 2: term dictator. So that's good. He just he just calls
Speaker 2: it a monarchy a lot.
Speaker 7: Now, Oh, okay, that's good. Yeah, that's good.
Speaker 2: Now. JD's pivot, which he often credits with his conversion
Speaker 2: to Catholicism, although you can see he's been on this
Speaker 2: road for much longer than that. Was perfectly timed for
Speaker 2: his Senate run in twenty twenty two. Peter Teel was
Speaker 2: his biggest donor, providing fifteen million to the superpack that
Speaker 2: backed him, which at the time at least was the
Speaker 2: largest amount ever given to boost a Senate candidate.
Speaker 7: Yeah, is fifty million for a Senate run is crazy?
Speaker 2: It's nuts. JD had been a long shot candidate at
Speaker 2: first because he's very unlikable, but the Teal money allowed
Speaker 2: for a major ad blitz and the kind of media
Speaker 2: prep work that only a well funded pack can provide.
Speaker 2: His pack published the data on an open Medium page
Speaker 2: with a username at protect Ohio values forms, which allowed
Speaker 2: the pack to send info and advice to Vance without
Speaker 2: violating federal campaign finance loss. Vance had been hit early
Speaker 2: for comments made a few years back negative to Trump,
Speaker 2: but he clawed his way back into the MAGA good
Speaker 2: graces by appearing on Breitbart News, Tucker Carlson's Fox Show,
Speaker 2: Steve Bannon's war Room podcast, and most of all, by
Speaker 2: positioning to himself as a violent opponent of immigration from
Speaker 2: a write up in Politico. In February, Thompson, Who's the
Speaker 2: guy running the pack, posted a memo to the medium
Speaker 2: site arguing that Vance had an opening to zero win
Speaker 2: on immigration and border security, noting that he had a
Speaker 2: personal connection to the issue given his mother's struggles with
Speaker 2: drug addiction. The issue was near and dear to the
Speaker 2: primary voters, the memo argued, and crucially could help in
Speaker 2: nabbing Trump's support. To win a Trump endorsement, a candidate
Speaker 2: has to show a growing ballot share. To get that,
Speaker 2: a candidate has to own a critical issue, the memo read,
Speaker 2: JD can do that, and that's exactly what JD does.
Speaker 2: When he takes the stage at the Conservative Political Action
Speaker 2: Conference in Florida later that month, he focuses his speech
Speaker 2: entirely on immigration, and when his campaign goes up with
Speaker 2: its first TV ad, it shows a direct to camera
Speaker 2: Vance telling viewers that he nearly lost his mother to
Speaker 2: poison coming across our border. Now by mid April, Trump
Speaker 2: has become convinced that Vance's past mean remarks were water
Speaker 2: under the bridge, and he calls an associate of Peter
Speaker 2: Teal to say, Hey, I'm moving closer to endorsing Vance.
Speaker 2: Teal by this point has also introduced Vance to David Sachs,
Speaker 2: who adds another million dollars to his super PACs war chest.
Speaker 2: On April fifteenth, Convinced by Vance's rising poll numbers and
Speaker 2: impressive fundraising, Trump makes an official endorsement. This helps pull
Speaker 2: Vance over the top, and he ekes out a narrow
Speaker 2: win in the election that followed. The next year, Vance
Speaker 2: repaid the favor, writing a January Wall Street Journal op
Speaker 2: at where he endorses Trump as a candidate. In twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four. This was back in. This is the start
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty three. The Republican primary is just gearing up,
Speaker 2: and the end of it is in enough doubt. You
Speaker 2: can remember back then. It sounds silly now, but people
Speaker 2: really thought DeSantis had a shot, right, And so he
Speaker 2: is Vance. This is kind of in before any of
Speaker 2: the other major Republican figures and backing Trump for his
Speaker 2: reducts round right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, he's like one of the first to fall in
Speaker 7: line here.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And there's a few people like Sarah Huckabee Sanders
Speaker 2: had been seen as a potential Trump VP pick, but
Speaker 2: she waits months to actually endorse Trump. Officially, so Vance
Speaker 2: gets in on the ground floor, and this impresses Trump
Speaker 2: that he is someone who he can count on to
Speaker 2: be loyal. Vance wins more praise the next month, when
Speaker 2: a train carrying hazardous materials to rails in East Palestine.
Speaker 2: In Ohio, Trump makes a visit to the town as
Speaker 2: one of the first stops on his campaign, and Vance
Speaker 2: organizes the visit and he does apparently a good job
Speaker 2: of this. Trump says to his entourage, this guy is
Speaker 2: turning out to be fucking incredible.
Speaker 10: Now.
Speaker 2: By this point, Vance has befriended Trump's oldest son, Donald
Speaker 2: Trump Junior, and set himself to the task of well
Speaker 2: and truly kissing ass to get on that twenty twenty
Speaker 2: four ticket. By late January of this year, Vance and
Speaker 2: his team had received enough friendly feedback from Trump World
Speaker 2: that they decided to invest in a full court press.
Speaker 2: Vance began showing up on TV networks that I'm considered enemies,
Speaker 2: doing a reverse Buddhaj edge and throwing himself into the
Speaker 2: enemy camp to take shots on behalf of the boss.
Speaker 2: He also devoted himself to raising money for Trump from
Speaker 2: the Silicon Valley VC set. Most of these guys were
Speaker 2: Teals friends dudes like David Sachs. What finally put him
Speaker 2: over the top, though, was an article Donald Trump Junior
Speaker 2: gave his dad from bright Bart News about the man
Speaker 2: then seen as Trump's most likely VP pick, Doug Bergham,
Speaker 2: governor of North Dakota. The article's title was, Carl Rove
Speaker 2: endorses Doug Burgham for Vice President and I do love that.
Speaker 2: Carl Rove's endorsement is the fucking kiss of death right
Speaker 2: now for a fucking VP candidate. Very funny place for
Speaker 2: his story to have wound up. Not a bad call
Speaker 2: by Trump, though, I gotta say, actually it is a
Speaker 2: bad call for Trump. But also I get it. I
Speaker 2: read one Politico article that argues this was the final
Speaker 2: straw for Trump. It was this Carl Rove article. I
Speaker 2: can't actually speak to that. It is worth noting that
Speaker 2: in the months leading up to the RNC, Trump is
Speaker 2: also being subjected to a charm campaign by all of
Speaker 2: Peter Teal's friends. This huge pile of wealthy Silicon Valley
Speaker 2: investors from the Washington Post quote. In the weeks before
Speaker 2: former President Donald Trump announced his vice presidential pick, some
Speaker 2: of tech's biggest names launched a quiet campaign to push
Speaker 2: for one of their own. Ohio Senator JD. Vance, the
Speaker 2: former president, fielded repeated calls from tech entrepreneur David Sachs,
Speaker 2: pallanteer advisor Jacob Helberg, and billionaire venture capitalist Peter Teal,
Speaker 2: Vance's former employer and mentor employing him to add the
Speaker 2: one time Silicon Valley investor to the ticket. According to
Speaker 2: three people familiar with the entreaties, all caps, we have
Speaker 2: a former tech VC in the White House. Greatest country
Speaker 2: on Earth. Baby. Delian Ashparov, of a partner at Teal's
Speaker 2: founder's fund, wrote on X after the announcement of Vance's nomination.
Speaker 2: Delian Sparova s Parov something like that, Jesus Christ, I
Speaker 2: know it's fucking exhausting, but that is, you know, the JD.
Speaker 2: Vance story, more or less, that's where he comes from.
Speaker 2: That's who wants him to be the VP. It's all
Speaker 2: of these fucking ghouls who want to own the world
Speaker 2: and become It's these people who have achieved the highest
Speaker 2: level of financial success you can achieve in any society
Speaker 2: on the earth right now, and they found that it's
Speaker 2: kind of empty. And it's kind of empty in part
Speaker 2: because people can still be mean to you, and they
Speaker 2: don't have to care what you believe just because you
Speaker 2: have a lot of money.
Speaker 7: They don't like neoliberal capitalism because it fundamentally still has
Speaker 7: a shred of like a democratic value. Yeah, and that
Speaker 7: makes them too mad. Yeah. So instead they are going
Speaker 7: back to like a much a much more like archaic
Speaker 7: system where they can still maintain their personal wealth while
Speaker 7: being like very influential through like a dictatorial means. They're
Speaker 7: still like fundamentally capitalists, but almost in like a more
Speaker 7: like fascistic feudal sense, like they.
Speaker 2: Want to be lords. Well, that's exactly it, that's what
Speaker 2: they really want. They are terrified of death. And what
Speaker 2: they're terrified of more than anything. What scares the mostly
Speaker 2: about death is the idea that like all the success
Speaker 2: they've scene goes away.
Speaker 7: It's meaningless, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: Fundamentally, all of this passes. No one is on top forever,
Speaker 2: nobody is like matters.
Speaker 7: No one's in a care about PayPal in twenty years.
Speaker 2: That's the price of time, right, and they want to
Speaker 2: stop the clock. That's fundamentally what near reactionaries are. There
Speaker 2: are people who think I am special, I am super special.
Speaker 2: The world should be oriented around recognizing how special I
Speaker 2: am forever, and anything I can do to turn back
Speaker 2: the clock is necessary justified like that. That's what these
Speaker 2: people are. That's what they believe fundamentally.
Speaker 7: Like imagine being so mad that no one will remember
Speaker 7: PayPal in two hundred years, that you try to install
Speaker 7: a fascist takeover yes, Yes, of the United States of
Speaker 7: America so.
Speaker 2: That PayPal always matters. It's these fucking guys anyway, Garrison.
Speaker 2: That's the James Donald Vance story. Not his name.
Speaker 7: Is that his name?
Speaker 2: No, of course not. Maybe I forget. I forget. I
Speaker 2: always forget what JD stands for, who can? Who gives
Speaker 2: a shit? Hopefully he's not going to matter much longer.
Speaker 7: This is this is this is this is My biggest
Speaker 7: thing going going into November, is that you know, if
Speaker 7: the Democrats win on on on, like on their ticket,
Speaker 7: that still means plenty of bad things around the world. Yeah,
Speaker 7: but I also really don't want these freaks in there,
Speaker 7: Like I really don't want them. They're they're like they're
Speaker 7: like spooky. They're trying to do like this like like
Speaker 7: esoteric larp in like the White House, like come on,
Speaker 7: and most.
Speaker 2: Of the things that need to happen for the world
Speaker 2: to get better can't happen while these people are in
Speaker 2: power right like or close to power like they there
Speaker 2: needs to be damage done to them, and I'm I'm
Speaker 2: hopeful about that if nothing else in this election.
Speaker 7: And like electoral damages is only like one type. They
Speaker 7: have to be like culturally humiliated, like they have to
Speaker 7: be like culturally like rejected, being like no, like you
Speaker 7: you are not actually the wizards of culture that you
Speaker 7: kind of want to be, like no one likes what
Speaker 7: you do, no one likes what you believe like that
Speaker 7: that it has to be like this this larger this
Speaker 7: larger like col battle. That's why they have like the
Speaker 7: culture wars. This is like super important thing. That's why
Speaker 7: they're so scared of like queer and trans people, especially
Speaker 7: queer and trans people like that are like influential, whether
Speaker 7: they be like you know, like teachers, whether they be
Speaker 7: working like in media, making movies, television, writing books. That's
Speaker 7: where they're so freaked out with that kind of stuff.
Speaker 7: That's what they're trying to get out of schools. That's
Speaker 7: why they're trying to stop Woke Disney. It's because they
Speaker 7: know that no one's gonna want to listen to these
Speaker 7: freaks when like gay people can make a good art
Speaker 7: or like give a good history lesson. Yeah, that's like
Speaker 7: there's that's like the strongest like anecdote to these like
Speaker 7: just really really bizarre like esoteric ramblings about wanting to
Speaker 7: go back to like nineteen ten like racist science, just weird,
Speaker 7: weird shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know. I think that these guys delved too
Speaker 2: deep and too greedily if we're going to continue the
Speaker 2: Lord of the Rings references, which by God, they're not
Speaker 2: going to let us stop doing so. And I think
Speaker 2: that there was this thing we used to I used
Speaker 2: to talk about a lot when I tried to explain
Speaker 2: like far right terminology to people back twenty nineteen, twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: five decades ago, a thousand years ago. That's my l
Speaker 2: ron moment. I was there Garrison a thousand years ago.
Speaker 2: We talked about like the term hide your power level, right,
Speaker 2: which these Nazis used to use, and they've just completely
Speaker 2: given up on that. No, and the thing that they
Speaker 2: are seeing there was like all this. I was reading
Speaker 2: that twenty twenty two article by Poe, which I think
Speaker 2: is a really important snapshot because it's these people about
Speaker 2: to head into twenty twenty four and they they know
Speaker 2: before the dims do how badly down Biden is. Right,
Speaker 2: the Democrats have not really taking seriously what a dangerous
Speaker 2: position Joe Biden was going to be in for reelection yet.
Speaker 2: But they also think that like, wow, all these young
Speaker 2: people are showing up at our lame parties. That means
Speaker 2: there's a broader sweep. All young people are becoming like
Speaker 2: closer to reactionarys.
Speaker 7: Becoming like all weird treadcats.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're capturing the culture. And that's just absolutely not
Speaker 2: what was happening. And it would have been obvious if
Speaker 2: like they had been capable of actually like listening to people.
Speaker 2: But what we're seeing now is they did the most
Speaker 2: dangerous thing you could do. Is they predicted and understood
Speaker 2: one thing about the future, but nothing else right, And
Speaker 2: so they understood the weakness that Joe Biden represented and
Speaker 2: kind of the weakness of his control over the Democratic Party,
Speaker 2: but they did not understand that, like other things are possible, right,
Speaker 2: and including the fact that like Joe Biden and largely
Speaker 2: the other people who were running the Democratic Party might
Speaker 2: come to understand that weakness too, And after a disastrous
Speaker 2: debate and a shooting, go, you know what, let's change course.
Speaker 2: And I really think that that, above all else might
Speaker 2: be what fucks them is they completely came out of
Speaker 2: the woodwork. They were tired of having to pretend they
Speaker 2: didn't want a king. They thought their time had come,
Speaker 2: and perhaps it has not. Well still, we'll all see,
Speaker 2: we'll all see.
Speaker 7: Well, I'm super excited to hear what kind of just
Speaker 7: unhinged and bizarre things Tim Walls has done. Yeah, in
Speaker 7: the next tale.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm just going to accuse him of having been
Speaker 2: the Zodiac killer. You know that that's worked on a
Speaker 2: couple of guys.
Speaker 7: Seems to work.
Speaker 2: Actually, yeah, So we're just going to do that. Call
Speaker 2: it a night. Anyway, this has been JD vance. We've
Speaker 2: been it could happen here, Go to Hell, I love you,
Speaker 2: Clean your couch, Clean your couch. Shit, I need to
Speaker 2: do that. Welcome back to It could happen here a
Speaker 2: podcast about Tim Walls. And in this episode, Garrison and
Speaker 2: I are going balls to the walls. Are you happy
Speaker 2: with that? Garrison?
Speaker 7: What's skivitying your Biden?
Speaker 2: What does that even mean?
Speaker 7: All right, let's get going some fucking.
Speaker 2: Ging z bullshit Garrison because I won't take part in it.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm excited to hear about how Walls is either
Speaker 7: great or terrible or probably a mix of both.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, he's a politician and a pretty successful one,
Speaker 2: so it's definitely going to be a mix of both.
Speaker 2: For jd Vance, I figured the most relevant thing to
Speaker 2: do is to talk about, like what does he actually
Speaker 2: believe and where does he come from in the right,
Speaker 2: because people had gotten pieces of that, but I feel
Speaker 2: like unless you put it all together, it's not as useful.
Speaker 2: So I hope we did that with Walls. He's not
Speaker 2: a guy where there's anything sinister for you to know,
Speaker 2: So I think the useful thing is kind of going
Speaker 2: through his whole political biography and just kind of talk about,
Speaker 2: like what is this guy done in his public life? Right,
Speaker 2: That's kind of what I wanted to do here, so
Speaker 2: that people actually know, you know, whether or not you
Speaker 2: are making your mind up about whether or not to vote,
Speaker 2: you're voting for harm reduction, you're anti electoral Here's this
Speaker 2: guy who may or may not wind up being the
Speaker 2: vice president, and here's what he's actually done in the
Speaker 2: past when he's had any kind of power. It's worth
Speaker 2: noting that kind of at this point here, Walls is
Speaker 2: maybe the most popular politician at his level in the country.
Speaker 2: This has happened very suddenly, but he's got something like
Speaker 2: a plus sixteen net favorability among moderates, which is insane.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's a lot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's wild.
Speaker 7: As someone who's looked at a lot of the favorability
Speaker 7: ratings the past six months. Yeah, that is astonishingly high,
Speaker 7: especially gotpared to where we were like two months ago
Speaker 7: with Skibbity Biden, which was yeah, very low, quite dire.
Speaker 2: He's incredibly popular with the normies because basically everyone in
Speaker 2: the country has positive memories of a guy like Tim Walls,
Speaker 2: like whether it was like your favorite social studies teacher
Speaker 2: or your dad. There is like a kind of rotund, balding,
Speaker 2: very mechanically capable man probably somewhere in your life that
Speaker 2: you have fond memories of, and Walls dredges those up.
Speaker 7: We are of a very Freudian country.
Speaker 2: Yes, for an idea of how like rapidly people have
Speaker 2: gone from not really knowing who this guy is to
Speaker 2: loving him. On August eighth, a UGU of Survey should
Speaker 2: him with a net favorability rating of plus eleven, which
Speaker 2: was up from plus one, and a survey conducted in
Speaker 2: late July. In the same time frame, Jade Vance has
Speaker 2: seen his approval ratings steadily drop.
Speaker 7: Yeah, isn't he like at like negative points?
Speaker 12: Oh?
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes, by any stretch of the imagination, at
Speaker 2: negative points. And if you're just kind of looking at
Speaker 2: Tim's life, which we're not really getting into because we
Speaker 2: have limited time here and it's not the most important
Speaker 2: thing I thought we could be talking about. But he
Speaker 2: has a long history of doing decent things in his
Speaker 2: personal life kind of most notably in the early nineties,
Speaker 2: like ninety three ninety four, he sponsored the Gay and
Speaker 2: Lesbian Alliance at his high school. And his reasoning was that,
Speaker 2: you know, he was a soldier in the National Guard
Speaker 2: and the football coach at that point, and he decided,
Speaker 2: you know, him sponsoring the club in particular would have
Speaker 2: the biggest impact. And I honestly, I think that's the
Speaker 2: kind of thing that might have saved lives.
Speaker 10: Yep.
Speaker 2: Good thing to have done. Anyway, this isn't an episode
Speaker 2: about his life and background. We're not going to litigate,
Speaker 2: which we're not going to always any time litigating the
Speaker 2: attacks on his military career, which seemed to confusingly say
Speaker 2: that after extending his time in the Guard by four
Speaker 2: years to participate in Operation during Freedom, he owed his
Speaker 2: soldiers staying on even longer to fight in Iraq. I
Speaker 2: could make the point that no grunt in any US
Speaker 2: war ever found themselves in the shit and said, boy,
Speaker 2: I wish the commands Sergeant major was here. But given
Speaker 2: that JD Vance was played onto stage at the RNC
Speaker 2: to a song with the refrain we got to get
Speaker 2: out of Iraq and take our country back, I just
Speaker 2: don't think these attacks are worth acknowledging it. All right,
Speaker 2: the right has already acknowledged that was a stupid war
Speaker 2: to fight in. Walls decided not to fight in it.
Speaker 2: Good for him now when it comes to the current
Speaker 2: war that is on everyone's minds, or one of the
Speaker 2: wars that's on everyone's minds. Walls is fine on Ukraine,
Speaker 2: but when it comes to the war that he's not
Speaker 2: fine on the genocide in Gaza. Walls is in no
Speaker 2: way that I can find really better than Kamala Harris.
Speaker 2: But he did take a stand against the Iraq war
Speaker 2: back when that mattered, which is I guess a little
Speaker 2: bit of a point, but again doesn't really matter today,
Speaker 2: And in any case, we're far afield from the subject,
Speaker 2: which is what has Tim done in politics. So Tim's
Speaker 2: political career he came late in life to that. He
Speaker 2: was a social studies teacher. For a couple of decades,
Speaker 2: he was a coach. He lived in Nebraska, then moved
Speaker 2: to Minnesota, and in two thousand and six, after retiring
Speaker 2: from the guard he was elected to Minnesota's first congressional district.
Speaker 2: Now this was a tough campaign. His opponent in this
Speaker 2: race was a sixth term Republican incumbent, Gil Gutneckt.
Speaker 7: Wait wait, wait, wait, good necked good Neckt.
Speaker 2: I'm guessing his family were knights, and it was used
Speaker 2: to be like good night or something like that, like
Speaker 2: gut k n Echt. But I don't know enough about
Speaker 2: ancient German to tell you if that's really where his
Speaker 2: last name came from. Yeah, yeah, But Walls came in
Speaker 2: that he kind of goes against this guy who had
Speaker 2: promised not to run for another term and then decided, actually,
Speaker 2: I don't want to give up power. Not a thing
Speaker 2: that's ever happened again, and Walls kind of came in
Speaker 2: both when this guy had violated his promise to not
Speaker 2: run again and near the peak of disillusionment and exhaustion
Speaker 2: with neo cons Right, this is kind of the twilight
Speaker 2: of the Bush years. Even conservative Americans are pretty fucking
Speaker 2: tired of the Republican Party right this second, and Walls
Speaker 2: exhibited a notable ability to connect with rural Americans who
Speaker 2: mostly voted read. He did so with basically no funding
Speaker 2: or larger national operation behind him. From a write up
Speaker 2: in The New York Times, he had no money, no nothing,
Speaker 2: said Representative Betty McCollum of Minnesota, who that cycle worked
Speaker 2: on House Democrats recruitment team under their campaign chief Rama Manuel.
Speaker 2: He had a grassroots campaign that he had put together
Speaker 2: that I just knew was going to be dynamite. So
Speaker 2: I went back and I told Rama Manuel, this guy's
Speaker 2: going to win. He's great, and rom looked at me
Speaker 2: like I was crazy. Walls was a dark horse candidate
Speaker 2: and would claim around that time that his whole inspiration
Speaker 2: for getting into politics was when he tried to take
Speaker 2: two students to a rally for President George Bush and
Speaker 2: they were kicked out because one student had a John
Speaker 2: Kerry button. Now I found a blog by the Republican
Speaker 2: staffer who kicked them out where he admits he made
Speaker 2: a dumb call. He was kind of trying to be
Speaker 2: a dick. He had seen Walls out protesting against Bush
Speaker 2: like the day before, and he knew he was going
Speaker 2: to kick them out of the rally, but he made
Speaker 2: them stand in line for a long time before he
Speaker 2: kicked them out, and he was like, I shouldn't have
Speaker 2: done that. But his angle was that Walls wanted to
Speaker 2: get denied and kicked out so that he could make
Speaker 2: a big deal about it and use it as a
Speaker 2: line on the campaign trail. That's probably what happened.
Speaker 7: Regardless, this is a very funny little domino leading to
Speaker 7: big domino.
Speaker 2: Everyone likes Walls, who tends to meet him. Joe Biden
Speaker 2: for the last year or two has seems been trying
Speaker 2: to get him to do more events with Walls, just
Speaker 2: because he put Biden in a good mood. I think
Speaker 2: that's a big reason why Kamala picked him. He just
Speaker 2: seems to be a very likable guy. But he's very
Speaker 2: okay with lying to get what he needs. I mean,
Speaker 2: he's a politician.
Speaker 7: He's a politician.
Speaker 2: Another good example of this would be his duy. Right
Speaker 2: when he was thirty one, he got a duy, and
Speaker 2: he is at times claimed basically that's why I decided
Speaker 2: to like, I stopped drinking. I changed my life, I moved,
Speaker 2: you know, I got my shit together. But his campaign
Speaker 2: manager made a statement recently, Oh, he wasn't drunk. He
Speaker 2: just couldn't hear the cop. I don't know who to trust,
Speaker 2: politician or cop in this case, but the CoP's attitude
Speaker 2: is like, well, I would be fine if he had
Speaker 2: just like fixed his shit up, but he definitely was drunk.
Speaker 2: And I don't have any trouble believing that a man
Speaker 2: in rural Nebraska, a football coach in rural Nebraska, drove
Speaker 2: drunk once.
Speaker 7: Right, No, that is not the most surprising thing in
Speaker 7: the world.
Speaker 2: So I think he's a guy who's certainly he's not
Speaker 2: naive political actor, right, He's not one of these guys
Speaker 2: who's so so good and pure that he's not willing
Speaker 2: to like fudge in order to make shit work for him.
Speaker 2: And that's probably what he did at this Bush event
Speaker 2: right now. That said, it would be hard to overstate
Speaker 2: what a difficult task he picked for himself and trying
Speaker 2: to unseat Gutneck. At the time that Walls ran, Minnesota's
Speaker 2: first district had been held by one other Democrat in
Speaker 2: the last hundred years, so he was the second Democrat
Speaker 2: in a century to win in that district, and as
Speaker 2: soon as he left, by the way, a Republican took back.
Speaker 2: Over his six terms in Congress, he was one of
Speaker 2: the more interesting legislators in the country. Walls was a
Speaker 2: risk taker, supporting liberal votes on major issues even when
Speaker 2: he was politically vulnerable. He opposed Republican legislation to make
Speaker 2: doctors vulnerable to criminal penalties for performing abortions. He supported
Speaker 2: a climate cap and trade bill on greenhouse gas emissions
Speaker 2: that failed, and this really pissed some folks off. He
Speaker 2: supported the Affordable Care Act, and kind of one of
Speaker 2: the more notable things about him is there's stories of
Speaker 2: when he was running for reelection, he would do town
Speaker 2: halls in southern Minnesota and he would get attacked by
Speaker 2: these red voters who had supported him early on for
Speaker 2: backing the Affordable Care Act, and rather than like backing off,
Speaker 2: he would lean into it and argue with them and
Speaker 2: try to convince them. And you know, his numbers with
Speaker 2: conservative rural Republicans got worse and worse every cycle basically,
Speaker 2: so you could argue how good he was, but it
Speaker 2: is worth something to me that he didn't back off.
Speaker 2: He didn't do the well this might, you know, fuck
Speaker 2: up my chances of reelection. Like he's never really been
Speaker 2: that kind of guy. There's things that he believes and
Speaker 2: he will just kind of like jam his flag into
Speaker 2: the mud over them. That said, Tim was a pragmatist.
Speaker 2: He voted for a resolution calling for the withdrawal of
Speaker 2: US forces from Iraq within ninety days, but when that failed,
Speaker 2: he voted in favor of continuing funding for the wars
Speaker 2: in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tim also received an a from
Speaker 2: the NRA during much of his time in office, voting
Speaker 2: against gun control based on what seemed to be a
Speaker 2: natural inclination to firearms and hunting. Walls may have been
Speaker 2: the best shot in the Minnesota National Guard during the
Speaker 2: time when he was there. He's apparently a very good shot.
Speaker 2: He is an avid and skilled turkey hunter, and if
Speaker 2: you talk to people who want game in the US,
Speaker 2: Turkey is one of the more difficult game to hunt.
Speaker 2: He developed a reputation as a guy who wouldn't apologize
Speaker 2: for voting with liberals, but who would go across the
Speaker 2: aisle when it mattered. During his time on the Veterans
Speaker 2: Affairs Committee, which he ultimately chaired, he voted with Republicans
Speaker 2: to make it easier for the VIA to fire employees,
Speaker 2: even with union opposition, and he also pushed through change
Speaker 2: just to improve GI Bill college access for veterans post
Speaker 2: nine to eleven. One of the things I find interesting
Speaker 2: about his record is that in twenty eighteen, he voted
Speaker 2: against most of his party opposing an overhaul of the
Speaker 2: VA healthcare system. He agreed everyone agrees that the system
Speaker 2: needed to be overhauled, but he argued the proposal in
Speaker 2: place would force the VIA to cannibalize itself, basically starving
Speaker 2: the organization to try and fix it. And his attitude was, well,
Speaker 2: it needs to get fixed. I'm not going to vote
Speaker 2: for a change that might be worse than what we
Speaker 2: currently have. While chairing this committee, Walls made strong connections
Speaker 2: to Nancy Pelosi, who like basically everyone really came to
Speaker 2: like Walls, and she's going to be one of the
Speaker 2: people who's one of the strongest voices for picking him
Speaker 2: as VP, and we will be back to talk about
Speaker 2: more of that. But first, Garrison, you know who else
Speaker 2: loves Nancy Pelosi?
Speaker 7: Probably these products and services. If they come from San Francisco.
Speaker 2: They're based in the Bay Area. She will break their
Speaker 2: kneecaps if they don't like her enough. Ah, and we're back.
Speaker 2: So one of the big shifts for Tim during his
Speaker 2: time in Congress was away from the NRA. This started
Speaker 2: after in twenty seventeen, after the Las Vegas mass shooting,
Speaker 2: and then after the Parkland mass shooting, and then in
Speaker 2: February of twenty eighteen, he writes an op ed supporting
Speaker 2: what he calls common sense gun reform and donates the
Speaker 2: NRA contributions to his campaign That cycle to some sort
Speaker 2: of I think gun control cause. Walls's common sense gun
Speaker 2: regulations include an assault weapons ban, and he is currently
Speaker 2: in line with the Democratic Party on that if you
Speaker 2: were curious. That same year, twenty eighteen, he launched his
Speaker 2: campaign for governor of Minnesota. By this point, Walls had
Speaker 2: bled much of his ability to win rural red votes.
Speaker 2: It is accurate to say he was only really good
Speaker 2: at this during his early years in Congress, his margins
Speaker 2: grew a lot narrower over time, and once he hit
Speaker 2: the governor's office, his support was largely in the cities.
Speaker 2: Now it's one of those things where I think there's
Speaker 2: been debate, Like some people have arguable he's not maybe
Speaker 2: not the best VP pick because he actually isn't all
Speaker 2: that good at getting these red rural votes. But I
Speaker 2: just don't see that as where the elections coming down to.
Speaker 2: Walls has great favorables with like suburban white people and
Speaker 2: a particularly suburban like moderates, and that is like one
Speaker 2: of the most important demographics to win. So I don't
Speaker 2: believe the fact that he's he's kind of bled his
Speaker 2: support with rural conservatives is really necessarily a mark against
Speaker 2: him in an electoral sense. One thing I do appreciate
Speaker 2: about Walls is how direct he is to people I dislike.
Speaker 2: He decides in twenty eighteen to run for governor, and
Speaker 2: during that run he has a meeting with a bunch
Speaker 2: of business leaders at a luxury hotel. The president of
Speaker 2: a machining company asks if Walls felt corporate taxes hurt workers,
Speaker 2: and Walls replied, we're not taxing people, We're taxing corporations,
Speaker 2: and I want to quote from a CNBC write up
Speaker 2: for Jeff Baker, it was a bit of an O
Speaker 2: shit moment. That's not what I wanted to hear, said Baker,
Speaker 2: president of McFarlane truck Lines. There's a lot of stories
Speaker 2: like that. He's been very willing to tax the wealthy
Speaker 2: and to tax corporations to pay for things like children's lunches.
Speaker 2: This is a consistent Walls move and it's something that
Speaker 2: he absolutely is unapologetic about, and I think that's fine.
Speaker 2: Minnesota currently taxes corporate income at nine point eight percent,
Speaker 2: the highest rate in the nation. Walls did not back
Speaker 2: down on this during his time in office. In fact,
Speaker 2: that CNBC report found that quote Walls's policy battles have
Speaker 2: a common theme. Walls supported either higher taxes on the
Speaker 2: rich or businesses, and corporate leaders fought back. One of
Speaker 2: their fights was over a one percent ser tax on
Speaker 2: passive investment income over a million dollars. Another was a
Speaker 2: tax on the wealthy. Walls signed into law that limits
Speaker 2: standard and itemized deductions for households with gross incomes over
Speaker 2: two hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Due to Republican control
Speaker 2: of the legislature. Walls's first term was not hugely eventful
Speaker 2: up until the COVID nineteen pandemic. This is because Republicans
Speaker 2: retained control of the state legislature and were able to
Speaker 2: stop much of his plan perform. We did get to
Speaker 2: see more of the politician Tim Walls during COVID when
Speaker 2: he stood up against Republican resistance more common sense pandemic
Speaker 2: safety regulations. He earned a lot of hate from the
Speaker 2: right for some of the more extreme COVID restrictions in
Speaker 2: the country, which were put in place in Minnesota. In particular,
Speaker 2: Walls threatened citizens with up to ninety days in jail
Speaker 2: during the shelter in place period and threatened twenty five
Speaker 2: thousand dollars fines for meeting in public. Minnesota instituted a
Speaker 2: COVID hotline where people could inform on their neighbors if
Speaker 2: they saw rules being broken. And I get why the
Speaker 2: right is uncomfortable with this. I'm not fully comfortable with
Speaker 2: this kind of stuff either, But given what was going
Speaker 2: on at the time, I'm not going to slam the
Speaker 2: man for trying to save lives in a very uncertain
Speaker 2: and desperate situation. You know it beats the nothing that
Speaker 2: a lot of state governors did, so I guess that's
Speaker 2: kind of where I stand on that shit. Not long
Speaker 2: after the pandemic lockdown started, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis.
Speaker 2: Walls mobilized the National Guard after three days of riots,
Speaker 2: earning praise from President Trump on June first, who said
Speaker 2: what they did in Minneapolis was incredible. They went in
Speaker 2: and dominated, and it happened quickly. And this is you know,
Speaker 2: the National Guard do a lot of very violent shit
Speaker 2: coming into crackdown on these protests. I know a lot
Speaker 2: of people who were the ones cracked down upon. It's
Speaker 2: one of those things where, yeah, he's a governor, you know,
Speaker 2: I think pretty much any governor in this situation would
Speaker 2: have sent in the National Guard in that sort of.
Speaker 7: Situation, especially after the burning of the Third Precinct.
Speaker 2: Especially after the Priconct got burnt. Which doesn't excuse it.
Speaker 2: It's just like, well, yeah, he's not an anarchist, right like,
Speaker 2: he's not your communist like revolutionary hero. He is the
Speaker 2: governor of Minnesota. I'm just really not surprised that this happened.
Speaker 2: It's you know, a pretty normal thing for a guy
Speaker 2: in his position to have done yeah now, like every
Speaker 2: other dim in creation. During the height of the uprising,
Speaker 2: Walls voice support for a wide host of police accountability reforms.
Speaker 2: He even voiced some degree of support for Indian qualified immunity,
Speaker 2: but this did not last long, and as the backlash
Speaker 2: against police reforms swelled up after the election, Walls joined
Speaker 2: many iems and pulling back and even quashing moves for
Speaker 2: greater police accountability. When he ran for reelection, he did
Speaker 2: so as a tough on crime, law enforcement friendly democrat.
Speaker 2: Right many such cases. Now, he did push through some
Speaker 2: accountability measures. He used fifteen million in COVID funds to
Speaker 2: pay for grants for community violence prevention. He pushed through
Speaker 2: some requirements to increase data sharing from the police Licensing Board.
Speaker 2: He pushed through a demand for state law enforcement to
Speaker 2: share footage of police killings with the family of the
Speaker 2: victim within five days. These are, I think we can
Speaker 2: all say, minor accountability moves, very very very minor, he said.
Speaker 2: Of these moves. They build trust in police, they build
Speaker 2: trust in the systems, They build trust among communities, and
Speaker 2: they provide the community with some basic closure and understanding
Speaker 2: for families. Nothing builds trust, like a video of your
Speaker 2: cousin getting shot in the back.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I have the biggest accountability thing that you get.
Speaker 7: First look at the murder video.
Speaker 2: I don't know, Okay, I like, yes, I do think
Speaker 2: you probably have to legislate that because otherwise police just
Speaker 2: won't give it up at all. But like, yeah, I
Speaker 2: wouldn't hang my hat on that.
Speaker 7: It is ignoring the main issue at play, Yeah, which
Speaker 7: is the fact that we have murder right videos.
Speaker 2: It's like, come on now. There were some bigger reforms,
Speaker 2: including limitations on no knock warrants, although again not like
Speaker 2: a ban or anything, but it lacked a lot of
Speaker 2: the stuff that activists in the state had pushed for,
Speaker 2: including limits on police stops of motorists, and Walls had
Speaker 2: agreed that there needs to be more movement in this direction,
Speaker 2: particularly after the murder of Philando Casteele. It also left
Speaker 2: out and asked for end to the statute of limitations
Speaker 2: for wrongful death cases against officers. Walls had personally voiced
Speaker 2: support for a ban on officers with white supremacist gang affiliations,
Speaker 2: but this was also left out. Ultimately, State Rep. John
Speaker 2: Thompson said to Walls at the time, you have the
Speaker 2: power to do so, and all I've been getting from
Speaker 2: your office is lip service. And I mean that we
Speaker 2: don't need a news conference from you, governor. We need
Speaker 2: a leader. So you're not gonna get a lot of
Speaker 2: police reform under Tim Walls. That's just a pretty consistent
Speaker 2: reality of the guy that said he can be forced
Speaker 2: to do some things if you scare him enough. So
Speaker 2: you know, keep that in mind. I guess first, keep
Speaker 2: in mind these ads, and then we'll talk about the
Speaker 2: environment and stuff, which is a happier story for Walls.
Speaker 2: We're back. So Walls ran for reelection under the slogan
Speaker 2: one Minnesota, and he managed another solid victory. Up to
Speaker 2: this point, you would say he'd been a pretty standard
Speaker 2: dim governor in a swing state. But something happened in
Speaker 2: the twenty twenty two midterms that changed the course of
Speaker 2: Walls's career in maybe the nation. The Democrats won a
Speaker 2: slim majority in the state legislature. As David Schultz, a
Speaker 2: political science perform or at Hamlin University, told CNN, Walls's
Speaker 2: message immediately jerked away from one Minnesota to damn the
Speaker 2: torpedoes and fuck the Republicans. Quote that agenda included codified
Speaker 2: protections for abortion access, restored voting rights for felons who've
Speaker 2: completed their sentences, driver's licenses for people regardless of their
Speaker 2: legal status, a state child tax credit, free public college
Speaker 2: for families making less than eighty thousand annually, protections for
Speaker 2: gender affirming care, a paid family and medical leave program.
Speaker 2: Walls signed legislation to move the state towards achieving one
Speaker 2: hundred percent clean energy by twenty forty and to establish
Speaker 2: a universal free school meal program that provides breakfast and lunch.
Speaker 2: And that is a real solid spate of shit for
Speaker 2: a governor to get done. And all of this is
Speaker 2: about in a year, right, Like most of the shit
Speaker 2: that Walls has gotten done as governor has been very recently,
Speaker 2: because the dims had just taken back control, right, and
Speaker 2: it's very narrow control. Amy Koch, a Republican and former
Speaker 2: Minnesota Senate majority leader, said Walls definitely had not governed
Speaker 2: like a moderate, and un like other governors with trifecta control,
Speaker 2: had not emphasized in making deals with Republicans. Everything that
Speaker 2: went forward was signed. She said, I'm not sure what
Speaker 2: that says about him, but it definitely puts a Dent
Speaker 2: in his argument that he's just this moderate Democrat from
Speaker 2: the Midwest. And this is why progressives, many of them,
Speaker 2: are excited about Walls, is that when he actually had
Speaker 2: the opportunity, he was willing to say, Fuck the Republicans,
Speaker 2: let's get some shit done. I don't care that we
Speaker 2: only have one vote, right, yeah. Now, Walls has stated that,
Speaker 2: in his opinion, political capital exists to be spent improving
Speaker 2: people's lives. And this is an area where you can
Speaker 2: say that he's put his money where his mouth is, right,
Speaker 2: this is how he actually governed. Now, it's worth noting. Obviously,
Speaker 2: he also promised to burn political capital on major police
Speaker 2: reform and he gave that up. So you know, the
Speaker 2: fact that he says he's going to do something like
Speaker 2: any politician, not a guarantee it's going to happen.
Speaker 7: Well, and some of one of the more upsetting things
Speaker 7: but not surprising things, is now that Kamala has basically
Speaker 7: secured the nomination, she has rolled back many of the
Speaker 7: progressive policies that she ran on in twenty twenty when
Speaker 7: those seems to be more pre popular, right, you know,
Speaker 7: that's not necessarily Walls, that is that's Kambala. But but
Speaker 7: they're running on the same ticket. And again, like, it's
Speaker 7: not surprising that she's not advocating for Medica for all
Speaker 7: now that she is the actual nominee, right, But it
Speaker 7: still is, you know, disappointing for people who are like, hey,
Speaker 7: her actual policies four years ago were actually relatively progressive,
Speaker 7: and now they are slightly more kind of in line
Speaker 7: with like the mainstream Democratic Party views on most of
Speaker 7: these issues.
Speaker 2: Right. And again, one of the reasons, maybe for a
Speaker 2: little bit of hope, is that Walls has not really
Speaker 2: been that guy during his time with the executive power, right,
Speaker 2: and kind of the area where he's been best maybe
Speaker 2: actually is climate change. Right, This is the thing dim
Speaker 2: seem to like to compromise on the most. And Tim's
Speaker 2: history here is interested in me, particularly because he's got
Speaker 2: he doesn't have a perfect record, but it's genuinely pretty positive.
Speaker 2: His major achievement was a policy passed in twenty twenty
Speaker 2: three that required Minnesota to have a carbon free electric
Speaker 2: grid by twenty forty. Now, this is the kind of
Speaker 2: legislation that could just be virtue signaling, but Walls didn't
Speaker 2: just say yep, we'll get it. Done by twenty forty,
Speaker 2: when I won't be the fucking governor anymore. He backed
Speaker 2: it up by approving a historic amount of state spending
Speaker 2: on energy. The legislation included rebates on climate friendly technology
Speaker 2: like air source heat pumps and electric vehicles, as well
Speaker 2: as spending to improve home insulation and one hundred million
Speaker 2: dollars for city extreme weather preparedness. Walls also signed a
Speaker 2: bill to cut red tape for winden solar farms and
Speaker 2: transmission lines, and the speed up permitting for infrastructure needed
Speaker 2: to replace colon gas plants. So it was not just
Speaker 2: a yeah, we'll definitely do this. It was a well,
Speaker 2: there's certain things that need to happen for this to
Speaker 2: be possible, and I am going to work to make
Speaker 2: it easier to do those things. I'm going to make
Speaker 2: sure that we're passing legislation that makes it easier to
Speaker 2: do those things. And that that shows me someone who
Speaker 2: sees this as important as not just a thing that's
Speaker 2: virtue signaling, but as we need to figure out what
Speaker 2: the actual concrete steps are to make this doable, and
Speaker 2: that's something that gives me a little bit of hope.
Speaker 2: The more questionable side of his environmental history is the
Speaker 2: Inbridge Line three pipeline, which he and state regulators approved
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty. This angered a lot of local environmental
Speaker 2: groups and several indigenous tribes in the area. The pipeline
Speaker 2: was argued to be necessary because the old one was
Speaker 2: corroding and a spill risk, and of course, when the
Speaker 2: new pipeline was constructed, workers punctured multiple aquifers. This seems
Speaker 2: to have been a case of Walls being the politician
Speaker 2: that he is. Trade unions supported the project because jobs,
Speaker 2: and it's also worth noting this is twenty twenty, so
Speaker 2: the dims do not have a majority in the legislature,
Speaker 2: and there's just a lot less of a stick available
Speaker 2: to Walls at this point. So you know, maybe he
Speaker 2: would have ruled differently, or maybe he would have acted differently,
Speaker 2: you know, have been in a more friendly situation.
Speaker 7: Yeah. I reported on this back in twenty twenty one. Yeah,
Speaker 7: we did a two part series on stop Line three
Speaker 7: where I traveled to the pipeline. Yeah, it's not surprising,
Speaker 7: especially with pressure from trade unions to approve this pipeline.
Speaker 7: From what I've seen, he did not have much to
Speaker 7: do with the police crackdown on protesters. I've seen that alleged.
Speaker 7: I'm not finding much to back that up. There's a
Speaker 7: lot of like county sheriffs and other task forces working
Speaker 7: directly with the pipeline company, like you know, Walls never
Speaker 7: used National Guard against these people. I don't see much
Speaker 7: from him being personally involved in suppressing these protests beyond
Speaker 7: the fact that he's the governor. Like he's the top
Speaker 7: guy in charge. He could shut that all down if
Speaker 7: but he also doesn't need to be like actively involved
Speaker 7: for that to happen, right, police will do it themselves, right,
Speaker 7: And that seems to be mostly what took place.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that seems fair to say.
Speaker 7: And most of the extreme charges that top line three
Speaker 7: protesters were getting, like a felony theft for locking down
Speaker 7: onto construction equipment mostly have since all been dismissed in
Speaker 7: the courts or at least taken down to a lower
Speaker 7: and more appropriate charge.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So again, like with everything about this guy, he's
Speaker 2: not perfect. He's not without some fucked up things in
Speaker 2: his background. He's a politician, but on ballance a better
Speaker 2: history on environmental stuff than most governors in the country.
Speaker 2: I should also note here under Walls, Minnesota passed the
Speaker 2: nation's most comprehensive ban on PFAS chemicals, a category of
Speaker 2: industrial compounds that do not break down and run off
Speaker 2: and have been associated with a bunch of cancers and
Speaker 2: other health risks. It is a band that rolls out
Speaker 2: over an eight year timeframe, so you know, maybe it's
Speaker 2: not like who knows how well it will actually get executed,
Speaker 2: but literally no other state has passed a ban this strong.
Speaker 2: So I'm putting it in the ups for Walls category. Now,
Speaker 2: that is kind of what I had to say. I
Speaker 2: didn't want to end talking a little bit more about Palestine,
Speaker 2: because again, Walls has a very mixed record here at best.
Speaker 2: While he was in the House, he received APAX endorsement
Speaker 2: and spoke at the group's twenty ten conference, where he said,
Speaker 2: this Israel is our truest and closest ally in the region,
Speaker 2: with a commitment to values of personal freedoms and liberties,
Speaker 2: surrounded by a pretty tough neighborhood. You know, I might
Speaker 2: quibble with me most of that, well, except with our
Speaker 2: closest ally in the region. That's kind of hard to
Speaker 2: argue with. After October seventh, he or state flags flown
Speaker 2: at half staff and condemned the Hamas attacks. In early March,
Speaker 2: he began endorsing calls for a permanent working ceasefire a
Speaker 2: few days after Harris called for a six week ceasefire.
Speaker 2: He's made statements about how the uncommitted protesters should be
Speaker 2: listened to, the same thing about college protesters. But he
Speaker 2: is not. He's not backing an embargo, right, He's not
Speaker 2: you know, pushing any kind of like stick to actually
Speaker 2: force Netanyahu's hand in any way. You would not say
Speaker 2: he's the worst Democrat on Gaza, but he's not, you know,
Speaker 2: particularly good either.
Speaker 7: He didn't lie about volunteering with the IDF. He did not.
Speaker 2: He did not lie about volunteering with the IDF as
Speaker 2: a teenager. That's that's one thing we can say.
Speaker 7: But unfortunately the bar is quite low these days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you know that's Tim Walls a political biography.
Speaker 2: I hope you now can walk away being like, Okay,
Speaker 2: that's that's more or less who Tim Walls is.
Speaker 7: I do. I do feel it's important to end with
Speaker 7: one more kind of anecdote about Walls that I learned
Speaker 7: this morning, Okay, is that on I believe his first
Speaker 7: date with his with his suite to be wife. When
Speaker 7: he was teaching geography, he took her to see the
Speaker 7: movie Falling Down, the nineteen ninety three Michael Douglas masterpiece,
Speaker 7: incredibly based, which I feel like every single politician should
Speaker 7: be forced to watch.
Speaker 2: I would make it a mandatory part of graduation. You know,
Speaker 2: that was that was an important movie for me.
Speaker 7: It is a pretty funny first date movie. It's not
Speaker 7: the worst, you know, It's not like it's not like
Speaker 7: American Psychoach, which is also a great movie, but you know,
Speaker 7: it is. It is a curious first pick. But I
Speaker 7: think it is important that whoever is sitting in the
Speaker 7: White House is familiar with Falling Down. Yeah, as it
Speaker 7: as it kind of displays American male violence.
Speaker 2: It predicted a kind of guy who was just starting to, like, yeah,
Speaker 2: creep up into public consciousness when the movie came out,
Speaker 2: and who now commits a mass shooting every four weeks.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Yeah, So I think that is a very funny anecdote.
Speaker 2: Watch Falling Down, folks. It's a great date movie. You know,
Speaker 2: maybe double Parrot with Event Horizon and really really gets an.
Speaker 7: Ax in Christ.
Speaker 2: All right, Garret, that's the end of the episode, how
Speaker 2: you feeling pretty good?
Speaker 7: Pretty good? Honestly, well, you know, not great. You know,
Speaker 7: actually the whole situation politically in the country is kind
Speaker 7: of a nightmare.
Speaker 2: It's fine, it's fine.
Speaker 7: Somehow, I feel slightly better than I did two months ago.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna tell you, this is the best it's been
Speaker 2: in a while, and maybe maybe the best in the
Speaker 2: ll ever be again.
Speaker 7: Which also just points to how low the bar is
Speaker 7: at the moment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's fine. Look, best case scenario, Matt Walsh
Speaker 2: is mad. It is a little further than mad. We'll see,
Speaker 2: We'll see if we can get like a welfare check
Speaker 2: over at his house. Anyway. That's the end of the episode.
Speaker 2: Good night and good luck, Carl Walls.
Speaker 1: In the last few weeks, indeed the last few months,
Speaker 1: the eyes of the world have been on the a
Speaker 1: Trustees aflicted on the people of Palestine on a daily basis.
Speaker 1: For the first time in most of our lifetimes, tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of people have taken to the streets to
Speaker 1: lift their voices for a stateless station of Palestine and
Speaker 1: against Israel's une checked mass murder of civilians. It's something
Speaker 1: I never thought I would see in the US, and
Speaker 1: one of my first visits here, I was staying at
Speaker 1: a bed and breakfast in the Bronx in late December.
Speaker 1: It was cold and now I was wearing a kafir
Speaker 1: to stay warm, as I still often do. I remember
Speaker 1: wearing it while I was talking to small guys. That's
Speaker 1: what I was waiting for the train, and we talked
Speaker 1: about Palestine for a long time. I ended up giving
Speaker 1: one of them my kafir and he gave me some
Speaker 1: cool badget so I still have one jacket somewhere. I
Speaker 1: was hopeful after that, but since then I've lived here
Speaker 1: for more than a decade. It was really not for
Speaker 1: about fifteen years that I saw someone else in the
Speaker 1: US without a direct connection to Palestine who wanted to
Speaker 1: show up for the Palestinians. It's an important cause, and
Speaker 1: it's one that we've been supporting here on our podcast
Speaker 1: with our coverage and speaking for myself also with my
Speaker 1: presence when I can. But as the word looked at Gaza,
Speaker 1: bombs also fell on Kurdistan. It's equally hard, if not harder,
Speaker 1: to find solidarity for the Kurdish freedom movement in the
Speaker 1: United States. I have a Kurdish Kafir as well. A
Speaker 1: Kurdish migrant that there met in the mountains gave it
Speaker 1: to me on one cold night last year after I
Speaker 1: said good.
Speaker 9: Evening to him.
Speaker 1: In Comanche. Stinks of campfires and cigarettes and I wearried
Speaker 1: all the time. I don't think anyone has ever recognized
Speaker 1: it l alone said anything positive about it. But someone
Speaker 1: did once ask me if it was a rast thing.
Speaker 1: So while our eyes have been on Gaza, those of
Speaker 1: Turkish drones and warplanes have been on the mountains of
Speaker 1: southern Kurdistan. Bombs have been going off in Kurdistan for
Speaker 1: a very long time. Indeed, before Gernica, Britain was dropping
Speaker 1: bombs on people in the Middle East without paintings to
Speaker 1: commemorate it. Stick boundaries and alliances have changed a lot
Speaker 1: since those first bombs, as has technology, but the fact
Speaker 1: that death from above has remained a consistent tool of
Speaker 1: the colonial state hasn't changed. When I was in Kurdistan
Speaker 1: in October of twenty twenty three, it was amidst almost
Speaker 1: constant drone strikes. I had to conduct my interviews in
Speaker 1: a climate of secrecy and concern, somewhat for my own
Speaker 1: safety but also for the safety of my interviewees who
Speaker 1: took great and serious personal risks to come and meet me.
Speaker 1: One of the people I met was Zagarros Heuer, a
Speaker 1: spokesman for the Kurdistan Communities Union or in Kurdish Komasievakin Kurdistdani.
Speaker 1: It's generally known as a casey k by It's Curtis's initials.
Speaker 1: Recently I connected with Zagros again and I asked him
Speaker 1: to explain the latest rounte of aggression.
Speaker 6: Hello, dear James, I hope you're doing well. As far
Speaker 6: as your first question is concerned, I can say that
Speaker 6: this operation has started from sixteenth of April, six days
Speaker 6: before advanced visit to Baghdad, and in the last weeks
Speaker 6: the Tekish Army has extended these operations and this invading
Speaker 6: army has moved further deep into the Iraqi territory and
Speaker 6: the Kurdistan region. Now they have set up checkpoints, they
Speaker 6: stop civilians, they interrogate them. According to CPT report, CPT
Speaker 6: stands for Community Community Peace Making Teams. It is a
Speaker 6: civil society organization active in Iraq and Curlison region of Iraq.
Speaker 6: According to CPT report, in the last months, there has
Speaker 6: been two hundred thirty eight bombardments in those areas and
Speaker 6: the two thousand hectares of agricultural land have been burned
Speaker 6: to ashes. And now six hundred two villages are under
Speaker 6: the threat of displacement and one hundred and sixty two
Speaker 6: of them have already been displaced. They have been raised
Speaker 6: to earth. From the start of this year, according to
Speaker 6: CPT data, oney seven hundred attacks have been have been
Speaker 6: done and this comes against the backdrop of attacks in
Speaker 6: twenty twenty three where one thousand, five hundred forty eight
Speaker 6: bombardments have taken place.
Speaker 1: If you're not familiar with the kk on whose behalfs
Speaker 1: Agros is speaking, you can think of it as the
Speaker 1: umbrella group that unites of various Kurdish freedom movements in Bakur,
Speaker 1: North Bashur or South, Rajava or West, and Rodjulat or
Speaker 1: East to use the Kurdish terms. These parts of the
Speaker 1: Kurdish homeland are found in different states respectively. They are
Speaker 1: in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. In each of these states,
Speaker 1: Kurdish people represent a minority. Under the Assad regime in Syria,
Speaker 1: Syrian Kurds were stripped of their citizenship and forced out
Speaker 1: of their homes and what is known as the Arab
Speaker 1: Belt program. In Turkey, they've been bombed, banned from speaking
Speaker 1: their language, and even have their very existence denied by
Speaker 1: the state. In Iran, tens of thousands of Kurds were
Speaker 1: killed when they rose up for autonomy in nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: and they still cannot teach their children in their own language.
Speaker 1: In Iraq, they were subjected to genocidal violence, chemical weapons,
Speaker 1: and the murder enforced Arabization of tens of thousands of
Speaker 1: Kurds what is known as the anphal If you ever
Speaker 1: find yourself in Solomania or Slimani as it's known in Kurdish,
Speaker 1: you can visit the incredible museum there, which documents a
Speaker 1: tortured history of the Kurdish people at the hands of
Speaker 1: the Iraqi state. It's a very moving place. On entering
Speaker 1: the museum, you'll walk through a hallway that's covered from
Speaker 1: floor to ceiling with broken pieces of mirrors. Each represents
Speaker 1: a life cut short during the Anphile. After this entrance,
Speaker 1: the first exhibit you'll see has a large sign that says,
Speaker 1: in those days, we had no friends but the mountains.
Speaker 1: It's an old and sometimes overused aphorism about the Kurds,
Speaker 1: but it's not untrue. In the mountains of southern Kurdistan.
Speaker 1: The Kurdistan Freedom Movement aims to liberate the Kurdish people
Speaker 1: from all four states and indeed from the state altogether,
Speaker 1: and it's in these mountains that's found a place where
Speaker 1: it could avoid state violence. The mountains of Kurdistan have
Speaker 1: long provided a safe place, and especially in recent years,
Speaker 1: the mountains of Iraqi curtiss done controlled by Bathet Talabani's
Speaker 1: Patriotic Union of Kurdis DAN, which shares power in the
Speaker 1: Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq with the Kurdistan Democratic Party
Speaker 1: headed by Masud Barzani. The Kurdish Freedom Movement that is
Speaker 1: the KSEYK has been able to exist largely without the state. This,
Speaker 1: of course, has always been unpopular in Anchor, and it
Speaker 1: didn't Baghdad. A recent offensive by Turkey seek not only
Speaker 1: to displace the PKK that's the Kurdistan Workers Party which
Speaker 1: is part of the k c K and its allies
Speaker 1: from the mountains, but also to extend their state control there.
Speaker 9: Now.
Speaker 1: I could go on find a diversion about James C.
Speaker 1: Scott here, but that's another episode that I'm working on,
Speaker 1: so I'll spare you instead. I asked Mohammed Hamasila, a
Speaker 1: Kurdish historian, to explain the impact of this latest round
Speaker 1: of aggression and how local people felt about it.
Speaker 12: People he had in the p K controlled area, what
Speaker 12: are even in could the son who who selves our
Speaker 12: sympathy with pick Ak sympathy with the sympathy so they
Speaker 12: see that that the really extra stuggle against an enemy
Speaker 12: went to invent the whole sun went to move Some
Speaker 12: want to burn the vocal stand is in my point
Speaker 12: of view, it's it's not that the case of of
Speaker 12: Peak a k of and there are there they have
Speaker 12: the same issue on the same stand with with with
Speaker 12: with the with the Sirian part of of star people
Speaker 12: here so especially getting one or not the pewty control.
Speaker 9: I think that.
Speaker 12: With the the struggle of Java, the struggle of of.
Speaker 9: And they did very issue.
Speaker 12: For their people and they have actually very concrete program
Speaker 12: for the future.
Speaker 1: Turkey, however, seeing the existence of the movement as a
Speaker 1: threat to its national security, has begun a campaign to
Speaker 1: eliminate the movement wherever it finds it.
Speaker 10: As M.
Speaker 1: Hubbard mentioned, the history of the Kurdish people in Turkey
Speaker 1: is one that's riddled with state of violence, and it's
Speaker 1: that which I want to discuss today. Turkey has long
Speaker 1: vacillated between the genocidal denial of the existence of Kurdish people,
Speaker 1: recognizing that they exist only in so far as it
Speaker 1: allows them to be targets for bombing. We could really
Speaker 1: start this history almost anywhere in the twentieth century. Indeed,
Speaker 1: following a series of suppressed rebellions, the entirety of northern
Speaker 1: Kurdistan was closed military area in which Turkey did not
Speaker 1: allow foreigners from nineteen twenty five to nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 1: But I want to start it just after a coup
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty, when Abdullah Oujerlan had recently founded the
Speaker 1: PKK or Kerdistein Workers' Party and was beginning to view
Speaker 1: a vision of Kurdish liberation that was rooted in a Marxist,
Speaker 1: Leninist and socialist analysis and ideas of national liberation. Soon
Speaker 1: after the nineteen eighty coup, Turkey began to refer to
Speaker 1: the Kurds as Mountain Turks, and although it doesn't do
Speaker 1: this as much anymore, it did recently release school books
Speaker 1: in Diarbacere, a majority Kurdish region that made no reference
Speaker 1: to the Kurds or their language, and asserted that people
Speaker 1: that spoke a dialect of Turkish don't they speak Kurdish.
Speaker 1: It's this denial of their very existence. Zagreus told me
Speaker 1: they made the Kurdish Freedom Gorillas take up arms in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four, which is actually forty years ago yesterday.
Speaker 1: You're listening to this on the day it comes out.
Speaker 6: But after the military of nineteen eighty and the inhuman
Speaker 6: tortures in the notorious prison of the Arbaker Armed City,
Speaker 6: the movement embarked on a strategy of legitimate self defense
Speaker 6: and which manicure struggle against the Turkish state, starting from
Speaker 6: fifteen of August nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 1: Since then, there have been periods of ceasefire and periods
Speaker 1: of conflict, with tens of thousands of lives lost. Both
Speaker 1: sides have killed civilians as part of their attacks on
Speaker 1: the other. The most recent fire was signed in twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: and as a result, the PKK began slowly withdrawing to
Speaker 1: the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. In twenty fifteen, when the
Speaker 1: Syrian Kurdish YPG and YPGA fighters were leading the battle
Speaker 1: against ISIS. Turkey broke the ceasefire between the PKK and
Speaker 1: itself began attacking the Kurdish fighters, forcing them into a
Speaker 1: war on two fronts. As far as Turkey is concerned,
Speaker 1: the YPG, YPJ, KCK, ybs in a Zed Areas and
Speaker 1: all other elements of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement are just
Speaker 1: different names for the PKK, which it considers to be
Speaker 1: a terrorist organization. Everyday life for Kurdish people in Turkey
Speaker 1: can be hard. I've spoken to hundreds, if not thousands
Speaker 1: of them in the last year, often sitting around fires
Speaker 1: in the mountains, working together to build wooden shelters for
Speaker 1: their children, or sharing the balls of beans that my
Speaker 1: friend's cooked because the state refused to feed the people
Speaker 1: it was detaining in the open air for days. These
Speaker 1: aren't conversations I recorded, because that wouldn't be safe. There's
Speaker 1: a very real danger of these folks not getting asilum
Speaker 1: and being sent back to a country where they've seen
Speaker 1: their friends murdered, their election results denied, their job applications
Speaker 1: thrown away, and their language suppressed. Having them on the
Speaker 1: record would be a huge risk to their safety. And
Speaker 1: not every interaction I have with people, even people I'm
Speaker 1: writing about, has she turned into content to go between
Speaker 1: the adverts. So sometimes I just do things because I
Speaker 1: like to do them. If you'd like to know more
Speaker 1: about these stories, you could find a link to a
Speaker 1: piece I wrote for the Kurdish Piece Institute in the
Speaker 1: show notes. Anyway, here's an ad break. The situation in
Speaker 1: Iraq is different. The Kurdish's an Actoma's region enjoys a
Speaker 1: great degree of autonomy from Baghdad. They're chiefly run by
Speaker 1: two parties, the KDP and the p UK. The KDP
Speaker 1: enjoys influence in a Bile or how La and Kurdish
Speaker 1: in Slomania. The p UK is in control. In these areas,
Speaker 1: especially those of the KDP, a more neoliberal vision of
Speaker 1: Kurdish identity is pursued. And how Laeri saw skyscrapers lit
Speaker 1: up all night, huge mansions, but also the whole areas
Speaker 1: of the city struggling to get by or sometimes not
Speaker 1: even having actives a year around water. The vision of
Speaker 1: Kurdish identity here is not a threatening to Turkey, and
Speaker 1: the KDP seems to take the line that the PKK
Speaker 1: or to keep it struggle within the Turkish borders. The
Speaker 1: p UK has been more sympathetic to the KDK. The
Speaker 1: PKK it's often in the mountains near Slamanian du Howk
Speaker 1: that Turkey targets Kurdish rillers and their infrastructure. For the
Speaker 1: last forty years, Turkey has remained extremely hostile to division
Speaker 1: of Curdish liberation, with the democratic and federal system that
Speaker 1: Ojerland and the movement that follows him have adopted. I
Speaker 1: asked Zagorros to explain the connection between the Kurdish struggling
Speaker 1: in North and East Syria, which many listens will probably
Speaker 1: be familiar with, and the element to the Kurdish freedom
Speaker 1: movement in other parts of Kurdistan, which they might not
Speaker 1: be familiar with, and I'll ask interview. I spoke to
Speaker 1: Zagros about history in Spain. Now it is history. To
Speaker 1: give me a history lesson. By the way, he calls
Speaker 1: the Ojilan leader appo here Raber appo in Kurdish, it's
Speaker 1: a common contraction that's used all over Kurdistan, and Appo
Speaker 1: is also the evocative form of the Commandji word for
Speaker 1: a paternal uncle.
Speaker 6: A leader uncle migrated to the Middle East. He migrated
Speaker 6: to Syria and Lebanon. I mean months before the military
Speaker 6: coup in Turkey is the military coup of nineteen eighty.
Speaker 6: He went there on his own. There was only one
Speaker 6: comrade with him. First he entered the city of Kogani
Speaker 6: and from the he found his way to Lebanon to Beirut.
Speaker 6: In Lebanon he made relations with the Palatinian groups. He
Speaker 6: even took part in the resistance of the Palastinian groups
Speaker 6: against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. For nearly twenty years,
Speaker 6: he waged the freedom of cruggle from Lebanon and Syria.
Speaker 6: In doing so, he educated, he trained, and organized the
Speaker 6: Kurdish people in Rajawa Kerkistan. In this sense, his struggle
Speaker 6: is twofold. First day. He developed self awareness in the
Speaker 6: people of Rajawa with regard to the natural and cultural identity,
Speaker 6: and brought the Rajawa people together, who had been divided
Speaker 6: by the many Arab builds and demographic change operations of
Speaker 6: the bath regime. All these organizational activities were done despite
Speaker 6: the Sudian regime, and he managed to run a delicate
Speaker 6: balance to foil the repressive measures of the Syrian regime.
Speaker 1: There I just interject here to explain these terms. Bath
Speaker 1: Is Syria and Haffazala Said and his son Bashi al
Speaker 1: A Said attempted to divide and deny the existence of
Speaker 1: the Kurdish people in many ways. Some of these included
Speaker 1: omitting them from censuses, denying them citizenship, prohibiting the public
Speaker 1: use of their language, and demographic transfers to installed belts
Speaker 1: of Arab people in areas that were majority Kurdish. Nonetheless,
Speaker 1: as I'd also saw benefit allowing the PKK to exist
Speaker 1: within his borders, especially in the parts of Lebanon that
Speaker 1: Syria occupied, in order to use them as a tool
Speaker 1: against other states.
Speaker 6: Secondly, he got this Nationally and culturally aware people of
Speaker 6: Rajena support the struggle in North Kydalstan. Therefore, thousands of
Speaker 6: Rajawa youth were first organized and educated in villages in cities,
Speaker 6: and then they joined the guerrilla struggle and fought in
Speaker 6: North Kandestan in Baku Kalistan. This struggle served to unite
Speaker 6: Rajawa and North Karalistan Baku Karalistan and developed shared national
Speaker 6: political awareness and attitudes. Thousands of Rojawa youth boys and
Speaker 6: girls film martyr in the ranks of the guerrilla struggle.
Speaker 6: Leader Apple tried to reach out to all cities, to
Speaker 6: all villages, to all families, and even to all individuals
Speaker 6: in Rojawa, Kedistan. This has created a strong national, social, cultural,
Speaker 6: and let's say, a philosophical point between Leader Apple and
Speaker 6: the Rajava people. And because a neglected and divided people
Speaker 6: had igunited around him.
Speaker 1: This isn't an episode about the entire history of the PKK,
Speaker 1: and I wouldn't be the person to write that, but
Speaker 1: I will attempt to speed run it here anyway. Up
Speaker 1: I was arrested in Arabia in nineteen ninety nine. Ever
Speaker 1: since then he's been held in prison, often without access
Speaker 1: to visitors or his lawyers, and at some points on
Speaker 1: an island where he was a solitary prisoner surrounded by hundreds,
Speaker 1: if not thousands, of guards. His human rights are almost
Speaker 1: universally knowledge to have been violated by this arrangement, and
Speaker 1: despite a quarter century of detention and Turkish moves towards Europe,
Speaker 1: there seems to be no willingness on a part of
Speaker 1: the Turkish state to release him. In his time in jail,
Speaker 1: he began to read more and correspond with many thinkers,
Speaker 1: including Murray Bookchin. Bookchin influenced his thinking a great deal,
Speaker 1: and gradually, through this and other influences, Arsland moved away
Speaker 1: from a Marxist Leninist analysis and national liberation goals and
Speaker 1: instead began to conceive feminist and ecological revolution that decentralized power,
Speaker 1: ensured all authority positions were shared by a man and
Speaker 1: a woman, and valued the environment as much or more
Speaker 1: than the economy. This libertaria left ideology came to be
Speaker 1: known as democratic confederalism, and it is a guiding ethos
Speaker 1: for Java and indeed the Casey Care as a whole.
Speaker 1: The civil war in Syria provided an opening that the
Speaker 1: Kurdistan Freedom movement took advantage of as ASAD forces withdrew
Speaker 1: from their regions to fight elsewhere. Didn't spring from the
Speaker 1: ground in twenty eleven, but instead they'd spent decades building
Speaker 1: a movement that they felt could replace the state. Today,
Speaker 1: millions of people live, work and play under a democratic
Speaker 1: confederist ideology in the Autonomous Area of North and East Syria,
Speaker 1: where it was last year. It's not paradise, but it's
Speaker 1: a special place, and by any metric, life there is
Speaker 1: better than in the rest of Syria. Right now. For
Speaker 1: over a decade, they've navigated a complex system of adversaries,
Speaker 1: including the Syrian State, the Islamic State, and the Turkish State.
Speaker 1: Just this week, all three of them have tried to
Speaker 1: attack Rajava. More than fifteen thousand people men and women
Speaker 1: have died in the decade long war against the Islamic State, which,
Speaker 1: contrary to much reporting, remains ongoing. I sexually car bombed
Speaker 1: a place not far from where I stayed last October
Speaker 1: after I'd come home. At times, the USA has supported
Speaker 1: the people of Vjavre in their battle against Islamic State,
Speaker 1: but it's also stood by as Turkish bombs fell on them.
Speaker 1: But though Rajava is by far the biggest territorial area
Speaker 1: which to democratic confederalism is in practice, much as a
Speaker 1: movement remains in the mountains of southern Kurdistan in what
Speaker 1: is technically Iraqi territory, there are many more Kurdish people
Speaker 1: in Turkey, and as a recent election results show, revolution
Speaker 1: by the ballot box is not really an option for them.
Speaker 1: Rajavre enjoys autonomy, but it is still very much ideologically
Speaker 1: twinned with the part of the movement that remains in
Speaker 1: the mountains and dedicated to its struggle against the Turkish state.
Speaker 1: Turkey in return, has crossed the border with Iraq to
Speaker 1: attack the KCK and anyone else you gets called the crossfire.
Speaker 1: As Gross explained, this is not new, but the recent
Speaker 1: change has been notable well.
Speaker 6: During the eighties, nineties and even after two thousand, the
Speaker 6: Turkish Army used to do military operations to the other
Speaker 6: side of the border into the Iraqi border for several months,
Speaker 6: to a draw back to the other side of the
Speaker 6: border to its own border afterwards after several months, and
Speaker 6: in that period it only had limited number of barracks
Speaker 6: and bases in the Iraqi and the Iraqi territory. The
Speaker 6: change now is that Teki has built a new military
Speaker 6: roads from Scratch to the Credit Sad region to northern Iraq.
Speaker 6: It has built more than one hundred big and small
Speaker 6: military basis barracks in the area and has no intention
Speaker 6: to withdraw. As I said, the ultimate goal is to
Speaker 6: is to annex all these lands to the Turkish territory.
Speaker 1: Today, Turkish troops can be found deep inside Iraq according
Speaker 1: to the Community Peacemaker teams. Since December of twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: Turkish forces have built over forty bases anywhere from nine
Speaker 1: to twenty five kilometers into Iraqi, Kurdistan's territory south of
Speaker 1: its border end quote. They have dispatched hundreds of troops
Speaker 1: and military vehicles into another state, set up checkpoints, and
Speaker 1: even killed civilians a member of the Kig's military. The
Speaker 1: Peshmerga fighting has caused massive wildfires. For example, in Sagale village,
Speaker 1: about fifty five percent of the agricultural land has been
Speaker 1: burned by Turkish attacks. Incidentally, Turkish selling the Autonomous area
Speaker 1: of North and East Syria has also caused similar fires
Speaker 1: and destruction of crops in agricultural areas. The Kurdish freedom
Speaker 1: movement is very well established in the mountains southern Kurtis Down,
Speaker 1: where they live in tunnels and caves. These they're not
Speaker 1: caves of tunnels like you played in a little child.
Speaker 1: We're talking about villages underground. This makes tracking them very hard.
Speaker 1: As we heard another episode, many of the fighters said
Speaker 1: to Curtis Down as Syrian Arabs, repurposed by Turkey and
Speaker 1: ginned up on anti Kurdish sentiment. But this is perhaps
Speaker 1: the least concerning of the ways that the tunnels are
Speaker 1: being attacked. Zagros explained. Some of the other things that
Speaker 1: they've seen.
Speaker 6: Is that they use dogs. They tie explosives to the
Speaker 6: dogs and send the dogs into the tunnels and they
Speaker 6: explode the doves wire remote control.
Speaker 1: In addition to the dogs, he says that the Turkey
Speaker 1: state uses chemical weapons inside the tunnels, and they are
Speaker 1: also reports of suicide bombers deathonating themselves. The KTK also
Speaker 1: claims the Turkey uses thermobaric bombs sometimes called bunker busters,
Speaker 1: which create a huge pressure wave from subsequent vacuum.
Speaker 6: Also, they are using tenmobodic bombs. We have documented the
Speaker 6: use of these thermobotic bumps. There are remnants of these bumps.
Speaker 6: They are using thermobotic or vacuum bumps against the tunnels,
Speaker 6: and they are using some form of explosives which are
Speaker 6: more powerful than thermobotic bumps. Got some freedom grillas have
Speaker 6: developed literature for it because they do know what kind
Speaker 6: of explosive we did. But it has the effect of
Speaker 6: a nuclear bomb. We got some freedom grilla called nuclear bomb.
Speaker 6: They call it so because the effects are high are
Speaker 6: higher than the thermobotic bombs.
Speaker 1: I asked Mohammed to explain how people reacting to the
Speaker 1: current situation.
Speaker 12: You know, you know in some parts of I coul
Speaker 12: understand actually the areas under the control or the influence
Speaker 12: of CHA instead of KDP. And you know that people
Speaker 12: here have dislike this issue is like the Parson of
Speaker 12: Turkey to this area. It's not just in past telling
Speaker 12: people besides the Picaka elements and telling people and building
Speaker 12: the whole agricultural area and you know, so and so on.
Speaker 9: So it's kind of an inversion.
Speaker 12: And but here some people on forces in in the
Speaker 12: southern part of Kurdasa or you know, Iraqi for Dastan
Speaker 12: like the sympathy with the Picaky sympathy, okay, as they
Speaker 12: see that, they're so they're struggling against Turkey because if
Speaker 12: there is no big a gay, even there is no
Speaker 12: bigger gay, the Turkish forces will will not withdraw from
Speaker 12: Kutsa when it controlled, any area of iraqis to be
Speaker 12: saved or Southa, it will not withdraw. And it's it's
Speaker 12: excuse is speaker ky, But thanks so on Earth this
Speaker 12: telling something else.
Speaker 1: Despite what both my guests have seen as alienation of
Speaker 1: the local population, Turkey's continuing with its attacks. I asked
Speaker 1: aggress what do you thought the goals of this Turkish
Speaker 1: invasion of Iraqua.
Speaker 6: The invasion and annexation of these lens is the prime
Speaker 6: goal of Turkey. This goal is a long term goal
Speaker 6: of the Turkish state since it has been created after
Speaker 6: the Luzan Agreement. It has two aspects. Firstly, Turkey lays
Speaker 6: claim to what was once part of the Ottoman Empire
Speaker 6: one hundred years ago. Lays claims to the cities like
Speaker 6: Mussil and Kirkuk and claims that these these are lens
Speaker 6: of a Turkey. So the the invasion operation in the
Speaker 6: area of Batina isap in Matina and Avashin. In the
Speaker 6: areas around the cities of Armedia, Dea luxA and the Hook,
Speaker 6: there are attempts to take control of these mountainous areas
Speaker 6: and to materialize those long range goals. Turkey already has
Speaker 6: a has a big military base near Musul I think
Speaker 6: fifteen to twenty kilometers in northern Musuil. It is called
Speaker 6: the Bashika Base. So if Teki manages to invade all
Speaker 6: these areas in Badina I mean in the cities of
Speaker 6: the Hook, mountainous areas of the Hook, Turkey would be
Speaker 6: able to create a land bridge between these areas and
Speaker 6: its base in Musil, and it will be far easier
Speaker 6: for Turkey too. Let's say an ex city of Muslim
Speaker 6: and Kirkuktu It's lands. Secondly, Turkey has a long term
Speaker 6: goal of democratic demographic change in Kurdistan. As you know,
Speaker 6: Kurdistan is a land, the ancestral land of the Kurts,
Speaker 6: being divided between four countries Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria
Speaker 6: being divided by borders. People from one side of the
Speaker 6: border are Kurdish, put on the other side of the
Speaker 6: ark Kurdish. In many cases, the borderline go through the cities.
Speaker 6: They divide the cities. They have divided the villages. They
Speaker 6: have divided the tribes they have they have divided large populations.
Speaker 6: They have even divided families. This is one of the
Speaker 6: characteristic of the border in Kurdistan.
Speaker 1: In fact, Turkey has Pigan so I think of an
Speaker 1: Arab belt program is owned in Syria seeking to resettle
Speaker 1: Syrian refugees. Turkish backs Syrian anti government rebels in the area,
Speaker 1: so it took from Java in military operations over the
Speaker 1: last eight years. This is part of Turkey's plan to
Speaker 1: return as many as a million Syrian migrants to a
Speaker 1: country still in the grips of a brutal civil war,
Speaker 1: and pushed the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria
Speaker 1: back from the Turkish borders or crush it altogether. For Turkey,
Speaker 1: there's no distinction between Java and the PKK, and thus
Speaker 1: Turkey claims the entirety of Ajava is a haven for terrorism.
Speaker 1: Many Kurdish fighters and international volunteers who fought Isis for
Speaker 1: years died fighting the Turkish army in a Frien and
Speaker 1: the many other territories at Turkey has expanded into since
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen. The fighting there was fierce and saw the
Speaker 1: wig and the wipej the men's and women's armed forces
Speaker 1: of Rejava battling a NATO army with modern armor and
Speaker 1: modern airpower. After taking significant losses, they retreated and I
Speaker 1: asked Sagarus what this means for people living in a
Speaker 1: free who had just managed to return to some semblance
Speaker 1: of normalcy after Assad's forces left and attack from me
Speaker 1: on Nusra Front became less frequent.
Speaker 6: This is genocide. I'man forcing people to leave their lands
Speaker 6: and replacing those people with people which are not from
Speaker 6: that land. Forcing people to leave the ancestral land lands
Speaker 6: which they have lived on for thousands of years, for
Speaker 6: more than ten thousand years, and getting Arab Jihades Cheching
Speaker 6: jihadis to live in those areas, it is a genocide
Speaker 6: along with the ecocide which is now taking place. Thousands
Speaker 6: of hectares of forests of agricultural land are now burning.
Speaker 6: So what Turkey does is femicide, is ecoside, is genocide
Speaker 6: in Kurdistan and these let's say, what now happens to
Speaker 6: the curse is the same thing that happened to the
Speaker 6: Armenians one thousand years ago. The genocide of the Armenians
Speaker 6: was done by the people who had the same mentality
Speaker 6: and the same mindset of are the one I can say.
Speaker 6: So these areas are very strategic for the Kurds. They
Speaker 6: bind the four parts of Kurdistan together demographically. And now
Speaker 6: Arduan wants to draw a Jihadis buffer zone between these areas.
Speaker 6: If occurred from Syria wants to go to the Kurdistan
Speaker 6: under the invasion of Turkey, we call it North Kurdistan.
Speaker 6: He will have to go through cities and areas populated
Speaker 6: by Arab jihadists, by Chech and jihadists by Turkman jihadists
Speaker 6: by jihadists have been which have been collected from around
Speaker 6: the world. So this buffer zone, which is more than
Speaker 6: one thousand kilometers long according to Arduna's plan and thirty
Speaker 6: to forty kilometers wide, is expected to be inhabited to
Speaker 6: be settled by the Jahadis which Ardouan has gathered from
Speaker 6: x d ASH members ext not remembers Al Qaeda.
Speaker 2: At present.
Speaker 1: It's Turkish occupation. It's a situation in parts of Syria,
Speaker 1: but it's also increasingly becoming likely it will be the
Speaker 1: situation in parts of Iraq. This is often the case,
Speaker 1: say to trying to use divisions in Kurdistant to their advantage,
Speaker 1: and Turkey in particular is relying on the well worn
Speaker 1: excuse of counter terrorism to mount its incursions deep into
Speaker 1: a rock. Here's Mohammed explaining.
Speaker 12: That Pek is thinking like in such a way to
Speaker 12: support to support maybe pick again. They don't say orally
Speaker 12: that that thing, and KDP says that follow the instruction
Speaker 12: of Turkey and the actually here, the force an influence
Speaker 12: of Turkey and even Iran in the Buty controlled area
Speaker 12: is very strong and people here as people of the nation,
Speaker 12: I am not feeling comfort with such impassion such issues.
Speaker 12: So we are lot like the owner of our right
Speaker 12: decision in the area. So we're divided within Iran, Iran
Speaker 12: and Turkey and so on, so and we are not
Speaker 12: depending on our people. You know, thousands of people kill
Speaker 12: for the nation, analysts, you know, hopes and now people
Speaker 12: are frustrate with such such issues, with such situation.
Speaker 1: Mahmad also said that was really frustrating for him to
Speaker 1: see Curish politicians influence by the states that they've been
Speaker 1: trying to escape for a century.
Speaker 12: So we are here illustration from the north, Turkey, from
Speaker 12: the east, Iran, from the south, Iraq and all are
Speaker 12: they working that the people who pay thousands thousands of
Speaker 12: of of you know Martyr Souther and so of uh,
Speaker 12: you know, loss of the people. Why you are not
Speaker 12: depending on your will or the force of your people,
Speaker 12: Why you are became like like a feather, a feather
Speaker 12: to the to the windsor of so forth, which are
Speaker 12: not you're they're not your friends. Even in the east
Speaker 12: and the North and the south, there are not new
Speaker 12: But if you depend on your own people, on your
Speaker 12: own historical hard and we have you know, we have
Speaker 12: the legacy of this issue. We have the legacy of
Speaker 12: struggle in this area from nineteen sixstiers.
Speaker 1: Indeed, the evasion of southern Kurdistan would not be possible
Speaker 1: without the consent of both the Iraqi and Kurdistan regional authorities.
Speaker 1: Sagress mentioned. Turkish President Worship Type du One visited Baghdad
Speaker 1: on April the twenty second. This was his first visit
Speaker 1: to Iraq since twenty eleven. During the visit, Iraqan Turkey
Speaker 1: signed the Joint Security Agreement allowing Turkey to conduct military
Speaker 1: operations deep within Iraqi territory. In return, Iraqi received desperately
Speaker 1: needed water from Turkey and.
Speaker 6: Now in those areas, tens of thousands of Turkish troops,
Speaker 6: hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles, drones, rods have been deproved
Speaker 6: to the area. They are active every day, and they
Speaker 6: are invading northern Iraq at a time and when the
Speaker 6: border guards of Iraqi Iraqi Army border guards are standing
Speaker 6: by and just watching. As you may know, as the
Speaker 6: result of the agreement between the Iraqi State and Turky State,
Speaker 6: Iraqi border guard forces, let's say they were decided to
Speaker 6: be sent to the Iraqi Turkish border but now these
Speaker 6: border guards are not under the Turkish Iraqi border. The
Speaker 6: border that we now these border guards have been deployed
Speaker 6: forty kilometers thirty kilometers deep into the Iraqi territory. They
Speaker 6: don't go to the border. They are guarding the invading
Speaker 6: Turkish army.
Speaker 1: For the people of the region, this means yet more
Speaker 1: trauma and more displacement. They're already more than one million
Speaker 1: displaced people in southern Kuristar. Some of them are living
Speaker 1: in pretty terrible conditions. I've seen those refugee camps when
Speaker 1: I was there last October, but these operations have created more.
Speaker 1: Here's just one anecdotic displacement shared by CPT on their website.
Speaker 13: We met a man named Kakbashir who had tried to
Speaker 13: build a cafe here. His dreams of a cafe had
Speaker 13: been shattered by Turkish artillery and small arms fire coming
Speaker 13: from the Turkish base on the hillside nearby. He was
Speaker 13: originally from Segedde village, but had been displaced to Ghani
Speaker 13: Village by the Turkish military five years ago due to
Speaker 13: the loss of his farm in Seagatee. He has planted
Speaker 13: some vegetables next to the side of his cafe He
Speaker 13: gave each CPT member some sweet basil and invited us
Speaker 13: to his village. When we arrived, a man dressed in
Speaker 13: immaculate traditional Kurdish clothes stood transfixed staring into the valley.
Speaker 13: He was staring at Mejia Village his home. Mijia is
Speaker 13: one of at least nine villages displaced by the recent
Speaker 13: Turkish operation. Kakbashir told us that displaced people from the
Speaker 13: valley would visit this place daily to gaze upon their
Speaker 13: cut off towns and farmland below.
Speaker 1: Despite month of shading embalming, the military trunk holds the
Speaker 1: Kurdistan Freedom Movement remain intact, and the more obvious damage
Speaker 1: has been done to civilians rather than military targets. The hPG,
Speaker 1: which is the fighting arm of the Bikka, has been
Speaker 1: able to obtain loitering anti aircraft munitions shut down several drones,
Speaker 1: but it's still unable to shoot down fighter jets like
Speaker 1: the US provided F sixteens to the currently bombing them.
Speaker 1: For civilians without mounting caves or tunnels to hide in.
Speaker 1: The impact is severe and people who have faced oppression
Speaker 1: and persecution from Saddam Hussein Isis, numerous other states and
Speaker 1: groups are now once again being displaced. I want to
Speaker 1: finish up with the end of Zagorro's message to me,
Speaker 1: in which he made a comparison with Palestine, like I
Speaker 1: did at the start on the day of thus intrude Zagros.
Speaker 1: Bombs made in the US had just been falling from
Speaker 1: Israeli planes on too civilians in Palestine again, and we
Speaker 1: discuss the fact that all the solutions being discussed hinged
Speaker 1: around the need for states, one state or two states
Speaker 1: to solve the problem. But this was a problem created
Speaker 1: by states, and it was state sending bombs to another
Speaker 1: state to drop on children. Both in Kurdistan and in Palestine.
Speaker 1: There was a problem. Here's a cross reflection on nearly
Speaker 1: ten months of bombing in Palestine and Kurdistan. And I
Speaker 1: just want to explain here that Abu Baka or Baghdadi
Speaker 1: was at one point the leader of ISIS. He's dead
Speaker 1: now and when he says Dash, he's referring to the
Speaker 1: former so called Islamic state.
Speaker 6: The struggle that is now waged in the mountains of
Speaker 6: Kurdistan against the invading Turkish army. It is a continuation
Speaker 6: of the struggle against Dash in Iraq and Assyria, because
Speaker 6: ideologically there is no difference between Ardovan and Abba Baghadadi.
Speaker 6: Baghdadi first took Musul, and now Aldovan wants to invade
Speaker 6: Mussul too. Aldowan attacks all those places which have been
Speaker 6: hubs of resistance against Dash. He attacks Sinjar, he attacks Kobani,
Speaker 6: He attacks Candil Mountains, which are the home of those
Speaker 6: who inspired and organized the fight against Aj. On the ground,
Speaker 6: Erdogan's army is Dash in native uniforms, in native fatigues.
Speaker 6: In recent days, Arduan accuses Natenno of committing genocide against
Speaker 6: the Palacinians. Ntenno also accuses Erdogan of committing genocide against
Speaker 6: the Kurts. In fact, what these two men say against
Speaker 6: each other is is, to some extent right, both of
Speaker 6: them have been commissioned by the forces of capitalist modernity
Speaker 6: to eliminate two people, to eliminate the Curs and the Palatinians.
Speaker 6: What n'itanejo does against the Palacinians is exactly what Erdoonan
Speaker 6: is doing against the Kurts. What is needed is to
Speaker 6: draw the attention of the world's public opinion to the
Speaker 6: atrocities of Dugan's regime and the genocidal and ecosidal crimes
Speaker 6: he commits against the Kurdish people and their land, which
Speaker 6: is Kurdistan. The struggle in Palestine and Kurdistan are one struggle,
Speaker 6: the struggle of two people against genocide and examination. Both
Speaker 6: struggle needs support from the youth, from the women all
Speaker 6: around the world, from democratic forces, from intellectuals, students, unions, workers,
Speaker 6: from all people. People need to be united against Ardowan
Speaker 6: as they were united against Dash, as they are now
Speaker 6: united against the genocidal attacks in Palestine. The Turkish regime
Speaker 6: can be protested everywhere in many ways. Turkish goods and
Speaker 6: commodities can be boycotted because they are the source of
Speaker 6: funds for Ardowan's war machine, for Ardowan's genocidal army. The
Speaker 6: delegations can be formed and they can come to visit
Speaker 6: Kurdistan and see with their own eyes the extent of
Speaker 6: ecoside and genocide in Kurdistan. Free journalists can shed more
Speaker 6: light on the atrocities of Aardovan in Kurdistan. Revolutionary youth,
Speaker 6: revolutionary people, men and women can come and join the
Speaker 6: struggle in the mountains of Kurdistan. Kurdistan is your home.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 3: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 3: Thanks for listening.