Speaker 1: Al Zone Media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.
Speaker 1: So every episode of the week that just happened is
Speaker 1: here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package
Speaker 1: for you to listen to in a long stretch if
Speaker 1: you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every
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Speaker 1: for you, but you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 2: Either snow nor rain, nor heat nor darkness can stop
Speaker 2: the Persian Courier Service. Welcome to Dick it Out here,
Speaker 2: a podcast about postal services. Who reasked the question can
Speaker 2: the American capitalist class finally stop the American post Office?
Speaker 2: I'm your host, Mio Long and with me to talk
Speaker 2: about what is going on with the post office, what's
Speaker 2: going on with the post office unions, and yeah, how
Speaker 2: things are going downhill for the noble people who carry
Speaker 2: your mail. Is Tommy Espinoza, who's a union steward for
Speaker 2: the National Association of Letter Carriers to welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me, Thank you so
Speaker 3: much for giving us the mail care dollars, the male
Speaker 3: carriers a platform to stand on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm really I'm really happy to you and I'm
Speaker 2: really happy to get to talk to you about this.
Speaker 2: So I think the place we should start is with
Speaker 2: a bunch of very very weird stuff in how labor
Speaker 2: law works. So, Okay, for like most people in the
Speaker 2: United States, you have a fatally protected right to strike
Speaker 2: if you have a union. That is not true for
Speaker 2: federal employees. That is especially not true for members of
Speaker 2: the Post Office, and that is a real issue because
Speaker 2: the government has decided that, like, yeah, I know, all
Speaker 2: these people who do vital service are not allowed to
Speaker 2: go on strike and it absolutely sucks. Yeah, So I
Speaker 2: think this gets into sort of where I want to start,
Speaker 2: which is with the sort of history of the National
Speaker 2: Association of Life Carriers, a union that is not allowed
Speaker 2: to strike, and how sort of weird that is. So yeah,
Speaker 2: I was wondering if you could talk a bit about
Speaker 2: sort of the origins of the union and what effect
Speaker 2: that has had on how organizing works or doesn't work.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the right to strike has been a rather divisive topic.
Speaker 3: I'm sure you're familiar with unions and just generally people
Speaker 3: on our side of our side of politics to be
Speaker 3: infighting a lot I shouldn't come to a surprise.
Speaker 4: So in nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 3: Just over fifty years ago, the salary for postal workers
Speaker 3: was under two dollars an hour. People were working months
Speaker 3: straight with no days off, and those were close to
Speaker 3: twelve hour days, And so these postal workers at the
Speaker 3: time qualified for welfare and decided in nine teen seventy
Speaker 3: to go on strike despite it being illegal. This conversation
Speaker 3: is not new. It was illegal then, it's illegal now.
Speaker 3: And I do want to be crystal clear here. I
Speaker 3: am not advocating for a strike that would also be
Speaker 3: against the law, and we don't advocate for anything that's
Speaker 3: against the law. What I do want to advocate for
Speaker 3: is the right to strike, because being quasi federal, there's
Speaker 3: a lot of limitations in what the NAOC and the
Speaker 3: general postal unions are able to do. In total, there
Speaker 3: are nine bargaining agreements and seven unions within the Post Office,
Speaker 3: some of which are the manager's unions, so take that
Speaker 3: as it is. Yet, on top of not being able
Speaker 3: to strike, none of our money that we collect as
Speaker 3: union does can be used for lobbying purposes, so they
Speaker 3: can't support a single candidate or any of the parties involved.
Speaker 3: We have a separate fund for that with the NALC
Speaker 3: called the Letter Carrier's Political Fund, to try and circumvent
Speaker 3: the restrictions that are put on there. And as a
Speaker 3: result of that, it's like we're fighting with our hands
Speaker 3: tied behind our back. We are unable to organize effectively.
Speaker 3: Our union leadership seems to be afraid of protests and
Speaker 3: picketing for fear that it'll be misconstrued or labeled as
Speaker 3: a strike, and they're I think generally afraid of public opinion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a debilitating set of conditions because you've effectively
Speaker 2: taken away sort of the two major tools that you know,
Speaker 2: I mean unions of basically across all political stripes used, right,
Speaker 2: You've taken away the ability to strike. You've taken away
Speaker 2: the ability to use your due's money to influence actions.
Speaker 2: So this immediately means you've taken away the tool that
Speaker 2: sort of Milton unions use, which strikes, and you've taken
Speaker 2: away the tools that more conservative unions use, which is
Speaker 2: buying attempting to buy politicians. And then also your leadership
Speaker 2: is like we can't strike, I mean, we can't protest
Speaker 2: because someone might think it's a strike and the public
Speaker 2: might commenitus, and it's like that that doesn't seem I
Speaker 2: don't know, it really seems like it's like it's not
Speaker 2: only have you tied both hands behind your back, you've
Speaker 2: like tied them behind your back to your legs and
Speaker 2: you're now rolling around on the ground.
Speaker 3: Right, And to talk about what happens when we push
Speaker 3: past all of these barriers and just do it anyways?
Speaker 3: You know, in March nineteen seventy, two hundred and ten
Speaker 3: thousand postal workers defied law, defied the general leadership of
Speaker 3: the time. And it all started in New York where
Speaker 3: people clocked in and at nine o'clock they just walked out. Soon,
Speaker 3: let's see, it was Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles. The nation
Speaker 3: joined very shortly after. Once it broke the news that
Speaker 3: they were calling for a national strike. Nixon called in
Speaker 3: the National Guard to try and deliver mail, and the
Speaker 3: National Guard had no idea what they were doing. There's
Speaker 3: an amazing video that I'll try and send you afterwards.
Speaker 3: It's just the National Guard at our cases where we
Speaker 3: sort the mail. An interviewer is asking him, do you
Speaker 3: think that you're doing a good job? It's just like, no,
Speaker 3: it's just some kid, you know. And don't get me wrong,
Speaker 3: I'm just some guy. But you need the training, you
Speaker 3: need to know what you're doing. And it's not something
Speaker 3: that anyone can pick up in a day, but it's
Speaker 3: a job that anyone can do. But yeah, for the
Speaker 3: first time, the mail had stopped, and that won us
Speaker 3: collective bargaining binding arbitration, which is a process that I
Speaker 3: think most people within unions know what they mean, but
Speaker 3: to explain it, arbitration is what happens when our parties
Speaker 3: cannot agree on a settlement for a grievance, and eventually
Speaker 3: we call in a third party, an arbitrator to decide
Speaker 3: for us, and those are generally lawyers. On top of
Speaker 3: binding arbitration, it gave us a new pay scale and
Speaker 3: set in motion.
Speaker 4: I think over.
Speaker 3: It's got to be hundreds of raises between the colas
Speaker 3: and the new pay table. It used to be twenty
Speaker 3: one years for you to reach the top pay scale,
Speaker 3: which is absolutely ridiculous, and I think it's eight. Yeah,
Speaker 3: So the post Office was forced to reorganize, and so
Speaker 3: is the union. This is where the American Postal Workers
Speaker 3: Union was born and from this strike, we were able
Speaker 3: to settle on the National Agreement. So there's the National Agreement,
Speaker 3: which is our binding contract. There's the JCAM, which is
Speaker 3: the Joint Contract Administration Manual, just what the Post Office
Speaker 3: and the Union use as the interpretation of the contract.
Speaker 3: That way, we are not arguing and spending time about
Speaker 3: what the contract could mean. We can just focus on
Speaker 3: whether or not someone broke our agreement. So after this,
Speaker 3: one would imagine that a quasi federal institution would honor
Speaker 3: the contract that was created, argain in good faith, and
Speaker 3: treat their employees.
Speaker 4: Isn't that right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know it's spoken like someone who has never
Speaker 2: watched a federal cod action.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Absolutely not.
Speaker 3: Before we get into issues that we face today, I
Speaker 3: do want to say that one of the main goals
Speaker 3: of our contract negotiations, or of this episode really is
Speaker 3: to create public knowledge of how our contract is not
Speaker 3: being adhered to. If there was one main goal that
Speaker 3: I'd have in mind, is just to have the Post
Speaker 3: Office honor what they signed and agreed to do.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is something that it's a part of
Speaker 2: being in a union that doesn't get talked about very much,
Speaker 2: which is that the contract doesn't mean anything unless the
Speaker 2: union enforces it, because the moment the contract happens, the
Speaker 2: bosses will attempt to not abide by it. And this
Speaker 2: is what a lot of union militancy back in the
Speaker 2: sort of heyday of militancy was. I mean, like, you know,
Speaker 2: if you look at like how the UAW worked in
Speaker 2: like the sixties, right, they'd have a guy with a
Speaker 2: whistle standing on the line, and if someone did a
Speaker 2: contract violation, he would blow the whistle and everyone would
Speaker 2: just sit down and you'd immediately have a strike right it,
Speaker 2: you know, And like that level of miltancy. You don't
Speaker 2: need to be at that level to enforce a contract,
Speaker 2: but you have to actually be willing to do stuff
Speaker 2: and to fight management over it. And if you're not
Speaker 2: willing to do that, your contract is effectively meaningless. And
Speaker 2: that's a real issue with a lot of unions.
Speaker 3: Which just kind of circles back to one of the
Speaker 3: big issues that we face is that if we were
Speaker 3: to do that, that would be a willingfu delay of mail,
Speaker 3: and we could be charged for it just for trying
Speaker 3: to enforce the contract.
Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah, which the thing I think is really interesting,
Speaker 2: just to circle back to the nineteen seventy strike. Is
Speaker 2: that so the strike was illegal, right, Nixon brings in
Speaker 2: the army, in the National Guard to break it, and
Speaker 2: the strike still wins. And not only does it you know,
Speaker 2: I mean you could argue whether it achieved total victory,
Speaker 2: but not a single person who walked off the line
Speaker 2: got arrested, even though all of them technically committed a crime.
Speaker 2: And that's something that like, you know, I think, let
Speaker 2: me okay, the the enforcements of laws depends on sort
Speaker 2: of the the depends on a set of of relative
Speaker 2: balance of forces and whether people care about enforce in
Speaker 2: the law, which is how like for example, like if
Speaker 2: you pirate like seven movies and you get you get
Speaker 2: three copyright strike, you go to prison. But you know,
Speaker 2: like the sam Alman or whatever like AI company can
Speaker 2: literally steal everything on the entire Internet and get money
Speaker 2: for it and no one will love to prosecute him, right,
Speaker 2: And so so you know, whether or not something is
Speaker 2: illegal is to a large extent or or the difference
Speaker 2: between something being illegal and you going to prison for
Speaker 2: it largely has to do with the balance of forces involved.
Speaker 2: And that's something that you should keep in mind when
Speaker 2: and this is this is the thing, this is the
Speaker 2: thing that that cuts the other way too. Employers just
Speaker 2: do illegal actions literally all the time, and it doesn't
Speaker 2: matter because the state doesn't care.
Speaker 3: Yeah, By and large, labor laws in America are set
Speaker 3: up in favor of the businesses of the employers. If
Speaker 3: you're familiar with workers comp or any of the systems
Speaker 3: involved in the Federal Employees Compensation Act, it's not enforced.
Speaker 3: We have cases that are pending arbitration where someone's been
Speaker 3: run over by a worker has been run over by
Speaker 3: a postal vehicle while they were working. The post office
Speaker 3: effectively takes them off of payroll to increase the damage
Speaker 3: done to the individual. Eventually, the Department of Labor says, yes,
Speaker 3: we will pay this individual, and the post office is
Speaker 3: liable to pay them now they are off the rolls,
Speaker 3: which means there's a greater period of time before this
Speaker 3: individual gets their money. And there's a certain form that
Speaker 3: within the post office the managers need to fill out.
Speaker 4: I believe it's an eighty one thirty or you know.
Speaker 3: All these forms have some numbers associated with them that
Speaker 3: they just refuse to fill out, and there's no recourse.
Speaker 3: There's no cheez, a path for us to take to
Speaker 3: make them hurry or make them get this individual the
Speaker 3: money that they're owed. And some people this doesn't ruin
Speaker 3: their lives and they've already paid off their house or whatever.
Speaker 3: But I imagine for many many working Americans that's that's their
Speaker 3: livelihood immediately down the drain.
Speaker 2: Yeah, unfortunately we need to go to ads for a
Speaker 2: little bit because unfortunately, my boss's boss's boss's livelihood depends
Speaker 2: on these ads. By technically does too, but like lord knows,
Speaker 2: I don't see that money.
Speaker 5: So ads.
Speaker 1: We are back.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I guess that leads into you the next
Speaker 2: place you want to go to, which is talking about
Speaker 2: what are the specific grievances today that y'all are dealing
Speaker 2: with and the union is not dealing with.
Speaker 3: Right So, in terms of grievances within the union and
Speaker 3: a negotiation, a lot of it does have to do
Speaker 3: with the aforementioned workers' compensation. Employees are just simply not
Speaker 3: getting paid. I think the biggest problem with the union
Speaker 3: and the grievance procedure today is that management has figured
Speaker 3: out this really effective strategy if they don't settle on
Speaker 3: the lower levels, and it gets pushed up to arbitration.
Speaker 3: Then we have a massive backlog of cases appending arbitration,
Speaker 3: which could be scheduled years out. I think if you
Speaker 3: do the math for our current rate of handling these
Speaker 3: cases and how many cases we have, it'll take around
Speaker 3: fifteen years to get through the long.
Speaker 2: Christ not assuming there's no new ones.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's like you know when you go to a
Speaker 3: restaurant and there's that little stanchion out there that says
Speaker 3: it's a five hour wait from this point. That's the
Speaker 3: point that we're at. Anything beyond today will be further
Speaker 3: along Jesus Christ. And so I think that is just
Speaker 3: a major problem for us clearly. Yeah, management just not
Speaker 3: complying with any of the and it makes it so
Speaker 3: that our employees have to wait.
Speaker 4: Something I do want.
Speaker 3: To talk about that's outside of the grievance procedure if
Speaker 3: we can, is just what's going on with the post
Speaker 3: Office and the Postmaster General. Yeah, all right, So I
Speaker 3: want to go at this from the customer perspective first,
Speaker 3: because I think that's the best way to relate to people.
Speaker 3: I think by and large, people are losing faith in
Speaker 3: the Post Office. Either you have no idea what's going on,
Speaker 3: or you don't care, and that's fine, I'd say. Before
Speaker 3: I joined, I didn't think of them at all. You know,
Speaker 3: they're just the guy that shows up at my house
Speaker 3: every morning. A lot of people seem to think that
Speaker 3: the post Office is going out of business, and our
Speaker 3: customers are facing increasingly long lines, misdelivered or lost mail,
Speaker 3: and an increase in postage for a service that is
Speaker 3: getting worse. People are paying more for worse service, and
Speaker 3: it's easy to point out the issues from the outside
Speaker 3: and be rightfully upset at them. I do feel like
Speaker 3: we're doing a disservice to our our customers, and I'm
Speaker 3: not really not trying to attack them when I say
Speaker 3: that they're uninformed or clueless to the inner workings of
Speaker 3: the Post Office. I do directly want to attack Congress
Speaker 3: and say that, yeah, when they post They had pushed
Speaker 3: forward a bill called the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act
Speaker 3: in two thousand and six, which required the Post Office
Speaker 3: to prefund one hundred percent of its retiree health benefits
Speaker 3: and liabilities seventy five years into the future. What so, overnight,
Speaker 3: the Post Office was handed a five point five billion
Speaker 3: dollar burden, and that's where the whole I don't know
Speaker 3: if you remember, I certainly wasn't conscious of it at
Speaker 3: the time, to save our post office stickers that were
Speaker 3: being sold and trying to fund the post Office. And
Speaker 3: really that's where the rhetoric of the post Office is
Speaker 3: going under comes from. The Other thing I want to
Speaker 3: point out is that we are a quasi federal We
Speaker 3: actually accept nothing from tax payer monies. It says it's
Speaker 3: a service, but really the post Office has ran as
Speaker 3: a business. We don't even get subsidized because they don't
Speaker 3: need to. My local union president loves to remind us
Speaker 3: that the post Office is a business that has a
Speaker 3: revenue of seventy eight point two billion dollars, and he'll
Speaker 3: want me to stress that the point two is extremely
Speaker 3: important because point two of a billion is twenty million.
Speaker 3: They are not in jeopardy. We are not going out
Speaker 3: of business. And the Postmaster General, Louis de Joy, he's
Speaker 3: the second highest paid public servant in America, just underneath
Speaker 3: the President of the United States.
Speaker 2: He's played Ward and Clarence Thomas.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it was like three hundred and eighty
Speaker 3: two thousand a year or something. Like that the Joy
Speaker 3: was appointed by Donald Trump. I'm assuming this is kind
Speaker 3: of a baseless assumption, so forgive me. I'm not doing
Speaker 3: my research here, but I'm assuming that they're buddies because
Speaker 3: d Joy has no idea.
Speaker 2: Yeah, wasn't Wasn't she the guy that Trump brought in,
Speaker 2: like specifically to destroy the post office as part of
Speaker 2: the campaign to steal the election.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so there's been a lot about the Joy defrauding
Speaker 3: the election process. I wasn't part of the post office
Speaker 3: to see the inner workings of it, so it's kind
Speaker 3: of hard for me to say if it was hearsay
Speaker 3: or not, but I believe it because the Joy has
Speaker 3: no idea how to run a post office. He's never
Speaker 3: been involved with this kind of business. He is in
Speaker 3: the same way that Trump is a businessman, a horrible businessman,
Speaker 3: and his Delivering for America plan could really be redefined
Speaker 3: as consolidation efforts for a business. So what they're doing
Speaker 3: is their consolidating infrastructure and the workforce, which means closing
Speaker 3: post offices in order to save money and shoving three
Speaker 3: installations into one building. That's why the lines are getting longer.
Speaker 3: It also means that from dispatch, the employees have to
Speaker 3: drive an extra mile or two into their working zone,
Speaker 3: which of course means that we're going to go into overtime,
Speaker 3: and this just throws a wrench in the mail handling process.
Speaker 3: He has single handedly made the service a lot more reliable,
Speaker 3: and I do think that you're right. Irreliable, yeah, sorry,
Speaker 3: more unreliable, And I do think that you're right. He
Speaker 3: wants to destroy the post office not only for the election,
Speaker 3: but to the point where it makes more sense to
Speaker 3: go private. Now is the time to point out that
Speaker 3: the joy is a major shareholder in FedEx, which is.
Speaker 4: Which is a subcontractor for the.
Speaker 3: USPS, and he has millions of dollars in equity involved.
Speaker 4: He's got skin in the game.
Speaker 2: Love open corruption so great.
Speaker 3: And so on the local level, on what's going on
Speaker 3: in my office, I actually have one of the better
Speaker 3: offices that I've seen or heard about. I have been
Speaker 3: sent to other offices and I have experience firsthand the
Speaker 3: bullying and harassment from management pushing us to go faster.
Speaker 3: But even at one of the better offices, I work
Speaker 3: sixty hour weeks. I don't have set days off. It's
Speaker 3: not even a rotation. When I get home. I'm spent.
Speaker 3: And my commute isn't that bad. I think I'm about
Speaker 3: fifteen minutes each way, and I really can't imagine driving
Speaker 3: two hours after an eleven hour shift just to eat
Speaker 3: and come back and do it again.
Speaker 6: I mean, that's just unsafe, Like that's see.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, it would be illegal, but since it's in
Speaker 3: the contract, it's not illegal.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: So the sacrifice that you make when you're joining the
Speaker 3: post Office, well, I guess I should explain. When you
Speaker 3: join as a letter carrier, the first ninety days, they
Speaker 3: can fire you for any reason, and you're something called
Speaker 3: either a CCA or a PTF, and that means part
Speaker 3: time flexible or a city carrier assistant. You are only
Speaker 3: guaranteed four hours for showing up for work. You're not
Speaker 3: guaranteed to be scheduled. So if they don't like you,
Speaker 3: they just will schedule schedule you once a week for
Speaker 3: an unknown amount of time until you quit. And if
Speaker 3: you're in a busy place, then that just means that
Speaker 3: they're going to work you to death. So when you
Speaker 3: join the workforce, immediately you lose time with your family.
Speaker 3: You lose time with your loved ones and your friends,
Speaker 3: and I myself am so fortunate that all my loved
Speaker 3: ones have been beyond understanding. But every time I talk
Speaker 3: about it, I get asked the same thing, why don't
Speaker 3: you quit?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: And the truth is, this job is awesome. I love it.
Speaker 3: I want to work it. I just want it to
Speaker 3: make sense and be livable. And I'm not gonna give
Speaker 3: up just because we haven't reached the point where it is.
Speaker 3: You know, if you walk away now, it doesn't get better.
Speaker 3: I'm sure someone would take my place. But it helps
Speaker 3: to have people stick around.
Speaker 2: That's actually a pretty comedy. I mean, this is one
Speaker 2: of the Amazon strategy right through from their warehouses. They
Speaker 2: intentionally want to cycle through people because the more the
Speaker 2: more new people you have continuously cycling through, the less
Speaker 2: organized and the less sort of like must knowledge, they
Speaker 2: have less you have to pay them, et cetera, et cetera,
Speaker 2: et cetera. And so if you can just cause high
Speaker 2: turnover rates on purpose, that's the thing that a lot
Speaker 2: of these sort of business gohoule like Nightmare or factory
Speaker 2: people love in their workforces and makes everyone else's life
Speaker 2: just a living hell. But you know they're getting They're
Speaker 2: still getting paid.
Speaker 4: Right, and so I try and hold that in mind.
Speaker 3: When I've been overworked and I'm at the end of
Speaker 3: one of my major shifts because I had to carry
Speaker 3: part of another route because someone else called out, I
Speaker 3: really have to stop and think to myself that this
Speaker 3: other person who called out is just as exhausted as
Speaker 3: I am is probably going to get a letter of
Speaker 3: warning for calling out.
Speaker 4: That's another issue. They don't want you to use your leave.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: I'm going to file an unfair labor practice because they've
Speaker 3: been doing that a lot at my office as well.
Speaker 4: It reminds me a.
Speaker 3: Lot are issues of your recent episode. I think it
Speaker 3: was you about the nurses Union, the shift change episode.
Speaker 3: Their members are dealing with a lot of the same things,
Speaker 3: where the unions are so big that they become detached
Speaker 3: from the membership and we are finding out afterwards what
Speaker 3: our bargaining agreements are, what our strategy was. Everything's after
Speaker 3: the contract has been signed, and that's just not how
Speaker 3: unions were meant to be. They're meant to be from
Speaker 3: the bottom up, by the workers, for the workers. But
Speaker 3: it really does feel like it's like National is its
Speaker 3: own entity, and so I guess that would bring us
Speaker 3: to talking about the union and the future of the union.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's get into that.
Speaker 3: So I got to be careful here because Brian Renfro,
Speaker 3: he's our national leader of the union. He's been struggling
Speaker 3: with problems in his personal life, and I don't feel
Speaker 3: like I'm outsteeing him as its public knowledge, at least
Speaker 3: within the Post office.
Speaker 4: It's public knowledge.
Speaker 3: He's dealing with substance abuse, with alcoholism, and that's something
Speaker 3: that hits very close to home within my family, and
Speaker 3: I really don't want to demonize that he's struggling. But
Speaker 3: what I do want to say is when you're going
Speaker 3: through something like that and you've accepted a position on
Speaker 3: the national level like this, you really need to either
Speaker 3: step down or appoint someone to handle things in your place.
Speaker 3: As negotiations started over a year ago, he kind of
Speaker 3: went missing and it was later revealed that he was inpatient,
Speaker 3: which is fine, get your help, but there was nothing left,
Speaker 3: no notes left for us to strategize with, and our
Speaker 3: membership is just in the dark. And beyond that, the
Speaker 3: leadership has gone missing. It's it's very dark times for
Speaker 3: the NAOC.
Speaker 2: Well, and that that's also just sort of like an
Speaker 2: organizational problem, right like if if you're if your organization
Speaker 2: is set up in such a way that a small
Speaker 2: number of people being incapacitated means total paralysis and no
Speaker 2: one has any idea what's going on. That's just a
Speaker 2: bad way to run something. And especially it's a terrible
Speaker 2: way to run a union because the union's you know,
Speaker 2: power is supposed to be from from its organization and
Speaker 2: from the collective power of a large, large, organized group
Speaker 2: of people who can make decisions for themselves. And if
Speaker 2: it's if that's not happening and you get to the
Speaker 2: point where these decisions are being made by a very
Speaker 2: small number of people who can just sort of vanish,
Speaker 2: like that's that for whatever, And you know, literally whatever
Speaker 2: reason that is, right, it could just be you get sick.
Speaker 2: It could just be like whatever happens. That's just a
Speaker 2: terrible way to organize things. And I guess it's also
Speaker 2: like I want to make take it like like like
Speaker 2: a little tiny tangent to be like, if you're doing
Speaker 2: any organizing project, your goal is to organize yourself out
Speaker 2: of a job, Like you're like ideally, if you were
Speaker 2: in an organization, it should be able to function without you.
Speaker 2: There should Not having an indispensable person is a fiasco.
Speaker 5: Don't do that.
Speaker 2: This is true of both like your tiny local mutual
Speaker 2: aid group, as much as is true of your giant
Speaker 2: national union. So that this this has been this has
Speaker 2: been mea talking about the indispensable person don't have.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, that's kind of the funny thing about joining
Speaker 3: a union from an anarchist perspective. It gets a little
Speaker 3: funky how hierarchical they typically are, and the problems that
Speaker 3: we know we are going to face when you have
Speaker 3: a system that's built like a pyramid.
Speaker 4: Yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 3: And so I was saying, we're in dark time, but
Speaker 3: there's such a bright future that I can see for
Speaker 3: us Branch nine of the NALC, and namely this individual
Speaker 3: Tyler Vasser, who when I had originally posted on Reddit
Speaker 3: asking for attention, he's the one that I thought would
Speaker 3: be great for this interview. His branch, Branch nine has
Speaker 3: passed a resolution to form an open bargaining strategy for
Speaker 3: contract negotiations, and I hope this sweeps the nation. We're
Speaker 3: not allowed to strike, as I've mentioned, and our leadership
Speaker 3: is so shy when it when it comes to activism
Speaker 3: or mobilization of the workforce, they don't want to touch
Speaker 3: the topic. The closest thing we have to it is
Speaker 3: a rally that is enough is Enough that's being held
Speaker 3: in Baltimore soon about the violence that's being done to
Speaker 3: postal workers. We're being robbed and we're being harassed, But
Speaker 3: even then we're missing a large chunk of the danger
Speaker 3: that is posed to postal workers, because yes, we're being
Speaker 3: robbed on the streets, but we're also being bullied and
Speaker 3: harassed inside of our work places by management, by the
Speaker 3: people who are supposed to empower us to do the
Speaker 3: job effectively.
Speaker 4: And so they don't want to touch the topic of
Speaker 4: a strike, I think, for fear of retaliation. But to me,
Speaker 4: pushing for the right to strike is a I'm not
Speaker 4: sure how to word this. It is such.
Speaker 3: An important part of the nilc's identity, the postal strike
Speaker 3: of nineteen seventy, that it seems silly to ignore it
Speaker 3: today and pretend like it didn't happen. So for the future,
Speaker 3: I think that activism is our key to success. I
Speaker 3: think that the old heads that lead our union come
Speaker 3: from a time where unions were frowned upon where activism
Speaker 3: was frowned upon. But I think that public opinion will
Speaker 3: be largely in our favor, and that public opinion can
Speaker 3: really put pressure on the legislative branch on Congress, and
Speaker 3: if we are transparent about our union, what we're asking for,
Speaker 3: the issues that we're facing, I think that the public
Speaker 3: would be on our side. If the people in America
Speaker 3: knew that management was falsifying time records or training records
Speaker 3: and interfering with workers' comps, claim and back pay, or
Speaker 3: that they're not paying the settlements that they've agreed to pay,
Speaker 3: that they're not scheduling arbitration sessions big or small, that
Speaker 3: they would care, and that they would join us in
Speaker 3: the streets. One major thing that happened, I think it
Speaker 3: was last year in the summer, we had a letter carrier,
Speaker 3: his name is Eugene Gates, who died in the Texas
Speaker 3: heat Jesus year because management told him not to take
Speaker 3: as many breaks or he would face discipline. These pressures
Speaker 3: that we face when when you're threatened that you will
Speaker 3: lose your job if you don't listen to us, you
Speaker 3: will push yourself to the point of exhaustion and further, Yeah,
Speaker 3: I think that the Post Office killed mister Gates and
Speaker 3: there wasn't as much outcry or.
Speaker 4: Or anger behind the movement.
Speaker 3: I often find myself thinking that while I don't have
Speaker 3: the answers, I do know that we need to care more. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it's hard to care when you're exhausted. I acknowledge that.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, I think there's two things about that. One, I mean,
Speaker 2: I don't and this is something I've gotten to with
Speaker 2: a lot of the sort of interviews that I've done
Speaker 2: on this show, is that I think a lot of
Speaker 2: very very basic jobs have labor conditions that are unimaginably
Speaker 2: appalling that people just don't know about. And I think
Speaker 2: people are very sympathetic too, once they actually understand what's
Speaker 2: happening in the kind of just horror show stuff that's
Speaker 2: happening in these workplaces. And the second thing I think
Speaker 2: that's sort of important in terms of getting people to
Speaker 2: you know, trying to actually do like mass mobilizations even
Speaker 2: just to get people to understand what's going on, is
Speaker 2: that I think a lot of people who are facing
Speaker 2: these kinds of conditions think that they're alone and think
Speaker 2: that it's just something that happens to them, or they've
Speaker 2: been in them for so long they think that it's
Speaker 2: sort of normal. And having a bunch of people go no,
Speaker 2: like a this happens and be it shouldn't happen is
Speaker 2: extraordinarily powerful because you know, like that that feeling of
Speaker 2: isolation is is the thing that all of that you know,
Speaker 2: you're that your bosses depend on to make sure that
Speaker 2: you know you you just keep going along with these
Speaker 2: conditions even though they are just objectively horrific. And I
Speaker 2: think any strategy that's not based on that is just
Speaker 2: not going to go anywhere.
Speaker 3: Right, And one of the strategies that I really want
Speaker 3: to push forward as I grow within the union. And
Speaker 3: don't get me wrong, I want to stay as steward.
Speaker 3: I think that educating our members and uh being part
Speaker 3: of the workforce is my place in the union. But
Speaker 3: what I want to push is for union solidarity. I
Speaker 3: want the NLC to hire organizers, specifically organizers to try
Speaker 3: and get the public mobilized and as well as the workforce,
Speaker 3: so that we can put pressure on Congress, so that
Speaker 3: we can show our bargaining teams that we support them,
Speaker 3: and so that we can have clearly defined bargaining terms.
Speaker 3: And yeah, I think that having solidarity between unions and
Speaker 3: reaching out to the other movements in a time where
Speaker 3: union support is higher than ever is such a clear
Speaker 3: path that we are just ignoring for whatever reason because
Speaker 3: people are afraid to speak out against the Post Office.
Speaker 3: And so I'm really not sure what's going to happen
Speaker 3: with our current contract, but I do know that the
Speaker 3: fight never ends, and that while we stand on the
Speaker 3: shoulders of giants, we have to pay respect to these
Speaker 3: giants by not giving up now. And I'm a relatively
Speaker 3: new employee and steward, but I'm really walking in the
Speaker 3: footsteps of some warriors. The branch president I mentioned, Ken
Speaker 3: Lurch has given me so much support and education and
Speaker 3: has done so much hard work over the years that
Speaker 3: I don't have to reinvent the wheel, none of us do.
Speaker 3: We just have to continue the struggle.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think I think that's a great place
Speaker 2: to end you unless you have anything else that you
Speaker 2: want to make sure we get to.
Speaker 4: No, nothing, nothing on this topic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So how can how can people support you and
Speaker 2: postal workers just in general? If there's specific place you
Speaker 2: want them to go?
Speaker 4: In general?
Speaker 3: There is on the na LC site, which is just
Speaker 3: an ALC dot com. There is a section where you
Speaker 3: put in your address and it it'll give you the
Speaker 3: email addresses, the phone numbers for your representatives so that
Speaker 3: you can make some noise. Again, we're amazingly limited in
Speaker 3: what we can do, so there's not really anything that
Speaker 3: you can donate to to help us, including the letter
Speaker 3: carrier political fund.
Speaker 4: But yeah, just pay attention to us.
Speaker 3: Maybe leave a bottle of water out in your front door,
Speaker 3: says for the postal worker. You know, there's nothing better
Speaker 3: that you can do than talking about it. Word of
Speaker 3: mouth is the best advertisement.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, we will, we will. We will put that
Speaker 2: in the show notes. I help you all win, and
Speaker 2: I don't. I don't think I've ever said this genuinely
Speaker 2: in my life, but thank you for your service.
Speaker 4: I appreciate that. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I never imagined myself to become a federal employee, and
Speaker 3: it is just as bad as I imagined. Yeah, so
Speaker 3: I do want to shout out Actually it's a little meta,
Speaker 3: I guess, but I do want to shout out some
Speaker 3: important episodes of it could happen here that.
Speaker 4: Hit me very closely. If I can.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, go for it because a lot of the
Speaker 3: people listening will be postal workers that have been pointed
Speaker 3: in this direction. Please look at the May and Mar episodes,
Speaker 3: the Free burm the Burmese Revolution, and look at the
Speaker 3: work that me I believe you've done the same work
Speaker 3: as James with border kindness.
Speaker 4: Those are two topics that.
Speaker 3: I think y'all hit really well and that really touched
Speaker 3: me as a person. Sometimes I'll relisten to those episodes
Speaker 3: when I'm having a hard day just to remind myself
Speaker 3: that it's all the same. It's all the same fight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it absolutely is, And I mean I think that's
Speaker 2: that's sort of the beauty. I mean, it's it's both
Speaker 2: the beauty and the horror of this world is that
Speaker 2: on the one hand, all of us are being crushed
Speaker 2: by the same sets of forces. But on the other hand,
Speaker 2: it means that whatever fight that you're taking is also
Speaker 2: a part of the larger fight forget all.
Speaker 4: Of us free.
Speaker 3: Yeah exactly, So just fight the burnout and stay in
Speaker 3: the fight.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is pennicket Apple. Here go make trouble for
Speaker 2: people who suck.
Speaker 7: Hi.
Speaker 5: Everyone, it's James. We just wanted to let you know
Speaker 5: that some new shit has come to light since since
Speaker 5: we recorded this. Specifically, a former staff of was A
Speaker 5: Your Kitchen who resigned who was of Palestinian descent wrote
Speaker 5: an op ed I guess in Mundweiss, which is a
Speaker 5: publication that covers is rather Palestine and the United States
Speaker 5: role there, and it's given us some more information about
Speaker 5: what's the tr kitchen that we didn't know when we
Speaker 5: first recorded this, and so we are going to address
Speaker 5: out at the end. So after the second ad break,
Speaker 5: Charles will go Sherean and I will come back and
Speaker 5: we gonna address some stuff that we found in that
Speaker 5: op ed. We will also link it in the description
Speaker 5: to this podcast.
Speaker 8: Yes, it's a really good article. I recommend you guys
Speaker 8: give it a full read. But yeah, we will be
Speaker 8: talking all about it at the end, so please listen
Speaker 8: to the whole episode. Hello, everybody, welcome to it could
Speaker 8: happen here today. I am joined by my illustrious colleague.
Speaker 5: James Hi James, Hi Scheren.
Speaker 8: And my now friend Charles McBride. Hi, Charles, welcome back
Speaker 8: to the show.
Speaker 5: Hi, no friends, Sharen.
Speaker 9: It's wonderful to be here and to know that you're
Speaker 9: a real person, not a yeah.
Speaker 10: Fun fact.
Speaker 8: I have met Charles in person, but I have not
Speaker 8: met James in person, and I think that's pretty funny.
Speaker 5: That's why I got colleague and Charles ki friends.
Speaker 10: Tech that don't read into that.
Speaker 6: Okay, we have.
Speaker 8: We're talking about World Central Kitchen and the tragedy that
Speaker 8: happened last week in which seven AID workers were killed.
Speaker 8: Both of these gentlemen have personal experience with the organization,
Speaker 8: so I thought it would be good to talk about.
Speaker 8: But James take it.
Speaker 5: Away, Okay, So yeah, I think I think we should
Speaker 5: maybe start off Charles, you and I've both seen World
Speaker 5: Central Kitchen in different places. Like my longest experience with
Speaker 5: them was starting in twenty eighteen in Tijuana, right when
Speaker 5: we were trying to feed people who were part of
Speaker 5: a caravan of migrants who had arrived right before the midterms,
Speaker 5: and what was a relatively normal thing became a really
Speaker 5: big political sort of football, which resulted in the people,
Speaker 5: remember like people being tear gassed in Mexico from inside
Speaker 5: the United States, people being held first in a baseball
Speaker 5: stadium and then in an old strip club, which was
Speaker 5: really gross. And they're being essentially no and goo presence
Speaker 5: at first and then Mutual Aid Presence and then World
Speaker 5: Central Kitchen were one of the first people to show
Speaker 5: up and cook for people, and like, at this point,
Speaker 5: there was a really dying of need for food. Like
Speaker 5: I have this vivid memory of three of my friends
Speaker 5: and I are riding in a bed of a pickup
Speaker 5: truck into this refugee camp and people just mobbing for
Speaker 5: food and water, and like people would get about, like
Speaker 5: not stamping on children once once we stopped, but like
Speaker 5: I was really worried there was going to be a crash.
Speaker 5: People were very hungry and very thirsty, and I had
Speaker 5: just had massive respect for people showing up and just
Speaker 5: being like, we are people who cook food, and what
Speaker 5: we're here to do is cook food and these people
Speaker 5: are hungry who were going to give it to them?
Speaker 5: And so I've always been admiring of their work since then.
Speaker 5: And I went to Childs, like what your sort of
Speaker 5: initial experience was with them, and if you could describe
Speaker 5: like sort of what sort of work you've seen them doing. Yeah, So.
Speaker 9: First experience that I had with World Central Kitchen was
Speaker 9: actually hands off. It was when my friends and I
Speaker 9: we created this thing four years ago called the Farm
Speaker 9: Project which is a food rescue organization. It basically finds
Speaker 9: food that's going to waste on farms and pays the
Speaker 9: wages of the truckers and the drivers to transport the
Speaker 9: food to food banks that are overworked. We sort of
Speaker 9: tagged in with World Central Kitchen in the beginning of
Speaker 9: COVID and talked with them a little bit, but there
Speaker 9: was never any official partnership. Some of their comms people
Speaker 9: gave us advice, some of their fundraising people gave us advice.
Speaker 9: First time I ever saw them in operation was coming
Speaker 9: into the Jimish train station week two of the Ukraine War,
Speaker 9: and they were the organization feeding all the refugees coming
Speaker 9: in a bunch of people in World Central Kitchen, and
Speaker 9: the thing I noticed was none of them were speaking English.
Speaker 9: They were all speaking Polish and Ukrainian or Russian. And
Speaker 9: I started to realize, this is an organization that knows
Speaker 9: how to mobilize a local population and a local response
Speaker 9: as a part of the thing. And that's something I
Speaker 9: really noticed when almost a year later, I flew from
Speaker 9: Ukraine to Turkey when a seven point five Magetude earthquake
Speaker 9: went through southeastern Turkey, Kardistan and I flew into Adanna
Speaker 9: and then basically linked up with the World's Central Kitchen
Speaker 9: people in the city of Osmania. And one of the
Speaker 9: things I noticed was how quickly they were able to
Speaker 9: get into Syria when nobody else was getting into Syria.
Speaker 9: And the reason is because it's just chefs. It's just
Speaker 9: using chefs in restaurants in places where they already exist.
Speaker 9: Every place in the world has chefs and restaurants. And
Speaker 9: Jose Andres has this amazing quote that I really like.
Speaker 9: He says, everyone already works for World Central Kitchen, they
Speaker 9: just don't know it yet. And I saw that in action.
Speaker 9: I saw all these kitchens transformed into you know, shelters
Speaker 9: and food distribution sites, and I got to work alongside
Speaker 9: their team. So my project, I was trying to fundraise
Speaker 9: for heaters and blankets to heat the AFAD tents in
Speaker 9: the affected regions in Kurdistan and in the Kurdish villages
Speaker 9: on the on the border with Syria, because there was
Speaker 9: it was still very cold at that time and there
Speaker 9: was not you know, adequate attention paid to that. Obviously,
Speaker 9: AFAD and its cronies is part of the whole reason
Speaker 9: that that incident was as bad as it was, but
Speaker 9: World Central Kitchen stepped up in a big way in Turkey,
Speaker 9: and I was really impressed with kind of their outfit.
Speaker 9: We were working out of the same distribution center, you know.
Speaker 9: I got to a company, Jose Andres on a couple
Speaker 9: of his deliveries, and we went in to Hate and
Speaker 9: walked around and saw the extent of the devastation and
Speaker 9: visited all the World Central Kitchen feeding sites, and it
Speaker 9: was just it was all Turkish people and Gurtish people
Speaker 9: who were there working from World Central Kitchen. They had
Speaker 9: been mobilized by this entity. So there's this decentralized element
Speaker 9: to World Central Kitchen that I found really impressive. It
Speaker 9: didn't feel like the top down, bureaucratic thing I kept
Speaker 9: throwing into in my humanitarian work with these big NGOs.
Speaker 9: It was much more grassroots, much more bottom up. So
Speaker 9: it gained a lot of respect for me in that sense.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think that's a really good point to make
Speaker 5: that they do have a different model. It allows them
Speaker 5: to be flexible. It's allowed them to be places where
Speaker 5: other people aren't like. I think a lot of people,
Speaker 5: perhaps like are not as familiar with the NGO world
Speaker 5: as you and I might be like, like, NGOs often
Speaker 5: present themselves in places where people need help, but it's like,
Speaker 5: you know, they have large office buildings and white land cruises,
Speaker 5: and they have one way of doing things and it's
Speaker 5: their way, and sometimes that doesn't work well. I can
Speaker 5: recount countless examples of this, right, NGOs that exist to
Speaker 5: do things in a certain way and don't adapt to
Speaker 5: a local situation or culture. And that's something the World's
Speaker 5: Central Kitchen have done really well in my experience, all
Speaker 5: over the world.
Speaker 9: Yeah, they graft themselves on to a local response and
Speaker 9: every everywhere that they go, it takes on the local flavor.
Speaker 9: And I think it's that's why this happened, is because
Speaker 9: they inserted themselves into a highly volatile situation and because
Speaker 9: they are so decentralized, and because they are so on
Speaker 9: the ground, they also exposed themselves to the realities of
Speaker 9: what Palestinians have been facing in Gaza and lost members
Speaker 9: of their team, you know as a result. And I
Speaker 9: think that is part of that is there's a lot
Speaker 9: of people who won't even go into Gaza, you know,
Speaker 9: if they had the opportunity, like you said, these big NGOs,
Speaker 9: I think last time I was on the on the
Speaker 9: podcast Sharen, I talked about, you know, seeing these big
Speaker 9: UN advertisements in the Copenhagen airport saying save Ukrainian children
Speaker 9: when I first when I was going over there, and
Speaker 9: then as soon as I got there, I mean, the
Speaker 9: minute you go east to Leviv, You're not going to
Speaker 9: see a UN truck anywhere. And it was it was
Speaker 9: that way for nine months, you know. In Yeah, it
Speaker 9: was just a bunch of people with like brand new
Speaker 9: white Land Cruise or Pratos, sipping cocktails and Leviv while
Speaker 9: subcontracting with actual humanitarians working closer to the front line.
Speaker 9: World Central Kitchen was not that way. They were all
Speaker 9: the way out, all the way on the east. Everywhere
Speaker 9: I went there was World Central Kitchen cars, even deep
Speaker 9: into Donyetsk, And that was really impressive. It was so
Speaker 9: it felt antithetical to the whole nonprofit industrial complex model
Speaker 9: that I'd become familiar with, and I was impressed by that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So perhaps we should to speak about exactly what
Speaker 5: they were doing in Ghaz because I think people are
Speaker 5: practical a little confused. There's been a lot of like
Speaker 5: misinformation from all kinds of angles about what they were
Speaker 5: doing in Gaza, So do you have a good handle
Speaker 5: on that.
Speaker 9: I mean, World Central Kitchen positioned itself. They engage in
Speaker 9: slightly more activist humanitarianism than most organizations, which is why
Speaker 9: I mean jose Andres went big on Ukraine. He was there,
Speaker 9: he brought the whole team. I mean, they put they
Speaker 9: dedicated so many resources to Ukraine, and for him it
Speaker 9: was unequivocal. Ukrainians are the good guys, Russians are the
Speaker 9: bad guys. We're helping the victims of this conflict, and
Speaker 9: you know, we're on the side of the angels in
Speaker 9: this and that was the positioning, and I think it
Speaker 9: was a bit of a wake up call when after
Speaker 9: October seventh he did the same thing in Israel and
Speaker 9: went and you know, gave food to the to the
Speaker 9: to the different Kibut seam that were affected by the
Speaker 9: October seventh attacks, and at first very much positioned himself
Speaker 9: as like, we're here to help relieve the affect at
Speaker 9: israelis which again for like polite liberals in the humanitarian world.
Speaker 9: You know, Israel Ukraine both aligned with Western interests, Western
Speaker 9: values theoretically, and I think and then you know, suddenly
Speaker 9: the war focus goes from what happened to the kibbut
Speaker 9: seem to what's happening in Gaza. And so they went
Speaker 9: to Egypt and they started helping the refugees, and then
Speaker 9: they tried to get into Gaza. Then they did get
Speaker 9: into Gaza and they set up, you know, an effective
Speaker 9: system of the food aid. And I started to notice
Speaker 9: while that was happening that the perspectives of a lot
Speaker 9: of the people that I was working with in the
Speaker 9: aid community were starting to shift on this whole thing.
Speaker 9: People who didn't have a political interest in supporting the
Speaker 9: Palestinians and were just kind of supporting Israel because of
Speaker 9: the default. When they actually went to Gaza, they started
Speaker 9: to really change their tune.
Speaker 5: And you see this.
Speaker 9: A little bit with Jose Andres as well. I think
Speaker 9: Jose Andres was, yeah, I mean this in terms of
Speaker 9: his personal views on Israel, they seem to have very
Speaker 9: clearly evolved. You can see very soon after October seventh,
Speaker 9: he is calling out the Spanish Prime Minister on calling
Speaker 9: what's happening in Palestine and genocide. He's saying Israel has
Speaker 9: the rights to defend itself, and then he spends a
Speaker 9: bunch of time in Gaza, and now he's greeting everyone
Speaker 9: in Arabic, and then this thing happens, and he immediately
Speaker 9: points the finger at ISRAELI says, you guys targeted my team,
Speaker 9: you killed them deliberately, and you made sure the job
Speaker 9: was finished, and that is just so reproachable. And in
Speaker 9: doing so, he became one of the only really big
Speaker 9: celebrity voices to make what appeared to be something of
Speaker 9: a one to eighty turn on that conflict. And pretty
Speaker 9: much everyone that I've worked with in the humanitarian or
Speaker 9: journalism space has also done the same thing in regard
Speaker 9: to Gaza. I'd say most people thought my views on
Speaker 9: this were too extreme after October seventh, when I began
Speaker 9: immediately criticizing Israel, and now the ones who have actually
Speaker 9: been there pretty much on equivocally say they're the bad
Speaker 9: actor in this region. And I think you saw that
Speaker 9: shift happen in real time with sort of the attitude
Speaker 9: that World Central Kitchen took to Gaza. All that stuff
Speaker 9: is available from public statements. I don't want to share
Speaker 9: private sentiments that have been shared with me by members
Speaker 9: of World Central Kitchen staff. Those are their own and
Speaker 9: they don't represent the organization. But I think even just
Speaker 9: watching the yo yo of Jose Andres's perspective on this
Speaker 9: change has been enlightening.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I think, like it's easy to be critical
Speaker 5: of someone for having opinions which like have not aided well, right, Like,
Speaker 5: and sometimes that's okay sometimes some since we need to
Speaker 5: do that, sometimes people say shit which is unforgivable. But
Speaker 5: like I think in this instance, like we can be
Speaker 5: critical at a point, but I don't think now it's
Speaker 5: a time for that. Like I think now it's a
Speaker 5: time for like everyone who wants the starving and killing
Speaker 5: of innocent people in Gaza to stop is on our
Speaker 5: side right now, and we need to welcome that. And
Speaker 5: like there are a lot of people in this country
Speaker 5: right who we need to do that same one eighty
Speaker 5: and giving examples of people doing that is good, like
Speaker 5: they and there are a lot of people who don't
Speaker 5: see themselves when they see dead people in Gaza, and
Speaker 5: that's a problem, right, And that's some shit that they
Speaker 5: need to examine, and because there's a lot of bigotry there.
Speaker 5: But if they see themselves in those aid workers, or
Speaker 5: they see themselves in Jose Andres, and look fucking when
Speaker 5: I saw the bodies of those aid workers, right, you
Speaker 5: have a tall, skinny British guy with long hair in
Speaker 5: a plate carrier with a badge on like that, That's
Speaker 5: what I look like to ninety nine percent of the world,
Speaker 5: and it's hard not to feel like, oh shit, like
Speaker 5: that could be me, and and I have well, I
Speaker 5: feel like I have a lot of empathy for people
Speaker 5: in guys that are friends in guars that we speak
Speaker 5: to them on the podcast sharing and I spoke to
Speaker 5: them last week. But whatever it takes for those people
Speaker 5: to change their opinions right now is what we need,
Speaker 5: and we can we can dissect how we got here later,
Speaker 5: but like every minute that this continues, more innocent people die.
Speaker 5: And if we can stop this one minute sooner than
Speaker 5: there's an important life that we can save. And I
Speaker 5: think it's really important to focus on where we are,
Speaker 5: not like how how we got here right now, if
Speaker 5: that makes sense.
Speaker 8: As far as global conflicts go. I believe it's like
Speaker 8: two hundred and twenty four AID workers have died in Gaza,
Speaker 8: which is not a normal number in any kind of war.
Speaker 8: So that's according to the UN.
Speaker 5: Yeah, one hundred journalists, right like every there is one
Speaker 5: person I can think of who has worked with in
Speaker 5: Gaza who is still alive. Everyone I know has lost
Speaker 5: family members, and that that's just my tiny slice, you know,
Speaker 5: and by no means as affected by this as most people.
Speaker 5: But yeah, that three times as many children have died
Speaker 5: since October in Gaza as are normally killed in conflicts
Speaker 5: in a year worldwide. It's fucking horrific. And yeah, we
Speaker 5: will do well to put aside our differences and make
Speaker 5: it stop, I think.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I agree, opposition to genocide and wanting to end
Speaker 9: it should be a very big tent and the fact
Speaker 9: that some people on the Internet are trying to make
Speaker 9: it a smaller one doesn't make a lot of sense
Speaker 9: to me.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, it promotes infighting, which is not helpful right now. Yeah,
Speaker 8: it is helpful to not call it a war and
Speaker 8: continue calling a genocide because that's what it is. So yeah,
Speaker 8: just continuing to change all the rhetoric around this genocide
Speaker 8: I think is important. This is also not the first
Speaker 8: time that Israel has directly targeted aid workers that are
Speaker 8: clearly labeled as aid workers. In two thousand and six
Speaker 8: and Lebanon, Israel struck a red Cross ambulance right in
Speaker 8: the center of the logo. Right on top of the
Speaker 8: truck there was or the van was a red cross,
Speaker 8: a clear red cross, and it struck right in the center.
Speaker 8: I think that image is now going around again from
Speaker 8: two thousand and six.
Speaker 10: Again.
Speaker 8: It's not the first time that Israel has directly targeted
Speaker 8: AID workers, and I think it's really appalling seeing leadership
Speaker 8: in Israel just kind of apologize half hardly, being like
Speaker 8: this was a mistake, and then they just move on.
Speaker 8: It's if this was the red line for people. I one,
Speaker 8: I find that frustrating, But if it's finally the red
Speaker 8: line for people, I just hope it continues and people
Speaker 8: don't let it go.
Speaker 5: That story that was absolutely fucking heartbreaking, right of that
Speaker 5: young girl who was trapped in her car and she
Speaker 5: called the ambulance and the ambulance came and they bombed
Speaker 5: the ambulance right and they killed her. And they called
Speaker 5: the ambulance drivers like those two ambulance drivers were Palestinian.
Speaker 5: They were working for the Palestinian Red Crest and they
Speaker 5: deserve every bit as much outrage as the words Central
Speaker 5: Kitchen people do what they did with every bit as admirable,
Speaker 5: but like, if this is what it takes for people
Speaker 5: to change, then like I hope that they will also
Speaker 5: acknowledge that everything else that happened before was an a
Speaker 5: trustee too, talking of like a trustees, we have an
Speaker 5: advertising break now.
Speaker 10: That was good James, good job, and we're back.
Speaker 8: Charles. You recently got some online attention for a video
Speaker 8: that you posted that was highlighting the vast imbalance of
Speaker 8: attention that the targeted assassination of the AID workers got
Speaker 8: in comparison to the murder and genocide of Palestinians. Specifically,
Speaker 8: people were talking about how there was also a Palestinian
Speaker 8: driver who was murdered along with the AID workers and
Speaker 8: his name was not getting mentioned. His name is safe,
Speaker 8: Isam Abudaha. And just a reminder of how frustrating it
Speaker 8: is that this had to be the red line for people.
Speaker 8: There are over thirty three thousand people in Gaza who
Speaker 8: have been murdered, nearly half of which are children. There
Speaker 8: are probably thousands more who are trapped under the rubble,
Speaker 8: and other thousands that are just unaccounted for because of
Speaker 8: the bobbing of hospitals and the lack of records. So
Speaker 8: to have the killing of six aid workers be a
Speaker 8: red line for people. That's what I mean by saying
Speaker 8: it's frustrating because it is a tragedy, but tragedy has
Speaker 8: been taking place for the past six months and also
Speaker 8: the past seventy six years. So yes, the video that
Speaker 8: Charles made gossa well deserved attention, and I'd love for
Speaker 8: you to talk about it a little bit.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 9: So this was like a strange convergence of things for
Speaker 9: me because I had been keeping up with the WCK
Speaker 9: team as they went into Gaza. I'd actually even been
Speaker 9: in conversations with some of them about potentially going there,
Speaker 9: but I hadn't. I mean, like these were just buddies
Speaker 9: from a humanitarian trip. I mean, you know, like James
Speaker 9: probably knows, you make friends really fast when you're connected,
Speaker 9: when you're in these sorts of scenarios, and you know,
Speaker 9: I had, I made friendships while I was in Turkey
Speaker 9: that I've maintained, and but then my my Palestinian advocacy
Speaker 9: was separate. You know, I'm over here educating and everything.
Speaker 9: And then suddenly there's this converse jints of like former
Speaker 9: co workers on this team dying and then it being
Speaker 9: the fault of this regime that I've spent the last
Speaker 9: six months trying to educate people on why it's bad.
Speaker 9: And I posted a video which was my tribute to
Speaker 9: the fallen WCK employees, who were very close friends of
Speaker 9: people that I got really close to on that project,
Speaker 9: and it was a tribute to them and also a
Speaker 9: way of pointing out how their martyrdom has been has
Speaker 9: overshadowed the martyrdom of so many Palestinians who will never
Speaker 9: get the kind of press and attention that they did,
Speaker 9: and I think it achieved that effect. The video went very,
Speaker 9: very viral. It's exceeded a million views on TikTok, it's
Speaker 9: around a quarter a million on Instagram, and more than
Speaker 9: that on the accounts that have reposted and shared it,
Speaker 9: sometimes without the context that I am not a World
Speaker 9: Central Kitchen employee, nor do I represent the opinions of
Speaker 9: the organization. And one of the things that I think
Speaker 9: made that story go viral is that I did shift
Speaker 9: the attention to I said, this is a genocide, and
Speaker 9: I said, as grieved as I am at the loss
Speaker 9: of these people that I have this connection with, I
Speaker 9: do want to point out that it is overshadowing the
Speaker 9: horrendous loss of life of Palestinians, and I think that
Speaker 9: resonated with a lot of people. It also resonated with
Speaker 9: my former my friends at w CK, who reached out
Speaker 9: to say, we appreciate you using your platform to talk
Speaker 9: about this, especially considering the fact that w CK employees
Speaker 9: do not typically are not really supposed to be making
Speaker 9: statements online about this, so they have a little more
Speaker 9: leeway with that. Concerning the fact that the head of
Speaker 9: the organization has explicitly now condemned Israel for this strike,
Speaker 9: but I've had some very interesting conversations with friends of
Speaker 9: mine that either still work or connected to the organization.
Speaker 9: And that's a slightly complicated thing because World Central Kitchen
Speaker 9: subcontracts with so many different people, So at any given point,
Speaker 9: there are people who are connected to World Central Kitchen
Speaker 9: who are not representatives of the organization or technically employees.
Speaker 9: So you know, you can't say definitively this is what
Speaker 9: the majority of people in WCK feel about Gaza or
Speaker 9: Israel or anything. You know, different people have different opinions
Speaker 9: about that whole situation.
Speaker 5: I think what you tried to do was obviously not
Speaker 5: to represent them, and it would be disingenuous any want
Speaker 5: to suggest you did, but the internet does that. I
Speaker 5: want to talk about one more, talking of disindienuous things
Speaker 5: on the Internet, I guess there was this thing that
Speaker 5: went around immediately in the aftermath of the photos coming
Speaker 5: out of the different people's corpses that like it seemed
Speaker 5: to be mostly like tankies or perhaps people who still
Speaker 5: believe that they can generate revenue from views on Twitter,
Speaker 5: saying that like, because these people had a security team,
Speaker 5: the security team was somehow spies and the evidence they're
Speaker 5: working phase are right, and you can speak to your
Speaker 5: experienced childis like, I've worked with security teams and seen
Speaker 5: people working with security teams all over the fucking world
Speaker 5: because war is dangerous and you have the thing that
Speaker 5: everyone needs.
Speaker 9: If you have the misfortune of being a veteran of
Speaker 9: the global War on Terror, you have a very few
Speaker 9: outlets for your skill set. One of those is providing
Speaker 9: security for humanitarian actors and journalists, and that is one
Speaker 9: of the most pro social applications of your skill set.
Speaker 6: Yeah, those things to do with those skills, believe me, right.
Speaker 9: So I have encountered a lot of people in my
Speaker 9: time in Ukraine and elsewhere who have decided to turn
Speaker 9: their sort of military intelligence background experience into you know, well, okay,
Speaker 9: I'm good at this. I'm familiar with these types of scenarios.
Speaker 9: And if there's one thing I'm decent at, it's well,
Speaker 9: at least trying to keep people safe and give them intelligence.
Speaker 9: And that is a that's never a guarantee. But in
Speaker 9: all the people I've met who actually are legit, you know,
Speaker 9: security consultants or or just veterans who have applied their
Speaker 9: skills towards a pro social humanitarian purpose are pretty good guys.
Speaker 9: And while I'm sure you know there are some of
Speaker 9: them who are connected to various you are still connected
Speaker 9: to sort of the intelligence services of their various countries.
Speaker 9: I think that's definitely a possibility. A lot of them
Speaker 9: are not. They're just veterans who are trying to help
Speaker 9: and they this is a way that they can make
Speaker 9: a living and while doing something that has a low
Speaker 9: moral hazard.
Speaker 4: So yeah, I.
Speaker 9: Dismissed that stuff. There's a lot of conspiracies. The problem is,
Speaker 9: I mean, in the vacuum of the sort of post
Speaker 9: manufacturing consent world where none of us truyus the Western
Speaker 9: liberal media. A lot of people trust stuff that's even dumber,
Speaker 9: including just like takes on the Internet that somebody pulled
Speaker 9: out of their ass. And a lot of it is
Speaker 9: if you have set yourself up against everything that comes
Speaker 9: out of the West, then every everything that looks like
Speaker 9: a fingerprint of an intelligence agency or anything is going
Speaker 9: to ring your alarm bells, obviously, you know, James. I
Speaker 9: feel like Ukraine is a great example of this. The
Speaker 9: fact that the United States supports Ukraine means that Ukraine
Speaker 9: must be the villain, and that the entire thing must
Speaker 9: be a CIA SIOP and their spies everywhere. And I'm
Speaker 9: a spy for going to Ukraine and helping grandmothers get
Speaker 9: their insulin. All of those things have been said about Ukraine,
Speaker 9: about me, about you know that sort of thing, and
Speaker 9: we know it, we know it's not true.
Speaker 5: It's just that people.
Speaker 9: I mean, these, as far as I know, these were
Speaker 9: guys who were security consultants, very similar to I work
Speaker 9: with a lot of British veterans of the Global War
Speaker 9: on tear, basically on various different projects, of it having
Speaker 9: to do with PTSD, others having to do with environmental conservation.
Speaker 9: Some of whom have worked in Palestine and been in
Speaker 9: the West Bank. And I think Brits by and large
Speaker 9: have a more sane perspective on Palestine than people in
Speaker 9: the US too. I've just noticed that they are like
Speaker 9: fewer ultra Zionist Brits than Americans.
Speaker 5: I think our politics is less dominated by that perspective.
Speaker 5: There are ultra zion As British people, but yeah, it's
Speaker 5: also just I think a little bit harder to live
Speaker 5: a life in Britain where you don't know, it's not
Speaker 5: Palestinian people, Arab people and and Muslim people, right, and
Speaker 5: that complete demonization and dehumanization of Muslim people that the
Speaker 5: Western media did for twenty years to manufacture consent for
Speaker 5: war that wasn't about weapons of master attraction or women
Speaker 5: in Afghanistan. It doesn't stick the landing quite so well
Speaker 5: when like, you have friends and you can kind of
Speaker 5: see through the nonsense. Yeah.
Speaker 8: Well, also I think the percent of like evangelical Christians
Speaker 8: was probably much less.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: No one's bringing a fucking red cow in England to
Speaker 5: take it to this third temple that I know of.
Speaker 9: That was one of the things I was going to
Speaker 9: point out is I don't think you even have to know,
Speaker 9: like to be a Zionist, you don't even have to
Speaker 9: know Jewish people in the US. I was raised an
Speaker 9: ultra Zionist without knowing a single Jewish family because I
Speaker 9: came from an evangelical community in South Carolina that was
Speaker 9: very Christo nationalist, very kind of culturally dispensationalist. Even though
Speaker 9: my family wasn't dispensationalist. It was all about in times,
Speaker 9: you support Israel because that's where you know, that's where
Speaker 9: Jesus is going to come back. So yeah, I remember,
Speaker 9: I mean I I we even had like fake Passover
Speaker 9: ceremonies in our church. God, this is bringing up some interesting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, into the trima bugs.
Speaker 9: But truly, I mean one of my one of my
Speaker 9: early sort of I would say I was I was
Speaker 9: completely anti Zionist before I was even a leftist. And
Speaker 9: part of that reason was because I got to know
Speaker 9: a Palestinian friend in Washington, d C. While sharing a
Speaker 9: desk with an Israeli conservative and a liberal Zionist.
Speaker 8: Wow that is and yeah, joke like these people walk
Speaker 8: into a bar, Yeah, trio of.
Speaker 9: People, So I like I think I had kind of
Speaker 9: I got pilled on Palestine. Part of it was because
Speaker 9: like I was history major in college, so I learned historiography.
Speaker 9: I just never applied historiography to the Israel Palestine conflict.
Speaker 9: And then having these two voices in my ear while
Speaker 9: like living and working in DC, I was like, oh,
Speaker 9: I need to actually look into this, and so yeah,
Speaker 9: I mean I would say even before I was like
Speaker 9: a leftist, I was down on Israel. I figured they
Speaker 9: were not the good guys. And then I think reading
Speaker 9: The Fateful Triangle by nome Chrompsky really solidified that. And uh,
Speaker 9: obviously Ilan Pope kind of was the nail on the
Speaker 9: coffin for me. So yeah, and speaking of like you
Speaker 9: know what happens in DC, and you know, America's opinions
Speaker 9: on the Middle East, most of them are dogshit opinions
Speaker 9: because most people do not have some sort of strong
Speaker 9: point of reference to this zone. But it goes back
Speaker 9: to what we were saying about how being against genocides
Speaker 9: should be a very big tent and we should resist
Speaker 9: efforts to make it smaller. Because I'm reading through the
Speaker 9: Hundred Years War in Palestine right now Rashid Khaldi, and
Speaker 9: one of the things that he said is how the
Speaker 9: war is fought in the United States in Congress because
Speaker 9: we hold the keys. So as much as it's as
Speaker 9: painful as it is to try and change the minds
Speaker 9: of dumb Americans with no geopolitical understanding, it's absolutely essential
Speaker 9: to holding Israel to account. It is actually one of
Speaker 9: the best things that you can do. And when someone
Speaker 9: who has the international appeal of Chef jose Andres points
Speaker 9: the finger at Israel and said, you killed my employees
Speaker 9: deliberately and you're starving Gazans, that goes a long way
Speaker 9: towards shifting the opinions of the people who actually hold
Speaker 9: the keys to everything Israel does.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think that's a very good point, and like
Speaker 5: that's what we need to do, right And I like
Speaker 5: to stop them getting bombs to kill people, not argue
Speaker 5: you on Twitter or you know, Instagram or what have you. Like,
Speaker 5: we need to make the killing stop. I wonder, like
Speaker 5: you spoke at Childs but knowing people I know, Central
Speaker 5: Kitchen are no longer working in Gaza for the time being.
Speaker 5: From when is that still correct?
Speaker 9: They they've publicly announced that they're scaling back their efforts. Yes,
Speaker 9: I'm not sure if they're going to totally close down
Speaker 9: their operation. I think right now they're probably trying to
Speaker 9: reconsider their security protocols before making another step.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean I don't really know what as there
Speaker 5: are things, of course, but like they did attempt to
Speaker 5: deconflict I guess, and they were using a road which
Speaker 5: is designated for the use that they were using it for, and.
Speaker 8: Israel knew where they were, Like it's they have to
Speaker 8: report where they are. So, I mean, it would be
Speaker 8: fucking crazy if Israel attacked Abergers again right now, but
Speaker 8: also it's Israel. I mean, I've done crazier things.
Speaker 9: Yeah, but can we like dwell on that for a second.
Speaker 9: Like Israel constantly boasts about its ISR capabilities mm HM
Speaker 9: in ISR's intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. So like Israel is
Speaker 9: constantly reassuring people that it is doing everything it can
Speaker 9: to avoid civilian casualties, it talks about its chain of
Speaker 9: command for approval. And in light of that, none of
Speaker 9: the things that they've said about this make any sense whatsoever,
Speaker 9: because if if they're protocols, because they're either, it's like
Speaker 9: they can't decide what they're trying to gaslight the world
Speaker 9: into believing every claim that they're making is muddling what
Speaker 9: they're trying to get the world to believe about them,
Speaker 9: and it just gives everyone the distinct impression that they're recklessly, incompetent, lying, evil,
Speaker 9: or potentially all three.
Speaker 5: Right, even if you look, I was because I don't
Speaker 5: know why this is the thing that I do. I
Speaker 5: was looking at like trying to work out what munition
Speaker 5: Israel hood used, right to destroy those vehicles, And Israel
Speaker 5: has they have a number of different sort of musus
Speaker 5: that they could have used. But one of the things
Speaker 5: that they do in the US does it too, but
Speaker 5: it's a bigger thing with Israel is if they have
Speaker 5: inert or low yield health fire ammunitions sort of guided
Speaker 5: munitions at a five from a helicopter or drone, and
Speaker 5: they use them to do a thing that they call
Speaker 5: roof knocking, right, which sounds maybe like you're like knocking
Speaker 5: on someone's ref What you're doing is sending a missile
Speaker 5: through somebody's roof, and that is the means by which
Speaker 5: you alert them to evacuate the building because you planning
Speaker 5: a larger strike that in itself. Yeah, we have this
Speaker 5: great ISR capability and what do we do? We launch
Speaker 5: missiles into the homes of civilians and then hopefully they
Speaker 5: will run away and fear for their lives so that
Speaker 5: more of them don't die when we blow up that
Speaker 5: block ten minutes later. Like, it's just you know, you
Speaker 5: have to look at what's happening, not what's being said.
Speaker 5: I guess, but.
Speaker 9: No, there they're absolutely allergic to accountability. And I think
Speaker 9: you can see just how far they've been able. They're
Speaker 9: scrambling now because they've been able to get away with
Speaker 9: so much for so long, and their excuses are falling
Speaker 9: apart because they're alternatively depicting themselves as a highly disciplined
Speaker 9: and professional, you know, army, or that they're just making
Speaker 9: mistakes because it's war and that people should get off
Speaker 9: their back because no one holds anyone else at the
Speaker 9: same standard that they hold Israel.
Speaker 8: It.
Speaker 9: So I was like, which is it? Like, what are
Speaker 9: you trying to get the world to believe? Are you
Speaker 9: either this like crack discipline unit with a very sophisticated
Speaker 9: chain of command in an AI software that you're really
Speaker 9: proud of for targeting, or are you is this the
Speaker 9: fog of war and you're just making mistakes and everyone
Speaker 9: makes mistakes and we should get off your back for
Speaker 9: it because you can't.
Speaker 5: Have it both ways.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, the civilian casualties are too high for you to
Speaker 9: have it both ways. So either you are making mistakes
Speaker 9: and too many people are getting killed and you're violating
Speaker 9: the laws of rule, or you're doing it deliberately, which
Speaker 9: is worse.
Speaker 5: Yeah, people can make up their in minds.
Speaker 6: I guess Charles.
Speaker 8: Thank you so much for joining us today. I really
Speaker 8: respect all the work you do and I am grateful
Speaker 8: that you have shared your voice with our audience once again.
Speaker 8: Where can people find you on the internet if you
Speaker 8: want to be found, thank.
Speaker 5: You, Shran.
Speaker 9: Yeah, you can find me pretty much everywhere except Twitter
Speaker 9: with Charles McBride and that's McBride with a why rather
Speaker 9: than an I. That's on substack, Instagram, TikTok, and my
Speaker 9: website Charles McBride dot com will be live at this
Speaker 9: point nice when this episode drops. So if you want
Speaker 9: to support the humanitarian work I've been involved in in Ukraine,
Speaker 9: you can support Mission Harkive on Instagram. It's mission dot
Speaker 9: harkive and their website is missionharkive dot com. And if
Speaker 9: you're looking for an org that is already working in
Speaker 9: Gaza to provide life saving aid in the wake of
Speaker 9: you know, unrubbing gone. World Central Kitchen now pulling out
Speaker 9: an era pulling out. Global Empowerment Mission is still there
Speaker 9: and still fulfilling a lot of the same functions that
Speaker 9: those organizations were doing.
Speaker 10: Thank you so much, Charles.
Speaker 8: Scheren and James from the future here giving you an
Speaker 8: update about the article that we mentioned at the top
Speaker 8: of the episode. So the title itself is I resign
Speaker 8: from World Central Kitchen because they refuse to tell the
Speaker 8: truth about the Israeli genocide and Gaza. The ex staffer
Speaker 8: is Ramsey t. The article itself has some really damning
Speaker 8: information about WCK, so we're going to get into it.
Speaker 8: He says, for months, World Central Kitchen leadership censored material
Speaker 8: coming out of its Gaza operation and refused to honor
Speaker 8: staff concerns about their work there. And even though they're
Speaker 8: finally taking a stand after its personnel have been murdered,
Speaker 8: it is much too late. So he resigned in early
Speaker 8: March of this year, and at the time he was
Speaker 8: the only staff member of Palestinian descent at WCK. And
Speaker 8: there is an amendment. There, he says that while WCK
Speaker 8: hired many Palestinian contractors in Gaza in Egypt, he was
Speaker 8: the only Palestinian with staff status following the departure of
Speaker 8: one other longtime employee, and he resigned in protest of
Speaker 8: the extensive unexplained censorship regarding Gaza At the organization. They
Speaker 8: talk about how in December seventh of last year, they
Speaker 8: sent a letter to wck's executive team, and that letter
Speaker 8: called for WCK to join other regionally active NGOs in
Speaker 8: calling for a ceasefire and condemning his reels blockade, as
Speaker 8: well as conforming its language and coverage of Gaza to
Speaker 8: the standard that was stepped by the coverage of Ukraine,
Speaker 8: as well as stopping meal service in Israel. It got
Speaker 8: fourty three signatures, and the WCK executive team declined to
Speaker 8: meet up with the people that signed the letter, and
Speaker 8: they failed to respond to any inquiries, and they also
Speaker 8: actively still served the meals in Israel while the second
Speaker 8: day of the ICJ Genocide hearing was happening in January.
Speaker 5: There's one paragraph that I want to diale as well,
Speaker 5: just because I think it's very crucial when we're discussing
Speaker 5: the fact that these people died working for a Ceter kitchen.
Speaker 5: And that's this paragraph that I would pick up halfway through.
Speaker 5: In another instance, a video of a WCK kitchen caught
Speaker 5: in an IDF bombing was put on hold entirely. It
Speaker 5: appears this incident, as well as the fact that WCK
Speaker 5: personnel were board a UN convoy that was bombed, have
Speaker 5: not been mentioned anywhere externally. Like, I think that's a
Speaker 5: real crucial getting off point. You can have shit politics,
Speaker 5: but if you're not saying stuff when your people are
Speaker 5: getting bombed, like until they're getting killed, A, I don't
Speaker 5: know what's wrong with you, and B if you didn't
Speaker 5: change things that, I don't know they didn't change things, right,
Speaker 5: that's not detailed here, but like you have to change
Speaker 5: things if your people are being bombed, Like if I'm
Speaker 5: working somewhere where that's a likelihood, you know, like if
Speaker 5: if we get bombed once and we're lucky enough to
Speaker 5: be okay, we do not continue doing the same shit.
Speaker 5: And I'm not entirely sure that they did. I don't
Speaker 5: want to for a moment suggest that like the people
Speaker 5: who died were in like complicit right, that's not what
Speaker 5: I'm saying. It's not what you're in saying. I very
Speaker 5: much understand the desire to go to places where dangerous
Speaker 5: things are happening and help the people who did nothing
Speaker 5: to deserve this, and I think the people who did
Speaker 5: that deserve are an ending gratitude and respect. I'm not
Speaker 5: for a minute saying that that's not true. I'm saying
Speaker 5: that this organization needs to really think about how it
Speaker 5: does shit if it wants to continue operating.
Speaker 8: And yeah, the blame is on the executives of this organization.
Speaker 8: The article also talks about how the character of w
Speaker 8: CK's relief response to Gaza. It was revealed very early
Speaker 8: on after October seventh the chief communications officer, Linda Roth.
Speaker 8: She had put out a statement without the communications team's input,
Speaker 8: which is apparently breaking precedent, and it was about how
Speaker 8: Hamas attacked Israel with no mention of the Palestinian lives
Speaker 8: that were lost. And then three days later, Jose Andres
Speaker 8: posted a video to w CK's Instagram where he only
Speaker 8: makes reference to the October seventh attack, with no mention
Speaker 8: of the climbing Palestine death till at the time or
Speaker 8: the blockades and then on social media, Charles mentioned this
Speaker 8: of the episode. On October sixteenth, he tweeted at the
Speaker 8: Spanish Prime Minister to be removed for her protest of
Speaker 8: the Israeli tactics, and at the same time, WCK continued
Speaker 8: to work closely with the IDF over the course of
Speaker 8: the relief response. The initial statement as well as Andre's video,
Speaker 8: were decisions that were made by leadership against the concerns
Speaker 8: of a WCK personnel. There's this paragraph that I want
Speaker 8: to read just verbatim. Much of the work in a
Speaker 8: genocide is not pulling the trigger, but instead minimizing and
Speaker 8: denying that a genocide is going on. Genocide is a
Speaker 8: phenomenon of gradual boundary pushing. Each increment must be accepted
Speaker 8: by the parties with agency for the next to be reached.
Speaker 8: Under the direction of CEO Aaron Gore, Linda Roth, and
Speaker 8: quote Chief Feeding Officer Jose Andres, World Central Kitchen recklessly
Speaker 8: endangered its personnel, selflessly exploited the situation for its own benefit,
Speaker 8: and actively participated in the normalization of an ongoing genocide.
Speaker 5: I think what I want to say more broadly here
Speaker 5: it's my stunts. I guess maybe other people sharre it, man,
Speaker 5: they don't. This situation is not going to be solved
Speaker 5: by NGOs, and it certainly not going to be solved
Speaker 5: by NGOs which have this very explicitly neoliberal political agenda. Right, Like,
Speaker 5: at best they can plug a hole in a leaky bucket,
Speaker 5: and it's good when they do that. Right, if one
Speaker 5: less person starves, that's good. It doesn't mean they don't
Speaker 5: have to be perfect to help, but they don't get
Speaker 5: to be exemptive from criticism because they're helping, right, Like
Speaker 5: World's Central Kitchen didn't want to help us at the
Speaker 5: border in Hucumber. My friends reached out. They didn't want
Speaker 5: to do that. Yeah, I don't think you should expect
Speaker 5: endios to share your your radical politics. It doesn't mean
Speaker 5: that they can't do harm reduction, and it doesn't mean
Speaker 5: that when they are doing harm reduction, they sometimes need
Speaker 5: your money, and in the such situations where this is happening,
Speaker 5: you should give it to them if you can't help
Speaker 5: more directly. Right, But like you know, if we look
Speaker 5: at their communications, we do see them calling for a
Speaker 5: cease fire, which is about what you can expect from
Speaker 5: an NGO, you know, we actually it appears that we
Speaker 5: see Hosse Andrews calling for a ceasefire, and we see
Speaker 5: World Central Kitchen saying Jsse andrew is for a ceasefire,
Speaker 5: which I don't quite know why they don't just say
Speaker 5: we are calling for a ceasefire. They didn't sign that
Speaker 5: document with the other rango. It's like that. I don't
Speaker 5: know if they're trying to play like have it both ways.
Speaker 5: I don't know. I don't I'm not privy to those conversations. Right,
Speaker 5: they didn't sort of wholeheartedly say this is the genocide
Speaker 5: but they have to get permission for Israel to do stuff.
Speaker 5: I mean, now they're saying it, but after the Trustee
Speaker 5: that happened, the whole world is watching, right, Not that
Speaker 5: the whole world shouldn't have been watching from the start,
Speaker 5: but I don't think enos are ever going to be
Speaker 5: you know, it's radical that there's people on the internet
Speaker 5: want them for They're also they're doing stuff and people
Speaker 5: on the internet aren't, so you know, we have to
Speaker 5: respect that. And I don't want any of this to
Speaker 5: take away from the fact that some people from all
Speaker 5: over the world, right from Europe, from Australia, from the
Speaker 5: United States, have died feeding people who need to be fed,
Speaker 5: because that's the most any of us can give, is
Speaker 5: our lives, right, And so I don't for a minute
Speaker 5: want any of this to detract from the sacrifice they made.
Speaker 5: No should their sacrifice be held in any higher regard
Speaker 5: than the sacrifice made by hundreds, if not thousands of
Speaker 5: Palestinian aid workers, right, people working for the Palestinian re Crescent,
Speaker 5: a Palestinian even the Palestinian people working for International NGOs right,
Speaker 5: or the United Nations people who have been killed, right,
Speaker 5: None of the sacrifices it should be ignored or ound
Speaker 5: mind because if people are certainly given a lot more
Speaker 5: than I have, I don't have any right to say that.
Speaker 5: I think, yeah, this organ it changes communications, right. I
Speaker 5: think they've obviously realized that there is no nicely nicely
Speaker 5: about this, like you have to call a spade a
Speaker 5: space when it comes to what's happening in Gaza, which
Speaker 5: is a deliberate and targeted campt to kill civilians, thousands
Speaker 5: and tens of thousands of children even And I think
Speaker 5: until we move the conversation onto where that is being
Speaker 5: called by its name, that is to say, genocide, then
Speaker 5: I don't think we'll see that the reactions that we need,
Speaker 5: and I think they appear to have reflected on that.
Speaker 5: I wish they've got there sooner, but they're there now,
Speaker 5: and I'm sorry that it took these people's lives to
Speaker 5: get there. But what I see from them is what
Speaker 5: I see from other NGOs. It's not they're not certainly
Speaker 5: not uniquely bad. In fact, they are better than very
Speaker 5: many indios. And they were there when other people weren't,
Speaker 5: and they're delivering food when other people weren't, So I
Speaker 5: don't want, I don't want to distract from that. But yeah,
Speaker 5: they're this messaging, this internal conduct, like there's somebody these
Speaker 5: internal messages, they are traveling and like again, it's just
Speaker 5: what i'd expect from any other NGO, whereas I've seen
Speaker 5: these guys do things in many ways sort of better
Speaker 5: than other angios, but none if that messaging takes away
Speaker 5: from these people giving their lives, and I don't want
Speaker 5: to suggest that.
Speaker 8: I think the most telling thing is that they're making
Speaker 8: the biases of their the top people that work for
Speaker 8: this company very evident. And the article goes into Linda
Speaker 8: Roth's background and her pro Israeli stances in the past,
Speaker 8: and the fact that in all the outwardly facing materials
Speaker 8: about Gaza, it was very typical to change the word
Speaker 8: siege to conflict or to question the blockades. It talks
Speaker 8: about how the people at the very top their biases
Speaker 8: just seeped through and the people that were actually working
Speaker 8: for the organization were in disagreement with this. I think
Speaker 8: the last thing I want to read from this article
Speaker 8: just really highlights that WCK did not protect the people
Speaker 8: that worked for them. It says, save the possibility of
Speaker 8: genuine and competence, the WCK leadership's decisions were not made
Speaker 8: to maintain neutrality, did not increase effectiveness, and as April
Speaker 8: first demonstrated, did not protect personnel. The leadership's failure to
Speaker 8: honestly portray the dire reality in Gaza and lack of
Speaker 8: an attempt to influence the genocide in Gaza via its
Speaker 8: status and close ties to the Bien administration means that
Speaker 8: they bear responsibility for its outcomes. Let no one say
Speaker 8: they did everything they could. And this is obviously talking
Speaker 8: about the leadership versus the personnel. And then he goes
Speaker 8: on to close the article saying that his experience is
Speaker 8: one experience and when he resigned there was a palpable,
Speaker 8: widespread atmosphere of disappointment among the staff and employees. And
Speaker 8: he ends with just calling on current and former WCK employees, contractors,
Speaker 8: and volunteers to publicly share their stories as well in
Speaker 8: order to force accountability and change.
Speaker 5: Yeah, okay, if you work for a Central Kitchen, you
Speaker 5: can message us hate to hear your stories that.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, we wanted to make sure that this perspective
Speaker 8: was shared. And again the article will be in the description,
Speaker 8: so please give it a good read. But yeah, that
Speaker 8: is the episode. Thanks for listening, Three pals done.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to It could Happen here a podcast about
Speaker 1: things falling apart. And when things fall apart, one of
Speaker 1: the things that happens is you get a bunch of
Speaker 1: a lot of opportunities for a lot of weird little guys,
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of Nazis and other kinds
Speaker 1: of scums start, you know, sliding up to the surface
Speaker 1: in the hopes that they can get some of the sweet,
Speaker 1: sweet oxygen of collapse. And that's why we've brought onto
Speaker 1: the program and are bringing into the network our good
Speaker 1: friend Molly Conger for a little recurrence series. I like
Speaker 1: to call look who's stalking? That was the That was
Speaker 1: the stocking joke. I'm wanted to open the episode with
Speaker 1: my own journeys.
Speaker 11: I'm not stalking anyone. I would never do that. That
Speaker 11: is a crime. This is reporting.
Speaker 1: It is reporting, and the line between reporting and stalking always.
Speaker 11: Clear, you know. I think it's it's on the publication. Yeah, yeah, so, Robert,
Speaker 11: Today's topic is such a perfect mash up of so
Speaker 11: many of my favorite things. It couldn't be more my
Speaker 11: speed unless this whole story took place on a Wiener
Speaker 11: dog ranch.
Speaker 1: Right. Yeah.
Speaker 11: This story has city council meetings that got rowdy. It
Speaker 11: has unite the right attendee getting docks. It has the
Speaker 11: internal calms of a hate group getting leaked. It has
Speaker 11: regular ass people putting their foot down about hate in
Speaker 11: their town. It is a year's long arc of one
Speaker 11: man's journey from fucking around to finding out his evolution,
Speaker 11: from chanting you will not replace us to getting replaced
Speaker 11: at the ballot box. This is the story of Enid, Oklahoma,
Speaker 11: Ward one City Commissioner Judson Gannon Blevins.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, ah, we're going back to my old home.
Speaker 11: That's why you spent some time in Oklahoma as a kid.
Speaker 11: So jud Levins was raised in the town of en
Speaker 11: in Oklahoma, and the listener, you'd be forgiven for thinking
Speaker 11: this is the story of a small town. And I'll
Speaker 11: be honest, I did. I'd never heard of Enid, but
Speaker 11: you grew up in the area. Do you have any
Speaker 11: sort of pre existing notions of gar Field County? Uh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean Enid was like a bigger play. I
Speaker 1: grew up in Ida Bell, which was really out in
Speaker 1: the sticks, so kind of everywhere was more civilization than
Speaker 1: Ida Bell, but Enid certainly was, although not much. No
Speaker 1: one would no one would accuse it of much civilization.
Speaker 11: It is apparently the ninth largest city in Oklahoma, which
Speaker 11: was surprising to me. It's an hour and a half
Speaker 11: outside of Oklahoma City, seventy six percent white, sixty percent Republican,
Speaker 11: and according to a twenty twenty one article on Yahoo
Speaker 11: News that reads like it was written by an intoxicated chatbot,
Speaker 11: it is ranked one of the most conservative cities in
Speaker 11: the country.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that all scans for Enid, Jared, Now that scans
Speaker 1: for a lot of cities in Oklahoma, mind you.
Speaker 11: Right, They could have named any of them. Yeah, but
Speaker 11: it has a population of about fifty thousand, which is
Speaker 11: actually the same size as Charlottesville, my hometown and a
Speaker 11: city that Johnson Blevens happened to visit. In the summer
Speaker 11: of twenty seventeen eighteen, the former US Marine moved back
Speaker 11: to his hometown to work at his father's roofing business.
Speaker 11: In twenty nineteen, he was publicly identified as a regional
Speaker 11: leader in a white supremacist organization, and in twenty twenty
Speaker 11: two he announced he was running for office.
Speaker 1: I mean that all that's a very Oklahoma politician route.
Speaker 1: It's also like a not a white like, from from
Speaker 1: roofing to white supremacy, not a wildly uncommon route for
Speaker 1: people to take in Oklahoma.
Speaker 11: Now he's still doing both.
Speaker 5: Oh good.
Speaker 1: I mean, you never want to give up on your
Speaker 1: passion for roofing. That would have made me sad.
Speaker 11: Although some of his supporters have pointed out that he
Speaker 11: hires lots of non white people to do manual labor,
Speaker 11: so how could he be racist?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, you don't want to get up on
Speaker 1: those roofs yourself. That's dangerous, Czarr. Yeah, it's hot out, Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is all pretty Oklahoma so far.
Speaker 11: On February fourteenth, twenty twenty three, jud Levins narrowly won
Speaker 11: a seat on the Eden City Council, defeating the incumbent
Speaker 11: by just thirty six votes. His past ties the now
Speaker 11: defunct white supremacist group Europa were no secret. Of course,
Speaker 11: by twenty twenty three, Identity Europa didn't exist anymore. So
Speaker 11: I don't blame you if you don't have a clear
Speaker 11: memory of exactly what kind of Nazi group they were.
Speaker 11: And I want to make it very clear. I don't
Speaker 11: want time, distance and white polo shirts to soften this.
Speaker 11: Identity Europa was a neo Nazi organization.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah. They were also just like the most infiltrated
Speaker 1: group of the Trump era. Like of all the Nazi
Speaker 1: orgs in the Trump era, I feel like they were
Speaker 1: the one where every week someone else got inside their coms.
Speaker 11: Well, I guess Bluvin's maybe part to blame for that
Speaker 11: as the regional coordinator.
Speaker 1: Oh good, so he was doing a great job.
Speaker 11: But Identity Europa was modeled after the far right French
Speaker 11: identitarian movement and sought the creation of a white ethno state.
Speaker 11: You will not replace us, chance you remember from Unite
Speaker 11: the Right were actually popularized by Identity Europa at their
Speaker 11: rallies earlier that year, and, according to testimony from a
Speaker 11: former girlfriend, one time Identity Euroopa leader Elliot Klein considered
Speaker 11: himself quote an unironic exterminationist, and he had violent fantasies
Speaker 11: about killing Jewish people himself. So it's not just guys
Speaker 11: hanging out right.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 11: Identity Europa was founded in twenty sixteen by Nathan Dimigo,
Speaker 11: a former marine who went to prison after drunkenly pulling
Speaker 11: a gun on a cab driver for quote looking iraqi.
Speaker 1: Well that gets at least he's honest.
Speaker 11: But while he was doing his time, he read David
Speaker 11: Duke's autobiography.
Speaker 1: Oh and he.
Speaker 11: Had an awakening, right, he read My Awakening and he
Speaker 11: had an awakening in prison. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know,
Speaker 11: you go to prison for a hay crime, you read
Speaker 11: a little David Duke, you get some ideas.
Speaker 1: Man, it it's not a good book. Like that's my
Speaker 1: thing about having David Duke's autobiography be like your life
Speaker 1: changing event, is it? It's not even a good book, right,
Speaker 1: which I guess neither was mind comp but I feel
Speaker 1: like everyone's lying about that one.
Speaker 11: According to some this is so off the beaten path here,
Speaker 11: this is I have to say it. According to some
Speaker 11: payments that came out in a divorce proceeding, David Duke
Speaker 11: made payments to Kevin Strome for ghostwriting it. Kevin Strom
Speaker 11: is the pedophile who actually said that thing that people
Speaker 11: think full terror said about the Jews.
Speaker 1: Oh cool, yeah great.
Speaker 11: So just something to think about when you're reading David
Speaker 11: Duke's autobiography in prison.
Speaker 1: I guess, I mean, I guess I had wondered what
Speaker 1: happens to pedophiles, like when they're back out in the world, like,
Speaker 1: how do.
Speaker 11: Your wife now? No that was before that was yeah, no,
Speaker 11: he's got a kid now, so.
Speaker 1: Oh what, No, he shouldn't do that. Okay, great, not
Speaker 1: a loved to live near a school. But I guess
Speaker 1: they can't stop you from procreating. We should evaluate some
Speaker 1: of that. I don't know.
Speaker 11: Anyway, back to our friend Nate, right, So, Nathan Amigo
Speaker 11: gets out of prison, makes his own hate group. You
Speaker 11: may also remember him as the guy who bravely beat
Speaker 11: the shit out of a ninety five pound woman at
Speaker 11: the rally in Berkeley in April of twenty seventeen. Oh yeah,
Speaker 11: and they memed the hell out of that. They squeezed
Speaker 11: it for all it was worth. That they used that
Speaker 11: image of him beating that woman in the street for
Speaker 11: promotion and recruitment. Dimigo himself touted a spike in membership applications,
Speaker 11: which he attributed to the popularity of the video. Identity
Speaker 11: Europa was heavily involved in the Summer of Hate, that
Speaker 11: rash of violent white supremacist rallies across the country in
Speaker 11: twenty seventeen. They were instrumental in planning as Unite the
Speaker 11: Right rally.
Speaker 6: But when the.
Speaker 11: Group's discord server was leaked in March of twenty nineteen
Speaker 11: and published in full by Unicorn Riot, their leader at
Speaker 11: the time, Patrick Casey, quickly announced a rebrand, Identity Europa
Speaker 11: is no more. They were the American Identity Movement now,
Speaker 11: much to the displeasure of the American Indian Movement, whose
Speaker 11: acronym they stole. But the rebrand was not successful and
Speaker 11: the group died out completely in twenty twenty, and Casey
Speaker 11: tried to pretend the rebrand wasn't just an attempt to
Speaker 11: escape the fallout of the leak, but it really was
Speaker 11: the leak that killed Identity Europa. At least seven active
Speaker 11: duty military members were identified in the league. A school
Speaker 11: resource officer at a high school in Virginia was suspended,
Speaker 11: a Minnesota National Guardsman was recalled from basic training. So
Speaker 11: jud Levins was just one of dozens of members of
Speaker 11: the group to be identified in those chatlogs. The work
Speaker 11: of anti fascist researchers who identified Blevins and the leak
Speaker 11: chats was corroborated and published in an article on right
Speaker 11: wing Watch by Jared Hult within weeks, and it's about
Speaker 11: as solid as an idea as you could hope for
Speaker 11: from a chatlog, or, depending on your position, the kind
Speaker 11: of idea you really don't want. A user called Conway
Speaker 11: was Identity Europa's regional coordinator for Oklahoma. He recruited and
Speaker 11: vetted new members, organized outings for banner drops and social events,
Speaker 11: and frequently posted pictures of the white supremacist propaganda he'd
Speaker 11: been putting up, encouraging others to do the same, and
Speaker 11: offering tips on how to create more effective visuals for
Speaker 11: the group's online accounts. In over eleven hundred posts over
Speaker 11: a nearly two year period, he left a lot of clues.
Speaker 11: He posted a link to an article in his hometown paper,
Speaker 11: the Enid News and Eagle. He posted a photo of
Speaker 11: a relative's baby, details about his parents' lineage, his plans
Speaker 11: to move home to work for his father's business, and
Speaker 11: in the lead up to the Unite the Right rally,
Speaker 11: he excitedly shared the discord that he would be carrying
Speaker 11: the original flag of the state of Oklahoma, a red
Speaker 11: rectangle with the number forty six inside of a white star,
Speaker 11: and photos from the rally show just one man carrying
Speaker 11: that distinctive flag that was designed by a member of
Speaker 11: the Daughters of the Confederacy, jud Levins. As he grew
Speaker 11: into his role as regional coordinator for Identity Europa, he
Speaker 11: coordinated member meetups, getting several guys from Oklahoma to drive
Speaker 11: down to Texas for a get together. Conway posted about
Speaker 11: the meetup, and photos posted by other attendees show Blevins
Speaker 11: standing shoulder to shoulder with other members holding a large
Speaker 11: Identity Europa banner. Conway even posted about his appearance on
Speaker 11: a twenty eighteen episode of Identity Europa's podcast, where he
Speaker 11: emphasized the importance of staying in the You will not
Speaker 11: replace us mindset. The time he announced his run for
Speaker 11: office in twenty twenty two, it had been over three
Speaker 11: years since he'd been out at as Conway, the Hate
Speaker 11: Group member who attended the Unite the Right rally.
Speaker 1: And you could see why he would think it would work, right,
Speaker 1: because that you will not replace us thing. It's become
Speaker 1: like the mainstream Republican politics, right like this this ideology
Speaker 1: has at least one in the Republican Party, but it's
Speaker 1: also one divorced from these guys because even they are like,
Speaker 1: they're too toxic for even the modern Republicans. Like it's remarkable,
Speaker 1: but I also get why he thought this would work.
Speaker 11: And I think, I mean, I don't know what his
Speaker 11: connection remained to other members of IE after it dissolved,
Speaker 11: but towards the end of it, as it was dying, right,
Speaker 11: So under Elliott Klein, you know, Klein wanted to make
Speaker 11: a militia for Richard Spencer. He wanted to you know,
Speaker 11: build IE into a fighting force. But under Patrick Casey,
Speaker 11: they sort of moved back towards we should be trying
Speaker 11: to influence inside of politics. We should be going to
Speaker 11: colleges and getting you know, conservative students to become more base. Right,
Speaker 11: so this is a rational course of conduct, I think
Speaker 11: for where he was in twenty nineteen when Identity Europa died.
Speaker 11: But in any case, by twenty twenty two, anybody in
Speaker 11: Enid you could read his posts praising Hitler and celebrating
Speaker 11: Identity Europa for striking fear into the heart of the
Speaker 11: jew his words.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 11: You could see pictures of him at Unite the Right,
Speaker 11: both on the morning of the twelfth in the park
Speaker 11: and the evening of the eleventh with a torch. You
Speaker 11: could see pictures of him going to Texas for Ie meetups.
Speaker 11: You could see the dozens and dozens of photos he
Speaker 11: posted in the discord of Nazi posters and stickers he
Speaker 11: had put up on telephone polls and college bulletin boards
Speaker 11: across Oklahoma, and the posts where he reveled in the
Speaker 11: media coverage of the recruitment materials he left inside library books.
Speaker 11: His hometown newspaper, the Enid News and Eagle, ran an
Speaker 11: article about the allegations, which he never denied. A month
Speaker 11: before the election, and without ever having to give a
Speaker 11: straight answer on the issue, he won, and that could
Speaker 11: have been the end of the story. Right, You know,
Speaker 11: we've seen this trend in the last few years of
Speaker 11: these radical right wing elements trying to melt into the
Speaker 11: mainstream Republican party. You know, we've got these horrible little
Speaker 11: gropers working in congressional staff positions, and you know nazis
Speaker 11: going to spack and not getting ejected. They're getting out
Speaker 11: of the streets and into the meeting rooms.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 11: An account tied to blevins that he recently for the
Speaker 11: first time denied this was him.
Speaker 6: It's him.
Speaker 11: This has been widely reported. It was a Twitter account
Speaker 11: called at Abolish Journalism posted in twenty nineteen quote sts
Speaker 11: I agree with the argument GOP cannot be changed from
Speaker 11: the bottom up. However, I do not believe in discouraging
Speaker 11: our guys from getting elected into smaller offices such as
Speaker 11: city council, county commissioner, or even state legislators. Basically positions
Speaker 11: where one can fly under the radar yet still be effective.
Speaker 11: And that's what this is, right. This isn't a guy
Speaker 11: who got out of White Nationals organizing and in an
Speaker 11: unrelated fashion, became a local politician. No, he said years
Speaker 11: before he did this that this was a good idea
Speaker 11: that he had. You know, he never said I renounced
Speaker 11: my previous actions and beliefs. I regret bringing an active
Speaker 11: recruiter for a hate group. He just changed the way
Speaker 11: he was doing it. And he said countless opportunities to
Speaker 11: be clear about what he believes today and whether that's
Speaker 11: different from the beliefs he espoused between twenty seventeen and
Speaker 11: twenty nineteen, and he won't. He won't say I no
Speaker 11: longer identify with the posts I made when I was
Speaker 11: enthusiastically posting the fourteen words. And that's probably because he
Speaker 11: just found a better way to do it. But there
Speaker 11: were people in Enid, Oklahoma who saw right through that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is where the story takes a turn that like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, it made me hopeful because the first
Speaker 1: time I ever met a klansman was, you know, in Oklahoma.
Speaker 1: It was the dad of a friend of mine. Like
Speaker 1: he like that, this kid bragged about it, and I
Speaker 1: didn't know what a klansman was. And I had to
Speaker 1: go to my parents and like be like, hey, so
Speaker 1: you know so and so said this about his dad.
Speaker 1: What does that mean? And my mom was just like, well,
Speaker 1: you're not allowed to go to his house anymore. That's
Speaker 1: what that means, Juxes.
Speaker 6: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: If this like, if this guy had like, if shit
Speaker 1: had gone well for him, I guess that would have
Speaker 1: been my assumption. But that's that was my assumption based
Speaker 1: on me not giving a fair shake to Enid, Oklahoma, Right.
Speaker 11: I think that's you know what's so remarkable about this
Speaker 11: story is people didn't think Oklahoma could do it. But
Speaker 11: you know who can accomplish everything they set out to do?
Speaker 1: Uh huh, that's right, these sponsors, all of whom are
Speaker 1: available in Enid, Oklahoma, and we're back.
Speaker 11: Okay, alrighty, so I'm.
Speaker 1: Happy to hear. Yeah. The next part of this.
Speaker 11: Levins took office in May of twenty twenty three. Local
Speaker 11: election law requires a six month wait between being sworn
Speaker 11: in and when a recall attempt can be initiated, but
Speaker 11: the residents who opposed Levins didn't wait quietly. A group
Speaker 11: called the Enid Social Justice Committee protested his swearing in,
Speaker 11: with some protesters holding posters bearing a photo of Blevins
Speaker 11: holding a torch at the August eleven, twenty seventeen Nazi
Speaker 11: march at the University of Virginia. And now this I
Speaker 11: didn't even think about it until I was writing this
Speaker 11: that what an incredible coincidence of timing. Right, So May
Speaker 11: twenty twenty three, he's being sworn into office. It was
Speaker 11: just I think maybe two weeks before he was sworn
Speaker 11: in that the first indictment was unsealed against the guys
Speaker 11: who are now facing felony charges for participating in that
Speaker 11: torch march. Right, so it was we did an episode
Speaker 11: on this a little bit ago. But if you're not
Speaker 11: familiar that the guys who marched in that torch march
Speaker 11: at Eva in twenty seventeen, some of them are now
Speaker 11: being charged with a felony under Virginia law for burning
Speaker 11: an object with intent to intimidate. It's obviously a sort
Speaker 11: of a law aimed at the Klan, right, sort of
Speaker 11: a crossburning type law. But they were burning, they have
Speaker 11: these burning objects, and they were menacing people. It was
Speaker 11: racially motivated. So they're being charged with this felony for
Speaker 11: burning an object.
Speaker 1: It does feel like that's, yeah, a pretty good fit.
Speaker 11: But so right as he's being sworn in, you know,
Speaker 11: these people are protesting his swearing in with this photo
Speaker 11: of him with the torch and a couple guys just
Speaker 11: showed up in jail here in Charlottesville on that charge.
Speaker 11: So it's it's just a remarkable cognitive dissonance, right to
Speaker 11: see these people. Some of his supporters in Enid downplaying
Speaker 11: the seriousness or even outright denying that Levin's attended this rally,
Speaker 11: But the guys he was standing next to that day
Speaker 11: are pleading guilty to felonies. You know, he's up there
Speaker 11: voting on resolutions and passing ordinances about you know, storm
Speaker 11: water management or whatever. Or I think one of his
Speaker 11: accomplishments in office was getting a Texas roadhouse in Enid.
Speaker 1: First off, you shouldn't be proud of having a Texas
Speaker 1: roadhouse anywhere as a my job used to it might
Speaker 1: have been a Sizzler.
Speaker 11: I can't remember something like that.
Speaker 1: I would be much more excited for a Sizzler than
Speaker 1: a Texas fucking roadhouse, I'll say that much.
Speaker 11: But you know he's up there getting a you know,
Speaker 11: affordable chain steak restaurant in Edid. But there's a non
Speaker 11: zero chance that he could be arrested at any time
Speaker 11: and extradited on a felony charge.
Speaker 1: I mean, look, if there's one thing that's appropriate for
Speaker 1: the sizzler. It's knowing that the guy who put that
Speaker 1: sizzler there could be arrested on a felony charge at
Speaker 1: any moment.
Speaker 11: And you know, we don't know what the strategy is
Speaker 11: at the prosecutor's office. Obviously they're not going to charge
Speaker 11: everybody who is there. But it's on the table right
Speaker 11: Like he's on video at that march with the torch
Speaker 11: in his hand. He fits the criteria for the ten
Speaker 11: other guys that have already gone to jail for this.
Speaker 11: But in November of twenty twenty three, those six months
Speaker 11: had passed, recalls on the table now, and before the
Speaker 11: group made the final push to actually file for the recall,
Speaker 11: they made an offer of reconciliation. All Blevin's has to
Speaker 11: do is acknowledge the truth, denounce his past actions, just
Speaker 11: own up to it, start making amends. Just say yes
Speaker 11: I did that, No, I don't do it anymore. And
Speaker 11: he can't do it. Throughout this entire ordeal, he's never
Speaker 11: owned up to it. There are pictures and video and
Speaker 11: his own words across multiple online accounts. There's no plausible
Speaker 11: deniability here. There's no saying, well, maybe that's not him.
Speaker 11: You know, it's him, so just admit it and say
Speaker 11: you're not that guy anymore. But he has consistently refused
Speaker 11: to even acknowledge it right on several occasions, you know,
Speaker 11: when really pressed, he dismisses that twenty nineteen article by
Speaker 11: Jared Holt as quote a hit piece posted four years
Speaker 11: ago by a George Soros funded leftist outlet, calling it
Speaker 11: smears and slander.
Speaker 1: Nothing smears somebody like there their own words and actions.
Speaker 11: I'm being defamed by this photograph of me.
Speaker 1: I'm being judged simply for the things i chose to do.
Speaker 11: I thought this was America. But he won't actually deny
Speaker 11: specific facts. You know, he won't say that isn't me
Speaker 11: in the photo, or I did not participate in that,
Speaker 11: or I did not post those nice things about Hitler.
Speaker 11: He just attacks the people saying it. And while Levens
Speaker 11: has never denied the truth of the allegations, some of
Speaker 11: his supporters do. At one of those council meetings in
Speaker 11: November of last year, a woman speaking in support of
Speaker 11: Levins said the allegations weren't credible as they came from
Speaker 11: organizations like the SPLC that quote only exist to smear
Speaker 11: conservative Christians.
Speaker 1: There we go.
Speaker 11: First of all, the SPLC didn't publish it. It was
Speaker 11: Wright Wing Watch, Yeah, Huffington Post, but whenever Susan. And
Speaker 11: it was at that same meeting that the council declined
Speaker 11: to even vote on a resolution to censure Blevins. The
Speaker 11: council was putting forth a resolution to say we don't
Speaker 11: agree with what that guy did. You know, it wasn't
Speaker 11: like punishing him. It didn't actually strip him of any powers.
Speaker 11: He didn't do anything except say the rest of us
Speaker 11: we don't like that. And they could, they wouldn't even
Speaker 11: vote on it. It got tabled. And at that meeting, Commissioner
Speaker 11: Derwin Norwood, the only black member of Enid City Council,
Speaker 11: offered Blevins his forgiveness and gave him a big hug
Speaker 11: and told him he loved him.
Speaker 6: Great.
Speaker 11: Levan's never apologized, right, you can't forgive someone who hasn't apologized.
Speaker 11: He had never and still has never apologized. And he
Speaker 11: was pretty clear on where he stands on apology, saying
Speaker 11: I am not going to apologize for the lies that
Speaker 11: others tell. Yeah, it was a great meeting. I watched
Speaker 11: it from home. I had you know, I love I
Speaker 11: love a meeting.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, that's uh. I mean, I don't understand it,
Speaker 1: but I respect it.
Speaker 11: So, with their peace offering roundly rejected by an unapologetic Blevins,
Speaker 11: they moved forward the recall. The Enid Social Justice Committee
Speaker 11: gathered enough signatures to put it to a vote, and
Speaker 11: in January, Cheryl Patterson threw her hat into the ring
Speaker 11: to replace Blevins. And to be clear, this is still Enid, Oklahoma,
Speaker 11: where sixty percent of voters are registered Republicans. This wasn't
Speaker 11: some liberal coup. Patterson is also a lifelong Republican candidate
Speaker 11: formed the week before the election, Patterson was quick to
Speaker 11: say like right off the bat, the second she opened
Speaker 11: her mouth, she said, contrary to the rumor, I was
Speaker 11: not recruited by the Enid Social Justice Committee. And she said,
Speaker 11: you know, she'd been thinking about running for a while.
Speaker 11: She loves Enid, but she was pushed to action by
Speaker 11: her opponent's inability to clearly denounce his past involvement with
Speaker 11: a white supremacist group. And it is remarkable right to
Speaker 11: see conservative Republicans in the South saying like that Nazi
Speaker 11: stuff is too much for me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, and that's like that's actually an important
Speaker 1: part of turning shit back is getting these people who
Speaker 1: are otherwise conservative to draw a line and actually hold
Speaker 1: to it, because it it at least arrests that right
Speaker 1: word momentum to an extent. And we're just not going
Speaker 1: to get out of this unless we have some of
Speaker 1: that right.
Speaker 11: I'm not living in a you know, in a fantasy
Speaker 11: land where the city of Enid, Oklahoma is represented by
Speaker 11: a council of six socialists like that, that's not on
Speaker 11: the table. I accept that, but at least their Republicans
Speaker 11: can say, ah, the fourteen words is like not my vibe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, literally, participating in a white supremacist terrorist action is
Speaker 1: a line for us, and I'm glad there's a line,
Speaker 1: so you know.
Speaker 11: She says she was inspired to run for office because
Speaker 11: he not because of what he did, but because he
Speaker 11: couldn't even denounce it, right that. You know, people can
Speaker 11: grow and change. I pray that his heart moves, but
Speaker 11: he's unable to even denounce it, and he really does
Speaker 11: seem incapable. The very first question at that forum the
Speaker 11: week before the line was about this. Obviously a lot
Speaker 11: of the questions were, and he gave another non denial. Right,
Speaker 11: he said, this election is about the next three years
Speaker 11: of this city, not about organizations that disbanded five years ago.
Speaker 11: But he went on to say that he would quote gladly,
Speaker 11: plead guilty to speaking out against what is being done
Speaker 11: to this country and the anti white hatred in the media.
Speaker 11: So he tries to talk around the issue, saying, you know,
Speaker 11: he was just advocating for the same policies that got
Speaker 11: Donald Trump elected. But it's not like he was on
Speaker 11: the local Republican committee, right, He wasn't working on a
Speaker 11: GOP campaign. He was an organizer for a group that
Speaker 11: supported those policies of the Trump administration explicitly because they
Speaker 11: believe those policies were a stepping stone towards the full
Speaker 11: Nazification of American politics. Right, you know, the relationship between
Speaker 11: those two things troubling concerning. But you can't pretend there's
Speaker 11: no difference between voting Republican and holding a torch at
Speaker 11: the Nazi parade. And that's what he's trying to do here.
Speaker 11: He's trying to blur that lines. You know, I'm just
Speaker 11: being punished for being a proud conservative. And it's like,
Speaker 11: which which part right people who's you know people who
Speaker 11: want free speech, and it's like, well, which word do
Speaker 11: you want to say? And at no point during this
Speaker 11: recall campaign, from when they announced it in November to
Speaker 11: the election two weeks ago now, at no point during
Speaker 11: this recall campaign did he publicly denounce any of the
Speaker 11: white supremacists who supported him. Outlets like v Dare, a
Speaker 11: white nationalist publication run by an English born anti immigration
Speaker 11: race scientists who lives in a castle in West Virginia,
Speaker 11: wrote fawning editorials which were promoted by prominent white nationalists,
Speaker 11: including Identity Europa founder Nathan Dimigo. Fascist telegram channels provided
Speaker 11: guidance to subscribers about Oklahoma's campaign finance laws, which would
Speaker 11: allow them to donate to Blevins's campaign anonymously as long
Speaker 11: as they kept it under fifty dollars. According to reporting
Speaker 11: by Christmathias and Huntington Post, a man in Tech who
Speaker 11: runs a business with a known Patriot Front member donated
Speaker 11: nearly two thousand dollars to the campaign, which made up
Speaker 11: the bulk of the donated cash. And you might give
Speaker 11: him the benefit of the doubt and say, well, maybe
Speaker 11: he didn't know he was being endorsed by some of
Speaker 11: the largest elements in organized white supremacy in America.
Speaker 6: Sure, but he did he did know.
Speaker 11: As a member of the city council, he definitely saw
Speaker 11: the letters that were addressed to the city Council in
Speaker 11: support of Blevins from the American Freedom Party, an explicitly
Speaker 11: white supremacist political party that occasionally runs a Nazi for president.
Speaker 11: But he said nothing. And when a constituent, father James Neil,
Speaker 11: asked him directly why his campaign was funded by members
Speaker 11: of Patriot Front, he told the priest to quote, shut
Speaker 11: up again. He chose the company of neo Nazis, Holocaust deniers,
Speaker 11: white supremacists, white nationalists, and ethno state enthusiasts. How can
Speaker 11: you expect people to believe you're not that guy anymore
Speaker 11: when you have their public praise, their endorsement, and their
Speaker 11: money in your pocket. But you know who does not
Speaker 11: have two thousand dollars in cash from Patriot Front in
Speaker 11: their pockets?
Speaker 1: No, I know they keep that shit in the back.
Speaker 1: I mean, they don't have it. Here's here's our sponsors,
Speaker 1: and we're back.
Speaker 11: So on April second, that's two weeks ago.
Speaker 12: Now.
Speaker 11: As we're recording, the people of Enid returned to the
Speaker 11: polls and jud Blevins was voted out of office as
Speaker 11: Ward one City Commissioner by a vote of eight hundred
Speaker 11: and twenty nine to five sixty one. And I don't
Speaker 11: know if you're a math guy. I'm not a math guy.
Speaker 11: I a calculator. Out for this bad boy. But this
Speaker 11: turnout was significantly larger than the vote that put him
Speaker 11: into office. A seventy two percent increase in total votes.
Speaker 11: That's a lot. Yeah, that's a lot more people who
Speaker 11: showed up to you know, an off cycle special election.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, that's specifically weird.
Speaker 11: And unlike the slim margin of just thirty six votes
Speaker 11: that won him the twenty twenty three election, he lost
Speaker 11: the recall by nearly twenty points. That's a spankin. You know,
Speaker 11: it's hard to chalk a loss like that up to
Speaker 11: a lunatic fringe, right, That's that's the electorate speaking. But
Speaker 11: Matthew Gibert, a former State Department employee who lost his
Speaker 11: job for failing to disclose his active involvement in white
Speaker 11: supremacist organizing, noted in his telegram channel that while the
Speaker 11: loss is disappointing, an open white nationalist winning forty percent
Speaker 11: of the vote is quote, nothing to despair over, and
Speaker 11: you never got a hand out to the guy who
Speaker 11: hosts a podcast about the joys of Nazi fatherhood or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 11: but the numbers are what they are. You know, he
Speaker 11: did win forty percent of the vote, and this was
Speaker 11: after months of very public debate in the national spotlight
Speaker 11: that made it impossible not to know what the allegations were.
Speaker 11: And it's not like these were just diehard conservatives who
Speaker 11: had walk into the voting booth and put their check
Speaker 11: mark next to wherever the letter R was right in
Speaker 11: this election, the other name on the ticket was a
Speaker 11: Republican too, Like, these were people who walked in there
Speaker 11: and knowingly and intentionally cast their vote for a guy
Speaker 11: who used to vet new members for a Nazi club.
Speaker 11: This isn't a fairy tale, it's reality, right. This wasn't
Speaker 11: an offensive win by progress or the left or what
Speaker 11: have you. This was an effective defense And I hope
Speaker 11: conservatives can see a little lesson here, right, Like the
Speaker 11: story is too often one of ever ratcheting extremism. You
Speaker 11: can only win if you go further, if you go wilder,
Speaker 11: if you're appealing to the people who are on the
Speaker 11: absolute extreme end of what's acceptable to say in the party.
Speaker 11: But this was a case where a fellow conservative said, Hey,
Speaker 11: I want to take some books out of the library too.
Speaker 11: I'm not a liberal, but we just can't be out
Speaker 11: here saying the fourteen words, right. And I think some
Speaker 11: of the buzz around this story comes from people in
Speaker 11: bigger cities or bluer states. I mean, honestly, I'm of
Speaker 11: this as well, who were shocked that, you know, purple
Speaker 11: haired liberals and progressive clergy even exist in a place
Speaker 11: like Enid, Oklahoma. But this red state blue state dichotomy
Speaker 11: is a myth. Most places are purple, most places are
Speaker 11: sixty forty. Even in places that reliably one hundred percent
Speaker 11: of the time vote Republican, there's still a large minority
Speaker 11: of people who are not represented by that. So even
Speaker 11: in a place like Enid, which is Republican at the polls,
Speaker 11: you have a pretty big chunk of the population isn't
Speaker 11: represented on that two colored map. That doesn't mean they
Speaker 11: don't care. And when I watched those Enid city council meetings,
Speaker 11: I saw Charlottesville.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 11: I've gone to every city council meeting in Charletsville for
Speaker 11: the last seven years. Like, I know what it looks
Speaker 11: like for people in a town that size to show
Speaker 11: up and say, what the fuck, what the fuck are
Speaker 11: you doing to us?
Speaker 7: Right?
Speaker 11: Yeah, you know it looked like one of our meetings.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 11: I saw regular people, moms and students and grandmas and
Speaker 11: teachers and ladies who bring muffins to the church bake sale.
Speaker 11: People who know that their town can do better than
Speaker 11: to be represented by a guy who won't apologize for
Speaker 11: attending the largest Nazi rally on US soil in our lifetimes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I feel a lot for the folks who
Speaker 1: are kind of not represented by either of the two
Speaker 1: big lines on the political map, and maybe most of
Speaker 1: the time feel like I don't know what the fuck
Speaker 1: I can actually do or should do, but I know
Speaker 1: this Nazi shouldn't be in office.
Speaker 11: So these were just these were just regular people. These
Speaker 11: weren't party apperatics or you know, this wasn't the Democrat
Speaker 11: party doing this, as wasn't the Republican party doing this.
Speaker 11: These were just people who didn't think that a Nazi
Speaker 11: should be their city commissioner. And that's I think another
Speaker 11: myth at play here, right, is that activist is some
Speaker 11: sort of separate class of person, that there is some
Speaker 11: portion of the population whose only goal in life is
Speaker 11: this nebulous, nefarious thing called activism. That you know, it's
Speaker 11: sort of this boogeyman of the professional troublemaker. And throughout
Speaker 11: this process, Blevins and his supporters have smeared the group
Speaker 11: organizing the recall, the Ined Social Justice Committee, is some
Speaker 11: kind of fringe radical group. They're Antifa, they're freaks, They're
Speaker 11: not like us. They're coming for our children. His recall
Speaker 11: campaign website called the petitioners an unhinged group of left
Speaker 11: wing fringe activists. And the campaign website didn't say what
Speaker 11: he could do for you. It attacked the petitioners and
Speaker 11: said this is what they will do to you. And
Speaker 11: I've seen this in my own city council meetings, right,
Speaker 11: this sort of bizarre tendency of those in power to
Speaker 11: write off the people they don't want to hear from
Speaker 11: as activists. Well, those are people we need to listen to.
Speaker 11: Those are activists. That's a different kind of person. Anyone
Speaker 11: who's asking for something they don't want to do, something
Speaker 11: that's uncomfortable, something that requires them to look inward, or
Speaker 11: look at the structures they're upholding. They undergo this instant
Speaker 11: metamorphosis from constituent to activists. This is no longer a
Speaker 11: voter or a constituent. This is a crazy person. This
Speaker 11: person isn't your neighbor anymore. They're an activist.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 11: I think you know, there are people who wear that
Speaker 11: mantle proudly, and why shouldn't they. It's a usually positive thing.
Speaker 11: But the use of the word as some sort of
Speaker 11: delegitimizing cudgel is so consistent that I think it's worth
Speaker 11: thinking about when it gets used against the recipient's will. Yeah,
Speaker 11: and there's no ending to this story, right, because this
Speaker 11: is never really over. It is happening here, it is
Speaker 11: happening there. And I don't know what's next for Blevins.
Speaker 11: Maybe he just smelts quietly back into society and puts
Speaker 11: roofs on houses. A week after the recall, he filed
Speaker 11: paperwork to change the name of his dad's contracting business
Speaker 11: from Invincible Contracting to Great Planes Roofing. The paperwork filed
Speaker 11: shows that the company is now registered. The company is
Speaker 11: now registered. His address a house in Enid that he
Speaker 11: bought last summer, with a VA loan. But now that
Speaker 11: he's free of the self imposed recons train of running
Speaker 11: for office, maybe he leans into it and becomes this guy. Right,
Speaker 11: Maybe he's just the guy that this happens to, and
Speaker 11: he goes on the cancel culture grievance circuit. Maybe he
Speaker 11: goes full throttle and tries to get back into movement organizing.
Speaker 11: I think his failure to come out and really celebrate
Speaker 11: the movement and really own it and say yes, I
Speaker 11: said that stuff and it's good. I think that failure,
Speaker 11: as they would perceive it, would hurt him a little
Speaker 11: bit if he tries to re enter the movement, but
Speaker 11: not so badly that he couldn't do it. You know,
Speaker 11: they're so desperate for new material that they would probably
Speaker 11: embrace him if he wanted to be the figurehead of
Speaker 11: the month. Yeah, hopefully he just does the roofing thing though.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, hopefully he does the roofing thing and then
Speaker 1: the falling off the roof thing, and then you.
Speaker 11: Know he's that they're doing the work himself. He doesn't
Speaker 11: even have a contracting license, I checked.
Speaker 1: I hope he hires someone who is like a very
Speaker 1: large person and they fall off and are okay because
Speaker 1: they land on him. That's that's I think where I'm.
Speaker 11: Going here, And to be clear, that's Robert speaking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that is, But that is also the official
Speaker 1: opinion of iHeartMedia.
Speaker 11: Mean, I don't know that he's he's made any great pronouncements.
Speaker 11: He hasn't showed up on any Nazi podcast yet. I
Speaker 11: will put ten dollars on a bet that says he will.
Speaker 11: He'll be on somebody's podcast by the end of the month.
Speaker 11: I don't doubt it. But hopefully he just does roofing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, stick to roofing.
Speaker 11: As for ENID, you know, they want a battle that
Speaker 11: they shouldn't have had to fight. It should be kind
Speaker 11: of a no brainer that we don't elect guys like this.
Speaker 11: That's becoming less certain every day, Like the fact that
Speaker 11: there was any question about how the recall might go
Speaker 11: is concerning. We shouldn't be in a position of wondering
Speaker 11: will people vote for the guy who won't deny he
Speaker 11: loves Hitler. But I think we can applaud the tenacity
Speaker 11: of the folks in Enan who did what was necessary
Speaker 11: in a place where it wasn't easy. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 11: and there's there's lessons to be learned here. Go to
Speaker 11: the meetings, get a seed and sit council chambers. Go
Speaker 11: to the library board meeting, go to the school board meeting.
Speaker 11: You don't have to be an activist, whatever that means,
Speaker 11: but be in the room because nobody's going to change
Speaker 11: the world on their own. And maybe changing the world
Speaker 11: isn't even a meaningful objective. I don't know what that means. Yeah,
Speaker 11: but today, maybe there's something you can do with your
Speaker 11: neighbors to stop the rising tide in your town. You
Speaker 11: can't change the weather, but you can put down some sandbags.
Speaker 11: And there are jud blevins Is everywhere, hiding behind mealy
Speaker 11: mouthed rhetoric of conservatism and quietly chipping away at your
Speaker 11: local institutions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's doable, fighting the juds Blevin of I
Speaker 1: chose a different way to Pluraliza's name of your wherever
Speaker 1: you live, your state, your city. Like is doable, and
Speaker 1: it's doable if you stick to this very simple platform
Speaker 1: of like, but not a Nazi. Right, we can agree
Speaker 1: not a Nazi.
Speaker 11: You know, if conservatives have any if conservatives had any sense,
Speaker 11: they could retake a lot of ground by saying like
Speaker 11: you know, we love all the stuff you love, fellow conservatives,
Speaker 11: but we're not that guy, right, Like, if they had
Speaker 11: any if they had any pride, they would stop pandering
Speaker 11: to the lunatic fringe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it is just kind of looking at how
Speaker 1: congressional race is shaping up, where it seemed like it
Speaker 1: should have been pretty easy for them to retake the house.
Speaker 1: But you know, now they're kind of like flailing a
Speaker 1: little bit, in part because they keep backing these maniacs
Speaker 1: who just aren't good. Yeah.
Speaker 11: I don't really believe that those ideas are popular. They
Speaker 11: just have fallen into this trap of thinking like this
Speaker 11: is the only way to win. So I guess I
Speaker 11: have to do it.
Speaker 1: But you'll send it not that house anyway, whatever, we'll
Speaker 1: cut that.
Speaker 11: Who cares about those guys. Yeah, but you don't have
Speaker 11: to do it, right, Be the Sheeryl Batterson you want
Speaker 11: to see in the world. Yeah, and just be a
Speaker 11: milk toast Republican and be the Nazi.
Speaker 1: Yeah, at least. I don't know. I'm mixed because, like
Speaker 1: I do, I do like it when the Republicans fail
Speaker 1: over much, but I also feel like it's bad to
Speaker 1: take the bet of like, well, if we hope for
Speaker 1: more nazis that push people away from the Republicans, maybe
Speaker 1: it'll work for us in the long run. Statistically that
Speaker 1: that kind of gamble is real dangerous. Yeah, yeah, that's Enid,
Speaker 1: that's inened Baby, good working.
Speaker 11: Congratulations to the end Social Justice Committee. Honestly, I'm yeah,
Speaker 11: very impressed.
Speaker 1: You get our coveted Oklahoma City of the Month award,
Speaker 1: which is confusing because you are very near Oklahoma City.
Speaker 1: But they shouldn't have named it that. Well, that's all
Speaker 1: I got.
Speaker 11: That's all I got. Yeah, I was trying to put
Speaker 11: a button, trying to put a button on that bad boy.
Speaker 11: But uh yeah that's Oklahoma baby.
Speaker 1: Yeah, good for you, Good for Oklahoma.
Speaker 6: Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. On
Speaker 6: this show, we try to apply political and cultural analysis
Speaker 6: towards speculative futurity. What can we learn about the future
Speaker 6: by looking at how our present relates to our past
Speaker 6: and now? As we approach a whole decade of a
Speaker 6: resurgent far right gaining cultural prominence, we're entering a moment
Speaker 6: in time where pop culture and media is starting to
Speaker 6: catch up to the current political zeitgeist. Our media landscape
Speaker 6: is inundated with depictions of unreality, political extremism, collapse, and
Speaker 6: rising civil tensions. Some of these succeed more than but
Speaker 6: most are still deeply neoliberal in their depictions. The Obama
Speaker 6: produced a Netflix movie from last year, Leave the World Behind,
Speaker 6: was a speculative look at a collapse orchestrated to jumpstart
Speaker 6: a second American Civil war. Alex Garland's voyeuristic civil war
Speaker 6: movie just released, which sort of gestures at politics with
Speaker 6: offhand mentions of portlaind maoists and the Antifa massacre. But
Speaker 6: as a movie, it completely fails to understand the moment
Speaker 6: we currently occupy, and I believe is even more out
Speaker 6: of touch than the Obama collapse movie, but we're not
Speaker 6: talking about that today. For my thoughts on that, you
Speaker 6: can look up my review on Letterboxed and refer to
Speaker 6: the reviews I liked for a more robust critique of
Speaker 6: Garland's deeply troubling depiction of quote unquote neutral war journalism
Speaker 6: as uncritically virtuous. Instead, this episode will be turning to
Speaker 6: a depiction of modern da extremism that I'm not sure
Speaker 6: is better. It's still deeply neoliberal and honestly more overtly copaganda,
Speaker 6: but one that I still find more interesting and I
Speaker 6: believe does understand our political moment much better than Alex
Speaker 6: Garland does, who comes off as less and less intelligent
Speaker 6: in every single interview he does. Last month, the television
Speaker 6: show Law and Order did an episode focusing on Robert
Speaker 6: Rundo's far right fitness groups, the White supremacist Active Clubs.
Speaker 6: To discuss, I am joined by longtime far right researcher
Speaker 6: Molly Conger.
Speaker 11: Hello, Molly, Hey, thanks for having me on. And you
Speaker 11: probably didn't know this about me. I am a secret
Speaker 11: enjoyer of police procedurals, so I've actually watched a lot
Speaker 11: of Law and Order.
Speaker 6: I have never seen a single episode of Law and
Speaker 6: Order until this week, so I was really inundated. I
Speaker 6: don't know. I watch a lot of kind of troubling media, though,
Speaker 6: and media that tries to comment on current political extremism,
Speaker 6: and often when I talk with my friends about my
Speaker 6: interest in viewing things like this episode, I get confused
Speaker 6: or even adversarial reactions, and I do truly understand their hesitations.
Speaker 6: Pop culture media like this is often very sensational, turning
Speaker 6: very real pain trauma and death caused by the far
Speaker 6: right into this form of kind of mindless entertainment and
Speaker 6: often reifying the role of good government and good cops
Speaker 6: to maintain order against racist insurgents, even though more and
Speaker 6: more of their ilk begin to occupy public office and
Speaker 6: become cops themselves. But politics and culture are hand in hand.
Speaker 6: Lots of what became the al Right grew out of
Speaker 6: gamer gait, and I think there is a real use
Speaker 6: in understanding how the political activities of fascists and anti
Speaker 6: fascists are depicted in mass media. I believe there is
Speaker 6: some value in knowing what NBC and the writers of
Speaker 6: Law and Order think in Active club is as like
Speaker 6: a sort of cultural litmus test, and also to see
Speaker 6: how well people like us are doing in trying to
Speaker 6: educate about these types of groups. But I totally understand
Speaker 6: that not everyone wants to suffer through a forty minute
Speaker 6: Lawn Order episode about cops beating the Nazis, So instead
Speaker 6: I will watch it for you and talk about exactly
Speaker 6: how they depicted this with Molly here today. So I
Speaker 6: think the most efficient way for me to do this
Speaker 6: is to kind of give a recap of the episode
Speaker 6: and as I start going through it, we will discuss
Speaker 6: a certain points. I can't just summarize all of it
Speaker 6: in like a short paragraph. I mean I could. I
Speaker 6: just think that would miss out on a lot of stuff.
Speaker 6: So instead, we're going to go through the episode and
Speaker 6: comment as things happen. And this episode ends up being
Speaker 6: about a lot more than just an active club. It's
Speaker 6: actually pulling from a few other influences that we will
Speaker 6: talk about probably towards the end. Anyway, that felt sloppy
Speaker 6: to me.
Speaker 11: I feel like they try to tackle several specific like
Speaker 11: I don't know how familiar are with with the Law
Speaker 11: and Order franchise, but they call these episodes the ripped
Speaker 11: from the headlines episodes, right where they take a real life,
Speaker 11: high profile case and write an episode about it. But
Speaker 11: they tried to combine several elements that I felt didn't
Speaker 11: blend well, and it deep the more material to work
Speaker 11: with than they were able to address, and so it
Speaker 11: just felt I just felt unresolved to me.
Speaker 6: I mean, I assume lots of these police procedurals are
Speaker 6: kind of undercooked, as like pieces of art.
Speaker 11: I mean, the Dick Wolf extended universe is churning out
Speaker 11: so much content that like, I don't know how they're
Speaker 11: still doing it. I mean, Olivia Benson has been on
Speaker 11: television since I was a child.
Speaker 6: So let's get into the actual episode. The cold open begins.
Speaker 6: It's night in New York City. A nervous looking white
Speaker 6: woman enters a subway station, and she's startled by a
Speaker 6: sleeping homeless man. As the subway approaches, eerie music starts playing.
Speaker 6: The anxious woman walks onto the subway and a black
Speaker 6: man cat calls her as a group of other men
Speaker 6: kind of join in. The woman quickly switches to a
Speaker 6: more empty subway car, where she then bumps into another
Speaker 6: black man whose eyes look kind of vacant and has
Speaker 6: make weird grunting noises, and then the man appears to
Speaker 6: lunge towards the woman. We cut to crime scene tape
Speaker 6: stretched across the subway station. Two police detectives to enter
Speaker 6: the subway car, where a dead body lies on the ground.
Speaker 6: But it's not the scared white woman. It's the oddly
Speaker 6: grunting black man who appears to have been strangled to
Speaker 6: death with no apparent witnesses. He's identified as twenty four
Speaker 6: year old Ellis Joyner, a stand up comedian who A
Speaker 6: detective says, quote came from down South, love to talk
Speaker 6: about how much he loved New York. The other detective remarks,
Speaker 6: great place to live, not such a great place to die.
Speaker 6: Cut the title screen with music that I assume has
Speaker 6: not been updated in like thirty years, because the actual
Speaker 6: it sounds so so nineties.
Speaker 11: They can't change it.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 11: There are thousands of episodes of the show Garrison, It's history.
Speaker 6: So already with the cold open, we have like, ooh,
Speaker 6: the dangerous subway, scary homeless people, this poor white woman.
Speaker 6: A lot of stuff's being thrown at.
Speaker 11: Us, right and obviously playing on the idea that like, oh,
Speaker 11: the white woman is going to be under that, but
Speaker 11: that sheet, like that's going to be her body.
Speaker 6: Totally totally So, as we returned to the episode, a
Speaker 6: forensic pathologist says the man died after being put in
Speaker 6: a quote unquote sleeper hold, which cut off oxygen to
Speaker 6: his brain. His medical records reveal he also had severe asthma,
Speaker 6: and his hyperinflated lungs indicate he was currently suffering an
Speaker 6: asthma attack when he was killed by the lethal chokehold.
Speaker 6: In the fifty minute window for a time of death.
Speaker 6: The train passed through six subway stations, four of which
Speaker 6: all had broken cameras.
Speaker 11: Which is supposed to remind the viewer that we really
Speaker 11: need to fund the subway cops.
Speaker 6: Correct. A lot of this episode is about how subway
Speaker 6: surveillance is under equipped to deal with crime. And we
Speaker 6: could probably fix a lot of problems if there was
Speaker 6: more security cameras in the subway.
Speaker 11: Or just one hundred cops. What if they put one
Speaker 11: hundred cops on there.
Speaker 6: Sure, or more cops and like to my, the subway
Speaker 6: in New York City historically has not had security cameras
Speaker 6: inside the actual train cars, though they are expected to
Speaker 6: by twenty twenty six. But like the light rail in Portland,
Speaker 6: the kind of like not not subway, but like the
Speaker 6: Public Transits train in Atlanta, they all have cameras inside
Speaker 6: the actual train cars. I was surprised that the subway
Speaker 6: in New York did not. I just I just never
Speaker 6: knew that. Anyway. Back to law and order, Ellis Joiner's
Speaker 6: credit card identified the station that he got on at,
Speaker 6: which also had broken cameras, but police pulled streetcam footage
Speaker 6: from a few blocks away, which shows Joyner getting into
Speaker 6: a fight with another comedian where Joyner got punched. The
Speaker 6: other man is recognized as Malcolm Paige, a stand up
Speaker 6: who quote used to open for Chappelle back in the
Speaker 6: day unquote, so already setting up something fantastic. The detectives
Speaker 6: interview Page and show him social media footage of Joiners
Speaker 6: is set from last night, making fun of Page for
Speaker 6: being old and irrelevant. Page says that verbally attacked him
Speaker 6: because Joiner quote got his panties in a twist unquote
Speaker 6: over some of Page's jokes quote hit too close to
Speaker 6: home for fancy boy unquote. And when Page says fancy boy,
Speaker 6: he does this little shaky hand thing, which the detective
Speaker 6: asks if that's supposed to imply that Joyner is gay,
Speaker 6: which the older comedian says, yes.
Speaker 11: I mean I've seen this sort of like limpressed hand
Speaker 11: movie this.
Speaker 6: Did it did? It was just like a weird like
Speaker 6: shaking like hand, like fancy you.
Speaker 11: Sort of shake your hand side to side when you
Speaker 11: mean like kind of or maybe exactly exactly hand movie.
Speaker 11: It was your homophobic gestures, right, it was.
Speaker 6: It was really weird. I found this whole interaction kind
Speaker 6: of bizarre.
Speaker 11: And unnecessary, like you write in this kind of red
Speaker 11: herring when you're trying to fill time. But they had plenty,
Speaker 11: they had plenty of script. They didn't need this.
Speaker 6: This episode's so focused on different forms of racism, so
Speaker 6: much adding in this like weird gay subplot to doesn't
Speaker 6: It doesn't end up going anywhere, and it's just kind
Speaker 6: of bizarre. So anyway, this basically, this older comedian was
Speaker 6: telling homophobic jokes. Joiner then made fun of him on stage,
Speaker 6: and this older comedian Page assaulted him outside. Page then
Speaker 6: left in an uber and Joiner ran off with his boyfriend, who,
Speaker 6: according to Paige, weren't getting along either. So there's some
Speaker 6: kind of like like God, a new suspect arises exactly exactly.
Speaker 6: So police look through Joiner's emails and texts in the
Speaker 6: cloud quote unquote, and can't find any record of a boyfriend,
Speaker 6: making detectives surmise that he must have been in the closet,
Speaker 6: which is a baffling thing to surmise. Cops then contact
Speaker 6: quote the Traveler app. That's that's Traveler spelled.
Speaker 11: T r a v l R. You have to cut
Speaker 11: out a vowel or it's not an apple.
Speaker 6: So legally not Grinder gives NYPD complete access to Joiner's account, and.
Speaker 11: I'm sorry, Like, are gay male sex apps usually like
Speaker 11: pink and purple. The color scheme is pink and purple.
Speaker 6: Yeah, not my experience, but yeah, I think it's also
Speaker 6: a referenced to like like travelers, like fellow travelers, right right,
Speaker 6: it was obviously supposed to be Grinder, but it's it's
Speaker 6: just Grinder. It doesn't matter, but cop legally not Grinder
Speaker 6: gives NYPD full access to Joiner's account, which shows he's
Speaker 6: dating a guy named Michael Zain. And this, this whole
Speaker 6: thing is, this whole thing's so wild because if you're
Speaker 6: dating someone, you should not be primarily communicating through Grinder.
Speaker 11: And he said later they've been dating for six six months,
Speaker 11: six months, They've never texted, they're just using Grinder to chat.
Speaker 6: Whenever you go on Grinder, the goal is to get
Speaker 6: off of Grinder as soon as possible. Why why would
Speaker 6: privately texting each other instead out you as gay anymore
Speaker 6: than having an identifiable Grinder profile?
Speaker 11: Do I feel like having Grinder up on your phone
Speaker 11: and it has a very distinctive like text tone, Like
Speaker 11: that's way more likely to out you dog just text
Speaker 11: regular exactly.
Speaker 6: It makes no sense anyway. The traveler messages between Joyner
Speaker 6: and Michael Zain indicate a sort of ongoing fight or argument.
Speaker 6: Now Zain has a prior conviction for aggravated assault last year.
Speaker 11: They didn't actually, so I went back and I went
Speaker 11: back and double check this because I have some beef.
Speaker 6: He doesn't have a care.
Speaker 11: They said he was arrested for assault last year.
Speaker 6: He was just charged. He wasn't connected at my mistake, yes,
Speaker 6: but also the episode does not make that very clear.
Speaker 11: No, because I have a reason. I went back and
Speaker 11: checked because it makes no sense.
Speaker 6: So, yeah, his boyfriend was charged last year for aggravated assault.
Speaker 6: So the detectives pay him a visit because they think
Speaker 6: he's like a suspect.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 6: Zain says that he didn't kill Joyner, he loved him,
Speaker 6: and that their fight on the night of the murder
Speaker 6: was about to Joiner's own self hatred and Zay believing
Speaker 6: that things would be better if they could just live
Speaker 6: openly as a couple, but Joyner was concerned that it
Speaker 6: would threaten his comedy career. Zain maintained nothing ever got
Speaker 6: physical between each other and explained that his assault charge
Speaker 6: was from trying to break up a bar fight, but
Speaker 6: when the cops arrived, they targeted Zane because he was black,
Speaker 6: to which the two NYPD detectives nod solemnly.
Speaker 11: They're like, yeah, that does sound like something we would do.
Speaker 6: Yeah, other cops are racist, but not us. They're like okay.
Speaker 6: Zain claims that Joyner wanted time alone, so he got
Speaker 6: off the train a few stops before and went home,
Speaker 6: but mentions that there was a white guy with short
Speaker 6: brown hair, bright yellow sneakers, and a hoodie with some
Speaker 6: kind of symbol on the back who was looking weirdly
Speaker 6: at him and Joiner. Security camera footage shows someone matching
Speaker 6: that description exiting the train car one stop before Joyner's
Speaker 6: body was found, and one of the detectives recognizes the symbol.
Speaker 6: We will learn more about this mysterious hoodie, sneaker, and
Speaker 6: symbol after this adbreak. So I first, I just want
Speaker 6: to describe what this symbol is. It's it is. It's
Speaker 6: this octagon with spiky corners and like two k's facing
Speaker 6: like like like one facing backwards. Yeah, one one facing
Speaker 6: forward with one facing backwards, but smushed together and the
Speaker 6: shared middle pillar is like an arrow pointing upwards.
Speaker 11: It looked like nothing to me.
Speaker 6: They tried to desire something that looked vaguely racist, but
Speaker 6: it's just not. It just it just looks dumb.
Speaker 11: It looks like I don't like a tech company logo
Speaker 11: or something like. Yeah, it is not evoke anything for me.
Speaker 6: No, it's it's not good. They're trying to make it
Speaker 6: scary with like lots of like different like angles, but
Speaker 6: like it's it's it's not. It's not scary anyway. The
Speaker 6: detectives arrive at an MMA gym in Chelsea called the
Speaker 6: Kovak Academy. It opened about a year ago and they've
Speaker 6: been peppering the neighborhood with flyers. Well, that sounds familiar,
Speaker 6: extremely accurate. The cops are graded by jacked staff member
Speaker 6: with a shaved head, and they asked to speak with
Speaker 6: the owner, and this skinhead employee says that they just
Speaker 6: missed him. But there's a picture on the wall of
Speaker 6: the owner holding a trophy and he's wearing the exact
Speaker 6: outfit in the subway security footage. The detectives are told
Speaker 6: that he was getting a cab to the airport. Now
Speaker 6: thought I thought this was gonna be like a classic
Speaker 6: Rundo move right, do some crimes flee the country, But
Speaker 6: allegedly he was actually flying to Toronto, which actually will
Speaker 6: kind of get explained later on. Cops are outside to
Speaker 6: see if they can spot him before he leaves, and
Speaker 6: they see a man in yellow sneakers and a logo
Speaker 6: emblazoned hoodie walking towards a cab. They sprint tap him
Speaker 6: on the shoulder. The MMA guy throws detectives against the car,
Speaker 6: starts fighting, not realizing their NYPD because he has like
Speaker 6: earbuds on. Cops pull their guns, then he surrenders. The
Speaker 6: owner of the gym is named Domino Dominal. It's a
Speaker 6: weird it's weird name.
Speaker 11: I think Dominall it's like and I think it's an
Speaker 11: Irish name.
Speaker 5: Dominall.
Speaker 6: Yeah, dominoll Kovak. He has four previous convictions for assault,
Speaker 6: all against black victims, with two charged as hate crimes.
Speaker 6: A detective notes that Kovak has a tattoo on his
Speaker 6: right arm of laced up combat boots with the number
Speaker 6: eighty eight, which the detective calls a white nationalist symbol.
Speaker 11: Okay, okay, here, I looked, I looked hard. I looked
Speaker 11: hard through a lot of photographs of Nazi tattoos, and
Speaker 11: the boot tattoo is not common and you only see
Speaker 11: it in skinhead culture.
Speaker 6: And this guy's not a skinhead. The actual owner of
Speaker 6: the gym does not appear to be a skinhead. He
Speaker 6: has like a big beard. He has like long brown,
Speaker 6: like longish brown, not long, but like medium shaggy brown hair.
Speaker 6: But but yeah, he has this combat boot eighty eight tattoo.
Speaker 11: That's there are a lot of Nazi tattoos and that's
Speaker 11: not the one I would have picked for this character.
Speaker 6: No, it's obviously like some lawn order writer googled like
Speaker 6: Nazi tattoo and just picked that.
Speaker 11: Like, but that's the thing is, if that's what they
Speaker 11: had done, I don't think they would have picked that, because,
Speaker 11: like I said, I was looking through all of these
Speaker 11: sort of like lists of different kinds of tattoos, yeah,
Speaker 11: by different nonprofits. There is one one picture in all
Speaker 11: of these databases of a tattoo that's even similar to this,
Speaker 11: where it's a pair of boots with the number eight
Speaker 11: on each boot. I found one.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean I think that that is the one
Speaker 6: they used. I think they did want to like bring
Speaker 6: in some level of like the idea of dog whistling
Speaker 6: kind of with eighty eight, which will come up later
Speaker 6: in the episode, but it's it's not well done anyway.
Speaker 6: Kovac says that he's never seen Ellis Joyner before and
Speaker 6: that the night of the murder, he was running a
Speaker 6: late night intensive training program called the Combat Academy, based
Speaker 6: on the Navy Seals training course. So many red flags
Speaker 6: are going off here. It ended around midnight. Afterwards, Kovec
Speaker 6: said he walked to his girlfriend's dear By apartment. He
Speaker 6: was never on the subway, but he explains that the
Speaker 6: gray hoodie and yellow sneakers are part of the Combat
Speaker 6: Academy uniform that all members wear.
Speaker 11: It's so important to wear matching outfits with your boys.
Speaker 6: And in one of the more accurate moments of the episode,
Speaker 6: as soon as he's in even a little trouble, he
Speaker 6: gives out all the names of the members in his group.
Speaker 11: Did not even wait for a subpoena. He's like, would
Speaker 11: you like their credit card numbers?
Speaker 6: Did not hesitate. He's like, no, absolutely, I'll give a DNA,
Speaker 6: so I'll tell I'll tell you the names all the guys.
Speaker 6: It wasn't me, I swear. So the detectives locate they're
Speaker 6: recently divorced Brandon Arnaut outside of the I like that
Speaker 6: they added the detail he was recently divorced, but this
Speaker 6: never actually come up. It does not matter.
Speaker 12: But the second, the second they walk up to him
Speaker 12: on the street, he was like, oh, my wife left me.
Speaker 12: My wife left me last year with me, so I
Speaker 12: got really into grappling with the boys because my wife
Speaker 12: left me.
Speaker 6: Yes, exactly. So they find him outside the elementary school
Speaker 6: he teaches that and which.
Speaker 11: Also never comes up again.
Speaker 6: Nope, and after very very little questioning, very came questioning,
Speaker 6: he immediately admits to killing Joyner, saying it was an
Speaker 6: accident and that Joyner was attacking a woman on the
Speaker 6: subway and Brandon here was trying to protect her. At
Speaker 6: the police station, the police say that they can't find
Speaker 6: any footage of the woman Brandon is talking about, but
Speaker 6: the defense attorney asks if the cameras were even working
Speaker 6: at every station, to which the cops roll their eyes
Speaker 6: if like really sartastical answer. They're like, oh my god,
Speaker 6: this fucking guy asking if the cameras are broken. The
Speaker 6: cops tell Brandon that they found Ellis Joyner's missing cell
Speaker 6: phone in his gym locker. They searched his house, they
Speaker 6: didn't find anything, but they got his They got a
Speaker 6: warn for his gym locker and found the cell phone,
Speaker 6: and they alleged that he stole it after he realized
Speaker 6: that Joyner recorded a video of the fight that ended
Speaker 6: up with Joiner being strangled to death.
Speaker 11: And that's something we call consciousness of guilt.
Speaker 6: The defense attorney ends the interview immediately as soon as
Speaker 6: they bring this.
Speaker 11: Up, like, why wouldn't you tell your lawyer that tell
Speaker 11: him that before you go in the search history and
Speaker 11: Brandon's laptop shows him trying to figure out how to
Speaker 11: unlock the phone to delete the video.
Speaker 6: Now, this part's a little bit odd. The cops debate
Speaker 6: even though quote he admits to killing Joyner, I'm not
Speaker 6: sure we have enough evidence to charge unquote, which is
Speaker 6: not true. You have so much evidence, you have a confession,
Speaker 6: you have so much evidence to charge.
Speaker 11: This is so bizarre, Like how often do you have
Speaker 11: a recording of a murder happening and then the guy admitting.
Speaker 6: That it admits, Yeah, it's ridiculous. They charge on far
Speaker 6: far less.
Speaker 11: They have that conversation in the room and they're like, well,
Speaker 11: we can charge him or we can let him go.
Speaker 11: He's like, I mean, I understand a conversation about like
Speaker 11: is this murder too, is this manslaughter? Yeah, but it's
Speaker 11: not a question of whether or not you're charging with something.
Speaker 11: You're charging him with something.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I mean, I think there's a reason actually why they
Speaker 6: had this conversation, which I will get to at the
Speaker 6: end of the episode if you remind me. I think
Speaker 6: there's a reason why they discussed this option of letting
Speaker 6: him go versus charging him. But at this point we
Speaker 6: now swa to the law half of the episode after
Speaker 6: we finished the order half. I don't know why these
Speaker 6: are reversed because they do the police part first, then
Speaker 6: the court part. But whatever, it should be called order
Speaker 6: and law, which just guess, I guess, just doesn't sound good.
Speaker 6: So a front page story in the legally not New
Speaker 6: York Post is being passed around the DA's office. It
Speaker 6: reads self defense or racist killing hero or zero.
Speaker 11: A recurring story in New York City.
Speaker 6: The prosecutor who's played by Hugh Dancy I'm just gonna
Speaker 6: call Hugh Dancy because they don't know his character's name,
Speaker 6: states that half the city believes Brandon's self defense story
Speaker 6: and the other half just to sees a white man
Speaker 6: killing an unarmed black man. That is what happened, a
Speaker 6: litmus test for what people want to believe, says the
Speaker 6: main DA.
Speaker 11: I think at this point the writers in that room
Speaker 11: are just tired. Oh yeah, so like you can only
Speaker 11: do so much cocaine before it just like stops working.
Speaker 6: The DA's office says that Brandon held Joiner in a
Speaker 6: choke for so long after he was unconscious that even
Speaker 6: if it started as self defense, it escalated to homicide.
Speaker 6: They debate between manslaughter and murder, saying the former would
Speaker 6: be easier to win with a clear use of excessive force,
Speaker 6: regardless of Brandon's story of trying to help the girl.
Speaker 6: But based on the cell phone video, the DA decides
Speaker 6: to pursue a murder case due to a quote depraved
Speaker 6: indifference to human life unquote displayed by choking someone for
Speaker 6: full three minutes after falling unconscious.
Speaker 11: I'm not sure if you mentioned so. They found the phone,
Speaker 11: So the victim had been recording the altercation and then
Speaker 11: it got knocked out of his hand, and so it
Speaker 11: was recording audio of the murder, but not video.
Speaker 6: I'm going to get to that once we get to
Speaker 6: the court scene. Hugh Dancy is nervous about Brandon's literal
Speaker 6: white night story and that he has no history of violence,
Speaker 6: but the DA insists on second degree murder, saying, quote,
Speaker 6: this is George Floyd all over again in what way?
Speaker 6: And I'm sure as hell not going to end up
Speaker 6: on the wrong side of it unquote, Which does ut
Speaker 6: make the DA sound like a good guy, just makes
Speaker 6: him sound like he doesn't want to have like a
Speaker 6: bad press. It comes off as very slimy.
Speaker 11: I you know, I said, I watch a lave of
Speaker 11: Law and Order, and so I have seen probably a
Speaker 11: thousand hours of it, but I haven't watched it in
Speaker 11: several years, so I don't know if maybe the tone
Speaker 11: has evolved a little bit, but I got the impression that, like,
Speaker 11: I don't know, maybe this is a guy who's consistently
Speaker 11: worried about getting re elected, right because his job is
Speaker 11: an elected position. Yeah, just doesn't want the press.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So finally we cut to court, the prosecution plays the
Speaker 6: cell phone video. Seconds after Joyner starts recording on his phone,
Speaker 6: Brandon knocks it out of his hand, landing camera side down,
Speaker 6: continuing to record only audio of the struggle. We hear
Speaker 6: Brandon putting Joyner into a choke hold, Joyner repeatedly saying
Speaker 6: he can't breathe, before appearing to pass out, followed by
Speaker 6: three minutes of silence up until Brandon releases his arm
Speaker 6: from around Joyner's neck. He picks up the phone, sees
Speaker 6: it's recording, and turns it off. As the video is playing,
Speaker 6: the prosecutor and the jury are all shaking their heads
Speaker 6: so that we know that they don't agree with it.
Speaker 6: Hugh Dancy questions the medical examiner, who explains it after
Speaker 6: Joiner lost consciousness, he could no longer pose an a
Speaker 6: lethal threat to the defendant, who continued to talk donor
Speaker 6: for three more minutes. The defense suggests that a surge
Speaker 6: of adrenaline distorted time and awareness of his surroundings, which
Speaker 6: in the panic of the moment, made brand did not
Speaker 6: realize Joiner lost consciousness for that long. Ellis, Joiner's secret boyfriend,
Speaker 6: testifies next. He says the defendant was weirdly staring at
Speaker 6: Joyner and himself, and that Brandon moved aggressively to step
Speaker 6: in Zayne's way. When he was trying to exit the
Speaker 6: train and said, quote unquote watch yourself in a quote
Speaker 6: unquote racist tone. The defense brings up Zayne's past aggravated
Speaker 6: assault charge to cast doubt on his testimony.
Speaker 11: Okay, they can't do that. They cannot take they cannot
Speaker 11: you cannot do that. There is a very limited set
Speaker 11: of circumstances in which you can bring up a witness's
Speaker 11: criminal history, and this isn't it.
Speaker 6: There is a lot of funky law decisions going on
Speaker 6: in this episode.
Speaker 11: You can't do that.
Speaker 6: Speaking of a funky law decisions, while actually speaking of
Speaker 6: speaking of this ad break, we are back speaking of
Speaker 6: troubling law decisions. The defense calls a surprise female witness,
Speaker 6: Rebecca Laski, something you cannot do.
Speaker 11: I looked it up. The average time to take a
Speaker 11: felony to trial in New York is a year, So
Speaker 11: from time of death to this going to trial, best
Speaker 11: case scenario probably like a fucking year. They had a
Speaker 11: year to find this woman and she shows up on
Speaker 11: the last day of the trial.
Speaker 6: It's definitely not the last day because if.
Speaker 11: This was you know, this is obviously sort of mimicking
Speaker 11: the what was his name, Daniel Penny.
Speaker 6: Yes, that's it's always.
Speaker 11: Like making the Daniel Penny caase like this would have
Speaker 11: been on the New York Post like every day leading
Speaker 11: up to the trial.
Speaker 6: This woman would have been located. The murder happened in January.
Speaker 6: The trial star I believe in early March, and lasts
Speaker 6: about two weeks according to the timeline of the TV show,
Speaker 6: So that's not how it works anyway. Rebecca Laski, the
Speaker 6: female the surprise female witness. She testifies that she accidentally
Speaker 6: bumped into Joyner, who quote unquote appeared mentally disturbed and
Speaker 6: was making aggressive grunting noises aggressive grunting noises before lunging
Speaker 6: at her. She then claims Joyner reached into his pocket
Speaker 6: and she was scared he had a knife or something,
Speaker 6: so she screamed. She screamed for help, and Brandon Arnau
Speaker 6: saved her. She testified that mister Arnau grabbed Joyner away
Speaker 6: from her and the two men started fighting. Laski calls
Speaker 6: Brandon a hero, and a jury looks on inquisitively. After
Speaker 6: the female witnesses quote unquote compelling testimony, the prosecutor talks
Speaker 6: with the DA about offering a manslaughter plea but the
Speaker 6: DA is steadfast since the video clip of a man
Speaker 6: begging for his life and being choked to death for
Speaker 6: three minutes after falling unconscious has not actually changed. Hugh
Speaker 6: Dancy remarks that new context for the video isn't really
Speaker 6: in their favor to it. The DA just replies, just
Speaker 6: because a white woman saw Joyner as a threat doesn't
Speaker 6: make it true, like okay, based in New York, DA,
Speaker 6: I guess. Back in court, the prosecution asks Rebecca Laski
Speaker 6: if she was actually present when a quote, the defendant
Speaker 6: choked the life out of a joiner unquote. She clarifies
Speaker 6: that the train stopped as the men were still fighting.
Speaker 6: Joyner was reaching into his pocket. She was scared that
Speaker 6: he maybe had a knife.
Speaker 5: Again.
Speaker 11: He's probably reaching for his inhaler and.
Speaker 6: Hailer or his cell phone to record this fight. She
Speaker 6: curiously mentions, though, that after Brandon grabbed Joyner's arm and
Speaker 6: the fight started, Brandon kept yelling at Joyner. He was
Speaker 6: yelling to quote, surrender and that he was bleeding, and
Speaker 6: that he was dirty or fighting dirty. I don't really
Speaker 6: remember the exact words unquote.
Speaker 11: This destroyed me. I almost turned it off.
Speaker 6: Everyone in the courtroom gets a really funny look when
Speaker 6: she meant when she mentions the word dirty. So we
Speaker 6: we will get to this in a sec Under questioning,
Speaker 6: Last admits that she never saw any weapon of any kind,
Speaker 6: let alone a knife, and Hugh Dancy suggests that after
Speaker 6: being attacked by a fellow comedian and having an argument
Speaker 6: with its boyfriend, Joyner was probably suffering from an asthma
Speaker 6: attack triggered by high stress. He wasn't mentally ill, he
Speaker 6: wasn't acting aggressive or grunting in a threatening manner. He
Speaker 6: was stuck in a subway car having an asthma attack.
Speaker 6: And he addresses Laski saying, quote, you saw a scary
Speaker 6: black man making a noise. Objection Uh sustained, So yeah.
Speaker 11: But they didn't but they objected there. But then when
Speaker 11: he says like, and isn't it true that his behavior
Speaker 11: was consistent with an asthma attack? Nobody objected to that
Speaker 11: she can't offer She can't offer a medical opinion.
Speaker 6: Rebecca Laski, a ballet dancer, not a medical professional, cannot
Speaker 6: offer an opinion on what what his medical symptoms can
Speaker 6: be consistent with.
Speaker 11: When she starts getting upset, saying like, oh my God,
Speaker 11: this is all my fault, Like this happened because of me.
Speaker 11: Like at that point, no prosecutor would have allowed her
Speaker 11: to continue speaking. He would have said, just answer the questions,
Speaker 11: just answer the questions. He would not have let her
Speaker 11: get emotional up there and blame it like that's that's poison.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but it makes not very good television, thrilling television.
Speaker 6: So after court for the day, the prosecution wonders if
Speaker 6: Brandon allegedly saying something about blood and dirt could have
Speaker 6: really been quote the Nazi slogan blood and.
Speaker 11: Soil no no, no gere no no.
Speaker 6: The new battle cry of white nationalist groups unquote.
Speaker 11: See here's the thing.
Speaker 6: So this is where the episode goes fully, fully off
Speaker 6: the rails.
Speaker 11: So like when I was watching her testimony, she was
Speaker 11: like he said something about like you know, he was
Speaker 11: bleeding and like he was dirty. At no point did
Speaker 11: my mind no connect that too. And I quite literally
Speaker 11: just yesterday was watching videos of guys yelling blood and soil.
Speaker 11: This is something that's on my mind.
Speaker 6: It is a ridiculous jump. It's not there because yeah,
Speaker 6: he's yelling something about like bleeding because his lip was bleeding,
Speaker 6: and sure, a remark about being dirty could be could
Speaker 6: be construed as as like a racist remark. But the
Speaker 6: jump from bleeding and dirty to blood and dirt to
Speaker 6: blood and soil is fucking baffling.
Speaker 11: It's just not even the same words. But not to
Speaker 11: nippick here, not to Nipick. I just don't know that
Speaker 11: blood and soil would have been the chant he chose
Speaker 11: as he was doing the choking.
Speaker 6: It's bizarre he would have said a slur. Hugh Dancy
Speaker 6: is also skeptical. None of the interviews with Brandon's family
Speaker 6: or co workers indicated anything about racial extremism, but the
Speaker 6: other prosecutor suggests that they look into his fitness gym,
Speaker 6: the Covak Academy, as the owner quote has ties to
Speaker 6: a few white nationalist organizations.
Speaker 11: Uh oh.
Speaker 6: The DA's office decides to investigate further. They arrive at
Speaker 6: the gym as the buff Skinhead staff member from the
Speaker 6: start of the episode is closing up for the day.
Speaker 6: He claims to not know Brandon very well, and when
Speaker 6: he's asked if he's ever heard Brandon say something that
Speaker 6: could be interpreted as racist, he responds by saying, I'm sorry,
Speaker 6: but I can't help you. The prosecutor makes a snydermark
Speaker 6: and starts to leave, and the man quietly says, look,
Speaker 6: I can't get into details, but let's just say you're
Speaker 6: heading down the right path. But I can't help you
Speaker 6: because it would blow my cover unquote.
Speaker 11: WHOA, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 6: He's a cop infiltrating the Nazi fight club. I mean,
Speaker 6: there are some cops in there, right. I don't know
Speaker 6: if I would say they're infiltrating. The next scene is
Speaker 6: the funniest in the whole episode. After stumbling onto the
Speaker 6: undercover operation, the head DA arrives at the NYPD counter
Speaker 6: Terrorism Bureau as they have info pertaining to the prosecution's
Speaker 6: murder case. But the counter Terrorism Bureau explains their scope
Speaker 6: is much larger than this one case and they have
Speaker 6: quote had their eye on Kovac for a while now.
Speaker 6: They explained to the DA that his MMA gym is
Speaker 6: actually a quote active club part of an international network
Speaker 6: of a white supremacist sleeper cells that all front as
Speaker 6: MMA style gyms unquote. So okay, okay, okay. White nationalists
Speaker 6: have been using MMA gyms to front for activities for decades.
Speaker 11: I just found a new one the other day.
Speaker 6: This does happen. This does not mean they are active clubs,
Speaker 6: nor do active clubs have to be MMA gyms. These
Speaker 6: are these things are venn diagrams that can sometimes overlap,
Speaker 6: but not always. The version of active clubs we see
Speaker 6: in this episode now starts getting pretty fictitious.
Speaker 11: It Immediately first, I was like, almost like a fairly
Speaker 11: reasonable like, yeah, like we do have active clubs at
Speaker 11: MMA gyms, that's the thing they were like and their
Speaker 11: stockpiling weapons to do a January sixth.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so what what? So they say they've identified over
Speaker 6: thirty active clubs across nine states and several provinces of Canada.
Speaker 6: So nine states far too low. There's active clubs in
Speaker 6: way more states than that. There's also not necessarily like
Speaker 6: if you have thirty active clubs across nine states, that's
Speaker 6: a bizarre ratio. It means there's a lot of active
Speaker 6: clubs in like a few states, which generally isn't how
Speaker 6: it kind of ends up being there's maybe like one
Speaker 6: or two, maybe three like per state. We don't fully know,
Speaker 6: but I will give them points for adding in the
Speaker 6: Canadian chapters, which most people kind of overlook, but.
Speaker 11: Also like, why is the NYPD investigating something happening in
Speaker 11: nine states. That's FEDS.
Speaker 6: To be fair, that is fully accurate. The NYPD counter
Speaker 6: Terrorism Bureau investigates things all over the world.
Speaker 11: But it's like just let if it's interstate, let the
Speaker 11: FEDS handle it.
Speaker 6: Their jurisdiction is fucking bonkers. They're like the third biggest
Speaker 6: that counter terrorism like law enforcement group in the entire world.
Speaker 11: It's like one of the world's largest standing armies.
Speaker 6: Yeah, no, it is. It is absurd, they say. Quote
Speaker 6: the clubs operate as recruitment centers. They lure in a
Speaker 6: young white men under the guise of getting fit while
Speaker 6: indoctrinating them in racist ideology and training them in military
Speaker 6: combat unquote. Now, the training that people receive in active
Speaker 6: clubs very often does not equal military combat training. In fact,
Speaker 6: they often have very poor fitness regiments and really bad
Speaker 6: advice on how to get fit.
Speaker 11: I mean, if getting hooked on gear and rolling around
Speaker 11: on the floor shirtless with the boys is military combat training,
Speaker 11: then absolutely.
Speaker 6: If you look at the there's a pretty sensive docks
Speaker 6: of some of the active club members in the state
Speaker 6: of Georgia last year, and they were their fitness information
Speaker 6: was not up to stuff. They were mostly seventeen year
Speaker 6: olds who were arguing about different ways to like lift
Speaker 6: better anyway. Lawn Order says that these active clubs are
Speaker 6: quote trying to build an army. It's the new face
Speaker 6: of hate unquote a very kind of retro slogan. We
Speaker 6: don't really use that anymore, but if you look like
Speaker 6: ten years ago or like, yeah, around ten years ago,
Speaker 6: you would see a lot of like liberal articles talking
Speaker 6: about the new face of hate. Quote no more white
Speaker 6: sheets or burning crosses. They've adapted and created a facade
Speaker 6: to mask their racist beliefs unquote. So the DA wants
Speaker 6: their undercover guy to testify to secure the conviction against
Speaker 6: one of the active club members, but the counter Terrorism
Speaker 6: Bureau doesn't want to blow their nine month undercover operation
Speaker 6: even for a murder conviction, as they've quote recently received
Speaker 6: credible intel that Kovak is now stock pile a leg
Speaker 6: of firearms and explosive materials unquote.
Speaker 11: So they should probably go ahead and arrest him for that.
Speaker 6: Huh yeah, yeah, right, it's time to move I guess
Speaker 6: now they're combining like active club stuff with some like
Speaker 6: Adam Woffen and militia stuff, just like throat, just just
Speaker 6: smushing together all these different groups into one like mega boogeyman.
Speaker 6: I guess quote these men are terrorists. They're capable of
Speaker 6: significant violence unquote. So the counter Terrorism Burero suggests that
Speaker 6: the DA takes a quote big picture of view of
Speaker 6: the situation unquote. So the DA breaks the news to
Speaker 6: the prosecution team that the undercover will be unable to
Speaker 6: testify because the active club is quote planning a coordinated
Speaker 6: attack along the lines of the January sixth insurrection unquote.
Speaker 11: So you should probably like the undercover operation is over,
Speaker 11: Like if you have credible intel that there's an imminent attack,
Speaker 11: like the operation is over.
Speaker 6: So also like this is just not what active clubs do,
Speaker 6: Like this is like they don't care about J six.
Speaker 6: That's like a proud boy thing and some militia dude.
Speaker 6: It's like most active club members would be like, no,
Speaker 6: all of the J six people are like fucking like
Speaker 6: conservative like Trump Trump, brain dead losers.
Speaker 2: They're like, it's.
Speaker 11: Really that thing a couple of years ago where those
Speaker 11: members of the base were arrested right before they were
Speaker 11: going to try to kick off the Civil War by
Speaker 11: inciting they were going to shoot into the crowd at
Speaker 11: the gun rally in Richmond at the Virginia Gun and
Speaker 11: then the plan was that everyone would start shooting each other.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 11: It's like, so they had a pretty large stockpile of
Speaker 11: weapons that one of the guys was Canadians, So like
Speaker 11: maybe they got mixed up with that the base.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like they're combining elements of the bass Adam offfin
Speaker 6: active clubs, proud boys into this like mega boogeyman, right,
Speaker 6: just a villain. The DA says that this new attack
Speaker 6: will quote only be more violent and without advance warning
Speaker 6: this time.
Speaker 11: What do you mean without advanced warning?
Speaker 6: He just says, no, right, right, let this happen.
Speaker 11: The greater good is for us to allow this to occur.
Speaker 6: The undercover investigation cannot be jepridized in any way. But
Speaker 6: as this looks more and more like a racially targeted murder,
Speaker 6: according to the DA, the DA's office is to find
Speaker 6: a different way to show that Brandon is racist. Quote
Speaker 6: it's for the greater good a phrase, a phrase that
Speaker 6: Hugh Dancy says helps justify a lot of otherwise unjustifiable positions.
Speaker 6: And true, they started getting into this kind of debate
Speaker 6: around like the ethics of like doing a long term
Speaker 6: infla tration operation versus seeing like a like like an
Speaker 6: active like like seeing an active threat, or like seeing
Speaker 6: a way to like currently clamp down on a like
Speaker 6: arm of an organization, even if they can't get the
Speaker 6: whole thing yet, and they have this debate like is
Speaker 6: it is it better to like do like a long
Speaker 6: term strategy or to like just like chop off as
Speaker 6: many limbs as we can as we go on and again,
Speaker 6: it doesn't make sense because if they have all this
Speaker 6: credible intel, why not just like get them right now?
Speaker 6: But like what I wrap it up? So back in court,
Speaker 6: mister Kovak is on the stand. Hugh Dancy asks if
Speaker 6: he and the defendant have ever discussed quote, racial ideology,
Speaker 6: to which Kovac says, I don't know what that means.
Speaker 6: Believable the Probible. I mean, yeah, that is the correct
Speaker 6: answer for this situation. The prosecutor elaborates racial purity into
Speaker 6: racial marriage, what role black people should or shouldn't have
Speaker 6: in society, and Kovac once again feigns ignorance. Hugh Dancy
Speaker 6: asks about Kovacs eighty eight to tattoo being a Nazi
Speaker 6: symbol and Kovec just says, I don't know, I just
Speaker 6: like the number eighty eight, and then he doesn't.
Speaker 11: The prosecutor doesn't explain to the jury, no, does it
Speaker 11: means Kyle Hitler.
Speaker 6: He just he just moves on. Never once in the
Speaker 6: episode is it explained that the eighty eight symbol me
Speaker 6: is a reference to high Hitler.
Speaker 11: Never ever actually say it, never say it. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Dancy does bring up mister Kodak's for prior convictions for
Speaker 6: assaulting black men, two of which were charged as hay crimes,
Speaker 6: and Kovec just says, that was a long time ago.
Speaker 11: And now see, I do want to say, because you
Speaker 11: made such a big deal about it earlier, about how
Speaker 11: you can't ask about prior convictions. I think in this
Speaker 11: case it is an allowable exception because it goes to
Speaker 11: direct impeachment, Like if he said, like, yeah, you know,
Speaker 11: he made a statement himself about how he's not racist,
Speaker 11: and you say, well, you have a hate crime conviction.
Speaker 6: And later in the court room he says that he
Speaker 6: of course obviously doesn't have any problems with black people
Speaker 6: when being a questioned by the defense attorney, but Hugh
Speaker 6: Dancy pulls up Kovak's social media accounts, all of which
Speaker 6: contained the phrase blood and soil in his bio objection relevance.
Speaker 6: The prosecution then argues that Rebecculaski's testimony of hearing something
Speaker 6: about blood and dirt may have been a vague recollection
Speaker 6: of hearing blood and soil.
Speaker 7: No.
Speaker 6: Dancy describes bud and soil as a Nazi reference to
Speaker 6: a racially uniform society.
Speaker 11: The jury would not have been allowed to hear this.
Speaker 11: This happened outside the presence of the jury.
Speaker 6: Kovaca says, the phrase means that you're proud of who
Speaker 6: you are and where you come from. Kovac taught the
Speaker 6: defendant how to fight, how to do a choke hold,
Speaker 6: so to end the questioning, Hugh Dancy asks if he
Speaker 6: also taught the defendant to hate black people. Objection objection,
Speaker 6: all right, So, The defense's closing argument frames the subway
Speaker 6: as a dangerous, lawless zone and Brandon as a peaceful
Speaker 6: elementary school teacher who has never gotten as much as
Speaker 6: a speeding ticket.
Speaker 11: Probably because he doesn't dry.
Speaker 6: Yeah, because you live in New York. Uh who saw
Speaker 6: someone in danger and bravely decided to step up and
Speaker 6: do something. The prosecution's closing argument frames Brandon Arnaut as
Speaker 6: a closeted racist who saw an opportunity to put his
Speaker 6: white supremacist ideology into practice in a situation where he
Speaker 6: thought he could get away with it. Quote. People like
Speaker 6: mister Arnaud keep their bigotry buttoned up. They only discuss
Speaker 6: it that people who share their hateful worldview. They rely
Speaker 6: on plausible deniability because if the racism isn't overt, many
Speaker 6: good people are all too happy to assume it isn't there.
Speaker 6: But every once in a while, in moments of panic
Speaker 6: or anger, the mask will slip unquote. Hugh Dancy closes
Speaker 6: by saying that Ellis Joyner was an innocent, unarmed black
Speaker 6: man suffering a medical emergency, and the two white people
Speaker 6: on the train assumed he was a violent threat, and
Speaker 6: they attacked him. And even if there was no intention
Speaker 6: to kill at the start quote, at some point, the
Speaker 6: defendant's focus shifted and his racial hate began to manifest unquote,
Speaker 6: yelling blood and soil at Joiner quote a declaration of
Speaker 6: hatred for all people of color unquote, as Brandon choked
Speaker 6: him to death.
Speaker 11: Okay, here's the thing, here's the thing. This whole situation
Speaker 11: with the undercover the counter terrorism. I have to believe
Speaker 11: that they're trying to set up a longer plot arc
Speaker 11: that that's going to come back in a later episode
Speaker 11: or so. They have a new spin off called Law
Speaker 11: and Order Organized Crime with Christopher Maloney Elliott Stabler from SVU.
Speaker 11: So I wonder if they're going to cross it over
Speaker 11: to organized crime, because it makes no sense.
Speaker 6: That's what I assume. I think this white national group
Speaker 6: is going to come back and be even a bigger
Speaker 6: plot point in a future episode. Otherwise, it didn't need
Speaker 6: to be in here. Otherwise the inclusion in this in
Speaker 6: this piece is really bizarre.
Speaker 11: So but no, so, but what I was going to
Speaker 11: say is they did not need that undercovers testimony because
Speaker 11: the only testimony they wanted to elicit it from him
Speaker 11: was like as a character witness to say like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 11: I've met him and he's racist. That wouldn't really even
Speaker 11: be admissible in most like like even if the even
Speaker 11: if the judge allowed the jury to hear that, like,
Speaker 11: this isn't a hate crime case, it doesn't matter. What
Speaker 11: matters is whether or not he used excessive, like more
Speaker 11: force than was necessary for a self defense argument.
Speaker 6: The entire legal strategy they shift to halfway through the
Speaker 6: corproateceedings is so obviously a dead end that doesn't actually relate.
Speaker 11: To and wouldn't have been allowed.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's so it's so bizarre.
Speaker 11: And if they wanted to and if they wanted to
Speaker 11: get information about like his views that maybe his family
Speaker 11: didn't know about that people at work didn't know about,
Speaker 11: why did they not get warrants for his phone and computer?
Speaker 6: I mean, I think they did because they mentioned in
Speaker 6: searching through his phone and computer multiple times through the.
Speaker 11: Episode, found that he had searched for like how to
Speaker 11: delete from cloud or whatever from the guy's phone.
Speaker 6: But like again, I think that's mostly just like undercooked.
Speaker 11: He didn't open like his telegram account to see what exactly.
Speaker 6: You didn't see the active club chat season. You didn't
Speaker 6: see like you didn't talk to any other members of
Speaker 6: the Combat Academy, no other members of the gym really anyway,
Speaker 6: So the jury finds the defendant not guilty because yeah, okay,
Speaker 6: outside the courtroom, the head DA says, quote, we did
Speaker 6: the best that we could.
Speaker 11: Here's another problem. There's another problem. So not all states
Speaker 11: allow this, but in New York, the court can submit
Speaker 11: to the jury what are called lesser included charges. So
Speaker 11: if you're charged with murder two I think was what
Speaker 11: they charged him with his case, you know, the jury
Speaker 11: can deliberate on the actual charge murder too, but they
Speaker 11: can also consider what are called lesser included charges, so
Speaker 11: something like manslaughter. So the jury can say, well, we're
Speaker 11: not going to convict on murder. Tube we do think
Speaker 11: it was manslaughter, so we're going to convict on that,
Speaker 11: even though that wasn't the charge in the indictment. So
Speaker 11: I can't imagine that this DA would not have pushed
Speaker 11: for lesser included charges.
Speaker 6: Well, Hugh Dancy may agree. He says, quote, no, we
Speaker 6: could have done better. We just chose not to for
Speaker 6: the greater good.
Speaker 11: No, but they they could.
Speaker 6: I think I think he said that kind of sarcastically.
Speaker 6: The the DA affirms that one day soon they will
Speaker 6: take down the whole racist organization. But behind the the
Speaker 6: to the two days here Brandon walks out of the
Speaker 6: courtroom and celebrates with the other members of the Active Club.
Speaker 6: End of episode.
Speaker 11: Okay, so but when they when they put Kovac on
Speaker 11: the stand and they were saying like, oh, like, did
Speaker 11: you teach him about racism. The better line of questioning
Speaker 11: at that moment would have been, Okay, you're his grappling coach,
Speaker 11: did you teach him how dangerous choke holts are?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 11: Because, like, I don't know anything about a choke holds.
Speaker 11: If I accidentally killed someone with one, maybe I didn't
Speaker 11: know that would happen. If you are taking five hours
Speaker 11: a week of private hand to hand combat lessons, you
Speaker 11: probably do know, and that would go to you know, foreknowledge,
Speaker 11: and like, why didn't why didn't they ask that?
Speaker 6: Again? I started this episode because I thought it would
Speaker 6: be about active clubs, and it turns out by the
Speaker 6: end it's really not.
Speaker 11: It's really about Daniel Penny.
Speaker 6: It's really about the killing of Jordan Neely. So this
Speaker 6: is the actual rip from the headline's piece that they're doing,
Speaker 6: which I did not really realize until the episode was over.
Speaker 6: So this is kind of riffing on the incident that
Speaker 6: happened on May first, twenty twenty three. Jordan Neely was
Speaker 6: a thirty year old black man. He was Michael Jackson impersonator.
Speaker 6: At the time. He was homeless. He was running the
Speaker 6: subway in Manhattan and appeared emotionally distressed. He was yelling
Speaker 6: about needing food and water. No one was helping him.
Speaker 6: He was yelling that he didn't care about going to jail.
Speaker 6: He was ready to die, and this was reportedly frightening
Speaker 6: other writers. Daniel Penny, a twenty four year old former marine,
Speaker 6: approached Neely and placed him in a lethal chocold that
Speaker 6: lasted anywhere from five to seven minutes, depending on if
Speaker 6: you ask the prosecution or the defense. Penny was repeatedly
Speaker 6: told by other writers that Neely appeared to be dying.
Speaker 6: By the time first aid was being administered, he was
Speaker 6: already dead. Daniel Penny was let go after being questioned
Speaker 6: by police, and only arrested eleven days later. I think
Speaker 6: this is the part where they're like, do we want
Speaker 6: to let them go or charge him now? I think
Speaker 6: that's kind of what they're doing here. On June fourteenth,
Speaker 6: twenty twenty three, he was indicted on a charge of
Speaker 6: second degree manslaughter. The trial scheduled to start on October eighth,
Speaker 6: twenty twenty four. So this episode also, I think it
Speaker 6: fails in a lot of ways in this depiction of
Speaker 6: active clubs. It uses certain terms, like the term active clubs,
Speaker 6: which I was surprised they just I'm surprised they use
Speaker 6: because that's kind of a more of like a niche term,
Speaker 6: but they just made it to be this like MMA
Speaker 6: elite Nazi squad. And I think them trying to include
Speaker 6: this bit does an incredible disservice to trying to depict
Speaker 6: the killing of Jordan Neely, which, first of all, like
Speaker 6: there's already problematic aspects of right of turning this this
Speaker 6: like really fucked up thing into a piece of entertainment.
Speaker 6: That's kind of why I started this episode with that monologue.
Speaker 6: But I think by cramming so many other elements in here,
Speaker 6: like this, like this homophobia angle, this this this active
Speaker 6: club angle, it does a real disservice to the actual
Speaker 6: incident that they're trying to comment on, where there was
Speaker 6: a man in a very crowded subway who very publicly
Speaker 6: was basically lynched because a few writers were not super
Speaker 6: comfortable when riding the subway because this man was yelling
Speaker 6: for food and water. So it's not great, But after
Speaker 6: watching Leave the World Behind Civil War on this, I
Speaker 6: think this is the best depiction of our current political
Speaker 6: moment out of all of those three things, which is
Speaker 6: a pretty fucked up bar. I guess, Molly, do you
Speaker 6: have any other thoughts on how they depict Nazi stuff
Speaker 6: in this?
Speaker 11: I mean not well, not well, bitch, uh no. The
Speaker 11: I was just gonna say, I was looking on Reddit
Speaker 11: and seeing people's people's takes on it on the Law
Speaker 11: and Order Reddit, and I found this fantastic comment. They
Speaker 11: did take the Daniel Penny case but change the whole
Speaker 11: story to make Penny look guilty, probably to make the
Speaker 11: real Penny look like a bad guy in real life.
Speaker 6: Objection, objection, objection in your honor, object mods mods not yeah,
Speaker 6: not great because also yeah, it also like for people
Speaker 6: who are like looking at this as a parallel to Jordania,
Speaker 6: like oh, why do they change so many details to
Speaker 6: make him look even more guilty, and like, no, that's
Speaker 6: not what's happening at all.
Speaker 11: Like I think they did a disservice to that story
Speaker 11: by changing so many elements. I mean, like you said,
Speaker 11: there's there's a conversation to be had about the ethics
Speaker 11: of depicting the story as entertainment period. Yeah, but if
Speaker 11: they're going to do it, and they've been doing it
Speaker 11: for thirty years, right, that's just what Law and Order does.
Speaker 11: If they're going to do it, I think they have
Speaker 11: a responsibility to not do this, to not do this.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well again, they have bigger fish to fry since
Speaker 6: there's that upcoming worse than January sixth attack head led
Speaker 6: by these MMA guys who are stockpiling this explosive, so
Speaker 6: watch out for that, I guess.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I guess I'll have to watch the rest of
Speaker 11: the season to see if the MMA gym blows up
Speaker 11: New York.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I will not be until they release a direct
Speaker 6: follow up, So I think that doesn't for us today.
Speaker 6: This is already way too This episode's already long episode.
Speaker 6: It's already longer the Law and Order episode, So that
Speaker 6: doesn't for us today. Thank you for listening. If you
Speaker 6: want to check out my review of Civil War, it's
Speaker 6: very short, but it's kind of to the point. I'm
Speaker 6: on letterboxed at Hungry bow Tie, and then the reviews
Speaker 6: that I liked, which are underneath my own review, go
Speaker 6: into more depth about kind of the problems with that
Speaker 6: film in my opinion and other people's opinion. Anyway, Where
Speaker 6: can people find you online? Molly Oh?
Speaker 11: I am on Twitter at Socialist Dog Mom and my
Speaker 11: newsletter The Devil's Advocates on Ghost and Think Us. That's
Speaker 11: it for me. Oh, I'm podcasting sometimes now, no objections
Speaker 11: for me. Yeah, I guess by the time you're listening
Speaker 11: to this, you can listen to my latest episode the
Speaker 11: show yesterday.
Speaker 6: All right, see you on the other side.
Speaker 5: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the show. It to me
Speaker 5: James today, and I'm joined by doctor maung Zani, who's
Speaker 5: an activist and scholar with thirty five years of experience
Speaker 5: advocating against genocide and for freedom and Burma and one
Speaker 5: of the founding members of the anarchist activist platform Forces
Speaker 5: of Renewal Southeast Asia. Welcome to the show, doctor Journey.
Speaker 7: Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, yeah, it's.
Speaker 5: A pleasure to have you here. So and also I
Speaker 5: should mention Nobel Peace Prize nominee as of as yesterday
Speaker 5: or the day before the congratulations on that.
Speaker 6: Also, yeah, thanks so much.
Speaker 7: It happened in January, before the deadline, and so I
Speaker 7: just released the announcement you know for the Burmese New
Speaker 7: Year you know occasion, because yes, you know, the country
Speaker 7: has been torn apart by you know, armed revolutions genocide,
Speaker 7: the racism, anti Muslim violence, and so thought like this
Speaker 7: may be a tiny sliver or positive thing. And so
Speaker 7: if activists want to have, you know, there's some sustenance
Speaker 7: for their grassroots revolution, here's somebody who's who has been
Speaker 7: grassroots for thirty five years. So that's why I released it.
Speaker 7: But that's you know, the secondary anyway.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I know, it's if it can get the world
Speaker 5: to look at what's happening and pay attention, then I
Speaker 5: think it's a good thing. So one thing I wanted
Speaker 5: to ask you about today to start off with, is
Speaker 5: something that when I talk to people in the US
Speaker 5: and the UK about the revolution and the cure in Meanma,
Speaker 5: the context of like ultranationalist Buddhism is one that is
Speaker 5: very hard, I think for people who don't have a
Speaker 5: great understanding of how that works to understand. So I
Speaker 5: was wondering if we could start off with you explaining
Speaker 5: like this, this long and painful history of like ultranationalist
Speaker 5: Buddhism in Myanmar and how it's empowered the genocide of
Speaker 5: Muslim people and also the hunter today.
Speaker 7: Well, when we talk about you know, ultra nationalism or
Speaker 7: various strengths of nationalism. I think we need to periodize
Speaker 7: or put in different historical periods because you know, the
Speaker 7: term nationalism was a progressive, emancipatory ideological umbrella when the
Speaker 7: local society or primarily Buddhists and also other people, but
Speaker 7: the majority political systems were built on the foundation of
Speaker 7: Buddhism in Burma, you know, like different kingdoms. But when
Speaker 7: when when we were under the British for one hundred
Speaker 7: and twenty four years, the you know internally warring Buddhist kingdoms,
Speaker 7: you know, like Rakine and Morn and Burmese and Sean,
Speaker 7: they all at Buddhist kingdoms and they formed this oppositional
Speaker 7: ideological identity as you know, nationalists Buddhists that would confront
Speaker 7: the alien colonial British rule. So in that sense, you know,
Speaker 7: nationalism was not a bad thing at all because it
Speaker 7: was you know, primarily for image concipatory struggle. But then
Speaker 7: like you know, then fast forward post colonial independence period
Speaker 7: nineteen forty eight onward. Right when when the British rule
Speaker 7: was removed at the end of the Second World War
Speaker 7: three years after the the oppositional Buddhist nationalists, you know,
Speaker 7: umbrella identity collapse, right so Raklines want to full ground
Speaker 7: their ethnic city given that the main oppositional commonality, the
Speaker 7: colonial colonialism, was no more. And so that's when the
Speaker 7: ethnicity was reinjected, you know, into the ideological formation. And interestingly,
Speaker 7: as you would know as well, the end of the
Speaker 7: Second World War was followed by the Coal War, right.
Speaker 7: And on the one hand, like you've got you know,
Speaker 7: godless communists, atheistic Russia, a Soviet Union and in China.
Speaker 7: And then on the other hand, you know, essentially Christian West,
Speaker 7: you know, or at least allegedly Christian West. And in
Speaker 7: that context, the alternationalism was essentially encouraged to buy the
Speaker 7: by the United States and allies. You know, like if
Speaker 7: you that this is nothing new. If you look at
Speaker 7: the rights of like a socialist governments across the Middle East,
Speaker 7: you know, primarily Muslim Middle East, you would find like
Speaker 7: the rights of Muslim brotherhood and you know what we
Speaker 7: call today fundamentalist islamicist right, but that you know, the
Speaker 7: Buddhist with at no central orientation were encouraged you know,
Speaker 7: by the United States through grants and aid. The same
Speaker 7: way like you know, the rights of you know, fundamentalist
Speaker 7: Islam was encouraged or or midwifi with the US money.
Speaker 7: Because this is important because through the eyes of the
Speaker 7: coal war strategists, the only way that egalitarian leftist ideologies
Speaker 7: could be confronted was through this, the faith based ideology.
Speaker 7: So I don't want I'm not saying that the Burmese
Speaker 7: nationalists and also nationalists were not responsible for their own growth.
Speaker 7: But I also what I'm saying is that there was
Speaker 7: a larger global context in which this monster was hatched. Yes,
Speaker 7: and so, but even you know, like the going back
Speaker 7: to the nineteen thirties, after the War Street collapse, you know,
Speaker 7: then like you know, the the recession pervaded across the world,
Speaker 7: and colonial economies like Burma with massive agricultural explorer economy,
Speaker 7: the British founded expedient to basically turn to a religious
Speaker 7: divide and rule, and like you know, the Burmese Buddhist
Speaker 7: laboring classes were pitted against the Indian laboring classes of
Speaker 7: different religions, but that was more like the Buddhist nationalists
Speaker 7: and non nationalists versus you know, like what we were
Speaker 7: called today migrant laborers from India, you know, under the
Speaker 7: because we were part of British Empire. After the British left,
Speaker 7: the Muslims began to be scapegoaded, and then finally I
Speaker 7: think like the we cannot understand yes, you know very
Speaker 7: well the nationalism or alter nationalism without some kind of
Speaker 7: political organization. And that organization is what we call Burmese
Speaker 7: political or state, whether it's controlled by the civilian elected
Speaker 7: politicians or the military military as an organization, political state's
Speaker 7: always there, whether it's you know, fascism in Nazi Germany
Speaker 7: or Italy or Japan or like you know, the genocidal
Speaker 7: Mimah about fifteen years ago. State was the engine. Actually
Speaker 7: it's not the people that were generating this toxic ideology.
Speaker 7: It was state that was inventing, manipulating and mobilizing towards
Speaker 7: their sinister end.
Speaker 5: Right Yeah, And it's the divide and rules strategy and
Speaker 5: the full I guess the falling back to this these
Speaker 5: kind of colonial methods of rule is something that I
Speaker 5: guess I want people to understand is still happening in
Speaker 5: Burma or Myanmar. Right we see the military that the
Speaker 5: junta doing it right now, right like attempting to ferment
Speaker 5: inter ethnic conflicts to prevent the formation of a popular
Speaker 5: front or a coalition against against their rule.
Speaker 7: Right, yes, I think the here the one observation I
Speaker 7: want to make is a you know, independence from Britain,
Speaker 7: restoration of say like you know, more than form of
Speaker 7: sovereignty to Burmese people was not a clean break from
Speaker 7: the colonial past. Because the state in Burma as it
Speaker 7: exists or it has existed over the last seventy plus years,
Speaker 7: remains a colonial state. It was an instrument of economic
Speaker 7: exploitation or racialized or ethnicized administration. And all the security
Speaker 7: laws and you know, ordinances and whatnot, they were formulated
Speaker 7: with the interest of the ruling colonial interests or power
Speaker 7: like at the time British and what the what independence
Speaker 7: did was really transfer of this internally racialized entity we
Speaker 7: call state from the white man's hand to the Brahman's hand,
Speaker 7: you know, the Burmese. So so when when you the
Speaker 7: state wasn't actually finding it difficult to foment racial or
Speaker 7: inter we don't use the term race here, inter ethnic
Speaker 7: conflict or inter religious conflict. The state itself embodied this
Speaker 7: divide and rule outlook because it remains internally colonial, you
Speaker 7: see what I mean? And so so I think that
Speaker 7: it isn't simply the policies of the you know, X
Speaker 7: y Z regimes that have rude Burma since independence. But
Speaker 7: the state itself is conducive to, or you know, supportive
Speaker 7: of this kind of inter religious and inter ethnic contest
Speaker 7: because there there are no principles of equality as as
Speaker 7: ethnic or religious communities or there there there was no
Speaker 7: sense of you know, horizontal or vertical fairness among the
Speaker 7: political class and the majoritarian agrarian communities, and so the
Speaker 7: state is self problematic. Yeah, that's why, like you know
Speaker 7: that when ol San Suci came to you know, semi power,
Speaker 7: because the military is still controlled or backseat drove for
Speaker 7: a regime, she found it really difficult to maneuver because
Speaker 7: she was straight jacketed in this you know internally colonial shell.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7: And then so so I think, of course, like you know,
Speaker 7: you're it's correct what the military is doing now, say
Speaker 7: in Racine State, where they committed genocide against Rainia Muslims.
Speaker 7: You know, they drove out you know, close to eight
Speaker 7: hundred thousand Rohindas of genocidally across the border to Bangladesh
Speaker 7: in two thousand and seventeen and also sixteen. They are
Speaker 7: now army and training, and you know, forcively conscripting able
Speaker 7: body young Rhindja men into their ranks and to fight
Speaker 7: the progressively militarily stronger recind Buddhist Arakan army. That's just
Speaker 7: one area. But you know, if you look at other
Speaker 7: regions like shun Stay, for instance, there's an extremely complex
Speaker 7: ethnic contestations happening. Right, so what like political scientists call
Speaker 7: like a horizontal violence is taking place, and so it's
Speaker 7: like there are multiple conflicts at work, you know, but
Speaker 7: of course like the military is number one, you know,
Speaker 7: problem maker, but they're also lesser evil forms of like
Speaker 7: political and ethnic conflicts taking place.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think, yeah, it's very much against Shan states.
Speaker 5: I think particularly complicated and interesting as we look at
Speaker 5: the situation now in the different like both in the
Speaker 5: liberated areas or the areas without control of the like
Speaker 5: NAPI or state that they may still be controlled kind
Speaker 5: of in a sense by other kind of like pseudo states.
Speaker 5: I guess are you familiar with this? There's this argument?
Speaker 5: I think it's probably like articulated. I'm sure you are articulated,
Speaker 5: most notably by James C. Scott of like and he
Speaker 5: looks at the example of me and Ma has been
Speaker 5: rightly criticized in some areas of like the mountains, as
Speaker 5: an area where people can I guess, choose to opt
Speaker 5: out of the state or or to be where the
Speaker 5: state is not completely consolidated, I guess, and never has been.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I know, I know Gym's work, you know, like
Speaker 7: the the he divides people into valleys and you know, mountains.
Speaker 7: You know what's interesting is like you know, it's it's
Speaker 7: it's a lot more complex than this, you know, the
Speaker 7: the dualistic understanding of like hill people versus plain people,
Speaker 7: because you know, like even in the in the hills
Speaker 7: that there are you know, highlands and and and there
Speaker 7: are plateaus and.
Speaker 6: You know the you know and so.
Speaker 7: But also I think like that I find it more
Speaker 7: useful to look at this not through geographic lens, but
Speaker 7: through the colonial lens, because you've got the colonial state,
Speaker 7: because like you know, Gym is essentially anti status. But
Speaker 7: as a matter of value, yeah, I am with him,
Speaker 7: you know, because I'm bent on the anarchism as my value,
Speaker 7: you know. But analytically, I think, but given the fact
Speaker 7: that the colonial state continues to live on and continue
Speaker 7: to haunt the Burmese society. I think, like the way
Speaker 7: I look at it is like you know, center and peripheree, right,
Speaker 7: irrespective of the altitude. I mean, at this point, like
Speaker 7: altitudes no longer really strategically important because you know, we're
Speaker 7: we live in the age of drones and like you know,
Speaker 7: MiG twenty nine and sixteen, mountains are no longer cover
Speaker 7: you see what I mean, right, Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, the construct of the mountains as like nonstate space
Speaker 5: or place where you can go to choose to be nonstate.
Speaker 5: I think like it's interesting to hear young Bamar PDFs
Speaker 5: fighters now be like, oh, I chose to go to
Speaker 5: the mountains, even though it sits very much alongside that
Speaker 5: Canelian analysis that you had of like the wild people
Speaker 5: or like quote unquote savagery, right, which or when I
Speaker 5: speak to Bamar people who are like twenty one now
Speaker 5: who joined the PDFs at eighteen seventeen after the coup,
Speaker 5: they had all been very much indoctrinated with the idea
Speaker 5: of non Bamar people as quote savages or wild people
Speaker 5: who lived in the quote mountains or jungles, and like
Speaker 5: choosing to go there to escape the state. I think
Speaker 5: it's really interesting to hear like that analysis reproduced in
Speaker 5: their storytelling of their own lives.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, I think you know that it has
Speaker 7: been in the Burmese political psyche. You move away from
Speaker 7: the Senate and you are more autonomous, and you are
Speaker 7: you know, freer from the right, you know, the reach
Speaker 7: of the center, right, because we we still have this
Speaker 7: center periphee mentality. Yeah, I mean you know culturally, yes,
Speaker 7: you're absolutely right. Uh, the way people in the center,
Speaker 7: like the group that I belong to, Burmese Buddhist majority,
Speaker 7: we look down on people that are on the periphree right,
Speaker 7: that the way people dress. I mean it's also like
Speaker 7: you know, the rural and urban divide as well, you know,
Speaker 7: the even like those who grew up in the in
Speaker 7: the non majoritarians, you know regions, you know what I
Speaker 7: call it, the peripherys of the Burmese colonial state. When
Speaker 7: they settle in Rangoon or Mandally or or you know
Speaker 7: major urban areas, they they begin to dress, they begin
Speaker 7: to I mean, they necessarily adapt to the the the
Speaker 7: Burmese way of life, the majority dominant you know, customs
Speaker 7: and whatnot, and so so I still stick with the
Speaker 7: you know this whole colonial relations the organizationally and psychologically.
Speaker 7: The yeah, I mean also that we have the vocabulary.
Speaker 7: If you want to oppose a central state or the
Speaker 7: central regime, we say, we take refuge in the forest, right,
Speaker 7: And we take refuge in the forest or under the
Speaker 7: tree against the scorching sun or like pouring monsoon rain right,
Speaker 7: or the evil center right. And so so it's all
Speaker 7: built in. It's in the language even you know, like
Speaker 7: organizing an armed revolt or going underground is described as
Speaker 7: taking refuge in the forest the jungle, you know. And
Speaker 7: and and what's what's interesting though, is like you know,
Speaker 7: from the state's perspective, if you're taking refuge in the
Speaker 7: in the jungle, of course, like that's treason us and
Speaker 7: you know, that is an act of criminality. But if
Speaker 7: you if you use that language, or if you if
Speaker 7: you do exactly the same thing literally physically, if you're
Speaker 7: a Buddhist monk, you know, you you are considered holier
Speaker 7: than monks that continue to live in the city, you
Speaker 7: know what I mean. So you go, you know, the
Speaker 7: forest monks versus like a city, town or village monk. Right.
Speaker 7: So this is quite a fascinating linguistic you know, twist
Speaker 7: here on one hand, like you know, but from the
Speaker 7: revolutionaries perspective, if you're in the jungle, you grow certain
Speaker 7: aura around you. You're in the jungle, right, and you
Speaker 7: don't you don't wear jeens or you don't look like
Speaker 7: city people by you're wearing you know, like the fatigue,
Speaker 7: army fatigue and you know, jungle the paraphernalia. And as
Speaker 7: a revolutionary that's like, you know, that's I check with
Speaker 7: our time.
Speaker 1: You see what I mean.
Speaker 7: Revolutions start or organize around jungles, you know, I mean,
Speaker 7: so it has nothing to do with altitude. You see
Speaker 7: what I mean?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's just yeah, I like that periphery
Speaker 5: colonial model.
Speaker 6: So I wonder like, I think people who.
Speaker 5: Listen to this will both be very much like amenable
Speaker 5: to anarchism and see the problems that state societies create
Speaker 5: and also to the revolution in me Emma and to
Speaker 5: the young people and then not so young people who
Speaker 5: are fighting it. I wonder like, how do we build
Speaker 5: a future for Memma that doesn't replicate this colonial corpora
Speaker 5: fhery model that doesn't the scene quiton of the state
Speaker 5: that's centered in Napidor is like the it's this use
Speaker 5: of violence to control and this colonial relationship.
Speaker 6: Right, so how do we not replicate.
Speaker 5: That in the post revolution future?
Speaker 7: Well, I think you know, there's a danger in or
Speaker 7: should I say, the romanticizing the mini states or substates,
Speaker 7: right if establishing autonomous states does not confront the colonial
Speaker 7: nature of the state from which these meaning states you know,
Speaker 7: emerge as oppositional entities. In other words, whatever administrative structures
Speaker 7: that you know, the the the current armed revolutionary organizations
Speaker 7: set up, they need to first make sure they don't
Speaker 7: replicate that the internally colonial nature of the state that
Speaker 7: they have been fighting and to some degree of like
Speaker 7: success at this point in history, right, because the coloniality
Speaker 7: is very much connected with the idea of pure ethnic identity,
Speaker 7: you see what I mean, and in this day and age,
Speaker 7: I mean whether I mean you've been to current State
Speaker 7: and other places in Burma and and you know in
Speaker 7: the Middle East at Curtis and so. But they're they're
Speaker 7: they're always like, you know, the idea of pure ethnic identity, right,
Speaker 7: even if you're a revolutionary. But but but the truth,
Speaker 7: the truth is, you know, even small places you will
Speaker 7: find Muslims and Hindus and Christians or people with different
Speaker 7: migratory histories and class background. You flettened them into a
Speaker 7: single ethnic identity, right that well, that that that in
Speaker 7: and I mean self perception, we are a new Kuran
Speaker 7: state or Karany state or Kachin state, right, even Kachin
Speaker 7: the late the term label the label Kachin in the north.
Speaker 7: You know, they have about like the three or four
Speaker 7: major groups there, and and some resent being referred to
Speaker 7: as Kitchin, but they go along because they are against
Speaker 7: the more evil CenTra, a Burmese Buddhist state, right right,
Speaker 7: so so so so so that's why when I when
Speaker 7: I explain to you, you know, at the outset of
Speaker 7: this the conversation, this like your Buddhist identities merged as
Speaker 7: an oppositional umbrella, anti colonial identity against the British when
Speaker 7: that common oppressors has gone home, and then we start
Speaker 7: fighting each other, you see what I mean? So number one,
Speaker 7: it's like you know, that is very very important. These
Speaker 7: new entities do not define their political organizations along any
Speaker 7: idea of like you know, blood and soil. Yeah, and
Speaker 7: that's very very important.
Speaker 6: Otherwise we we.
Speaker 7: We replicate what we fought against. Right. And secondly, I
Speaker 7: think no military organizations should control administrations. But at the moment,
Speaker 7: you know, with the exception of the current National Union,
Speaker 7: most other ethnically organized armed resistance organizations in Burma, when
Speaker 7: they set up administrations, you know, administrators are guys who
Speaker 7: are you know, like carrying AK forty seven or some
Speaker 7: other weapons. You see what I mean? Because like what
Speaker 7: they need to do is as soon as like that
Speaker 7: they have secure any like ancestral region, what they need
Speaker 7: to do is they need to separate law and order
Speaker 7: maintenance from the defense. Yeah, And the reason we have
Speaker 7: gotten into this bloody mess is because the military did
Speaker 7: not separate law and order administration as a civilian function
Speaker 7: function from the national defense. So the current progressively militarily
Speaker 7: successful ethnic resistance organizations have to demilitarized self consciously and
Speaker 7: as a matter of policy their new administrations. So these
Speaker 7: two things, you know, move away from blood and soil
Speaker 7: idea of identity and demilitarized and civilianize the administration.
Speaker 5: Yeah, do you have hope? Like I find when I
Speaker 5: talk to especially younger people in the PDF, who are
Speaker 5: most people are like maybe it's easier for them to
Speaker 5: see the obvious the colonial relationship and the way that
Speaker 5: these constructs have harmed them and prevented them from finding
Speaker 5: solidarity with people of other ethnic groups. That's something that
Speaker 5: like sometimes they will articulate to me, right that, like,
Speaker 5: you know, we were told these people were bad and
Speaker 5: evil and savage, and they're not, and there are allies
Speaker 5: in this fight against dictatorship. Do you think that that's
Speaker 5: replicated in the in the leadership of eros like that
Speaker 5: that idea that this blood and soil nationalism has been
Speaker 5: the blood soil identity, I should say, is something that's
Speaker 5: like a big problematic and devisive and will always be
Speaker 5: so like, do you not see that replicated so much?
Speaker 7: Well, there is still you know, the old conservative orientations
Speaker 7: in these ros with respect to two things, the acceptance
Speaker 7: of you know, younger generations into policy making circles, right yeah.
Speaker 7: And then the other one is the half of the
Speaker 7: population of these ethnic communities have remained marginalized, and that
Speaker 7: is war men, if you you know, I mean, on
Speaker 7: one hand, it does make sense that you know, men
Speaker 7: with guns and men with like you know, the fifty
Speaker 7: years of revolutionary experience are going to play leading role.
Speaker 7: But these guys have to make a conscious effort in
Speaker 7: changing their own value system, which is like, you know,
Speaker 7: bring in new generations with more progressive ideas into policy
Speaker 7: making circle, leadership circle, and bring in warming. And you know,
Speaker 7: I wish I understand I know more about the Kurdish
Speaker 7: revolutionary organizations. My own very limited understanding is that you know,
Speaker 7: gender equality, I mean, for the for the Islamophobic crowd,
Speaker 7: it might be quite shocking, but the Kurdish revolutionary organizations
Speaker 7: are you know, much more gender equal, yeah than like
Speaker 7: you know, white democratic societies.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's right. And I think their analysis, if I
Speaker 5: can sort of summarize like opposed thought very is that
Speaker 5: colonialism begins in the patriarchal family, and that the first
Speaker 5: colonized subject is the woman. And therefore, if we can't
Speaker 5: decolonize off amelia and community relations, then we have little
Speaker 5: hope of decononizing ourselves as a group or as a society.
Speaker 5: So that their analysis rest in the same place as
Speaker 5: yours does. And I think that there's I think increased
Speaker 5: solidarity and communication between the Kurdish freedom movement and the
Speaker 5: resistance movements in mem which I hope can only do
Speaker 5: good for that. Like, especially with regard to gender relations,
Speaker 5: it was interesting to see the Kereni K and d
Speaker 5: F Battalian five issued a statement which said that like
Speaker 5: they had a long way to go in terms of
Speaker 5: gender relations, and they looked to the Kurdish model of
Speaker 5: example of where they can get to, which at least
Speaker 5: it gives me hope that these things can get better.
Speaker 7: Yeah. I mean K and DF is a remarkable you
Speaker 7: know organization, crenatural defense organization, right, Kranny, Kranny. I mean
Speaker 7: they are led by very progressive sort of like you know,
Speaker 7: semi anarchist type young people. Yeah, you know, the the
Speaker 7: ethnicity and gender discrimination are self consciously avoided and discouraged. Yeah.
Speaker 7: So basically, other we we cannot we cannot have a
Speaker 7: successful revolutionary movement, you know, just by trying to you know,
Speaker 7: take power from the center. You know, there has to
Speaker 7: be you know, it's an rebellion. It's different from a
Speaker 7: revolutionary movement. Revolutionary movement involves a shifting fundamentally the non
Speaker 7: progressive values and outlooks. Right. That that is something that
Speaker 7: needs to happen, and that that, in my view U
Speaker 7: is a deeply you know, intellectual psychological process. But I
Speaker 7: think I think that the the the that is happening,
Speaker 7: you know, and so the so that that that ideological
Speaker 7: progressive shift is it's going to hit the uh, the
Speaker 7: ceiling at some point because you've got old men in
Speaker 7: a decision making positions who are not who haven't bought
Speaker 7: in entirely uh, the need to shift their value system.
Speaker 7: And then partially it's not simply ideological, it's also self interest.
Speaker 7: When you're when you're the when you're the boss for
Speaker 7: twenty five years, you know, you're a little like autocredit tyrant,
Speaker 7: you know what I mean, right, organization, So shifting the
Speaker 7: you know, giving women and younger generation spaces me you know,
Speaker 7: you shutting up fifty percent of the time and letting
Speaker 7: the other you know, people speak fifty percent, you know,
Speaker 7: like they're no more like monologue for one hour, you
Speaker 7: see what I mean. Yeah, so even like you know,
Speaker 7: the airtime, you have less airtime, that's like you're less.
Speaker 7: That's your self interest your airtime, you know, let alone
Speaker 7: economic and other interests. This is just like talking in
Speaker 7: a meeting, you see what I mean. I've been through
Speaker 7: like some of some of the meetings and stuff, and
Speaker 7: so you know, like guys think that only they have
Speaker 7: important things to say, you know, especially military matters or
Speaker 7: big items, okay, like women talk about welfare of children
Speaker 7: and you know, widows kind of shit.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, this is very sort of still like separate
Speaker 5: spheres gender model that I know. Yeah, I have hope
Speaker 5: for the young generation. But I remember one of the
Speaker 5: guys as I met, he told me that, like he said,
Speaker 5: he said, like three years ago, I had some gender problems,
Speaker 5: and I didn't understand what he meant, and he was like,
Speaker 5: I thought that women couldn't do things that men could do,
Speaker 5: and now I realized I was wrong. And they were
Speaker 5: telling me that the police wouldn't there there was a
Speaker 5: taboo to walk underneath a woman's lunch. Yes, so yeah,
Speaker 5: so they hung them around their protest camps when they
Speaker 5: were in Yangon fighting the police, and that the police
Speaker 5: wouldn't come in, so that you were like, oh, this
Speaker 5: is when I realized that sexism hurts everyone. So I
Speaker 5: think it's yeah, I have hope for that generation. I
Speaker 5: think it's It's been one of the things that has
Speaker 5: given me so much hope for the world in general
Speaker 5: as I've been covering the revolution in the Amma, is
Speaker 5: to see people reconstruct and change their identities in a
Speaker 5: progressive and inclusive way, and people, you know, people in
Speaker 5: this countries and the UK as well are so stuff
Speaker 5: in their sort of regressive identities. And to see young
Speaker 5: people there acknowledged that sexism, homophobia, these these racist and
Speaker 5: inter ethnic like hierarchies are damaging everyone. It's given me
Speaker 5: a great deal of hope for the future.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: I share your optimism. And part of it is, you know,
Speaker 7: the progressives or people or younger people or like older
Speaker 7: people with progressive outlooks. I mean, everything is constructed, you know,
Speaker 7: like if you change the material situation in terms of
Speaker 7: you know, who's making decisions or you know, under what
Speaker 7: conditions decisions are made, I think that people are able
Speaker 7: to shift their thinking, you see what I mean. I mean,
Speaker 7: And so I think like that, but definitely that political
Speaker 7: leadership is very important, you know. I mean I don't
Speaker 7: I don't believe in this like a goddess idea of
Speaker 7: like a group of men, uh you know, you know,
Speaker 7: guiding guiding the herd. Right, But at the same time,
Speaker 7: I think like these older men should meet the younger
Speaker 7: generations halfway. Yeah, And I'm not saying like okay, all right,
Speaker 7: you know, like a you know, like don't trust anyone
Speaker 7: above forty because I'm sixty, so I still want to
Speaker 7: be trusted. And but yeah, I mean I'm sixty and
Speaker 7: I can take ship from eighteen year old junior friend
Speaker 7: or colleague could tell me you're full of shit. And
Speaker 7: here's the reason I listen, Right, So I assume, like
Speaker 7: other other people my age, my generation, will be able
Speaker 7: to uh do the adjustment right and especially for the
Speaker 7: better and the But but I think that said there,
Speaker 7: they are really articulate young people and women, yes, who
Speaker 7: whose voices need to come to the full like you know,
Speaker 7: like people the people I mean, like we don't live
Speaker 7: in isolation anymore. Like in the nineteen sixties and seventies
Speaker 7: and agies, Burma was very isolated and so you know,
Speaker 7: and so the ideological currents did not reach within the
Speaker 7: Burmese society. So that the type of religions or religions
Speaker 7: I mean Christianity, the type of Christian practices outlook whatnot
Speaker 7: remain like extremely conservative compared with like you know, even
Speaker 7: like a conservative like Christian country like USA, yea. And
Speaker 7: but now, like you know, with we live in the
Speaker 7: social media internet age, and so you know, young people
Speaker 7: you know use the term like intersectionality, you know what
Speaker 7: I mean. They start to see like race, class, gender
Speaker 7: and other issues, you know, like inter intersecting and then
Speaker 7: producing or reproducing or ending like different forms of you know,
Speaker 7: repression and you know, exploitations and whatnot. We still have
Speaker 7: a very very long way to go. We can't shift.
Speaker 7: But that's not not to say that, you know, we
Speaker 7: should feel like discouraged, you know, but we we We
Speaker 7: won't see instant changes.
Speaker 5: No, yeah, but I think over time, Yeah, I have
Speaker 5: an deal of a great deal of optimism for the
Speaker 5: future of Memma, doctor Sanny. It's it's been really great talking.
Speaker 5: Where can people, especially people who are interested in your
Speaker 5: work and in the future of Memma, How how can
Speaker 5: they follow along with your work and with these struggles
Speaker 5: to create a more equal and just in democratic in
Speaker 5: the non state sense Burma.
Speaker 7: I mean one. I mean, I use social media, especially
Speaker 7: like in Facebook a lot, and I begin like consciously
Speaker 7: writing in Burmese language because I don't need to inform
Speaker 7: the world, because the world know the ship that's going
Speaker 7: on in Burma, and and so I think the my
Speaker 7: Facebook's okay. But if if people read like English or
Speaker 7: even like you know, other languages you know, our own
Speaker 7: mother tongue. Uh, the the Forces of Renewal Southeast Asia
Speaker 7: four c dot com CEO. It's a good platform. We
Speaker 7: encourage and actually we seek out uh you know, very
Speaker 7: radical ideas in multiple languages Burmese or or Chin or
Speaker 7: Karani or whatever language they want to use. We don't
Speaker 7: censor anyone. They can say anything as long as they're
Speaker 7: not advocating fascist them are violence or like you know,
Speaker 7: things like that. And so yeah, I encourage to take
Speaker 7: a glandset our South East Asia Network of anarchistic activists
Speaker 7: and scholars.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, it's a great website. I'll inclear a link
Speaker 5: to it in the description. Thank you so much for
Speaker 5: your time this evening. We really appreciate it.
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