Speaker 1: Foll Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's got to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions. Oh man, welcome back
Speaker 2: to it could happen here a podcast about it meaning
Speaker 2: bad things happening here, meaning you know here. Obviously, here
Speaker 2: at cool Zone, we have a little bit of a
Speaker 2: habit of talking about colts. Some of you who have
Speaker 2: been listening to Behind the Bastard since the beginning will
Speaker 2: remember how we kind of started that series with several
Speaker 2: long episodes about a guy named Keith Ranieri. And today
Speaker 2: we're here to talk with a wonderful author and journalist,
Speaker 2: Sarah Berman, who has written both about the next sim
Speaker 2: cult and about a new cult that some of you
Speaker 2: are probably familiar with if you if you caught the
Speaker 2: recent Netflix documentary Prime has a documentary out too on
Speaker 2: the Twin Flames cult, and so we're going to introduce
Speaker 2: why this is such an interesting cult, why it's kind
Speaker 2: of groundbreaking. But first, Sarah, welcome so much to the show. Graham, Hey, hey.
Speaker 1: So good to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Sarah, your book is called don't call it a cult,
Speaker 2: wonderful book about the next sim cult. And yeah, you were.
Speaker 2: You are kind of the person who first I'm not
Speaker 2: sure if you're the very first person to ever report
Speaker 2: on twin Flames, but you're certainly the person who broke
Speaker 2: the story in a in a meaningful and detailed way.
Speaker 2: How did you well? First off, we shul probably start
Speaker 2: with how would you describe twin Flames to people?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: So, twin Flames Universe began as sort of a YouTube
Speaker 3: channel and a Facebook group that was all about finding
Speaker 3: true love. So this group promises not only that you
Speaker 3: find your true love, but also that you will find
Speaker 3: career fulfillment and enlightenment and basically everything good will happen
Speaker 3: to you. Miracles will happen only if you spend thousands
Speaker 3: of dollars on their coursework and keep up with their
Speaker 3: sort of spiritual homework, which is a never ending treadmill.
Speaker 3: And eventually it sort of becomes, you know, an all
Speaker 3: powerful control over people's lives, where they go, who they
Speaker 3: interact with, even their life partner, even their gender identity.
Speaker 3: So yeah, lots of people calling it a matchmaking cult.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a matchmaking I mean. One of the things
Speaker 2: that I think is interesting to me about the kind
Speaker 2: of like rhetoric of the cult leaders, and this is
Speaker 2: one that there do seem to be kind of two
Speaker 2: people heading it up a couple, is the idea that
Speaker 2: like they have the ability to see who someone's soulmate is,
Speaker 2: and like that's a that's kind of a it both
Speaker 2: sort of. I think the Appeals has speaks to, among
Speaker 2: other things, kind of the deep loneliness that a lot
Speaker 2: of younger people feel, you know, as we're dealing with
Speaker 2: this kind of increasingly closed off, isolated nature of society,
Speaker 2: especially since COVID, as well as kind of mixing that
Speaker 2: with some of these you know, much longer standing older
Speaker 2: cult traditions in a way that felt really really interesting
Speaker 2: to me and also like something that could only exist now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally, Yeah, there's so much to impact there. So
Speaker 3: in their early days in twenty fourteen, this couple Jeff
Speaker 3: and Shelia. I mean Shellly is actually a Megan, but
Speaker 3: Shellia is the name she arrived at through some conscious journeying. Sure,
Speaker 3: they have these videos where they just met and they
Speaker 3: are in love and they are making eyes at each other,
Speaker 3: and this is something to attain. It was sort of
Speaker 3: started as this, you know, romantic YouTuber content, and then
Speaker 3: they start selling Yes, you can have this too. All
Speaker 3: you have to do is buy our you know, coursework
Speaker 3: and whatnot. And I think it does speak to, especially
Speaker 3: during the pandemic, a sort of deep dark loneliness in
Speaker 3: isolation that's happening where people are enticed by this couple
Speaker 3: who they're just regular, you know, Michigan white people.
Speaker 1: They're making eyes at each other.
Speaker 3: Doesn't look like anything special to an outsider, but clearly,
Speaker 3: you know, thousands of people have sort of.
Speaker 1: Lashed on to it.
Speaker 3: Have have, you know, hoped that this secret knowledge that
Speaker 3: this group is giving them, you know, will bring them happiness.
Speaker 3: And because it's sort of an all encompassing ideology where
Speaker 3: if you even question the group, well then you are
Speaker 3: definitely never going to see your life partner and we'll
Speaker 3: probably see hell at some point.
Speaker 1: In your life.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: It just creates this perverse incentive to just keep pouring
Speaker 3: time and effort into this group in a way that yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't think could exist in any other timeframe, especially
Speaker 3: not through Zoom.
Speaker 1: Right, So most of these.
Speaker 3: Classes that they sell are happening on Zoom, just like
Speaker 3: you and I are on today, So that you know,
Speaker 3: Naxium could never achieve, right, this group has achieved a
Speaker 3: level of you know, connection and I don't know, just
Speaker 3: getting into people's brain stems through a laptop screen, which
Speaker 3: is incredible for our time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very I mean again, this is part of
Speaker 2: what's so modern about it is that it appears to work
Speaker 2: entirely like cults, and particularly cult leaders tend to be
Speaker 2: such social phenomena. This is nearly always a thing that
Speaker 2: involves person to person contact, and in fact, one of
Speaker 2: the things any cult expert will tell you is a
Speaker 2: hallmark of a cult is it's the focus it puts
Speaker 2: on isolating members and perspective, members away from their friends
Speaker 2: and their family and keeping them under the power of
Speaker 2: the cult leader at all times. And this is very
Speaker 2: People are not all together, they're not all living in
Speaker 2: one area, They're geographically isolated. The dynamics that this reproduces
Speaker 2: itself with our parasocial dynamics, the same dynamics podcast listeners
Speaker 2: have with like like like you know, it's a more
Speaker 2: extreme version of that, but it's part of this thing
Speaker 2: we see with twitch streamers, we see it with like YouTubers,
Speaker 2: this kind of And it solves one of the mysteries
Speaker 2: because I've watched this stop with a couple of friends
Speaker 2: who kept being like, well, these people don't seem charismatic,
Speaker 2: they don't seem this doesn't seem like, it doesn't seem
Speaker 2: like they could be attaining this.
Speaker 4: Degree of control over people.
Speaker 2: And I think part of what explains that is just like, well,
Speaker 2: someone may not seem charismatic when you're watching little clips
Speaker 2: of them in a documentary, but when they're in your
Speaker 2: ears and you know, on calls with you and stuff
Speaker 2: all day every day, your body builds up like they
Speaker 2: get through your defenses that way. Like that's how parasocial
Speaker 2: relationships kind of work.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, Yeah, you just have the binging quality of how
Speaker 3: people consume media these days. And it's the same for
Speaker 3: you know, YouTube rabbit holes that radicalize sort of right
Speaker 3: wing white men. So it's the same process these folks
Speaker 3: who I was speaking to, they were consuming up to
Speaker 3: ten even fifteen hours of this content per day, and
Speaker 3: they were feeling like they had to keep up with
Speaker 3: that just to maintain their coaching title or what have you. So, yes,
Speaker 3: they have Jeff inside their head at all times.
Speaker 1: They start speaking like him.
Speaker 3: You know, you can kind of tell when an still
Speaker 3: involved member emails you that it sounds just like the leaders.
Speaker 3: It is a yeah, fully saturating, indoctrinating process, and I guess, yeah,
Speaker 3: you don't have to be particularly charismatic in person to
Speaker 3: achieve that kind of saturation when you have the YouTube algorithm.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, my YouTube algorithm is also ruined, so up on
Speaker 3: YouTube is looking pretty.
Speaker 1: It's yikes these days.
Speaker 2: No, I actually discovered a really effective method of for
Speaker 2: my own research in various cults, which is I just
Speaker 2: used my roommate's YouTube premium account, So I have ruined
Speaker 2: his life. But it's not a problem for me. So
Speaker 2: it's it's worked out really well, is what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: I mean, I might try that solution, but I live
Speaker 3: with my you know, partners, so.
Speaker 1: You might not appreciate that. We'll see how it goes, though.
Speaker 2: I'm kind of curious, how did you get on this story,
Speaker 2: Like what was what was your backstory there?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I was in the depths still of reporting
Speaker 3: on Nexium. I don't believe the sentencing for Keith Ranieri
Speaker 3: had happened yet at that point. So this was late
Speaker 3: twenty nineteen early twenty twenty. One of the mothers was
Speaker 3: the first to reach out to me, and she had
Speaker 3: two daughters who are featured in the Netflix series in
Speaker 3: the group, and she had told me that she was
Speaker 3: cut off from all contact, that the only contact she
Speaker 3: did have with one of her daughters was when she
Speaker 3: sent thousands of dollars. And so that to me right away,
Speaker 3: like you said, you know, isolating people from their family
Speaker 3: members who might you know, raise questions or you know,
Speaker 3: want to know more about what's happening, asking for money
Speaker 3: so blatantly, you know, in denying contact based on an
Speaker 3: amount of money sent, that all sounded pretty bad to me,
Speaker 3: and so I started looking into it. That mom pointed
Speaker 3: me towards Elle, who is also featured in the Netflix series.
Speaker 3: She's also Katie in the A Vanity Fair piece that
Speaker 3: later came out after our reporting, and it just sort
Speaker 3: of snowballed from there. I'll put me in touch with
Speaker 3: I would say half a dozen ex members. At that point,
Speaker 3: some different mothers started contacting me because they all were
Speaker 3: sort of in a group chat trying to figure out
Speaker 3: how they could re establish content contact with their mostly daughters.
Speaker 3: That was my origin story. We put out a piece
Speaker 3: fairly quickly. I tried to get it out within a
Speaker 3: month or two of that first contact.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well that makes a lot of sense, and I
Speaker 2: want to continue talking about this. We'll get into a
Speaker 2: lot more, but first it's time for an ad break.
Speaker 2: So here we go, ah, and we're back Mia. Did
Speaker 2: you have anything you wanted to move into next?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So there are some parts of this that are very
Speaker 5: familiar in the sense of the combination of Christianity and
Speaker 5: weird New Age spiritualism stuff I think is a pretty
Speaker 5: old combination. I mean, the mood is very famously sort
Speaker 5: of pioneered this thing, and you know, you can go
Speaker 5: back to eight hundreds and find versions of it. The
Speaker 5: thing that I think is interesting about it is the
Speaker 5: way that they've effectively been doing conversion therapy on people,
Speaker 5: and I don't know, this is something I haven't really
Speaker 5: seen before. From a cult, and I guess, I guess
Speaker 5: I think the way into this is talking about the
Speaker 5: sort of divine masculine, divine feminine stuff.
Speaker 4: For sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree that this seemed new and you know,
Speaker 3: sort of bizarre to me. And certainly I've already seen
Speaker 3: on Twitter some right wing takes on it that give
Speaker 3: me a lot of uncomfortable feelings because they're obviously taking
Speaker 3: the wrong opposite lesson. You know, when I guess, when
Speaker 3: I watched this, I see, see you can't tell someone
Speaker 3: what their gender is. You know, it doesn't work, It
Speaker 3: falls apart, it doesn't make sense. But I think, yeah,
Speaker 3: something that's been taken away in some smaller circles is that,
Speaker 3: oh see, you can coach someone to change their gender,
Speaker 3: and that's you know, blame teachers, blame whoever for doing that.
Speaker 1: So this particular group does have.
Speaker 3: A divine masculine and divine feminine teaching that used to.
Speaker 1: Be a little more flimsy.
Speaker 3: So in the early days, they just said, if you're
Speaker 3: in a queer couple, it just means one of you
Speaker 3: has the more wearing pants vibe. You know, it wasn't
Speaker 3: supposed to literally translate to a gender expression.
Speaker 1: Or gender identity.
Speaker 3: But later on, when you know, you had this growing
Speaker 3: amount of you know, sis women who are.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're interested in finding.
Speaker 3: Their man, and that's not happening because, you know, the
Speaker 3: group makes it very hard to actually meet outside people.
Speaker 3: If you're on this constant treadmill of doing spiritual homework,
Speaker 3: you don't have time to meet you.
Speaker 1: People, and maybe when you talk about it, it's pushing
Speaker 1: people away.
Speaker 3: So eventually, in late twenty nineteen they started actually making
Speaker 3: pairings and to get around the fact that you know,
Speaker 3: folks said, well, that's not my you know, orientation, I'm
Speaker 3: not attracted to women, they started actually telling people, well
Speaker 3: that you're the divine masculine and actually, you know, you,
Speaker 3: going back your whole life, probably knew this all along,
Speaker 3: and we're just revealing something to you.
Speaker 1: And that sat the wrong way in.
Speaker 3: A lot of cases, and a lot of people left
Speaker 3: around that time, but they successfully paired up I think
Speaker 3: more than a dozen people around that time, and they
Speaker 3: continued to do pairings into twenty twenty, and some folks
Speaker 3: did come along on the journey.
Speaker 1: They did in.
Speaker 3: Some cases pursue top surgery and hormones and have changed
Speaker 3: their names changed their pronouns.
Speaker 1: It's yeah, it's not.
Speaker 3: Obviously, there are moms who are just barely coming to
Speaker 3: terms with this, and you know, they're not always using
Speaker 3: the right language, and they're a little confused, you know,
Speaker 3: and that confusion was often used as a reason to
Speaker 3: cut off all contact, you know, say hey, mom, you're transphobic,
Speaker 3: you know, and push them aside. And so I think
Speaker 3: it is new in some sense, but it's also very
Speaker 3: old in the sense that cults often create a brand
Speaker 3: new identity for people, right, Like new names when you
Speaker 3: join a cult is not a new thing. That that's
Speaker 3: something that a lot of you know, and changing hair, right.
Speaker 4: Shaving your heads, that's like one of the things exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I mean this is I guess an updated
Speaker 3: version where I mean it's kind of smart in a
Speaker 3: way that like people might be afraid to question it, right,
Speaker 3: Like you're hiding behind something that sounds very progressive and
Speaker 3: very inclusive, and that's what a lot of cults do,
Speaker 3: is they hide in very progressive spaces. But yeah, it's
Speaker 3: a lot. It's a lot to take in, and I
Speaker 3: definitely like to bring experts up to speed on this
Speaker 3: and get their perspectives because I don't know everything, you know,
Speaker 3: I can't possibly pretend to know what's in someone someone's
Speaker 3: heart and mind and body, you know, at any time.
Speaker 3: So everyone is just working through it. Like one of
Speaker 3: the experts in the documentary says, you know, some of
Speaker 3: these folks could have been transmit all along, but the
Speaker 3: way that they're being told to do it is concerning
Speaker 3: to say the least.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I mean, I think there's some interesting stuff
Speaker 5: with how they were able to do this, which is
Speaker 5: even before they started force to be transitioning people, there
Speaker 5: was this is I think the most trans people I've
Speaker 5: ever seen in a cult like this, Like the number
Speaker 5: of people who were trans going in was really high,
Speaker 5: and I suspect that was how they were able to
Speaker 5: sort of like like, you know, like one of the
Speaker 5: people in the documentary was talking about how she was
Speaker 5: like a transphoman. She was being basically like tokenized by
Speaker 5: the group as this like hey, we're like trans inclusive thing.
Speaker 5: And I wonder how much of the way they were
Speaker 5: able to do this is from basically taking the firsthand
Speaker 5: experience of like actual trans people and then like using
Speaker 5: that to try to convince people of this really weird
Speaker 5: sort of essentialist, like we've decided that you're the divide
Speaker 5: and masculine, so you have to transition to be a
Speaker 5: man now.
Speaker 4: Stuff.
Speaker 3: The origin story of it is you're right in reaching
Speaker 3: out to LGBTQ type communities. So folks like our Celia
Speaker 3: who you see in the documentary, and also Jesse who
Speaker 3: you see in the Netflix documentary, they were sent out
Speaker 3: recruiting in queer spaces, so any type of queer Facebook group, Twitter.
Speaker 1: User, you know, YouTuber.
Speaker 3: They were in the comments there talking about their twin
Speaker 3: Flame journey and talking about how queer.
Speaker 1: Inclusive it was.
Speaker 3: So they were actively doing that and it's fascinating to see.
Speaker 3: You know, you can go back through Twitter history and find,
Speaker 3: you know, how they were phrasing these things. You know,
Speaker 3: like that was their job basically to do outreach for
Speaker 3: the group in queer space is they also did lots
Speaker 3: of PTSD spaces, former military spaces. You know, they really
Speaker 3: like tried to find any slice of a person who
Speaker 3: might need a community, who might be lonely and sort
Speaker 3: of feed them into the group. And you're right, I
Speaker 3: think if you have a bunch of queer, open minded
Speaker 3: people in a space, there's a lot you can do
Speaker 3: with you know, suggestion, There's a lot you can do
Speaker 3: with a deck of tarot cards. It seems a lot
Speaker 3: of these, you know, gender conversions started with a tarot
Speaker 3: reading where they would just hold up a card that
Speaker 3: represented them or their supposed partner and you know, sort
Speaker 3: of building off of that. So it is it's new
Speaker 3: and old in so many ways because yeah, you're just
Speaker 3: using the divine to basically just dictate any aspect of
Speaker 3: someone's life. You know, what they eat, what they wear,
Speaker 3: they go everything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I mean it's also we're talking about like
Speaker 2: how how much of this kind of plays on loneliness,
Speaker 2: the fact that people are desperate for companionship, that particularly
Speaker 2: younger people are like dating less or more socially isolated,
Speaker 2: and like, if you want to push that up to
Speaker 2: the nth degree, you take a group of people who
Speaker 2: is under siege right now and so particularly having trouble
Speaker 2: like being safely out and around people right like, you
Speaker 2: give them what looks like it's a safe, welcoming community
Speaker 2: that's supportive of them, and if especially they have not
Speaker 2: had that, Yeah, it's it's I mean, it's deeply insidious
Speaker 2: and evil.
Speaker 3: I would say it's powerful stuff. I would say when
Speaker 3: I go on the Facebook group. You know, I'm block now,
Speaker 3: but when I could, it would you know, show folks
Speaker 3: really deep into a fantasy, you know, like they want
Speaker 3: a perfect life for themselves where they are openly welcomed
Speaker 3: with open arms, where the people that they care about
Speaker 3: care about them back, you know, and that's often not
Speaker 3: actually the case in their home life, but it seems
Speaker 3: to be real on this Facebook page, and they think,
Speaker 3: you know, if I just put in the work, this
Speaker 3: will happen for me. That straight guy who I'm into
Speaker 3: is going to come around and see that we're twin flames.
Speaker 3: And so yeah, it definitely also feeds into a bit
Speaker 3: of fantasy and delusion. That's you know, I think maybe
Speaker 3: a symptom of us being so isolated in our you know,
Speaker 3: pandemic brain spaces.
Speaker 2: Speaking of isolated shit, well, it's an AD, it's an
Speaker 2: AD break. I don't I don't know how anything it
Speaker 2: goes with that, But here's some ads. Ah, and we're back. Sorry,
Speaker 2: you've you've just encountered some of our classic incombatant AD transitions.
Speaker 2: But what's not incompetent is your reporting on this subject
Speaker 2: and I'm I'm curious as you realize how potentially a
Speaker 2: lot of what's going on in this cult, with this
Speaker 2: divine masculine divide feminine stuff, could, if not handled carefully,
Speaker 2: play into some really pernicious culture war stuff that's going
Speaker 2: on in the country right now. How do you kind of, like,
Speaker 2: how consciously did you sort of work to avoid that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is definitely something I'm worried about, is that
Speaker 3: this could feed into some sort of culture war talking point.
Speaker 3: And you know, you're seeing the seeds of that. If
Speaker 3: you search Twitter very deeply, you can find it. I
Speaker 3: guess X, I'm calling it Twitter. It's still Twitter to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's still Twitter.
Speaker 4: It's only acceptable dead naming.
Speaker 1: Speaking of dead naming.
Speaker 4: Yes, So.
Speaker 3: I definitely wanted to be as careful as possible, listen
Speaker 3: to trans people as much as possible, you know.
Speaker 1: So that's why our Celia was one of.
Speaker 3: The first folks that I talked to, And you know,
Speaker 3: she had just such an interesting understanding of this because she,
Speaker 3: you know, had transitioned before she came into this group,
Speaker 3: and she was able to witness so much of the
Speaker 3: coaching that was happening. And I'm just so grateful for
Speaker 3: someone who goes through that ringer and still is able
Speaker 3: to articulate what happened afterwards, because you know, not everybody
Speaker 3: comes around to understanding it as deeply as she did.
Speaker 3: So that was my main, you know thing, was I
Speaker 3: was going to listen to trans people and then yeah,
Speaker 3: I guess just trying to sort out what was the
Speaker 3: ideology of the group, how that was being you know,
Speaker 3: I guess executed, and yeah, just trying to come from
Speaker 3: this perspective that, yeah, nobody can tell you what your
Speaker 3: gender is and this is actually an example of that.
Speaker 3: It was hard to wrap my head around, and I
Speaker 3: still worry about it. I'm still worrying about my words
Speaker 3: kind of right now.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that was something in the documentary that like you
Speaker 5: could see the filmmakers kind of like you can you
Speaker 5: can see them kind of going back and forth between
Speaker 5: wanting to use people getting top surgery as this kind
Speaker 5: of like shock factor thing, but then also like at
Speaker 5: the same time being like wait, hold on, like this
Speaker 5: is you know, this is something that you can very
Speaker 5: very easily like be a right wing transphobe and just
Speaker 5: like take a clip of and put on the internet
Speaker 5: and be like hey, like we need to stop gender
Speaker 5: clinics from being able to do this.
Speaker 4: And I don't know. I think I.
Speaker 5: Think you've handled it pretty well, but I don't know,
Speaker 5: like this is this is something that is like I
Speaker 5: think like one of the important things is like this
Speaker 5: cult is ran by SIS people and this is you
Speaker 5: know what. I think it was a good decision for
Speaker 5: you to talk about it in terms of conversion therapy,
Speaker 5: because that's a lot closer to what's happening than people transitioning.
Speaker 5: And you know, I mean like it's I don't know,
Speaker 5: like I would say. The thing that's complicated about it,
Speaker 5: right is you know you it's you can't talk. It's
Speaker 5: really really it's almost impossible to like talk to the
Speaker 5: people who are going through this and get an understanding
Speaker 5: of what their sense of their gender is. I mean,
Speaker 5: like I've I watched a couple of the videos that
Speaker 5: they made and like, I don't know, it's it's it's
Speaker 5: really difficult to like it's it's it's easy to play
Speaker 5: arm tre psychologist with it, and I don't want to
Speaker 5: do that. And so yeah, I think I think you've
Speaker 5: been watch a difficult line, and yeah, I keep.
Speaker 1: My hands off that too.
Speaker 3: You know, like, I am not going to tell any
Speaker 3: one of those folks, you know, Gabe Ray, what's going
Speaker 3: on in their brains and bodies. I just do happen
Speaker 3: to know about the systematic sort of coaching that they.
Speaker 1: Were, you know, exposed to.
Speaker 3: So you know, for in the case of Jesse Hersey,
Speaker 3: she had months and months of coaching around letting go
Speaker 3: of her entire life, her entire identity starting over, let
Speaker 3: go of any image of what you think your twin
Speaker 3: flame could be, right, and so if you're doing that,
Speaker 3: you know, and eventually folks do sort of acquiesque. I
Speaker 3: think it's similar in a gender conversion coaching situation. Some
Speaker 3: people acquiesque, you know, they they get into a high
Speaker 3: pressure situation, they're being told who they are, They're being
Speaker 3: told there will be consequences if they.
Speaker 1: You know, go back to their normal queer selves.
Speaker 3: So that actually does get somebody to change, but in
Speaker 3: a beer based situation, so.
Speaker 1: I can speak to the coaching.
Speaker 3: But yes, I'm never going to be a person telling
Speaker 3: anyone what their gender.
Speaker 1: Is because we don't know.
Speaker 3: Hopefully, you know, they can break free of what I
Speaker 3: think is you know, pretty manipulative coercive practices and then
Speaker 3: they can tell us more about who they are.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I mean I think the other thing I'll
Speaker 5: say about that is like, well, I mean we know
Speaker 5: just on a societal level, that it's possible to force
Speaker 5: people to live as a gender that they're not and
Speaker 5: to identify themselves as that gender by systematic social pressure.
Speaker 5: And we know this because this is the story of
Speaker 5: like every transperson who's ever lived, right and totally you know,
Speaker 5: and like it sucks, like it really fucking sucks, like
Speaker 5: having someone force a gender on you. And I really
Speaker 5: hope that these people, like I hope these people.
Speaker 4: Find and.
Speaker 5: Find who they are and you know, whatever form that takes,
Speaker 5: that they're not being coerced into it, because like, yeah,
Speaker 5: and this is something I think that was in I
Speaker 5: think it was in the Netflix documentary that people were
Speaker 5: talking about. This is like, you know, in terms of
Speaker 5: people who could understand what this is like, like I
Speaker 5: think other trans people are probably some of the only
Speaker 5: people in the world who actually do, like even sort
Speaker 5: of understand what it's like to be forced to be
Speaker 5: a gender if that you're not. And so yeah, I'm
Speaker 5: hoping that this develops in a way like of solidarity
Speaker 5: and not of weaponization by right wingers.
Speaker 2: But I mean, I think you guys have done all
Speaker 2: you could reasonably do to avoid that, like the culture
Speaker 2: war is going to do with the culture war does.
Speaker 2: I wanted to get into Keith Ranieri a little bit
Speaker 2: and kind of how what went on with the Nexium cult,
Speaker 2: because he's a friend of the pod over here. We've
Speaker 2: talked a lot about the details of what he got
Speaker 2: up to. He's obviously probably the biggest recent cult in
Speaker 2: the US, and like US popular culture at least, you know,
Speaker 2: there's a couple other a little bit of other competition
Speaker 2: for that title, but not a ton And yeah, I
Speaker 2: wanted to talk to you a little bit about how
Speaker 2: some of how people's awareness of that because like, obviously,
Speaker 2: given the media environment, all the people getting pulled in
Speaker 2: by the Twin Flames cult were aware to some extent
Speaker 2: of cult dynamics and probably of this story of this
Speaker 2: cult that is not unrelated.
Speaker 1: Definitely.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So there is a bit of stories colliding. When
Speaker 3: you write about cults, there's only so many of them.
Speaker 3: Inevitably stories start to cross over. So I was still, yeah,
Speaker 3: covering Vnexium trial, and you know, folloout sentencings when this
Speaker 3: story came across my desk, you know, and even the
Speaker 3: first person who talked to me about it was like,
Speaker 3: I think it's similar, you know, I think their practices
Speaker 3: are similar. And sure enough, I go and look at
Speaker 3: this mind alignment process and you're right, it's it's kind
Speaker 3: of similar to auditing, and scientology is kind of similar
Speaker 3: to you know, what Nexium was doing.
Speaker 1: So it's.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the tools of manipulation are common across many of
Speaker 3: these groups. And I would say, you know, not just
Speaker 3: ex members of Twin Flames, but even potentially the leaders
Speaker 3: of Twin Flames have studied other groups, including Nexium. There
Speaker 3: is the detail in the documentary that Jeff actually made folks.
Speaker 1: In the group write an essay about why Keith R.
Speaker 3: Nieri was a cult leader but why he was not one,
Speaker 3: based on watching the vow inseduced. So that's just, yeah,
Speaker 3: a world's colliding for me. But yeah, I think Nexium
Speaker 3: has in some ways brought a certain underst standing. So
Speaker 3: some of the sources I was talking to, yeah, had
Speaker 3: an understanding of how that worked. And you know what
Speaker 3: made that wrong, what made that coercion? Twin Flames doesn't
Speaker 3: have as many of the aspects as nexiums, so they
Speaker 3: don't have a blackmail program, right, there's no branding in
Speaker 3: twin Flames Universe. And you know their diet plan was actually,
Speaker 3: you know, load up on calories, right, So there's some.
Speaker 1: Various differences that.
Speaker 3: You know, maybe Jeff studied and thought he could fly
Speaker 3: under the radar with that.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I don't know Jeff's motivations. He has only sent me long,
Speaker 3: rambling emails.
Speaker 1: He has never agreed to an interview.
Speaker 3: But yes, there's so much commonality, including the lawsuits that
Speaker 3: came out of this. So when I reported on this
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty, immediately after our first story, twin Flames
Speaker 3: Universe sent a bunch of threatening letters to all of
Speaker 3: who they suspected was cooperating with my reporting.
Speaker 1: So this was a group of some thirty five people.
Speaker 3: I definitely didn't interview all of them, but they were
Speaker 3: suspected collaborators. And it basically said, if you do not
Speaker 3: retract your story within twenty four hours and write a
Speaker 3: public apology, we are going to publish very damning information
Speaker 3: about you, and we might pursue a lawsuit. And this
Speaker 3: letter was not signed by a lawyer, you know, sign legit. Yeah,
Speaker 3: in reporting on it, which we did, and of course
Speaker 3: nobody retracted. But sure enough, a couple months after that,
Speaker 3: they did file a defamation suit against I want to say,
Speaker 3: seven or eight members and one mom, and of course
Speaker 3: that got thrown out. But that's the next you and
Speaker 3: playbook is sue, sue folks until they don't speak to
Speaker 3: anyone anymore. Right, So it's a silencing tactic and it worked.
Speaker 3: It really shook people up. I definitely wanted to give
Speaker 3: people space after that. Yeah, it was definitely deja vus.
Speaker 3: I guess to see that many lawsuits because there were
Speaker 3: two separate ones booth thrown out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, and that's like something I've had to
Speaker 2: like coach some some younger journalists and stuff through too,
Speaker 2: because it's a favorite tactic of a lot of terrible people,
Speaker 2: like send out legal threats and like, this is not
Speaker 2: legal advice. You should always consult a lawyer. But the
Speaker 2: vast majority of threats like that that are sent out
Speaker 2: cannot be backed up to any realistic extent. Again, don't
Speaker 2: ever assume that always consult a lawyer about this sort
Speaker 2: of thing. But like the fact that somebody sends you
Speaker 2: a we're going to sue you or like a ease
Speaker 2: and desist. Does not mean they can actually hurt you, right,
Speaker 2: It just means like for a lot of people, that's
Speaker 2: like a go to sort of thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it does evoke emotions in the.
Speaker 2: Netflix stuff, and it does mean you've got to reach
Speaker 2: out to a lawyer, which is scary, you know.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, thankfully we had vice lawyers that on that one.
Speaker 1: But I don't know.
Speaker 3: In the Netflix documentary, Jeff actually names me, you know,
Speaker 3: and tries to intimidate me by name. And that was
Speaker 3: actually cut from a much longer video, And I have
Speaker 3: to say, when it first came out, it did make
Speaker 3: me want a cuke.
Speaker 1: Now when I see it in the series, it makes
Speaker 1: me laugh.
Speaker 3: But it Yeah, you can really intimidate someone with that stuff.
Speaker 2: Sure, I think we should probably end on kind of
Speaker 2: talking about where things are now, because again, if you've
Speaker 2: watched the documentary, I think the thing that was brought
Speaker 2: up to me by a couple of people I know
Speaker 2: who watched it was like, so, wait, there's so just
Speaker 2: out there doing it. You know, we're used to when
Speaker 2: stuff like this gets covered, they're being some sort of
Speaker 2: satisfying narrative arc. They've been charged, they're in you know, prison,
Speaker 2: they're on the run, but this like they're just continuing
Speaker 2: to do cult stuff. And I think part of like
Speaker 2: one of the things that is unfortunate. It's just I'm
Speaker 2: not a law expert, again, but just from what I'm
Speaker 2: looked at, it's not clear to me that they've broken
Speaker 2: a law in a way that's going to be easy
Speaker 2: to come after them for.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So this is the interesting thing about Twin Flames Universe
Speaker 3: is it does sort of straddle this line between you know,
Speaker 3: it's not nexium.
Speaker 1: They weren't clear up, they.
Speaker 4: Haven't abducted people, Yes, exactly.
Speaker 3: They haven't risen to that level. Although there are folks
Speaker 3: who are in this group who believe they were trafficked,
Speaker 3: which is an interesting perspective because they weren't able to
Speaker 3: choose the person that they were having sexual contact.
Speaker 1: With, that they didn't even get.
Speaker 3: To control when or how that sexual contact happened. It
Speaker 3: would take I think, you know, a very ambitious prosecutor
Speaker 3: to take on that kind of case. But back in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty, some of these moms were already calling you know,
Speaker 3: the FBI and the local Farmington Hills Police Farmington Hills
Speaker 3: has been like, this is not our jurisdiction. If anything, like,
Speaker 3: go to the FBI. We haven't heard any particular updates
Speaker 3: from that, you know case. Certainly folks have said things
Speaker 3: to me that sound a bit like fraud. You know,
Speaker 3: wire fraud is a very broad concept. I don't know
Speaker 3: if that's actually the case. I am not a lawyer,
Speaker 3: I'm not a prosecutor, but definitely I think the filmmakers
Speaker 3: behind the Netflix documentary in particular, think that this is
Speaker 3: up to the FBI. They should be taking action, and
Speaker 3: they want their documentary to spur that action.
Speaker 1: So yeah, we'll see what happens.
Speaker 3: I you know, am as I said, not an expert,
Speaker 3: not a lawyer, but certainly a lot of the things
Speaker 3: that I've heard about sound very concerning and very similar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean and I yeah, it's tough because like
Speaker 2: I mean, I do I will say I would be
Speaker 2: shocked if there's not an active FBI investigation, purely based
Speaker 2: on how how popular the documentaries have been. Right like,
Speaker 2: that doesn't mean anything will actually happen, but at this
Speaker 2: point I would be shocked if they were not seriously
Speaker 2: looking into it. Just because it's like they're probably getting
Speaker 2: hassled by a bunch of people.
Speaker 3: Yes, and I mean it is a very culty thing
Speaker 3: that they also collect everything, you know, video of everything
Speaker 3: they've done.
Speaker 4: There's a lot to look into. Yeah.
Speaker 3: The Yes, the hard drive that one of the folks
Speaker 3: in the documentary named Keeley collected was really called the
Speaker 3: Holy Grail, right.
Speaker 1: Rynexium.
Speaker 3: For Keith Ranieri, his you know, damning evidence was called Studies.
Speaker 1: So I feel like this is the Studies hard drive.
Speaker 2: Yeah. In that case, Well, we'll continue to all look
Speaker 2: into this and excited to kind of see hopefully eventually
Speaker 2: some sort of justice being done, although that's always a
Speaker 2: lot to ask for out of the world. Yeah. Well, Mia,
Speaker 2: did you have anything else you wanted to get into.
Speaker 4: I think that's basically everything.
Speaker 2: Okay, And Sarah, did you have anything else you wanted
Speaker 2: to make sure to mention?
Speaker 3: Well, I would just like to mention that, you know,
Speaker 3: having a belief about something like a soulmate is not
Speaker 3: necessarily a bad thing. I don't want people to feel
Speaker 3: stupid for having weird beliefs. If you open your third
Speaker 3: eye and you know, believe your partner has been you know,
Speaker 3: in your dreams since birth.
Speaker 1: That's fine to me.
Speaker 3: I don't want to disparage that kind of persons. It's
Speaker 3: the systematic coersion that, you know, I'm particularly concerned about
Speaker 3: in my reporting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but yeah.
Speaker 3: Maybe you could check out my book it's called Don't
Speaker 3: Call It a Cult about the Nexium Case. You can
Speaker 3: follow me on Twitter Sarah Burns b e r MS
Speaker 3: not X I'm dead naming Twitter again. Yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 3: about it.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, everyone, that's been another episode of It
Speaker 2: Could Happen Here? Until next time. Why don't you go
Speaker 2: happen somewhere else?
Speaker 6: Welcome to It Could Happen Here? A podcast asked about
Speaker 6: stuff falling apart and how it can maybe come back together.
Speaker 6: I'm Garrison Davis. Joining me today is Mia Wong.
Speaker 4: Hello. Hello. So I don't know what this episode is about.
Speaker 4: I have been told the words David Graeber, and that's
Speaker 4: that's that's all I know.
Speaker 6: Gra Graber will will come up. So we've we've been
Speaker 6: we've had a lot of you know, upsetting stuff that
Speaker 6: that's been covered on the pod recently. It's it's it's
Speaker 6: not a it's not it's not a great time in
Speaker 6: the world. It's a lot of upsetting things happening, but
Speaker 6: I thought we we might get a small reprieve from
Speaker 6: all of the all of the uh real real world
Speaker 6: chaos and mayhem to talk about some fake world chaos
Speaker 6: and mayhem. And it's also the it's also you know,
Speaker 6: it's we are We are vastly approaching the holiday season,
Speaker 6: which means that I, I think next week am doing
Speaker 6: my yearly bat Man Returns watch party, which I am
Speaker 6: extremely excited about. Is it's gonna it's gonna be a
Speaker 6: fun time, which is it's probably it's probably the best
Speaker 6: Batman movie. Oh no, it's just the aesthetics. The aesthetics
Speaker 6: are unparalleled.
Speaker 4: But I'm discovering what this episode is about.
Speaker 6: But there is another Batman movie that's also set during
Speaker 6: winter time, which is also also very political, because Batman
Speaker 6: Returns is weirdly political. We have the Penguin running for mayor.
Speaker 6: It exposes the the corrupt core of our political system.
Speaker 6: And there is another Batman movie, also set during winter
Speaker 6: that tries to expose the corrupt core of the political system,
Speaker 6: which is Christopher Nolans twenty twelves and Dark Knight Rises,
Speaker 6: a not very good movie which which.
Speaker 4: I think we have.
Speaker 6: We have referenced before because there's this one essay by
Speaker 6: one David Graber which really gets into the film which
Speaker 6: we're gonna which we're gonna get to. But the reason
Speaker 6: why I actually put together this episode, or I wanted
Speaker 6: to do this, is because when I was at the
Speaker 6: Ghost Conference earlier this year in Seaside, Oregon, as you
Speaker 6: can listen to that two parter which came out last Halloween,
Speaker 6: I got a whole bunch of old magazines from this
Speaker 6: conspiracy talk radio host. Now I love collecting old magazines.
Speaker 6: I find them endlessly fascinating. We have this one from
Speaker 6: two thousand and three called Mkzine oh No. On the cover,
Speaker 6: we have a mind control, ritual abuse and political implications,
Speaker 6: the cult of National Insecurity. I've not flipped through this
Speaker 6: one super in depth before because I'm more taken aback
Speaker 6: by the other magazine I got from twenty twelve called
Speaker 6: Paranoia the Conspiracy Reader. On this cover we have beyond
Speaker 6: MK Ultra Satellite Terrorism in America, science fiction or space Faction,
Speaker 6: oh No, And Dark Knight Kill Programming, which is obviously
Speaker 6: the one we're going to be talking about here today.
Speaker 4: No is this the Sandy thing.
Speaker 6: No, no, this is this is this will briefly get
Speaker 6: into the Aurora mass shooting because this comes up in
Speaker 6: this in this article, I'm not going to get too
Speaker 6: into that's actually not the focus.
Speaker 4: I think I'm realizing.
Speaker 6: I'm confusing my, I'm confusing your There's actually no twelve
Speaker 6: mass shootings.
Speaker 4: No, there's that because there there is actually a Alex
Speaker 4: Jones conspiracy that there was predictive programming in the Dark
Speaker 4: Knight returns or the Dark Knight Rises.
Speaker 6: That's what this is going to be about. Oh okay, okay, okay, Yes,
Speaker 6: this is by discount Alex Jones, Clyde Lewis, who lives
Speaker 6: in power.
Speaker 4: God damn it.
Speaker 6: Uh. There's there's some pretty fun stuff in this issue,
Speaker 6: which we might get too later at the end to
Speaker 6: kind of close out all of our political mamba jomba
Speaker 6: that we will actually get into as well. But I
Speaker 6: I want to first look at how conspiracy theorists read
Speaker 6: this movie and how they read the political aspects of
Speaker 6: this movie, because this movie is obviously very political if
Speaker 6: you've seen it. We will we will get into some
Speaker 6: of some of the stuff, but I want to I
Speaker 6: want to talk about how these conspiracy theorists saw this
Speaker 6: movie because the way that they do political analysis of
Speaker 6: media is very different from the way actual academics and
Speaker 6: people who take this stuff seriously do political analysis of media.
Speaker 6: And I think there's an interesting juxtaposition there. So this
Speaker 6: is this is the cover page for this story.
Speaker 4: The storm is coming. Oh no, no, says one already
Speaker 4: off from bands start.
Speaker 6: Yes, yes, all right, so I will read a little
Speaker 6: bit from this magazine and then we can kind of
Speaker 6: talk about it and then compare to uh. To our
Speaker 6: our colleague David Graeber, As I was watching Christopher Nolans
Speaker 6: The Dark Knight Rises, I didn't know the political substance
Speaker 6: right away, which is a great way to start this
Speaker 6: because the film is so obviously political.
Speaker 4: This this movie like real whoever? Like this movie like
Speaker 4: starts with Bain literally saying he's going to occupy Wall
Speaker 4: Street and.
Speaker 6: Like seizing below see this is Wall Street. This, this
Speaker 6: is this is what we will soon be debated. But anyway,
Speaker 6: I only saw it as a bit of predictive programming
Speaker 6: and a believable scenario as to how it might all begin.
Speaker 6: In The Dark Knight Rises, Catwoman as Slida Kyle and
Speaker 6: Batman as Bruce Wayne, are dancing at a socialight gathering
Speaker 6: when Selena purs in his ear. There's a storm coming,
Speaker 6: mister Wayne. As it turns out, The Dark Knight Rises
Speaker 6: is a damning indictment of the anti corporate movement and
Speaker 6: the threat of social chaos it poses. Despite rallying people
Speaker 6: around their deceased hero Harvey Dent, the rich are losing
Speaker 6: their grip on Gotham City. Antagonist Baine played by Tom Hardy,
Speaker 6: and his League of Shadows rise up against the bankers
Speaker 6: and the elite billionaires like Bruce Wayne, and attack Walsh Street,
Speaker 6: savagely beating the rich while promising the good people of
Speaker 6: Gotham that tomorrow you claim what is rightfully yours. Bain's
Speaker 6: organized violence against the wealthy evokes the reality of Occupy
Speaker 6: Wall Street, but Bain is no Robin Hood. He is
Speaker 6: plotting a massive transfer of wealth through stock exchange after
Speaker 6: inciting civil unrest and taking control of cutting age weapons
Speaker 6: technologies whose algorithm can be directly traced to Bruce Wayne,
Speaker 6: software which will avail them from the fortunes of the rich.
Speaker 6: As the war between the people and the police in
Speaker 6: the Dark Knight rises indicates the predictive programming of statistical
Speaker 6: data could very well undermine the one percent and send
Speaker 6: them into the streets where the disgruntled will eat them.
Speaker 6: Fraudulent practices will be exposed, identity theft, credit card fraud,
Speaker 6: securities fraud, and a number of other practices that the
Speaker 6: elite do in order to bilk the poor out of
Speaker 6: their money. This is one interesting thing about these sorts
Speaker 6: of kind of conspiracy radio guys, how they're both against
Speaker 6: the elite but also fundamental also for the elite. Like
Speaker 6: this film is celebrated as being you know, like it's
Speaker 6: deriding the anti corporate occupy movement, which they hate because
Speaker 6: they hate they would dislike, you know, a left wing
Speaker 6: popular uprising.
Speaker 4: But in the end they.
Speaker 6: Actually prefer this corporate like illuminati to the actual alternative.
Speaker 4: Well, and it's it's it's interesting too, like the ways
Speaker 4: that they think that like rich people exploit people is
Speaker 4: through like credit card fraud is like that that's how
Speaker 4: you think rich people get rich.
Speaker 6: Like really, like all right, we are almost at the
Speaker 6: end here. Christopher Nolan's epic sounds the alarm of the
Speaker 6: advent of an organized puppet master anarchy that plans to
Speaker 6: topple the government by exposing and gutting the fortunes of
Speaker 6: the elite. In real life, it might look like an
Speaker 6: occupy in the streets, sands and evil drums soundtrack pounding
Speaker 6: out the perennial battle between the haves and the have nots,
Speaker 6: while the Dark Knight rises acknowledges the systemic inequality and justice.
Speaker 6: It is not the rich, but anarchy that is the
Speaker 6: bane of Gotham's existence.
Speaker 4: It get it.
Speaker 6: Nolan portrays the occupy anti hero Bane as a demagogue,
Speaker 6: ultimately seeking to speculate on legitimate grievances. And when Baine
Speaker 6: or hands the reigns of power over to the people,
Speaker 6: they really won't know what to do with it, which
Speaker 6: is something that never happens in the movie.
Speaker 4: By the way.
Speaker 6: Oh now this is at this point Clyde Lewis stops
Speaker 6: talking to the movie and instead talks about this bit
Speaker 6: of predictive programming in the movie, which has a few
Speaker 6: kind of aspects. Then there is the intriguing subplot that
Speaker 6: seemingly seeped into reality on the eve of The Dark
Speaker 6: Knight Rice's release, that a software company takes its findings
Speaker 6: to the Supreme court and exposes so called political heroes
Speaker 6: which would lead to riots and marauding shooters creating mass casualties.
Speaker 6: Imagine that intelligence is aware of the threat and issues
Speaker 6: a declassified memo from the Department of Homeland Security warning
Speaker 6: lawn Hosement that terrorists could be killing people in movie theaters.
Speaker 6: All that is needed is the catalyzing event and immediately
Speaker 6: the police estate is activated. Flash riots take place in cities,
Speaker 6: civil unrest, bruise under the radar. Truth becomes stranger than
Speaker 6: fiction as we examined the media stories surrounding the main
Speaker 6: story of the so called brainwashed low nut James Holmes
Speaker 6: opening fire in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, on
Speaker 6: July twentieth, twenty twelve, an allegedly killing twelve and injuring
Speaker 6: fifty nine others. Interesting use of the word allegedly there
Speaker 6: in regarding regarding the people that were killed.
Speaker 4: Oh boy.
Speaker 6: And then the next sentence is really where things pick up.
Speaker 6: Not only is James Holmes connected to the neuroscience super
Speaker 6: Soldier Peak Soldier performance experiments, but his father works for
Speaker 6: a software company that analyzes fraud. So I'm not going
Speaker 6: to actually read the next bit because it is just
Speaker 6: the ramblings of conspiracy brained lunatic who think that because
Speaker 6: the shooter's dad was a neuroscientist, that therefore his son
Speaker 6: must have been this victim of a super soldier program
Speaker 6: to brainwash you to activate the police state. Once you
Speaker 6: receive a bit of predictive programming.
Speaker 4: And the other I will I will get to.
Speaker 6: One other paragraph and then will be done with this article,
Speaker 6: because there's really not much more substance quote. The chilling
Speaker 6: predictive programming looming behind the dark Knight Rises does not escape,
Speaker 6: at least the unconscious of those watching. Bain, the leader
Speaker 6: of the fictional anarchist mob, decides to plant bombs in
Speaker 6: the Gotham underground, the final target being a stadium where
Speaker 6: the Mayor of Gotham attends a sports event. A young
Speaker 6: boy sings the national anthem with a British accent. Bain
Speaker 6: pauses to listen to the distinct voice, then says, Nott
Speaker 6: the Gerbers brigand after which the stadium is bombed and
Speaker 6: the mayor is killed in his reserved viewing box. Now,
Speaker 6: Clyde Lewis believes that this was a bit of predictive
Speaker 6: programming in order to prepare people for a mash casualty
Speaker 6: event at the London twenty twelve Olympics, which you might
Speaker 6: you might know did not happen, was not was.
Speaker 4: Not a thing.
Speaker 6: But he is convinced that this is part of some
Speaker 6: predictive programming to either trigger this event, or cover up
Speaker 6: this event, or allude to this event again, an event
Speaker 6: that did not happen. So that's, you know, as as
Speaker 6: as we're going to be talking about, you know, how
Speaker 6: people view mass uprising and political movements in media for
Speaker 6: the for the rest of this episode, this is how
Speaker 6: a certain sect of conservative does their own media analysis,
Speaker 6: which I think is a really is a really fun,
Speaker 6: really fun look into how their brains operate, sorting a
Speaker 6: very political film into these into these predictive programming boxes.
Speaker 6: But we will we will return to talk about the
Speaker 6: Virgin David Graber and the chad Mark Fisher.
Speaker 4: After this ad break, we are back.
Speaker 6: I am I am waiting watching for the rich to be
Speaker 6: thrown from their balconies as wealth as redistributed and a
Speaker 6: man in a very fancy coat takes over a sporting event.
Speaker 6: So I read almost every serious political analysis of the
Speaker 6: Darknight Races that I could find from fascists, from conservatives,
Speaker 6: from liberals, and from leftists and anarchists.
Speaker 4: Everyone agrees that.
Speaker 6: This film has some very very obvious occupy parallels. We're
Speaker 6: going to get into how much of those are actually
Speaker 6: kind of built into the film's production versus how much
Speaker 6: of those are more or less coincidental. Now, unfortunately for me,
Speaker 6: not actually unfortunately, because I actually do like Graber a lot,
Speaker 6: but his analysis was by far the best out of
Speaker 6: anybody else's in regards to this film, And unfortunately the schizoid,
Speaker 6: acid fueled chaos magic of Mark Fisher kind of paled
Speaker 6: in comparison to the precision of the anthropologist David Graeber
Speaker 6: in terms of their analysis of this film, but both
Speaker 6: of them had roughly the same opinion. Graber has just
Speaker 6: went into a lot more depth about how kind of
Speaker 6: this film actually politically operates. So I'll be mostly talking
Speaker 6: about in quoting from Graber, with a few things from
Speaker 6: Fisher kind of mixed in, and then we'll compare it
Speaker 6: to some stuff in Breitbart and The Daily Caller and
Speaker 6: a few other reactions from liberals who enjoyed the film
Speaker 6: too much and are are unwilling to kind of seed
Speaker 6: this conservative ground to Nolan's twenty twelve film, and I
Speaker 6: think this is actually really interesting to talk about this
Speaker 6: film this year after the release of Oppenheimer, which I
Speaker 6: think is Nolan's probably most politically mature work.
Speaker 4: And he has definitely grown a.
Speaker 6: Lot in the past ten years as a filmmaker, at
Speaker 6: least in terms of his his ability to get into
Speaker 6: politics in a way that is not just purely reactionary,
Speaker 6: where I think a lot of his early films are
Speaker 6: kind of absorbed by this reactionariness. And I think I
Speaker 6: think he has matured a decent bit, at least as
Speaker 6: a as a political filmmaker. So we will start with
Speaker 6: a paragraph from Graber quote Christopher Nolan's Batman, The Dark
Speaker 6: Knight Rises Not the title of the film is really
Speaker 6: a piece of anti occupy propaganda. Christopher Nolan, the director,
Speaker 6: claims that the script was written before the movement even started,
Speaker 6: and that the famous scenes of the occupation of New
Speaker 6: York Gotham City were really inspired by Dickens's account of
Speaker 6: the French Revolution. This is probably true, but it's disingenuous.
Speaker 6: Everyone knows Hollywood scripts are continually rewritten while movies are
Speaker 6: in production. And when it comes to messaging, even details
Speaker 6: like precise wording or where a scene a shot can
Speaker 6: make all the difference. Then there's the fact that the
Speaker 6: villains actually do attack the stock exchange. Still, it's precisely
Speaker 6: this ambition, the filmmaker's willingness to take on the great
Speaker 6: issues of the day, that ruins the movie. So the
Speaker 6: script was written well before Occupy started. Shooting for Dark
Speaker 6: Knight rices ended two months after the start of Occupy.
Speaker 6: Most of the shooting for the film took place before
Speaker 6: Occupy even happened. And now in twenty eleven, it was
Speaker 6: widely misreported that the movie was going to be filming
Speaker 6: at Occupy itself, which started from like I think something
Speaker 6: in the La Times which just got blown blown out
Speaker 6: of proportion.
Speaker 4: Was not true.
Speaker 6: They did shoot in New York, but they did not
Speaker 6: shoot at Occupy.
Speaker 4: Yap boblcause would have got run out.
Speaker 6: Probably now, leading up to twenty eleven, both Nolan and
Speaker 6: what became Occupy were on very similar conceptual roads. They
Speaker 6: were just leading to two very different places. The Dark
Speaker 6: Knight released in the middle of the two thousand and
Speaker 6: eight financial crisis, right after the two thousand and eight
Speaker 6: writers strike, ended, So there were a lot of class
Speaker 6: issues circling around in Nolan's bubble, so it made sense
Speaker 6: that Nolan's next Batman flick would tackle these things that
Speaker 6: rose to cultural prominence by the time he finished The
Speaker 6: More Patriot Act inspired at The Dark Knight Now, Nolan
Speaker 6: and other writers obviously saw economic inequality and corruption seating
Speaker 6: people's anger and the rising possibility of civil unrest, and
Speaker 6: that was put into the script and then it just
Speaker 6: happened two months before they finished shooting Now. Nolan also
Speaker 6: took a lot from the Tale of Two Cities. This
Speaker 6: probably more than anything else. The Dark Knight Rises is
Speaker 6: actually based on the Tale of Two Cities, a passage
Speaker 6: of which is read at the end of the film,
Speaker 6: and there's plenty of parallels to the French Revolution, including
Speaker 6: the storming of Bastille. There's actually two prison breaks inside
Speaker 6: The Dark Knight Rises. There is the release of Black Eight,
Speaker 6: and then there's of course when Bruce Wayne escapes the
Speaker 6: Giant Hole in the ground and frees the other prisoners
Speaker 6: as well. So still, throughout all of these kind of
Speaker 6: class issues that Nolan is talking about in this film,
Speaker 6: he still shows a deep trust of populism or at
Speaker 6: the very least feared how easily it could be subverted
Speaker 6: in a charged financial climate. I'm going to read one
Speaker 6: one quote from Fisher here. Quote when Nolan revived the
Speaker 6: Batman franchise in two thousand and five, the setting Gotham
Speaker 6: in the midst of an economic depression seemed like an
Speaker 6: achronistic reference to the superheroes origins in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 6: Two thousand and eight to The Dark Knight was too
Speaker 6: early to register the impact of the financial crisis. But
Speaker 6: The Dark Knight Rises clearly attempts to respond to the
Speaker 6: two thousand and eight situation. The film isn't this simple
Speaker 6: conservative parable that the right wingers would like, but in
Speaker 6: the end it is a reactionary vision, which I think
Speaker 6: is the fairest way to look at this film. But
Speaker 6: now we're going to go deep into Graver's analysis, which
Speaker 6: is by far, probably one of the best write ups
Speaker 6: on twentieth century superheroes and their role in American culture.
Speaker 5: It's my favorite by far. This is the one that
Speaker 5: I always like push on people when people talk about Marvel.
Speaker 6: Because yes, no, absolutely, I mean this is this is
Speaker 6: I say that you've referenced a lot on this show.
Speaker 6: I've been I've been going into a bit of a
Speaker 6: graver resurgence lately. I deeply enjoyed his essay on Puppets,
Speaker 6: which I'm going to respond to by writing an essay
Speaker 6: on why nihilists hate puppets and except the U and
Speaker 6: except the adversarial framing of the police. But that is
Speaker 6: a digression. Now we will we will get back to
Speaker 6: Graber's essay in the New Inquiry titled superposition.
Speaker 5: Oh the thing, the thing I want to mention here
Speaker 5: about this essays he wanted to Oh God, what was that?
Speaker 5: He wanted to call it on Batman and the problem
Speaker 5: of constituent power.
Speaker 4: But they wouldn't let him do it. So it's well
Speaker 4: superposition instead.
Speaker 6: This is that is certainly what it's actually about, is
Speaker 6: constituent power. Will we will get to that very shortly.
Speaker 4: So quote.
Speaker 6: Superheroes are a product of their historical origins. Superman is
Speaker 6: a Depression era displaced to Iowa farm boy. Peter Parker,
Speaker 6: a product of the sixties, is a smart ass, working
Speaker 6: class kid from Queen's Batman. The billionaire play Boy is
Speaker 6: the scion of the military industrial complex that was created
Speaker 6: just as he was at the beginning of World War Two.
Speaker 6: I will say the early origins of Batman are far
Speaker 6: divorced from that, but that is certainly what Batman has
Speaker 6: evolved into.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 6: These heroes are purely reactionary in a literal sense. They
Speaker 6: have no projects of their own, at least not in
Speaker 6: their roles as heroes. Almost never do superheroes make, create,
Speaker 6: or build anything. The villains, in contrast, are endlessly creative.
Speaker 6: They are full of plans and projects and ideas. Clearly,
Speaker 6: we are supposed to, at first, without constently realizing it,
Speaker 6: identify with the villains, after all, they're the ones having
Speaker 6: all the fun. Then, of course we feel guilty about it,
Speaker 6: re identify with the hero and have even more fun
Speaker 6: watching the super ego clubbing the errant id back into submission.
Speaker 6: This essay that Graber wrote is very Freudian. Craper makes
Speaker 6: a lot of freud references in this. I am not
Speaker 6: going to be getting into as much, but superheroes are
Speaker 6: also very very Freudian.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I want to say, thinking about this specific passage,
Speaker 5: or specifically the way that you're encouraged identify with the
Speaker 5: hero and then like that gets like that gets subverted.
Speaker 4: You're supposed to come back to the hero.
Speaker 6: So this used to be a kind of so to
Speaker 6: identify with the villain and then yeah, and then come
Speaker 6: back back to the Yeah. So and this is this
Speaker 6: works as like a conserv ave project of conservative ideology,
Speaker 6: and this used to be like an implicit thing in
Speaker 6: these movies. And then you get to Black Panther, which
Speaker 6: is literally well literally they just like that. That is
Speaker 6: just the like they stopped being subtle and we're like, hey,
Speaker 6: here's a guy who's an anti imperial list and then
Speaker 6: the ending reveal is, oh my god, he's actually evil.
Speaker 6: In terms of Marvel, I would say yes, I would.
Speaker 6: I think my two favorite superhero movies, which would be
Speaker 6: Tim Burton's Batman and Batman Returns, do the reverse of
Speaker 6: this where very obviously the villain is the main characters
Speaker 6: of both of those and Batman is really just a
Speaker 6: side character. And I think that was actually work better
Speaker 6: for this medium so much more. Oh yeah, but when
Speaker 6: it comes to Marvel, absolutely yeah, they're just like openly
Speaker 6: doing this now. It's really sort of like, yeah, this
Speaker 6: was what the second one's about.
Speaker 4: Two yes, yes, now.
Speaker 6: Grayber then talks about kind of what the project of
Speaker 6: these comic books were originally supposed to be, and how
Speaker 6: that kind of continues on today into pop culture.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 6: Politically speaking, superhero comic books can seem pretty innocuous. If
Speaker 6: all a comic is trying to do is tell a
Speaker 6: bunch of adolescent boys that everyone has a certain desire
Speaker 6: for chaos and mayhem, but ultimately such desires need to
Speaker 6: be controlled, the implications would not seem especially dire, especially
Speaker 6: because the message still does carry a healthy dose of ambivalence.
Speaker 6: After all, the heroes of even the most right leaning
Speaker 6: action movies seem to spend much of their time smashing
Speaker 6: up suburban shopping malls, something that many of us would
Speaker 6: like to do at some point in our lives. In
Speaker 6: the case of most comic book superheroes, however, the mayhem
Speaker 6: has an extremely conservative political implication. This is where we
Speaker 6: could start getting into God versus the people and using
Speaker 6: both of these things as constructs. Right, neither of these
Speaker 6: things really fully exist in a super material way. Both
Speaker 6: of these things are constructs quote unquote God, quote unquote
Speaker 6: the people. They both occupy a very similar ontological rule,
Speaker 6: and this is something that Graper gets into quote any
Speaker 6: power capable of creating a system of law cannot itself
Speaker 6: be bound by them. In the Middle Ages, the solution
Speaker 6: was simple. The legal order was created either directly or
Speaker 6: indirectly by God. The English, American and French revolutions changed
Speaker 6: all that when they created the notion of popular sovereignty,
Speaker 6: declaring that the power once held by kings and by extension, God,
Speaker 6: is now held by an entity called the people. The people, however,
Speaker 6: are bound by the laws. They are able to create
Speaker 6: the laws through those revolutions themselves. But of course revolutions
Speaker 6: are acts of law breaking, so laws emerge from illegal activity.
Speaker 6: This creates a fundamental incoherence and the very idea of
Speaker 6: modern government, which assumes that the state has a monopoly
Speaker 6: on the legitimate use of violence. It's okay for police
Speaker 6: to use violence because they are enforcing a law. The
Speaker 6: law is legitimate because it's rooted in the constitution. The
Speaker 6: constitution is legitimate because it comes from the people. That
Speaker 6: people create the constitution by acts of illegal violence. It
Speaker 6: all circles back on itself.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 6: The obvious question, then, is how does one tell the
Speaker 6: difference between the people and a mere rampaging mob, Which
Speaker 6: is a question that comes up all the time across
Speaker 6: the political spectrum from anarchists to fascists to liberals. This
Speaker 6: is a debate that still goes on. Is without the law,
Speaker 6: what is the difference between the people and just a
Speaker 6: lynch mob. Now Graber doesn't really give an answer to this,
Speaker 6: because this doesn't really have an answer. This is a
Speaker 6: very vague question, and kind of, as Graber points out,
Speaker 6: it's vague by design.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 6: The response by mainstream, respectable opinion is to push this
Speaker 6: problem as far away as possible. The usual line is
Speaker 6: that the age of revolutions is over. Now we can
Speaker 6: change the constitution or legal standards by legal means, this
Speaker 6: of course means that the basic structures will never change.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 6: And this is where kind of Graver talks about how
Speaker 6: the role of tradition has totally taken over the legal
Speaker 6: implications of our system. Here, how the US, which was
Speaker 6: you know, at once progressive in its electoral college and
Speaker 6: two party system, is now quite old fashioned compared to
Speaker 6: a lot of other you know, popular democratic countries. There's
Speaker 6: a good line quote we base the legitimacy of the
Speaker 6: whole system on the consent of the people, despite the
Speaker 6: fact that the only people who were ever really consulted
Speaker 6: on the matter lived over two hundred years ago in
Speaker 6: America at least, quote unquote, the people are long since dead.
Speaker 6: So now we have this situation that we have this
Speaker 6: idea of the legal order which comes from God, which
Speaker 6: then came from armed revolution, and now it just comes
Speaker 6: from this idea of sheer tradition. Now, there's obviously a
Speaker 6: lot of American politicians who would want to give this
Speaker 6: power back to God.
Speaker 5: But even then, I was like, it's really hard to
Speaker 5: actually do that.
Speaker 4: Like, even even governments that are.
Speaker 5: Very explicitly theocratic, like for example, like Oron, it's like, well,
Speaker 5: they still have elections and they still have this like
Speaker 5: the the notion of popular sovereignty belonging to the people
Speaker 5: is very hard to dislodge unless you're going to straight
Speaker 5: up impose a monarchy. And even a lot of the
Speaker 5: monarchies now are like, you know, they follow the European
Speaker 5: thing of like claiming to like derive the authority from
Speaker 5: the people or something.
Speaker 6: But we also we also have people like like Walsh
Speaker 6: and Michael Knowles who are like Catholic monarchists. Yeah, a
Speaker 6: lot of prominence in American culture.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's it's a like. I don't know. I
Speaker 4: wish them bad luck. Yes, that is, that's a little moderate.
Speaker 6: Thing I wish upon them. Back to Graber, quote for
Speaker 6: the radical left and the authoritarian right, the problem of
Speaker 6: constituent power is very much alive, but each takes dimetrically
Speaker 6: opposite approaches to the fundamental question of violence unquote. Now,
Speaker 6: I think this is something that has I'd be interested
Speaker 6: to see Graber revisit this idea.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 6: Unfortunately that cannot be the case, because this question of
Speaker 6: violence has certainly evolved a lot in the ten years
Speaker 6: in which he wrote this, both in terms of how
Speaker 6: the alt right operates, but also in terms of how
Speaker 6: the quote unquote left views violence as a necessary political tool.
Speaker 6: But getting into his analysis of the twentieth century, I
Speaker 6: think it is still fairly accurate.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 6: The left, chastised by the disasters of the twentieth century,
Speaker 6: has largely moved away from its older celebration of revolutionary violence,
Speaker 6: preferring non violent forms of resistance. Those who act in
Speaker 6: the name of something higher than the law can do
Speaker 6: so precisely because they don't act like a rampaging mob.
Speaker 6: For the right, on the other hand, and this has
Speaker 6: been true since the rise of fascism in the twenties.
Speaker 6: The very idea that there is something special about revolutionary violence,
Speaker 6: anything that makes it different from mere criminal violence, is
Speaker 6: so much self righteous twaddle. Violence is violence, but that
Speaker 6: doesn't mean a rampaging mob can't be the people, because
Speaker 6: violence is the real source of law and political order.
Speaker 6: This is why, as Walter Benjamin noted, we cannot help
Speaker 6: but admire the great criminal, because, as so many movie
Speaker 6: posters have put it, he makes his own law. After all,
Speaker 6: any criminal organization does inevitably begin developing its own, often
Speaker 6: quite elaborate set of internal laws. They have to as
Speaker 6: a way of controlling what would otherwise be completely random violence.
Speaker 6: From the right wing perspective, that's all law, ever is.
Speaker 6: It is a means of controlling the very violence that
Speaker 6: it brings into being and through which it is ultimately enforced. Now,
Speaker 6: I think this is also true of even certain aspects
Speaker 6: of the left, where we have we don't call them laws,
Speaker 6: we might call them like community guidelines or something, but
Speaker 6: we often actually do this same process, especially in the
Speaker 6: anarchist kind of formations that try to replicate gang formations
Speaker 6: like purposefully, we get this same essence that is developed
Speaker 6: in order to people might you know, reject these to
Speaker 6: the word police, but at least, you know, make some
Speaker 6: kind of structure that deems which violence is acceptable and
Speaker 6: which violence isn't. But back to Graber quote. This makes
Speaker 6: it easier to understand the often surprising affinity between criminals,
Speaker 6: criminal gangs, right wing political movements, and the armed representatives
Speaker 6: of the state. Ultimately, they speak the same language, they
Speaker 6: create their own rules on the basis of force. As
Speaker 6: a result, they typically share the same broad political sensibilities.
Speaker 6: In Athens nowadays, there's an active collaboration between the crime
Speaker 6: bosses in poor immigrant neighborhoods, fascist gangs, and the police.
Speaker 6: In fact, in this case, it was clearly a political
Speaker 6: strategy face with the prospect of popular uprisings against a
Speaker 6: right wing government. The police first withdrew protection from neighborhoods
Speaker 6: near the immigrant gangs, then started giving tacit support to
Speaker 6: the fascists for the far right. Then it is in
Speaker 6: that space where different violent forces operating outside of the
Speaker 6: legal order interact that new forms of power and hence
Speaker 6: of order can emerge. What does this have to do
Speaker 6: with costume superheroes. Well, everything, because this is exactly the
Speaker 6: space that superheroes and supervillains also inhabit. An inherently fascist
Speaker 6: space inhabited only by gangsters would be dictators, police and thugs,
Speaker 6: with endlessly blurring lines between them. Sometimes the cops are legalistic,
Speaker 6: sometimes they're corrupt. Sometimes the police themselves slip into vigilanteism.
Speaker 6: Sometimes they pursue the superheroes, sometimes they look the other way.
Speaker 6: Sometimes they help. Villains and heroes occasionally team up. The
Speaker 6: lines of force are always shifting. If anything new where
Speaker 6: to emerge, it could only be through such shifting forces.
Speaker 6: There's nothing else, since in the DC and Marvel universes,
Speaker 6: neither God nor the people really exist. Now, I think
Speaker 6: this is greater hitting on something that really actually does
Speaker 6: hit at the core of this whole genre is that
Speaker 6: this is the genre which is really only inhabited by
Speaker 6: the uber manch as this like governing body. Right, There's
Speaker 6: there really isn't the god in any kind of meaningful way.
Speaker 6: There isn't the people in any kind of meaningful way.
Speaker 6: There is just the super individual. The uber manch himself
Speaker 6: is what inspired Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel to create Superman.
Speaker 4: Like that.
Speaker 6: This is this is the origin of this entire genre.
Speaker 5: By the way, I want to I want to mention
Speaker 5: some some comic book nerds are gonna get very angry
Speaker 5: here and be like, Wow, there's some one above all.
Speaker 5: It's like okay, like God, like there there are there
Speaker 5: is technically God in this right, but like God is
Speaker 5: the thing that you can beat the crap out of,
Speaker 5: Like it's not God in the sense of like God.
Speaker 4: Ordained authority is blah blah blah blah. Like no, it's not.
Speaker 5: It's not the same thing this is. That's not what
Speaker 5: we were talking about. Please don't be pedanic in the
Speaker 5: comic cult.
Speaker 6: And I'm talking like as like a literary tradition. God
Speaker 6: does not operate as a significant role in these pieces
Speaker 6: of art like that that like that, like if you're
Speaker 6: gonna be looking at the genre as art for twelve
Speaker 6: year old boys, God does not operate specific crucial role
Speaker 6: in in this world's ontology.
Speaker 5: And it's funny too, because one of the things that
Speaker 5: happens after this is there's there's a thing called there's
Speaker 5: a thing called Occupy Avengers, and they make this attempt
Speaker 5: to bring the people.
Speaker 4: It's it's a shit show. It is awful it's so bad,
Speaker 4: Like it's well, and it's interesting to you because like
Speaker 4: anytime they try to so that, that was an attempt
Speaker 4: to bring in like sort of the people as like
Speaker 4: a left wing constitutive body, and that was a disaster.
Speaker 5: They tried to do it, Like they've tried to do
Speaker 5: it again. But the people exist as this sort of
Speaker 5: like very right wing like forced it is like they
Speaker 5: as like this bob that's constantly on the edge of
Speaker 5: sort of like destroying society whatever. And that's been like
Speaker 5: the most attempts to do it.
Speaker 6: No, there're certainly attempts to bring in like the American
Speaker 6: political system into various aspects of comics, whether that's like
Speaker 6: Lex Luthor being president, whether it's stuff like the.
Speaker 4: I know this stuff and I think it's called the.
Speaker 6: Mortal Hulk has has has a lot of politics.
Speaker 4: But that one's Wilde's.
Speaker 6: I do think Raber's kind of point here is still
Speaker 6: still still accurate.
Speaker 4: And rings true.
Speaker 6: I have one other paragraph from Graper then we'll kind
Speaker 6: of get into a little bit more more discussion.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 6: Insofar as there is a potential for constituent power, then
Speaker 6: it can only come from purveyors of violence. The super
Speaker 6: villains and evil masterminds, when they are not merely indulging
Speaker 6: in random acts of terror, are always scheming of imposing
Speaker 6: a new world order of some kind or another. Surely,
Speaker 6: if Red Skull King the Conqueror or Doctor Doom did
Speaker 6: ever succeed in taking over the planet, there'd be lots
Speaker 6: of new laws created very quickly.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and there was.
Speaker 5: Actually after he wrote this, there was an arc where
Speaker 5: Doctor dun successfully conquered the entire universe, and he did
Speaker 5: in fact do exactly that, which also one another w
Speaker 5: for common David Graber w.
Speaker 6: Which also does not last very long, because if if
Speaker 6: that happened for a while, it would make the story
Speaker 6: incredibly boring. Yeah, things doing things always return to the
Speaker 6: status quo. Which is also another crucial aspect of this genre,
Speaker 6: that things have to return to the status quo, which
Speaker 6: is something I will get to very shortly. Back to
Speaker 6: Grabor quote, although their creator would doubtless not himself feel
Speaker 6: bounded by them, superheroes resist this logic. They do not
Speaker 6: wish to conquer the world. Now, this is where I'm
Speaker 6: going to actually disagree slightly with Graber. He writes that
Speaker 6: superheroes quote remain parasitical off the villains in the same
Speaker 6: way that police remain parasitical off criminals. Without them, they'd
Speaker 6: have no reason to exist. Now, I'd argue that the
Speaker 6: police actually create the spectral category of criminals to justify
Speaker 6: their own existence. Yeah, criminals didn't create the police. It's
Speaker 6: the other way around, right, you can look at you
Speaker 6: can look at like the way even the past few years,
Speaker 6: police have been lying about inflated crime rates to justify
Speaker 6: their own increased funding. And now, obviously people always broke
Speaker 6: social norms, but if you're looking at the actual, like
Speaker 6: the actual like political class of criminal and the political
Speaker 6: class of police, this is like it's like everyone has
Speaker 6: done a crime, right, Like police commit more crimes than
Speaker 6: the average person, but they do not often get called
Speaker 6: a criminal. I'm talking about like a very political class
Speaker 6: that we call criminal, and this is something that the
Speaker 6: police create. And curiously, in the same way, most superheroes
Speaker 6: also pre date their respective supervillains, as it is the
Speaker 6: presence of the superhero that often births the adversarial supervillain.
Speaker 6: We see this across tons of superhero medias where they
Speaker 6: use example of how the superhero predated the arrival of
Speaker 6: these theatrical villains, and this is actually the superhero's fault, right.
Speaker 6: Is this happens in Batman, this happens in Spider Man.
Speaker 6: This is very, very common. We even see this in
Speaker 6: something like The Boys or The Watchmen, both of which
Speaker 6: target superheroes as a reactionary right wing tendency, which are
Speaker 6: aligned with the police and military. We literally have Homelander
Speaker 6: creating supervillain to justify his own existence, or super terrorists
Speaker 6: in The Watchman, the actual team predates the arrival of
Speaker 6: many super villains. So this, this is this is one
Speaker 6: one small nitpick I might I might say with this article,
Speaker 6: at least in terms of the like the the causality
Speaker 6: loop between superheroes and villains and criminals and police. Do
Speaker 6: you know what also pre dates all all of us,
Speaker 6: every every single person listening.
Speaker 4: We're gonna have like someone who's one hundred and.
Speaker 6: The advertising industrial complex predates every single one of you fuckers.
Speaker 6: The surrealists burst this hell hole of advertising, which tricks
Speaker 6: your mind via predictive programming, the witch to buy this
Speaker 6: fucking food box. Okay, we are we are back. We
Speaker 6: have returned to the status quo of our podcast, speaking
Speaker 6: speaking of which we're going to talk about returning to
Speaker 6: the status quo. So what what superheroes and the police,
Speaker 6: which are very ontologically similar roles in a lot of cases,
Speaker 6: what their end project is is that they seek to
Speaker 6: maintain what is and then seek out and destroy anything
Speaker 6: that threatens to alter our civilizational fabric. They they fundamentally
Speaker 6: are defenders of the status quo. That is, that is
Speaker 6: the that is the role of the superhero across almost
Speaker 6: all media. This is why if you had the powers
Speaker 6: of Superman, why are you just saving cats from trees
Speaker 6: and instead not fundamentally reshaping the world in something that
Speaker 6: is better. Now, this is a question that gets tackled
Speaker 6: by people like Grant Morrison and Alan Moore is to
Speaker 6: they often give reasons for why someone shouldn't do that,
Speaker 6: But still, this is this is a fundamental aspect of
Speaker 6: this genre is that these guys never really have any
Speaker 6: generative political project. They they are purely reactionary, and they
Speaker 6: purely are are are made to to hold up the
Speaker 6: status quo and always return to this single point from
Speaker 6: which they emerged, Back to grayber quote, they remain defenders
Speaker 6: of a legal and political system which itself seems to
Speaker 6: have come out of nowhere, and which, however faulty or degraded,
Speaker 6: must be defended because the only alternative is so much worse.
Speaker 6: They aren't fascists, They're just ordinary, decent, super powerful people
Speaker 6: who inhabit a world in which fascism is the only
Speaker 6: political possibility. Why might we ask what a form of
Speaker 6: entertainment premised on such a peculiar notion of politics emerge
Speaker 6: in the early to mid twentieth century America at just
Speaker 6: around the time that actual fascism was on the rise
Speaker 6: in Europe? Was it some kind of fantasy American equivalent.
Speaker 6: Not exactly. It's more that both fascism and superheroes were
Speaker 6: products of a similar historical predicament. What is the foundation
Speaker 6: of social order when one has exercised the very idea
Speaker 6: of revolution, and above all, what happens to the political imagination?
Speaker 6: So at this point Graver starts talking about how basically
Speaker 6: all power goes to the individual, but the individual who
Speaker 6: is embedded within a system. He discusses how the core
Speaker 6: audience for superhero comics are adolescent or pre adolescent to
Speaker 6: white boys. At least that was in the nineteen twenties
Speaker 6: or thirties, and forties, and roughly is still the case.
Speaker 6: It's that these comic books and now Marvel films, although
Speaker 6: unfortunately Marvel films have a much broader audience, but they
Speaker 6: are targeted to people who are at a point in
Speaker 6: their lives where they're like where they're likely to be
Speaker 6: both like the most imaginative and a little bit rebellious. Right,
Speaker 6: this is like, this is the twelve year old white
Speaker 6: boy is the thing that that this is targeting. So
Speaker 6: they're both very imaginative, they're a little bit rebellious, but
Speaker 6: they're also being groomed to take on positions of power
Speaker 6: and authority in the world. Right, They're about to transition
Speaker 6: to being fathers, share of small business owners, middle management.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 6: So this is what this genre is targeted towards. So
Speaker 6: what are they supposed to learn from these kind of
Speaker 6: endlessly repeating stories that are all very much the same story.
Speaker 6: One aspect is that imagination and rebellion will inevitably just
Speaker 6: lead to violence, right, And then second is like imagination
Speaker 6: and rebellion violence can actually be a lot of fun,
Speaker 6: but ultimately violence must be directed back against any overflow
Speaker 6: of imagination and rebellion, or else everything will kind of
Speaker 6: go into chaos. These things have to be contained. So
Speaker 6: this is why superheroes are only allowed. I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 6: gonna quote from grayper again quote their imagination can only
Speaker 6: be extended to the design of their clothes, their cars,
Speaker 6: maybe their homes, and their very successories unquote. Basically all
Speaker 6: of their imagination for the superhero is limited to commodities. Right,
Speaker 6: This is this is the fundamental aspect where that's the
Speaker 6: only acceptable outlet for your imagination. It's it's it's just
Speaker 6: with these it's just with commodity fetishism like that. That's
Speaker 6: that's the only possible way back to Graper quote. It's
Speaker 6: in this sense that the logic of the superhero plot
Speaker 6: is profoundly, deeply conservative. Ultimately, the division between left and
Speaker 6: right sensibilities turns on one's attitude towards the imagination. For
Speaker 6: the left, imagination, creativity and by extension, production, the power
Speaker 6: to bring new things and new social arrangements into being
Speaker 6: is always celebrated. It's the source of all real value
Speaker 6: in the world. For the right, it's dangerous and ultimately evil.
Speaker 6: The urge to create is also a destructive urge. But
Speaker 6: this is also what separates conservatives from fascists. Both agree
Speaker 6: that the imagination unleashed can only lead to violence and destruction.
Speaker 6: Conservatives wish to defend us against this possibility. Fascists wish
Speaker 6: to unleash it anyway they aspire to be, as Hitler
Speaker 6: imagine himself, great artists painting with the minds, bloods, and
Speaker 6: sinews of humanity. I think this is a really good
Speaker 6: distinction between conservatives and fascists in terms of how they
Speaker 6: view creative violence. And to get back to superheroes, I
Speaker 6: think this medium, as Graver points out, has this kind
Speaker 6: of built in essence of a guilty pleasure. It revels
Speaker 6: in the absurdity of both the costumed heroes and villains,
Speaker 6: all while still targeting and imagine which is too expansive
Speaker 6: to outside the norm as being the ultimate crime. This
Speaker 6: guilty pleasure aspect even applies to the great superhero satires
Speaker 6: like The Watchmen and the Boys, which we applaud for
Speaker 6: poking and prodding at the conservative superhero all while still
Speaker 6: reveling and watching the outlandish antics on screen or on
Speaker 6: the page. Now, Graver even applies this guilty pleasure aspect
Speaker 6: into explaining the kind of the conservative backlash to superheroes
Speaker 6: in the forties and fifties, particularly with the book Seduction
Speaker 6: of the Innocent, which kind of viewed superheroes as this
Speaker 6: weirdly fetishistic, kind of naughty impulse, which resulted in superheroes
Speaker 6: getting very sanitized and much more much more silly, much
Speaker 6: more campy, which which resulted in the fantastic nineteen sixty
Speaker 6: six Batman Show. But still it kind of it kind
Speaker 6: of points at this this this guilty pleasure aspect. There's
Speaker 6: there's something inherently kind of naughty about about viewing this material.
Speaker 6: All right, we are we are nearing the end of
Speaker 6: Graber's analysis here. Quote if the message was that rebellious
Speaker 6: imagination was okay as long as it was kept out
Speaker 6: of politics and simply confined to consumer choices like clothes, cars,
Speaker 6: and accessories, this had become the message that even executive
Speaker 6: Hollywood producers could easily get behind, which results in stuff
Speaker 6: like the nineteen sixty six Batman Show. And now leading
Speaker 6: us back into Christopher Nolan, we get this really good,
Speaker 6: really good paragraph from grab quote if the classic comic
Speaker 6: book is intensively political about Madaman trying to take over
Speaker 6: the world, but really psychological and personal about overcoming the
Speaker 6: dangers of rebellious adolescents, but then ultimately political. After all,
Speaker 6: then the new superhero movies are precisely the reverse. They
Speaker 6: are sensibly psychological and personal, but really political, but ultimately
Speaker 6: they go back to being psychological and personal. So this
Speaker 6: is me just ripping. Now let's take Batman begins right.
Speaker 6: We have Racial Gul who operates in this psychological role
Speaker 6: of a second father for Bruce right after Bruce's training
Speaker 6: initiation to the League of Shadows. Only then does Race
Speaker 6: reveal his political goals to destroy Gotham and rid the
Speaker 6: world of corruption. So this is like the psychological is
Speaker 6: the first bit, then it's actually political, and then by
Speaker 6: the end it actually it goes all the way back
Speaker 6: into being truly psychological. Now I'm gonna I'm gonna read
Speaker 6: one paragraph from Graver, which is only because it has
Speaker 6: a very funny oh two word combination. In the ritual Kobis,
Speaker 6: we learned that rayshal Ghoul, a character introduced telling Lee
Speaker 6: In in nineteen seventy one, is in fact a zerzen
Speaker 6: Esque primitivist and terrorist determined to restore the balance of
Speaker 6: nature by reducing the earth's human population by roughly ninety
Speaker 6: nine percent. None of the villains in any of the
Speaker 6: three movies want to rule the world. They don't wish
Speaker 6: to have power over others or to create new rules
Speaker 6: of any sort, unquote. And I just really like the
Speaker 6: term deservesi esque to describe the seventies racial ghoul, which
Speaker 6: is a deeply, a deeply brain poisoned way to.
Speaker 4: Describe a comic book.
Speaker 6: Likeliar. John Zergen is an eco anarchist writer who certain
Speaker 6: sects of kind of social anarchist theorists liked to make
Speaker 6: fun of.
Speaker 1: Think.
Speaker 4: I think Great Graver's most devastating thing about the Primitivest
Speaker 4: was calling them all Marxists, because they're the only people
Speaker 4: on earth who say it's a program, not a critique.
Speaker 4: It's very funny.
Speaker 5: I think like one of the things that's kind of
Speaker 5: going on here is like everyone who's writing about superhero
Speaker 5: movies is also trying to settle their own grudges a
Speaker 5: little bit.
Speaker 4: And oh absolutely grudges in this is like one of
Speaker 4: Graverer's grudges that he was like like he was tear gassed,
Speaker 4: like very very close to a lot of where these
Speaker 4: things were shot, like a month before, and his second
Speaker 4: grudge is that he had to spend the whole fucking
Speaker 4: nineties arguing with a bunch of primitivists. He's very annoying
Speaker 4: it because yeah, so that those are his grudges going
Speaker 4: into And.
Speaker 6: I do believe his his kind of framing of the
Speaker 6: Nolan supervillains of not really having any desire to rule
Speaker 6: the world as ringing true. They they really only want
Speaker 6: to like wipe the slate clean. I think Graber correctly
Speaker 6: identifies Nolan's supervillains as being primarily some form of anarchist,
Speaker 6: just a very peculiar type that really only exists in
Speaker 6: Nolan's imagination. Graber describes them as, quote, they are the
Speaker 6: anarchists who believe that human nature is fundamentally evil and
Speaker 6: corrupt unquote. I think this has taken to its most
Speaker 6: obvious extent in The Dark Knight, with the Joker, who
Speaker 6: openly claims affiliation with anarchy and fetishizes destruction. His sick
Speaker 6: and twisted imagination is the real villain, even with the
Speaker 6: backdrop of the film's kind of deceptive war on terror frame. Now,
Speaker 6: between the production of The Dark Knight and The Dark
Speaker 6: Knight rises.
Speaker 4: The funniest thing happened.
Speaker 6: The economy completely collapsed in two thousand and eight, and
Speaker 6: it wasn't due to an eco terrorist cult or a
Speaker 6: clown set on a total negation. Instead, it was bankers
Speaker 6: and finance managers in Wall Street Bros. Who became the
Speaker 6: obvious villains in their quest to maintain the lie of
Speaker 6: endless growth. Millions of people lost their homes and source
Speaker 6: of income. So in response, there was a whole bunch
Speaker 6: of popular uprisings that took place all around the world.
Speaker 6: Graver lists regimes being toppled in the Middle East and
Speaker 6: people occupying squares everywhere from Cleveland to Karachi trying to
Speaker 6: create new forms of democracy. So there's this resurgence of
Speaker 6: constituent power, right, and this imagination driven kind of radical
Speaker 6: and largely non violent form of resistance, at least here
Speaker 6: in the States. And this is the sort of political
Speaker 6: situation which superhero universes can never really fully tackle because
Speaker 6: it can't exist within their own weird ptology. To quote
Speaker 6: Graver or quote in Nolan's world, something like occupy could
Speaker 6: only have been the product of some tiny group of
Speaker 6: ingenious manipulators who are really pursuing some secret agenda. Why
Speaker 6: does Bain wish to lead the people in a social
Speaker 6: revolution if he's just gonna nukee them all in a
Speaker 6: few weeks anyway, it's anyone's guess. He claims that before
Speaker 6: you destroy someone first, he must give them hope. So
Speaker 6: is the message that utopian dreams can only lead to
Speaker 6: nihilistic violence. Presumably it's something like that, but it's singularly unconvincing,
Speaker 6: since the plan to kill everyone came first and the
Speaker 6: revolution was a decorative afterthought. In fact, what happens to
Speaker 6: the city can only possibly make sense as a material
Speaker 6: echo of what's been most important, what's happening in Bruce
Speaker 6: Wayne's tortured brain.
Speaker 4: Yeah it's a good line, which.
Speaker 6: Yes, yeah, because in the end, Batman and the police
Speaker 6: rise from the abyss. Literally in both cases, both of
Speaker 6: them are trapped underground. They both rise from underground join
Speaker 6: forces to battle the people occupying outside of the Gotham
Speaker 6: City stock Exchange. Batman fix his own death by disposing
Speaker 6: of this nuclear bomb, and Bruce Wayne gets to live
Speaker 6: happily in Florence with the criminal Selina Kyle. And then
Speaker 6: a new new phony martyr legend is born in the
Speaker 6: role of Batman and people of Gotham are returned once
Speaker 6: again to the status quo. I'm gonna read kind of
Speaker 6: Graver's final kind of overview of the entirety of this message,
Speaker 6: right like, of what this thing is really trying to convey,
Speaker 6: right quote. If they're supposed to be a take home
Speaker 6: message from all of this, it must run something like, yes,
Speaker 6: the system is corrupt, but it's all we have anyway.
Speaker 6: Figures of authority can be trusted if they've first been
Speaker 6: chastised and endued terrible suffering. Normal police might let children
Speaker 6: die on the bridges, but the police who've been buried
Speaker 6: alive for weeks can employ violence. Legitimately, charity is much
Speaker 6: better than addressing structural problems. Any attempts to address to
Speaker 6: such structural problems, even through nonviolent civil disobedience, really is
Speaker 6: a form of violence, because that's all it could possibly be.
Speaker 6: Imaginative politics are inherently violent, and therefore there's nothing inappropriate
Speaker 6: If police respond by smashing protesters' heads repeatedly against the
Speaker 6: concrete as a response to occupy, this is nothing short
Speaker 6: of pathetic. When The Dark Knight came out to this
Speaker 6: in eight there was much discussion over whether the whole
Speaker 6: thing was really just a vast metaphor for the War
Speaker 6: on Terror? How far is it okay for the good
Speaker 6: guys America? Obviously to adapt the bad guy's methods. The
Speaker 6: filmmakers managed to respond to these issues and still produce
Speaker 6: a good movie. This is because the War on Terror
Speaker 6: actually was a battle of secret networks and manipulative spectacles.
Speaker 6: It began with a bomb and ended with an assassination.
Speaker 6: One can almost think of it as an attempt on
Speaker 6: both sides to actually enact a comic book version of
Speaker 6: the universe. Once real constituent power appeared on the scene,
Speaker 6: the universe shriveled into incoherence. Revolutions were sweeping the Middle East,
Speaker 6: and the US was still spending hundreds of billions of
Speaker 6: dollars fighting a ragtag bunch of seminary students in Afghanistan. Unfortunately,
Speaker 6: for Nolan, for all of his manipulative powers, the same
Speaker 6: thing happened to his world when even the hint of
Speaker 6: real popular power arrived in New York. So that that
Speaker 6: is kind of the essence of Graber's view of this movie.
Speaker 6: I think it's pretty good. This is a This is
Speaker 6: a pretty a pretty solid take on this now there's
Speaker 6: obviously people who have opinions that are less good than this.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna read.
Speaker 6: I'm gonna read this this right up from from these
Speaker 6: two guys, Jeff Sprosse and Zach Buchamp, who argue that
Speaker 6: Batman represents this symbolic defense of liberal democracy, which I
Speaker 6: think is true. But the way that they go about
Speaker 6: their analysis I think is heavily flawed, Because yes, I
Speaker 6: do think he represents a defensive liberal democracy, I just
Speaker 6: don't think that's necessarily.
Speaker 4: A good thing. Yeah.
Speaker 6: So they talk about how fear is the kind of
Speaker 6: the core emotion across all of Nolan's Batman films. Right,
Speaker 6: we have in Batman begins fear and as it takes
Speaker 6: the form of Scarecrows, you know, one of the main villains.
Speaker 6: But we also have this terror of there being a
Speaker 6: powerful criminal underworld which overwhelms the power of political and
Speaker 6: social intitutions that are meant to address such criminal underworlds.
Speaker 6: We have Batman, in his role is to fight injustice
Speaker 6: by turning quote fear against those who prey on the
Speaker 6: fearful right Batman is this is this terrifying symbol meant
Speaker 6: to restore the balance of fear between the anarchic private
Speaker 6: underworld and the gutless public spear to quote Jeffinzax right
Speaker 6: up quote. In The Dark Knight, Nolan continues his examination
Speaker 6: of the terror of anarchy, as well as the potential
Speaker 6: for the state and allied institutions to abuse their enormous power.
Speaker 6: Bain and each of Nolan's other villains attempt to exploit
Speaker 6: fear for ideological projects, revenge or simple fun. Batman aims
Speaker 6: to channel it to make his opponents legitimate grievances subjects
Speaker 6: for debate in an orderly system, rather than through violent resolution,
Speaker 6: which is not what Batman does. That man punches people.
Speaker 6: Were we watching the same movies quote to entrust Gotham
Speaker 6: to heroes with a face, as he says in The
Speaker 6: Dark Knight, and to democratize Batman as a symbol that
Speaker 6: can be embodied by anyone. That it's not that Christopher
Speaker 6: Nolan is taking a side in our political debates. He's
Speaker 6: simply defending a particular system through which we address them,
Speaker 6: which is nonsense of A writer from Forbes said that
Speaker 6: this analysis is quote a beautiful rebuttal to those critics
Speaker 6: who viewed the film as fascistic or as a critique
Speaker 6: of left wing populism, Batman as the defender of liberal democracy,
Speaker 6: not of conservatism or liberalism, but the system itself from
Speaker 6: the forces of fear and chaos. Gotham as an examination
Speaker 6: of the frailties and pressure points that make this system
Speaker 6: weak in the face of the unexpected and uncontrollable. While
Speaker 6: there is indeed both praise for the role of civil
Speaker 6: society in these films, there's also a portrait of economic
Speaker 6: inn quality that provides the brittleness needed for men like
Speaker 6: Baying to truly succeed. This is not a critique of
Speaker 6: the government or private sector as so much as it
Speaker 6: is a critique of the frailty and fragility of our
Speaker 6: system and its institutions, and the power of symbols to
Speaker 6: combat this fragility, which is a deeply a deeply liberal analysis.
Speaker 5: It's not even good, Like I mean, this is the thing,
Speaker 5: this is the thing that really pisses me off about this.
Speaker 5: So the cadre of liberal intellectuals that we've gotten in
Speaker 5: the last like twenty years, it's like, look, you don't
Speaker 5: have to be like unable to form coherent and that
Speaker 5: like it is it is not a precept of liberal
Speaker 5: like of like liberal intellectualism, that you are unable to
Speaker 5: form a coherent argument or do any piece of analizable
Speaker 5: like they used to be able to do this, and
Speaker 5: then at some point, like after the War on Terror,
Speaker 5: they just stopped. Yea, Now all we have is like
Speaker 5: matt Iglesias and it's like these I.
Speaker 6: Think, well, like this is what Greaver talks about when
Speaker 6: there's like a fundamental incoherhearrance, And I think this is
Speaker 6: really exemplified by like the structure of The Dark Knight.
Speaker 6: Rices It's a very messy film. The pacing is bad,
Speaker 6: the plot is very convoluted. It's it's so it's so plotting,
Speaker 6: which is often Nolan's kind of biggest failure as a
Speaker 6: as a filmmaker in my opinion, it's it's it's very
Speaker 6: structurally just confusing, whereas The Dark Knight is actually pretty clear.
Speaker 6: It still has a few of those weird plot like
Speaker 6: super plotty elements, but overall it's it's it's it's much clearer.
Speaker 6: But in the wake of the War on Terror and
Speaker 6: then the financial crash, there's this fundamental incoherence that kind
Speaker 6: of seeps into everything. I have two final takes to
Speaker 6: read say. I know, I know we are getting along here,
Speaker 6: but I think it's important to look at what the
Speaker 6: conservatives and the fascist rite actually said about this movie,
Speaker 6: beyond just the conspiracy rattled ramblings that we started this
Speaker 6: episode with. This is from The Daily Caller twenty twelve.
Speaker 6: The film is sympathetic to the concerns of the poor
Speaker 6: and points out that some who achieve well don't earn
Speaker 6: it legitimately. But these themes disappear as soon as the
Speaker 6: hulking terrorist Baine takes over Gotham City. All that criminals
Speaker 6: are released, rich people are executed in sham trials headed
Speaker 6: up by Baines's lunatic friends, government officials and police officers
Speaker 6: are killed or captured. Bain claims that he is solving
Speaker 6: inequality by leveling the playing field, but his true plan
Speaker 6: is to perpetuate mass murder by setting off a nuclear bomb.
Speaker 6: In this way, viewers see a familiar story unfold, one
Speaker 6: that's reminiscent of communist and fascist revolutions in Russia, Germany, Cambodia,
Speaker 6: and North Korea. No matter how legitimate criticisms of the economic, political,
Speaker 6: and social order may be, any revolution that shatters the
Speaker 6: rule of law or eliminates the market entirely will necessarily
Speaker 6: results in greater inequality, suffering, and death.
Speaker 5: It's so funny you can tell how on the defensive
Speaker 5: they are, like in the way you've occupied because yes,
Speaker 5: you have.
Speaker 4: These people going like wait, social inequality is real, but
Speaker 4: if you try to do anything to.
Speaker 5: It, it's also so f This is this is the
Speaker 5: interesting thing about like I think I think the fundamentally
Speaker 5: incoherence of it politically is that they've tried to graft
Speaker 5: the French Revolution onto Occupy because like, yes, yes, the
Speaker 5: two things that Occupy resolutely refused to do was one
Speaker 5: have a leader and two like do any kind of
Speaker 5: mass violence, like arguably outside of Oakland, but that wasn't
Speaker 5: even like but that was like ok, in Oakland.
Speaker 4: Sometimes they fought the cops, like in New York, Like now,
Speaker 4: the only.
Speaker 5: Bank window in New York that was broken the entire
Speaker 5: time was I think it was a Bank of America
Speaker 5: window that was broken when a cop smash of protest
Speaker 5: just head through it.
Speaker 6: Like that's it's that's why, that's why I really don't
Speaker 6: think the darknet rices isn't about Occupy it just like
Speaker 6: it just isn't It arose from similar conditions that Occupy
Speaker 6: arose from. And then in its final two months of
Speaker 6: filming they did some parallels to Occupy, but it is
Speaker 6: much more about the French Revolution, especially in like beans
Speaker 6: like a vanguard, like he is a leader of this
Speaker 6: there is there's no but there's no such role in Occupy.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 6: During during the editing and final production of the film,
Speaker 6: obviously they realize that there is some obvious parallels here,
Speaker 6: which they do, which they did indulge in. But I
Speaker 6: mean most of the writing and the filming of this
Speaker 6: took place before Occupy. I think it just came from
Speaker 6: a very similar social place.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Also, though even as a French Revolution thing, it's incoherent because.
Speaker 6: It's like it's not like rose Beer got in there
Speaker 6: and was like this is all a secret plot executing beggars,
Speaker 6: Like it doesn't make any sense. It's like that's why
Speaker 6: it has that fundamental incoherence, right. Yeah, there's one other
Speaker 6: paragraph from the from the Daily Caller. Then we will
Speaker 6: read something from Breitbart, like the communist parties of real
Speaker 6: authoritarian states, Baine and his Cohurtz represent a new ruling
Speaker 6: class that pretends to care about equality and liberation, but
Speaker 6: in practice resorts to oppression and extreme violence. The film's
Speaker 6: good guys are Batman and the police officers of Gotham
Speaker 6: who bravely go to war to prevent Baine's genocide.
Speaker 4: These guys have, These guys have never had more than
Speaker 4: two thoughts like consecutively. It's purely impressive.
Speaker 6: If the political message of The Dark Knight Risis seems muddled,
Speaker 6: which it does, it's because real life problems can't be
Speaker 6: solved with Batman. There is no well funded superhero with
Speaker 6: a glut of fancy gadgets and moral incruptibility. No, A
Speaker 6: core part of these films is that Batman is morally corrupt.
Speaker 4: This is sorry.
Speaker 6: Nor are there villains in America as damning and transparently
Speaker 6: evil as Bane. The film doesn't offer much. The film
Speaker 6: doesn't offer much of a practical answer for what. The
Speaker 6: film doesn't offer much of a practical answer for what
Speaker 6: to do about inequality, social unrest or terrorism.
Speaker 4: Great great work, daily collar God. Now where do they
Speaker 4: find these guys? I guess I find these guys from
Speaker 4: failed actors. So makes sense.
Speaker 6: So you mentioned Bush as being an obvious villain well
Speaker 6: Breight part disagrees, obviously bright part disagrees. Here is here's
Speaker 6: our final take on The Dark Knight Rises. Quote Bain,
Speaker 6: a hulk of a man burning with resentment against a
Speaker 6: society whose only provocation is being prosperous, generous, welcoming, and
Speaker 6: content instead of miserable like him. That's not Bain's gripes,
Speaker 6: but anyway, in Gotham sewers, Bain recruits those like himself,
Speaker 6: the insecure thumbsuckers, raging with a sense of entitlement, desperate
Speaker 6: to justify their own laziness and failure, and to flaunt
Speaker 6: a false sense of superiority through oppression, violence, terror, and
Speaker 6: ultimately total and complete destruction. As expected, The Dark Knight
Speaker 6: Rises is a love letter to Gotham City. It's flawed
Speaker 6: but ultimately decent people. It's industry and generosity, all of
Speaker 6: which are by products of liberty, free markets, and capitalism.
Speaker 4: In other words, watch this movie in other words.
Speaker 6: In other words, just as The Dark Knight was a
Speaker 6: touching tribute to an embattled George W. Bush, who chose
Speaker 6: to be seen as a villain in order to be
Speaker 6: the hero, Rises is a love letter to an imperfect America,
Speaker 6: that in the end always does the right thing. And
Speaker 6: Nolan loves the American people, the wealthy producers who are
Speaker 6: more often than not trickled down their hard earned winnings,
Speaker 6: the workaday folks who keep our world turning a financial
Speaker 6: system worth saving because it benefits it's all, and those
Speaker 6: everyday warriors who offered their lives for the greater good
Speaker 6: with every punch of a clock. Nolan's love for this
Speaker 6: country is without qualifiers, and is symbolized in all of
Speaker 6: its unqualified sincerity, in the form of a beautiful young
Speaker 6: child sweetly singing a complete version of the Star Spangled Banner,
Speaker 6: just before Occupy attempts to fulfill its horrific vision of
Speaker 6: what equality really means. Nolan, Sorry, I can't.
Speaker 4: Like this.
Speaker 5: Is this one passage, this whole thing is. It's such
Speaker 5: a great explanation if you weren't around for for how
Speaker 5: the Trump guys just completely blew aside all of the
Speaker 5: old George Bush coalition because all of the George Bush
Speaker 5: guys were fucking like this. They all talked like this.
Speaker 5: It was this like absolutely insufferable, like since it's completely
Speaker 5: completely sincere nonsense, it's crazy. It's still all this ship
Speaker 5: because it fundamentally misunderstands Nolan's a filmmaker. He's purposely juxtaposing
Speaker 5: a British child that's singing the star spangled banner at
Speaker 5: a sporting event with this destruction inherent to America. He's he's,
Speaker 5: he is, He's making these things kind of combat each
Speaker 5: other like this is this is actually pretty good framing
Speaker 5: and this guy fundamentally must understands this. Nolan's genius is
Speaker 5: a filmmakers well, Nolan's genius as a filmmaker is, without question,
Speaker 5: the pacing, the editing, the performances, the humanity of the
Speaker 5: duc Knight Rises will be talked about for decades, which
Speaker 5: it doesn't. This is by far one of his worst films.
Speaker 5: This is widely seen as one of one of his
Speaker 5: worst films. The editing, pacing, performances are all heavily criticized.
Speaker 5: This is actually like a bad movie. I do like
Speaker 5: the juxtaposition of the star spangle banner at the sporting
Speaker 5: event with this like spectacle of destruction. I think that
Speaker 5: plays very.
Speaker 4: Well, but like that is this is come on, come on,
Speaker 4: like these are.
Speaker 5: The people who and this is this is the thing,
Speaker 5: this is this, this is why the sort of trumpest
Speaker 5: like the sort of sort of like ironic detachment stuff
Speaker 5: became so popular because these are the people who listen
Speaker 5: to Born in the USA and are like this rules
Speaker 5: this rue like this is this is this is about
Speaker 5: how America is good. And it's just like like these people.
Speaker 4: They have nothing. There's nothing going on with them. There's
Speaker 4: just just like there's nothing going on in their heads.
Speaker 5: They don't have any ideas whatsoever. They just have that
Speaker 5: like they just have this like reflexive flag warship stuff
Speaker 5: and that it's awful. It's it's like the whole fucking
Speaker 5: American right was like this. It's just like, yeah, Soland.
Speaker 4: Trumpy has just destroyed them.
Speaker 6: Because this is a really good example of nothing of
Speaker 6: the conservative political conditions that led to populace to takeover right.
Speaker 6: We have all of these guys who are lampooning populism
Speaker 6: and had this very like deeply sincere neo conservative outlook,
Speaker 6: which then got all got decimated in three years by
Speaker 6: Trump's very kind of basic childish rhetoric just just blew
Speaker 6: this stuff out of out of the water. I think
Speaker 6: this is all this stuff is a very fascinating snapshot
Speaker 6: into the politics of ten years ago. I know there's
Speaker 6: a lot of zoomers who listened to this who may not.
Speaker 6: It's been this politically kind of engaged in twenty twelve.
Speaker 6: All this stuff is a very good look at that.
Speaker 6: And I know this is too long, but the final
Speaker 6: final thing to just like that. We will return, as
Speaker 6: as all good superhero stories do, return to the status
Speaker 6: quo of my paranoia. Conspiracy Reader magazine, which also had
Speaker 6: a review for The Cabin in the Woods movie Uh,
Speaker 6: which it thinks is a secret Illuminati message about how
Speaker 6: there's secretly control rooms that are that are like navigating
Speaker 6: your entire life. There's like people in control rooms who
Speaker 6: are like controlling every every spect of your life. The
Speaker 6: Cabin in Woods was an ironic admission of this pretty good,
Speaker 6: Pretty good. Our technic credit controllers and manipulators are crass
Speaker 6: and evil pretenders, able to get off only spectacles of
Speaker 6: pain and torture. Pretty funny. There's some quite racist stuff
Speaker 6: in the middle, which is not not even gonna mention.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, that's the everything. It was like people were
Speaker 4: really racist. People are still really racist. People are still
Speaker 4: quite racist.
Speaker 5: Shit that like like you could say, ship back, like
Speaker 5: like people who are ostensibly liberals, would say shit back
Speaker 5: then that like would get you like thrown off a building.
Speaker 6: Today we have an article by someone who says, quote,
Speaker 6: my author worked with Jimmy Carter on the submarine one
Speaker 6: Killer and chased flying saucers for Project Blue Book, which
Speaker 6: is a fascinating article.
Speaker 4: Then it talks it also talks.
Speaker 6: About here that a cern is building a matrix, like
Speaker 6: you know, like the movie The Matrix.
Speaker 5: Fucking god we have when you do an episode about
Speaker 5: about the should what's the silliest thing we really should
Speaker 5: do an episode about certain conspiracies, because yeah, they are
Speaker 5: they are certainly quite amusing.
Speaker 6: There's one other aspect in this article that I wanted
Speaker 6: to mention.
Speaker 7: Here's the serns to Oh here it is here?
Speaker 2: What it is?
Speaker 8: This?
Speaker 6: It is in the Alister Crowley section of the article. No, no,
Speaker 6: you know, I I think we've actually suffered enough. I
Speaker 6: will I will let you imagine what this guy what
Speaker 6: this guy says about Alister Crowley, Hitler and beef Vendetta.
Speaker 6: Oh no, so I'll let you imagine what that says.
Speaker 6: Because we we've gone on too long. I'm happy you
Speaker 6: were able to join us in our deep dive into
Speaker 6: the twenty twelve disaster. The Dark Knight Rise is not
Speaker 6: very good movie. And instead, if you want to watch
Speaker 6: a Batman film about politics and Christmas, just watch Batman Returns.
Speaker 6: That's what I'm doing this week, So get your friends together.
Speaker 6: Watch Danny DeVito vomit black goo for two hours watching
Speaker 6: Michelle Feifer's Catwoman in a latex suit. It is much
Speaker 6: much better. So that does it for us today here
Speaker 6: it could happen here. I hope we lead a little
Speaker 6: bit something about constituent power police superheroes and how CERN
Speaker 6: is building a matrix and this predictive programming targeting the
Speaker 6: next Winter Olympics.
Speaker 9: Hello everyone, and welcome to it could have here podcasts
Speaker 9: about the world falling apart and people putting it back together.
Speaker 9: Today I'm lucky to be joined by Margaret Kildury. She
Speaker 9: is the host of Live Up The World Is Dying,
Speaker 9: a podcast what feels like the end Times? And we
Speaker 9: are going to talk about bug out bags, don't me, Margaret.
Speaker 4: Woo bug out bags or bill bags? Yes? Or I
Speaker 4: bet they have other names. Okay, wait, can I tell
Speaker 4: you my favorite? Yeah? I hate me? Okay, the First Preppers.
Speaker 4: I ever met were these like weird cool anarchists twenty
Speaker 4: years ago they had oh shit gear or OSG in
Speaker 4: their basement. I love that. But yeah, that's great.
Speaker 9: It's basically what you're talking about, Like, it's the it's
Speaker 9: the thing that you go for when things are going
Speaker 9: to shit.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9: And I think the reason we're talking about this right
Speaker 9: is A because it's entertaining. It's always fun to engage
Speaker 9: in hypotheticals. B Because we've got Margaret here, because she's
Speaker 9: very knowledgeable on this stuff, and that's what she covers
Speaker 9: on If the World is Dying. If you haven't listened
Speaker 9: to that podcast, you should.
Speaker 4: It's very good.
Speaker 9: It's got lots of like sensible preparedness focused content.
Speaker 4: It's a fair, fair summary. Muggret, I hope.
Speaker 8: So.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Our whole thing is that we're basically trying to talk
Speaker 4: about community prep I'm not the only host in one
Speaker 4: of three hosts. Yes, we try to talk about community
Speaker 4: preparedness rather than individual preparedness, or rather how the two
Speaker 4: are not at odds with each other, like how what's
Speaker 4: best for the individual is to be part of a
Speaker 4: functioning community, and how like the bunker mentality will get
Speaker 4: you killed. So one of my favorite things in the
Speaker 4: world is talking shit on preparedness done wrong. And since
Speaker 4: most of the preparedness space skews at best center right,
Speaker 4: but also far right, there's lots of it done wrong
Speaker 4: that we can talk shit on. Like, for example, this
Speaker 4: is me setting you up for.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, bug out bags there it is. Yeah, that's
Speaker 9: like a layup and a dunk basketball, understand it.
Speaker 4: We're really good at it.
Speaker 9: Yeah, there's nothing that we like more than sportsball.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay.
Speaker 9: So the reason we talk about this today is because
Speaker 9: I have done a lot of time recently in refugee
Speaker 9: camps helping out, helping people, feeding people, giving them blankets,
Speaker 9: playing with their children, doing all the things. And obviously
Speaker 9: everyone who who enters these camps comes with a bag, right,
Speaker 9: They bring a bag with them. They can generally have
Speaker 9: one sort of carry on size bag when they enter custody,
Speaker 9: and that's generally all you can carry when you're moving
Speaker 9: across the desert mountain ranges of Baja California and Serthern, California.
Speaker 9: And I was spend the day there and it was cold,
Speaker 9: and it was wet, it was miserable, and I was
Speaker 9: trying to keep people warm, and I was trying to
Speaker 9: build shelters all day, and I was trying to just
Speaker 9: do things along with my friends. Obviously, this is by
Speaker 9: no means a solo effort. It's a great group of
Speaker 9: people who you've all heard about if you listen to
Speaker 9: this podcast.
Speaker 4: We've been out there all day. And then I got
Speaker 4: back and.
Speaker 9: Just because I hadn't you know, had a difficult enough day,
Speaker 9: I lugged onto Twitter dot.
Speaker 4: Com at dot com day to get worse.
Speaker 9: Yeah, exactly, I thought, what can I do? Let's be
Speaker 9: pissed off at a fucking stranger on the internet you
Speaker 9: don't care about and you've never met, but you let
Speaker 9: them make you angry anyway.
Speaker 4: That's why that's what I did.
Speaker 9: I loved on, and I loved on promptly to be
Speaker 9: greeted by some prick with I guess not your fault.
Speaker 9: I supposedly didn't be a prick whatever. Someone someone who
Speaker 9: hadn't quite like, someone whose idea of preparedness was heavily
Speaker 9: influenced by the film Red Dawn and not by reality,
Speaker 9: which is like ninety percent of the people in that space.
Speaker 9: But this person had, you know, this this kit with
Speaker 9: a with a gas mask with a folding AR fifteen right,
Speaker 9: with one of those law tactical folding things, so you
Speaker 9: can like break the buffer tube with seven or eight
Speaker 9: magazines of ammunition. Like just like it just the sort
Speaker 9: of stuff that, yeah, sure you would need to do
Speaker 9: like one sustained firefight and then then what are you
Speaker 9: going to do? But like it just really struck me
Speaker 9: that the the juxtaposition between these two things that I
Speaker 9: have seen people have to quote unquote bug out or
Speaker 9: oh shit or whatever. I myself have had to leave
Speaker 9: a place where I was go to a refuge camp
Speaker 9: for a few days a few years ago, and I've
Speaker 9: never seen a situation where a folding assault right for
Speaker 9: would be that useful to me. And I have seen
Speaker 9: a lot of people who could really fucking use a
Speaker 9: sleeping bag or coat or a toy for their child
Speaker 9: because their child is crying, and bring any toys, you know,
Speaker 9: and lots of people don't have any preparedness stuff at all.
Speaker 9: That's fine, you know, we'll start somewhere, but like, if
Speaker 9: you're going to do this, I want you to do
Speaker 9: it in a way that might be useful to you.
Speaker 9: And so that is why I have asked Margaret Kiljoy
Speaker 9: to come and help me.
Speaker 4: And the right and the problem of course with the
Speaker 4: scenario that we discussed is that instead of having a
Speaker 4: folding ar, they should have a folding AK forty seven
Speaker 4: because then there's no need to break a buffert.
Speaker 9: Yeah that's okay, Yeah, yeah no, and you can scavenge
Speaker 9: ammunition from the Cubans. Yeah, I see what you're doing. Great, Yeah,
Speaker 9: yeah no.
Speaker 4: And although actually, if I was gonna deep into gun
Speaker 4: stuff and talk about how like people who are obsessed
Speaker 4: with AK forty sevens while living in the United States
Speaker 4: are also not doing preparedness right because anyway.
Speaker 9: Yeah yeah, and actually ak's break all the time. I
Speaker 9: have personally seen that happen, and you cannot, in fact,
Speaker 9: not maintain them at all.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and there's more parts available for a hares. But
Speaker 4: the point is that most of the time you don't
Speaker 4: need firearms for most crises. Many crises are made worse
Speaker 4: by having a firearm. And Okay, so, like a lot
Speaker 4: of your background is with refugee stuff, and you've had to,
Speaker 4: you know, escape to a refugee center, and you work
Speaker 4: in refugee situations all the time. One of my main
Speaker 4: backgrounds is that I lived out of a backpack for
Speaker 4: a long time when I was a crosspunk, right, I
Speaker 4: was a homeless hitchhiker who you know, hopped freight trains
Speaker 4: and slept under bridges and things like that. And I
Speaker 4: come from more of a position of privilege than a
Speaker 4: lot of people who do that. I chose to do
Speaker 4: it as part of an activism lifestyle and stuff, you know.
Speaker 4: And so I'm not trying to like get stolen valor here,
Speaker 4: but I spent a very long time living outside. And
Speaker 4: the people who live outside all the time, who have
Speaker 4: only a backpack know what goes in the backpack really well.
Speaker 4: And you don't see homeless people with guns, and it's
Speaker 4: not because they're not legally allowed to have them. People.
Speaker 4: I mean, well that's part of it in some situations, right,
Speaker 4: it's you know, you don't have a safe place of
Speaker 4: story and something. It is a lot more complicated, but
Speaker 4: like you're even talking about a group of people who
Speaker 4: often have to resort to violence to defend themselves and
Speaker 4: largely not using firearms to do it, because in most
Speaker 4: situations they're more trouble than they're worth. Because someone who's
Speaker 4: living outside is going to have to deal with cops
Speaker 4: all the time. Someone, And this is what you were
Speaker 4: talking about when when we were talking about getting ready
Speaker 4: for this episode. It's like, well, let's say you have
Speaker 4: your ear ar and you approach the border.
Speaker 9: Yeah, you're getting engaged really fast by like seventy five
Speaker 9: Border patrol guys who have been training their whole life
Speaker 9: for this. Not saying that they're particularly like a well
Speaker 9: trained or efficient, but they have been waiting for the
Speaker 9: one person with an assault rifle who they can fire
Speaker 9: at a very long time.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And the only purpose of having a firearm is
Speaker 4: if it makes you and the people that you care
Speaker 4: about more likely to survive.
Speaker 9: Yes, which is doesn't happen if the entire Border patrol
Speaker 9: is shooting at you, Right, that's bad.
Speaker 4: That's a worse time. Yeah. No, It's like it's like
Speaker 4: I always carried a legal knife, you know. Yeah, Like
Speaker 4: wherever I was, I have a legal length knife and
Speaker 4: that was fine. Yeah EF fishing.
Speaker 9: Yeah, look into knife flaws though before you before, like
Speaker 9: a knife flows in America almost as complicated as gun laws.
Speaker 4: And we live in California. You can have a cane sword, yeah.
Speaker 9: That's right, but I can open carry a large machete
Speaker 9: on my belt as long as I don't attempt to
Speaker 9: conceal it.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, regularly. I used to hitchhike with a machete.
Speaker 9: So yeah, yeah, yeah, I like there were times that
Speaker 9: I've been doing stuff with a machete.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, I needed. I was kind of a campaign
Speaker 4: I did actually once get a.
Speaker 9: I think it's a part ranger of someone like I
Speaker 9: was coming in from free diving and when you freedom
Speaker 9: if you always have a.
Speaker 4: Knife, because I've experienced this.
Speaker 9: Actually when you dive and you get tangled in fishing
Speaker 9: nets and your breathold diving.
Speaker 4: You need to get out so you don't die.
Speaker 9: Yeah, you have a knife and you cut yourself out.
Speaker 9: You're supposed to have that knife. So yes, yes, I'm
Speaker 9: supposed to have that knife. So yeah, you can open
Speaker 9: carry a knife. It just depends on the county. You're
Speaker 9: in a California, but in San Diego County, Okay.
Speaker 4: So to talk about bugout bags though, yes, what we
Speaker 4: do want them for is going to be different person
Speaker 4: a person. And what I recommend that any preparedness minded
Speaker 4: person or any person I hope more people become preparedness minded,
Speaker 4: is to think about the crises that could happen that
Speaker 4: are likely, and think about what you would want and
Speaker 4: how you would deal with them. And my argument up
Speaker 4: front is that this can reduce anxiety if you do
Speaker 4: it right, if you fixate on these things forever. Like
Speaker 4: a lot of people don't engage withparedness because they don't
Speaker 4: want to be anxious about it. They don't want to
Speaker 4: think about a forest fire.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: But if you I've said this before, maybe even on
Speaker 4: this show, I'm not sure. It was like when I
Speaker 4: lived in a cabin really in the woods, like I
Speaker 4: currently live in a house in the woods, but there's
Speaker 4: like a little bit of buffer. But I, you know,
Speaker 4: built a twelve by twelve cabin and like in that,
Speaker 4: I cut down two small trees and built a cabin, right,
Speaker 4: And so I worried about forest fire, and so I
Speaker 4: thought about what to do, which was make sure that
Speaker 4: I always had like you know, some sort of radio
Speaker 4: and or sell communication available to me, keep a bag
Speaker 4: ready with all the stuff I need, keep make sure
Speaker 4: that my car is half a tank of gas. And
Speaker 4: that's it. That's all I was going to do to prepare.
Speaker 4: There's more you can do. That's all I was going
Speaker 4: to do, so I stopped worrying about forest fire, and
Speaker 4: so I think, done right, a go bag or a
Speaker 4: bug out bag or preparedness in general can reduce our anxiety.
Speaker 4: And the thing that I think people get wrong is
Speaker 4: that for most people, moving over land by yourself and
Speaker 4: surviving in nature is not a likely reci response to crisis. Yes,
Speaker 4: there are some times where that will be true, and
Speaker 4: even like you're talking about, like working at you know,
Speaker 4: in the border, where people are having to like build
Speaker 4: shelters and things like that. But for most people, I
Speaker 4: don't even say put a sleeping bag in your go
Speaker 4: bag because size might be more important than that. Yeah,
Speaker 4: having other warm stuff and emergency blankets and things like that,
Speaker 4: I do absolutely advocate, you know, But then again, I
Speaker 4: often make sure that I have a sleeping bag around
Speaker 4: because I do live in the middle of the woods,
Speaker 4: and if my cars were broken and there was a
Speaker 4: bad thing, I would have to go over land ten
Speaker 4: miles to get anywhere.
Speaker 9: You know, Yeah, because RS situation is not the same
Speaker 9: as everything, and I think that's right.
Speaker 4: But for most people, I advocate that you think about
Speaker 4: your bug out bag as your get out of town
Speaker 4: for a weekend bag. It is the you live in
Speaker 4: a hurricane area. It is a blizzard's coming. It is
Speaker 4: your stalker X is in town and you don't want
Speaker 4: to be around. It is a I decided all of
Speaker 4: a sudden, I'm going to go visit my family and
Speaker 4: I don't want to pack. You know, it is just
Speaker 4: a it's you're more likely to spend a night in
Speaker 4: your car on the road somewhere, like in a blizzard.
Speaker 4: Let's say, you know, so, what do you need to
Speaker 4: spend the night in the car in your car in
Speaker 4: the snow, And the answer is not that much. You
Speaker 4: need water and you need warmth. Food is like great, right,
Speaker 4: yeah we can kind of. I mean, you should have
Speaker 4: a little bit of snacks to so you why not
Speaker 4: have snacks around?
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's in a stressful situation, having something to eat,
Speaker 9: it helps, it calms you down, It helps you deal
Speaker 9: with that stress.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And one of the other things that we were
Speaker 4: talking about is we're talking about how you know, Okay,
Speaker 4: so like the basic level that I advocate, I advocate
Speaker 4: actually even more than having like your your bug out
Speaker 4: bag is having a smaller pouch that is your emergency bag,
Speaker 4: and that goes into whatever other backpack or purse or
Speaker 4: anything else you're carrying around. And I actually like make
Speaker 4: these and distribute them to my friends and stuff. Oh
Speaker 4: here's a fun tip. If you're the prepper in your
Speaker 4: family or friend group when it comes time to holiday presence,
Speaker 4: if you give them preparedness stuff that has to be
Speaker 4: on top of whatever else you give them. I guess
Speaker 4: you can't just give them your weird niche stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 4: like you have to give them what they want, as
Speaker 4: well as the wind up radio, you know.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's fair if sad and you can't
Speaker 9: just recycle gear that you wanted to, try to just
Speaker 9: give it to your aunt till sent thing.
Speaker 4: I mean you can you just also give other stuff.
Speaker 9: You can just each a bad nissoor nephew or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 9: non binary, try sibling.
Speaker 4: So. I say that these emergency kits are three different things.
Speaker 4: They are a hygiene kit, because like the thing that
Speaker 4: I need the most often when I'm suddenly didn't prepare
Speaker 4: and I'm suddenly somewhere and I'm staying out late is
Speaker 4: like a folding toothbrush, right, or like some wet wipes
Speaker 4: in a packet, or you know, I don't know, like
Speaker 4: nail clippers or something.
Speaker 9: Yeah, like if you I'm a person who used insulin, right,
Speaker 9: So like I have a lot of bags insulin in
Speaker 9: and there it's in most of my bags because I'm
Speaker 9: up Shake Creek without it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it is better to have it, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And I'm very lucky.
Speaker 9: To have access to inculin and even have some spend
Speaker 9: what everyone does, because pharmaceutical industry is terrible.
Speaker 4: It is. Yeah, that's actually one of the hardest things
Speaker 4: when talking to people about preparedness is like getting more
Speaker 4: of your medication is very complicated, and a lot of
Speaker 4: the methods that people should consider are not legal, and
Speaker 4: I'm not going to advocate them.
Speaker 9: It is legal to buy medicine, I think for your
Speaker 9: own personal usage in countries that are not the United
Speaker 9: States when you're traveling there anyway.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, So you want hygiene, you
Speaker 4: want a basic first aid kit, like kind of on
Speaker 4: the like booboo kit level, right, which is as if
Speaker 4: it's like not important, but actually, like you just don't
Speaker 4: want Infections can get real bad. So you just want
Speaker 4: to make sure that you have the ability to clean
Speaker 4: a small wound and treat it right and uh, what
Speaker 4: is it. It's hygiene, it's medical, and then it's survival stuff.
Speaker 4: And for me, this is just like tiniest amounts of
Speaker 4: One of the cool things about preparedness is that the
Speaker 4: little first things you do are so much more likely
Speaker 4: to be useful than the complicated things later. Right, Like
Speaker 4: having a big lighter is so much more likely to
Speaker 4: be useful than flint and steel and fire starter and
Speaker 4: all of the bells and whistles.
Speaker 9: Yeah, do you left my flint steel? But you're right,
Speaker 9: it is, Oh, I exponentially more useful. Like I've been
Speaker 9: so like I've been at the border a week, right,
Speaker 9: people are called it's very windy. I have a flint
Speaker 9: steel in my truck. I have used that zero times.
Speaker 9: I have gone through an entire eight pack of big lighters.
Speaker 9: I've refilled my Zippo twice, given away all my lighters. Yeah,
Speaker 9: because yeah, when your code in fact, you're not inclined
Speaker 9: to start shaving little pieces off a large metal rod.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, And like I keep little bits of fire
Speaker 4: starter and things like that in the emergency kits. Basically,
Speaker 4: anything that is like light and cheap and useful goes
Speaker 4: into these kids. For me, you know, but the stuff
Speaker 4: that I prioritize is stuff like the first lighter is
Speaker 4: more useful than the second one, you know. Yeah, yeah, Margaret.
Speaker 9: Do you know what's probably not light, certainly not cheap
Speaker 9: and rarely useful gold?
Speaker 4: Gold.
Speaker 9: That's right yet gold, you've known it. But let's hear
Speaker 9: about gold. All right, we're back. That was an apercentth
Speaker 9: that you don't need. But Margaret was about to pivot,
Speaker 9: I think, to telling you some more things that you
Speaker 9: do need, right, So.
Speaker 4: Go ahead, Margaret. Okay, So tiny little emergency kit. You
Speaker 4: just put it in everything, and it's just like it's
Speaker 4: always useful, and it's like everyone I give these two
Speaker 4: is always a little bit like, oh thanks, And then
Speaker 4: about a year later they're like, oh I was at
Speaker 4: this protest and someone cut themselves or just some really minor,
Speaker 4: strange random thing. They're like, it always comes up that
Speaker 4: it's really useful that I have this tiny little flashlight
Speaker 4: in a bag always all right, yeah, your and and okay,
Speaker 4: so there's that. And then if you want, you could
Speaker 4: have a designated bug out bag and you keep it
Speaker 4: in the front closet or you keep it under your bed,
Speaker 4: or you keep it wherever is like kind of useful
Speaker 4: to you. Some people might keep them in their vehicles.
Speaker 4: That really depends on where you live. I wouldn't necessarily
Speaker 4: advocate it in a lot of places because vehicles are
Speaker 4: more broken into and also have more temperature fluctuations, and
Speaker 4: things like advil and like over the counter medications aren't
Speaker 4: like they don't do so great with like wild temperature fluctuations. Okay,
Speaker 4: so you get yourself a bag, and what kind of
Speaker 4: bag really depends on what you're talking about. Like we
Speaker 4: were showing each other our bags before it.
Speaker 9: Yeah, that's what a little insight into our interactions off mic.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and uh, and I'll describe mine, then you describe yours.
Speaker 4: I'll and I'll describe mine. You describe yours, and then
Speaker 4: say why you have it, and then I'll say why
Speaker 4: I have mine? Okay, you got this. I basically have
Speaker 4: like a regular day pack computer bag. It just a
Speaker 4: there's no waste bell, it's just it's designed hole the laptop.
Speaker 4: That's my bug out bag. What I have is a mystery.
Speaker 4: It's a thirty two liter bag.
Speaker 9: It's called a scree thirty two For those of you
Speaker 9: who want to be just like me, and I have
Speaker 9: it because I really like the carriage system. Mystery round
Speaker 9: Us is just like a yoke, so it carries like
Speaker 9: a frame backpack, but it isn't big and bulky.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's cool.
Speaker 9: I've used it, Like I think I've used this bag
Speaker 9: on every continent in the world apart from the Antarctic.
Speaker 4: Like, it's just a.
Speaker 9: Bag that I can put stuff in that is a
Speaker 9: size that it's not obnoxious, and it works for me
Speaker 9: for almost everything. I day hike with it, I go
Speaker 9: on urban nights with it. I use it as my
Speaker 9: carry on on the plane. Yeah, it's just a useful
Speaker 9: bag that is not covered in molly and multi caam
Speaker 9: and such things. Yeah, and I know it works for me,
Speaker 9: Like I've used it for a long time, and I
Speaker 9: know that it's suitable for my body with heavyweights.
Speaker 4: Yeah no, And like I love I love bags, and
Speaker 4: I will happily geek out about bags, and like that
Speaker 4: bag is a me too. It's pretty nice. And this
Speaker 4: is like my least favorite backpack, right, I have like
Speaker 4: other backpacks, Like my day hiking bag is like a
Speaker 4: twenty five leter you know, actually has a waste strap.
Speaker 4: And I like really like it, but I keep it
Speaker 4: packed with my day hiking stuff, you know, And so
Speaker 4: you do a lot of outdoor sports, yes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: and so it really easily doubles as all of that, right.
Speaker 9: Yeah, exactly, Like I'm you know, most weekends, you know,
Speaker 9: I try and sleep outside at least.
Speaker 4: Once a month.
Speaker 9: So yeah, you know, I just sort of have that
Speaker 9: stuff anyway, because it's part of my day to day.
Speaker 4: Life and mine is designed from the period of my
Speaker 4: life where I basically would go to whatever anarchist coffee
Speaker 4: shop was in whatever town and just hang out there
Speaker 4: and work all day, right yeah, and so like and
Speaker 4: I was like, and I used to have a bug
Speaker 4: out bag that was like a little bit bigger. It
Speaker 4: was like a tactical bag. It was a three day
Speaker 4: assault pack, you know, and I like perfect, And to
Speaker 4: be fair, I lived in a cabin in the woods
Speaker 4: and it was twenty twenty in the odds of major
Speaker 4: military crisis were much higher, and you know, but like,
Speaker 4: but right now, I'm just like, this is my bag
Speaker 4: that comes with me when I go to my friend's
Speaker 4: house or when I go see my family. And because
Speaker 4: it's the important thing is that you have the bag
Speaker 4: that is available, like it. The piece of gear that
Speaker 4: you have is always better than the piece of gear
Speaker 4: you don't have.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you don't have to save up two
Speaker 9: hundred bucks for you know, a mystery round you and
Speaker 9: I'll spray bag.
Speaker 4: Right, But if your thing is being outside all the time,
Speaker 4: like you know, you should have those things, right yeah,
Speaker 4: And okay, so what I put in my the Everyone's
Speaker 4: gonna have really different stuff in their bug out bag.
Speaker 4: But some of the lists that I have as my
Speaker 4: like kind of like core of it that I would
Speaker 4: recommend that most people would want to have some version of.
Speaker 4: And you should add things and we could talk about
Speaker 4: these things. Your passport and print copies of any essential
Speaker 4: records such as your animal's rabies vaccine card and medication
Speaker 4: and things like that. This is the stuff to help
Speaker 4: you ease bureaucracy as you move through the world. This
Speaker 4: is actually a thing you need to be careful with
Speaker 4: because then sometimes you don't want to bring your passport
Speaker 4: everywhere you go, right, you don't want to lose.
Speaker 3: It, you know.
Speaker 4: But if it's your bug out bag that's waiting for
Speaker 4: you in case of an emergency, I think that's a
Speaker 4: decent place to keep it. Yes, I agree. You want
Speaker 4: an encrypted USB stick with copies of all these important
Speaker 4: documents such as your driver's license, your passport, house and
Speaker 4: vehicle titles or rental agreements, insurance information, contact information for
Speaker 4: family and friends, vaccination records for your animals, and the like.
Speaker 4: It clearly shows that I have an animal and not kids.
Speaker 4: I'm sure there's other stuff that you would Yeah.
Speaker 9: I mean, this is just making me think of I
Speaker 9: ran into a guy the other day who had come
Speaker 9: to the US with his dog or a patrol wouldn't
Speaker 9: process him along his dog, so volunteers kind of looked
Speaker 9: after his dog while he was protested and then returned
Speaker 9: to his dog to him. Yeah, but now he's going
Speaker 9: to have to go through the process of certifying the
Speaker 9: dog's vaccinations.
Speaker 4: Maybe the dog will have to get them again.
Speaker 9: Luckily, he and the dog are on a road trip
Speaker 9: to their final home with the place where they want
Speaker 9: to live, where they're meeting up with friends and families,
Speaker 9: so that they're having a great trip across the country
Speaker 9: right now. Like, yeah, that just having easing that transition
Speaker 9: through bureaucracy by having those documents to hand, I'm sure
Speaker 9: would have been great.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and like, Honestly, the more I read about people
Speaker 4: dealing with refugee crisis and like, oh, I don't know
Speaker 4: the right to return various places, the more you can
Speaker 4: prove like the ownership of the stuff you own and
Speaker 4: things like that. Yes, yeah, it can be very easy
Speaker 4: to become like.
Speaker 9: I understand that lots of this bureocracy exists to make
Speaker 9: people legible and therefore taxable by the state. Right, if
Speaker 9: we're talking from an anarchist perspective, I understand why it exists,
Speaker 9: James Scott a lot recently. If that fair enough there,
Speaker 9: but I in a scenario where the state exists, which
Speaker 9: is the one we are in, then there are advantages
Speaker 9: to being legible and understendable by the state, and certain
Speaker 9: disadvantages to being eligible to the state when you're trying
Speaker 9: to get your house back.
Speaker 4: And even like again my time as a as a
Speaker 4: krusty traveler my twenties and into my thirties, the single
Speaker 4: most useful thing that I carried was my driver's license
Speaker 4: without warrants, because I used to have my ID run
Speaker 4: every single day. Because actually it's actually part of the
Speaker 4: reason I have a stranger version to carrying a hiking
Speaker 4: style backpack around often is because I learned when you
Speaker 4: look like a punk and you have a travel like
Speaker 4: a hiking backpack, you are now the cops main target. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 4: yeah yeah, and so like whereas when I have like
Speaker 4: a computer bag, I'm not the cops main target, and
Speaker 4: that makes my life fasier, you know. Okay, small amounts
Speaker 4: of emergency food, such as protein bars that you want
Speaker 4: to like, swap out every couple of months. I recommend
Speaker 4: putting in the ones that you don't like because otherwise
Speaker 4: you'll eat them, because otherwise you'll be like, oh, I
Speaker 4: could go tasty snack.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, this is sorry. Just before we recorded a
Speaker 9: bar from this bag that I've been showing you.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9: There's a product called a Humanitarian Daily Ration, which is
Speaker 9: a vegan emory.
Speaker 4: That they give to refugees. Oh wow, yeah, there's great.
Speaker 4: Everyone can eat them.
Speaker 9: Yeah, They're very good to have, and I have those
Speaker 9: for emergency food because if one can eat them, ready,
Speaker 9: do I feel like I want to eat them?
Speaker 4: So yeah, I've been recently keeping I haven't eaten one yet.
Speaker 4: I've been keeping these flavorless emergency ration bars, like the
Speaker 4: lifeboat rations. Yeah, they're just like I think like oil
Speaker 4: and sugar and flour or something. Oh sounds yeah, and
Speaker 4: it's like, you know what, it's three days worth of
Speaker 4: food at twelve hundred calories a day, barely three but whatever. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 4: So I recommend having that and you know, making sure
Speaker 4: to swap that out. Overall, I advocate not putting in
Speaker 4: things that will go bad, because you are going to
Speaker 4: forget about this until it becomes a habit for you
Speaker 4: to check it every month or so. Yeah. Okay. A
Speaker 4: travel hygiene kit with toothbrush, floss, toothpaste, moist tallets, foam
Speaker 4: ear plugs for sleeping in noisy environments. That one is
Speaker 4: like way more. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I am.
Speaker 9: And it's a time in my life when I was
Speaker 9: mostly living in my car, traveling around France racing bicycles.
Speaker 9: I got caught in a snowstorm along with a number
Speaker 9: of other people who were traveling in various vehicles, and
Speaker 9: some of them were traveling in order to make an
Speaker 9: asylum claim, and we all got to this refugee camp
Speaker 9: where basically we're sleeping on the floor of a large building.
Speaker 4: And I did not sleep for.
Speaker 9: Days because people had children and you know, it's loud,
Speaker 9: and like, yeah, those air plugs would have been the
Speaker 9: most important thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah. And it was like I actually started carrying
Speaker 4: them just because of going to shows when I used
Speaker 4: to do that more. And then I was like, oh,
Speaker 4: these are really useful in all kinds of situations. They
Speaker 4: cost like nothing and they save your hearing. The bang
Speaker 4: for your buck, the non bang for your buck is
Speaker 4: very good. Yeah, the buck is great. Uh, nail clippers,
Speaker 4: your daily wear, makeup, and anything else you might need
Speaker 4: to goes in your hygiene kid, any prescription or over
Speaker 4: the counter medications that you rely on. And one thing
Speaker 4: that came up from a doctor friend of mine recommended.
Speaker 4: When I was first started making these kids for my friends,
Speaker 4: I was like buying bulk aspirin and putting it into
Speaker 4: little drug baggies you know, yeah, smut. And my friend
Speaker 4: was like, you need to put blister packs in instead
Speaker 4: blister packs being the like little yeah, individually individually labeled ones. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 4: to explain this thing, yeah, yeah, we're professionals. Yeah, because
Speaker 4: the police have less cause for suspicion if you were
Speaker 4: certain and this is clearly advil, it says, so it
Speaker 4: is packaged in a way that is not convenient for
Speaker 4: people to make their own packages. Yeah, and so and
Speaker 4: actually it's funny is that of all the ones that
Speaker 4: I put into people's things, the only thing I haven't
Speaker 4: been able to get blister packed is caffeine. Because I
Speaker 4: put caffeine into these things because a lot of people
Speaker 4: are addicted to it, and also because it's useful to
Speaker 4: be able to stay awake in certain environments. And so
Speaker 4: I actually put in like different like caffeine powder drinks
Speaker 4: or caffeine gum or other things. Yes, yeah, it's going
Speaker 4: to say, get MRI caffeine gum. Yeah. And then also
Speaker 4: and I give them to my friends who are about
Speaker 4: to drive sleepy. Is like yes, And that's the main
Speaker 4: use that I have had. It's amazing. I don't drink caffeine.
Speaker 4: It's amazing how much caffeine I have on me at
Speaker 4: any given time. Yeah, A change of socks and underwear,
Speaker 4: and these should be like climate appropriate, especially like wool
Speaker 4: socks are like the most useful thing in the world.
Speaker 4: Just as a general rule, I think that a packable
Speaker 4: range jacket and or poncho is incredibly useful here. A
Speaker 4: lot of people like the ponchos that are sort of
Speaker 4: a slightly more military style because you can use them
Speaker 4: as a tarp and make a shelter if you need.
Speaker 4: That might be overkill for your particular environment. You might
Speaker 4: also just have, like your hiking rain jacket that goes
Speaker 4: in there. A puffy packable warm top is a little
Speaker 4: bit of a like bonus item. It's I think having
Speaker 4: a warm upper layer is really important for a lot
Speaker 4: of it's until you've slept outside without a sleeping bag,
Speaker 4: you have no idea how cold it is in the
Speaker 4: summer to sleep outside. Yeah, on the ground. Especially whenever
Speaker 4: I'm watching movies or reading books and like the kid
Speaker 4: runs away from home or they're like on the and
Speaker 4: they go and they sleep in the woods, I'm like,
Speaker 4: the fuck they did? They did not sleep that night? Yeah?
Speaker 9: Yeah, you lie on your side, holding yourself, wondering while
Speaker 9: you made these choices in life.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I might add that if you're going to have
Speaker 9: a specific like a puffy jacket for this, and you
Speaker 9: don't own a puffy jacket yet. A couple of things
Speaker 9: to consider that generally, compressing down will help make it
Speaker 9: lose some of its loft, so it will be less lofty. Yeah,
Speaker 9: so you don't want to keep that stuff compressed for
Speaker 9: a very long time or super compressed, right, don't cram
Speaker 9: it into the smallest ball. Remember that when you buy
Speaker 9: down jackets or the baffles which are the sewing lines
Speaker 9: across it, like, those are areas that are not insulated, right,
Speaker 9: So you don't actually want the ones with the with
Speaker 9: one hundred little baffles going down them.
Speaker 4: Oh interesting, that makes sense.
Speaker 9: Yeah uh. And then synthetic insulation does a lot better
Speaker 9: with with with with wetness. It retains some of its
Speaker 9: insulating properties. And my final thing with down jackets, I
Speaker 9: think a lot about down jackets. I'm sorry, is get
Speaker 9: one that is a size bigger than you would normally
Speaker 9: get for like, oh yeah, because you don't really want
Speaker 9: to be taking stuff off when you're cold.
Speaker 4: You want a jacket that you.
Speaker 9: Can just put on over all your stuff. We call
Speaker 9: it a ballet Parker in the in the in the
Speaker 9: sort of mountaineering community. But it's like a static thing. Right,
Speaker 9: So you're hiking your mount to climbing, you stop, you
Speaker 9: immediately check that thing on over everything that keeps you
Speaker 9: warm until you start moving again.
Speaker 4: That makes sense to me, I advocate personally, I advocate
Speaker 4: for synthetic. I advocate because it's cheaper, you can leave
Speaker 4: it compressed, and because it insulates better in the wet
Speaker 4: and it is much heavier for its and larger for
Speaker 4: its insulating value. But for me, like having spent a
Speaker 4: lot of my life like sleeping and sleeping bags with
Speaker 4: no tarp or whatever and just being like, I'll just
Speaker 4: fucking deal whether it's not raining that hard, you know, like.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, totally, Like I have fucked some really expensive
Speaker 9: down sleeping bags, even the oil on your skin, and
Speaker 9: will actually eventually closet that down to Yeah, like that
Speaker 9: you really have to baby some ultra light down stuff,
Speaker 9: which is fine.
Speaker 4: Like if I'm mountaineering.
Speaker 9: If I'm not that I will baby my bag because
Speaker 9: I don't want to carry extra shit.
Speaker 4: But this is not that exactly, Like if you are
Speaker 4: trying to do a through hike, you might look at
Speaker 4: this very differently. And there's a version of the world
Speaker 4: where your crisis might involve moving over the mountains in
Speaker 4: winter to get out of a country that has just
Speaker 4: elected a fascist who says that he wants to kill
Speaker 4: all the communists or whatever. Yeah, I've spoken to those people. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and so like in that situation, get the mountaineer and shit,
Speaker 4: you know. Yeah yeah, okay, other stuff to have in
Speaker 4: this bag a heavy duty trash bag. You can put
Speaker 4: all your stuff in it to keep it dry. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 4: there's like all these like arguments about how to keep
Speaker 4: your bag dry and overall. And I'm curious if this
Speaker 4: has been your experience. People have been moving away from
Speaker 4: like pack covers where you cover the pack and instead
Speaker 4: just put everything inside the pack into something that's waterproof.
Speaker 9: Yeah, that's what I've done for a very long time.
Speaker 9: You can spend a lot of money on stuff sacks
Speaker 9: like the event ones that see. To some it make
Speaker 9: it cool because they have a one way breathable fabric,
Speaker 9: so you squeeze them and the egg goes rules, it
Speaker 9: doesn't go back in.
Speaker 4: It's pretty cool.
Speaker 9: Yeah, But then you end up with these really hard
Speaker 9: bricks of clothing or whatever that like you can't kind
Speaker 9: of make them fill the space, right, They just end
Speaker 9: up being like solid, so sometimes they don't pack as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: I have used three milimeter contract great bin bags for years.
Speaker 9: The amountain into the deserts. You can sleep in them,
Speaker 9: you can make them into a poncho. You can fill
Speaker 9: them with brush and make them into a sleeping pad.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Great items, And it's sketchy, but a lot of people
Speaker 4: who are stuck living outside in very cold environments will
Speaker 4: wear them close to their skin for like a really
Speaker 4: intensely heating insulating layer. But it's sketchy because then you
Speaker 4: sweat like hell, and you can freeze to death if
Speaker 4: you really careful. Yeah, that's some like that's some life
Speaker 4: or death shit. Yeah exactly. I'm not telling you how
Speaker 4: to do that on air here, you know, yeah.
Speaker 9: Google, But yeah, they have a lot of usage. You
Speaker 9: get them to gather water too, I've done that before.
Speaker 4: Oh that makes sense. Cash. Cash is really useful. The
Speaker 4: amount of cash you want to carry has to do
Speaker 4: with the amount of actually you're willing to put into
Speaker 4: a bag that just sits there if it does nothing. Yeah,
Speaker 4: gold of course, Yeah, totally have so many thoughts about
Speaker 4: Golden air. Yeah yeah, yeah. Anyway, that's beside the point.
Speaker 4: That's where home prepping. Okay, you want to spare USB
Speaker 4: battery and charging cables. I would advocate an octopus cable
Speaker 4: that has like mini USBC and lightning charger all on
Speaker 4: one cable so you don't have to keep track of
Speaker 4: multiple cables for multiple devices.
Speaker 9: Yeah, right right here, I'm trying to look what the
Speaker 9: brand is of mine, because I got one recently. When
Speaker 9: I'm working in places that are conflict zones, especially places
Speaker 9: where I think I might have to go like peace
Speaker 9: out to a bomb shelter for a few hours, days whatever,
Speaker 9: I like to have a little pouch with all my
Speaker 9: charging and medical and essential stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 9: This is called a leave a cable and I found
Speaker 9: it to be very handy because it's like stiff and
Speaker 9: it doesn't cables get twisted and frayed a lot. Okay,
Speaker 9: doesn't do that. Yeah, Yeah, a little buzz marketing for
Speaker 9: you there.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Now, I'm gonna look into those later because I
Speaker 4: as much as I'm like, oh fuck all the gadgets,
Speaker 4: know what I'm trying to say, You don't need all
Speaker 4: the gadgets, but they're kind of cool and like and
Speaker 4: the size of extra battery you have is depending on
Speaker 4: what you're doing. You know, like, if you're reasonably sure
Speaker 4: you're gonna be around power, just have a little one
Speaker 4: and because like you know what, you're gonna be the
Speaker 4: one who saves the night. When everyone's drunk at the
Speaker 4: bar and someone's phone is dead and they're the only
Speaker 4: person who has uber set up right, and you know, yeah,
Speaker 4: Like I've been trying to advocate that per snacks are
Speaker 4: the best example of prepping and that everything that like
Speaker 4: men are trying to do is like catching up with
Speaker 4: the fact that like women are actually culturally in our
Speaker 4: society like better at prepping. Yeah, but okay, uh, I
Speaker 4: put a milar emergency blanket in. These are these like
Speaker 4: you know, they seem almost gimmicky. They're these incredibly light
Speaker 4: little plastic tarps.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: Uh. One probably my life when I was thirty, like
Speaker 4: on my like twelfth or thirteenth birthday, when I like
Speaker 4: woke up getting hypothermia five miles from the road in
Speaker 4: a wet tent. So I'm just like, yeah, no, eyes
Speaker 4: are great, Like, yeah, they're great.
Speaker 9: They that you can do a hypothermia wrap with them,
Speaker 9: use them for signing if you're in a different kind
Speaker 9: of situation. We can't use them in the refuge count
Speaker 9: and working because one of them floated into a transformer
Speaker 9: and that oh wow that yeah, so yeah, that's your
Speaker 9: that's your caveat there doing get some around high voltage power.
Speaker 9: But yeah, there's things you're not going to get anything
Speaker 9: warmer for that size. It's the size of a couple
Speaker 9: of credit cards stacked on top of each other.
Speaker 4: Yeah, totally, And like in mind I have like a
Speaker 4: slightly nicer one because I don't have a sleeping bag.
Speaker 4: In mind, I have like an emergency bag. Sleeping bag.
Speaker 4: I've never used it, I don't.
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, the there's a company called Survive Outdoors. Fuck,
Speaker 9: I'm saying a little companies today by autu you have
Speaker 9: a shit you want, don't care. There's company go Survive
Speaker 9: Outdoors Longer that makes one that's like about the size
Speaker 9: of a beer can.
Speaker 4: Yeah that's that's yeah, I think, Yeah those are great. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I've sucked up.
Speaker 9: It's at night one of those when I was doing
Speaker 9: like the like look how ultra light I could be stuff.
Speaker 4: It's not great, but like but here you are recording here.
Speaker 9: I am not defintely with my full set of digits,
Speaker 9: so like I got really complain, you know, yeah exactly.
Speaker 9: And those things won't float off into a power transform.
Speaker 9: They're a bit heavier.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, yeah, no, that would be yeah, it would
Speaker 4: be an advantage of it. Uh yeah, and the other side.
Speaker 9: So again people will see you, right, which a contrary
Speaker 9: to what you might have seen on YouTube. You want
Speaker 9: people to see you most of the time. Most crises
Speaker 9: you're going to encounter, you're not going to be hiding.
Speaker 4: Right. Sometimes when you're like hitchhiking and shit, you do
Speaker 4: have to not be seen. And then I get really
Speaker 4: nice houp, right, all the tents are and so I
Speaker 4: kind of want one of the like new bullshit Camo
Speaker 4: ultra light tents. But yeah, that's I don't hitchhike. I
Speaker 4: have a fucking truck. It's bullshit. I'm fine. A full
Speaker 4: water bottle. I think it's always worth having a full
Speaker 4: water bottle in your in your bag. This is the
Speaker 4: heaviest thing in your bag. Water is just fucking wonderful
Speaker 4: and you need way more of it than you think
Speaker 4: you do when you're exerting yourself. I have been historically
Speaker 4: advocating a single wall steel canteen so that the water
Speaker 4: can be boiled in an emergency directly in it. But
Speaker 4: a lot of people have a preference for lighter weight
Speaker 4: and that makes a lot of sense, and also even
Speaker 4: having something that just looks a little bit more civilian
Speaker 4: also makes a lot of sense. The ultra light. I
Speaker 4: actually think the ultra Lighters might be right on this one.
Speaker 4: And they use the to use a brand name. They
Speaker 4: all get those smart waters, but then they don't keep
Speaker 4: drinking smart water. They drink one and then they clean
Speaker 4: it and refill the bottle of tap water. Yeah, or
Speaker 4: with the soil of filter fits on top of it,
Speaker 4: which is very handy. Right. Yeah.
Speaker 9: The thing I do like about a single waves change
Speaker 9: bottle a the smart water bottles. You fill them up
Speaker 9: and then they freeze. They can break right and b
Speaker 9: I like to do like the analogeen baby, you know
Speaker 9: where you boil some water, put it in that thing
Speaker 9: and then you are cold. That comes into bed with you. Yeah,
Speaker 9: it's very pleasant experience.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, that that makes sense to me.
Speaker 9: I don't know what happened to full water full full
Speaker 9: steel water ball, that's true. Someone on the head with it. Yeah,
Speaker 9: they're coming back from that. Even the guy with the
Speaker 9: folding ar, he's not getting up. You give him a
Speaker 9: couple with the well.
Speaker 4: And if we're going for cross punk, I also recommend
Speaker 4: a lock attached to a chain. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, Well,
Speaker 4: if you have a bicycle. True, that's true. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: areas of our interest. Yeah, okay, a buttane lighter, a
Speaker 4: bit lighter, an emergency whistle. This is the most. Like
Speaker 4: I was at a firearms training and we were talking
Speaker 4: about a bunch of stuff and people were like, all right,
Speaker 4: and this is how you like signal the following, you know,
Speaker 4: like like range clear kind of stuff, like use a whistle,
Speaker 4: bah blah blah blah. And everyone's like, I didn't bring
Speaker 4: a whistle. I'm like I got three in my bag,
Speaker 4: Like what are you doing?
Speaker 8: Yeah, amateurs, Yeah, if they're light and cheap and useful,
Speaker 8: like the number of people who wouldn't have done in
Speaker 8: the woods because if they had a whistle, like more
Speaker 8: than anything else.
Speaker 4: Because people think that the solution to our problems is
Speaker 4: fix it yourself. Usually the solution to problems is get help.
Speaker 9: Yes, yeah, yeah, And that's a great like you're going
Speaker 9: to use a lot less energy whistlingly shouting.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Most if hiking backpacks.
Speaker 9: Will have a chest buckle that is also a whistle,
Speaker 9: and if they don't, you can probably change it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that rules. That's the kind of shit I
Speaker 4: like to see. Yeah, it's well thought out. It's cover. Yeah,
Speaker 4: we love it. And when I when I lived on
Speaker 4: a lab project, I made everyone put the hurricane whistles
Speaker 4: by their door so that like we didn't always have
Speaker 4: a good cell reception or whatever, and so that there's
Speaker 4: an emergency, we can everyone has a whistle loud enough
Speaker 4: to be heard by everyone else on the large products.
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, you know spot. Yeah, it's a lot less
Speaker 9: money than a ham radio, which is something I've been.
Speaker 4: Right and like I'm not anti having like you know,
Speaker 4: Miwaukie talkies and stuff, but yeah, yeah, sometimes you're just like, no,
Speaker 4: I have a hurricane whistle, or even I just have
Speaker 4: a regular whistle. Okay, a folding knife to print them?
Speaker 4: What's that?
Speaker 9: You could three D print them pretty good ones. Oh
Speaker 9: that's cool, like three to printing me give them out, now,
Speaker 9: that's cool.
Speaker 4: That's awesome. I keep a folding knife in these bags.
Speaker 4: I also usually just have one on me. But and
Speaker 4: you know, the least weapon looking knife you can get
Speaker 4: is going to be a bang for your buck in
Speaker 4: terms of like being able to go with you lots
Speaker 4: of places. Obviously, this isn't going to your carry on luggage. Yeah,
Speaker 4: A rechargeable headlamp or flashlight, and then a basic first
Speaker 4: aid kit. That's my you know, there's there's all kinds
Speaker 4: of other stuff. If you're going to be hiking, if
Speaker 4: you're and if I know I'm going to be like
Speaker 4: in a lot of situations, one of the first things
Speaker 4: I would add as a tarp and a sleeping bag.
Speaker 4: That would be like, yeah, the next things to go
Speaker 4: in sleeping bags are pretty big.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I definitely have that stuff in a general sense,
Speaker 9: both for doing this and for Germany enjoying out all
Speaker 9: this stuff. It really helps if you can have your
Speaker 9: shit organized in stuff sacks and labeled so that you
Speaker 9: know if if you should you need to leave your
Speaker 9: house in an emergency, right, it's going to be more comfortable.
Speaker 9: If you have a sleeping bag and inflightable pillow and
Speaker 9: a top, you can grab them in ten seconds if
Speaker 9: you've got them labeled right, and it's this will also
Speaker 9: help you. Like I like to camp, the worst part
Speaker 9: about camping is packing. So if I have all my stuff,
Speaker 9: I can just be like, Okay, I've got a sleep system,
Speaker 9: I got to cooking system. Yeah, twenty four hours of food,
Speaker 9: I'm ready to rumble.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: No, it makes sense. But you know what, who else
Speaker 4: is ready to rumble? Oh yeah, yeah, Reagan, they're ready
Speaker 4: to fight at all times. Yep, here's an ad for fighting.
Speaker 9: We're back and we've now learned to fight thanks to
Speaker 9: the adverts.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, so moy tyejj. Actually that's what's fun. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 4: that's it's cool. Kraft Magar Yeah yeah, yeah, the the
Speaker 4: Rag and Gold of martial arts. Yeah, okay, so what
Speaker 4: do you Okay, so I have other stuff that I
Speaker 4: keep in my ad my bag that is like more
Speaker 4: fun or I think incredibly useful, but not in the
Speaker 4: like dead basics that I keep. But what else do
Speaker 4: you keep? Do you have any like fun stuff or
Speaker 4: other stuff that I didn't mention? Yeah, a couple of
Speaker 4: other things. I think.
Speaker 9: One of the things I use the most this is
Speaker 9: my little bag that I have that if I have
Speaker 9: to go to area, shelter or certain thing. It's very
Speaker 9: very small. It's like, I don't know, it's the size
Speaker 9: of a small paper book is would go into a
Speaker 9: bigger bag. But one of the things that I use
Speaker 9: I take on trips with me and I use everywhere
Speaker 9: I go. This is like a quarter inch bit driver.
Speaker 9: Oh nice, Yeah, and it spins, It spins, and it's
Speaker 9: just a tiny screw driver with where you can change
Speaker 9: the bits.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then I have a set of bits. Yeah.
Speaker 9: So like I use this bad boy all the time, right,
Speaker 9: I use it when I get water in my podcast equipment,
Speaker 9: which is a thing that I am wont to do.
Speaker 3: Uh, you have to.
Speaker 9: This is my this is my this is my laddism. Right,
Speaker 9: I'm breaking the frame of big podcast.
Speaker 4: Keep a sledgehammer specifically for breaking frames. Yeah, machine frames
Speaker 4: if you run out. Yes, yeah, there's one thing I
Speaker 4: fucking hate. It's a weaving machine. And I take them
Speaker 4: down whenever I can.
Speaker 9: But this this guy is really useful, right, Like you know,
Speaker 9: you could be staying with you could be There are
Speaker 9: a million things right there. Your bed in your hotel
Speaker 9: is loose and you need to tighten it. You need
Speaker 9: to take a part of your podcasting machine. There is
Speaker 9: you know that there's something wrong with your phone.
Speaker 4: Whatever.
Speaker 9: It is like a screwdriver and a few little bits,
Speaker 9: super handy. You want to help your friend put together
Speaker 9: to my kea furniture not a problem. So it's very
Speaker 9: very small. It's you know the size of pretty the
Speaker 9: size of a cigarette and then the sort of bits
Speaker 9: and the size of another cigarette. Very easy to carry
Speaker 9: around with you everywhere. I am an appreciator of sporks.
Speaker 4: Oh that's on my that was on my follow up
Speaker 4: list too. Oh excellent. Good.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I'm a person who thinks about sporks a lot.
Speaker 9: You guys can read my sport reviews at backpacking dot
Speaker 9: com if you want to. Yeah, that's that's not a joke.
Speaker 9: It's just a reflection on the sad person I am
Speaker 9: so yeah a Okay, are.
Speaker 4: You a long handled spork or regular spork? See?
Speaker 9: The long handled spook is nice for when you're going
Speaker 9: into an MRI type meal. How often you're going into
Speaker 9: an MRI type meal compared to like the pocketability.
Speaker 4: Of a normal spork.
Speaker 9: Right now, that makes sense to me. Yeah, the mr
Speaker 9: spoon is the best bargain eating device. It weighs six grams,
Speaker 9: which is less than a titanium spork. You can dip
Speaker 9: into hot water. It doesn't melt, it doesn't break like
Speaker 9: a like a traditional plastic like. It's not like a
Speaker 9: fast food plastic spoon. It's its best bang feed back
Speaker 9: when it comes to spoons. Okay, when I a shape,
Speaker 9: when I was when I was more of a crosspunk.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Always on my waist belt was a titanium spork
Speaker 4: with a P thirty eight can opener keychain to it. Yes,
Speaker 4: because no matter what, I could get into a can
Speaker 4: of Amy's chili.
Speaker 9: The amount of people I've seen I took camping lots.
Speaker 9: Sometimes I'll go with my trucks. Sometimes I go by
Speaker 9: myself on my feet. The amount of humans I've seen
Speaker 9: with very expensive overlanding setups trying to open a can
Speaker 9: of food on a rock. It's a lot of humans. Like, Yeah,
Speaker 9: a can opener is a very handy thing.
Speaker 6: No.
Speaker 4: And the P thirty eight or P fifty ones, these
Speaker 4: are the tiny military ones. They weigh nothing. They're like
Speaker 4: ten of them would fit on a credit card, you know.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have pretty six my truck. But yeah,
Speaker 9: they're very small. In terms of other things I do,
Speaker 9: like zip ties, zip tize, very small, very handy. Yeah,
Speaker 9: you know, always fix it with zip ties. I'm just
Speaker 9: looking at this bag in front of me and thinking
Speaker 9: what else I have.
Speaker 4: That's remarkable. I save the day with zyptized when when
Speaker 4: I was driving in the woods with my friend when
Speaker 4: some part of her exhaust system fell off of her
Speaker 4: van and oh yeah, and I was like dragging on
Speaker 4: the ground. And I didn't normally carry ziptize, but my
Speaker 4: dad had always been like, ziptize they're amazing, and I
Speaker 4: was like, sure, dad, whatever, So like I had some
Speaker 4: in my truck.
Speaker 9: Yeah, very hand Gyptized and duct tape certainly in your vehicle.
Speaker 9: You can fix most stuff that wants fixing with ziptized
Speaker 9: and duct tape. I just like to wrap the handles
Speaker 9: of my stuff, Like I have a little bit lighter here,
Speaker 9: and I just wrap that induct tape and then I
Speaker 9: have the duct tape.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I have the big lighter.
Speaker 9: Duct tape also is great tinder. You can start fire
Speaker 9: with it, so okay, really has many many uses.
Speaker 4: You can use one lighter to light the other lighter
Speaker 4: on fire. Yeah. Yeah. You could also take the tape
Speaker 4: off your lighter if you wanted to avoid lighting your lighter.
Speaker 4: All right.
Speaker 9: If you did light your lighter, you'll get a moment
Speaker 9: of excitement when it goes poof, yeah, unless you're holding it,
Speaker 9: which case you'll get a moment of pain.
Speaker 4: Which could be exciting.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it could be exciting. Hopefully you're close to a hospital. Yeah,
Speaker 9: and yeah, I like to carry it like a little
Speaker 9: pre made there's a I like to.
Speaker 8: I do.
Speaker 9: Like to vacuum seal stuff. It's the thing that I enjoy.
Speaker 9: I recently got a vacuum sealer, been getting really into it,
Speaker 9: so like I'll vacuum see your little packets of pills,
Speaker 9: little little plasters, band aids for American listeners, yeah, inter
Speaker 9: little packs and give them to people or keep them places.
Speaker 9: It maybe helps them with aging a little bit. But
Speaker 9: having a having a bag at that you could just
Speaker 9: open in an emergency. It's super handy. The other thing
Speaker 9: that I like, and largely this is just because I
Speaker 9: go to places and I have these tiny little fishing
Speaker 9: chem lights, like they're designed for certain fishing floats. They're
Speaker 9: very good if you need to like see something and
Speaker 9: so that's closed sticks for for the non tactical crowd yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 9: or silooms for the British tactical crowd.
Speaker 4: They're very handy.
Speaker 9: You need to mark something at night, right, They're not
Speaker 9: going to be great for like I have flares in
Speaker 9: my car. My car breaks down in the dark grown
Speaker 9: and I don't want people to pile into the back
Speaker 9: of it. But for smaller things. You're going around a
Speaker 9: campsite and you want to be like, oh, like, you know,
Speaker 9: there's a a piece of rebar sticking out the ground here, right,
Speaker 9: you can crack one of those bad boys and light
Speaker 9: it up.
Speaker 4: No, that makes sense. They're also just a way to
Speaker 4: bamboozle young children.
Speaker 9: If you are around kids at night and you can
Speaker 9: suddenly make light appear, just make sure they don't eat them.
Speaker 4: Okay, But see, this actually gets to something that you
Speaker 4: brought up earlier. A lot of crisy situations, an awful
Speaker 4: lot of them you're not alone, and then an awful
Speaker 4: lot of them. Things like being able to entertain kids
Speaker 4: and things like that is like, yeah, a genuine need,
Speaker 4: like a very useful thing. And so like I know
Speaker 4: people who keep you know, like I mean usually people
Speaker 4: who have kids, but they keep a stuffed animal or
Speaker 4: something like that in their bag.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Like I was, so there are a load of
Speaker 9: children in these camps down the border, and that's very
Speaker 9: fucked up. But like I realized didn't have any toys,
Speaker 9: so I got loads of these tiny little stuffed animals
Speaker 9: that someone had donated. Like they're about the size of
Speaker 9: a golf ball. And it gave each child an animal right,
Speaker 9: so they could play with the little animals, and animals
Speaker 9: could be in community with each other.
Speaker 4: That's amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, they were so pumped. And it wasn't just that
Speaker 9: the kids were like, yeah, I got a toy. The
Speaker 9: parents were like thank fuck, like they are so bored, right,
Speaker 9: or like I have a small finger puppet that I
Speaker 9: was using the other day to entertain them. I didn't
Speaker 9: where I found it. I found it in one of
Speaker 9: the vans we were using. Yeah, it's like a seal
Speaker 9: and something like that makes all the difference when you
Speaker 9: have nothing to do with your kids. And I guess,
Speaker 9: like along those lines, when I am bored, I have
Speaker 9: a kind lap on my phone. I think it works
Speaker 9: with all the phones obviously. Jeff Bezos is a bell end.
Speaker 9: But like that's age.
Speaker 4: It's a British word. Yeah, yes, it's a British word.
Speaker 4: We don't like beis. Yeah. It was the end of
Speaker 4: a dick the Tumescent Park.
Speaker 9: Yeah yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, for those who weren't clear
Speaker 9: in the audience, but yeah, Jeff bases a dick. But
Speaker 9: the kindlap is nice. You can also have PDFs of
Speaker 9: books on your phone. But it's again like I'm telling
Speaker 9: you from personal experience, when you're sitting in a giant
Speaker 9: warehouse with nothing to do for a few days. Somewhere,
Speaker 9: I have a picture of building a fort with this
Speaker 9: little you know, she's like three or four, you know,
Speaker 9: and have folks who had come, folks were refugees and
Speaker 9: we were just bored. We built a four out of
Speaker 9: miler blankets. But someone had an inflatable ball which we
Speaker 9: just played with for hours because you're so bored.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So yeah, just having like.
Speaker 9: An app on your phone where you can read books,
Speaker 9: it's probably going to be more useful to you than
Speaker 9: that shore barrowed rifle that you had to pay two
Speaker 9: hundred dollars tax stamp and that effects come into your
Speaker 9: house for.
Speaker 4: Yeah, every every crosspunk, I know, you always carry what
Speaker 4: you need, and then you carry something and you almost
Speaker 4: like set your personality around this. Like like I knew
Speaker 4: a guy who was not an ultra lighter and his
Speaker 4: name was Pogo Dave and a fucking stick, Yeah, an
Speaker 4: old metal like rusted pogo stick and I almost broke
Speaker 4: my knee with that thing. Oh yeah, in the middle
Speaker 4: of nowhere.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I don't know if younger listeners will be familiar
Speaker 9: with the pogos. I think that's like, do you think
Speaker 9: the zoom is in the audio?
Speaker 4: I have no idea there. They're probably looking up yeah
Speaker 4: and yeah and so having something. And it's funny too,
Speaker 4: because every like prepper manuals, like and a deck of
Speaker 4: cards and this is like technically true, but I'll tell
Speaker 4: you what. People actually plays hot dice, having some like
Speaker 4: six sided dice to play this really annoying game called
Speaker 4: hot dice, or like bring some D and D dice
Speaker 4: and just start playing like role playing games with people.
Speaker 4: You know, Like there's like having the entertainment things and
Speaker 4: then the other thing. I think it's really worth considering
Speaker 4: having a small musical instrument. I find that, like there's
Speaker 4: a reason that cross punks play music everywhere they go. Yeah,
Speaker 4: are you about to pull out harmonica?
Speaker 9: I have a harmonica in a pistol magazine pouch that
Speaker 9: I take on the side of my bag when I
Speaker 9: go to places. Hell yeah, yeah, we took me so
Speaker 9: when rub It I did on the Amo Trape, but
Speaker 9: I left my harmonica with the people who you're going
Speaker 9: to hit singing at the start of our show. They
Speaker 9: played their guitars and sung for us cool. I left
Speaker 9: them the harmonica and they play it now, yes, harmonica,
Speaker 9: and then go harmonica.
Speaker 4: The one thing that I have in my bug up
Speaker 4: bag that's a little bit extra, but I swear by
Speaker 4: I have a Nintendo Switch and a bunch of physical
Speaker 4: game cartridges for it. Because when twenty twenty hit, I
Speaker 4: lived in the cabin in the middle of nowhere. I
Speaker 4: was off grid, I barely had any electricity. I basically
Speaker 4: had to walk half a mile to my car and
Speaker 4: like charge things in my car for a while until
Speaker 4: I got together enough money to get some solar panels
Speaker 4: and some batteries and stuff, right, because I had not
Speaker 4: planned on having my cabin be suddenly where I lived
Speaker 4: well like full time, not going anywhere else lived. And
Speaker 4: the first thing I got was a little tiny it's
Speaker 4: called a bit boy, and it is a like tiny
Speaker 4: game boy that has every single Nintendo and Super Nintendo
Speaker 4: and Psychogenesis game pirated onto it. Oh wow, and immediately
Speaker 4: ordering that off to the podcast and it costs like
Speaker 4: forty I don't know much they cost now, but they're
Speaker 4: not expensive because they're little weird three D printed pirated
Speaker 4: things and they like use almost no electricity and so
Speaker 4: it uses way less electricity in a cell phone and
Speaker 4: that saved my sanity. And then when I finally got
Speaker 4: my shit together enough to get a Nintendo switch and
Speaker 4: I could play Skyrim, like and it's not that I
Speaker 4: had nothing to do. People are like, oh, you don't
Speaker 4: need to entertain yourself in crisis because you're busy. It's like, look,
Speaker 4: you can probably only physically work on building your house
Speaker 4: to get it ready for the apocalypse. You think you're
Speaker 4: living in for maybe fourteen hours a day, you know,
Speaker 4: maybe ten to fourteen hours.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and if you don't do manual labor right now,
Speaker 9: then it might be a little lesson.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like you have downtime, not always in every situation,
Speaker 4: but like injured need to sit around and do something
Speaker 4: or you'll you know, like like entertainment is like actually
Speaker 4: really useful. Yes, And if you bring a paperback, and
Speaker 4: I recommend it, bring one that you've already read because
Speaker 4: you know you like it. I like, normally don't reread
Speaker 4: books all that much, but when I need to turn
Speaker 4: my brain off, a book that you've already read, for
Speaker 4: a lot of people is going to do better. And
Speaker 4: if you haven't, So you should get a jump start
Speaker 4: on this by reading.
Speaker 2: Eh.
Speaker 4: My book is Stay There in ceul Island a magnificent
Speaker 4: All right, thanks? Yeah?
Speaker 9: Yeah, so so you can do the table tip roleplaying
Speaker 9: game that we did.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, there's an Escape from Insul Island tabletop roleplaying
Speaker 4: game that's coming out next year. Well, there's this little
Speaker 4: zen version of it that I think you can download now,
Speaker 4: but it's going to be slightly better. Yeah, I could
Speaker 4: keep that in your bag.
Speaker 9: The other thing I was going to plug that I
Speaker 9: forgot about was download the Google Maps onto your phone
Speaker 9: or whatever brand apps you want, maps you want, and
Speaker 9: have a watch that that doesn't need a battery. I
Speaker 9: think that's super handy. You can use the watch to
Speaker 9: tell the direction of south, which what I'll seek if
Speaker 9: you other compass directions if you really need to.
Speaker 4: But you can tell the time.
Speaker 9: You would again be surprised, how like people might imagine
Speaker 9: that after X happens, say it needs to tell the times.
Speaker 9: It won't matter. You probably will need to tell the
Speaker 9: time in most of your crises, you know, even to
Speaker 9: know if something has happened or it's not happened, right,
Speaker 9: And so being able to do that is very handy,
Speaker 9: and having a watch that powers itself is a way
Speaker 9: to do that.
Speaker 4: No, that makes sense. I use one that doesn't power itself,
Speaker 4: but it like lasts three weeks or so on. I'll
Speaker 4: charge and like vaguely charges itself from the sun, but
Speaker 4: not very efficiently. There's also and I know there's like
Speaker 4: now we're getting into the weeds. Okay, here's the other pitch.
Speaker 4: It's fun when besides doing the basics, you can nerd
Speaker 4: out about it, and you can do it cheaply. Because
Speaker 4: nerding out about it is free. You can find your
Speaker 4: other friends that want to talk about this bullshit and
Speaker 4: talk about with this bullshit. You don't have to go
Speaker 4: out and buy fancy crazy shit. Sometimes you want the
Speaker 4: fancy crazy shit, but most of the stuff we're talking
Speaker 4: about is super cheap, and then you can have the
Speaker 4: joy of talking about the shit and getting into the
Speaker 4: weeds with it. But there's a there's an app I
Speaker 4: think it's called Keywix, and it lets you download Wikipedia
Speaker 4: and read it on your phone offline. Yeah, that would
Speaker 4: be good.
Speaker 9: I've just remembered one more thing that Marker and I
Speaker 9: talked about off Michael a while ago, because this is
Speaker 9: the kind of people we are.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's called bank line.
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, yeah, so the tactical crowd of very enter
Speaker 9: power cord because it's a little bit stronger and you
Speaker 9: pick out the inside lines and stuff. It's also very
Speaker 9: shiny and could be annoying to not sometimes if you
Speaker 9: get some bank line and you need to construct a shelter,
Speaker 9: which is relatively unlikely, you can. If you need to
Speaker 9: repair your clothes and you have a needle, you can
Speaker 9: pick it apart and use it for that. But if
Speaker 9: you're bored, like everyone should know a few knots, you know,
Speaker 9: if you know how to do like a I guess
Speaker 9: figure eight, not if you know how to do a
Speaker 9: truck has hitched a bowl and knot and you're probably
Speaker 9: pretty good if you could do those, honestly, Like, you
Speaker 9: can do a lot of stuff to a justice prussic,
Speaker 9: maybe another friction hitch.
Speaker 4: You can practice those when you're bought. It's fun.
Speaker 9: It's okay. It may not be as fun for you
Speaker 9: as it is for me because I'm that kind of person.
Speaker 9: But if you like to learn stuff and then you
Speaker 9: can share that with someone else, right, it's fun to
Speaker 9: teach people and then they can teach you a couple
Speaker 9: I have taught and learned not from people from half
Speaker 9: a dozen nationalities in the last month.
Speaker 4: And it's fun anyway. It's cool to share.
Speaker 9: It's also like when you're in a situation being like, huh,
Speaker 9: having a moment where you're not thinking about the ship
Speaker 9: situation instead of thinking about that's cool.
Speaker 4: I learned that not.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's very nice actually and so yeah, like a
Speaker 9: Brazilian rodeo guy taught me a couple of knots that's cool.
Speaker 9: The other day, Yeah, it was sweet. We were helping
Speaker 9: We had dumpster dive some tents that Susan g coheman
Speaker 9: was throwing away, and so we were helping put those
Speaker 9: up and in one case we had their fly sheet
Speaker 9: but not the tent, so we were trying to work
Speaker 9: out how to make them to the top. Did some
Speaker 9: different knots.
Speaker 4: It was fun.
Speaker 9: And bank line is cheaper than para cord. Probably don't
Speaker 9: need the paracord with a fishing line inside. In ninety
Speaker 9: nine percent of circumstances to get some bank line number
Speaker 9: thirty six bank line.
Speaker 4: Okay, and then the other the cross punk challenges. You
Speaker 4: just start fixing your clothes at dental floss. Oh yeah,
Speaker 4: the gloss is great for that. Yeah, yeah, yea.
Speaker 9: I get a sale needle and dental floss and you'll
Speaker 9: smell minty fresh.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And when I make my emergency kits, I take
Speaker 4: little they're sort of sewing new needle vials. I like
Speaker 4: them better than the little slidey kits where everything gets
Speaker 4: lost all the time. Yeah, And I just get these
Speaker 4: little tiny vials. They're clear so everyone knows what's in it.
Speaker 4: And I put safety pins, regular sewing needles, and leather
Speaker 4: sewing needles into them. And then when you're sewing with leather.
Speaker 4: The other thing that I recommend people carry it Okay,
Speaker 4: Like in two thousand and three, if you are a crustpunk,
Speaker 4: the things you need to have on you are at
Speaker 4: all times. You need a folding knife, you need a headlamp,
Speaker 4: you need a multi tool with pliers, and you need
Speaker 4: a sleeping bag and like and a spork and a
Speaker 4: can opener. Yeah, and that's kind of it in a
Speaker 4: lot of ways.
Speaker 9: Yeah, don't combine those things, do it. Be the person
Speaker 9: with the spark multi tool now, because you'll get beans
Speaker 9: in your knife and fucking.
Speaker 4: Well, actually that's called a hobo tool. There actually are
Speaker 4: multi tools that are but oh sorry, spork then it's
Speaker 4: a spoon and a night it's a spoon and on
Speaker 4: one side and for yeah, yeah, yeah, those suck. Don't
Speaker 4: anything that folds. Anything that folds, you should keep it
Speaker 4: away from food. Your folding knife is going to get
Speaker 4: so gross. I mean, you'll do it anyway, but I
Speaker 4: think we're kind of probably at time.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, I could keep going. That's going to get tweezs.
Speaker 9: But okay, yeah, this is enough stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, if you want to hear more of this kind
Speaker 4: of content, yeah, Margot, just a whole other podcast. Oh
Speaker 4: I was going to say to you that I'd trick
Speaker 4: them into having me on to talk about this stuff more.
Speaker 9: But yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll have you back.
Speaker 9: We'll do a whole other one film. But Margaret also
Speaker 9: has a whole other podcast which you should listen to.
Speaker 9: What's it cool and where can people find it?
Speaker 4: Margaret? Well, okay, so the Prepper one is called Live
Speaker 4: Like the World Is Dying. Your podcast whar it Feels
Speaker 4: Like the End Times? It comes out every Friday. And
Speaker 4: I also have a cool Zone Media podcast called cool
Speaker 4: People It's Cool stuff where I talk about history and
Speaker 4: about cool people who did cool stuff. And James has
Speaker 4: been on both of these podcasts. So if you want
Speaker 4: to hear us continue to banter about things, there's so
Speaker 4: many more available options available to you.
Speaker 9: Yeah, maybe download them for those terrible times when you
Speaker 9: when you just need the calming voice of Ma and
Speaker 9: Margaret talking about bags.
Speaker 4: That's right, well, just to like just to like, it's okay,
Speaker 4: you're going to get through this. I know that things
Speaker 4: seem bad right now, and they are bad, but it's okay.
Speaker 4: We'll just still an hour of that. Yeah, yeah, to
Speaker 4: an hour of that. I'm proud of you.
Speaker 9: Yeah totally yeah, yeah yeah, we will be your anarchist affirmations.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: That's another podcast. This has been it could happen here.
Speaker 9: Thank you, Margaret.
Speaker 4: That was wonderful.
Speaker 7: Hello, it's Sharene. Welcome to the pod. I'm back to
Speaker 7: talk about you guessed it Palestine because we need to
Speaker 7: keep talking about it. There is still a ongoing genocide
Speaker 7: happening in Gaza, and if you ask me, a slower
Speaker 7: genocide that's been happening for the last seventy five years
Speaker 7: in Palestine. And there are so many aspects of history
Speaker 7: and of what's currently happening that are worth delving into. Today,
Speaker 7: I wanted to focus on a new investigation by plus
Speaker 7: nine seven to two magazine, and this is an investigation
Speaker 7: that was confirmed by the Guardian, and it reveals that
Speaker 7: Israel is deliberately killing large numbers of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Speaker 7: Nita remind you that the Palestinian population in Gaza is
Speaker 7: mostly women and children. Does it mean that palestine men
Speaker 7: are disposable because they are not. That is something I
Speaker 7: do reject about constantly saying women and children. It's only
Speaker 7: because I think it reinforces the idea that every Palestinian
Speaker 7: man could potentially be a terrorist. Really, they are the
Speaker 7: ones pulling people out of the rubble and treating them
Speaker 7: in the hospitals, and Palestinian men are incredible, so their
Speaker 7: loss is just as tragic. My point is, though, that
Speaker 7: I keep seeing Israeli officials on news outlets and everything
Speaker 7: spewing lies and bullshit about how the IOF is trying
Speaker 7: everything they can to avoid civilian death, and that is
Speaker 7: just simply not true. And now there is definitive proof
Speaker 7: that it's not true with this investigation. As of it's recording,
Speaker 7: the death toll in Gaza has risen to over twenty
Speaker 7: one thousand people. This number includes those who are presumed
Speaker 7: to be dead underneath the rubble. At this point, the
Speaker 7: number of killed and displaced Palestinians as higher than the
Speaker 7: number of killed and displaced Palestinians during the Nekaba of
Speaker 7: nineteen forty eight. Right now, almost one point nine million Palestinians,
Speaker 7: which makes up about eighty of Gaza's entire population, have
Speaker 7: been displaced. I really want you guys to absorb what
Speaker 7: that means to eclipse the numbers of the Nekba in
Speaker 7: nineteen forty eight, which is the catastrophe that coincides with
Speaker 7: the establishment of the State of Israel, which up till
Speaker 7: this point was the greatest act of terrorism against Palestinian people.
Speaker 7: So the fact that we have eclipsed the numbers of
Speaker 7: the Nekba, which amounts to about seven hundred and fifty
Speaker 7: thousand Palestinians being displaced and about fifteen thousand people dead.
Speaker 7: To have eclipsed those numbers in about two months is
Speaker 7: truly horrific, and I hope that comes across when you
Speaker 7: hear these numbers. Humanitarian organizations that once warned the world
Speaker 7: of an impending catastrophe in Gaza, are now describing an apocalypse.
Speaker 7: The UN Humanitarian Chief said the situation in Gaza is apocalyptic.
Speaker 7: Israel's relentless bombing of Palestinian society has taken it past
Speaker 7: the point of collapse. Bombs are still falling as winter
Speaker 7: draws near, and millions of Palestinians are starving, dehydrated, sick,
Speaker 7: and living in unsuitable and unsustainable conditions and shelters. In
Speaker 7: addition to this, all cell service in northern Gaza is down.
Speaker 7: Palestinians can't contact their loved ones and they can't share
Speaker 7: the reality of what is going on on the ground.
Speaker 7: Cutting internet access and service is a very deliberate act
Speaker 7: on Israel's part to silence people the same way they've
Speaker 7: been targeting and killing journalists. Israel does not want the
Speaker 7: world to see the truth, and cutting internet access is
Speaker 7: a great way for them to avoid this. Keep in
Speaker 7: mind that news outlets are not allowed in Gaza, so
Speaker 7: the Palestinian journalists on the ground, most of whom are
Speaker 7: very young in their early twenties, they are the ones
Speaker 7: being targeted because they're the ones showing the truth with
Speaker 7: their photos and videos and activism and news. So I
Speaker 7: want you guys to keep in mind how deliberate everything
Speaker 7: Israel does is when it comes to cutting internet, food,
Speaker 7: water from Gaza, it is deliberately starving and cutting off
Speaker 7: these people. Nowhere in Gaza is safe. Israel is bombing everywhere,
Speaker 7: including the areas they tell Palestinians to go to to
Speaker 7: find safety from the bombs. So there are no safe zones.
Speaker 7: Regardless of what Israeli officials are telling us. Everywhere is
Speaker 7: unsafe because Israel is bombing everything, including the areas they're
Speaker 7: supposed to go to for safety. Israel is not trying
Speaker 7: in the slightest to avoid civilian casualties. And that's what
Speaker 7: we're going to talk about today. So this investigation is
Speaker 7: based on conversations with current and former members of the
Speaker 7: Israeli intelligence community, as well as reports from Palestinians and
Speaker 7: independent data. It explains how destroying Palestinian homes and society
Speaker 7: and the process of killing Palaestinian civilians is very deliberate
Speaker 7: as well. It explains the tactics Israel has used to
Speaker 7: kill Palestinians at an accelerated rate during the past two months,
Speaker 7: which amounts to a clear cutcase of genocide as well
Speaker 7: as genocidal intent. I truly can't believe there are still
Speaker 7: so many people in denial that what is going on
Speaker 7: in Palestine is in fact a genocide, because I've heard
Speaker 7: truly the most inane arguments as if to prove their
Speaker 7: point this isn't a genocide, whether it's about population growth
Speaker 7: or the fact that Israel hasn't killed enough people. But
Speaker 7: I'll have to get into that later, only because I
Speaker 7: will go on forever and just start ranting. But if
Speaker 7: every genocidal scholar and Israeli historian I can think of
Speaker 7: agrees this is a genocide, if humanitarian organizations are also
Speaker 7: telling you this is in fact, the genocide is a genocide.
Speaker 7: Genocide is about intent on the part of the person
Speaker 7: committing the genocide or the entity commuting the genocide. It's
Speaker 7: about intent and about the actions. It is not about
Speaker 7: birth rate or whatever the as Ionists will try to
Speaker 7: argue about. It's not about that, and what's happening is genocide,
Speaker 7: whether you want to hear that or not. This investigation
Speaker 7: also explains how Israel seeks out what it calls quote
Speaker 7: unquote power targets to bomb power targets are non military
Speaker 7: targets like homes and public buildings like schools and hospitals,
Speaker 7: and Israel targets and bombs these for the direct purpose
Speaker 7: of terrorizing Palestinian civilians and harming their society. Israel's deliberate
Speaker 7: attacks on Palestinians and their society are illegal and inhumane,
Speaker 7: to say the very least. Then again, something being illegal
Speaker 7: truly means nothing at this point, because Israel has violated
Speaker 7: international law for decades without any repercussions whatsoever. Something being
Speaker 7: illegal means nothing, and the un feels useless because nothing
Speaker 7: ever happens. This is not the first time Israel has
Speaker 7: murdered Palestinians indiscriminately. It's not the first time they have
Speaker 7: violated international law or committed war crimes. But nothing ever
Speaker 7: happened before, so why would it happen now. Permissive air
Speaker 7: strikes on non military targets and the use of an
Speaker 7: artificial intelligence system have enabled the Israeli Army to carry
Speaker 7: out the deadliest attack on Gaza. Ever, so, the Israeli
Speaker 7: Army's expanded authorization for bombing non military targets, the loosening
Speaker 7: of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties and the use of
Speaker 7: an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than
Speaker 7: ever before. All of this has contributed to the destructive
Speaker 7: nature in the deadliest military campaign against Palestinians since the
Speaker 7: Nekpa of nineteen forty eight. As I mentioned. This investigation
Speaker 7: by plus nine seven to two magazine and local call
Speaker 7: is based on conversations with seven current and former members
Speaker 7: of Israel's intelligence community, including military intelligence and air force personnel,
Speaker 7: who were involved in Israeli operations in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Speaker 7: In addition to this includes Palestinian testimonies, data and documentation
Speaker 7: from the Gaza Strip, as well as official statements by
Speaker 7: IOWS spokespeople and other Israeli state institutions. Compared to the
Speaker 7: previous Israeli assaults on Gaza, the current attack, I will
Speaker 7: never call it a war. This is not a war.
Speaker 7: I have said this before. A war indicates both sides
Speaker 7: are equal and have an army, but you literally can't
Speaker 7: go to war with an entity you are occupying. Regardless,
Speaker 7: compared to previous assaults on Gaza, what's happening now is unprecedented.
Speaker 7: Israel has named the current attack on Gaza that is
Speaker 7: happening now, the current genocide. It has named its actions
Speaker 7: that have started in the wake of October seventh, after
Speaker 7: the Hamas attack, Operation Iron Swords, and we've seen the
Speaker 7: Israeli armies significantly expand its bombing of targets that are
Speaker 7: not distinctly military in nature. This includes private residences as
Speaker 7: well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high rise blocks, which
Speaker 7: sources say the army defines as these power targets. Israel
Speaker 7: seeks out these power targets to bomb. Power targets again,
Speaker 7: are non military targets like homes in public buildings, and
Speaker 7: Israel again targets and bombs these for the purpose of
Speaker 7: terrorizing Palestinian civilians and harming their society. And this is
Speaker 7: according to intelligence sources who had first hand experience with
Speaker 7: this application in Gaza in the past, who confirmed that
Speaker 7: not only is it mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society,
Speaker 7: but it's also meant to quote create a shock that,
Speaker 7: among other things, will reverberate powerfully and lead civilians to
Speaker 7: put pressure on Hamas, as one source put it. Several
Speaker 7: sources spoke on the condition of anonymity, and they confirmed
Speaker 7: that the Israeli Army has files of the vast majority
Speaker 7: of potential targets in Gaza, including homes, which stipulate the
Speaker 7: number of civilians who are likely to be killed in
Speaker 7: an attack on a particular target. This number of casualties
Speaker 7: is calculated and known in advance to the army's intelligence units,
Speaker 7: who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly
Speaker 7: how many civilians are certain to be killed. So the
Speaker 7: Israeli Army knows just how many Palestinian civilians they'll kill
Speaker 7: with each strike, and Israel kills them anyway, fully aware
Speaker 7: of the number of civilian death that will ensue. In
Speaker 7: one case discussed by these sources, the Israeli military command
Speaker 7: knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in
Speaker 7: an attempt to assassinate a single top hamass military commander. Allegedly.
Speaker 7: One source said the numbers increased from dozens of civilian
Speaker 7: deaths permitted as collateral damage as part of an attack
Speaker 7: on a senior official in previous operations two hundreds of
Speaker 7: civilian deaths as collateral damage. Another source said nothing happens
Speaker 7: by accident when a three year old girl is killed
Speaker 7: in a home in Gaza. It's because someone in the
Speaker 7: army decided it wasn't a big deal for her to
Speaker 7: be killed, that it was a price worth paying in
Speaker 7: order to hit another target. We are not Hamas. These
Speaker 7: are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly
Speaker 7: how much collect damage there is in every home. The
Speaker 7: investigation revealed that another reason for the overwhelming civilian death toll,
Speaker 7: as well as a number of targets in Gaza, is
Speaker 7: the widespread use of an AI system called Habsaora aka
Speaker 7: the Gospel. The Gospel is largely built on artificial intelligence
Speaker 7: and can generate targets almost automatically, at a rate that
Speaker 7: far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as
Speaker 7: described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates, in his words,
Speaker 7: a mass assassination factory. Israeli sources said that the increasing
Speaker 7: use of AI based systems like Habsora allow the army
Speaker 7: to carry out strikes on residential homes where a single
Speaker 7: Hamas member lives on a massive scale, But testimonies of
Speaker 7: Palestinians argue that the army attacked many private residences where
Speaker 7: there was no known or apparent member of Hamas anywhere
Speaker 7: inside or any other militant group residing such strikes can
Speaker 7: knowingly kill entire families in the process, and that is
Speaker 7: exactly what has happened and keeps happening. In the majority
Speaker 7: of cases, the sources said, military activity is not conducted
Speaker 7: from these targeted homes. One of them said, I remember
Speaker 7: thinking that it was like if Palestinian militants would bomb
Speaker 7: all the private residences of our families when Israeli soldiers
Speaker 7: go back to sleep at home on the weekend. The
Speaker 7: source was apparently critical of this practice. He's still a
Speaker 7: fucking soldier, so I don't give a shit. Another source
Speaker 7: said that a senior intelligence officer told his officers after
Speaker 7: October seventh that the criteria around harming Palestinian civilians were
Speaker 7: significantly relaxed. As such, there are quote cases in which
Speaker 7: we shall based on a wide cellular pinpointing of where
Speaker 7: the target is killing civilians. This is done to save
Speaker 7: time instead of doing a little more work to get
Speaker 7: more accurate pinpointing, said the source. The result of these
Speaker 7: policies is the staggering loss of human life in Gaza.
Speaker 7: Since October seventh, over three hundred families have lost ten
Speaker 7: or more family members in the Israeli bombings over the
Speaker 7: past two months. That number is fifteen times higher the
Speaker 7: figure from what was previously Israel's dead las war on
Speaker 7: Gaza in twenty fourteen. One source said there is a
Speaker 7: feeling that senior officials in the army are aware of
Speaker 7: their failure on October seventh and are busy with the
Speaker 7: question of how to provide the Israeli public with an
Speaker 7: image of victory that will salvage the reputation. I just
Speaker 7: think it's really pathetic that an entire army will bomb
Speaker 7: and obliterate a piece of land with millions of people
Speaker 7: on it because they're essentially embarrassed that they failed. It
Speaker 7: really just makes you realize that humans are small, silly
Speaker 7: creatures that are just too powerful for their own good.
Speaker 7: Getting your ego slighted is not an excuse for committing
Speaker 7: a genocide, and there's nothing you can say to make
Speaker 7: me think otherwise. From the first moment after the October
Speaker 7: seventh attack, politicians in Israel openly declared that the response
Speaker 7: would be of a completely different magnitude to previous military
Speaker 7: operations in Gaza. Idspokesperson Danielle Hagari on October ninth, said,
Speaker 7: the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy, and
Speaker 7: the army swiftly translated these declarations into actions. Israeli intelligence
Speaker 7: divides its targets in Gaza into four categories. The first
Speaker 7: is tactical targets, which include standard military targets like armed
Speaker 7: militant cells, weapon warehouses, rocket launchers, anti tank missile launchers,
Speaker 7: launch pits, mortar bombs, military headquarters, observation posts, and so on.
Speaker 7: The second is underground targets, mainly tunnels that Hamas has
Speaker 7: dug under Gaza's neighborhoods, including under civilian homes. Aerial strikes
Speaker 7: on these targets could lead to the collapse of the
Speaker 7: homes above or near the tunnels. The third is what
Speaker 7: we're talking about earlier power targets, which includes the high
Speaker 7: rises and residential towers and the heart of cities, as
Speaker 7: well as public buildings like universities, banks, and government offices.
Speaker 7: The idea behind hitting such targets, say three intelligence sources
Speaker 7: who were involved in planning or conducting strikes on power
Speaker 7: targets in the past, say that a deliberate attack, devastation
Speaker 7: and destruction of Palestinian society will exert civil pressure on Hamas.
Speaker 7: The final category of targets are family homes. The stated
Speaker 7: purpose of these attacks is to destroy private residences in
Speaker 7: order to assassinate a single resident suspected of being a
Speaker 7: Hamas member or an Islamic Jahad operative, but Palestinian testimonies
Speaker 7: explained that most of the families that were killed did
Speaker 7: not include any operatives from any organization. In the early
Speaker 7: stages of the current genocide, the Israeli army appear to
Speaker 7: have given particular attention to the third and fourth categories.
Speaker 7: According to statements on October eleventh by the IOF spokesperson,
Speaker 7: during the first five days of fighting, half the targets bombed,
Speaker 7: which amounts to one thousand, three hundred and twenty nine
Speaker 7: out of a total of two than six hundred and
Speaker 7: eighty seven or deemed power targets. Just to loop in
Speaker 7: the people that maybe don't know. But IOF is used
Speaker 7: instead of IDF by a lot of Palacini activists because
Speaker 7: they define it, and I define it as Israeli occupation
Speaker 7: forces and not defense forces, because what they're doing has
Speaker 7: never been defense. So you might see many people call
Speaker 7: it IOF because that is what they're referring to. Israeli
Speaker 7: occupation forces. One source said, we are asked to look
Speaker 7: for high rise building with half a floor that can
Speaker 7: be attributed to hamas. Sometimes it is a militant group's
Speaker 7: spokesperson's office or a point where operatives meet. I understood
Speaker 7: that the floor is an excuse that allows the army
Speaker 7: to cause a lot of destruction in Gaza. That is
Speaker 7: what they told us. If they would tell the whole
Speaker 7: world that the Islamic stuh Hot offices on the tenth
Speaker 7: floor are not important as a target, but that its
Speaker 7: existence is justification to bring down the entire high rise
Speaker 7: with the aim of pressuring civilian families who live in
Speaker 7: it in order to put pressure on terrorist organizations. This
Speaker 7: itself would be seen as terrorism, so they do not
Speaker 7: say that. As expected. Testimonies and videos from Gaza, unsurprisingly
Speaker 7: show that some of these targets that have been attacked
Speaker 7: have been attacked without warning and without prior notice given
Speaker 7: to their occupants, thus killing entire families as a result.
Speaker 7: Let's take our first break here, because that's what we do,
Speaker 7: and we are back you and data for the period
Speaker 7: up until November eleventh, by which time Israel had killed
Speaker 7: eleven thousand and seventy eight Palestinians in Gaza stated that
Speaker 7: at least three hundred and twelve families have lost ten
Speaker 7: or more people in Gaza. For the sake of comparison,
Speaker 7: Operation Protective Edge in twenty fourteen, twenty families in Gaza
Speaker 7: lost ten or more people twenty in comparison to over
Speaker 7: three hundred now. In addition, according to the UN, at
Speaker 7: least one hundred and eighty nine families have lost between
Speaker 7: six and nine people, while five hundred and forty nine
Speaker 7: families have lost between two and five people. According to
Speaker 7: the UN, and this number is changing and unfortunately rising
Speaker 7: even as we speak. One point nine million Palestinians, which
Speaker 7: is the vast majority of the Strip's population, have been
Speaker 7: displaced within Gaza since October seventh. The IOF claims that
Speaker 7: the demand to evacuate the strips north was intended to
Speaker 7: protect civilian lives. However, Palestinians and most of the world
Speaker 7: see this for what it is that this mass displacement
Speaker 7: is part of a new Nekba, an attempt to ethnically
Speaker 7: cleanse part or all of the territory. And I'm not
Speaker 7: just making up the phrase new Nekba because Israeli politicians
Speaker 7: and officials have described what is happening right now as
Speaker 7: a nekba, as well as stating genocidal intent in many
Speaker 7: other ways. So Duve Waxman, the Directtion euro of UCLA's
Speaker 7: Y and S. Nazarin Center for Israel Studies, talked a
Speaker 7: little bit about this in a phone interview with NBC News.
Speaker 7: Some of that rhetoric can be seen as potentially genocidal
Speaker 7: from the way it dehumanizes Palestinian civilians. He noted that
Speaker 7: the right wing ministers who made comments like this are
Speaker 7: quote not in the war cabinet, so their awards can
Speaker 7: only have so much impact on Israeli policy. But still,
Speaker 7: hearing ministers of any kind in public, officials with millions
Speaker 7: of followers and eyes on them, make suggestions like flattening
Speaker 7: Gaza with a nuclear bomb should be concerning. Nonetheless, Agriculture
Speaker 7: Minister Avi Dickter, a member of the right wing Lecud party,
Speaker 7: told Israeli Channel twelve that the quote unquote war would
Speaker 7: be Gaza's nekba, using this Arabic word for catastrophe that
Speaker 7: we all use to describe the nineteen forty eight displacement
Speaker 7: of Palestinians as well as their genocide. He said, from
Speaker 7: an operational point of view, there is no way to
Speaker 7: wage a war as the Israeli army seeks to do
Speaker 7: in Gaza with masses between the tanks and the soldiers.
Speaker 7: When Dictor was pressed on his use of the word
Speaker 7: nekba to describe the situation in Gaza, he said again,
Speaker 7: doubling down, Gaza nekba twenty twenty three, that's how it'll end.
Speaker 7: A week before these comments were made, Israeli Heritage Minister
Speaker 7: Amahai Iliyahu apologies from his pronouncing it, but also not
Speaker 7: really sparked outcry after he suggested that dropping a nuclear
Speaker 7: bomb on the Gaza strip was quote one of the
Speaker 7: possibilities in the current conflict. Also, it's important to remember
Speaker 7: that the increasingly hostile rhetoric from Israel's far right cabinet
Speaker 7: ministers has not only centered on Gaza, but also the
Speaker 7: occupied West Bank. An example of this is when Israeli
Speaker 7: Finance Minister Bezialel Simotrik, who was a prominent settler advocist,
Speaker 7: called for the creation of quote sterile zones in the
Speaker 7: West Bank in a letter that he sent Anya who
Speaker 7: and Yoov Galant, the Defense Minister, and this letter was
Speaker 7: shared with Israeli media. Such sterile zones, he said, with
Speaker 7: block Palestinians from entering certain areas and bar them from
Speaker 7: harvesting olives close to Israeli settlements in the enclave. This
Speaker 7: letter also came during the annual olive harvest, with ol
Speaker 7: of farming being a primary source of income for many
Speaker 7: Palestinian farmers in the West Bank. It also came during
Speaker 7: a surge of settler violence against Palestinians in the area,
Speaker 7: which has only increased since then. There was a law
Speaker 7: that was passed a couple of years ago. I believe
Speaker 7: that essentially allows Israeli soldiers to shoot unarmed Palestinians without
Speaker 7: any legal repercussions, and we're seeing that happen in real
Speaker 7: time in the West Bank. So as this genocide is
Speaker 7: unfold Gangaza, keep in mind there's no Hamas in the
Speaker 7: West Bank and they are still committing acts of terror.
Speaker 7: There also a side note, if you guys want to
Speaker 7: learn about the significance of olives and olive trees for Palestine,
Speaker 7: I did an episode about that. You can look it up.
Speaker 7: But the olive harvest and olives and olive trees in
Speaker 7: particular are very significant part of Palestinian life. One such
Speaker 7: case of both increasing settler violence and targeting olives and
Speaker 7: all of farmers in particular is in Balal Saleh, who
Speaker 7: was killed while tending to his olive trees earlier this month.
Speaker 7: An elderly couple were also attacked by settlers last month
Speaker 7: without provocation while collecting olives in the West Bank. Comments
Speaker 7: like those made by Simotrik only in bolden settlers to
Speaker 7: attack Palestinians again. I want to mention here that it
Speaker 7: is not against Israeli law for soldiers to shoot at
Speaker 7: unarmed Palestinians. It is permissible and done all the time.
Speaker 7: When that is the norm. Of course, you're going to
Speaker 7: have hateful settlers adopting the same strategy when they're armed
Speaker 7: with no repercussions. According to the Israeli Army, during the
Speaker 7: first five days of fighting, it dropped six thousand bombs
Speaker 7: on the Gaza Strip with a total weight of a
Speaker 7: four thousand tons. Media outlets reported that the army had
Speaker 7: wiped out entire neighborhoods. According to the Gaza based Elmizan
Speaker 7: Center for Human Rights, these attacks led to the complete
Speaker 7: destruction of residential neighborhoods, the destruction of infrastructure, and the
Speaker 7: mass killing of residents, as documented by Ademizan and numerous
Speaker 7: images coming out of Gaza. Israel bombed the Islamic University
Speaker 7: of Gaza, as well as the palastinan Bar Association, a
Speaker 7: un building for educational programs for outstanding students, a building
Speaker 7: belonging to the Palestine Telecommunications Company, the Ministry of National Economy,
Speaker 7: the Ministry of Culture, roads, and dozens of high rise
Speaker 7: buildings and homes, especially in Gaza's northern neighborhoods, again striking
Speaker 7: targets like these functions primarily as a means that allow
Speaker 7: damage to civil society. That is a direct quote from
Speaker 7: a source, and the sources understood, some explicitly and some implicitly,
Speaker 7: that damage to civilians is the real purpose of these attacks.
Speaker 7: In May twenty twenty one, Israel was heavily criticized for
Speaker 7: bombing the El Jallah Tower, which housed prominent international media
Speaker 7: outlets like Al Jazeera, AP and AFP. A source said,
Speaker 7: the perception is that it really hurts Hamas when high
Speaker 7: rise buildings are taken down because it creates a public
Speaker 7: reaction in the Gaza Strip and scares the population. They
Speaker 7: wanted to give the citizens of Gaza the feeling that
Speaker 7: Hamas is not in control of the situation. Sometimes they
Speaker 7: toppled buildings and sometimes postal service and government buildings. The
Speaker 7: idea of causing mass devastation to civilian areas for strategic
Speaker 7: purposes was formulated in previous military operations in Gaza, honed
Speaker 7: in by the so called Dahiya doctrine from the Second
Speaker 7: Lebanon War of two thousand and six. According to the
Speaker 7: Dahiya doctrine developed by former iof's Chief of Staff Gadi Zenkot,
Speaker 7: who was now a kanescant member and part of the
Speaker 7: current war cabinet. According to him and this doctrine, in
Speaker 7: a war against guerrilla groups such as Hamas or Husbandlah,
Speaker 7: Israel thus use disproportionate and overwhelming force while targeting civilian
Speaker 7: and government infrastructure in order to establish deterrence and force
Speaker 7: a civilian population to pressure the groups to end their attacks.
Speaker 7: The concept of power targets also seems to have been
Speaker 7: emanated from this same logic. The first time the Israeli
Speaker 7: Army publicly defined power targets in Gaza was at the
Speaker 7: end of Operation Protective Edge in twenty fourteen, the army
Speaker 7: bombed four buildings during the last four days of the war,
Speaker 7: three residential multi story buildings in Gaza City and a
Speaker 7: high rise in Rafa. The security establishment explained at the
Speaker 7: time that the attacks were intended to convey to the
Speaker 7: Palestinians in Gaza that quote, nothing is immune anymore, and
Speaker 7: to put pressure on Hamas to agree to a cease fire.
Speaker 7: An Amnesty report in late twenty fourteen stated, the evidence
Speaker 7: we collected shows that a massive destruction of the buildings
Speaker 7: was carried out deliberately without any military justification. Previous operations
Speaker 7: have also shown how striking these targets is meant not
Speaker 7: to only harm Palestinian morale, but also raised the morale
Speaker 7: inside Israel. Herods revealed that during Operation Guardian of the
Speaker 7: Walls in twenty twenty one, the IOF Spokesperson's unit conducted
Speaker 7: a si off against Israeli citizens in order to boost
Speaker 7: awareness of the iof's operation in Gaza and the damage
Speaker 7: they caused to Palestinians. Soldiers using fake social media accounts
Speaker 7: to conceal the campaign's origin, uploaded images and clips of
Speaker 7: the army's strikes in Gaza to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and
Speaker 7: TikTok in order to demonstrate the army's prowess to the
Speaker 7: Israeli public, which is, in my opinion, pathetic. During the
Speaker 7: twenty twenty one assault, Israel struck nine targets that were
Speaker 7: defined as power targets, all of them high rise buildings.
Speaker 7: One security source said the goal was to collapse the
Speaker 7: high rises so that the Israeli public would see a
Speaker 7: victory image. The bottom line is that they knocked down
Speaker 7: a high rise for the sake of knocking down a
Speaker 7: high rise. Let's take our second break and we'll be
Speaker 7: right back. We're back, okay. So not only are we
Speaker 7: seeing Israel attack an unprecedented number of power targets, we're
Speaker 7: also getting testimonies from Palestinian residents in Gaza that indicate
Speaker 7: that since October seventh, Israel has attacked high rises with
Speaker 7: their residents still inside without prior warning, which leads to
Speaker 7: many civilian deaths. Such attacks obviously result in the killing
Speaker 7: of entire families, and this was experienced in previous offenses.
Speaker 7: According to an investigation by AP conducted after the twenty
Speaker 7: fourteen war, about eighty nine percent of those killed in
Speaker 7: the aerial bombings of family homes were unarmed residents, and
Speaker 7: most of them were women and children. Sound familiar. Just
Speaker 7: goes to show you that Israel has been doing this
Speaker 7: for a long time without anything happening because international law
Speaker 7: is bullshit. But really, think about that, eighty nine percent
Speaker 7: of those killed in the aerial bombings in the twenty
Speaker 7: fourteen war sasgenocide were innocent people who were unarmed, most
Speaker 7: of them women and children. The exact same thing is
Speaker 7: happening right now. Some examples of the current indiscriminate bombing
Speaker 7: of residential buildings are the following. On October tenth, Israel
Speaker 7: bombed the Babbel building in Gaza, and this is according
Speaker 7: to the testimony of Belal Abuhatzira, who rescued bodies from
Speaker 7: the ruins that night. Ten people were killed in the
Speaker 7: attack on the building, including three journalists. On October twenty fifth,
Speaker 7: the twelve story Eltage residential building in Gaza City was
Speaker 7: bombed to the ground, killing the families living inside it
Speaker 7: without warning. About one hundred and twenty people were buried
Speaker 7: under the ruins of their apartments. According to the testimonies
Speaker 7: of the residents, yusuf ahmud Shadaf, a resident of Eltaje,
Speaker 7: wrote that thirty seven of his family members who lived
Speaker 7: in the building were killed in the attack. He said,
Speaker 7: my dear father and mother, my beloved wife, my sons,
Speaker 7: and most of my brothers and their families were killed.
Speaker 7: Residents stated that a lot of bombs were dropped that
Speaker 7: resulted in damaging and destroying apartments in nearby buildings as well.
Speaker 7: Six days later after this, on October thirty first, an
Speaker 7: eight story building the Elmu had seen was bombed without warning.
Speaker 7: Between thirty and forty five bodies were reportedly covered from
Speaker 7: the ruins. On the first day. One baby was found
Speaker 7: alive without his parents. I'm not sure if I mentioned
Speaker 7: this in a previous episode, but I think it bears
Speaker 7: repeating that children in Gaza are being admitted to hospitals
Speaker 7: completely alone and with no surviving family members, and this
Speaker 7: is happening so often that hospitals now have an abbreviation
Speaker 7: for these children WCNSF Wounded child with no surviving family.
Speaker 7: The ones that can't speak are marked as unknown. There
Speaker 7: are many children and babies like this. Journalists estimated that
Speaker 7: the attack killed over one hundred and fifty people, and
Speaker 7: many are buried and remain under the rubble. The building
Speaker 7: used to stand in Uzurat refugee camp south of Wadi Gaza,
Speaker 7: in the supposed safe zone which Israel directed the Palestinians
Speaker 7: who fled their homes in northern and central Gaza. It
Speaker 7: therefore served as a temporary shelter for the displaced before
Speaker 7: getting obliterated into smithereens and bombed to the ground, killing
Speaker 7: hundreds of people. According to an investigation by Amnesty International,
Speaker 7: on October ninth, Israel shelled at least three multi story buildings,
Speaker 7: as well as an open flea market on a crowded
Speaker 7: street in the Jebelier refugee camp, killing at least sixty
Speaker 7: nine people. The father of a child who was killed said,
Speaker 7: the bodies were burned. I didn't want to look. I
Speaker 7: was scared of looking at Yamad's face. The bodies were
Speaker 7: scattered on the floor. Everyone was looking for their children
Speaker 7: in these piles. I recognized my son only by his trousers.
Speaker 7: I wanted to bury him immediately, so I carried my
Speaker 7: son and got him out. According to intelligence sources, Habsorah
Speaker 7: aka the Gospel the Ai system we mentioned earlier. This
Speaker 7: AI system generates, among other things, automatic recommendations for attacking
Speaker 7: private residences where people suspected in bold suspected of being
Speaker 7: Hamas or Islamic s Jahat operatives live. Israel then carries
Speaker 7: out large scale assassination operations through the heavy shelling of
Speaker 7: these residential homes. Haabsorah explained one of the sources processes
Speaker 7: enormous amounts of data that quote tens of thousands of
Speaker 7: intelligence officers could not process, as well as recommending bombing
Speaker 7: sites in real time. I wanted to put in bolds
Speaker 7: suspected because that is a crazy thing to do when
Speaker 7: you don't know for sure what the fuck you're doing
Speaker 7: and who the fuck you're killing. Just putting it out
Speaker 7: there that it's at this point can't be any clearer
Speaker 7: that it's not about Hamas. It's about the eradication of
Speaker 7: the Palestinian people, which has been slowly happening for the
Speaker 7: past seventy five years, and now it has accelerated. It's
Speaker 7: not about Hamas because that is a crazy thing to
Speaker 7: do if you're only targeting Hamas. One former intelligence officer
Speaker 7: explained that the Hubsori system enables the army to run
Speaker 7: a quote mass assassination factory, in which the quote emphasis
Speaker 7: is on the quantity and not quality. A human eye
Speaker 7: will quote go over the targets before each attack, but
Speaker 7: it need not spend a lot of time on them.
Speaker 7: In twenty nineteen, the Israeli Army created a new center
Speaker 7: aimed at using AI to accelerate target generation. The Target's
Speaker 7: Administrative Division is a unit that includes hundreds of officers
Speaker 7: and soldiers and is based on AI capabilities. This is
Speaker 7: according to the former IOF Chief of Staff, Aviv Coochavi,
Speaker 7: and he gave an in depth interview about this earlier
Speaker 7: this year. He said, this is a machine that, with
Speaker 7: the help AI, processes a lot of data better and
Speaker 7: faster than any human and translates it into targets for attack.
Speaker 7: The result was that an operation Guardian of the Walls
Speaker 7: in twenty twenty one, from the moment this machine was activated,
Speaker 7: it generated one hundred new targets every day. You see
Speaker 7: in the past there were times in Gaza when we
Speaker 7: would create fifty targets per year, and here the machine
Speaker 7: produced one hundred targets in one day. One of the
Speaker 7: sources of the investigation by plus nine to seventy two
Speaker 7: magazine said, we prepare the targets automatically and work according
Speaker 7: to a checklist. This source also worked in the new
Speaker 7: target's administrative division. They said, it really is like a factory.
Speaker 7: We work quickly and there is no time to delve
Speaker 7: deep into the target. The view is that we are
Speaker 7: judged according to how many targets we managed to generate.
Speaker 7: A senior military official in charge of the target bank
Speaker 7: told Jerusalem Post earlier this year that thanks to the
Speaker 7: army's AI systems, for the first time, the military can
Speaker 7: generate new targets at a faster rate than it attacks.
Speaker 7: One more time for emphasis, for the first time ever,
Speaker 7: thanks to AI systems, the military generates new targets faster
Speaker 7: than it can attack them. Another source said the drive
Speaker 7: to automatically generate large numbers of targets is a realization
Speaker 7: of the Dahia doctrine. The Dahia doctrine, as mentioned earlier,
Speaker 7: is when Israel uses this proportionate and overwhelming force when
Speaker 7: targeting civilian and government infrastructure in order to establish deterrence
Speaker 7: and make the palasinging people cower and fear and admit
Speaker 7: defeat essentially, and so this AI system is really helping
Speaker 7: achieve this Dahia doctrine. In the process. Automated systems like
Speaker 7: HPSURA have thus greatly facilitated the work of Israeli intelligence
Speaker 7: officers and making decisions during military operations, including calculating potential casualties.
Speaker 7: Five different sources confirmed that the number of civilians who
Speaker 7: may be killed in attacks on private residences is known
Speaker 7: in advance to Israeli intelligence and appears clearly in the
Speaker 7: target file under the category quote collateral damage. According to
Speaker 7: these sources, there are degrees of collateral damage according to
Speaker 7: which the army determines whether it is possible to attack
Speaker 7: a target inside of private residence. One of the sources said,
Speaker 7: when the general directive becomes quote collateral damage five, that
Speaker 7: means we are authorized to strike all targets that will
Speaker 7: kill five or less civilians. We can act on all
Speaker 7: target files that are five or less. A security official
Speaker 7: who participated in attacking targets during previous operations said, in
Speaker 7: the past, we did not regularly mark the homes of
Speaker 7: junior Hamas members for bombing. In my time, if the
Speaker 7: house I was working on was marked collateral damage five,
Speaker 7: it would not always be approved for attack. Such approval,
Speaker 7: he said, would only be received if a senior Hammas
Speaker 7: commander was known to be living in the home. To
Speaker 7: my understanding, today they can mark all the houses of
Speaker 7: any Hammas military operative, regardless of rank or confirmation of membership.
Speaker 7: The source added that is a lot of houses. Hamas
Speaker 7: members who don't really matter for anything live in homes
Speaker 7: all across Gaza, so they mark the home and bomb
Speaker 7: the house and kill everyone there. On October twenty second,
Speaker 7: the Israeli Air Force bombed the home of Palestinian journalist
Speaker 7: Ahmad al Nahouch in the city of Der El Badach.
Speaker 7: The strike on October twenty second collapsed blocks of concrete
Speaker 7: onto Ahmed's entire family, killing his father, brothers, sisters, and
Speaker 7: all of their children, including babies. Only his twelve year
Speaker 7: old niece, Manak survived and remained in critical condition, her
Speaker 7: body covered in burns. A few days later, Malak died.
Speaker 7: Twenty one members of Ahmed's family were killed in total,
Speaker 7: buried under their home. None of them were militants. The
Speaker 7: youngest was two years old, the oldest his father, was
Speaker 7: seventy five. Ahmed, who was now currently living in the UK,
Speaker 7: is alone without his entire family. This part particularly gutted me.
Speaker 7: But Ahmed's family WhatsApp group the group text thread that
Speaker 7: he had with his family. It was titled better Together.
Speaker 7: The last message that appears in this group was sent
Speaker 7: by him a little after midnight on the night that
Speaker 7: he lost his family. He sent this message someone let
Speaker 7: me know that everything is fine. No one answered. He
Speaker 7: fell asleep and woke up in a panic at four am,
Speaker 7: drenched and swept, and he checked his phone again nothing,
Speaker 7: and then he received a message from a friend with
Speaker 7: the terrible news. Unfortunately Ahmed's. The case is very common
Speaker 7: in Gaza these days. In interviews to the press, heads
Speaker 7: of Gaza hospitals have been echoing the same description. Families
Speaker 7: enter hospitals as a succession of corpses. A child, followed
Speaker 7: by his father, followed by his grandfather. The bodies are
Speaker 7: all covered in dirt and blood. The report does not
Speaker 7: have data regarding the number of military operatives who were
Speaker 7: indeed killed or wounded in aerial strikes on private residences
Speaker 7: in the current genocide, but there is ample evidence that
Speaker 7: in many, many cases, if not most, vast majority of
Speaker 7: none of the people killed or military or political operatives
Speaker 7: belonging to Hamas or Islamic Jihad, the bombing of family
Speaker 7: homes where Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives supposedly live. It
Speaker 7: likely became a more concerted IOF policy during Operation Protective
Speaker 7: Edge in twenty fourteen, and this is when Israel began
Speaker 7: to systematically strike family homes from the air. Human rights
Speaker 7: groups like Betstellem collected testimonies from Palestinians who survived these attacks.
Speaker 7: The survivors said the homes collapsed in on themselves, glass
Speaker 7: shards cut through the bodies of those inside, the debris
Speaker 7: smelled of blood, and people were buried alive. A UN
Speaker 7: report defined this in twenty fifteen as both a potential
Speaker 7: war crime and a new pattern of action that led
Speaker 7: to the death of entire families. And we're seeing this
Speaker 7: pattern repeat in real time right now. In twenty fourteen,
Speaker 7: ninety three babies were killed as a result of Israeli
Speaker 7: bombings on family homes, of which thirteen were under one
Speaker 7: year old. As of a month ago, two hundred and
Speaker 7: eighty six babies aged one year under were identified as
Speaker 7: having been killed in Gaza. And this is according to
Speaker 7: a detailed idealist with the ages of victims published by
Speaker 7: the Gaza Ministry of Health on October twenty six. This
Speaker 7: number has likely doubled and tripled, if not more, at
Speaker 7: this point. So in many cases, especially during the current
Speaker 7: attacks on Gaza, the Israeli Army carries out attacks that
Speaker 7: strike private residences even when there is no known or
Speaker 7: clear military target. For example, according to the Committee to
Speaker 7: Protect Journalists, by November twenty ninth, Israel had killed fifty
Speaker 7: Palestinian journalists in Gaza, some of them in their homes
Speaker 7: with their families. The murdering of these journalists, again, may
Speaker 7: I remind you, is very deliberate as far as silencing
Speaker 7: Palestine and people in Gaza from sharing the truth about
Speaker 7: what's going on. Rosti Charage is one of these journalists
Speaker 7: who was killed, who was thirty one, and a journalist
Speaker 7: in Gaza who was born in Britain who founded a
Speaker 7: media outlet in Gaza called Almidia. On October twenty second,
Speaker 7: an Israeli bomb struck his parents' house where he was sleeping,
Speaker 7: killing him. There's also journalists Salam Memma who similarly died
Speaker 7: under the ruins of her home after it was bombed,
Speaker 7: of her three young children. Hadi seven died while sham
Speaker 7: Aged three has not been yet found. Under the rebel,
Speaker 7: two other journalists, Dua Shutaff and Sema Makimad were killed
Speaker 7: together with their children in their homes. As of this recording,
Speaker 7: Israel has killed over sixty journalists since October seventh. That's
Speaker 7: going to be the episode for today because that was
Speaker 7: a lot, and I hope it was helpful. This investigative
Speaker 7: report is extremely important, especially now that we're seeing these
Speaker 7: Israeli officials and officers shamelessly saying that they're trying their
Speaker 7: best to avoid civilian casualties, when here we have proof
Speaker 7: that that is in fact a lie. So I want
Speaker 7: to do this episode to counteract the argument that this
Speaker 7: is about Hamas. It's not about Hamas, isn't Nothing can
Speaker 7: justify this amount of murder and death of people, point blank.
Speaker 7: Absolutely nothing justifies a genocide. Nothing. So I hope you
Speaker 7: guys keep learning about Palestine and raising awareness about the
Speaker 7: genocide and staying active in your communities and following Palestinian
Speaker 7: journalists that are still alive and risking their lives to
Speaker 7: share information. Motaz Azaiza is one of these journalists that
Speaker 7: is consistently posting on his stories There's also Bisan who
Speaker 7: is at Wizard Underscore Bisan one on Instagram. She's been
Speaker 7: an incredible source and really just being so vulnerable and
Speaker 7: sharing exactly what's going on. And I have no idea,
Speaker 7: and I hope I never do. How hard it is
Speaker 7: to not have time for grief. Palestinians do not have
Speaker 7: time to grieve their day. They're too busy photographing them
Speaker 7: and videoing them, so the world will even believe that
Speaker 7: they're going through a genocide. Something I wanted to bring
Speaker 7: up is that these journalists in Gaza are the ones
Speaker 7: that are left. They've been posting these heartbreaking last messages
Speaker 7: on social media. Be SAand posted on December second, I
Speaker 7: no longer have any hope of survival like I had
Speaker 7: at the beginning of this genocide, and I am certain
Speaker 7: that I will die in the next few weeks or
Speaker 7: maybe days. My message to the world, you are not
Speaker 7: innocent of what is happening to us. You, as governments
Speaker 7: or peoples that support Israel's annihilation of my people, we
Speaker 7: will not forgive you. Humanity will not forgive you. Even
Speaker 7: if we die. The history will never forget Motaz, also
Speaker 7: on December second, said it's about life or death. Now
Speaker 7: I did what I could. We are surrounded by Israeli tanks.
Speaker 7: Gaza's strip is getting divided into three parts, the North
Speaker 7: of Gaza, the Middle area and De La Baah and
Speaker 7: Han Yunis and the Dafa. The movement is becoming nearly impossible,
Speaker 7: and of course there is no safe place and people
Speaker 7: just don't know where to go. It is hard to
Speaker 7: keep up and watch, but it's truly the least you
Speaker 7: can do. We are so privileged in one me making
Speaker 7: a podcast and you listening to it, So the very
Speaker 7: least we can do is use our privilege to help
Speaker 7: those in need and be the mouthpiece that they so
Speaker 7: desperately want and are begging for, and not letting their
Speaker 7: stories be buried under the rubble with them just because
Speaker 7: Israel is trying to cover it up. So with that,
Speaker 7: I'll see you next time. Hello, This is Shreen and
Speaker 7: I'm joined by James. There's no preamble here, We're just
Speaker 7: gonna introduce ourselves.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, we know fucking around here, serious business.
Speaker 7: I actually like every time I start recording, I genuinely
Speaker 7: don't know how to start a podcast. I don't know
Speaker 7: any like at any time this happens, I feel like
Speaker 7: I am doing it for the first time.
Speaker 9: Me too.
Speaker 4: We could just do a thing like robot what we
Speaker 4: just kind of making gay?
Speaker 7: Yeah exactly. Yeah, maybe next time I'll have to practice
Speaker 7: that in the mirror a few times. But thank you
Speaker 7: for joining me today. Essentially, today we're going to talk
Speaker 7: about the rise in Islamophobia and how the demonization and
Speaker 7: dehumanization of Muslims and Arabs leads people to be scared
Speaker 7: of something like a scarf. The kaffeia is the black
Speaker 7: and white checkered scarf you might have seen that's worn
Speaker 7: by Palestinians and their supporters, and it's really symbolic and
Speaker 7: corn to Palestinians, and especially after those three students in
Speaker 7: Vermont were targeted because of the kafia, I thought it
Speaker 7: was worth discussing what it is. If you hear noise
Speaker 7: in the background, that is my cat and I apologize.
Speaker 7: That's just texture for POD.
Speaker 4: So texture for pod, you know, that's what we give
Speaker 4: you it.
Speaker 9: Yes, but yeah, we're going to talk about kafa, where
Speaker 9: it comes from, what it means, why people do it.
Speaker 9: The time that United Airlines and Rachel Ray joined the
Speaker 9: forces of International jihad. It's going to be an interesting podcast.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I didn't know about that part, so I'm excited
Speaker 7: for you to tell me about it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 9: I'm excited to talk about United Airlines like great, long
Speaker 9: time supported to the Palestinian course.
Speaker 7: So first, before we start to talk about the Kaffia,
Speaker 7: I want to talk about this uptick in anti Muslim,
Speaker 7: anti Arab, anti Palestinian hate, because we've been seeing a
Speaker 7: lot of supporters of Palestine lose their jobs. An agent
Speaker 7: in CIA, a lawyer in England, numerous journalists and news anchors.
Speaker 7: And this is an element of solomophobia that I don't
Speaker 7: think we take seriously enough, because liking or sharing a
Speaker 7: social media post denouncing genocide should only be seen as that,
Speaker 7: just a post denouncing genocide. I think the meanings that
Speaker 7: people push onto these things is really dangerous, and discussions
Speaker 7: and meetings on the issue have been barred. People who
Speaker 7: express any kind of sympathy for Palestine, even in old
Speaker 7: social media posts, have been dismissed from their job. We're
Speaker 7: seeing counter campaigns by pro Israel groups in the US
Speaker 7: trying to globally shut down the voices of pro Palestinian
Speaker 7: activists and to criminalize elements of Palestinian identity itself, for example,
Speaker 7: like displaying the Palestinian flag or wearing the Caffea headdress
Speaker 7: slash scarf. And this week, I think it's worth mentioning
Speaker 7: that the House passed Resolution eight ninety four, which equates
Speaker 7: criticizing Israel with being anti Semitic. Ninety five Democrats helped
Speaker 7: the House GOP pass this extremely ingenuous and dangerous resolution,
Speaker 7: and in their words, it's against anti Semitism, but it
Speaker 7: is extremely dangerous for the Jewish community in and of
Speaker 7: itself because condemning any criticism of the Israeli state should
Speaker 7: only be taken for that. That's the thing that I understand.
Speaker 7: People people project onto things.
Speaker 9: Yeah, anti signism. I wanted to like, when I'm studying
Speaker 9: at UCSD, one of the professors who I was very
Speaker 9: fond of, who was very informative from academic opinions and
Speaker 9: the way I teach, especially with someone called Debrah Hurtz,
Speaker 9: who's head of the Jewish Studies Department at UCSD. She
Speaker 9: is one of dozens, it's not maybe maybe hundreds of
Speaker 9: academics who signed something called the Jerusalem Declaration, which, like
Speaker 9: I believe most of them are involved in Jewish studies
Speaker 9: or Holocaust studies.
Speaker 4: It's throughout Palatini Middleat studies.
Speaker 9: Something like that, right, And like, I think it's useful
Speaker 9: to have some clarity around these topics because, like, right now,
Speaker 9: there are people who gave zero fucks about antisemitism when
Speaker 9: there were literal mobs carrying tortures through the streets screaming
Speaker 9: about Jewish people, right when when some of the people
Speaker 9: listening to this podcast, and people are on this podcast
Speaker 9: made every effort to call out what it was, when
Speaker 9: large numbers of people in Congress didn't give a fuck,
Speaker 9: weren't ready to call like literal genocidal fascism, genocidal fascism
Speaker 9: in case it got some votes or money. Now now
Speaker 9: they're ready to. Now they're ready to go hard as
Speaker 9: fuck against Palestinian people. Which it does seem like there's
Speaker 9: a whole lot of people in Congress who weren't given
Speaker 9: a cudgel to beat Muslim people. Won't think about it
Speaker 9: for more than five seconds, but I do want to.
Speaker 9: I just want to read this part from the Jeruisdom Declaration,
Speaker 9: the Jeruisom Declaration dot org.
Speaker 4: You can find yourself.
Speaker 9: Criticizing or opposing Zionism as the form of nationalism, or
Speaker 9: arguing for a variety of constitutional arrangements for Jewish or
Speaker 9: Palestinian people in the area between the Jordan River and
Speaker 9: the Mediterranean. That's listed under things which are not on
Speaker 9: the face of anti semitic. Right, it goes on, it
Speaker 9: is not anti semitic to support arrangement so called full
Speaker 9: of quality to all inhabitants between the river and the sea,
Speaker 9: whether in two states are by national state, a unitary
Speaker 9: democratic state, a federal state, or in whatever form. I
Speaker 9: think that's pretty clear, right, Like obviously the variety of
Speaker 9: options there, all of which are neither genocidal nor in
Speaker 9: the face of it anti semitic. It's just like this
Speaker 9: is just a canard, like I saw Scott Peters, who
Speaker 9: is the congress person for Poway. Scott Peters, I think
Speaker 9: it's pretty uncontroversial to say it's a giant piece of shit.
Speaker 9: Scott Peters is the reason why my incidence still costs
Speaker 9: lots of money. Fuck Scott Peters. But he was in
Speaker 9: this case accusing UCSD students of being anti Semitic for
Speaker 9: passing a BDS resolution. Another thing that Jewishalem Declaration which
Speaker 9: again was signed by Deborah Hurtz, the head of Jewish
Speaker 9: Studies at UCSD, specifically calls out as not being on
Speaker 9: the face of anti Semitic right, like these people aren't
Speaker 9: in some cases listening to what Jewish Studies scholars are saying,
Speaker 9: And I think we need to be careful when obviously
Speaker 9: all of us will call it anti semitism right. I've
Speaker 9: been personally at the forefront of calling anti semitism in
Speaker 9: the law enforcement apparatus in San Diego when our DA
Speaker 9: used anti Semitic tropes in her twenty eighteen campaign that
Speaker 9: seems to have been memory hold. But because this I
Speaker 9: think is often simply being weaponized as another way to
Speaker 9: suppress protest movements and specifically to justify Islamophobia, which we
Speaker 9: should all stand against, like regardless of where we stand
Speaker 9: on two states, one state, whatever, Like I think if
Speaker 9: we can see people using something to the cudgel against
Speaker 9: a group of people who have been victimized by this
Speaker 9: state for a very long time, and they're continuing to
Speaker 9: do it like this shit got us twenty years of war,
Speaker 9: fucking tens of thousands of lives right ruined or last,
Speaker 9: and we're going right back to it and like, if
Speaker 9: you can't see why it's a problem, I don't know
Speaker 9: if I have much more to say.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's not great.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think that's a big reason why I wanted
Speaker 7: to bring up the resolution, because when you have pundits
Speaker 7: and politicians pointing at a pro Palestinian protest and being like,
Speaker 7: this is pro Hamas, and when the resolution specifically calls
Speaker 7: out the from the River to the Sea chant, which
Speaker 7: in theory should be protected by the First Amendment, but
Speaker 7: that's not real. That's what really troubles me, because it's
Speaker 7: vilifying the entire idea of supporting Palestine, and that includes
Speaker 7: any kind of display of supporting Palestine. And you're right,
Speaker 7: it almost cheapens the meaning of anti Semitism because it
Speaker 7: almost makes us overlook true danger to the Jewish people.
Speaker 7: And it also completely raises the identity of anti Zionist
Speaker 7: Jewish people, which makes up a big part of the
Speaker 7: Jewish community in my opinion, even though they want to
Speaker 7: make it seem like they're the minority, but the majority
Speaker 7: of Dinas country are actually even Jewish, So Zionism is yeah,
Speaker 7: equated to Jewishness in the slightest I.
Speaker 9: Didn't think like we need to see to Congress a
Speaker 9: group of people who, like I said, who have been
Speaker 9: justifying or in the Middle East for twenty years when
Speaker 9: it comes to defining what bigotry is, right, Like, we
Speaker 9: a group of people who are like ruining over a
Speaker 9: country that's built on stolen land by stolen people, Like,
Speaker 9: we don't have to listen to them. They don't get
Speaker 9: to tell us what it is and it's not these things,
Speaker 9: and like, yeah, you fucking do not get to talk
Speaker 9: about anti semitism when you said shit about Charlottesville, right, Like,
Speaker 9: it's clearly two phased, it's bullshit, and it's just a
Speaker 9: cultural with which to be a protest movement that they
Speaker 9: see as woke or leftist or comprised of Muslims who
Speaker 9: they think are less than and like it's obviously despicable
Speaker 9: the people who did say shit about Charlottesville will make
Speaker 9: common cause with these people who are very clearly doing
Speaker 9: this in bad faith. Yeah, it's we can oppose anti Semitism,
Speaker 9: and we should, and we can oppose Dlamophobia and we should.
Speaker 7: But opposing them goes hand in hand in my opinion,
Speaker 7: because we are essentially the same people Like I don't
Speaker 7: see a big separation. Obviously the hate is different, but
Speaker 7: I think fighting both Islamophobia and anti Semitism it goes
Speaker 7: hand in hand.
Speaker 9: Yeah, with that, we should mention also that like consistently
Speaker 9: missing an American discourse to seek sick people.
Speaker 7: There's something I want to get into in a little bit.
Speaker 7: I want to get into how there's a huge rise
Speaker 7: in Islamophobic attacks and specifically there was a Sikh person
Speaker 7: who was attacked because he was presumed to be Muslim.
Speaker 7: Because the anti Arab dehumanizing language that we hear in
Speaker 7: the media, it emboldens like hateful terrorists to commit hate
Speaker 7: crimes against Arab Muslim people or people who are just
Speaker 7: perceived to be Arab and Muslim. And I remember this
Speaker 7: the tweet that Biden tweeted a couple of weeks ago
Speaker 7: when he was trying to cover his ass and be like,
Speaker 7: we hate Slamophobia too, but he said people perceied to
Speaker 7: be Muslim and wrongfully, no, wrongfully perceived to be Muslim
Speaker 7: was the wording, as if it was like a bad
Speaker 7: thing to be perceived Muslim. So you do you ever
Speaker 7: that tweet at all?
Speaker 4: Yeah? I didn't know.
Speaker 9: I try not to look at President Biden's sweets, because
Speaker 9: it's really a source of joy in my life.
Speaker 4: But that's great.
Speaker 9: Look the dude sitting here while little children and pregnant
Speaker 9: ladies and old folks are sleeping out in the dirt
Speaker 9: in the board of a third nine in a row,
Speaker 9: like I give a fuck about what he thinks. He again, right,
Speaker 9: that guy doesn't get to legislate morality for me because
Speaker 9: he has none. And word, I simply don't give a
Speaker 9: fuck what he says.
Speaker 7: Word. I like that approach. I like that approach. But
Speaker 7: Muslims and Arabs did pay attention to that word wrongfully,
Speaker 7: and it just kind of reinforced the sentiment in the
Speaker 7: country when it comes to Arab and Muslim people or
Speaker 7: those perceived to be Arab and Muslim and The Council
Speaker 7: on American Islamic Relations said it received seven hundred and
Speaker 7: seventy four requests for help and reports of bias incidents
Speaker 7: from Muslims in the US between the sixteen days of
Speaker 7: October seventh to October twenty fourth, which is a one
Speaker 7: hundred and eighty two percent jump from any given sixteen
Speaker 7: days stretch last year. Because on average of twenty twenty two,
Speaker 7: that number was two hundred and seventy four complaints, and
Speaker 7: Corey Saylor, the research and advocacy director, said, we're working
Speaker 7: seven days a week around the clock fielding incoming complaints.
Speaker 7: I have only ever seen that twice in my career,
Speaker 7: right after nine to eleven and in December twenty fifteen,
Speaker 7: after that announcement by Trump of his plan to ban
Speaker 7: Muslims from the country.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, yeah, that was a good time in history.
Speaker 9: Yeah, that the attacks and sek people are like a
Speaker 9: classic post nine to eleven, absolute like islamophobic mania. Yeah, right,
Speaker 9: Like it's something that like I'm consistently afraid of now,
Speaker 9: right when I'm at the border, when there are Muslim
Speaker 9: people there every day, and there is people there every day,
Speaker 9: and there are also Jewish people there, right because literally
Speaker 9: someone yesterday we were trying to get some candles for
Speaker 9: a hannaka minora, Right, But it doesn't matter. People who
Speaker 9: are hateful have access to hurt those people. And that's
Speaker 9: something I've become extremely concerned with recently, like and with
Speaker 9: half of Congress or more whipping up this kind of hysteria, right,
Speaker 9: which obviously you know, like George W. Bush benefited very
Speaker 9: greatly from although if you look at the stuff George W.
Speaker 9: Bush says, and this is not like yas George W.
Speaker 9: Bush like he is outflanked large number of the Democrat
Speaker 9: Party and his to the left in his acceptance, like
Speaker 9: Islam is a fabric of America's speech, Like it's wild
Speaker 9: how far we've come in a bad direction. But San,
Speaker 9: do you know what else is leading our listeners in
Speaker 9: a bad direction?
Speaker 4: Please exactly more?
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's this advert for Ronald Reagan memorabilia. Hopefully we
Speaker 9: get a Kissinger one soon. In Challa, we will get
Speaker 9: a Henry kissingcher gold coin advert in this episode.
Speaker 7: We're back. I think it's worth mentioning some incidents that
Speaker 7: have happened when it comes to harassment and physical violence
Speaker 7: against Muslims and Arabs. On October fifteenth, he probably heard
Speaker 7: that a six year old was stabbed to death with
Speaker 7: Dia l Fueimi. He was stabbed twenty six times and
Speaker 7: his mother was also attacked and was in critical condition.
Speaker 7: He was killed by his landlord who was spouting anti
Speaker 7: Muslim rhetoric. There's also a man in Illinois who was
Speaker 7: charged with a hate crime after he demanded two Muslim
Speaker 7: men to get out of the country and threaten to
Speaker 7: shoot them. And as we said, actual Muslims aren't the
Speaker 7: only ones at risk from Islamophobia, anyone perceived to be Muslim,
Speaker 7: including Arabs who belong to other faith groups and seeks.
Speaker 7: For example, our target. On October fifteenth, a nineteen year
Speaker 7: old sixteen was attacked on a New York City bus
Speaker 7: by an assailant who tried to remove his turban. And
Speaker 7: I think we should all remember that for palace Onions
Speaker 7: and more generally Arabs and brown people, this isn't a
Speaker 7: new thing. We've always been demonized and using the humanizing
Speaker 7: language has deadly consequences, often not only for Palestinians here,
Speaker 7: but those in Gaza and any person of color around
Speaker 7: the world. I want to also point out that he
Speaker 7: Jabbi women are easily identifiable as Muslim and they're particularly
Speaker 7: easy targets for people that are terrorist and filled with hate.
Speaker 7: A Muslim pediatrician, a Hijabi woman was killed after being
Speaker 7: stabbed multiple times while sitting outside her apartment complex last month.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and to tell the community that's just been bereaved
Speaker 9: to not you know, like be afraid, it's like again,
Speaker 9: it's a great time to say nothing.
Speaker 4: If that's your opinion.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think it's we're not really considering how afraid
Speaker 7: the community is and they're.
Speaker 9: I don't want to minimize, like Jewish people feel afraid
Speaker 9: to Like there are realist in se anti Semitism, Like
Speaker 9: there are definitely right wing shit bags anti Semitic who
Speaker 9: are trying to hijack the Palestinia Liberation movement for their
Speaker 9: own ends, and they suck and they are terrible, and
Speaker 9: we should all denounce that. The same force to do
Speaker 9: with almophobia, Like that's not a controversial statement, I think
Speaker 9: for anyone who's not a complete herd.
Speaker 7: Yeah, both communities are rightfully fearful, and that fear is
Speaker 7: valid for both communities. The last thing I want to
Speaker 7: say about this rise in Salmophobia is that ex Obama
Speaker 7: advisor Stuart Seldowitz who was harassing and saying the most
Speaker 7: heinous things to this uh oh yeah, calal cart Vendor
Speaker 7: in New York. He was at one point the US
Speaker 7: State Department's director of the Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs,
Speaker 7: which I think should tell you all you need to
Speaker 7: know about how our country feels about Palestine. Because he
Speaker 7: was saying truly abhorrent things like not enough children have
Speaker 7: died yet.
Speaker 9: You know, to be fair, that guy represents the shit bag. No,
Speaker 9: I'm not again, this is not a like pro state
Speaker 9: Department statement like that. There are definitely people within the
Speaker 9: State Department who are upset, Like people have left the
Speaker 9: State Department because of the way that and obviously those
Speaker 9: people have felt that their voices are being marginalized because
Speaker 9: they've chosen to leave, right that they haven't been listened to.
Speaker 7: But I guess I wanted to bring that up because
Speaker 7: someone with that much hate was in charge of some
Speaker 7: decisions that affected Palestine, and he has so much and
Speaker 7: when you watch these videos that are taken on multiple days,
Speaker 7: which indicates that he was stalking this person, you see
Speaker 7: this man smiling and like almost hannibal lectory, and he's
Speaker 7: filled with so much hate it is like spewing out
Speaker 7: of him.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's genuinely disturbing.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's disturbing.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's disturbing. Like I kept saying that for weeks
Speaker 9: to no one punched him in the face.
Speaker 3: But it's.
Speaker 4: Yeah, a better world, yeah, one day.
Speaker 7: But essentially I wanted to just go over that really quickly.
Speaker 7: About how the rise in Slamophobia and anti Palestinian, anti
Speaker 7: Arab sentiment makes it even more important to continue to
Speaker 7: say end up for Palestine and their people and their
Speaker 7: fight for liberation, and wearing the kaffia itself has been
Speaker 7: a symbol of this struggle for Palestine liberation and so
Speaker 7: we wanted to tell you guys about its history. James
Speaker 7: is wearing one right now. Good job.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because he's cold.
Speaker 7: Visual prop for a podcast.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I love to do it.
Speaker 9: It's a it's a little secret between us.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, well not anymore. Sorry, no name, no thanks, Serene.
Speaker 7: But what is the kaffia? Just go over the basics.
Speaker 7: It's a cotton square shaped headdress with a distinctive checkered
Speaker 7: pattern that is worn in many parts of the Arab world.
Speaker 7: The black and white one is known to be worn
Speaker 7: in Palestine. And I didn't know this to be completely honest,
Speaker 7: but apparently it dates back to Sumerians and Babylonians and
Speaker 7: Mesopotamia and thirty one hundred BC. It's been called other
Speaker 7: words as well. I think the most common one other
Speaker 7: than kaffia is the hata. It's also said that the
Speaker 7: prophet Muhammad war One as well, so it has a
Speaker 7: long history and it was used as the symbol of
Speaker 7: high rank and honor among priests. When you move forward
Speaker 7: in history, the kaffea was adopted by peasants who wore
Speaker 7: it while they were working on the land to protect
Speaker 7: them from the sun and the sand, that seems obvious.
Speaker 7: And it was in the winter to protect them from
Speaker 7: the cold. A very multifunctional piece of clothing.
Speaker 9: Yeah, you see, like everyone in this region has some
Speaker 9: kind of thing, Like Kuldish people have their own different versions, right,
Speaker 9: everyone behind me, the Kurdish refuge gave to me the
Speaker 9: other day, which is very kind. But like even when
Speaker 9: you saw the United States troops fighting in the Middle East, right,
Speaker 9: they adopted like their like tactical version that was like
Speaker 9: a green bass. But like it's a very practical garment
Speaker 9: that people in this part of the world have worn
Speaker 9: full Like even before Islamic people wore these things so
Speaker 9: like cover their faces.
Speaker 4: And because it made sense practically, like it's just yeah,
Speaker 4: for the climate, very handy. Yeah yeah, And this.
Speaker 7: Is not very commonly known, but the patterns on the
Speaker 7: kaffia is known to symbolize different aspects of Palestinian life.
Speaker 7: So there are some bold black stripes on the edges
Speaker 7: that are meant to symbolize the historical trade routes that
Speaker 7: used to go through Palestine. There's a fishnet like design
Speaker 7: that represents Palestinian fishermen and the Palestine connection to the
Speaker 7: Mediterranean Sea. And then there are some curvy lines that
Speaker 7: resemble olive trees, which are a major point of pride
Speaker 7: for Palestinians, with the pattern representing perseverance, strength and resilience.
Speaker 7: So it's an extremely symbolic, important symbol for Palestine. It
Speaker 7: hasn't always been, and that's what we're going to be
Speaker 7: going through because at this point, Palestinians view it as
Speaker 7: a symbol of their cultural and national identity, and unfortunately
Speaker 7: others view it as a threat because, as I mentioned,
Speaker 7: those students that got shot in Vermont, where two of
Speaker 7: them are wearing a caffea, it's said that they were
Speaker 7: speaking in Arabic and one of these students is now
Speaker 7: paralyzed from the chest down. So it really is important
Speaker 7: to deconstruct what the scarf is and why on earth
Speaker 7: it would spark that kind of fear and anybody, because
Speaker 7: it's not about fear or hate, it's about Palestinian pride
Speaker 7: and culture and history. As long as Palestinians are oppressed,
Speaker 7: then even something as simple as a traditional scarf can
Speaker 7: turn into something bigger than just cultural pride, because now
Speaker 7: it's a political statement, and I want everyone to realize
Speaker 7: that it's not something to be feared or something to
Speaker 7: get nervous around if you see it out in the open.
Speaker 7: So let's go back in history. Are you ready to
Speaker 7: go back in history?
Speaker 3: James?
Speaker 9: I am, yeah, that's an We can we do a
Speaker 9: sound machine, Daniel, like, like a try and Travel sound.
Speaker 7: Do you guys ever play Mario's Time Machine? I was
Speaker 7: obsessed with that game PC.
Speaker 4: It did help.
Speaker 7: Maybe you don't find that sound. So the kaffea evolved
Speaker 7: out of the common headdress, as we're saying that men
Speaker 7: in the Middle East war to protect themselves from the elements.
Speaker 7: It was specifically worn by nomadic and Bedouin community, from
Speaker 7: villagers to city people and townspeople. And while the kaffea
Speaker 7: was often associated with peasants, the bus or the red
Speaker 7: felt hat that is like a cylinder shape that you
Speaker 7: might see people wear that was often worn by more urban,
Speaker 7: middle and upper class Palestinians. I wanted to point out
Speaker 7: here that the word like peasants is a little bit
Speaker 7: extreme because the word in Arabic is pH lahin and
Speaker 7: fe laheen. I guess is more villager type, but it's
Speaker 7: not really used in a very condescending way because a
Speaker 7: lot of things are considered for lahi, Like the one
Speaker 7: of my favorite dishes in the Middle East is judada,
Speaker 7: which is just lentils and rice, and that's considered a
Speaker 7: falahei dish. So I just wanted to put that out
Speaker 7: there that it's not like a dis per se in
Speaker 7: Arabic to say, to call them peasants, it is like
Speaker 7: an indication that they are of lower class because jud
Speaker 7: dada is cheap to make, for example. But it's not
Speaker 7: exactly this like surf word. Does that make sense?
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, like humble, not like yeah yeah, like I said, yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 7: In nineteen thirty six, though, things started to change in
Speaker 7: the Arab Revolt when there was an uprising against British
Speaker 7: rule and occupation of Palestine, and this included demands for
Speaker 7: independence and an end to Jewish immigration. The armed Palestinian
Speaker 7: rebel groups were largely made up of poorer men, so
Speaker 7: in this way, whether it was intentional or not. In
Speaker 7: the beginning, the kaffia basically was their uniform because these
Speaker 7: rebel groups were made up of poorer men and that
Speaker 7: was what they wore, and that made it easier for
Speaker 7: the British to target them when they were in urban areas.
Speaker 7: So as the fighting escalated, rebel leaders urged Palestinian men,
Speaker 7: all Palestinian men to ditch the tarbush and don the
Speaker 7: kaffia instead, and so when Palestinians did this, it allowed
Speaker 7: fighters to blend in and evade British troops. At that time,
Speaker 7: the majority of the armed resistance was taking place in
Speaker 7: the villages, and the fighters used kafia to hide their features,
Speaker 7: helping it to become associated with the revolution. So it
Speaker 7: was only a strategic success to do this on the
Speaker 7: rebels part, but it was a breakthrough for the lower
Speaker 7: class as well, who basically forced their clothing onto the elites,
Speaker 7: and this catapulted the kafa as something that crossed classes
Speaker 7: and became a prominent national symbol.
Speaker 9: This is like perfectly timed as well to coincide with
Speaker 9: like the rise of nations to nationalism in the early
Speaker 9: nineteenth and like a late nineteenth thirty twentieth century, right
Speaker 9: like the Yeah, when religion and religion stops having this
Speaker 9: universal claim on truth and we see the client and
Speaker 9: monarchy at the same time, the rise in more like
Speaker 9: at first like middle class democracies, right got them Sometimes
Speaker 9: bosche Our revolutions like the nation came to be the
Speaker 9: way one could argue that the working class were kind
Speaker 9: of being tricked into supporting this bolshour project or however
Speaker 9: you want to see it. But yeah, nations arose well
Speaker 9: around the world this time, and they all took on symbols,
Speaker 9: so like this was perfectly timed to sort of slide
Speaker 9: into that pos totally.
Speaker 7: That's a really good point. So as the revolt came
Speaker 7: to an end, some elites, Palestinian elites, discarded the kaffia
Speaker 7: and they turned back to the tabus. But at that
Speaker 7: point it was already too late because the cafe had
Speaker 7: already been established as this emblem for Palestinian resistance, and
Speaker 7: this made Palestinine men also just start wearing it for
Speaker 7: an expression of their national identity. In the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 7: we saw it become even more unifying because women started
Speaker 7: to get included into the picture. Leila Khalid is a
Speaker 7: Palestine activist and a former militant who, fun fact, was
Speaker 7: the first woman to ever hijack a plane. Yeah feminism,
Speaker 7: after she took part in hijacking a plane flying from
Speaker 7: Rome to Tel Aviv in nineteen sixty nine. Just to
Speaker 7: a disclaimer that no one was injured in this hijacking,
Speaker 7: that wasn't the point of it. But a journal was
Speaker 7: captured a photo of Khalid holding her rifle while styling
Speaker 7: a kafia like a woman's head scarf, and this image
Speaker 7: became so popular it helped cement Leila Kylote's status as
Speaker 7: an icon in the Palestine resistance movement. I think Leilah
Speaker 7: Skala deserves an episode all on her own because she's
Speaker 7: an extremely fascinating woman and she's still alive, so maybe
Speaker 7: one day. But her choice to wear the kaffia was
Speaker 7: viewed as a feminist move on her part, and it
Speaker 7: ushered in this idea that Palestinian women were part of
Speaker 7: the Palestinian rebellion and a part of activism, part of
Speaker 7: the resistance, and because they had largely been excluded in
Speaker 7: some way or regulated to other roles in the resistance,
Speaker 7: and so by making the statement and putting the kaffea
Speaker 7: over her head. She was also acknowledging cultural norms of
Speaker 7: Palestinians and using a men's scarf to do it. But
Speaker 7: at the time I think it was really revolutionary. And
Speaker 7: first when you see the kaffia break classes, now you
Speaker 7: see it break genders. And now it's becoming even more
Speaker 7: acceptable for more people to wear it. And so she
Speaker 7: continued to wear the caffea, often around her neck, and
Speaker 7: it inspired many Palatine way to do the same. But
Speaker 7: at the same time that hijacking she took part in
Speaker 7: drew international attention and many people in the West started
Speaker 7: associating Palestine resistance with terrorism, and unfortunately this meant the
Speaker 7: caffee would also come to mean something else in the
Speaker 7: Western world. The Alstar Arafat almost did not go anywhere
Speaker 7: without a caffee. He was the chairman of the PLO
Speaker 7: from nineteen sixty nine to two thousand and four, and
Speaker 7: he helped popularize the image of wearing a caffea around
Speaker 7: the world by again almost always wearing one in public,
Speaker 7: and many non Palestine activists at this time, especially those
Speaker 7: who participated in anti colonial, anti war, and other social
Speaker 7: justice protests, they began to recognize the scarf as a
Speaker 7: symbol of resistance and wear it to express the solidarity
Speaker 7: with Palestinians. But at this point Israel had labeled Arafat
Speaker 7: to terrorist and the United States designated the PLO as
Speaker 7: a terrorist organization. And so again. While some people identified
Speaker 7: this scarf with the Palestinian struggle, others viewed it as
Speaker 7: controversial and even a violent symbol. Many other global leaders
Speaker 7: around the world started wearing the kaffea as well. Even
Speaker 7: Nelson Mandela at one point was photographed wearing one. I
Speaker 7: think something especially humorous in modern times is how the
Speaker 7: kaffia has entered the fashion world, and its meaning is
Speaker 7: kind of completely erased when this happens. Some clothing brands
Speaker 7: took the scarf's widespread appeal and co opted it, and
Speaker 7: it sanitized its meaning, and it erased its relationship with
Speaker 7: the Palestinian cause. I think it's important to bring up
Speaker 7: here that Palestinians and supporters of Palestine encourage everyone to
Speaker 7: wear the scarf. It's not appropriating it when you wear
Speaker 7: it in solidarity. It's appropriating it if you co opt
Speaker 7: it and make it into something. It's not like a
Speaker 7: skirt or I saw a version of one that had
Speaker 7: like intricate stars of David in there to be worn
Speaker 7: by Israelis. I think that's appropriation. But when it comes
Speaker 7: to solidarity and being in protests and showing that you
Speaker 7: care about the Palestinian cause, it's encouraged to wear it.
Speaker 7: And so I feel like a lot of people are
Speaker 7: afraid of cultural appropriation.
Speaker 4: But it's not.
Speaker 7: When it comes to the Kaffea, it's not about that.
Speaker 7: It's about solidarity more so than the act of wearing
Speaker 7: something that is from Palestine.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's not the same as wearing a plane Sdian
Speaker 9: headdress for example, or known sink for child. Very abbrupritive.
Speaker 9: And you should listen to the people who'se things you're
Speaker 9: wearing before you wear them.
Speaker 4: That's a rule. Oh yeah, before you make them into
Speaker 4: your mini skirt line. Yeah.
Speaker 7: And when capitalism enters the picture, that's when we cross
Speaker 7: into appropriation territory usually and the symbolic meaning goes away.
Speaker 7: In twenty sixteen, for example, an Israeli fashion designer Dodo
Speaker 7: Baro use the kaffia to create a range of dresses
Speaker 7: and miniskirts and she receives a lot of backlash for this.
Speaker 7: I think Israel. Doing this is especially ironic only because
Speaker 7: what haven't they stolen is my question? Land the food
Speaker 7: and now the clothing. I think it's pretty yeah sad.
Speaker 9: Yeah, that's right up there with like the Washington football
Speaker 9: team having a racist sass name or like, yes, exactly,
Speaker 9: it's very appropriate and almost genocidal right to like suggest that,
Speaker 9: like these people have a long history here kind of
Speaker 9: like that's actually your history, and like take it and make.
Speaker 7: Exactly it's like really insiduous. It's it's like a cruel
Speaker 7: to co opt a struggle that people are just like
Speaker 7: trying to their people are having tried to survive for
Speaker 7: so long, and to make it into something silly, to
Speaker 7: make it into something that it's not, is really hurtful
Speaker 7: and really pathetic.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's not respectful.
Speaker 9: It's not like it doesn't show a good faith effort
Speaker 9: to come to a solution in which both people are respected.
Speaker 4: Right exactly.
Speaker 7: The last example to make, as far as fashion quoe
Speaker 7: unquote goes, is that in two thousand and seven, Urban
Speaker 7: Outfitters sold a coffea that came in many different colors,
Speaker 7: but they simply promoted it as a anti war scarf,
Speaker 7: and unsurprisingly controversy ensued and they eventually pulled the item
Speaker 7: from its shelves. But I do remember this really brief
Speaker 7: moment in time where this happened, and it was so
Speaker 7: bizarre I just had to mention it. But let's take
Speaker 7: for a second break.
Speaker 9: And then we'll come back with a story about that scarff. Yeah,
Speaker 9: this is hopefully does not have for United Airlines famous
Speaker 9: kafia enjoys. All right, we're back, and we're back to
Speaker 9: discuss famous supporter of the palatini caused Rachel Ray Because
Speaker 9: for those of you who are blessed to be thus
Speaker 9: far unaware of this. In two thousand and eight, Rachel
Speaker 9: Ray wore a kaffia, or as she actually wore the
Speaker 9: Urban Outfitters model, which is like a silk scarf.
Speaker 4: It's a little different.
Speaker 9: Kafirs are normally like a thick kind of cotton. She
Speaker 9: wore it in a Dunkin Donuts dunkin Donuts is no
Speaker 9: g dunkin Donuts advert and Michelle Malkin, who's one in
Speaker 9: along line of crazy right wing people, accused her of
Speaker 9: wearing quote worrying the symbol of murderous palestin jin Jahad,
Speaker 9: which is which is a real insight into where we
Speaker 9: were there at the end of the of the Bush
Speaker 9: presidency as a nation. Absolutely batch it insane. That was
Speaker 9: when I moved to America.
Speaker 4: Good times.
Speaker 9: Actually, that was when I moved to America wearing a
Speaker 9: kafir on the plane because it was idea it's my
Speaker 9: thing that I worried a gift from someone who are
Speaker 9: very close with and we used to weard more the
Speaker 9: time at protests. That was a time when its Lamophobia
Speaker 9: was like very present in the UK and so like
Speaker 9: it was kind of a way a way I guess
Speaker 9: to show sort of arity or invite confrontation, depending on
Speaker 9: if it was me or not. I think I was
Speaker 9: probably Column B as well as Column MAY. But it
Speaker 9: was just the thing that I wore, you know. And
Speaker 9: it was at that point the movement for a free
Speaker 9: Palestine with I think, much more established in the UK
Speaker 9: than it was in the US and among obviously like
Speaker 9: white folks such to himself. I immediately got sent to
Speaker 9: like a secondary inspection when I arrived in the United States.
Speaker 9: I got off the plane, I had my little badge
Speaker 9: with the Palestinian flag, I have my little cafea and
Speaker 9: the guy was just like go in the room, and
Speaker 9: then yeah, we had a great talk about the stuff
Speaker 9: I had from Cuba, which at the time was obviously
Speaker 9: not a place that Americans were able to go. I
Speaker 9: think I still can't. So yeah, it was great, It's good.
Speaker 9: It was a wonderful start. They asked me what I
Speaker 9: was doing for my PhD. I told them I was
Speaker 9: studying anarchism. That went down like a sack of shit,
Speaker 9: and you know, from there it began along and enjoyable
Speaker 9: relationship with our friends who keep us safe at our borders.
Speaker 7: Wow, still has an orgin story. I suppose.
Speaker 4: Before that I was just a lib not true. Any
Speaker 4: interesting Saturday nights.
Speaker 7: No, thank you for sharing that. I didn't know about
Speaker 7: the Racheal raything until you told me about it, because
Speaker 7: I mean, way to go dunkin Donuts, I guess it's like.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Unfortunately they pulled the advert like still it's a
Speaker 9: shame in theory. Yeah still yeah, yeah, Dunky donut stands
Speaker 9: with Palestine. It's okay, it's okay to put a donut
Speaker 9: on your kaffir because donuts are a friend of the
Speaker 9: Palestinian people.
Speaker 7: That's the takeaway. Correct.
Speaker 9: Throughout we had donuts the I was, I was covering
Speaker 9: a protest the other day outside of your own manifacturing facility.
Speaker 9: Someone bought donuts. Doughnuts can continue to stand alongside the
Speaker 9: Palestinian people.
Speaker 7: Well powerful. Yeah, I wanted to mention really quick, how
Speaker 7: I mean, in addition to capitalism, just like being a disease,
Speaker 7: A lot of kaffeas nowadays are being sold, like in
Speaker 7: mass because the Palestinian cause is getting more popular. But
Speaker 7: there's only one fact three left in Palestine that actually
Speaker 7: makes them more than five decades ago, there were about
Speaker 7: thirty across Palestine, and now there is one in Hebron, Hitterbowie.
Speaker 7: It's the only caffe manufacturer left and it's been seeing
Speaker 7: a huge uptick that is, in their words, unparalleled ever
Speaker 7: before in their sales. Apparently they sold eighteen thousand of
Speaker 7: them in October and now they're in high demand all
Speaker 7: the like. It's sold out everywhere. And this is the
Speaker 7: authentic coffe. So one I have, Yeah, you have one
Speaker 7: from Putter Wawi, which is great.
Speaker 4: It's very nice.
Speaker 9: Actually, yeah, don't be buying like an Abby Express one
Speaker 9: because they're thinner and like it's when it's very nice.
Speaker 7: You can tell when it's authentic because it's good quality,
Speaker 7: has a weight to it. And just aside from that,
Speaker 7: supporting Palestine companies is important. And they're not the only
Speaker 7: ones that sell Palestine coffeas they have some websites that
Speaker 7: they that they share on their website that you can
Speaker 7: get their kaffeas through. But I think it's important to
Speaker 7: realize that there's only one place left in all of
Speaker 7: Palestine that still makes the kaffita.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's a good gift in the holiday season by one.
Speaker 7: Yeah, go add yourself to their email lissigns and they
Speaker 7: notify you when it's available for pre order. So I
Speaker 7: think supporting that factory is really important, especially now. And
Speaker 7: it's heartbreaking that it's the last one.
Speaker 9: But makes a great slink too. One time I broke
Speaker 9: my arm and used his guy to tie it off.
Speaker 9: It was works like a chap nice. So it's got
Speaker 9: my endorsement.
Speaker 7: Yeah, multiple functions still to this day.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 9: Now you can do all kinds of things. The blankets
Speaker 9: a sling. You can filter water through it because it's
Speaker 9: like a cotton fabric. You have some turbid water. So yeah,
Speaker 9: many uses exactly are you familiar with Dick hebdigger. No, no, no, okay,
Speaker 9: head Big is academic right about punk. But in his
Speaker 9: work on punk, he talked about how subcultures become commodified
Speaker 9: and then they just become aesthetics. And that's like the
Speaker 9: point in which happens to punk is when you can
Speaker 9: buy like a battle jacket, or look that jacket with
Speaker 9: safety pinsil down the arms a gap right like that,
Speaker 9: It's no longer punk, is it if you got it
Speaker 9: from fucking gap? Like the whole point of punk is
Speaker 9: to do it yourself. And I think this is in
Speaker 9: danger of happening again, as it kind of did in
Speaker 9: the early two thousands. So it just becomes an aesthetic.
Speaker 7: I don't want it to undermine the Palestinian narrative for liberation,
Speaker 7: you know what I mean. That's the thing that I
Speaker 7: hope does not happen. I don't think it is right now.
Speaker 7: I think so far people are wearing it in solidarity,
Speaker 7: and I personally really like when I see someone wearing
Speaker 7: it because I don't want I want it to be normalized.
Speaker 7: I don't want it to be something that people look
Speaker 7: at and are afraid of or are afraid of wearing.
Speaker 7: Because after the shooting, that happened in Vermont. A lot
Speaker 7: of people were afraid of even wearing a kafir of course.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I think it's the solidarity thing you can do, right, Like,
Speaker 9: you know, you can wear this, You're not only showing
Speaker 9: your solidarity. Maybe you can invite conversations, you know, Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 9: you can educate folks and like also, yeah, if people
Speaker 9: are being targeted, like you can choose to stand with
Speaker 9: them or not right and by doing that, you know,
Speaker 9: hopefully they can't shoot all of us. One would help,
Speaker 9: you know America, they fucking they've been trying. So, yeah,
Speaker 9: you can do it in the sense of solidarity. And yeah,
Speaker 9: maybe maybe you can spark some conversations which can be beneficial.
Speaker 4: You can educate some people.
Speaker 9: Yeah, if they call you, if they call it the
Speaker 9: scarff of Islamic murderists you had or whatever that Michelle
Speaker 9: Malkin called it, and probably know the conversation that will end. Well,
Speaker 9: then you can destroy a donut at that person.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's up to us to take actions that change
Speaker 7: how people perceive.
Speaker 4: Things in the world.
Speaker 7: And that's just a great example.
Speaker 4: Of one thing.
Speaker 7: But I guess we've talked about in this episode how
Speaker 7: the coffea is part of the Palestinian past, present, and future.
Speaker 7: It's a historical artifact that documents the history of a people,
Speaker 7: and it's a living symbol that inspires hope. And it's
Speaker 7: interesting that a piece of cloth can have such strong
Speaker 7: emotions tied to it, but it's really inspiring that it's
Speaker 7: a prevailing symbol of freedom. And yeah, I love it.
Speaker 7: I feel pride wearing it. The Caffeia has become a
Speaker 7: way for Palestinians to visualize their land, visualize their home,
Speaker 7: and visualize Palestine as an entity that can exist in
Speaker 7: themselves as well as outside on their clothed bodies. So
Speaker 7: that's the episode. Uh Free Palestine. Bye Hey.
Speaker 2: We'll be back Monday, with more episodes every week from
Speaker 2: now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 7: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 7: You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
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