Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions. Ah, it's it could
Speaker 1: happen here a podcast about things falling apart, and today
Speaker 1: I'm I'm happy that we're we're recording this right now,
Speaker 1: James and Garrison, because we all just got a historic
Speaker 1: example of something falling apart Elon Musk's Big Silly rocket.
Speaker 1: We're recording this about a day or so after it
Speaker 1: exploded in mid air for the Gulf Coast, showering a
Speaker 1: turtle sanctuary with toxic waste. It's such a such a
Speaker 1: fun news that's comically perfect. Is really it is pretty cool?
Speaker 2: Perfect unless it crashed landed in a kitten farm. That
Speaker 2: couldn't really be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, perfect, No, I mean it. What's nice is that
Speaker 1: it's given me. It's made me feel young again because
Speaker 1: when I was a wee lad. I was attending a
Speaker 1: speech to debate rally in Cooper, Texas when the last
Speaker 1: Space shuttle to explode exploded directly over us, blowing out
Speaker 1: a bunch of the windows in the building and raining. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was, it was. It was. Yeah. So I whenever
Speaker 1: whenever a space shuttle explodes over of some sort, explodes
Speaker 1: over Texas, I get powerful nostalgia.
Speaker 2: Well, they they slipped the surly bonds of Verse to
Speaker 2: blow out the windows in a high school in Cooper, Texas.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's how the line goes. It makes me
Speaker 1: think of all the other things I was doing that day,
Speaker 1: which was namely playing Lord of the Rings risk in
Speaker 1: a high school gym. As we as we were wont
Speaker 1: to do great game, one of the better, one of
Speaker 1: the better risk covers. What are we talking about today,
Speaker 1: friendo buddies.
Speaker 2: Wells, Yeah, we're talking.
Speaker 3: About talking about one one man having having a fun
Speaker 3: time on Discord dot com.
Speaker 1: Yeah, doing the human equivalent of being a spaceship that
Speaker 1: explodes in the sky.
Speaker 3: I suppose Discord is not really a dot com. It's
Speaker 3: it's more, it's more it's more of a more of
Speaker 3: an application now. But yes, it is what.
Speaker 2: Good discord and that I'm permanently banned from LEA again,
Speaker 2: what did you do to discord?
Speaker 1: Discord should a video?
Speaker 4: Who's on discord right? Like the worst people, all of
Speaker 4: the worst people. You know.
Speaker 2: We tried to start a discord for the fundraising live show,
Speaker 2: and I tried with several emails and every time it
Speaker 2: came back with ban evasion.
Speaker 3: That is extremely funny, Jims.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I posted the chickens and it has never forgiven me.
Speaker 1: Wow. Well, I mean, you know, those chickens didn't consent
Speaker 1: and they were technically naked, so I think it does
Speaker 1: count as revenge points are always close. Chicken peck, Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: you're one of the pansies. There's a big conflict in
Speaker 1: chicken owners and James has taken aside. So we're talking
Speaker 1: this week about the discord leaks, and this is one
Speaker 1: of those things we came into this kind of debating
Speaker 1: how much detail to go into. But when we brought
Speaker 1: this up, like this is something that gare James and
Speaker 1: I is like a major thing in our bubble for
Speaker 1: the last like week, so we've all been following it.
Speaker 1: But when we brought this up in the work chat.
Speaker 1: Daniel had no idea that this had gone on. So
Speaker 1: we're going to start with a pretty basic overview of
Speaker 1: what people are calling the largest leak of top secret
Speaker 1: US military and defense data since you know Snowden. So
Speaker 1: we're we're going to go over all of that right now.
Speaker 1: I think I want to start by talking about out
Speaker 1: an MMO RPG called war Thunder.
Speaker 2: This is a can you break down MMO RPG for
Speaker 2: those of us.
Speaker 1: It's it's a it's like World of Warcraft. It's a
Speaker 1: big video game that is play that you play online
Speaker 1: with a bunch of strangers. It's a free game. You
Speaker 1: use like modern military weapons to like fight other players.
Speaker 1: And it's kind of well known for having extremely realistic
Speaker 1: renderings and sort of depictions of the functionality of modern
Speaker 1: tanks and armored transports and fighter planes and naval vessels.
Speaker 1: Right so, and it's it's it's like it's it's a
Speaker 1: game for war nerds, right Like there's you you utilize
Speaker 1: like radar in a way that's broadly realistic, Like if
Speaker 1: you shoot, you know, if one tank shoots in another,
Speaker 1: the tank's weaponry works the way it's supposed to in
Speaker 1: the real world. The armor is vulnerable where it's vulnerable
Speaker 1: in the real world. And this is like the appeal
Speaker 1: to the kind of nerds who play this game, and
Speaker 1: as you might guess, from a bunch of people who
Speaker 1: really want to, like, in the most realistic way possible,
Speaker 1: render and fight each other with modern military vehicles. A
Speaker 1: significant number of these dudes are members of various different
Speaker 1: like defense departments right, or at least are employed in
Speaker 1: some degree of various different national military forces several different
Speaker 1: As a result, like when arguments happen, you know, with
Speaker 1: any MMLRPG, if you're playing like World of Warcraft, right,
Speaker 1: and like something gets nerved or something isn't working as
Speaker 1: well as it's opposed to, you'll get these like massive
Speaker 1: threads in the forums where people are like arguing about
Speaker 1: how something needs to be changed or changed back, or
Speaker 1: how there's a glitch or whatever. And because war Thunder
Speaker 1: is so based in realism, when you have these arguments online,
Speaker 1: it's often like, well, you know, the F fifteen shouldn't
Speaker 1: work this way, it should work this way, and people
Speaker 1: will get into arguments about that, and then someone will
Speaker 1: as happened like a couple of weeks ago, I think
Speaker 1: someone will post sensitive and information about the F fifteen
Speaker 1: Strike Eagle in order to prove that it would function
Speaker 1: the way that they are arguing it should function in
Speaker 1: this forum debate. That happened earlier this year, and I
Speaker 1: think with the F fifteen, it wasn't technically top secret information.
Speaker 1: It was information that US citizens were allowed to have
Speaker 1: but not allowed to post online because that's a violation
Speaker 1: of something called ITAR, which is a thing that governs
Speaker 1: the export, essentially of military information and technology. But on
Speaker 1: another situation, I think, like a year or so ago,
Speaker 1: information of it, I believe the F twenty two was
Speaker 1: posted that was extremely sensitive. It was like top secret.
Speaker 1: And these are again like some dude who's got some
Speaker 1: sort of military job and has a clearance and thinks
Speaker 1: that the right way to use it is arguing about
Speaker 1: the video game war Thunder. These are not just Americans.
Speaker 1: I want to be clear about that. In July of
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, there was a player arguing about a
Speaker 1: Challenger two tank who claimed to have been a former
Speaker 1: tank commander with the British Army, and he shared information
Speaker 1: from the Army Equipment Support publication. The information had been
Speaker 1: labeled unclassified, but it was actually classified, and other lakes
Speaker 1: has been a little more galling. A French Army soldier
Speaker 1: leaked information on the Clerk main battle tank that was
Speaker 1: top secret, and a Chinese user leaked capabilities at the
Speaker 1: Chinese Army's DTC ten one hundred and twenty five millimeters
Speaker 1: anti tank round that should not have been leaked. So
Speaker 1: thisat shit keeps happening in war Thunder. It's like a joke,
Speaker 1: like the war Thunder account when these discord leaks happened
Speaker 1: a week or so ago, like joked about it. But
Speaker 1: like the thing that the game is known for, Yeah,
Speaker 1: is these like different people in different national defense apparati
Speaker 1: can't stop themselves from like leaking stop secret info about vehicles.
Speaker 5: It's very funny.
Speaker 2: I guess the only reason I know why War th
Speaker 2: Under exists. I think it's the only reason why we
Speaker 2: know a decent amount of what like what by we
Speaker 2: here and meaning that could like I guess, uh, like
Speaker 2: Western militaries no, which of course we are all members of.
Speaker 2: No about like Russian main battle tanks is from war
Speaker 2: under leaks.
Speaker 4: Yeah, very funny.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you have to assume I would be surprised
Speaker 1: if no one had tried just like having you know,
Speaker 1: an agent from a national security agency in uh oh
Speaker 1: for sure, but they're trying to like be like trying
Speaker 1: to like provoke arguments about Chinese tanks or whatever. I'd
Speaker 1: be shocked if that hasn't happened.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like the overlap between like people who might play
Speaker 2: warth Under anyway and people who might work for a
Speaker 2: national security agency, Like those Van diagrams are a circle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. So it's one of those things where this
Speaker 1: happens a bunch on war th Under. But it's just
Speaker 1: kind of something people joke about because these leaks like
Speaker 1: they're meaningful. I guess to like militaries care about them.
Speaker 1: But like you sitting at home, you hear like, oh, hey,
Speaker 1: details of like the couple of construction of the new
Speaker 1: Abrams like models as leaked. That's not like the same
Speaker 1: as I don't know, Chelsea Manning leaking information about like
Speaker 1: war crimes by the US military in Iraq, or Edward
Speaker 1: Snowden leaking info about like the NSA. Like it's a
Speaker 1: little less relevant to most people. What we started seeing
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks ago is documents top secret label documents,
Speaker 1: like actual pictures of straight up, unredacted, top secret US
Speaker 1: Defense Department documents just kind of filtering out over various discords,
Speaker 1: and they were kind of appearing in random little bits.
Speaker 1: You'd see one that was like an update on the
Speaker 1: war in Ukraine that was kind of showing concerns that
Speaker 1: the US military had about the ability of the Ukrainian
Speaker 1: military to carry out the counter offensive that everybody's expecting
Speaker 1: in the near future. You have like casualty estimates from
Speaker 1: the US military. Another document that was leak had like
Speaker 1: a bunch of information inside the Russian General Staff. So
Speaker 1: these are number one, very serious leaks, right you're talking about,
Speaker 1: especially with the leaks from inside Putin's kind of inner circle.
Speaker 1: You're talking about leaks that could potentially expose a major
Speaker 1: US source inside the Russian government. And you're also talking
Speaker 1: about leaks that just kind of revealed the degree to
Speaker 1: which the CIA has an enormous amount of information apparently
Speaker 1: at least about what's happening inside the Kremlin.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: So these are very significant leaks, but they didn't appear.
Speaker 1: They weren't being like you know, kind of filtered out
Speaker 1: and released by an agency like Wiki leaks. They weren't
Speaker 1: being sent to journalists. They were just kind of showing
Speaker 1: up in these you know, Discord is basically a series
Speaker 1: of chat rooms, and they were just kind of showing
Speaker 1: up in different discords. So this is, you know, a mystery,
Speaker 1: and it's the kind of mystery that, like a certain
Speaker 1: kind of person who is extremely online is not going
Speaker 1: to be able to get out of their head and
Speaker 1: is going to kind of try to trace back to
Speaker 1: its origin. And in the case of this specific mystery,
Speaker 1: the nerd who could not get it out of their
Speaker 1: head and decided to trace it back to its origin
Speaker 1: was my former boss at Bellingcat, Eric Tohler. Eric is
Speaker 1: a very nice guy, probably the most talented and skilled
Speaker 1: researcher that I've ever met in my life. And you know,
Speaker 1: Eric started seeing these, like everyone else, these top secret documents,
Speaker 1: and was like, where the fuck are these coming from?
Speaker 1: And this is one of those things we'll talk about.
Speaker 1: It's become extremely controversial among a certain set of people
Speaker 1: in the day since. But when this kind of started,
Speaker 1: Number one, you can't really deny there was an intense
Speaker 1: public interest in figuring out what the origin point of
Speaker 1: these was because that was the only way to figure
Speaker 1: out are the these actual leaks. When you see something
Speaker 1: that's just like listed as a top secret document randomly
Speaker 1: on the internet, if you call up the US government
Speaker 1: and you say, hey, is this real top secret impot,
Speaker 1: They're not gonna say yes, right like, you don't get
Speaker 1: that response from them, I mean.
Speaker 3: And especially right now with all of like the AI
Speaker 3: chat generation tools, Generating fake documents is one of the
Speaker 3: main things people are doing for disinfo, generating like fake sources,
Speaker 3: fake documents. Of course, you can like edit things further
Speaker 3: to like make them seem more realistic, but yes, you
Speaker 3: have someone who is extremely curious is going to wonder
Speaker 3: if this is actually like a real thing or if
Speaker 3: this is just some like bullshit prank or something.
Speaker 1: And there were edits of these documents did also go violin.
Speaker 1: In fact, Kucker Carlson one of the one of the
Speaker 1: original documents shows kind of US estimates for killed in
Speaker 1: action on Ukraine's on the Ukrainian side and on the
Speaker 1: Russian side in the war. Obviously, it showed more Russian
Speaker 1: casualties than Ukrainian casualties, which is consistent with all previous reporting,
Speaker 1: but the edit of it showed something like many times
Speaker 1: as many Ukrainian dead as Russian dead, which is something
Speaker 1: that was valuable for the people who are trying to
Speaker 1: argue that this war is unwinnable on behalf of the Ukrainians.
Speaker 1: Guys like Tucker Carlson who covered the leaks on his
Speaker 1: show and knowingly used the fake edit of the leak,
Speaker 1: I can't imagine. I have to assume it was knowingly
Speaker 1: because he had been very well exposed by that point,
Speaker 1: so there's really no other explanation, I think. But anyway,
Speaker 1: the fact that there were edits of these documents that
Speaker 1: were not legitimate going around, it's just kind of part
Speaker 1: of why there was a legitimate public interest in trying
Speaker 1: to figure out where the fuck are these things coming from.
Speaker 1: Eric is again an extremely good researcher, and through a
Speaker 1: mix of open source intelligence and eventually just kind of
Speaker 1: like calling up people and talking to them, he found
Speaker 1: what appeared to be the source of these leaks, which
Speaker 1: was an invitation only clubhouse on scored of like thirty
Speaker 1: ish people, most of whom were teenagers. Over time, it
Speaker 1: kind of became clear that this group was a bunch
Speaker 1: of kind of young people who had gotten together during
Speaker 1: the pandemic to talk about you know, games. These guys
Speaker 1: are all gamers. Most of them were like kids in
Speaker 1: high school, they kind of were cut off from their friends,
Speaker 1: so they wanted a place to be social. They would
Speaker 1: share memes, including like extremely racist, you know, borderline Nazi shit.
Speaker 1: They would like watch movies over and like chat over
Speaker 1: kind of the voice app. They were all what you
Speaker 1: call tradcats, which is like basically weirdo Catholic fundamentalists, like
Speaker 1: I think a lot of them deny Vatican two, that
Speaker 1: sort of shit. It's like a whole thing. A lot
Speaker 1: of them were that at least, so there was a
Speaker 1: lot of like praying and anyway, a bunch of weirdos.
Speaker 1: And the head of this group of weirdos was the
Speaker 1: oldest of them, a guy who was known on like
Speaker 1: in the discord as og and Og. He's a was
Speaker 1: you know, in the Land of the Teenagers, the person
Speaker 1: in the early twenties who can buy an AR fifteen
Speaker 1: is king. And so this this guy is in his
Speaker 1: early twenties. He's in the military, which he talks about.
Speaker 1: He posts videos of himself like shooting guns and like
Speaker 1: you know, saying racial slurs and like signposting to these
Speaker 1: like you know, weird memes and stuff that they're all into,
Speaker 1: which to them like makes him seem extremely cool.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 1: It's one of those things when you kind of read
Speaker 1: the different coverage of this, it's there's a little bit
Speaker 1: of like weird culty stuff going on. I don't know
Speaker 1: if i'd say that it was a cult in more
Speaker 1: than just like in.
Speaker 3: Every discord server is a cult exactly.
Speaker 1: The insular online communities like this very often reproduce aspects
Speaker 1: of cult dynamics. Right, Yeah, Hey, everybody, Robert here. We
Speaker 1: had a lot audio error obviously in the recording. I
Speaker 1: wanted to clarify this section because it was kind of garbled.
Speaker 1: The name of the discord server they were in was
Speaker 1: thug Shaker Central, which is potentially a reference to one
Speaker 1: of a couple of things. You'll find some disagreement about
Speaker 1: this online, but it's not really relevant. That's the discord
Speaker 1: name that they've worked under. You get, like the overall
Speaker 1: point of this, it's a bunch of like kids who
Speaker 1: are fans of games. They're fans of like this YouTuber Oxide.
Speaker 1: It's like a little group of dudes who got together
Speaker 1: via fandom and the pandemic and over the course of
Speaker 1: years developed like a shared culture, and part of the
Speaker 1: shared culture is this guy og who's the older one
Speaker 1: of them, you know, trying to keep them aware of
Speaker 1: what he thought was important about kind of global politics,
Speaker 1: and that particularly included aspects of battlefield conditions in Ukraine,
Speaker 1: information about North Korean ballistic missiles, all of this kind
Speaker 1: of stuf ugh that he had access to because spoilers
Speaker 1: he was in an Air National Guard wing as an
Speaker 1: intelligence and like it was in the intelligence sector of
Speaker 1: like an Air National Guard ring, and he had a
Speaker 1: security classification, right, And once this all got revealed, people
Speaker 1: are like, why the fuck is a twenty one year
Speaker 1: old because that's this guy's age have access to top
Speaker 1: secret data, And everyone who knows anything about the way
Speaker 1: our government classifies information was like most of the people
Speaker 1: have access are like twenty Yeah, it fits our wars
Speaker 1: fifty year olds.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it just genuinely, like you know, like
Speaker 2: if we've been around war and conflict of the people
Speaker 2: who do it quite long, I think most people would
Speaker 2: be genuinely burn away that most people doing it are children.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And this has caused like obviously some problems before
Speaker 1: for the Defense Department, but it's also like it's kind
Speaker 1: of a thorny problem because like most of your workforce
Speaker 1: are always going to be young kids. These are spoiler's
Speaker 1: shitty jobs often and that's the only one who will
Speaker 1: do a lot of them. And also just like if
Speaker 1: you're fighting a war, most of the people you have
Speaker 1: that are going to be tasked the field intelligence are
Speaker 1: going to be in this age. And see, it's not
Speaker 1: at all weird that this guy had access to this shit.
Speaker 1: What is weird is that so he starts off kind
Speaker 1: of like arguing, you know, sometimes he'll bring up stuff
Speaker 1: that he knows that's from classified documents while he's arguing,
Speaker 1: you know, about the war in Ukraine or whatever with
Speaker 1: these friends online, and then he starts doing like a
Speaker 1: series of regular updates where he'll basically he'll type out
Speaker 1: details from like a bunch of different top secret documents
Speaker 1: and he's massive, long and apparently kind of hard to
Speaker 1: read posts, and he'll just like post them into the
Speaker 1: chat to kind of keep his friends abreast of what
Speaker 1: he thinks is you know, important, But he gets frustrated
Speaker 1: over time that like they're not reading this shit because
Speaker 1: it's really boring and like kind of weird to just
Speaker 1: info up top secret info, and they don't. These kids
Speaker 1: don't again, like these other folks are like in high school.
Speaker 1: They don't really realize where he's getting the info or
Speaker 1: what he has, but they do. The folks who do
Speaker 1: pay attention recognize over time that like stuff will happen
Speaker 1: in the real world that corresponds to something he posted
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks ago, and they're like, wow, he
Speaker 1: seems to have like actually really good information. Eventually, Og
Speaker 1: gets frustrated because he's not no one's paying attention to
Speaker 1: his posts, so he starts taking photos of just the
Speaker 1: top secret documents themselves and posting them in the discord day.
Speaker 2: Amazing.
Speaker 1: Now this is unbelievably illegal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he really crosed a line there. I just don't
Speaker 2: believe it'd be dumb.
Speaker 1: By the way. It was illegal before, but this is
Speaker 1: really illegal.
Speaker 2: In terms of like allowing yourself making it so much
Speaker 2: easier for the consequences you're fucking around to find you
Speaker 2: like that. He crushed the rubicon right there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, and now we have to face the hard
Speaker 3: question is this guy an illegalist king or is he
Speaker 3: more problematic? And this is this is the question that
Speaker 3: we have to actually focus on now stop because it is.
Speaker 3: It is, on one hand, pretty funny. It's exceedmely funny.
Speaker 1: There's zero argument there among people who aren't ship heads.
Speaker 1: It's very funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very funny that like he could be doing
Speaker 2: an illegalism without with zero intention of doing so.
Speaker 1: Now, I do think there's a some people have kind
Speaker 1: of errantly called him a whistleblower. I just not.
Speaker 3: That's not active. That is, that is not what he's doing.
Speaker 3: He's a Nazi who's posting top secret information to impress
Speaker 3: children online.
Speaker 1: That's right, Garrison. I do think we have to. I
Speaker 1: think we have to. Let's let's dig into that a
Speaker 1: little bit, because a whistleblower is somebody who exposes information
Speaker 1: from inside of an organization for some sort of purpose. Right,
Speaker 1: they believe that what's going on is wrong. They think that, like,
Speaker 1: they believe there's some sort of public interest in information
Speaker 1: that is being kind of siloed inside of an organization
Speaker 1: that they're a part of, and they release that organization. Right, fundamentally,
Speaker 1: that's what a whistleblower is. This guy was telling his
Speaker 1: friends and this thirty person discord, do not post these
Speaker 1: anywhere else. This is not stuff that you're allowed to share.
Speaker 1: This is just for your eyes because we're friends, right.
Speaker 1: He does not intend for this to get out. But
Speaker 1: here's the thing. All of his friends in this group
Speaker 1: are like dumb kids, and just like those people on
Speaker 1: war Thunder, they start getting into arguments with people outside
Speaker 1: of the discords yet and other discords discords. One of
Speaker 1: them is a fan discord for some other YouTuber, one
Speaker 1: of them is the discord is a Minecraft discord, and
Speaker 1: they get into arguments with random other users about like
Speaker 1: the war in Ukraine and stuff. And when they're having
Speaker 1: those arguments, they'll hear someone make a point and they'll
Speaker 1: think back to a top secret document that OGPO and
Speaker 1: they'll be like, well, I know you're wrong because I've
Speaker 1: seen like some CIA like satellite footage that like shows
Speaker 1: that this isn't accurate. And rather than being like, well,
Speaker 1: I guess I can't prove this person wrong on the
Speaker 1: internet without exposing my friend in our private discord to
Speaker 1: being imprisoned for the decade, they just grab top secret
Speaker 1: documents that he posted and they post them in these
Speaker 1: other discords. And that's how this shit breaks containment. Right now,
Speaker 1: It's one of those things I do want to note that, like,
Speaker 1: these are not generally speaking, super pleasant people. OG is
Speaker 1: the kind of guy who, like one of his big
Speaker 1: arguments that he tries to like make to these kids,
Speaker 1: he like claims that based on the top secret info
Speaker 1: he has, which he posts, nothing that proves this, the
Speaker 1: mass shooting in Buffalo, New York by that Nazi at
Speaker 1: that majority you know, black frequented grocery store, that that
Speaker 1: was like a government plot to institute gun control, and shit,
Speaker 1: it was a false flag. So he's not just posting good.
Speaker 1: He's like lying here too, because obviously there's no intelligence
Speaker 1: to post backing that up. He just he's just kind
Speaker 1: of trying to It's a mix of he's trying to
Speaker 1: like prove that, you know, he's trying to make arguments
Speaker 1: about like what's happening, you know, in various overseas conflicts
Speaker 1: using at US intel, but he's also just like spreading
Speaker 1: different kind of conspiracy theories that he has to these
Speaker 1: kids who are by and large looking up to him.
Speaker 1: There's a couple like the Washington Post has done some
Speaker 1: really deep reporting where they talk to some of these
Speaker 1: kids who they're like, yeah, man, we loved him, Like
Speaker 1: when he realized this shit had broken containment, he like
Speaker 1: called us and we were all crying because we knew
Speaker 1: he was going to go to prison. Like there they
Speaker 1: seem legitimately distraught. Yeah, there's like lines like he said
Speaker 1: something had happened, and he prayed to God that this
Speaker 1: event would not happen, but now it's in God's hands.
Speaker 1: Like these are like weirdo ashy. I hesitate to like
Speaker 1: condemn like the literal children too much because they're very vulnerable.
Speaker 1: This guy is like by This guy is a bad
Speaker 1: person who is deeply like in a very fucked up way,
Speaker 1: influencing this group of like thirty ish teenagers on the
Speaker 1: internet in his like weird politics. It's not great. Now
Speaker 1: that's separate from the question of like is there a
Speaker 1: value to these leagues, which we can talk about in
Speaker 1: a little bit. But so as we've talked about Eric
Speaker 1: Tohler tracks down where this is happening, tracks down like
Speaker 1: the name Og publishes a piece on Belling Cat. It's
Speaker 1: sort of ripped off by like I don't know it
Speaker 1: does like every other newspaper in the world, and then
Speaker 1: additional reporting is done Belling Cat and The New York
Speaker 1: Times team up and they eventually like track down and
Speaker 1: publish an article on who this guy is, an airman
Speaker 1: named Jack Tik Sarah, And they publish an article about
Speaker 1: that about a day before this guy gets arrested by
Speaker 1: the FBI. And it's one of those things, one of
Speaker 1: the if you if you look at the FBI Affid David,
Speaker 1: it kind of makes clear how the FBI cracked this
Speaker 1: guy down and found him because they did so, you know,
Speaker 1: using the resources they had before the Times did online.
Speaker 1: People have been going after The Times and Eric for
Speaker 1: like revealing this guy to the government, which is not
Speaker 1: the case. Basically, once it became clear what had gotten leaked,
Speaker 1: the FBI, because they had access to you know, the
Speaker 1: systems by which people utilize and get access to sensitive
Speaker 1: compartmented information, found out who had most recently like on
Speaker 1: the days that kind of corresponded to the leaks, pulled
Speaker 1: up information about that and narrowed it down to this
Speaker 1: guy Jack. They like it, and they were they had
Speaker 1: access to Like one of the things they did is
Speaker 1: they called Discord and talked to Discord, and Discord helped
Speaker 1: them track down where the leaks were originating. From. And
Speaker 1: then because they could see that the account that had
Speaker 1: posted you know, the top secret data originally was a
Speaker 1: paid account, they were able to like provide the FBI
Speaker 1: with this guy's home address and the shit. This is
Speaker 1: exactly what you'd expect for the f.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, the FBI has a lot of non
Speaker 3: open source means to do this type of investigation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they are not doing what Eric is doing and
Speaker 1: just kind of like clicking through shit for hours and
Speaker 1: hours and hours until they figure out where it's come from.
Speaker 1: Like they have they are the FBI, they have access
Speaker 1: to other things, and.
Speaker 2: It's what you'd expect from Discord too, right, Like they
Speaker 2: will comply with whatever they absolutely these are top secret
Speaker 2: that like if they don't have a legal choice here,
Speaker 2: they're a gigantic company, they're going to comply.
Speaker 1: So this is the kind of thing where like one
Speaker 1: of the there's this big argument I don't even even
Speaker 1: though it's big, but there's definitely like a weird chunk
Speaker 1: of the left that has like leaned on because the
Speaker 1: right has immediately started calling this guy a whistleblower. Fucking
Speaker 1: Marjorie Taylor Green was like he's a Christian and he's
Speaker 1: a leaker trying to expose crucial details about our government,
Speaker 1: and no he wasn't. He was like trying to fucking
Speaker 1: groom some teenagers and they posted it without his permission.
Speaker 3: And a lot of a lot of the more conspiracy
Speaker 3: type stuff is like trying to call out like you know,
Speaker 3: it's a lot of the more conspiracy related stuff is
Speaker 3: related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and making it
Speaker 3: seem like the US is doing things that are wrong
Speaker 3: and secretly helping the Ukrainians too much, and it kind
Speaker 3: of it it plays into this weird, weird thing that
Speaker 3: people have against the way Biden's been handling the geopolitics
Speaker 3: around the Russian invasion, and it's like it it plays
Speaker 3: into a whole bunch of right wing talking points we've
Speaker 3: seen around Russia. You know, We've seen this type of
Speaker 3: stuff get talked about by Tucker Carlson quite often. There's
Speaker 3: there's a there's a whole bunch of like little nodes
Speaker 3: that this that that this touches on, and we even
Speaker 3: we even see stuff like that among like you know,
Speaker 3: people who are authoritarian communists, right who are who are
Speaker 3: still pro Russia despite Russia not being a communist country,
Speaker 3: but still like being like, oh, there, you know, this
Speaker 3: is something he's trying to expose the things that are
Speaker 3: people are doing wrong to Russia, and it's like okay,
Speaker 3: all right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and to me it's one of them. And
Speaker 1: there's also you've gotten among some chunks of this attitude
Speaker 1: that like, well, you know, I don't care why he
Speaker 1: did it or like what he is in his personal life.
Speaker 1: Any leak you know of the US military machine is
Speaker 1: good and should be you know, protected. And it's like,
Speaker 1: for one thing, this guy like nobody knew where these
Speaker 1: things were coming from. There was a vested need in
Speaker 1: sort of figuring out what the origin point was to
Speaker 1: figure out if they were accurate. But for like another thing,
Speaker 1: I don't know, man, you can argue about like what
Speaker 1: point you know, the digging, whether or not, like the
Speaker 1: it's ethical to dig this shit back to its source.
Speaker 1: I would argue that like people also have a right
Speaker 1: to know if there's some sort of fucking like like
Speaker 1: if the documents were fake or altered in some way,
Speaker 1: there was a reason to be trying to figure out
Speaker 1: the providence of this shit. But more to the point,
Speaker 1: like I think it's good to have access to like
Speaker 1: data from inside of our military. I think that's that's
Speaker 1: broadly positive. And when I look at these data, or
Speaker 1: when I look at what's been leaked, I don't think
Speaker 1: most of it's you know, one of the concerns that's
Speaker 1: always that always exist when you're talking about a leak
Speaker 1: of data is like, is this going to expose like
Speaker 1: potentially innocent people to any kind of arm And there
Speaker 1: is a potential for that with some of this, because
Speaker 1: some of it dealt with Ukrainian military readiness for the
Speaker 1: upcoming offensive, and like, well, like I don't really care
Speaker 1: if some guy inside the Kremlin who's like a member
Speaker 1: of the Russian General Staff and a double I don't
Speaker 1: care if that guy, like something bad happens to him.
Speaker 1: He's probably not a great dude. But but I do
Speaker 1: care about like a bunch of random Ukrainian soldier potentially
Speaker 1: getting harmed. Now, I will say, from what I can
Speaker 1: tell from this, I think the odds of that are
Speaker 1: pretty low. It looks like this has impacted kind of
Speaker 1: the timetable for the counter offensive, but I don't know
Speaker 1: that it's I haven't seen any evidence that it's exposed
Speaker 1: things in a way that's like going to cause loss
Speaker 1: of life, although it's a little bit unclear as to
Speaker 1: whether that not that might happen. But also, while I
Speaker 1: think it's accurate to say, I'm not saying evidence that
Speaker 1: like a lot of people's safety have been harmed by
Speaker 1: these leaks, it's also not you know, what we're It's
Speaker 1: not anything like what Snowden did or what Manning did.
Speaker 1: Right again, Manning revealed, you know, videos like the collateral
Speaker 1: murder video, evidence of like breakdowns of order and things
Speaker 1: that I think are accurate to call war crimes that
Speaker 1: were being kind of hidden by our government, whereas Snowden
Speaker 1: revealed intense details about an n Essay spying program. All
Speaker 1: of that's extremely relevant to the average American. Most of
Speaker 1: this is just kind of like wonky inside base fall
Speaker 1: military stuff, which again I'm not like sad that it's
Speaker 1: gotten out, but it's also not It really does seem
Speaker 1: like a bunch of shit that like a guy pulled
Speaker 1: out based on his own kind of like weird interests.
Speaker 1: It's not there's not like a strong unifying theme around them.
Speaker 1: And again, most of it's most of it's shit that's
Speaker 1: not going to be interesting to the average person. One
Speaker 1: of the documents I just read an article about, because like,
Speaker 1: we don't entirely know everything that was leaked right now,
Speaker 1: right there's been there's like the Post in the time
Speaker 1: seem to have a pretty complete archive of what was leaked,
Speaker 1: but they haven't published anything because you know, they're reading
Speaker 1: through it and you know, actually reporting it out. One
Speaker 1: of the articles that just came out was about the
Speaker 1: fact that the Ukrainians made some overtures to the Kurdish
Speaker 1: led self administration in in northern northeast Syria, to Rojava,
Speaker 1: to the SDF in order to talk about the potential
Speaker 1: for them attacking Russian assets in elsewhere in Syria. When
Speaker 1: and this has kind of gotten out over like Twitter,
Speaker 1: it's often been like described as, oh, the Ukrainians were
Speaker 1: going to team up with the Courage to attacked Russia
Speaker 1: in Syria, like like this was an actual, like serious plan.
Speaker 1: Would you actually see the document? It seems a lot
Speaker 1: less inciting than that. Basically, what happened was some folks
Speaker 1: on the Ukrainian General staff or whatever were like looking
Speaker 1: into the possibility, Hey, you know, is there any way
Speaker 1: that we could kind of anything we could pay the
Speaker 1: Kurds over in Syria to carry out an attack on
Speaker 1: the Russians, and apparently they had access to somebody who
Speaker 1: claimed to be in the SDF at least, and that
Speaker 1: person was like, we might be able to do something
Speaker 1: if you can get us some anti air defenses, right,
Speaker 1: which I don't know how Ukraine could possibly ship meaningful
Speaker 1: anti air defenses to northeast Syria. It's kind of bordered
Speaker 1: on all sides. There is some stuff if you're a
Speaker 1: walk in the region. There's some interesting stuff about this,
Speaker 1: which is that the SDF basically responded, like we could
Speaker 1: potentially do this, we couldn't attack Russian assets that are
Speaker 1: within the borders of the self administration. Russians are acting
Speaker 1: as peacekeepers there between Turkey and you know, it's kind
Speaker 1: of desire to invade the entire region. They're not great
Speaker 1: as peacekeepers. The Armenians will tell you that Russian soldiers
Speaker 1: are not great, great givers. But the SDF didn't want
Speaker 1: to like ship where they were eating, right, so there
Speaker 1: was some like debate about where they might be able
Speaker 1: to attack. One of the things that is really interesting
Speaker 1: about this week is that apparently Ukraine like talk to
Speaker 1: Turkey about this because obviously the Turks consider the core
Speaker 1: of the SDF the YPG to be a terrorist organization.
Speaker 1: But when Ukraine was talking to them, they're like, hey,
Speaker 1: we might basically bribe these people to carry out an
Speaker 1: attack on Russian assets elsewhere in Syria. Turkey was like, okay,
Speaker 1: well don't do it here here here, because that's kind
Speaker 1: of close to some our guys might like that. That
Speaker 1: party is interesting. But again, none of this matters all
Speaker 1: that much because nothing happened as far as we know.
Speaker 1: In December, Zelenski was like, no, don't proceed with looking
Speaker 1: into this. This is the kind of thing like the
Speaker 1: US military has, like plans for what happens if you
Speaker 1: have to fight Canada. This is the kind of thing
Speaker 1: defense departments do. And as far as I can tell,
Speaker 1: there's no evidence that went much for them, like a
Speaker 1: series of phone calls right which, by the way, the
Speaker 1: SDF denies ever happened. I don't know what exactly occurred.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's hard for me to tell.
Speaker 1: Did the Ukrainians were they talking to someone who was
Speaker 1: actually a representative of the sdf's like military hierarchy, or
Speaker 1: was this like some guy that they thought was because
Speaker 1: maybe Ukraine doesn't have great context into the air like
Speaker 1: or did the US, And it's it's not kind of clear.
Speaker 1: Did the US maybe like hook them up with somebody,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't like at the at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, you can argue, as someone who follows the region,
Speaker 1: I find this kind of interesting. It's not exactly like groundbreaking,
Speaker 1: you know, in its importance, because nothing happened, no one
Speaker 1: did anything. This is like some guys in Ukraine thought
Speaker 1: about doing a thing and then decided not to, which
Speaker 1: is you know, potentially interesting context. But we're not talking
Speaker 1: about the manning or the snowed in lakes here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's yeah, it's that particular document I think
Speaker 2: is kind of clearly they have access to people who
Speaker 2: have formally fought in Syria with the YPG right there.
Speaker 2: There are probably dozens of them now fighting in Ukraine
Speaker 2: without a volunteer units. Like it's it's not hard to
Speaker 2: see how this thought came up. But like you said,
Speaker 2: nothing really happened. It was just some people like spitbolling.
Speaker 1: So I don't know. There's some other like bits and
Speaker 1: stuff in here that are kind of interesting. One of
Speaker 1: them was there was a document in there about how
Speaker 1: the US had kind of like interfered in peace negotiations
Speaker 1: in Yemen due to like kind of concerns that they
Speaker 1: had about the fact that China was kind of brokering
Speaker 1: a degree of peace between the Houthi rebels in between
Speaker 1: the Saudi government. There's definitely some like slightly some somewhat
Speaker 1: shady shit from the US and there, but at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, it didn't derail the peace negotiations.
Speaker 1: It's just like, yeah, they were like like like and
Speaker 1: a lot of it's like that where it's kind of
Speaker 1: like this is useful context. I'm glad historians or journalists
Speaker 1: reporting it out will have that. But at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, like the fact that like, oh hey,
Speaker 1: at one point in these peace negotiations the US was like,
Speaker 1: you know, being being kind of a kind of a
Speaker 1: dick isn't exactly like shocking. You know, It's not going
Speaker 1: to like change your overall concept of what's happening over there.
Speaker 1: It's not stuff that like is most of it's not
Speaker 1: stuff that's like massively important important. It is really interesting
Speaker 1: that the detail that are our defense establishment apparently has
Speaker 1: from within the Russian government I do think it's worth
Speaker 1: noting because we're talking like when we talk about sort
Speaker 1: of the the provenance of these and the reliability of
Speaker 1: these leaks. As they regard the war in Ukraine, there's
Speaker 1: been a lot of talk about like, oh, this reveals
Speaker 1: that like the Ukraine doesn't have the capacity to carry
Speaker 1: out a counter offensive, or that the war has gone
Speaker 1: much worse for them than they think. It is kind
Speaker 1: of worth noting that, like, prior to the expanded Russian invasion,
Speaker 1: all US military intelligence suggested that the Ukrainian government was
Speaker 1: going to fold in a matter of days. So even
Speaker 1: though a lot of this is top secret info, that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean it's like one hundred percent accurate. Right Like
Speaker 1: our guys, like think back to the Iraq War. Our
Speaker 1: dudes get shipped right und constantly. It is. Again, this
Speaker 1: is all really interesting, And I will say two things.
Speaker 1: I think it's very funny that this this guy nuked
Speaker 1: his entire life basically to impress children on a discord.
Speaker 1: I think it's extremely funny. I have laughed many a
Speaker 1: time at this. I also think it's like, like, as
Speaker 1: someone who is interested in this stuff, interesting that and
Speaker 1: good that we have this context. I don't think any
Speaker 1: of this is like massively surprising or shocking. Like the
Speaker 1: shit that's in that defense industry or intelligence agency analysis
Speaker 1: of the Ukrainian position right now is like stuff that
Speaker 1: you would know if you were paying attention to the
Speaker 1: good ocent aggregators who have been covering the war, and
Speaker 1: if you've been like just reading good reporting on what's
Speaker 1: going on over there. I'll read a little bit of
Speaker 1: a summary from an article that's kind of going over
Speaker 1: some of the other stuff that appears to have been leaked.
Speaker 1: One details information apparently obtained through US eavesdropping on Russia's
Speaker 1: Foreign intelligence service and suggests that China approved the provision
Speaker 1: of lethal aid to Russia and its war in Ukraine
Speaker 1: early this year and planned to disguise its military equipment
Speaker 1: as civilian items. Another includes details of a test conducted
Speaker 1: by Beijing on one of its advanced experimental missiles, the
Speaker 1: DF twenty seven Hypersonic light vehicle, on February twenty fifth.
Speaker 1: It says the vehicle flew for twelve minutes across thirteen
Speaker 1: hundred miles and that it possessed a high probability of
Speaker 1: penetrating US ballistic missile defense systems. The documents contain new
Speaker 1: details about a Chinese spy balloon dubbed Killeen twenty three
Speaker 1: by US intelligence agencies, that earlier this year flew over
Speaker 1: the UNI United States. They detail sophisticated surveillance equipment. US
Speaker 1: intelligence agencies were aware of up to four additional Chinese
Speaker 1: by balloons. The documents a and another previously unreported revelation,
Speaker 1: and so let's kind of break that down. One thing
Speaker 1: we have here is basically an argument through from the
Speaker 1: US that based on their intercepts, they believe that China
Speaker 1: has approved provisioning weaponry, selling weaponry to Russia and disguising
Speaker 1: it as civilian items. That doesn't mean they have done this.
Speaker 1: It means that, like there's sigent that someone in our
Speaker 1: government has that says that they were. That could be
Speaker 1: disinformation from them. It could be out of date. It
Speaker 1: could be something like with this Ukraine and Syria thing
Speaker 1: that they talked about doing and then didn't do. It's interesting,
Speaker 1: I would say, if you are a defense industry reporter,
Speaker 1: it's something that woul could should definitely spur you to
Speaker 1: further reporting, because like that's really relevant if that's occurring.
Speaker 1: But it's not the final word on the matter. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: you've got this thing on like, Yeah, this hypersonic missile
Speaker 1: the Chinese had is good at shoot and shit. Theoretically,
Speaker 1: this is you know, the kind of thing that's interesting
Speaker 1: and I think is probably more accurate than you know,
Speaker 1: talking about the China providing lethal aid because you can
Speaker 1: kind of you know, theoretically you're looking at actual like
Speaker 1: data on how the missile has performed. It just seems
Speaker 1: like it's something that you've got more fidelity on. But
Speaker 1: this is again to kind of contrast it with like
Speaker 1: the snowed and Manning leaks. Well, what do you do
Speaker 1: if like the NSSAY is spying on people? Well, you
Speaker 1: could at least attempt to pass laws that restrict their
Speaker 1: ability to do that. Right, What do you do if
Speaker 1: there have been like war crimes committed by your military
Speaker 1: that were then cover it up, Well, you can at
Speaker 1: least attempt to prosecute people. What do you do if
Speaker 1: some other countries got a better missile? Well, there's not
Speaker 1: a whole lot for you to do sitting at home
Speaker 1: and like New York City or you know, fucking Austin, Texas, Right, Like, like,
Speaker 1: what are we to do about China's hyper I don't know.
Speaker 1: My assumption, generally speaking, not that this is an interesting
Speaker 1: but my assumption generally speaking is that when you're talking
Speaker 1: about Russia, China, the United States, we can all murder
Speaker 1: each other if we wanted to write, like we've all
Speaker 1: got real nice missiles at this point. And it's this,
Speaker 1: you know, the Chinese by balloon stuff is like interesting.
Speaker 1: I don't think anyone's surprised by this. Like we knew
Speaker 1: there was a spy balloon. I assumed it had sophisticated
Speaker 1: surveillance technique. It's again, it's interesting that there were four
Speaker 1: other spy balloons in the area. But we simply know
Speaker 1: from older reporting that this happened like three or four
Speaker 1: times while Trump was in office too, So like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is something we've known about. There's been reporting about.
Speaker 1: This is corroboration. That's interesting. Again, none of this is
Speaker 1: really like a sea change in our understanding of any
Speaker 1: of these conflicts. It is interesting context. Some of it's
Speaker 1: being blown up, you know, into stuff that it isn't.
Speaker 1: There's reporting and like the number of US servicemen in
Speaker 1: Ukraine that's being like spun is like we've got boots
Speaker 1: on the ground there, and it's like, well, they're like
Speaker 1: embassy guards and stuff. There's like twenty nine dudes that
Speaker 1: this like confirmed. Michael, Yeah, yeah, this confirms there's not
Speaker 1: a lot of US guys on the ground there.
Speaker 2: You send a lot of people when we're doing wars.
Speaker 2: But yeah, like every embassy in the world has a
Speaker 2: contingent of marines who make sure that it doesn't just
Speaker 2: get Yeah. I don't want to say bang ghazied, but yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: you know big Ghazi. Yeah, that's fine. And this is
Speaker 2: not new news to anyone who's been paying attention. But
Speaker 2: if you are Michael Tracy, this is brain melting shit.
Speaker 1: Michael Tracy's a weirdo quasi left journalist who like early
Speaker 1: on in the war he didn't want to go into
Speaker 1: Ukraine very much, but he like hung out in Poland
Speaker 1: and took pictures of like US soldiers and like a
Speaker 1: facility that they were had been in for years and
Speaker 1: was like, look, you know, this is evidence of the
Speaker 1: secret US support. And it's like, guys, I mean, for
Speaker 1: one thing, like look at this, Look at how much
Speaker 1: shit just leaked out because some kid wanted to impress children.
Speaker 1: If there were like like secret massive formations of US
Speaker 1: troops or even large like forces of US specops guys
Speaker 1: carrying out operations in Ukraine. How good do you think
Speaker 1: they'd be at keeping that shit secret? Right? For one thing?
Speaker 1: Like Special Forces guys get killed all the fucking time,
Speaker 1: Like they get killed, they get overrun, like like's it's
Speaker 1: a terrible risk for US to just like send Seal
Speaker 1: Team six in to fight the Russians when spoilers, the
Speaker 1: Ukrainians have really good Special Forces guys every bit as
Speaker 1: good as ours actually with in a lot of cases
Speaker 1: more experience fighting this kind of war. And we're given
Speaker 1: And it's like, if you want to talk about US involvement,
Speaker 1: we're giving them their weapons. Like we're involved fucking plenty.
Speaker 1: There's just not much of a point in US like
Speaker 1: sending the green fucking Berets into Bakamut, right, Like why
Speaker 1: that doesn't That doesn't help us at all, That doesn't
Speaker 1: like help our government. That's not like good for the military.
Speaker 1: It would be stupid anyway, whatever, anything else to talk
Speaker 1: about here?
Speaker 2: Do we want to talk about the Israel one?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, this is one of the interest although
Speaker 1: it's not again basically one of the things that leaked.
Speaker 1: Is like the US is spying on all of its allies,
Speaker 1: which this leaks every couple of years. We're always spying
Speaker 1: on our allies, including Israel. Israel has spied on US
Speaker 1: a bunch. That's why they have nuclear weapons. Yeah, James,
Speaker 1: you want to talk about this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So this is a document that basically what it
Speaker 2: alleges is that what has been alleged, perhaps incorrectly, is
Speaker 2: that it was encouraging Mossad staff to attend protests against
Speaker 2: net Yahoo when he was attempting his liketo golpe like
Speaker 2: his coup from within, what do you want to call that? Right,
Speaker 2: he was attempting to centralize power, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: Now it's a LEAQD. Like you said, it's a document.
Speaker 2: It says that I'm quoting from it, or I'm quoting
Speaker 2: from reporting on it. At least senior leaders of the
Speaker 2: Mossad spy Service advocated for Mossad officials and Israeli citizens
Speaker 2: to protest the new Israeli governments, proposed judicial reforms, including
Speaker 2: several explicit calls to action that decried the Israeli government.
Speaker 2: According to Singet Signals Intelligence, the Infamy, So actually Netanyahu
Speaker 2: himself has been asked about this, and it's worth he
Speaker 2: appointed the Mossad director, a guy called David I think
Speaker 2: it's Baynya, and he has also he's on the record
Speaker 2: previously in news media before this saying that he had
Speaker 2: clarified to Mosad personnel who could attend protests and who
Speaker 2: could not attend, like because at a certain point in
Speaker 2: any of these things, that you're not allowed to be
Speaker 2: explicitly political, right folks, even at a very low point
Speaker 2: in the US military, Like you're not supposed to say
Speaker 2: and do certain things. So there was a petition that
Speaker 2: went out earlier, and again this has already been reported.
Speaker 2: They that were sent by intelligence offices basically saying like,
Speaker 2: we'll go on strike. And there had been again like
Speaker 2: widely reported instances other Israeli military people saying that they
Speaker 2: would go on strike or not shot up for work
Speaker 2: if these judicial reforms went ahead. So I think again
Speaker 2: it's been kind of we've really stretched. What was interesting
Speaker 2: I thought was that it had a Feiser label on
Speaker 2: FI series to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and if people
Speaker 2: aren't familiar, basically it allows US intelligence to wire tap things,
Speaker 2: which they can do it without warrant if it doesn't
Speaker 2: include a US person. So a US person is not
Speaker 2: just a citizen, but also maybe a permanent resident something
Speaker 2: like that, right, like like a person who has more
Speaker 2: rights than others in the United States. But in this
Speaker 2: case they seem to have got a fis a warrant,
Speaker 2: which it's very easy to get, right. It's like a
Speaker 2: closed courtroom procedure where they go to a judge and
Speaker 2: like it's not like an adversarial argument. Now there's no
Speaker 2: one who argues that you should get the warrant, and
Speaker 2: so in practice they nearly always get these warrants. But
Speaker 2: what it showed they have to just prove it its
Speaker 2: intelligence asset of a foreign power. And so it showed
Speaker 2: that at some point they went for a judge and said, like, hey,
Speaker 2: you know, we need to wiretap some kind of some
Speaker 2: kind of communications or I'm using wiretap in the broad
Speaker 2: sense or specific sense. But it's interesting I think that
Speaker 2: that they have some intelligence asset in the United States
Speaker 2: and said, hey, we know this an Israeli intelligence asset.
Speaker 2: And to be clear that this could just be shits
Speaker 2: going in and out of the embassy that they've decided
Speaker 2: that they needed to wyattap that and keep an eye
Speaker 2: on that now, given given that like it's Rael's foreign
Speaker 2: policies has been talking terrible for decades, but net and
Speaker 2: Yahoo is a new degree of crazy. Uh it is.
Speaker 2: It's unsurprising that like anyone concerned with I guess international
Speaker 2: relations would would want to know more about what is
Speaker 2: going on.
Speaker 1: And again like that's it's interesting context. As you noted,
Speaker 1: a lot of this had been reported out previously, So yeah,
Speaker 1: we're it's it's just like it's it's it's all interesting again.
Speaker 1: I'm my, my, my, My attitude here is like I'm
Speaker 1: glad this information is out and I don't really care
Speaker 1: what happens to Jack tech Sierra. Like yeah, in my
Speaker 1: in my ideal world, the policing infrastructure that's come down
Speaker 1: on this kid would not exist. But he made this
Speaker 1: decision knowing full well what happened when you leak top secretly,
Speaker 1: Like it's one of those things where it's like just
Speaker 1: just within the context of shit that's fucked up in
Speaker 1: our country. The thing I'm going to be upset about
Speaker 1: is not a kid leaking top secret info to win
Speaker 1: an online argument and then having it blow up on him, right, Like,
Speaker 1: especially not a kid who's a fucking Nazi. At the
Speaker 1: end of the day, he did something that was obviously done.
Speaker 1: It's like if some guy hops on Twitter under his
Speaker 1: real name and starts posting pictures of heroin and saying, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: this is my name and address. I'm selling hella heroin.
Speaker 1: Here's photos of a felony quantity of heroin and guns. Well,
Speaker 1: I think heroin should be legal, but I'm not gonna, like,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna like make a crusade out of that
Speaker 1: guy's arrest because that's stupid. Like, like, you know what
Speaker 1: happens if you post, hey, here is my at home
Speaker 1: address and name. Here is all of the heroin I'm selling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you'll probably get in trouble because you have posted online
Speaker 1: a serious crime. Obviously that could be a problem for you.
Speaker 1: That's not my primary concern in the world when people
Speaker 1: do really stupid shit and it blows up on them
Speaker 1: and it's like again, leakers, you look at the way
Speaker 1: Manning proceeded, You look at the way Snowden proceeded. They
Speaker 1: were aware of the danger of what they were doing.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, Chelsea did years in fucking prison.
Speaker 1: Snowden fled the country. That's because because they were whistleblowers,
Speaker 1: they under they under they understood this is a serious
Speaker 1: like this is very illegal, and I have to try
Speaker 1: to take steps to protect myself because the government's going
Speaker 1: to come after me. The thing about Jack is like
Speaker 1: just the level of like arrogance that like I can
Speaker 1: post this shit all day long and nothing will happen.
Speaker 1: It was like, well, for one thing, this is never
Speaker 1: going like it's information you're posting online, Like I don't care.
Speaker 1: There's no way to keep stuff completely contained within a
Speaker 1: thirty person discord. It's going to leak out, and when
Speaker 1: it is, the government's gonna want to know who the
Speaker 1: fuck is leaking this ship. And you took like took
Speaker 1: pictures of this shit inside his home, Like it's just dumb.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna like I don't at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, I have no room in my sympathy for
Speaker 1: like a fucking fascy kid who committed the dumbest crime
Speaker 1: possible and got in trouble, Like I don't know. There's
Speaker 1: there's people who I don't know. For example, we're camping
Speaker 1: in a forest and are getting charged with terrorism and
Speaker 1: facing longer penalties, Right, Jack might do fifteen years at
Speaker 1: the most, which is like fucked up, I guess. But
Speaker 1: you know, there's people facing a lot worse for a
Speaker 1: lot less, and I just, you know, whatever, I don't
Speaker 1: care what happens to this kid. He seems like he sucks.
Speaker 1: I think the leaks are interesting. There's nothing in here
Speaker 1: that's like fundamentally changed my understanding of geopolitics though. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's where I am.
Speaker 2: I would agree. It is a useful reminder to keep
Speaker 2: your crime offline.
Speaker 1: Yeah, don't continue, continue to not post crimes on the internet.
Speaker 1: If you're selling heroin, don't post on Twitter. Here is
Speaker 1: my name and home address. Anyone want to buy some
Speaker 1: fucking China white, that's not a great idea.
Speaker 3: If anyone has any top secret documents, you can find
Speaker 3: me on the Star Wars the Old Republic forums. Just
Speaker 3: just post, just post them there. Yeah, I am part
Speaker 3: of the Jedi Initiative program, So just locate that and
Speaker 3: it'll be I'm sure, I'm sure I'll see it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I am on the the the Nozdormo server on
Speaker 1: World of Warcraft. You can just hit me up under
Speaker 1: my U my given name. Just dm me and we'll
Speaker 1: figure it out. You can send that ship to me
Speaker 1: over AOL instant messenger. That's how I take all of
Speaker 1: my leaks. The most secure platform.
Speaker 2: You can find me in a Mountain Project comment section
Speaker 2: where any good things happen.
Speaker 1: So we're all on war Thunder too, so you can
Speaker 1: get there too for work reasons. Yeah, I'll be shipped talking.
Speaker 2: Your your grading on a problem, but also accepting national
Speaker 2: security two weeks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we do, We do it all, all right, everybody.
Speaker 1: That's an episode, Hello podcast Enjoys.
Speaker 2: It's me James today and I am joined again by mo.
Speaker 2: They are an educator, attorney, abolitionist, and they serve overlapping
Speaker 2: communities of activists, queer people, and prisoners. And we've heard
Speaker 2: from them before. We have from them about June eleventh,
Speaker 2: but today we're talking about something a little different. We're
Speaker 2: talking about redistributing power in the attorney client relationship. How
Speaker 2: are you.
Speaker 7: I'm doing okay. How are you, James?
Speaker 2: I'm existing, I'm fine, I'm thriving. So, yeah, you wanted
Speaker 2: to talk today? He reached out to talk about this.
Speaker 2: I think it's a really interesting topic and one that,
Speaker 2: like I've become increasingly more aware of in my coverage
Speaker 2: of some sort of different stuff. That's various prosecutions, I
Speaker 2: guess in the US, and so I was very interested
Speaker 2: in this. Can you preps like start out by explaining
Speaker 2: what it is exactly that you want you wanted to
Speaker 2: discuss within the attorney client relationship.
Speaker 7: Yeah, sure. I wanted to talk about building a trusting
Speaker 7: relationship with your attorney where you feel heard and respected
Speaker 7: and understand what you have a right to expect from
Speaker 7: your attorney and feel empowered to push for it. And
Speaker 7: this actually I want to address this both from the
Speaker 7: side of the client, particularly for people who are accused
Speaker 7: of criminal offenses, and I also want to speak a
Speaker 7: little bit to the people who may be representing folks
Speaker 7: who are accused criminal offenses. For people accused of criminal offenses,
Speaker 7: I want to make sure that anyone in that position
Speaker 7: really understands what you have a right to expect from
Speaker 7: that relationship and to feel really confident asking for it.
Speaker 7: For people who are representing individuals who are politically radical
Speaker 7: or people who are facing politically motivated prosecutions, I want
Speaker 7: those attorneys to feel safe and ethically empowered to practice
Speaker 7: criminal defense in a way that honors the goals of
Speaker 7: clients who may define their legal interests not with respect
Speaker 7: to only their own personal liability, but with respect to
Speaker 7: a larger set of principles or a larger community.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, yeah, that's a very it's a good
Speaker 2: distinction to draw, and I think a good thing for
Speaker 2: people to be thinking about. So why is this sort
Speaker 2: of a topic that's important right now?
Speaker 7: Well, so, I certainly don't want to say that participating
Speaker 7: in protests or in social movements is dangerous, or that
Speaker 7: it's even more dangerous than it has been in the past,
Speaker 7: but I am concerned that we might be seeing some
Speaker 7: arrests and charges that are a little more unhinged than
Speaker 7: we've seen in a while. So this isn't new, but
Speaker 7: it may be new to a newer generation of activists.
Speaker 7: And I think some of the community knowledge that was
Speaker 7: cultivated and held twenty or thirty years ago maybe outdated,
Speaker 7: or it might be inaccessible to folks who weren't involved
Speaker 7: back then, or maybe who weren't involved in things that
Speaker 7: were like subject to this level of state repression twenty
Speaker 7: or thirty years ago. So that includes activists, but it
Speaker 7: also includes even very experienced criminal defense attorneys who maybe
Speaker 7: haven't interacted with these kinds of pressingcutions, you know, for
Speaker 7: whatever reason, because they were doing a different area of practice,
Speaker 7: maybe because this what was happening to the people they
Speaker 7: were representing in the geographic area where they practice, or
Speaker 7: like it wasn't happening at the time that they were practicing.
Speaker 7: So I think that people on both sides of the
Speaker 7: attorney client relationship could benefit from considering that there are
Speaker 7: some maybe important and time tested methods of working to
Speaker 7: mount a collaborative defense in the context of a politically
Speaker 7: motivated prosecution.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's just to kind of piggyback off
Speaker 2: what you said. I think it's incredibly valuable. Often, like
Speaker 2: if you've been part of social movements, protest movements, what
Speaker 2: if you want to call it, like for a long time.
Speaker 2: Often we do have to learn things like the institutional
Speaker 2: memory of movements can be quite short, and a lot
Speaker 2: of people have come to the protest movement now who
Speaker 2: were not, like in my own case, like involved in
Speaker 2: sort of the campaign against neoliberal globalization in the early
Speaker 2: two thousands, where we screwed up a lot and learned
Speaker 2: a lot, and some of us are still around, and
Speaker 2: some of us are not sadly yet because part of
Speaker 2: the screw ups that that happened, and like a lot
Speaker 2: of people understandably right have been radicalized by having their
Speaker 2: bodily autonomy attacked by seeing the cops continue to murder
Speaker 2: people after we all got in the streets and got
Speaker 2: shot with robb bullets to ask them to stop murdering people.
Speaker 2: Like all these things that have understandably made people realize
Speaker 2: that the institutional the institutions haven't really responded to their
Speaker 2: demands for basic human decency, and so yeah, they might
Speaker 2: find themselves out in the streets and government doesn't generally
Speaker 2: yield power willingly, and certainly government right now is doing
Speaker 2: everything to kind of take what little liberty and autonomy
Speaker 2: folk have slice into that. So it's very reasonable to
Speaker 2: consider these things. So if in this attorney client relationship,
Speaker 2: what would be some areas of friction or of maybe
Speaker 2: I'm phrasing that wrong, but like places where people might
Speaker 2: want to advocate for themselves in order to get an
Speaker 2: outcome that they desire.
Speaker 7: Right, Well, so I'll certainly get more into the specifics,
Speaker 7: but I guess you know, I want to talk about
Speaker 7: this because I am seeing disconnects between people in these relationships,
Speaker 7: and just from where I sit, I feel like I
Speaker 7: can see what's going wrong, and I think that there
Speaker 7: are some straightforward solutions, and I think that having compassion
Speaker 7: each each party having compassion for the other can be
Speaker 7: really useful here. So I think like one thing that's
Speaker 7: happening is that attorneys are very much educated to be
Speaker 7: confident unto the point of arrogance, and clients often either
Speaker 7: don't feel authorized to push back on their attorney's ideas,
Speaker 7: or they do and attorneys to then just maybe steamroll them.
Speaker 7: And this is not entirely because attorneys are assholes. I
Speaker 7: think it is because criminal defense attorneys are very often
Speaker 7: taught to minimize their clients' legal liability by any means necessary, well,
Speaker 7: by any lawful means. I guess that is what I
Speaker 7: should say. So for criminal defense attorneys who do not
Speaker 7: primarily work with movement aligned clients, this often means negotiating
Speaker 7: deals with the prosecution that involve cooperating with the state's investigation,
Speaker 7: handing over information on your confederates, putting the client in
Speaker 7: an isolated or adversarial position with their co defendants or
Speaker 7: co arrestees, or doing things that require a person to
Speaker 7: renounce or disparage the people or the communities that they've
Speaker 7: been involved with that they come from. And I think
Speaker 7: it's true that using these kinds of tactics to minimize
Speaker 7: your own legal risk is very often what people charged
Speaker 7: with criminal offenses want, But that sort of approach is
Speaker 7: often at odds with movement values, and it's often totally
Speaker 7: inconsistent with what activists want. Activists want when they are
Speaker 7: facing charges. So, you know, trying to minimize legal consequences is,
Speaker 7: you know, certainly always a part of our job, and
Speaker 7: it's often a totally valid thing for lawyers to be doing.
Speaker 7: But the idea that an attorney's job is solely to
Speaker 7: mitigate legal fallout is not actually entirely accurate. What lawyers
Speaker 7: are supposed to do is work with the client to
Speaker 7: help the client articulate their goals, and then the attorney
Speaker 7: should use their expertise and their experience to help the
Speaker 7: client lawfully pursue those goals. And that's what attorneys are
Speaker 7: supposed to do in every case. But I think it
Speaker 7: often becomes most salient when the client's goals are less
Speaker 7: focused on minimizing legal consequences and more focused on, for example,
Speaker 7: highlighting movement messages or acting in solidarity with other people
Speaker 7: who are facing similar charges. So you know, again, I'm
Speaker 7: talking about this right now in the context of explicitly
Speaker 7: politically motivated prosecution, but frankly, the goals of the client
Speaker 7: have to lead in all cases.
Speaker 2: Yeah, of course. So one thing that we've chatted, that
Speaker 2: little bit that I think maybe folks in some areas
Speaker 2: that I've looked at might not have been aware of.
Speaker 2: It's a concept of a joint defense. Could you explain
Speaker 2: for people who aren't familiar what that looks like.
Speaker 7: So, a joint defense is a way of approaching a
Speaker 7: legal case where there are multiple defendants or multiple arrestees. Typically,
Speaker 7: in a criminal case, if you have multiple defendants, there's
Speaker 7: sort of a presumption that their interests are at odds
Speaker 7: with each other, that you know, one of them or
Speaker 7: one or more of them is going to get thrown
Speaker 7: under the bus to reduce the punishment of one or
Speaker 7: more of the others. When we're talking about something like
Speaker 7: a mass arrest or an arrest that takes place in
Speaker 7: the context of a social movement where there are multiple defendants,
Speaker 7: very often those people do not see their interests at
Speaker 7: being an odds with each other. Very often they see
Speaker 7: their interests as being unified, and so they want to
Speaker 7: act in solidarity with each other. And there are a
Speaker 7: bunch of reasons for this that are legal, and they're
Speaker 7: also political and social reasons, right, just in terms of
Speaker 7: people you know, having carrying social relationships. They often have
Speaker 7: commitments to each other and to community. But politically, people
Speaker 7: often feel that their individual legal interests are less the
Speaker 7: important thing that's at stake, and that the thing that's
Speaker 7: at stake is actually the health and welfare of their
Speaker 7: social movement, right, and that if they did do something
Speaker 7: like cooperate with the state's investigation, they would actually be
Speaker 7: undermining their larger social movement goals. Legally, and this is
Speaker 7: really important legally, having a joint defense agreement or using
Speaker 7: a joint defense approach allows all of those people to
Speaker 7: work together in a privileged context, right because they share
Speaker 7: a unity of interest, and so they and their attorneys
Speaker 7: are able to work on legal strategy together, are able
Speaker 7: to do things like negotiate for non cooperating plea agreements
Speaker 7: as a block, are able to just have you know,
Speaker 7: more eyes on the problem, more people doing legal research,
Speaker 7: more people drafting motions, right, and so in a very
Speaker 7: material sense, this is often a legal strategy. Working together
Speaker 7: actually leads to better legal outcomes for every body involved.
Speaker 7: So I want to be clear that this approach, both
Speaker 7: you know, using joint defense agreements and using that approach,
Speaker 7: but also just in terms of an individual attorney client relationship,
Speaker 7: acting in a way that's more collaborative is not just cosmetic,
Speaker 7: and it's not just something that makes you feel good
Speaker 7: if you're someone who's committed to anti authoritarian principles. In
Speaker 7: a material way, approaching the attorney client relationship in a
Speaker 7: way that is calculated to more fully incorporate the goals
Speaker 7: and expertise of the client or of many clients leads
Speaker 7: to better legal outcomes, less punitive outcomes. It leads to
Speaker 7: outcomes that are more closely aligned with client values, and
Speaker 7: it leads to outcomes that are better understood by the client,
Speaker 7: even if those outcomes are.
Speaker 2: Bad, right, yeah, yeah, least they're part of that process.
Speaker 2: And I think a great example of joint defense that
Speaker 2: we discussed would be the J twenty case. Right, If
Speaker 2: I'm not mistaken, it was a group of folks who
Speaker 2: were tried together or who amounted to joint defense I
Speaker 2: guess against charges that were like fouled against some Trump's inauguration.
Speaker 7: It was something they were cattled in DC protesting Trump's inauguration,
Speaker 7: and there were more than two hundred people arrested in
Speaker 7: this mass arrest, and they had a very coordinated defense,
Speaker 7: and they all worked together, and ultimately, I'm going to say,
Speaker 7: in large part because they had so many eyes on
Speaker 7: the problem, they had so many people working on it,
Speaker 7: they were able to really go through discovery, go through
Speaker 7: the state's evidence against them, and find prosecutorial misconduct that
Speaker 7: led to the favorable resolution of those cases. The other
Speaker 7: thing that they did is that they really all refused
Speaker 7: to cooperate with the state's investigation, which limited the harm
Speaker 7: that was done to larger social movements because it meant
Speaker 7: that people were not just rolling over on each other
Speaker 7: and giving the state information to which it was not entitled, right,
Speaker 7: like you know, information about people's relationships or interpersonal conflicts,
Speaker 7: or you know, different kinds of First Amendment protected information
Speaker 7: that the state always wants to have about activists but
Speaker 7: which they actually are not entitled to, but which they
Speaker 7: often end up getting because people who are facing criminal charges.
Speaker 7: You know, sometimes will will offer that up in exchange
Speaker 7: for you know, what they hope will be some lenience.
Speaker 2: I think that was a really good explanation of of
Speaker 2: how these techniques, like you say, they're not just cosmetic.
Speaker 2: It's not posturing or an aesthetic thing. It can result
Speaker 2: in material benefits as well as aligning with your moral desires.
Speaker 2: Can you explain substantively then, how this looks in an
Speaker 2: attorney client relationship, either with an individual or as a group,
Speaker 2: Matt your joint defense.
Speaker 7: So, you know, like any other relationship that's predicated on
Speaker 7: anti authoritarian principles and shared values of mutual aid and
Speaker 7: self determination, it requires building trust. It requires clear expectations,
Speaker 7: honest communication, respect for each other's expertise and consent. And
Speaker 7: I think, you know, the piece that I think is
Speaker 7: sometimes missing is a real understanding from both parties that
Speaker 7: the accused is the person who has rights and liberty
Speaker 7: on the line. The accused is the person whose goals matter.
Speaker 7: The accused is the person who needs to be able
Speaker 7: to make decisions about things like whether or not to
Speaker 7: accept a plea offer, whether or not to cooperate with
Speaker 7: the state, whether or not to go to trial and
Speaker 7: whether or not to testify a trial. The attorney is
Speaker 7: presumably the person who has a lot of expertise with
Speaker 7: the law and a lot of experience with the legal system,
Speaker 7: and that is valuable and important. But you know it,
Speaker 7: really I want people who are facing criminal charges to
Speaker 7: understand how much power they ought to feel comfortable exercising
Speaker 7: in this relationship. You know, it is up to the
Speaker 7: accused whether they want their attorney to take part in
Speaker 7: a joint defense strategy. Now we are seeing some stuff.
Speaker 7: I have recently seen some bond conditions imposed on people
Speaker 7: facing criminal charges that appear to me to make it
Speaker 7: very difficult for attorneys to engage in a joint defense
Speaker 7: strategy because sometimes it looks like these co defendants are
Speaker 7: being forbidden from communicating with each other, and so, you know,
Speaker 7: that is an interesting wrinkle. But one of the things
Speaker 7: that can mean is that it's up to the accused
Speaker 7: whether they need their attorney to go and argue to
Speaker 7: have that bond condition removed.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, I thought of that, But there are definitely
Speaker 2: especially if you are being proscuted in a group it's
Speaker 2: alleged to you've conspired to do something illegal, then yes,
Speaker 2: that might be condition of your bond, and that would
Speaker 2: make it very hard to do a joint defense. But
Speaker 2: like you said, that's when you should feel empowered to
Speaker 2: ask your attorney to stop that from being a thing.
Speaker 7: Right, Right, the person who's facing charges gets to make
Speaker 7: these decisions, right, And I'm saying, well, it's your right
Speaker 7: to decide whether to be involved in a joint defense.
Speaker 7: It's also your right to decide not to be. You
Speaker 7: can absolutely exercise your right to independent counsel, meaning the
Speaker 7: right to have an attorney who is not representing anyone
Speaker 7: else who's involved in your case, like who is not
Speaker 7: in any way connected to a co defendant or co arrest. Now,
Speaker 7: this is not to say that your attorney has to
Speaker 7: do everything you want and they're just a yes man,
Speaker 7: and that if they decline to do everything you instruct
Speaker 7: them to do, that you should fire them. You know,
Speaker 7: attorneys do have to operate under certain constraints, and this
Speaker 7: ranges from things like, you know, some law is not
Speaker 7: relevant to this case. Right. I've occasionally had clients ask
Speaker 7: me to use the uniform commercial Code to defend their
Speaker 7: criminal cases, which is not a thing. And you know,
Speaker 7: I've also had clients ask me to like hold have
Speaker 7: a hearing or vile emotion at a time when like
Speaker 7: procedurally that's not permissible, right, So you know, you can't
Speaker 7: just do everything that the client says. But look, typically
Speaker 7: the attorney has control over legal strategy because you know,
Speaker 7: as I said, presumably they have expertise with the law.
Speaker 7: But like, even if you have decided that you're just
Speaker 7: going to defer to your attorney entirely in matters of strategy,
Speaker 7: or even if you have an attorney who's like not
Speaker 7: super comfortable involving you in strategy to the degree that
Speaker 7: like I might be, at a minimum, the attorney needs
Speaker 7: to be able to explain their strategy to you and
Speaker 7: justify it right. So you know, again there needs to
Speaker 7: be mutual trust and respect for each other. So expertise,
Speaker 7: they're not just a mouthpiece. But if you feel like
Speaker 7: they're genuinely not listening to your goals or not helping
Speaker 7: you to understand what's happening, or they're actively disrespectful, it's
Speaker 7: really important for you to know you can fire your attorney.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think the one area of at least where
Speaker 2: I've become aware of this is somebody whose attorney was
Speaker 2: either refusing to or somehow was incapable of gendering them
Speaker 2: in the way that they would like to be gendered.
Speaker 2: And in cases like that, you have the right to
Speaker 2: ask your journey, you're your attorney, to use whatever pronouns
Speaker 2: you prefer, and to be referred to using those pronouns.
Speaker 2: Is that is that right?
Speaker 7: Absolutely? Absolutely. I've certainly heard horror stories, and not just
Speaker 7: and I'll speak to this in a second. I have
Speaker 7: heard horror stories not just about public defenders, but also
Speaker 7: about private counsel being you know, casually race cyst being misogynist,
Speaker 7: being transphobic, and you know, being ablest, being really disrespectful
Speaker 7: and classist, particularly around things like transportation and childcare. So
Speaker 7: you know, if you have an attorney who's just straight
Speaker 7: rude or being disrespectful or like being oppressive in some way,
Speaker 7: I would say, you know, the first step I suppose
Speaker 7: would be to bring it to their attention, and if
Speaker 7: they don't, if they are not responsive, you know, you
Speaker 7: should know that you do have a right to choose
Speaker 7: your own attorney. Now, I do understand that there are
Speaker 7: you know, financial issues with just choosing your own attorney,
Speaker 7: but particularly in the context of you know, movement related prosecutions.
Speaker 7: They're often not always, but often resources available to you
Speaker 7: where people will either work to find you someone who
Speaker 7: can represent you pro bono or you know, will raise money.
Speaker 7: And the other thing is that if you have a
Speaker 7: public defender, you can almost always have appointed counsel from
Speaker 7: another office if you have some kind of irretrievable conflict
Speaker 7: with your attorney.
Speaker 2: So I think we should talk about public defenders a
Speaker 2: bit because I think sometimes people can think that like
Speaker 2: that they're sort of the worst option, or like the
Speaker 2: bargain basement choice or what have you. Went In fact,
Speaker 2: there are some things you can get with a public
Speaker 2: defender you're very unlikely to get with private counsel and
Speaker 2: absolute yea, let's talk about public defenders a little bit.
Speaker 7: Sure, I would love to. I love public defenders actually
Speaker 7: in large cities that have what we would call institutional
Speaker 7: public defenders as opposed to you know, everyone takes a
Speaker 7: turn being a public defender for one week out of
Speaker 7: the year. You know, people who want to be public
Speaker 7: defenders do not go into public defense for the big bucks.
Speaker 7: They go into it because they care about defending people
Speaker 7: and keeping people out of jail, and very often, you know,
Speaker 7: the people who are in those positions care very much
Speaker 7: and are really really well trained, and they are not dummies,
Speaker 7: and they will work really hard for you. And I
Speaker 7: do want to push back against the widespread perception that
Speaker 7: public defenders are not good attorneys. They very often are
Speaker 7: the best available option are often in very very good hands. No,
Speaker 7: this isn't to say that you're never going to come
Speaker 7: across a public defender who is rude or incompetent in
Speaker 7: some way some way, but I would really really caution
Speaker 7: you against assuming that the public defender is not a
Speaker 7: super qualified, committed attorney. The other thing is that the
Speaker 7: offices of the public defender often have resources available to
Speaker 7: them that private counsel do not. You know, they have investigators,
Speaker 7: they have social workers, they have vouchers for public transportation,
Speaker 7: and all of those things are resources that I think
Speaker 7: can be very useful in supporting someone who's facing criminal charges.
Speaker 7: So again, you know, certainly, if you're having some kind
Speaker 7: of interpersonal problem with your defender or any attorney, I
Speaker 7: want you to feel really really empowered to address it
Speaker 7: and hopefully they're able to, you know, respond in a
Speaker 7: way that's appropriate. And explain what's going on and you
Speaker 7: know why things are happening in whatever way they are.
Speaker 7: But I think it would be a mistake to dismiss
Speaker 7: the public defender as a good option.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I know some public defenders, and
Speaker 2: some of them are really great people, very very committed,
Speaker 2: like you say, to keeping folks out of jail, which
Speaker 2: is his goal in a lot of these cases.
Speaker 7: Some of my best friends are public defenders.
Speaker 2: No, they don't, and like I, people obviously will be.
Speaker 2: I guess a lot of people in some who are
Speaker 2: anti authoritarian right are going to be like less im
Speaker 2: positively aligned with any sort of institutions or feel concerned
Speaker 2: about interacting with people who are part of these institutions.
Speaker 2: But like, as far as those people exist within those
Speaker 2: institutions to keep people out of much worse institutions like jails.
Speaker 7: I think a lot of people who do public defense
Speaker 7: really have the sense that they're you know, that their
Speaker 7: mission is harm reduction, right, and they're prepared to operate
Speaker 7: in the confines of what are sometimes sort of leviathan
Speaker 7: bureaucracies in order to achieve that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and maybe a lot of folks would have run
Speaker 2: into I certainly know. I'm a lot of public twenties
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty in the course of covering protest, and yeah,
Speaker 2: it's pretty clear that those folks were largely aligned with
Speaker 2: good things, with stopping the state doing violence to people
Speaker 2: in all of the different ways that it does that. Well,
Speaker 2: is there anything else that you'd like us to get
Speaker 2: to with respect to these relationships people might have with
Speaker 2: their attorney?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I say this a lot. Attorneys have an obligation
Speaker 7: to give their clients their best understanding of what's going on,
Speaker 7: what paths are available to take, and the possible or
Speaker 7: likely outcomes of each of those paths. Right, an attorney
Speaker 7: has an obligation to give you the best possible legal
Speaker 7: advice based on your articulated goals, their understanding of the law,
Speaker 7: their experience, and their clinical judgment, and their clients have
Speaker 7: no corresponding obligation to follow that advice, which can be
Speaker 7: frustrating from where I sit, but it is nevertheless a
Speaker 7: critical attribute of my work that I do not get
Speaker 7: to make big decisions for other people. They get to
Speaker 7: make decisions that I would not make if I were
Speaker 7: allowed to make them, But I'm not. I think that
Speaker 7: you know, I try to be really transparent with my
Speaker 7: clients about what my ethical commitments are, what I will
Speaker 7: do for them, what I'm not allowed to do for them.
Speaker 7: You know, I try to have those conversations in an
Speaker 7: ongoing way. I don't know that that's common practice. I
Speaker 7: think people are really busy and that's a hard practice
Speaker 7: to maintain. But I want to encourage people who are
Speaker 7: in an attorney client relationship to initiate those conversations, right.
Speaker 4: I guess.
Speaker 7: The only other thing I would say is, you know,
Speaker 7: if you have concerns with your lawyer, address those concerns immediately,
Speaker 7: because the farther into a case you are, the harder
Speaker 7: it is to have that conversation, and the farther into
Speaker 7: a case you are, the harder it is to fire
Speaker 7: your lawyer. Typically, you have a right to choose your
Speaker 7: own attorney, but if you're, you know, one week out
Speaker 7: from going to trial, the judge may not allow you
Speaker 7: to do it. Yeah, right, So yeah, I mean, I guess,
Speaker 7: I just I just wanted to tell anyone who's listening
Speaker 7: that if you are in a situation where you have
Speaker 7: to have a relationship with an attorney, you know, it's
Speaker 7: already probably kind of a bad situation, and you should
Speaker 7: be in a relationship where you feel like your lawyer
Speaker 7: is taking all of your goals seriously, which includes not
Speaker 7: just your straightforward legal goals, but movement support and solidarity.
Speaker 7: And if your lawyer is disrespecting your goals, or disrespecting
Speaker 7: your identities, or disrespecting other kinds of ethical commitments you have,
Speaker 7: you can choose to find a different attorney and are
Speaker 7: resources available, and ultimately these decisions are yours. And then
Speaker 7: I had some resources that I wanted to be great.
Speaker 7: So for people who may be accused of criminal offenses,
Speaker 7: there's a really great book called The Tilted Guide to
Speaker 7: Being a Defendant, and if you google that you can
Speaker 7: find a free pdf of it. I would also encourage
Speaker 7: people to reach out to and to become non lawyer
Speaker 7: legal workers, So people who have, you know, experience with
Speaker 7: jail support, people who have experience with court support, and
Speaker 7: with providing sort of community support to people who are
Speaker 7: facing charges. If you are somebody who has an ongoing case,
Speaker 7: having a support committee that includes at least one legal
Speaker 7: worker can be just so critical in maintaining morale and
Speaker 7: in feeling supported and in having the wherewithal to be
Speaker 7: an active participant in your own defense. And we do
Speaker 7: know that when people are active participants in their own defense,
Speaker 7: they have better legal outcomes.
Speaker 2: Yes, I would imagine even if they don't have better
Speaker 2: legal outcomes, they have ones that are easier for them
Speaker 2: to understand the more satisfactory because of that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, there are a lot of times when
Speaker 7: there are no good options on the table. I don't
Speaker 7: I want to be very clear, being an active participant
Speaker 7: in your own defense or having a really great attorney
Speaker 7: who really listens to you and respects your goals, does
Speaker 7: not mean that you are not going to experience punishment
Speaker 7: or state repression. It means that you are going to
Speaker 7: have a better handle on what your options are and
Speaker 7: why things are happening in the way that they are. So,
Speaker 7: even if you end up in a situation that involves,
Speaker 7: you know, for example, spending time in carceroal confinement, you
Speaker 7: will at least understand how you got there, and you
Speaker 7: will understand what the other possible options were. Right, you know,
Speaker 7: somebody might choose to endure punishment rather than cooperate with
Speaker 7: the state. And even if that is not what most
Speaker 7: people would understand, as a better legal outcome. It is
Speaker 7: an outcome that at least was more intentionally pursued than
Speaker 7: the alternative.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, yeah, So where could people find these these
Speaker 2: non lower legal workers if they wanted to add one,
Speaker 2: or if they know if they wanted support from one.
Speaker 7: If people wanted to find legal workers in their own community,
Speaker 7: I mean typically they're they're involved with movements, they might
Speaker 7: be associated with your local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild,
Speaker 7: they might be the people who are most active in
Speaker 7: jail support. If you really can't find anybody, you can
Speaker 7: call the National Lawyer's Guild Anti Repression hotline if you
Speaker 7: are actively facing charges. That number is two one two
Speaker 7: six seven nine two eight one one, and we can
Speaker 7: try to connect with you with appropriate legal resources in
Speaker 7: your community. That is one way that I would encourage
Speaker 7: people to reach out if you are facing charges and
Speaker 7: you're having a hard time connecting with legal resources. That
Speaker 7: hotline is mostly for federal federal cases and for federal repression,
Speaker 7: but if you call it, we will do our best
Speaker 7: to connect you with appropriate resources wherever you are. And
Speaker 7: there are also some resources for lawyers that I wanted
Speaker 7: to hy appear, which are first of all the National
Speaker 7: Lawyer's Guild, which is a bar association for people who
Speaker 7: value human rights over property rights.
Speaker 2: What a dark situation that this is the subset of
Speaker 2: human beings. Yeah, that the nalgy are great some positive
Speaker 2: energy experiences.
Speaker 7: What a dark situation that it hadn't occurred to me.
Speaker 7: How telling that was about lawyers as a whole.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when a subset of your the subset of my
Speaker 2: profession is equally the dark and terrible people, we just
Speaker 2: have to try and be bettering. Guess.
Speaker 7: The other thing that is available for attorneys who are
Speaker 7: interested is there's a book put out by the same
Speaker 7: people who wrote The Tilted Guide to Being a Defendant
Speaker 7: for attorneys, and it's called Representing Radicals. And that is
Speaker 7: I think available through ak Press.
Speaker 2: You should buy it from Akape Press directly and not
Speaker 2: from Jeffrey Bezos in any way.
Speaker 7: Thank you. But and the other thing is there are
Speaker 7: a lot of attorneys around the country who are more
Speaker 7: than happy to consult, to act as mentors, to share motions,
Speaker 7: to share legal research. The people who work in movement
Speaker 7: spaces as lawyers, are typically always prepared to share our
Speaker 7: experience and resources because we have a stake in other
Speaker 7: people becoming really good at this. You know, you know,
Speaker 7: my goal is to have fewer clients. So if anyone
Speaker 7: is interested in helping me to achieve that goal, either
Speaker 7: by going to law school or by taking some of
Speaker 7: my clients or taking some of the people who might
Speaker 7: otherwise be my clients, please I would be delighted to
Speaker 7: shepherd you into movement defense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that would be great. If we have any little
Speaker 2: like budding movement defenders, how would they be able to
Speaker 2: find you?
Speaker 7: Oh? Yes, if you would like to find me on
Speaker 7: the internet, please don't. But I do have a website
Speaker 7: that you can find if you google me. It is
Speaker 7: mo at Law and I am pretty available if you
Speaker 7: reach out to me by email and have questions. But
Speaker 7: generally when I come on these things, the only thing
Speaker 7: I have to plug is the concept of not talking
Speaker 7: to cops.
Speaker 2: I want to do an episode on that. Maybe we'll
Speaker 2: do it one day. I think we should do an
Speaker 2: expanded how to not talk to Cops guide the.
Speaker 7: I guess it's not just the concept of not talking
Speaker 7: to cops, it's actually the practice of not talking to cops.
Speaker 2: And certainly like it's somebody myself here that lives on
Speaker 2: the border and has to deal with all kinds of
Speaker 2: different jurisdictions of cops on an almost daily basis, just
Speaker 2: in the travel I need to do to live my life.
Speaker 2: It can be complicated and scary, and if you're not
Speaker 2: a citizen, it becomes even more complicated and scary. So,
Speaker 2: oh yeah, that's the thing we should discuss in detail.
Speaker 7: I would like to say that, apart from some very
Speaker 7: very specific exceptions that involve being at borders or being
Speaker 7: subpoenaed to a federal granchurie, you never have an obligation
Speaker 7: to talk to cops, to answer their questions, or to
Speaker 7: cooperate with their investigations. That doesn't mean you can obstruct
Speaker 7: their investigations, but you absolutely have no affirmative obligation to
Speaker 7: speak to police officers. And if they ask you, if
Speaker 7: they are trying to interrogate you or ask you questions,
Speaker 7: you can say I am going to remain silent and
Speaker 7: I want to speak to a lawyer. And if the
Speaker 7: FEDS show up at your house or call you on
Speaker 7: the phone, or come to your office or your place
Speaker 7: of work, you can say, I am represented by counsel.
Speaker 7: Please leave your name at number, and my lawyer will
Speaker 7: call you.
Speaker 2: Okay, Yeah, it's good to have scripts. I want to Yeah,
Speaker 2: I think we should. We should break down in detail
Speaker 2: some more socenarios. We should do it in another episode
Speaker 2: because it'll be maybe a bit longer. Yes, and yeah,
Speaker 2: I think folks, maybe I think everyone understands the concept.
Speaker 2: But the practice, and there's that advice you given their
Speaker 2: is great.
Speaker 7: Yeah. And if if you don't yet have an attorney
Speaker 7: and you feel uncomfortable saying I'm represented by counsel, you
Speaker 7: can just say, please leave your name and number and
Speaker 7: my lawyer will call you. And then you can call
Speaker 7: the National Lawyer's Skilled Anti Federal Repression Hotline at two
Speaker 7: and two six seven nine two eight point one and
Speaker 7: have a privileged conversation about your rights, risks and responsibilities
Speaker 7: and we can connect you with an attorney in your area.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: That is excellent, actionable advice. Yeah, thank you so much
Speaker 2: for giving us so much of your time and help. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I really appreciate it. I'm sureveryone else does too.
Speaker 7: At all. It's my pleasure. I am always available to
Speaker 7: come and talk to you about various the various rights
Speaker 7: of people accused of criminal offenses. Usually I am talking
Speaker 7: about your rights with respect to the state. But it
Speaker 7: has become really evident that I needed to talk about
Speaker 7: people's rights with respect to their own attorneys.
Speaker 2: It's empowering for people to hear this, So I'm glad
Speaker 2: we talked about it too.
Speaker 1: It could happen here. It in Today's Harlance, meaning Tucker
Speaker 1: Carlson getting fired, because that's what we're talking about today
Speaker 1: is Today is one of our classic timely reaction episodes
Speaker 1: to the firing of Fox News fascist and popular anti
Speaker 1: semite Tucker Carlson. Today on the show to chat about
Speaker 1: all of this, I've got Garrison Davis, James Stout, Mio Wong,
Speaker 1: and Sophie Lichterman. Hi, everybody, Wow, where's the.
Speaker 5: Last time we got like the whole crew together.
Speaker 1: A long time? This? This is the bulk of us.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And Sophie wasn't here for the com episode.
Speaker 1: No, Sophie. Sophie refused to be on for the com episode,
Speaker 1: threatening to quit, uh sadly. Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But so you know, today is a couple of days
Speaker 1: since we all got the surprising news that Tucker has
Speaker 1: been let go at Fox. This was news that was
Speaker 1: surprising to Tucker There's a couple of things that are
Speaker 1: funny about the announcement itself, namely that he signed off
Speaker 1: his last episode saying, see you guys next week. Fox
Speaker 1: Play in the messaging they've put out was like, you know,
Speaker 1: we both agreed that he needed to leave the network,
Speaker 1: that this is an amicable split. The Brian Kilmead, who
Speaker 1: replaced him the next episode with Fox News tonight, was like,
Speaker 1: Tucker and I are still good friends. He's just decided
Speaker 1: mutually to take a leave from the company. This is
Speaker 1: definitely not true. We'll talk a little bit about all
Speaker 1: of this, but the gist of I think it's kind
Speaker 1: of worth talking about, like why this happened. As far
Speaker 1: as we know, there's not, you know, objective kind of
Speaker 1: confirmation about why specifically he got fired, but the broad speculation.
Speaker 1: Some articles have like quoted a Fox News insider who
Speaker 1: says that it was due to something either he said
Speaker 1: in a recorded but unaired episode of the show, or
Speaker 1: that it was something that was found in the emails
Speaker 1: that were revealed during discovery that was profoundly anti semitic.
Speaker 1: I've heard out like in one source at least said
Speaker 1: that it was anti semitic enough that it might have
Speaker 1: been legally actionable. That's obviously like what the fuck? I
Speaker 1: would love to know what that's civically means. But what
Speaker 1: we do know is that a former producer for The
Speaker 1: Tucker Carlson Show who was a booking for him, is
Speaker 1: currently suing the network both for a hostile work environment.
Speaker 1: She claims that she was exposed to intense anti Semitism
Speaker 1: while working there, and she alleges that she was basically
Speaker 1: threatened into changing her deposition. So the lawsuit came alongside
Speaker 1: her like issuing a correction to her deposition and saying
Speaker 1: that she had basically lied in order like because she
Speaker 1: was being threatened by people at Fox, which is like,
Speaker 1: so there's a lot going on here. So that's kind
Speaker 1: of the gist of what we know right now as
Speaker 1: to like why he got shit canned. Yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: that's the basics.
Speaker 5: It's interesting too that he it's been like a day
Speaker 5: now and he has said nothing. There have been multiple
Speaker 5: people who said that he's not responding to his texts,
Speaker 5: which is extremely funny. He I saw one report that
Speaker 5: I don't I don't know how accurate is. I saw
Speaker 5: one report that says he found out ten minutes before
Speaker 5: Fox like released the statement.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was in contract negotiations, so he was in
Speaker 1: the middle of presumably getting Fox to agree to pay
Speaker 1: him a shitload more money.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and now he has no money, which is very funny.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, he'll still probably get a lot of money somehow.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, i'd be interesting to see if he like pivots
Speaker 2: to something like like o Ann or News Max. I
Speaker 2: don't know if they have the means to pay him
Speaker 2: what he would probably see.
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, I mean this is this is one of
Speaker 3: the questions kind of following this and how and how
Speaker 3: this decision is gonna affect, you know, politics going forward,
Speaker 3: especially with twenty twenty four. Two big questions being where
Speaker 3: is Tucker going to go and who is going to
Speaker 3: take his place? For the next few weeks, Fox is
Speaker 3: probably just going to be doing like a rotating selection
Speaker 3: of hosts until they like make a final decision. So
Speaker 3: you know, a lot of people could could end up
Speaker 3: end up with that job. But in terms of where
Speaker 3: he's going, there's there's a few interesting options. Now it
Speaker 3: kind of does come down to who's going to be
Speaker 3: willing to pay the probably pretty high price, or if
Speaker 3: he's just going to try to stay independent. But I
Speaker 3: think something like Newsmax isn't isn't out of the question.
Speaker 3: I think I think this that this is this is
Speaker 3: just like a guess, but I think there's a decent
Speaker 3: chance that The Daily Wire is going to go after
Speaker 3: him really hard.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's already.
Speaker 3: Pretty friendly with a lot of the people there. They've
Speaker 3: been willing to dishout a lot of money for someone
Speaker 3: like Stephen Crowder. Now Tucker will be undoubtedly more, but
Speaker 3: also he's going to be more of a pull, and
Speaker 3: that that is something that's entirely possible. I mean, the
Speaker 3: Daily Wire already produces like usually two of the most
Speaker 3: popular podcasts in the world, like in the top ten.
Speaker 3: They already have a lot, They have a lot of
Speaker 3: web traffic. They don't have like cable, but they get
Speaker 3: a lot of like other other ways to to to
Speaker 3: spread their work.
Speaker 2: They have a paid streaming service they yes, yes, they
Speaker 2: also have The Daily Plus.
Speaker 1: Yep, they are. I think that they're probably the only
Speaker 1: people in the right that can offer Tucker both money
Speaker 1: that's broadly in line with what Fox could and an
Speaker 1: audience that's that's sizeable. Potentially even an audience that's larger.
Speaker 1: One of the things to kind of keep in mind
Speaker 1: is that Tucker was going to get out three and
Speaker 1: a half million viewers a night somewhere around there, which
Speaker 1: made him the most popular uh host on cable news,
Speaker 1: but also is minuscule based on historical number one, minuscule
Speaker 1: based on the kind of audiences that like you can
Speaker 1: get on streaming platforms today, which are much larger than
Speaker 1: cable audiences, And is minuscule based on like I mean,
Speaker 1: it was like ten years ago that three and a
Speaker 1: half million viewers on a night ten fifteen years ago
Speaker 1: would have been like an unsuccessful show on ANBC, right,
Speaker 1: uh for for some for some perspective, the most successful
Speaker 1: TV finale of all time was the Mash finale, which
Speaker 1: had like one hundred and five million viewers. Like cable,
Speaker 1: cable don't or you know, television period does not get
Speaker 1: the kind of viewership that it does anymore. And I
Speaker 1: think when you're looking at Tucker, he is the the
Speaker 1: main draw for him has to be the audience. He's
Speaker 1: not and he's the heir to the Campbell or to
Speaker 1: the Swanson, you know, dinner of Fortune. He cannot be
Speaker 1: motivated primarily by the paycheck. Right that that that there's
Speaker 1: he's simply like it. Just that can't be the reason
Speaker 1: he's doing it. It has to be the the fame,
Speaker 1: you know, And so Daily Wire I think is a
Speaker 1: likely place for him as a result of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, another thing that's interesting I thought it is okay
Speaker 2: Man mentioned that he hasn't said anything yet and he's
Speaker 2: probably taking advice from his lawyer, Brian Friedman, who incidentally
Speaker 2: is the same dude who's representing Don Lemon who lost
Speaker 2: his job on the same day, which is for that guy,
Speaker 2: it is a good year for this guy. He like,
Speaker 2: this is the guy who gets a ship ton of
Speaker 2: money from networks when people get fired from networks, like
Speaker 2: he has represented like Megan Kelly before. Like, when you
Speaker 2: hear of a famous person getting let go by network,
Speaker 2: it's probably this guy who's representing them. I thought it
Speaker 2: was utterly hilarious that, yeah, both of them retained the
Speaker 2: same guy on the same day having been fired. But
Speaker 2: thinking about lawyering up, it made me think about like
Speaker 2: Sophie mentioned it that like Carlson defames people, he lies
Speaker 2: on an almost daily basis. Right, We recently spoke about
Speaker 2: how he took the statistics of Russian deaths from those
Speaker 2: league's documents, that he used the blatantly altered version of
Speaker 2: those documents long after everyone knew they'd been altered. Right,
Speaker 2: he needs serious legal clout to defend him from the
Speaker 2: fact that he lies into fames people every single day.
Speaker 2: So like going even though he has a sizable fortune,
Speaker 2: going out on his own would be costly in the
Speaker 2: sense of like he would almost have to be permanently
Speaker 2: defending himself.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I think I think this is one of
Speaker 5: the things where, well it's not clear to me what
Speaker 5: the impact is of the Alex Johnes trial has been,
Speaker 5: but this is one of those things where I think
Speaker 5: the dominion people actually just nailing Fox to the wall
Speaker 5: is going to be a sort of big factor here
Speaker 5: because it makes it seem easier and more plausible on
Speaker 5: things that like lawyers are willing to risk getting in
Speaker 5: fights about for actually going after these people, for just
Speaker 5: like defending people. And so yeah, it'll be it'll be
Speaker 5: interesting to see, like how how long Tucker can last
Speaker 5: on his own before he gets into a giant court
Speaker 5: battle with someone, and whether he is I don't know,
Speaker 5: attempts to be slightly more careful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like I yeah, exactly. I don't think if he's
Speaker 2: if he goes to YouTube or something, he's not going
Speaker 2: to be spending his his frozen dinner fortune on legal fees.
Speaker 2: I don't think so he and he can't do what
Speaker 2: he does without spouting shit, right, Like his whole thing
Speaker 2: is just straight up lying and doing this sort of
Speaker 2: credulous fool routine that he does, which which always results
Speaker 2: in these ridiculous conclusions that he comes to. So like,
Speaker 2: I don't know with that, maybe the daily why I
Speaker 2: can suderstain that I don't really have a good sense
Speaker 2: of sort of their clout if people aren't familiar. Should
Speaker 2: we summarize the dominion case? I know you've spoken about
Speaker 2: it on.
Speaker 1: Fast Yeah I did. I mean you can listen to
Speaker 1: the two parter I did with Katie and Cody on
Speaker 1: on the dominion lawsuit where he basically just go over
Speaker 1: the entire document that Dominion prepared for that. But the
Speaker 1: gist of it is that Tucker knowingly and knowingly. We
Speaker 1: know that he knew because the discovery process revealed a
Speaker 1: bunch of his text messages and emails where he talked
Speaker 1: about knowing that the election fraud conspiracy theory was bullshit,
Speaker 1: and he propagated it and attacks against Dominion and another company, Smartmatic,
Speaker 1: in order to keep his audience on board, which is
Speaker 1: a criminal you know, defamation or not criminal, but at
Speaker 1: least like legally actionable you can sue as as Dominion
Speaker 1: did and one like eight hundred million bucks. And I
Speaker 1: do think that's really worth That is kind of pertinent
Speaker 1: when we're talking about who's going to take him next,
Speaker 1: because like, obviously the Daily Wire would want a guy
Speaker 1: like Tucker except for the fact that he could cost
Speaker 1: them another eight hundred million dollars, which has to be
Speaker 1: has to be part of the calculus of any company
Speaker 1: looking at taking him on, And I think is something
Speaker 1: none of us, nobody really knows what's going to happen
Speaker 1: with this, but I think there is a good chance
Speaker 1: he is permanently marginalized in terms of audience just because
Speaker 1: of how much like eight hundred million dollars is not
Speaker 1: enough to sink Fox on its own, but it is
Speaker 1: enough to make anybody looking at bringing Tucker on board.
Speaker 5: The second guest, Yeah, I sawso numbers that were I
Speaker 5: think I think they were saying he was bringing in
Speaker 5: the highest like amount of revenue of any like like
Speaker 5: Kimble News anchor. But it was like it was like
Speaker 5: seventy eight million dollars a year and he lost like
Speaker 5: so he lost ten years of his income.
Speaker 1: He basically lost it, lost everything he'd made Fox during
Speaker 1: the time when he was the number one Get news house.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and that has to be that has to be
Speaker 5: a huge part of the coculus of like, Okay, you
Speaker 5: know these are these people like as as as as
Speaker 5: much as the right is ideological, it is also capitalist
Speaker 5: and the risk reward on that is terrifying.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I like, especially when it comes to the
Speaker 3: Daily Wire, a cost like that would just probably make
Speaker 3: their entire company fold.
Speaker 5: Because they don't have Murdock behind them.
Speaker 3: They're not They're not that big of a company, just
Speaker 3: have a disproportionate amount of influence because their hosts are
Speaker 3: really good at like marketing and social media manipulation.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, I ad revenue. That would be a
Speaker 2: great time for us to pivot to and for some
Speaker 2: gold coins with Reagan.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah. You can hear the ads for the
Speaker 1: new podcasts that are our future. Colleague Tucker Carlson's gonna
Speaker 1: be doing.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's whay Ym and Don Lemon just.
Speaker 1: Have yeah, him and Don Lemon. We we're calling it.
Speaker 1: H I don't know, there's there's a good there's a
Speaker 1: good there's a good joke with their two names somewhere.
Speaker 1: I haven't figured it out yet though, So you do
Speaker 1: that for yourselves, audience. Ah, what a good what a
Speaker 1: good time that we're talking about here. This is just
Speaker 1: just just a great day, great week. Uh So, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're looking at you know, I think kind of when
Speaker 1: we're talking about what's possible here and Daily Wirey agree
Speaker 1: is kind of the most likely thing. If you look
Speaker 1: at what leaked recently during their drama with Stephen Krawt,
Speaker 1: the contract they were offering Crowder was somewhere around thirty
Speaker 1: million dollars, which, from everything people have said, is a
Speaker 1: big deal for them. That's one of the biggest, bigger
Speaker 1: offerings they're capable of doing. That is, you know, probably
Speaker 1: the most Tucker is realistically going to be able to get.
Speaker 6: But also.
Speaker 1: One of the things that kind of is noteworthy about
Speaker 1: the contract they were offering Crowder is that it included
Speaker 1: clauses where like Crowder's take home could be reduced significantly
Speaker 1: if he got kicked off of platforms and fucking Tucker
Speaker 1: Carlson is not going to keep it a YouTube account.
Speaker 3: I mean it is. It is interesting in that sense
Speaker 3: of like they were they all of his content was
Speaker 3: able to be kept up when he was under Fox.
Speaker 3: Like on YouTube you can find all of his segments,
Speaker 3: and it'd be interesting to see how the content moderation
Speaker 3: differs if like he starts his own channel and how
Speaker 3: and how comparatively what things would be would be counted
Speaker 3: as like community guideline strikes. But yeah, I mean just
Speaker 3: I think I think, like last week Matt Walsh's show
Speaker 3: got demonetized on YouTube, which if his contract is anything
Speaker 3: like Crowters, means that he is gonna be suffering up
Speaker 3: like a personal financial hit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's they're taking probably you know, in the millions
Speaker 1: that he's losing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And there's something I think this is an interesting
Speaker 5: thing that's been happening in the last maybe like six months,
Speaker 5: has been there's there's been sort of increasing tension between
Speaker 5: sort of the far right that's basically sees control the
Speaker 5: Republican Party and like the money, and they keep running
Speaker 5: into these issues where in order to keep their base going,
Speaker 5: they need to say stuff that like their sort of
Speaker 5: like corporate backers are like, this is either losing us
Speaker 5: money or is so far out there that like it's
Speaker 5: you know, it's it's either directly losing us money from lawsuits,
Speaker 5: or or it's losing us elections, or it's losing us
Speaker 5: like business. And now I'm never gonna claim that like
Speaker 5: Murdoch is not the far right, because he is. But
Speaker 5: it's interesting that we've gotten to a point where people
Speaker 5: like Murdoch are getting more gun shy about what they
Speaker 5: can put on air because it's finally like the money
Speaker 5: is finally starting to see actual consequences, and they're starting
Speaker 5: to pull back from the stuff a little bit.
Speaker 1: Well, see, that's part of what I'm questioning is I'm
Speaker 1: sure that that is something that's entering his calculus more
Speaker 1: now since the settlement, but it's at least the earlier
Speaker 1: reporting suggests that's not really why, or at least not
Speaker 1: most of the reason why Tucker got shit canned. It's
Speaker 1: a bunch of shit like stuff that is not revealed
Speaker 1: yet in the deposition that he was saying an email.
Speaker 1: I mean, one of the things came out that woman
Speaker 1: who is accusing him of creating a sexist and anti
Speaker 1: semitic work environment. Is that he like when she got hired,
Speaker 1: he clustered swimsuit photos of Nancy Pelosi over her office,
Speaker 1: And that's what we've heard, like the ship that Like,
Speaker 1: I think it's possible, uh that what actually got Murdoch
Speaker 1: to make the call to can him is that he
Speaker 1: Murdoch himself found out through discovery that he was saying
Speaker 1: shit in emails that would sink the company, Like if
Speaker 1: he's saying full on Nazi shit. Yeah, and there's there's
Speaker 1: documentation of that, which I don't think is unlikely he
Speaker 1: had on it, like yeah.
Speaker 5: There's no there's there's there's no there's no limit at
Speaker 5: that point.
Speaker 2: Like yeah, no, the like clearly that ship aligns with
Speaker 2: his views, and he's made a concerted effort to mainstream
Speaker 2: more and more outright fascist New Genesis white supremacist talking
Speaker 2: points every year he's had that show, so it would know,
Speaker 2: especially when they got his text messages, Like he might
Speaker 2: be smart enough not to like maybe use his work email,
Speaker 2: but I think that the fact that he's there were
Speaker 2: some things in his text messages and yeah, that wouldn't
Speaker 2: surprise me. It's either that or he said something personal
Speaker 2: about one of the Murdochs, and.
Speaker 1: Well he did. He did talk shit about Fox executives,
Speaker 1: which some people have suggested as like part of why
Speaker 1: they made the decision. It can him that he actually
Speaker 1: just pissed off the moneymen too, and this was kind
Speaker 1: of an excuse to take more action. Again, like it's
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of unclear exactly what happened. I think
Speaker 1: it's probably worth talking about in the last portion of
Speaker 1: this what impact, because it is likely that whatever happens,
Speaker 1: he's he's going to have less reach and at least
Speaker 1: less reach in like a practical way, because if Tucker
Speaker 1: starts a podcast, even if the podcast has kind of
Speaker 1: more you know, through Daily Wire or whatever, even if
Speaker 1: it's got on paper more listeners than Fox, I think
Speaker 1: there's something about cable news where you're reaching an audience
Speaker 1: that's that's different with the ideas that he was When
Speaker 1: he was on Fox, he was hitting people who would
Speaker 1: never have encountered some of this like fascist shit, this
Speaker 1: great replacement stuff, whereas if he's saying the same thing
Speaker 1: on a Daily Wire podcast, he's probably talking more to
Speaker 1: people who are already pilled, so to speak. So I
Speaker 1: do think there's a good chance that overall this kind
Speaker 1: of tanks his ability to.
Speaker 3: Actually like influence culture inful way.
Speaker 2: Radicalized boomers like everyone listening can probably think of a
Speaker 2: person who they know or is in their sort of
Speaker 2: greatest circle of people who their friends know, who is
Speaker 2: an older person who is very much offline and has
Speaker 2: encountered these great replacement ideas through Tucker Carlson and become
Speaker 2: a significantly worse person because of Tucker Carlson's program.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, and you can you can see how
Speaker 3: all of the Daily Wire guys like like Wall and Mike,
Speaker 3: Michael Noles and even someone like Andy No, they they
Speaker 3: suck up to Carlson so much and have been for
Speaker 3: the past few years because they realized that that actually
Speaker 3: gives them cultural access to be on his show on
Speaker 3: that platform in a way that they're much more like
Speaker 3: Peterson too, Pete Peterson. Sure, I think Peterson's broken into
Speaker 3: the mainstream.
Speaker 5: I think a bit more.
Speaker 3: But like all of these other guys like like Andy No,
Speaker 3: Walsh Knowles, they're all heavily like Internet people, and they
Speaker 3: influence like Internet shit, and sometimes that can start crossing over.
Speaker 3: But in general, the cable news platform kind of reiffies
Speaker 3: things into broader culture in a way that someone like
Speaker 3: Walsh just doesn't because he like, most people don't know
Speaker 3: who walshes, but most people do know who Tucker is.
Speaker 1: And that is my interesting is lifelong Republican voter. And
Speaker 1: when I talked to him complaining about shit Matt Walsh
Speaker 1: is doing, Like the first thing he said was like,
Speaker 1: I've never heard of this guy. Yeah, And it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: because he's a fucking internet weirdo. And my dad doesn't
Speaker 1: you know, he knows Ben Shapiro because Ben breaks through
Speaker 1: to the mainstream, but he knows Ben Shapiro from like
Speaker 1: catching clips of him randomly being shared on Facebook by
Speaker 1: other people in his age group, as opposed to like
Speaker 1: seeking this shit out. And that's kind of the power
Speaker 1: of Tucker. And I think one of the things you've
Speaker 1: seen Gear that you were kind of talking at, which
Speaker 1: is the thing that is maybe most hopeful to me,
Speaker 1: is how scared people like Andy know Glenn Greenwald flipped
Speaker 1: the fuck out when this gun announced because they see
Speaker 1: this is a major threat to their reach into their
Speaker 1: earning potential. Yeah, Tucker can't host them anymore. That's potentially
Speaker 1: disastrous for them, and the fact that that's happening right
Speaker 1: as we're gearing up for twenty twenty four is something
Speaker 1: I'm hopeful about. At least I'll say.
Speaker 3: It is a massive like rejection of that platform to yeah,
Speaker 3: people like that like this type of like rhetoric Tucker
Speaker 3: is doing. Having this be like publicly rejected in this
Speaker 3: way will make all these people that are more on
Speaker 3: the fringes probably make it harder for them to break
Speaker 3: through in little ways like they used to try to
Speaker 3: by being on Tucker as a show.
Speaker 1: Speaking of reifying things into the broader culture. Buy these
Speaker 1: products and we're back.
Speaker 5: Okay. So there's one other thing that I We've could
Speaker 5: have been touching on it, but I think it's really
Speaker 5: interesting is that Tucker. Tucker basically has this sort of
Speaker 5: media ecosystem that revolves around him, and you know, there's
Speaker 5: a very established pathway for how you can become a
Speaker 5: sort of like a successful and profitable right wing grifter
Speaker 5: which goes through you know, you sort of go viral
Speaker 5: on Twitter, you go viral on TikTok, and then you
Speaker 5: go on a Tucker and you know, and like like
Speaker 5: people like lives a TikTok, right, Like, I think I
Speaker 5: think there's there's a certific kind of media campaign that
Speaker 5: even with whoever, like whatever absolute asshole that like Fox
Speaker 5: puts in that slot after Tucker's you know, when whatever
Speaker 5: they sort of figure out who that's going to be, Like,
Speaker 5: there's still I think going to be sort of a
Speaker 5: hole there. Yeah, where I think it gets harder to
Speaker 5: run the kinds the very the very very specific kinds
Speaker 5: of campaigns like liber tich talk, like the sort of
Speaker 5: mods for liberty shit that that's been just making the
Speaker 5: country unfathomably awful for the past few years.
Speaker 2: With like that. I've been kind of working on writing
Speaker 2: something scripted about this trans panic that happened in a
Speaker 2: town very near me in Santi right, which like was
Speaker 2: an extremely clear like like that was the goal, right,
Speaker 2: like like do to speech, go go viral, go on
Speaker 2: Tucker create, you know, then go on the speaking circuit,
Speaker 2: make money. Like to me, at least, it seems very
Speaker 2: clear that that was that was the goal.
Speaker 1: And I yeah, he's he's a weapons system that they
Speaker 1: they have learned, like has become kind of the center
Speaker 1: of right wing strategy really is like get on Tucker
Speaker 1: cause you know moral panic culture warship yep.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and and you know, and like obviously like other
Speaker 5: Fox shows do this stuff, it doesn't work anywhere anywhere
Speaker 5: near as well.
Speaker 3: And now I think it's the person the person that
Speaker 3: gets the closest is probably Laura Ingram, but I think
Speaker 3: she she kind of suffers from the glass ceiling problems.
Speaker 5: Yeah, she actually cannot be Yeah, I mean, but.
Speaker 2: I've Brad Masogy. I stand with Laura.
Speaker 3: Ingram rub Big specifically viewing Tucker as this thing that
Speaker 3: was like a targeted weapon. I think it's a really
Speaker 3: good way to look at this, and specifically now that
Speaker 3: that weapon no longer can like actually aim correctly because.
Speaker 1: Or at least may not be able to write. I mean,
Speaker 1: maybe he'll come back and we're wrong, but I I
Speaker 1: am optimistic. I think it all said, Yeah, it.
Speaker 2: Puts a spanner in the works of the hate machine
Speaker 2: that that he built and the folks built, and that's
Speaker 2: a good thing.
Speaker 3: But Mia, you were saying before I rudely interrupted.
Speaker 1: You, you asked, all you.
Speaker 5: Cannot remember what what I was gonna say.
Speaker 3: You're talking about how how how other other hosts kind
Speaker 3: of do the thing but.
Speaker 6: Not the Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean part of it also is just you know,
Speaker 5: part of the power of Tucker is just the time
Speaker 5: slot that he's in, Yeah, which is you know that
Speaker 5: that that's the one where like all of the people
Speaker 5: who've gotten off of work, who are like turning on
Speaker 5: the television at night get to But yeah, like Tuck,
Speaker 5: Tucker was I think was really in in the entirety
Speaker 5: of the sort of TV and media sphere, was uniquely
Speaker 5: good at that stuff and no one else, no one
Speaker 5: else can do it like that, and you know, like
Speaker 5: the like if the Fox people will create someone else,
Speaker 5: but until they fill that spot, A, there's a gap,
Speaker 5: and B it really remains to be seen whether seeing
Speaker 5: whether they're going to sort of pick someone who is
Speaker 5: as embedded in like that part of the sort of
Speaker 5: fascists right as Tucker is, or if they're going to
Speaker 5: find someone who's like, i mean still really really right
Speaker 5: wing and sucks but isn't like having ye on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And it's I mean, I am kind of
Speaker 1: curious slash worried about who's going to follow him into
Speaker 1: that time slot. Folks, real old heads will know Tucker
Speaker 1: got his job after Bill O'Reilly, who was the Fox
Speaker 1: News fascist of my childhood, got shit canned for sexual
Speaker 1: harassment on an industrial scale. Uh, and so that's that's
Speaker 1: why Tucker is in. And obviously as bad as Bill was,
Speaker 1: Tucker was worse, and maybe the person who follows Tucker
Speaker 1: will be worse than Tucker. I do have trouble imagining
Speaker 1: what that could be, because my god, he really he went.
Speaker 1: He went right up to the edge of putting on
Speaker 1: a fucking swastik arm band.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, I will say about the Bill Orilelly people,
Speaker 5: people have been like, oh, like, Tucker's going to disappear
Speaker 5: in the way Bill o'reiley did. I don't. I don't
Speaker 5: think that's I think he's going to be a bigger
Speaker 5: like But assuming he winds up somewhere, I think he'll
Speaker 5: still be a bigger influence than like Bill O'Reilly was
Speaker 5: after he got but.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean Bill was also a lot older, right, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: No, I think that is that is an accurate assessment.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm. Well excited, excited to get my new Rumble
Speaker 3: subscriptions so I can watch Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: It's going to be uh glorious to see him finally
Speaker 1: pair up with Tim Poole, the two, the two of
Speaker 1: them carrying AK forty seven, so doing field journalism in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Tucker casting, for those are not familiar, carried
Speaker 2: a gun when reporting in a rock, which for many
Speaker 2: reasons it's a fucking terrible idea, including putting f one
Speaker 2: else doing your changer.
Speaker 1: But it is really funny. It's very I will, I
Speaker 1: will say that it is funny.
Speaker 5: I I genuine like part of me doesn't, but part
Speaker 5: of me does. Hope he decides to do a thing
Speaker 5: where he's like, I'm gonna go do field journalism in
Speaker 5: Ukraine and just.
Speaker 1: Seemed so I will, it's fucking marked by God, damn
Speaker 1: like happens, No, no, no, you know what happens.
Speaker 3: He he imbeds with the aesoff battalion. Yeah, and they
Speaker 3: all get taken out.
Speaker 2: God willing kindness.
Speaker 3: But I think one thing I was serfinally thinking about,
Speaker 3: like the past few years, less less so that this
Speaker 3: this like past year specifically, but for a while it
Speaker 3: was a quite frightening prospect to think about what if
Speaker 3: Tucker was going to run for president? And I don't
Speaker 3: think he is. He is not going to do that
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty four. Absolutely, that's that's that's not happening.
Speaker 3: But I mean it's still possible he could in the future.
Speaker 3: Twenty twenty eight is likely, uh if, if he wants.
Speaker 3: But I think the loss of this position at this
Speaker 3: point in time will probably affect that decision because it's
Speaker 3: something he's certainly been thinking about, considering he's one of
Speaker 3: the most influential conservative people on the Yeah, like on
Speaker 3: the planet.
Speaker 2: He determines policy or did if.
Speaker 3: He did, yeah, and and and now it's interesting with him,
Speaker 3: with him leaving his job in this way, it'll be
Speaker 3: interesting to see if how that how that affects any
Speaker 3: kind of potential of prospect for him for him, yeah,
Speaker 3: running for office.
Speaker 1: My big question around all that, and this is kind
Speaker 1: of unanswerable, is like, does Tucker have any appeal outside
Speaker 1: of the right wing base. Three and a half million
Speaker 1: cable news viewers is not evidence of the kind of
Speaker 1: broad based appeal that can draw an independence and win
Speaker 1: an election. And Tucker has never you know, the one
Speaker 1: the closest thing he's been to a political candidate is
Speaker 1: when he went up against John Stewart, and that didn't
Speaker 1: go great for him. No, he and he moved aft
Speaker 1: after John Stewart kind of destroyed his Crossfire career. He
Speaker 1: moved to a situation where he was he had unprecedented
Speaker 1: control over his show. It was almost entirely recorded and
Speaker 1: stuff out of a studio in Maine that he set up.
Speaker 1: He built everything he was doing around being able to
Speaker 1: totally control how he was seen, what was shown, what
Speaker 1: of his was like put out to the public. And
Speaker 1: you simply can't do that as a presidential candidate. You
Speaker 1: have to accept and be able to make work for
Speaker 1: you the fact that every eye is on you and
Speaker 1: you do not have total control over what about you
Speaker 1: is put out and published, among other things. You're going
Speaker 1: to be repeatedly questioned in situations where you can't edit
Speaker 1: the footage or stop things from going out afterwards. And
Speaker 1: I don't know that Tucker has what it takes to
Speaker 1: succeed in that kind of environment.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Enchilade, he fucking never succeeds again and we never
Speaker 5: have to hear about him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we should shout out this lady kat Abazzale, that
Speaker 2: the person who had to watch Tucker Carlson for years
Speaker 2: and years and years and then explain it to people.
Speaker 2: She works at Media Matters for America. But she is
Speaker 2: taking the biggest victory lap that anyone has ever taken
Speaker 2: right now. And it's kind of glorious.
Speaker 3: To watch doing the lord's work. Truly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, taking on trauma for all of her stuff was
Speaker 2: quite good. Like she she did a good job explaining
Speaker 2: how toxic Tucker was to people who might not have
Speaker 2: been aware of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Anyway, in conclusion, Tucker, we would love to have
Speaker 1: you on at Cool Zone. Totally welcome to come host
Speaker 1: your own podcast. We'll bring you on to it could
Speaker 1: happen here. You can do a bastard's guest appearance, jam,
Speaker 1: he can right into the jungle.
Speaker 2: Directly.
Speaker 1: Come on, come on, Tucker. We'd love to have you anyway.
Speaker 1: I think that's I think that's a soode.
Speaker 5: It's been four months since French President Emanuel Macron effect
Speaker 5: declared war on French society. Euphemistically called pension reforms, Macron's
Speaker 5: proposal would increase the retirement age from sixty two to
Speaker 5: sixty four, effectively robbing the working class of two years
Speaker 5: of their lives. In January, French unions filled the streets
Speaker 5: of Paris with trash now French workers build brick and
Speaker 5: mortar barricades on highways and set branches on fire on
Speaker 5: train tracks. Welcome to it could happen here. The escalation
Speaker 5: from protest to uprising is in part a product of
Speaker 5: how Macron forced the retirement age increase through a national
Speaker 5: assembly he no longer controls without the ability to win
Speaker 5: a vote. Macron's Prime Minister, Elizabeth Bourne, suddenly invoked Article
Speaker 5: forty nine of the French Constitution, which allows the ruling
Speaker 5: government to force a bill into law without a vote.
Speaker 5: Macron argues that because circumventing Parliament to force legislation through
Speaker 5: is legal, the move is democratic across France. Disagree. We
Speaker 5: spoke to two French protesters, Mael, a student in Leone,
Speaker 5: and a Gat, a union railway worker at a state
Speaker 5: owned rail company, about the movement. The two met through
Speaker 5: a struggle committee designed to bring people from different backgrounds
Speaker 5: and movements together to fight against mccron's reforms and four,
Speaker 5: as Mael put it, victories for our class. A Gat
Speaker 5: had this to say about Macron's anti democratic sleight of hand.
Speaker 4: What they are using right now is a rhetorical trap
Speaker 4: which consists of confusing democracy and constitutionalism. I don't know
Speaker 4: if I'm using the right word, but for instance, you
Speaker 4: know that they maybe you know that to impose this reform,
Speaker 4: they have been using an article, which this article forty
Speaker 4: nine points three of our constitution and they say that, well,
Speaker 4: this article is in the constitution, we are in a democracy,
Speaker 4: and therefore this article is democratic, which is absolutely false.
Speaker 4: It's a fallacious reasoning. It is not true. It's the
Speaker 4: forty nine point three is an anti constitution. It is
Speaker 4: an anti democratic article of the constitution. And this is
Speaker 4: what they have been trying to do lately, to say
Speaker 4: to make us believe that everything that's been happening is
Speaker 4: absolutely normal and implies with the democratic standards of France,
Speaker 4: which is not true. Also, what they are trying to
Speaker 4: do to disqualify any opposition from the left wing is
Speaker 4: to say that the left wing party is actually an
Speaker 4: extreme left hardly, which it is not. And it's kind
Speaker 4: of they are trying to induce the kind of history
Speaker 4: in all this and to radicalize what is not. What
Speaker 4: we are asking for is simply for them to to
Speaker 4: listen to what we for once can call the people. Generally,
Speaker 4: when you have a protest, it's only a part of
Speaker 4: the population that disagrees with the policy of the government.
Speaker 4: But this time, honestly, uh, there are seven seven people
Speaker 4: out of ten who are who disagree with this and uh,
Speaker 4: nine workers out of ten who disagree with this reform. Honestly,
Speaker 4: I think we can call ourselves the people.
Speaker 8: And in a democracy, well what you do is listen
Speaker 8: to the people, not that representatives and not the members
Speaker 8: of the government, but the people in the fucking streets.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry. Uh. And and because they do not want
Speaker 4: to do that, they try to say that we are
Speaker 4: radicals and that we are supported by radical political parties.
Speaker 4: It's not true.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's it's very radious situation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is what I wanted to say about what
Speaker 4: they're at their current strategy, aside from the repression of
Speaker 4: which we are going to talk in a few minutes,
Speaker 4: this is what their strategy is.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Like basically they confuse all of the forces on
Speaker 6: the left together. They say that Melanchia is funding the
Speaker 6: black Block, you know, so it's things like that, the
Speaker 6: CGTS and a fee, all of them, it's on the
Speaker 6: same and they all want the destruction of civilization. And
Speaker 6: I don't know that's the discourse on the far right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, babies, Yeah, that sounds like you're American, right too.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and this is kind of linked to police violence,
Speaker 6: this discourse when you were talking about how they're saying
Speaker 6: that the constitution is democratic and there's nothing you can
Speaker 6: say even though well, the point of the constitution is
Speaker 6: to bypass the parliament. I don't know that democratic. But yeah,
Speaker 6: So when it comes to police violence as a reaction
Speaker 6: is to say that the state holds the legitimate monopoly
Speaker 6: of violence, so therefore they can repress us however they want.
Speaker 6: That's literally what they're saying right now, which is kind
Speaker 6: of worrying.
Speaker 5: The French police have been incredibly violent in their campaign
Speaker 5: to suppress the protests. At an ecological action in San
Speaker 5: Seline on March twenty fifth, tens of thousands of activists
Speaker 5: were met with helicopters, armored vehicles, and six thousand grenades,
Speaker 5: many of which were the French police's new and incredibly
Speaker 5: dangerous military grade GM two l cs gas grenades. One
Speaker 5: protester was shot in the head with a tear gas
Speaker 5: grenade fired by a grenade launcher mounted on an armored vehicle.
Speaker 5: He remained in a coma fighting for his life for
Speaker 5: an entire month. Earlier today, his parents' release a statement
Speaker 5: saying that he has begun to wake up, but is
Speaker 5: not fully conscious and his life remains in danger. The
Speaker 5: day before, a special police motorcycle unit called Brav M,
Speaker 5: created in twenty nineteen to suppress the Genejean with the
Speaker 5: yellow vest protests, was recorded threatening a group of random
Speaker 5: people that had arrested for sitting in front of a
Speaker 5: building from The Washington Post. The cop says, quote, You're
Speaker 5: lucky to be sitting there, and now that we've arrested you,
Speaker 5: I swear I'd have broken your leg literally. I can
Speaker 5: tell you We've broken elbows and faces, but you I'd
Speaker 5: have broken your legs, one officer says. In the recording.
Speaker 5: Limone reported two slapping sounds can be heard, the report says,
Speaker 5: along with an officer saying, wipe that smile off your face.
Speaker 5: Later in the clip, a police officer warns the young
Speaker 5: people they have detained. Quote, next time we come, you
Speaker 5: won't be getting in the car to go to the
Speaker 5: police station. You'll be getting in another thing called an
Speaker 5: ambulance to go to the hospital. Paris Police chief Laurette
Speaker 5: Nuez said on Friday he was quote very shocked by
Speaker 5: the audio clip Mayel and a gat We're less shocked.
Speaker 4: This is not really a surprise, unfortunately, because well, our
Speaker 4: lease is not as h I don't know, it's problematic,
Speaker 4: but maybe not as problematic as in the US. I'm
Speaker 4: sorry if I'm wrong about that. But we also follow
Speaker 4: sometimes what happens on the other side of the ocean.
Speaker 4: And uh, but I must say that we we have
Speaker 4: had issues of police murders on the street like and
Speaker 4: police violence, wanting violence, and unfortunately that now it's not
Speaker 4: new and there is a newspaper media parts who managed
Speaker 4: to to find a excerpt of I think it's a
Speaker 4: group on WhatsApp or whatever of policemen talking about race,
Speaker 4: war and uh and all these kinds of things. And
Speaker 4: unfortunately we know that there are such people in our police.
Speaker 6: So so police are there's a kind of basically fascists,
Speaker 6: all of them. Like they have like one of their
Speaker 6: unions which called Alliance and for the politics for the
Speaker 6: presidential elections, they invited the right wing party, who are
Speaker 6: basically only people who talg with all about genocide. And
Speaker 6: then the classic marine Lapin and the more the far
Speaker 6: right who's openly calling for a civilizational war with Muslims.
Speaker 6: So that's the police unions. And for a little bit
Speaker 6: of history on the police, we have, for example, one
Speaker 6: of the very violent units that you see arresting people
Speaker 6: all over friends, which are called brigadotic Huminality or back
Speaker 6: for fort. And these people come from some sort of
Speaker 6: colonial units who were in Algeria during the war and
Speaker 6: when there was a need to repress populations who previously
Speaker 6: lived in colonies and then moved to France to the
Speaker 6: main country, they created a lot of very violent units
Speaker 6: and recruited through people who were in the Algerian War
Speaker 6: to basically break down people's house things like this, beat
Speaker 6: them up.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 6: It was really colonial practices and all of this kind
Speaker 6: of state with the repression of poor and non white
Speaker 6: areas of town where they tried to always have a
Speaker 6: strong police presents and catch people. They say in the act,
Speaker 6: but they're really making up reasons to arrest people. Police
Speaker 6: violence is not new at all, And yeah, basically it's
Speaker 6: easier need to train all year long against poor, non
Speaker 6: white people, and then during protests they come against people
Speaker 6: who have come to protests which are generally different people,
Speaker 6: but not entirely different people.
Speaker 5: Of course, the police response to protests, again says, has
Speaker 5: gotten more violence as the Jiljan protests in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 5: but instead of clearing the streets as Macron had hoped,
Speaker 5: the increase in violence is just narrowing the traditional gap
Speaker 5: between more moderate trade union protesters and the more radical
Speaker 5: protesters found in black blocks.
Speaker 6: I've seen people.
Speaker 9: In America in England saying that the movement is dying
Speaker 9: down because the inter union protests are more and more
Speaker 9: away from each other. But in the actual protest people
Speaker 9: are much much more radical. And what happens is that
Speaker 9: the people who are in the front of the protests
Speaker 9: before the union and who may potentially fight with the
Speaker 9: cops that the union will never do, they're more and
Speaker 9: more numerous, like four times bigger than the protests months ago,
Speaker 9: and so the cops cannot charge us. Every time they charge,
Speaker 9: people get around them, and there are rocks which happen
Speaker 9: to hit their heads.
Speaker 5: I don't know how, yeah, cry. I ask about that
Speaker 5: a bit, specifically about the dynamic of there being a
Speaker 5: sort of I don't know, I kind of divide between
Speaker 5: the sort of more biltant people who are fighting the
Speaker 5: cops and the sort of more moderate like trade union
Speaker 5: like protesters. I wanted to ask, I guess, like how
Speaker 5: firm has that separation been and what I guess have
Speaker 5: the unions been doing here? Have they been trying to
Speaker 5: contain things? Have they been trying to push forward?
Speaker 6: Well? Yes, I think it's a very some phenomenon kind
Speaker 6: of especially the way it's taken from now, because it's
Speaker 6: basically a mix of a black block and some Dill
Speaker 6: June and some random already called people, yeah, yellow vests.
Speaker 6: But so the black block it started really in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 6: Before this, there was no real black block all the
Speaker 6: time at protests, And the attitude of the unions is
Speaker 6: that they hate the black block. It's pretty simple. I mean,
Speaker 6: not of course, as everyone who's in a union, but
Speaker 6: the unions who organize the protest, they don't want anyone
Speaker 6: in front of them. They want people to go behind
Speaker 6: them and follow whatever they want to do. So they've
Speaker 6: been really aggressive. But even if there are conflicts right now,
Speaker 6: I would say the fact that the people in front
Speaker 6: of the union are more and more numerous, I think
Speaker 6: there's somewhat less tensions the unions. I don't think they
Speaker 6: feel like they can really push against even the black
Speaker 6: bloc or radicals who break stuff.
Speaker 4: If I may add in something, Indeed, there is a
Speaker 4: difference between the attitude of the union directions, let's say,
Speaker 4: and people like me, the simple unionized workers. And what
Speaker 4: Miles said is absolutely true about the the hate, the Yeah,
Speaker 4: they really don't want any black blocks, especially in front
Speaker 4: of them. But what I observed in these over the
Speaker 4: last few demonstrations is that what we call the cortege,
Speaker 4: which is really the very head of the demonstration, even
Speaker 4: in front of the unions, the official union group, where
Speaker 4: there are the black blocks and the yellow vests, there
Speaker 4: are more and more people I was I was like,
Speaker 4: I was going to say, like me, but I'm a
Speaker 4: bit of a still a bit cowardly, and I'm still
Speaker 4: afraid of of getting in this kind of place. But
Speaker 4: there are more and more unionized workers who mingle with
Speaker 4: the black blogs and et cetera. And I you know,
Speaker 4: we also have what we call manifestations sauvage the wild
Speaker 4: and and not organized protests that are not organized by
Speaker 4: unions but are kind of spontaneous.
Speaker 6: They opened after Macro forced the reform through Parliament without
Speaker 6: a vote, and people just went in the streets without
Speaker 6: the union and they burned. There were images in Paris
Speaker 6: of everything burning. It was that day, and that's what
Speaker 6: we call a wild protests.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and for the first time I saw unionized workers
Speaker 4: joining in. That is crazy because they were feeling that
Speaker 4: what the unions were proposing within the legal and pacifists
Speaker 4: and nice frame was not enough because really our president
Speaker 4: was really just making fun of us and we couldn't
Speaker 4: have it, and what we usually do was not longer
Speaker 4: enough for us. And this is really something new.
Speaker 5: I asked about the appearance of the Chile Jean in
Speaker 5: the current protest and what you thought of them, Mael.
Speaker 5: The student was somewhat dismissive, but the impact that Chile
Speaker 5: Jean had on a GAT and the railway workers was
Speaker 5: very different.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I can say a little bit, but I don't
Speaker 6: know much about the yellow vests. For what I saw
Speaker 6: of the Yellow vests were a lot of blockages and
Speaker 6: people against taxes on gas, and it radicalized was towards
Speaker 6: some form of radical democracy, but maybe not so radical
Speaker 6: because they wanted the mass movement seemed to end on
Speaker 6: the demand for referendums. Basically, they wanted to be able
Speaker 6: to call their own referendums, and the demands were not
Speaker 6: directly linked to economics. And as I saw them many
Speaker 6: very often, and when we saw them in protests in Lyon,
Speaker 6: they were kind of weird. But I don't know them
Speaker 6: very well. What I saw was that the government repressed
Speaker 6: them really, really hard, much harder than the usual protests
Speaker 6: that we do, because they were really scared of them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because I took part to the Yellow lest movement
Speaker 4: and I tend to disagree a bit with your analysis
Speaker 4: on this problem. No, no, no, no, it's just a I'm
Speaker 4: just saying and it's not an attack at all. At first,
Speaker 4: I must say I hated this movement because well, just
Speaker 4: long story short, it began in twenty eighteen, and in
Speaker 4: twenty eighteen there was a big movement in the SENCF
Speaker 4: where I work in the Railway Public Company because the
Speaker 4: current it's very funny because it's the current Prime Minister
Speaker 4: who was the Transport Minister at the time.
Speaker 6: They just moved them around.
Speaker 4: We keep seeing this. It's absolutely I can't stand that anyway.
Speaker 4: I have a personal vendetta with this woman, and we
Speaker 4: had been fed trying to fight off the well, they
Speaker 4: kind of started to kill off our company. It's only
Speaker 4: now dying of its slow death. But this is where
Speaker 4: it really well, this is where the end really began
Speaker 4: in twenty eighteen for us.
Speaker 6: You mean by privatization, they're killing the contents.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we are not private yet, but the door has
Speaker 4: been opened on that idea. And so it's been a
Speaker 4: really really hard protest for us, and we in the
Speaker 4: end we lost. It was really hard, and after that
Speaker 4: we've been I've seen these people the yellow vest stand
Speaker 4: up and take on our songs to make them their own.
Speaker 4: The famous only lap. It started with in the railway world,
Speaker 4: and it really started in Lyons. I was there and
Speaker 4: suddenly these people whom I did not see by our
Speaker 4: side a few months before, started to invade the streets
Speaker 4: and sing our songs. I was really outraged. I was furious,
Speaker 4: and then I fortunately I spent time with the people
Speaker 4: who are more intelligent than me and who said that
Speaker 4: it was worth going to see these people and see
Speaker 4: what was on their minds and what they were thinking,
Speaker 4: especially because there were people who had never before protested.
Speaker 4: They had never been on the street to demonstrate about anything,
Speaker 4: and they were right to do that. And it all
Speaker 4: started with the price of oil and of gasolina. And
Speaker 4: I found that really really insignificant, and in fact it
Speaker 4: really opened my mind about the reality of other people,
Speaker 4: because I do not have a car, but some people
Speaker 4: have a car, and they needed to live together, to
Speaker 4: make a live in And not only that, but the
Speaker 4: motives of the protest. They roaded and roaded these people.
Speaker 4: They got politicized at such a speed, a high speed.
Speaker 4: This is incredible because quite rapidly what they were demanding
Speaker 4: was not simply the lowering of the oil price. It
Speaker 4: was also more democracy, it was more social justice. It
Speaker 4: was against the cancelation of attacks, unfortune, of the great
Speaker 4: fortune of people, on break wealth, and and on climate.
Speaker 4: Also it merged with the with a lot of climate demonstrations,
Speaker 4: and it broad it really it was about really a
Speaker 4: social model and what world we want to live in tomorrow.
Speaker 4: And so this is why I say this, This movement
Speaker 4: was really incredible. It was also incredible because it was
Speaker 4: taking place without the unions. It depends on the regions.
Speaker 4: In France. In Lyons, for example, there there is no
Speaker 4: love lost between the Yellow Vest and the unions, the
Speaker 4: direction of the unions. But in other regions, like in
Speaker 4: southern France or in the north, it's very different. And
Speaker 4: soon they began to protest together and the Yellow Vest
Speaker 4: they they they gave us a new a fresh new breath.
Speaker 4: It was really a fresher breath of fresh air. There
Speaker 4: was such spontaneous, they were so spontaneous and so angry. Also,
Speaker 4: you know, they remind they reminded us what it was
Speaker 4: to be angry and to have the right to be
Speaker 4: angry and not to be helpless in front of an
Speaker 4: unjust policy. And it really changed changes. And as just
Speaker 4: like I said that earlier that in this very movement,
Speaker 4: the movement we live in now, there are there are
Speaker 4: unionized workers who mingle with the black dog for example,
Speaker 4: well there were a lot of us unionized workers in
Speaker 4: the Yellow vese two and so yeah, it influenced us
Speaker 4: a lot.
Speaker 6: I think we can say that if twenty sixteen and
Speaker 6: that's a black block to the protests. Now with the
Speaker 6: Yellow Vest, it changed completely the way we protest as well.
Speaker 6: All the blockages are like much more regular and the
Speaker 6: way we're people fear less, you know, to demand things
Speaker 6: and to organize without unions. I think we can say
Speaker 6: that it definitely changed things. Also personally, I think that
Speaker 6: if I say wrong things about the yellow vests, why
Speaker 6: I don't know the importug is because yes, the concerns
Speaker 6: about oil gas price was not what of Pine because
Speaker 6: I live in the city and I don't have a car,
Speaker 6: So I think it affected more the country, the countryside
Speaker 6: of friends, which is more concerned with gas prices, yeah,
Speaker 6: than big cities. Also because we already have have lots
Speaker 6: of political movements here, so like it's it's kinven different.
Speaker 7: I don't know.
Speaker 6: I don't know this sport very well, to be honest,
Speaker 6: maybe I should just show up.
Speaker 1: No, I mean, it's it's interesting to me because I
Speaker 1: remember when the uh the g le John's protests started up,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of debate outside of France and
Speaker 1: kind of like Westerners observing the protests to are these
Speaker 1: guys is this something that's like a positive movement? Are
Speaker 1: they all right wing? And it's interesting that the way
Speaker 1: in which kind of all of these different sort of
Speaker 1: eras of protest movements in France have melded together for
Speaker 1: this this most recent kind of uprising like you've got
Speaker 1: you know, the the the You've got these trade unions,
Speaker 1: you've got le Jon's, you've got the Black Bloc, all
Speaker 1: sort of working as different pieces of this uprising, you know,
Speaker 1: based on kind of the different tactics of their eras.
Speaker 1: That's fascinating to me.
Speaker 6: I was discussing and saying that it's kind of a
Speaker 6: feature of movements about pensions, even if they can be
Speaker 6: very different, that they tend to attract a lot of people.
Speaker 6: And at first the protests were not very radical at
Speaker 6: all compared to protests we could have with similar sizes.
Speaker 6: But gradually the movement is radicalizing a lot, it seems
Speaker 6: to me, the people who are in it, and the
Speaker 6: fact that it tends to mobilize everyone at first, even
Speaker 6: if it's not very radical, when it created this sort
Speaker 6: of mingling of everybody, the Yellow ass the Union, the
Speaker 6: Black Block, everybody except the political party there useless books.
Speaker 5: Alongside the radicalization of protesters from all walks of life
Speaker 5: inside France, there's been a surprisingly strong international reaction from
Speaker 5: other European workers and activists.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm wondering, you know, during the Black Lives
Speaker 1: Matter protests in the US and twenty twenty. International attention
Speaker 1: was significant, and it was to some extent useful in
Speaker 1: terms of helping to raise money and stuff for different
Speaker 1: bail funds. People from all around the world helped to
Speaker 1: that extent. But I'm wondering is the is the degree
Speaker 1: of international attention by other countries left wings, you know,
Speaker 1: movements on what's happening in France right now. Is it
Speaker 1: having an impact directly or is it just sort of
Speaker 1: like noise.
Speaker 6: Well on my port, it seems to be a lot
Speaker 6: of noise, yes, because a lot of people seem to
Speaker 6: misunderstand completely the situation. And yeah, they just give their
Speaker 6: opinion and that's fine, I guess. But I think there
Speaker 6: may be actual solidarity with some militants. I mean, I
Speaker 6: know among anarchists that there are an archists who come
Speaker 6: from Italy, Switzerland, Germany and other countries who try to
Speaker 6: help actions and protests. And I'm pretty sure that among
Speaker 6: unions there is international solidarity as well. But maybe I
Speaker 6: got you U should say something about this.
Speaker 4: Yes, there is international solidarity. Honestly, this is not something
Speaker 4: I was expecting. But for instance, last week in Belgium,
Speaker 4: there are workers from a total plant that actually blocked
Speaker 4: the freaking port and to prevent them from sending product
Speaker 4: to substitute it from to the product that was blocked
Speaker 4: by protesters in France. And that was this is for me,
Speaker 4: This is absolutely wonderful and yes, so yes, there there
Speaker 4: are international solidarities. We have been in our inter professional assembly,
Speaker 4: because we have a local inter professional assembly, and we
Speaker 4: have been expressing our gratitude to the people in Greece,
Speaker 4: in Argentina, in Spain, in Germany who expressed their support
Speaker 4: openly and personally. I was really surprised to see how
Speaker 4: many people actually were being attention to what was happening
Speaker 4: in our country. And it gives us, well, it gave
Speaker 4: strength to many people, and it also gives hope because
Speaker 4: I realized that, well, you know, the main leverage we
Speaker 4: have on our liliticians is the economical beverage. And so
Speaker 4: when when the bosses of big companies and investors and
Speaker 4: everything start to say, well, guy, your reform of pensions
Speaker 4: in France is starting to make a mess in Germany,
Speaker 4: in Spain, in Greece, please stop your madness, Well this
Speaker 4: is a leverage I was not expecting. We are trying
Speaker 4: to use the leverage of the big wealth and UH
Speaker 4: and the big companies in France, which is already something
Speaker 4: quite hard to move, and that was really an unexpected
Speaker 4: support and we really hope that it's going to have
Speaker 4: because Macaron is very He's a narcissistic guy and he
Speaker 4: loves his own image. So if his image is starting
Speaker 4: to suffer internationally, I think this is going to be
Speaker 4: a big problem for him, and his image at the
Speaker 4: time is really a catastrophe.
Speaker 5: Belgium, of course, is not the only place for blockades
Speaker 5: are happening. They've become a staple of the uprising in
Speaker 5: France as well.
Speaker 6: I'm very interesting talking about the blockages of the highways
Speaker 6: around the Bond because many cities are trying to do this.
Speaker 6: There is a which is in Brotain which manages to
Speaker 6: block the highways very often, and so they started in
Speaker 6: Lyon and we tried once a few weeks ago. It
Speaker 6: was a call by the unions with a few points
Speaker 6: to block in the morning and people then militants from
Speaker 6: all over join the points at like six am or
Speaker 6: seven am, I don't remember. But when people arrived there
Speaker 6: were cups everywhere and they were pushed away and circulation
Speaker 6: and capitalism could work normally and everything was fine. So
Speaker 6: we were very frustrated. So reorganized completely and through the
Speaker 6: Struggle Committee, we assembled people from general assemblies all over
Speaker 6: the city and also various groups, and we managed to
Speaker 6: organize is a blockade last Thursday and it worked pretty well.
Speaker 6: It was not exceptional, but for first trip. People were
Speaker 6: very happy about it, and it led to many people
Speaker 6: from all over in the movement working together on a
Speaker 6: project and meeting together in assembly and then being together
Speaker 6: on blockages. And I think it's moments like this which
Speaker 6: are very important for the movement to develop. I'm not
Speaker 6: sure if the blockage in itself is the most interesting
Speaker 6: action in terms of economic damage, especially if we don't
Speaker 6: stay very long, but the different social relations it can create,
Speaker 6: and I think it can have a lot of influence
Speaker 6: in the movement, especially when we're thinking about the unions
Speaker 6: and sort of leaders of the unions who don't want
Speaker 6: to mobilize too much, we don't want to go too far.
Speaker 6: What can we do outside of that. Well, I think
Speaker 6: that's part of the answer, at least.
Speaker 4: I agree.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think I think that's something that was interesting
Speaker 5: to me because I think the roadblocks and barricades like
Speaker 5: that as a sort of social site is like a
Speaker 5: really it's a thing you see a lot in the past,
Speaker 5: like twenty twenty five years of protest movements like I.
Speaker 5: This was a big deal in I like Hawk in
Speaker 5: twosand and six. There's a lot of similar stuff in
Speaker 5: Tehran during the uprising there. It's interesting to see it
Speaker 5: sort of like re entering the repertoire of stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the kind of the different species of social interactions
Speaker 1: that are made possible by these kind of zones of
Speaker 1: autonomy that are creating.
Speaker 6: And they ask a lot of new questions for militants,
Speaker 6: how to hold a barricade against scarps and against cars.
Speaker 6: It's a lot of different questions which I think they
Speaker 6: can radicalize people. At least two demand more things, so
Speaker 6: it's not clear what they want to demand for now. Yeah,
Speaker 6: I just wanted to say that I'm really really happy
Speaker 6: to see people from different parts of society really coming
Speaker 6: together and accepting to work together, like so many things impossible.
Speaker 6: Now as a student, I've met basically Lisians from all
Speaker 6: universities in my town. I now have free access to
Speaker 6: all publications in French and I'll never pay for anything
Speaker 6: it's really really great in terms of blockage. There is
Speaker 6: just south of Leon there is an oil refinery which
Speaker 6: is not on strike. It's among the only ones. So
Speaker 6: it's really important because in France there's a special system
Speaker 6: because they wanted to stay independent from old producers, so
Speaker 6: they import the oil and then they refine it in France.
Speaker 6: So basically, if we stop all the refinery, there is
Speaker 6: no more gas for cars. And right down it's becoming
Speaker 6: a real problem because of the strikes, and this one
Speaker 6: stays open, and so people have started to try and
Speaker 6: block the entry. So right now there's like something like
Speaker 6: fifty union workers and like fifty radical militants who come
Speaker 6: there every morning. Well not this week, but last week
Speaker 6: they were doing it because this week we haven't said,
Speaker 6: but everyone is on holiday kind of somewhat. The students
Speaker 6: are on holiday, so many people take their paid leave
Speaker 6: right now as well. It's kind of a special time.
Speaker 6: But next week probably the blockages are going to start again.
Speaker 6: And it's great to see union workers meeting with more
Speaker 6: radical people to try and get an action together. And
Speaker 6: I think when there is story diarity exists, great things
Speaker 6: can happen.
Speaker 4: If I may add something about mockages and everything. What
Speaker 4: works pretty well and it's quite satisfying. There are big
Speaker 4: days of mobilization, and what has happened several times now
Speaker 4: is that on the very same day, very same time,
Speaker 4: there are several appointments a little everywhere in the in
Speaker 4: the town and to block something, to block a highway,
Speaker 4: to block a factory, to block a school or whatever.
Speaker 4: And this allows, uh, it allows us to dispatch and
Speaker 4: stretch the forces of the police, and so they are
Speaker 4: never enough everywhere to to to stop us. And that
Speaker 4: makes that can make that can make the day a
Speaker 4: real success because you have a lot of things happening
Speaker 4: at the very same time, but there is only so
Speaker 4: many cops. So yeah, it works pretty well.
Speaker 5: This is interestingly the same analysis the US police came
Speaker 5: to in twenty twenty. It's easy to stop one large action,
Speaker 5: but several smaller actions split police forces and prevent them
Speaker 5: from just kettling one large block of protesters. I guess
Speaker 5: I think I was interested in is that I think
Speaker 5: one of the things that happens in the US a
Speaker 5: lot is you'll get a national day of action, but
Speaker 5: all of the actions, like there'll just be one giant
Speaker 5: action in a city and you don't get the kind
Speaker 5: of like diffusion that's been helpful with spreading out cop numbers.
Speaker 5: And I was wondering, like, is this something like the
Speaker 5: unions are specifically planning to have multiple events all over
Speaker 5: the place or is that something that's been happening like
Speaker 5: outside that.
Speaker 6: Or no, no, no, the unions only plan once. They
Speaker 6: plan for a strike and for the protests.
Speaker 4: There are also actions, but only one action and the
Speaker 4: others are organized by I mean regular people.
Speaker 6: Or no, but like you mean, the actions on the
Speaker 6: days are not organized by the national union, its local
Speaker 6: unions which do the actions, right, that's what you're talking about. Yes, absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 6: so there are local unions because in friends, unions are
Speaker 6: very federal somewhat this we can talk about it. It's
Speaker 6: a bit of a problem. But like you know, the Segete,
Speaker 6: it started out as an archist union, so they were
Speaker 6: like very into federalism and all of this. So there
Speaker 6: is local autonomy. And what happens is workers in very
Speaker 6: mobilized sectors like the railways, the energy workers, they were
Speaker 6: organized through their union actions on that day, for example.
Speaker 6: And on top of this, for example, you have students
Speaker 6: in a certain high school or a certain university who
Speaker 6: decide to block something and for example, they need support. Recently,
Speaker 6: there was a notably right wing campus who was blocked
Speaker 6: by students, and so a lot of us came to
Speaker 6: help them because we've had never seen this campus blocked ever.
Speaker 6: And of course what happened was some fascists attacked them,
Speaker 6: but we were much much more numerous than them, so
Speaker 6: it was no problem. But the next time they had
Speaker 6: a blockage planned at this campus, they ended up not
Speaker 6: having enough numbers, so they canceled, but the fascists didn't
Speaker 6: know that it was canceled, and so they all came
Speaker 6: really armed with metal bars and all of that. You know.
Speaker 5: Still, despite the threat of fascist streak gangs, and they're
Speaker 5: better armed and morey legitimate counterparts in the police, the
Speaker 5: protests continue. They continue to block roads, they continue to
Speaker 5: occupy universities, They continued to strike, they continued to fight police.
Speaker 5: They continue to find new forms of resistance, new forms
Speaker 5: of solidarity, new worlds composed of people who in ordinary
Speaker 5: times would never have met, and in the process they
Speaker 5: continue to find new ways of being free. Beneath the cobblestones,
Speaker 5: the beach sat another generation of French protesters in May
Speaker 5: of nineteen sixty eight. All you have to do is
Speaker 5: pick it up and throw it. Welcome to Dick It
Speaker 5: Happened Here a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes
Speaker 5: about how to put them back together again. I'm your host,
Speaker 5: Via Wong. This is a We are once again talking
Speaker 5: about Wizards of the Coast. Now this time is not
Speaker 5: about Dungeon Gent Daggs. It is about their other property,
Speaker 5: Magic the Gathering, which if you don't know, is Wizards
Speaker 5: of the Coasts trading card game. That's at the forefront
Speaker 5: of some truly wild stuff right now. Now, you could
Speaker 5: ask Mia, why are we even talking about this about
Speaker 5: Magic the Gathering on this show, And you know, there's
Speaker 5: multiple answers. One of them is that as industrial profit
Speaker 5: rates have been decreasing in the last half a century,
Speaker 5: capital has increasingly turned towards entertainment as a way to
Speaker 5: make money. Magic is now a billion dollar brand, partnering
Speaker 5: with everything from Fortnite to The Walking Dead to and
Speaker 5: this is not a joke, being in the process of
Speaker 5: releasing an entire set of Lord of the Rings cards.
Speaker 5: As capital is flooded into the entertainment industry and Magic
Speaker 5: in particular, our silly little hobbies are suddenly the front
Speaker 5: lines of class struggle. Workers at TCG Player this year,
Speaker 5: given the job of sorting through literally tens of thousands
Speaker 5: of cards that TCG player processes, finally won their second
Speaker 5: attempt to form a union after two devastating union busting campaigns.
Speaker 5: And this is where things get very very weird. Now
Speaker 5: bear with me here, dear listeners. We have to talk
Speaker 5: about a little bit of magic minutia to understand what
Speaker 5: has happened in this incident, and then we will get
Speaker 5: back to what the show is usually about, which is
Speaker 5: corporations killing enormous numbers of people. So a few days ago,
Speaker 5: Dan Cannon, a man who runs a very small Magic
Speaker 5: YouTube channel called Old School EMPTG, bought what he thought
Speaker 5: were cards in the latest Magic the Gathering set called
Speaker 5: March of the Machine. Now Magic releases new cards periodically
Speaker 5: and what are called sets. These sets have plots and characters,
Speaker 5: they have written stories. They are enormous sort of lower events,
Speaker 5: They have enormous hype behind them. And March of the
Speaker 5: Machine story wise, is basically the version of an Avengers
Speaker 5: movie giant apocalyptic threats. All the heroes crossing over people,
Speaker 5: hopping through, multi versus, etc.
Speaker 7: Etc.
Speaker 5: Et cetera. Now, okay, this has happened before. You know,
Speaker 5: Wizards does big sets. It wasn't that weird. But Wizard
Speaker 5: decided to do something very very weird, which is they printed,
Speaker 5: for the first time ever, a mini set called March
Speaker 5: of the Machines March of the Machine Aftermath. Now, the
Speaker 5: regular March of the Machine set has three hundred and
Speaker 5: eighty seven cards in it, Aftermath has fifty. Now, I
Speaker 5: don't know why they decided to do this. They've never
Speaker 5: done anything like this if they've never printed just a
Speaker 5: tiny set they release a bit after the regular set before.
Speaker 5: And you know, the names are very very confusing, right,
Speaker 5: one is called March of the Machine and the other
Speaker 5: one is Marching the Machine Aftermath. How is a regular
Speaker 5: person supposed to keep track of this? The mind boggles,
Speaker 5: et cetera, et cetera. Either way, So Dan Cannon tries
Speaker 5: to buy cards from the regular March of the Machine
Speaker 5: set when he gets in sent instead are by accident
Speaker 5: March of the Machine Aftermath cards. Now these cards are
Speaker 5: still secret. They have not been revealed yet. No no one,
Speaker 5: no one knows what they are. No one's supposed to
Speaker 5: know what they are before every set. There's an incredibly
Speaker 5: elaborate process where Wizards gives cards to influencers to you know,
Speaker 5: reveal them to the public. And on a certain date,
Speaker 5: everyone reveals, you know, your influencer reveals what their card is,
Speaker 5: and there's this whole hype cycle on Reddit, and everyone
Speaker 5: argues about how good the cards are, and i'll call
Speaker 5: the art is and what it means for the story.
Speaker 5: It's sort of it's sort of similar to the the
Speaker 5: sort of hype cycles that would happen around trailers from
Speaker 5: Marvel movies, where people would be analyzing every detail of it,
Speaker 5: et cetera, et cetera. And these are these spoiler seasons,
Speaker 5: as they're called, are a huge deal for Wizards. Date
Speaker 5: Wizards tries to heavily control the entire process, but sometimes
Speaker 5: cards leak out. Now, Dan Cannon suddenly has been handed
Speaker 5: a bunch of cards no one has ever seen before,
Speaker 5: so he does what, you know, every person who just
Speaker 5: suddenly has magic cards that haven't been revealed yet do
Speaker 5: and have been doing for years and years and years.
Speaker 5: He makes a video showing off the cards. Now, importantly,
Speaker 5: this is not a lead. I need to stress this
Speaker 5: because of what's going to happen, what is going to
Speaker 5: happen next, You know, it's it's it's very very easy
Speaker 5: to look at the at the sort of severity of
Speaker 5: what's going to happen to this guy and assume that
Speaker 5: he broke a law. But no, he did not. He
Speaker 5: did not break a law. Nothing he has done he's illegal. Literally,
Speaker 5: what he's done is he bought some magic cards from
Speaker 5: someone who screwed up and accidentally broke the street date
Speaker 5: for selling cards because he confused March of the Machine
Speaker 5: with March of the Machine. Aftermath, Wow, how can anyone
Speaker 5: make that mistake? Right? The genius of Wizards of the
Speaker 5: Coast marketing is unmatched. Everything they do is incredibly clear,
Speaker 5: et cetera, et cetera. Now, in the process, because of
Speaker 5: how many cards he bought and how small the set is,
Speaker 5: he reveals most of the cars that are in the set,
Speaker 5: and then the Pinkertons show up to his house, forced
Speaker 5: their way through his door, make his wife cry, threaten
Speaker 5: to arrest him, and threaten to put him in prison
Speaker 5: for ten years with two hundred thousand do finds for
Speaker 5: copyright infringement on the grounds of him having stolen material.
Speaker 5: The Pinkertons also harass his elderly neighbors. Literally, just today,
Speaker 5: as I'm recording this, a story broken gizmoto that revealed
Speaker 5: that Wizards of the Coast have used the Pinkertons before
Speaker 5: to go after stolen goods. Now, some of you may
Speaker 5: be asking who are the Pinkertons, And you know, I
Speaker 5: think some of you probably know in very broad outlines
Speaker 5: who the Pinkertons are. But in order to really get
Speaker 5: at the core of what this organization is and why
Speaker 5: they look the way they do today as compared to
Speaker 5: how they've looked in the past, we need to ask
Speaker 5: another question, which is how has the balance of military
Speaker 5: power between the state and corporations changed over time? And
Speaker 5: this seems like a very weird question, but the Pinkertons
Speaker 5: emerge in a very weird period of time in this balance.
Speaker 5: They are what fills in the gap between corporations directly
Speaker 5: having army East could concre nations and modern corporations who,
Speaker 5: instead of having their own personal armies, have intelligence, you know,
Speaker 5: vast intelligence agencies, but also rely on the police and
Speaker 5: the governments as the people who do violence for them.
Speaker 5: So let's go back and tell the story from the
Speaker 5: beginning by taking a look a brief look at the
Speaker 5: most infamous corporate army of them all, the army of
Speaker 5: the East India Trading Company. The East India Trading Company
Speaker 5: was formed in sixteen hundred and it was given a
Speaker 5: vast state monopoly over trade in what they called East India,
Speaker 5: which is an area we would broadly call Southeast Asia
Speaker 5: and the South Pacific today. And at the start, these
Speaker 5: guys are optimistically they are half trading group, half pirate.
Speaker 5: The level of piracy is really high, especially in the
Speaker 5: early days. They you know, trade for spices. They steal
Speaker 5: a lot of other people's spices from places like Java
Speaker 5: and they bring them back to England. They make a
Speaker 5: lot of money now over the course of theirs. And
Speaker 5: again it is worth noting that these people are kind
Speaker 5: of the descendants of the British privateers, people like Thomas Drake,
Speaker 5: who'd been you know, just pirates who have been hired
Speaker 5: by the government to only go after like Spanish ships
Speaker 5: instead of English ships. So they are you know, from
Speaker 5: the beginning, the East India Company has this sort of
Speaker 5: DNA of army in it and over the course of
Speaker 5: about two centuries, they are going to conquer with their
Speaker 5: own army most of what is now India and Pakistan,
Speaker 5: and that territory is either going to indirectly or directly
Speaker 5: come under the rule of the East India Company. And
Speaker 5: the East India Company is fighting wars everywhere again. They
Speaker 5: seize India and Pakistan by force. They are fighting wars
Speaker 5: in Afghanistan. They kill unfathomable numbers of people. The worst
Speaker 5: of these events is the Great bengalf Femin'. There's a
Speaker 5: Behind the Bastard's episode about this that you can listen
Speaker 5: to if you want a really sort of long thing
Speaker 5: about the East India Company and the famine. But I
Speaker 5: want to talk about the famine a little bit because
Speaker 5: so the Great Bengal Famine of seventeen seventy kills ten
Speaker 5: million people. And I knew this intellectually, right, I studied
Speaker 5: a bit in college. But what I had never actually
Speaker 5: looked up somehow, what I'd never seen was the percentage
Speaker 5: of the population of this famine kills. And this famine
Speaker 5: is directly the fault of the East India Company. This
Speaker 5: is something that all historians who have look at this
Speaker 5: agree is that this is directly the fault of these
Speaker 5: India Company and the combination of their agricultural policies and
Speaker 5: their tax extraction. This sort of put into perspective how
Speaker 5: bad this gets. The highest serious estimates for the number
Speaker 5: of people who die in the Great Leap Forward stands
Speaker 5: at about thirty million dead. This is an unfathomable atrocity.
Speaker 5: It is a scale of death at which the human
Speaker 5: mind breaks down and loses the ability to process. Some
Speaker 5: of my family lived through it. It is horrific in
Speaker 5: ways that are difficult to even begin to was to describe.
Speaker 5: The Great killed about five percent of China's population. The
Speaker 5: Great Bengal Famine killed thirty percent of the population of
Speaker 5: India that the East India Trading Company controlled thirty percent.
Speaker 5: That's not just sort of small populations statistics either. Right,
Speaker 5: It's not like they killed thirty percent of a country
Speaker 5: with thirty people in it, right, They killed ten million people.
Speaker 5: This isn't you know? This is an unbelievable force of
Speaker 5: human evil. Are they are capable of killing people in
Speaker 5: numbers that defy comprehension. They're able to do this because
Speaker 5: they have an army that is the size of a
Speaker 5: great power nation state. The East India Trading Company's army
Speaker 5: in eighteen hundred had two hundred thousand soldiers. That is
Speaker 5: a massive army. Today, that is like the size of
Speaker 5: the Act of Ukrainian Army in twenty twenty two. It
Speaker 5: is more than twice the size of the British army
Speaker 5: eighteen hundred. And you know, in eighteen hundred it's not
Speaker 5: like the British aren't fighting wars, right they are in
Speaker 5: eighteen hundred are fighting the war the Second Coalition, so.
Speaker 1: They are there.
Speaker 5: They are fighting Napoleon, right, So this isn't a sort
Speaker 5: of you know, completely half assed like peacetime British army.
Speaker 5: This is a you know, this is a serious military force.
Speaker 5: And even even once they like fully build up their
Speaker 5: army at the peak of the Napoleonic Wars thirteen years later,
Speaker 5: the entire size of the British army is about two
Speaker 5: hundred fifty thousand troops and that's not much larger than
Speaker 5: the East India Company's army. At the same time and
Speaker 5: at the height of the East India Trading Company there
Speaker 5: are army swells to again two hundred and fifty thousand,
Speaker 5: which is again the size of the regular British Army
Speaker 5: at in the most desperate war that the British had
Speaker 5: fought to that point. The trading company is a full
Speaker 5: on military great power. Right But and this is this
Speaker 5: is this is something that is going to shape an
Speaker 5: enormous amount of the sort of arc of the relationship
Speaker 5: between corporate and Billie story power. It is unbelievably expensive
Speaker 5: to maintain an army like this, the the the British
Speaker 5: Stadia Company, even though they're they you know, they are
Speaker 5: looting entire nations, right they have they have there there
Speaker 5: are entire states where they fully taken over the tax services.
Speaker 5: They're just walking into temples and taking stuff. But even
Speaker 5: with all of that profit, right they you know, they
Speaker 5: have the ability to mint their own coins in a
Speaker 5: lot of these areas, but they still lose money. And
Speaker 5: they still lose money again because they're maintaining this two
Speaker 5: hundred and fifty thousand strong army. And you know, so
Speaker 5: you have this problem, right, which is that you have
Speaker 5: this item on your balance sheet that is unfathomably expensive.
Speaker 5: And then you have a second problem, which is that
Speaker 5: if you have an army, there's always a danger. But
Speaker 5: the army goes into revolts, and that's what happens. In
Speaker 5: eighteen fifty seven, the British managed to piss off their
Speaker 5: own army, which is almost all composed of Indian troops,
Speaker 5: and they fight an incredibly bloody worn. It is either
Speaker 5: the boy mutiny to suppoy uprising and the British win,
Speaker 5: and they after victory they strap a bunch of prisoners
Speaker 5: bodies to canons and shoot them so they can't be
Speaker 5: properly buried. But the consequence of this sort of horrifying war,
Speaker 5: and particularly the sort of fear it invokes in the
Speaker 5: minds of you know, the British populace of like, oh
Speaker 5: my god, these non white people can actually fight us,
Speaker 5: is that they directly seize control of India from the
Speaker 5: East India Trading Company. And for all your nationalization fans
Speaker 5: out there, the British assuming direct control of India was
Speaker 5: actually a nationalization. It's not actually inherently socialist, guys. You
Speaker 5: have to be a bit smarter than this, But that aside, right,
Speaker 5: this marks an enormous shift in the sort of political
Speaker 5: economy of violence. What is happening here is that states
Speaker 5: are assuming direct military control over their colonies. Instead of
Speaker 5: operating through corporations. And this means that what you see
Speaker 5: is a shift from direct corporate armies to corporations using
Speaker 5: the state to do violence for them. And this doesn't
Speaker 5: mean that corporations don't use force directly today, and it
Speaker 5: also doesn't mean that the governments you know, weren't acting
Speaker 5: as the armies of corporations and like the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 5: but what's happening here, and specifically the direct seizure of
Speaker 5: India from the East India, the direct seizure of India
Speaker 5: from the East India Company, marks a dramatic shift in
Speaker 5: the balance of forces away from corporations with armies doing
Speaker 5: violence towards states doing violence on their behalf. And this
Speaker 5: is one of the things, alongside sort of slave catchers
Speaker 5: in the US, that leads to the formation of the police.
Speaker 5: You see this but both both both in Britain and
Speaker 5: in sort of France, right, you start to get police
Speaker 5: agencies that are you know, largely tasked with putting down
Speaker 5: their own working class. And this is one of the things,
Speaker 5: one of the sort of inexorable marches that happens over
Speaker 5: the course of the twentieth century. And it's also happening
Speaker 5: in nineteenth century too. There is a sort of mass
Speaker 5: centralization of state and police power, and particularly that's an
Speaker 5: expansion of the bureaucracy. Right the Orican state in eighteen
Speaker 5: forty is barely a functional state by today's standards, right, Like,
Speaker 5: they have an incredibly difficult time even figuring out how
Speaker 5: many people there are in the country, that their provisioning
Speaker 5: of services as a joke, nobody has like geek cars,
Speaker 5: Like people don't even have birth certificates for the most part.
Speaker 5: And that's something, you know, and that's something that changes
Speaker 5: right over the course of sort of the eighteen and
Speaker 5: nineteen hundreds, is that you get a massive bureaucracy. The
Speaker 5: bureaucracy is built on the model of the police, and
Speaker 5: they get bigger and more powerful, and by the time
Speaker 5: you're you know, you're halfway through the twentieth century, get
Speaker 5: you get a modern standing army. And that's something that
Speaker 5: is very, very weird. The Founders, who you know, suck
Speaker 5: ass in enormous numbers of ways, are also fundamentally and
Speaker 5: deeply opposed to standing armies because you know, they are
Speaker 5: students of Roman history and they know that standing armies
Speaker 5: have this you know, this sort of way of seizing power,
Speaker 5: but we've lented in a situation where you know, they
Speaker 5: don't really need to.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: The US Army is kept in check by the fact
Speaker 5: that it has it basically a limited budget that increases
Speaker 5: every year, so you can't even like talk about cutting
Speaker 5: it without getting accused of treason. But it didn't used
Speaker 5: to be like that. In the eighteen hundreds, right after
Speaker 5: a war would end, you know, entire parts of the
Speaker 5: like they like, you all the US cavalry, for example,
Speaker 5: sometimes which just get disbanded. Right, there'd be these massive
Speaker 5: reductions in troop size in between wars. And you know
Speaker 5: that doesn't happen anymore, right, But the product of this
Speaker 5: was that, you know, there weren't that many like armed
Speaker 5: agents of the state running around with guns. And that's
Speaker 5: the thing that is completely and utterly ubiquitous in modern
Speaker 5: American life. I mean, modern American life has reached a
Speaker 5: point where people literally you can't even imagine what it
Speaker 5: would be like if there weren't cops literally everywhere, and
Speaker 5: if you didn't have the ability to call the police
Speaker 5: about anything. And that was just the sort of the
Speaker 5: state of affairs for a lot of the eighteen hundreds
Speaker 5: in the US. Is that just you know, they're really
Speaker 5: weren't police. And you know, there's kind of midpoints in
Speaker 5: the level of sort of bureaucratic development and the level
Speaker 5: of sort of the bureaucracy of violence, that is the
Speaker 5: police happens after a bit after the Civil War, where
Speaker 5: there are not enough police to develop the kind of
Speaker 5: sort of to deploy against the kind of violence that
Speaker 5: companies need to stop unions informing. And you know there's
Speaker 5: a secondary problem, right, which is okay, so you know
Speaker 5: there are armed troops in a state, but the armed
Speaker 5: troops are the militia. And you know a lot of
Speaker 5: the times the militia can be relied upon to choose
Speaker 5: striking workers and break them, but there's always a chance
Speaker 5: that you ordered the militia in and the militia are
Speaker 5: people from the towns where you know where the striking
Speaker 5: workers are from. And this is a real problem with
Speaker 5: sheriffs too, is that in this period, you get it,
Speaker 5: you get a lot of sheriffs who just won't prosecute
Speaker 5: workers because the entire town and the sheriff are all
Speaker 5: pro union. And this is where we come to the
Speaker 5: Pinkertons but first, and this is something that the Pinkertons
Speaker 5: would have approved of. Some ads, and we're back. So
Speaker 5: who are the Pinkertons. The Pinkertons are founded by a
Speaker 5: guy named Alan Pinkerton. Alan Pinkerton's an interesting guy. He's
Speaker 5: he's kind of a radical when he's young, he's like
Speaker 5: he's a hardcore abolitionist who like funds John Brown. Right,
Speaker 5: there's a whole debate about the extent to which she
Speaker 5: was involved in a sort of British workers reform movement
Speaker 5: called the chartlists. Every source I've read disagrees about how
Speaker 5: much he was involved in it. It's I mean, one's
Speaker 5: disagreements are basically penning the radiology. I don't know if
Speaker 5: I ever get to get a good answer about how
Speaker 5: involved in it he is. But Pinkerton briefly and kind
Speaker 5: of by accident, becomes a bounty hunter. But he just
Speaker 5: like walks across it, just runs into a camp of
Speaker 5: people who seem to clearly be counterfeitters. And he eventually
Speaker 5: becomes a detective around Michigan and then in Chicago, and
Speaker 5: then he becomes a postal cop. And in the process
Speaker 5: of being a postal cop, he figures out something that
Speaker 5: is more lucrative. He figured out a more lucrative way
Speaker 5: to de detective work than just working for the state,
Speaker 5: which is working for the railways. So by eighteen fifty
Speaker 5: he has a full detective agency going that he renames
Speaker 5: the Pinkertons. Now, you know this is the eighteen fifties, right,
Speaker 5: you are rapidly coproaching the Civil War. Durating the Civil War.
Speaker 5: He is hired by George McClellan, just the worst union general.
Speaker 5: He runs a spy network in the Confederacy that absolutely sucks,
Speaker 5: Like all the spies get caught. His intelligence being awful.
Speaker 5: It's one of the things that leads McClellan to suspect,
Speaker 5: you know, that there's like secret way more Confederate troops
Speaker 5: that there actually are. So he just never does anything
Speaker 5: for the entire worlds Like he's like the worst union
Speaker 5: general until he gets replaced. Yeah, when McClellan is asked,
Speaker 5: Pinkerton is also out, but you know the agency is
Speaker 5: still around and the detectives are initially known as Sidered
Speaker 5: as cinder Dicks for complicated railroading reasons. I yeah, I
Speaker 5: don't know about that one, but it's very funny and
Speaker 5: what they sort of do, right is in this early phases,
Speaker 5: they have this massive network of sort of informants and
Speaker 5: spies that they sell to the highest bidder. They're not
Speaker 5: sort of when you know, they are detectives, right and sometimes,
Speaker 5: but they're not detectives in the Sherlock sense where you
Speaker 5: have a guy who sees a bunch of evidence and
Speaker 5: then uses logic and uses investigation to deduce like who
Speaker 5: did the crime. Pinkerton detectives are operatives. They do infiltrations.
Speaker 5: This is basically their one trick, right is they send
Speaker 5: a guy under cover and then he gets people to
Speaker 5: talk to him, and then they catch the guy because
Speaker 5: someone talked. Right now. The other thing that the Pinkertons
Speaker 5: are really really good at is spinning mythology around them.
Speaker 5: Pinkerton claims that he saved Lincoln from an assassination plot,
Speaker 5: and you know, he successfully convinces Lincoln to flee a
Speaker 5: building in a disguise.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: The problem is that you know, as early as like
Speaker 5: the next day after this supposed plot happens, assassinating assassination
Speaker 5: plot happens, people were already claiming that there wasn't one.
Speaker 5: And you know, I think the evidence for their not
Speaker 5: being one is bolstered by the fact that no one
Speaker 5: was ever like, not only was no one ever tried
Speaker 5: for this, no one was ever even arrested for again,
Speaker 5: a plot to assassinate the president of the United States.
Speaker 5: So I am inclined to suspect that this was fake.
Speaker 5: So sorians disagree about this, but he's able to milk
Speaker 5: this for incredible pr right, He's you know, he's like,
Speaker 5: I'm the guy who saved the president, and he does
Speaker 5: this whole sort of like.
Speaker 10: Ah, if I had been there when if I if
Speaker 10: I had only been there when Lincoln was being gunned
Speaker 10: down by John wielks Booth, ah would have saved him.
Speaker 5: And you know, this makes him very famous. They also
Speaker 5: start doing you know, it's sort of word noting, right,
Speaker 5: the kind of crime that they're doing, these guys are,
Speaker 5: they're they're basically a corporate anti crime group.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: They solve crimes, but the crimes that they solve are
Speaker 5: people stealing from corporations. So, for example, they do a
Speaker 5: lot of solving bank robberies. They do a lot of
Speaker 5: security to stop train robbers, they do counterfeitting. These are
Speaker 5: all kinds of crimes that affect rich people and you know,
Speaker 5: and so the Ppiccotians are slowly starting to gain this
Speaker 5: reputation to sort of like the hired hands of capital.
Speaker 5: Now they're also sort of doing like frontier outlaws stuff.
Speaker 5: There's a gang of people who there is a gang
Speaker 5: that sort of bandits who they very successfully break up,
Speaker 5: but they also go after Jesse James. Okay, we need
Speaker 5: to tell the story of Jesse James briefly here because
Speaker 5: it's it's an important thing to get an understanding of
Speaker 5: what the sort of conflict that's going on in the
Speaker 5: West is at this point. And the thing that's incredibly
Speaker 5: important to understand about the story of Jesse James versus
Speaker 5: the Pinkerton's is that there are no heroes here. Every
Speaker 5: single person involved in all sides is just an absolutely
Speaker 5: terrible person. So Jesse James is an ex Confederate terrorists
Speaker 5: who somehow managed to make robbing trains uncool by doing
Speaker 5: it dress and a KKK rope with the aim of
Speaker 5: like restoring the honor of the Confederacy. So this sucks.
Speaker 5: And this is where part of the sort of like
Speaker 5: rebel flag like that part of the sort of like
Speaker 5: lost cause myth those comes from right there are you know,
Speaker 5: there are these sort of frontier outlaws who are like
Speaker 5: ex Confederates whose thing is like, yeah, we're like against
Speaker 5: the man and like the maand is like you know,
Speaker 5: the north Right. But these people suck right. These are
Speaker 5: these are these are these are people who fought and
Speaker 5: died for slavery. I Jesse James in particular, like again,
Speaker 5: he's in this group of like gorillas who are fighting
Speaker 5: in Kansas and Missouri. They they do things that are
Speaker 5: genuinely unspeakable. So these people suck right. But the problem
Speaker 5: is the people going after them are the Pinkertons. And
Speaker 5: we're gonna learn a lot about the Pinkertons by what
Speaker 5: they managed to accomplish by going after again ex Confederate
Speaker 5: terrorists who are like some of the worst people who've
Speaker 5: ever lived. So the Pinkertons take this case in eighteen
Speaker 5: seventy one. He sends in a bunch of agents try
Speaker 5: to infiltrate the gang, and Jesse James like smokes them all. So,
Speaker 5: in a very sort of modern cop move, the Pinkertons
Speaker 5: do a raid on Jesse James's house. So they throw
Speaker 5: in this weird pseudo it's a very weird kind of
Speaker 5: explosive device thing that I don't know. They claim that
Speaker 5: they were just trying to scare like the family out
Speaker 5: of the house so they could arrest them. But the
Speaker 5: family sees this thing that looks like a bomb and
Speaker 5: they throw it into their fireplace and it blows up,
Speaker 5: and instead of smoking the family out, they have now
Speaker 5: blown up Jesse James's nine year old step brother and
Speaker 5: maimed a mom. So the Piggertons absolutely suck right like
Speaker 5: so far in there at the catch Jesse James, they
Speaker 5: have managed to blow up a child.
Speaker 1: And name a woman.
Speaker 5: Now you can ask the question, right, Okay, so they
Speaker 5: have killed a child, they have maimed a woman. Do
Speaker 5: they get Jesse James. No, No, they don't. They never
Speaker 5: get him, because that's what happens when you know, you
Speaker 5: have an ex Confederate in places where with a bunch
Speaker 5: of ex Confederates, with a bunch of people who support
Speaker 5: the Confederacy right, they won't turn over their own people,
Speaker 5: and you know, and when the people they're going up
Speaker 5: against are the Piggertons, who are like the hired guns
Speaker 5: of Northern Capital, a bunch of people, you know, what
Speaker 5: happens is a bunch of grand people end up dead.
Speaker 5: And yeah, but both sides of this are incredibly deeply evil.
Speaker 5: Jesse James is later shot by one of his own men,
Speaker 5: and yeah, that is the famous story of Jesse James
Speaker 5: versus the Pinkertons, which I think is useful in establishing that,
Speaker 5: like God, like, the South are obviously the bad guys
Speaker 5: in the Civil War, but a lot of the people
Speaker 5: in the Union are sort of genuinely awful hired gun
Speaker 5: for capital people. And you know that's not so much
Speaker 5: of a big deal dreamed the war, but after the war,
Speaker 5: you know, you got these battles just like, oh God,
Speaker 5: everyone here is like everyone here should simply die now.
Speaker 5: Ellen Pinkerton dies in eighteen eighty six, and he is
Speaker 5: replaced by his even worse sons. And at this point
Speaker 5: the Pinkertons cease even sort of the pretense of being
Speaker 5: a detective agency, and they devote themselves full time to
Speaker 5: being strike breakers. Now they have spies everywhere. They have
Speaker 5: you know, over a thousand of them at their peak,
Speaker 5: spread across the dozens and dozens and dozens of Union,
Speaker 5: and they are spying on meetings or appointed with the pinkertons.
Speaker 5: And this allows corporations. For example, if you know who's
Speaker 5: in a union meeting, right, you can just fire all
Speaker 5: of them. And this is especially easy. And you know
Speaker 5: in this sort of pre nineteen thirties period where like
Speaker 5: there is no protected right to strike, right, like you
Speaker 5: if you stop working, that is illegal. The other thing
Speaker 5: they do is provide quote unquote security for corporations training strikes.
Speaker 5: What this looks like in practice is shooting people. And
Speaker 5: you know, sometimes those people are striking workers, like the
Speaker 5: three strikers they killed in the Pennsylvania close strike of
Speaker 5: eighteen ninety. Sometimes they just shoot random bystanders, like the
Speaker 5: random guy they shot in eighteen sixty six, while providing security.
Speaker 5: And you know, again when you're shooting in random bysanta,
Speaker 5: you have to ask.
Speaker 1: Like security for who, like who is.
Speaker 5: The security you're providing for when you're just shooting random people?
Speaker 5: You know, anominally it's for the alo doing a dock strike.
Speaker 5: And sometimes, like in eighteen seventy seven, they shoot children
Speaker 5: where they shot and killed a fifteen year old you
Speaker 5: a Jersey coal wharf strike, you know, and they do
Speaker 5: stuff like this all the time. Right, there's a famous
Speaker 5: incident in Chicago where a bunch of people are yelling
Speaker 5: at them, because again the thinker does have a really
Speaker 5: bad reputation among workers at this point. And you know
Speaker 5: there's a point where they're they're going by on a
Speaker 5: train and people yelled the train and the Pinkertons just
Speaker 5: bomb by, taking out the rifles and shooting four people
Speaker 5: out the window. So you know these are good people, TM, right.
Speaker 5: The other thing they do is they start getting into
Speaker 5: breaking strikes by being a company you can hire to
Speaker 5: import scabs, and this culminates in the Homestead strike. Again,
Speaker 5: there's another thing. There's like a giant Bastard's episode on,
Speaker 5: but we'll do we'll do a short version of the
Speaker 5: Homestead strike. So the Homestet strike is this giant confrontation
Speaker 5: between steel workers and the forces of Andrew Carnagie and
Speaker 5: Henry Frick. Carnagian Frick like locked the union out of
Speaker 5: the factory and they call a Pinkerton army to seize
Speaker 5: control of the town of Homestead. This is from the
Speaker 5: book Inventing the Pinkertons quote. By the end of June,
Speaker 5: he had built around the mills of protective twelve foot
Speaker 5: fence that included rifle holes, waterman's capable of blasting strikers
Speaker 5: with boiling water, and wires attached to a generator which
Speaker 5: could be electrified. In response, workers dubbed the mills Fort Frick.
Speaker 5: Now striking steel workers and other residents of Homestead. Here
Speaker 5: the Pinkertons are coming and they, you know, they the
Speaker 5: Pinkertons are trying to land on these like invasion barges
Speaker 5: that they've modified, and so the homestead people go try
Speaker 5: to stop the barges, and the Pinkertons start shooting at them.
Speaker 5: And this is the thing that's very interesting about this
Speaker 5: whole story is that, Okay, every account at the time
Speaker 5: agrees that the first person the people who started shooting
Speaker 5: first with pinkertons. Later accounts suddenly, like mysteriously later on
Speaker 5: it suddenly start to claim it like, well, nobody really
Speaker 5: knows she started the shooting in these fights, like maybe
Speaker 5: it was a worker, but like again everyone at the
Speaker 5: time cause it was the pinkertons. So I and give,
Speaker 5: given what we know about the track record of pinkertons
Speaker 5: are shooting children and shooting random people yelling at them
Speaker 5: outside of a train of shooting, just literally random people
Speaker 5: on the streets. We can be pretty sure that Pinkertons
Speaker 5: started this, and but you know, the workers in Homestead
Speaker 5: are heavily armed, and this starts a massive gun battle.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna read from inventing the Pinkertons again. This serious
Speaker 5: battle would last the next fourteen hours. After an initial shurge,
Speaker 5: the Pinkertons were pinned down in their barges. After several hours,
Speaker 5: the crowd attempted to sink the barges by cannon fire.
Speaker 5: Residents borrowed the cannon that had been that the city
Speaker 5: used for commemorations and by the way, that that's a
Speaker 5: Civil war cannon that they're using it in eighteen ninety to
Speaker 5: try to sink these boats. The crowd also set burning
Speaker 5: railcars rolling towards the barges and sprayed oil lunch the
Speaker 5: river was they attempted a light on fire in hopes
Speaker 5: of burning the Pinkertons out of their barges. The lubricating
Speaker 5: oil thrown onto the water proved impossible to set a flame.
Speaker 5: So the Pickertons like try to surrender, But by this
Speaker 5: one people hate them so much that every they threw
Speaker 5: this four times, and each time someone will hold up
Speaker 5: a white flag and a sniper will shoot the flag
Speaker 5: and refuse to let them surrender. On try five, the
Speaker 5: Pickertons are finally allowed to surrender and the Pickersons are crushed,
Speaker 5: but unfortunately, the state militia is brought in to sort
Speaker 5: of break the strike and the union movement in Pennsylvania
Speaker 5: is essentially destroyed. But pr White this is terrible from
Speaker 5: the Pinkertons, and they start trying to do like a
Speaker 5: giant pr OP to sort of recover the reputation, and
Speaker 5: a lot of what the sort of popular image of
Speaker 5: the Pinkertons right comes from the pr op the agency does,
Speaker 5: like after the Homes District that gets reproduced by like
Speaker 5: TV producers later on. So fast forwarding a little bit
Speaker 5: to some other stuff that they were involved in. In
Speaker 5: late nineteen oh five, someone blew up the notoriously anti
Speaker 5: union governor of Idaho who'd sent troops to kill striking
Speaker 5: workers a few years ago. Now Idaho hires a Pinkerton
Speaker 5: detective to just torture a guy into confessing to the
Speaker 5: murder and then also claiming that like basically every instance
Speaker 5: of violence in the last five years in in in
Speaker 5: that part of the US was committed by the i
Speaker 5: w W, who are the WW are a very very
Speaker 5: radical union whose thing basically was that society should be
Speaker 5: run by like confederations of direct democratic unions like run
Speaker 5: you know, in all all of society, all the production
Speaker 5: should be run by workers in these in you know,
Speaker 5: in in in the form of like one giant direct
Speaker 5: democratic union. And people hate this, and by people, I
Speaker 5: mean like bosses absolutely hate this EW. Very IWW very
Speaker 5: popular with workers. Bosses are going to spend the next
Speaker 5: rest of theirs just murdering them, you know. But having
Speaker 5: having tortured this guy into saying into fingering the industrial
Speaker 5: workers of the world in this conspiracy, they get Big
Speaker 5: Bill Haywood, who is one of the most famous and
Speaker 5: like successful organizers of the AWW, and several other IWW
Speaker 5: leaders kidnapped and taken into Idaho to stand trial for murder,
Speaker 5: which again they had nothing to do with. Haywood is
Speaker 5: defended by Clarence Darrow of the infamous Scopes Monkey trial,
Speaker 5: and Haywood gets off, but the case the serious damage
Speaker 5: to the WW. If you want to learn more about
Speaker 5: this whole story, go listen to Cool People Who Did
Speaker 5: Cool Stuff there's two episodes about the IWW in this
Speaker 5: period called the IWW and the Hoboes. You saved free speech.
Speaker 5: It's good stuff, you know. I should also briefly mention, right,
Speaker 5: another thing that the Pinkertons do is Okay, so if
Speaker 5: someone someone's wanted in one state, right, instead of having
Speaker 5: to like make you know, the government having to like
Speaker 5: the state government have to making requests, have to be
Speaker 5: having to make request to another state in order to
Speaker 5: get them to extradite someone, they would just have the
Speaker 5: Pingertions kidnap them. This is this is one of the
Speaker 5: sort of big services they provide. They also seemed it's
Speaker 5: very unclear. I don't know, this historical record is a
Speaker 5: bit muddled. They seem also to have been people you
Speaker 5: could hire if so if like your spouse was trying
Speaker 5: to divorce you, which sucks. Is deeply evil.
Speaker 1: They do sort of lots.
Speaker 5: More deeply evil stuff, which we will get into after
Speaker 5: these ads. All right, we're back, So speaking of deeply
Speaker 5: evil stuff, they also send one hundred detectives to break
Speaker 5: a strike of the mostly black Brotherhood of Timber Workers,
Speaker 5: which is an IWW affiliate in Louisiana. Now they break this.
Speaker 5: They try to break this union by walking into a
Speaker 5: union meeting shooting forty four people and killing four of them.
Speaker 5: There are like forty more stories of a guy with
Speaker 5: the Pinkerton walks in and shoots a bunch of people
Speaker 5: that I could put here. I had to find the
Speaker 5: limit at some point to how many stories about Pinkerton's
Speaker 5: murdering people that I could I could sort of put
Speaker 5: But you know, there's an interesting shift that starts to
Speaker 5: happen in the in sort of as the nineteen hundred,
Speaker 5: you know, the nineteen hundreds turned into nineteen tens. The
Speaker 5: Pinkertons start to figure out that it's more effective to
Speaker 5: form mobs of vigilantes than it is to fight unions directly.
Speaker 5: And there's a few benefits here, right, There's less danger
Speaker 5: to detectives themselves. It's easier to deploy large numbers of people.
Speaker 5: Instead of having to sort of like pay an enormous
Speaker 5: amount of money for a bunch of like eight hundred
Speaker 5: detectives and weapons and logistics, you can just sort of
Speaker 5: whip up a mob and get them to do the shooting, right.
Speaker 5: The Pinkertons also get plausible deniability, which is very helpful.
Speaker 5: For their reputation, and you know, the Pinkertons are are
Speaker 5: very much ahead of the curve here. The government, you know,
Speaker 5: who is going to displace the Pinkertons is sort of
Speaker 5: the main force opposing the IWW in later sort of
Speaker 5: like cio union organizing that you know, turn into the
Speaker 5: two Red Scares. They're going to start taking pages from
Speaker 5: the Pinkerton's book, and eventually they are going to you know,
Speaker 5: instead of like sending the US Army to invade Nicarago,
Speaker 5: which is what they would have done in the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 5: by you know, by the time you gets to the
Speaker 5: nineteen eighties, right, they are sending people to train Nicaraguan
Speaker 5: desk squads. And so we can track the shift here.
Speaker 5: Right as the nineteenth century comes to a close and
Speaker 5: we get to sort of the October Revolution of the
Speaker 5: height of the Red Scare, we're in a place where
Speaker 5: they're starting to be enough cops and enough federal agents
Speaker 5: to do the job the Pinkertons had done in previous generations.
Speaker 5: And you know, there's sort of robust arguments in the
Speaker 5: the sort of historiography about to what extent j Edgar
Speaker 5: Hoover and the FBI were influenced by the Pinkertons. I
Speaker 5: think there's decent evidence that they that they were influenced
Speaker 5: by them. But the FBI kind of turns into what
Speaker 5: the Pinkertons are. You know, they're the people who suddenly
Speaker 5: are like showing up and shooting people, showing up and
Speaker 5: arresting union organizers, deporting union organizers from the country. But
Speaker 5: this puts the Pinkertons in kind of a weird spot
Speaker 5: right there. The Pinkerton name has become synonymous with sort
Speaker 5: of this this kind of like they're called sort of
Speaker 5: like feudal retainers, right, these sort of lawless private armies
Speaker 5: that are you know, not supposed to exist in a democracy.
Speaker 5: And so you know in the nineteen thirties when the
Speaker 5: Wagnerak like makes strikes legal, right. I talked about the
Speaker 5: Wagner Acts a long time ago, an episode called The
Speaker 5: Eden Makes Its Strong. But after this they tried Robert
Speaker 5: Pinkerton the second who's the new sort of owner of
Speaker 5: the Pinkerton tries to do a rebrand and he has
Speaker 5: this great quote. That's quote he's talking about union busting.
Speaker 5: That is a phase of our business that we are
Speaker 5: not particularly delighted or proud of and we're out of it. However,
Speaker 5: there was nothing illegal about it at the time. Now, okay,
Speaker 5: you could say a lot about what was or wasn't
Speaker 5: illegal in a period when you know, you could order
Speaker 5: a drink that was cocaine mixed with wine and you know,
Speaker 5: you could just get like opium prescribed to your baby,
Speaker 5: But torturing and murdering people was still legal back then. Now,
Speaker 5: I guess if you're you know, if you really wanted
Speaker 5: to have fun, you can get into an argument that like,
Speaker 5: nowhere in the constitution is murdered specifically banned, but like,
Speaker 5: you know, how fun with that. But FDR and the
Speaker 5: New Dealers go after the Pinkerton's very hard. And this
Speaker 5: is a lot of interesting effects. What it means is,
Speaker 5: on the one hand, you can't have some guy with
Speaker 5: a detective badge who works for a corporation walked into
Speaker 5: a union meeting and start the killing. But it also
Speaker 5: means that when you need someone to smash a union
Speaker 5: by force, it's going to be the state doing it.
Speaker 5: And the aposteosis of this sort of one of the
Speaker 5: internal contradictions that destroys a new Deal is that it's
Speaker 5: reliance on the state to contain the worst exis of
Speaker 5: capitalism means that you know, they have in turn directly
Speaker 5: enormously empowered the state and the state's military capacity. And
Speaker 5: this means that in the nineteen eighties unions are going
Speaker 5: to be destroyed by the state that the New Deal
Speaker 5: had built. The Pickertons are replaced by Hoover and the
Speaker 5: g Men, and the g Men are eventually sort of
Speaker 5: become known as the dreaded modern fat who you know,
Speaker 5: lurks at every doorstep eating babies and is the terror
Speaker 5: of every sort of political movement in the US.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 5: The Pinkertons, for for their part, right with union busting
Speaker 5: now technically illegal, and when I say union busting like
Speaker 5: I mean walking in, shooting people stop and performing a union,
Speaker 5: they start working basically as regular security guards. And then
Speaker 5: they move on to selling surveillance equipment and trainings for
Speaker 5: government organizations. And this reflects a kind of larger shift
Speaker 5: in what kinds of military operations the corporations run, which
Speaker 5: is that instead of directly running armies or hiring groups
Speaker 5: like the Pinkertons to do violence for them, now what
Speaker 5: they're in the business office intelligence operations. And this changes
Speaker 5: the way that corporations kill people enormously. You know, when
Speaker 5: Coca Cola now needs to kill union organizers, right, they
Speaker 5: have paramilitaries for this. Now, some of these guys are contractors,
Speaker 5: some of them are paid under the table, some of
Speaker 5: them are in it for ideology, some of it for money.
Speaker 1: But it's not you.
Speaker 5: Know, it's not quite like Coca Cola has its own
Speaker 5: military force like it would have been in the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 5: and they're hundreds. It's also not there is just like
Speaker 5: a private but there's not like it's not they're not.
Speaker 5: They're not also not like hiring a specific private military contractor. Right,
Speaker 5: the way they do, way they do it tends to
Speaker 5: be they you know, sort of semi clandestinely arm paramilitary. Now,
Speaker 5: there are limited exceptions where sort of like oil companies
Speaker 5: will have private armies and places where civil wars are
Speaker 5: going on, but that's usually a thing that happens when
Speaker 5: they're in a place that doesn't have state capacity. When
Speaker 5: they're in a place that does have state capacity, like
Speaker 5: for example, Nigeria, you get a very very different story.
Speaker 5: So Nigeria is a major oil producer, and this has
Speaker 5: a number of consequences on the places where that oil
Speaker 5: is extracted. A huge amount of it comes from the
Speaker 5: Niger Delta, where the government faces an almost perennial insurgency.
Speaker 5: So okay, why is there an insurgency there?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 5: Part of the reason is that there is an indescribable
Speaker 5: amount of wealth coming out of the oil and Niger Delta,
Speaker 5: and that money goes mostly to I mean, might I
Speaker 5: say mostly ninety percent of it right, go to Nigerian
Speaker 5: elites and corrupt for oil for in oil companies. And
Speaker 5: you know. Another part of the reason this turns into
Speaker 5: an insurgency is that people try nonviolence with disobedience in
Speaker 5: the Niger Delta to protest the sort of horrific environmental
Speaker 5: consequences of companies like Shell doing oil extraction, you know.
Speaker 5: And they have these marches that will draw out three
Speaker 5: hundred thousand people in places where this is half of
Speaker 5: the population, half the total population of the ethnic group
Speaker 5: being affected. The Nigerian government responds by publicly executing one
Speaker 5: of the movement's leaders, the famous activist Ken Sarrowewa, by
Speaker 5: hanging him and then dissolving his body and limes we
Speaker 5: couldn't be buried, which is a real British Empire. Shit
Speaker 5: And okay, so at this point you've come to the
Speaker 5: sort of crossroad of a nonviolent movement, right where the
Speaker 5: government's answer to non violence we will publicly hang you
Speaker 5: and you get you get to this question do you
Speaker 5: take up arms? And the answer is yeah, a lot
Speaker 5: of people do.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: This is this is this is a very complicated insurgency
Speaker 5: in a lot of ways that you know, we can't
Speaker 5: do justice here too. But I want to read something
Speaker 5: from this interview from a guy for the Movement for
Speaker 5: the Emancipation of the Niger Delta Men, which is one
Speaker 5: of the many, many, many, many many like Milton groups
Speaker 5: that appear in the Delta over the last twenty five years. Quote,
Speaker 5: this is our territory. The soldiers dare not come here.
Speaker 5: Now they came, and we defeat them. He says. We
Speaker 5: are civilized people, educated people, and we do not want
Speaker 5: our children to be deprived as we have been deprived
Speaker 5: so other people can get rich from what is under
Speaker 5: our feet. The oil companies have had many years to
Speaker 5: treat us rights. They have never done that. Now we
Speaker 5: are making them think. Now if this is you know
Speaker 5: eighteen twenty right, and shell is dealing with people taking
Speaker 5: up arms and cutting off their ability to sort of
Speaker 5: like extract profits of oil. They would form an army
Speaker 5: of semi literate Belgian and British barbarians, arm they with
Speaker 5: cannons and conquer the region and place the entire area
Speaker 5: under direct corporate rule. You know, if this was say,
Speaker 5: like the eighteen nineties, right, they would hire the pinker
Speaker 5: Chance and the Pinkertons, nego shoot these people before them.
Speaker 5: But this is the nineteen nineties, in the two thousands,
Speaker 5: so instead, what Shell does is literally pay the salaries
Speaker 5: of Nigerian cops who go slaughter protesters in the streets,
Speaker 5: and eventually they move to spending hundreds of millions of
Speaker 5: dollars just just between two thousand and seven two thousand
Speaker 5: and nine alone directly funding equipping an army, the Nigerian Army,
Speaker 5: and a special like war crimes task force called the
Speaker 5: Joint Task Force the JFT, which is this like it's
Speaker 5: this sort of incredible thing where the army, the navy
Speaker 5: and the police do a fusion dance to massacre civilians.
Speaker 5: And you know, I say this hundreds of millions of dollars, right,
Speaker 5: that's an underestimate that's just three years. That's just what
Speaker 5: we know about. The actual total that they sunk into
Speaker 5: sort of like literally funding the Nigerian Army is enormous. Now,
Speaker 5: what's interesting here is that Shell does have its own
Speaker 5: security guards, but the ratio of what they spend in
Speaker 5: the Nigerian Army versus what they spend on their own
Speaker 5: security guards just two to one. And this goes to
Speaker 5: demonstrate the point that I've sort of been making this episode, right,
Speaker 5: which is that there's been a shift in you know,
Speaker 5: if you are a company like Shell, right who has
Speaker 5: a need, you know, who are horrifically exploiting a bunch
Speaker 5: of people to the point where you need to shoot
Speaker 5: them in order to keep them in line. Instead of
Speaker 5: going to like a private detective agency or having your
Speaker 5: own army, they are increasingly simply funding the state. And
Speaker 5: you know this means that right again again, instead of
Speaker 5: the Pinkertons, the actual trigger pullers are cops. They are
Speaker 5: the police, There are the military, they're weird special forces groups.
Speaker 5: And you know where that sort of leaves space for
Speaker 5: groups like the Pinkertons now is the area that's left
Speaker 5: for them is in corporate intelligence. And this seems to
Speaker 5: be most of what the Pinkertons have been up to recently.
Speaker 5: Amazon hired them in the last few years to work
Speaker 5: and to work with their intelligence division, the Global Security
Speaker 5: Operations Center, which they use to try to stomp out
Speaker 5: union organizing in their warehouses. And Amazon isn't just sort
Speaker 5: of spying on union organizers. 're spying on basically every
Speaker 5: social roupment they can get their hands on. Here's from WECE.
Speaker 5: In twenty nineteen, Amazon monitored the yellowfst movement known as
Speaker 5: the jele Jean, a grassroots uprising for economic justice spread
Speaker 5: across France, and solidarity movements in Vienna and protest against
Speaker 5: state repression in Iran. They've been deployed deployed against strikes
Speaker 5: of communication workers in West Virginia, Google and Facebook deploys
Speaker 5: them against their own employees to redout leakers. Now, this
Speaker 5: is all in line with the pivot of sort of
Speaker 5: corporate repression towards mass surveillance. Interestingly, the Pikersons have been
Speaker 5: planting stories in the press about going back to their
Speaker 5: roots as mercenaries, pitching themselves as you know, the force
Speaker 5: that could stop climate chaos with ex military forces. The
Speaker 5: company claims to have been deployed by corporations in Puerto
Speaker 5: Rico after the hurricane and after Hurricane ria antoin seventeen.
Speaker 5: I don't know if that's true. This is possible, but
Speaker 5: again it's something that they have to be very careful
Speaker 5: with the Pinkertons is that they are very, very brand obsessed,
Speaker 5: even though they're now owned by a different sort of
Speaker 5: Swedish security company, and they lie constantly, so it's very
Speaker 5: difficult to sort up sort of the myth from the
Speaker 5: fact when myth making has been such a vital part
Speaker 5: of their branding from the beginning. For another example, here's
Speaker 5: from a New York Times magazine. Among their most popular
Speaker 5: news services is the Pinkerton Dedicated Professional, in which agents
Speaker 5: join a client's company like any other new hire, allowing
Speaker 5: them to provide intel employees. By twenty eighteen, the agency
Speaker 5: said it could count among its clients about eighty percent
Speaker 5: of Fortune one thousand companies. Are these numbers correct? Who knows?
Speaker 5: They absolutely could be lying right. On the other hand,
Speaker 5: here's Gizmoto talking about the current reach of the Pinkertons
Speaker 5: in matchic together ring. There are other connections between Wizards
Speaker 5: of the Coast and the Pinkerton Agency. Robert M. Klemmick,
Speaker 5: who has been the director of Security Risk Management at Hasbro, Inc.
Speaker 5: Which is the parent company Wizards of the Coast for
Speaker 5: twelve years, was previously the director of supply chain Security
Speaker 5: Practice at Pinkerton Consulting in Investigations. The current manager of
Speaker 5: Global Investigations is also a form of Pinkerton Agents. So
Speaker 5: what we saw in the fact that you know, Wizards
Speaker 5: of the Coast said the Pinkertons after a guy who
Speaker 5: made a YouTube video showing some cards that he bought
Speaker 5: from someone else, is you know, you can see in
Speaker 5: that the arc of the arc of of what the
Speaker 5: Pinkers are trying to do. Right, You have, on the
Speaker 5: one hand, the Pinkertons falling back into their sort of
Speaker 5: intelligence role. You also have them specifically trading on their
Speaker 5: reputation to intimidate people. And you know, the reputation they
Speaker 5: acquired by killing unfathomable numbers of people between the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 5: which they used the sort of intimidate people by just
Speaker 5: sort of the power of the reputation. You can see
Speaker 5: something very interesting, which is that the Pinkertons don't arrest
Speaker 5: Dan Cannon directly, right, they're able to leave with the
Speaker 5: sort of goods. But what they threatened Dan Cannon with
Speaker 5: is the regular police. And that is I think a
Speaker 5: very important aspect of what the story actually is, which
Speaker 5: is it's a story about the modern division of labor,
Speaker 5: of violence against people who corporations don't like, and that
Speaker 5: division of labor runs through security. You know, you have
Speaker 5: your major, you have a major corporation. That corporation has
Speaker 5: its own security division. That security division is connected to
Speaker 5: the Pinkertons. They use the Pinkertons as an intelligence network,
Speaker 5: and they have done several times now and then you know,
Speaker 5: when it comes time to you know, you can use
Speaker 5: the Pinkertons as like the people will stop you booth.
Speaker 5: But when it comes time to actually do violence against someone,
Speaker 5: when it comes time to arrest someone, that's the state's job.
Speaker 5: And that, I think is the thing that's that you know,
Speaker 5: that that's very important to understand about the way all
Speaker 5: of this stuff works is that the thing that is
Speaker 5: true now about the year twenty twenty three that was
Speaker 5: not true about the year like eighteen seventy three, is
Speaker 5: that the the sort of primary driver of corporate violence
Speaker 5: in you know, in in in the US and abroad
Speaker 5: is not necessarily private security companies. It is the state,
Speaker 5: and it is the police. And yeah, this has been naked.
Speaker 5: Happened here. The police suck acab get rid of them.
Speaker 1: Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
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Speaker 1: Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 7: Thanks for listening.