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 got to be nothing new here for you. But
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 2: Welcomes it could happen here.
Speaker 3: I am Andrew of Future Channal Andreism, and I'm here with.
Speaker 4: Oh wait without the Q. Oh no, yeah, it's ties
Speaker 4: me and Mia Long. I'm also here at apparently missing
Speaker 4: cues instantly.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 4: It is barbarically early for me, So.
Speaker 2: Yay, b barically What time is it?
Speaker 4: Ten o'clock?
Speaker 2: Well, come on, come on, come on, come on.
Speaker 4: Look, it would have been fine if it wasn't up
Speaker 4: till three am last night dealing with a session of
Speaker 4: minor crises.
Speaker 2: Damn, that's unfortunate.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's all right.
Speaker 3: Otherwise, if it wasn't a crisis, I would have like
Speaker 3: flexed my early bird supremacy.
Speaker 2: But you know.
Speaker 3: I have enough since like seven sixth day or something
Speaker 3: like that. It'so a whole job now, but I just
Speaker 3: didn't do a lng of this one. And yeah, so
Speaker 3: today I wanted to shed light on some really interesting history.
Speaker 3: I think of the anarchist movement in Egypt. I've read
Speaker 3: in this book called Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial
Speaker 3: and Post Colonial World, and there's a section by a
Speaker 3: guy named Anthony Gorman that I found really interested in
Speaker 3: I just had to share.
Speaker 2: It's really specific.
Speaker 3: To the anarchist Egypt anarchist history of like the late
Speaker 3: nineteenth and early twentieth century, And honest I find that
Speaker 3: whole period to be very interesting, actually because I am
Speaker 3: a dreaded Paradox Games fan and I enjoy my little
Speaker 3: you know, like you three, you know, like that that
Speaker 3: period in history. Honestly, any period of history prior to
Speaker 3: World War Two I find interesting. Everything World War two
Speaker 3: is just like a complete boat to me, and then
Speaker 3: everything past World War two.
Speaker 2: Is like cool.
Speaker 3: But it seemed like the World War two period itself
Speaker 3: not my thing, you know, Like tell me about the Phoenicians,
Speaker 3: talking about the Phrygians, talking about the Carthaginians, But I
Speaker 3: don't really care about the axis, and which tank was
Speaker 3: the superior tank and.
Speaker 2: All those different things.
Speaker 3: A lot of these couldn't got history buffs into not
Speaker 3: to a personal one cereal of course, whatever you know
Speaker 3: floats your boat. But for me, I really like that
Speaker 3: pre WORL War II sort of stuff and Victorian eras
Speaker 3: one particularly interesting point in history, and a lot of
Speaker 3: things will.
Speaker 2: Happen in that time.
Speaker 3: Industrial revolution was shaken up around the world, Colonization was
Speaker 3: going on, and the effects of that, but you know,
Speaker 3: reverberate for centuries to.
Speaker 2: Come, and.
Speaker 3: The true successor to the Roman Empire, in my opinion,
Speaker 3: the Ottoman Empire was kind of going through a series
Speaker 3: of crises, and Egypt, which was under the Ottoman Empire
Speaker 3: and then Brook free of the Ottoa Empire, had its
Speaker 3: own stuff going on. So I don't want to get
Speaker 3: too much into that whole mess, but I want to
Speaker 3: give some context because you know, this isn't this is
Speaker 3: a history episode. It might be a two part history
Speaker 3: episode in fact, So let's just start back.
Speaker 2: In the late nineteenth century.
Speaker 3: So there's this foreign work in community in Egypt thanks
Speaker 3: to Muhammad Ali no relation, and he was the ruler
Speaker 3: of Egypt from eighteen o five to eighteen forty nine.
Speaker 3: This guy was all about modernizing stuff like the military,
Speaker 3: the state administration, and the economy. So he invited skilled
Speaker 3: folks to come to Egypt and lend their labor.
Speaker 4: Oh, isn't he the guy that Napoleon fought for a
Speaker 4: little bit?
Speaker 2: I think so? I think so.
Speaker 3: I mean, who didn't Napoleon fight? I'm sure if he
Speaker 3: could have, Napoleon would have fought.
Speaker 4: Like the dinosaurs, Napoleon fighting Cavement on the moon like.
Speaker 3: And speaking of Napoleon, I really don't appreciate how I mean,
Speaker 3: no disrespect to hawqu In Phoenix, but was Napoleon like
Speaker 3: in his twenties when he rose up the ranks military
Speaker 3: and all that.
Speaker 6: Like?
Speaker 3: I could be mistaken, I could be confused him with
Speaker 3: the other Napoleon. But I'm pretty sure Napoleon was not
Speaker 3: the old man when he was making a lot.
Speaker 2: Of the moves he was making. Let's see again, I
Speaker 2: could be wrong.
Speaker 4: Well, he was more in seventeen seventeen sixteen. I'm leaving
Speaker 4: I'm I'm leaving the maths of this as an exercise
Speaker 4: for the reader.
Speaker 3: What really through his new office that there's like multiple
Speaker 3: Napoleons and so I mix up the histories of the
Speaker 3: different Napoleons. Reasonable, But if it wasn't that Napoleon, I
Speaker 3: know for sure one of the Napoleon's in question was
Speaker 3: like relatively young when he was making some of his moves,
Speaker 3: like in his early to mid twenties when he's rising
Speaker 3: up the ranks kind of thing. Yeah, but I could
Speaker 3: be entirely mistake, and I'm sure somebody will correct me.
Speaker 3: None of this is relevant to what this episode is about.
Speaker 3: But yeah, so Muhammed Ali again no relation. His successors,
Speaker 3: Sayid and Ismail, took things to the next level after
Speaker 3: he passed on with some major infrastructure projects. They were
Speaker 3: building railways, they were expanding canals, they were gonwa the
Speaker 3: urban development, and they need a bunch of skilled workers
Speaker 3: for a lot of that. So they brought in Italians, Greeks, Syrians, Dalmatians,
Speaker 3: and of course they use their local Egyptian laborers as well.
Speaker 3: Many of those workers came to work on the famous
Speaker 3: Suez Canal, of course, and that required a massive workforce.
Speaker 4: Yeah, many of them died. Yeah, canal dinging, like like
Speaker 4: canal digging.
Speaker 2: I don't know if female high immortality rate profession.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, like you might as well dig your own
Speaker 4: grave too, like like dig it before you start, so
Speaker 4: they can bury your body halfway through.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's like not gallows humor. It's like canal humor.
Speaker 3: You know, it's like we're dig this canal. We're going
Speaker 3: to die here anyway. It's kind of similar thing I
Speaker 3: could in the Panama Canal, although in that case they
Speaker 3: brought in a lot of Beesian and other Caribbean workers
Speaker 3: to Yeah, you.
Speaker 2: Know, set that up.
Speaker 3: And actually the Panama now is responsible for, like what's
Speaker 3: responsible for I think a third of the Beasian economy
Speaker 3: at one point because the remittances they were being sent
Speaker 3: back to their families at home. That's a whole different
Speaker 3: chapter in history. But yeah, so this this massive and
Speaker 3: diverse workforce is bringing, of course, not just their labor,
Speaker 3: but ideas, because whenever you get people together, they start talking.
Speaker 3: Egypt was already considered something of a place of refuge
Speaker 3: for political exiles, so it's not very surprising that anarchism
Speaker 3: was starting to gain popularity around that time, particularly with
Speaker 3: the Italians in Egypt.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's the thing. That's the thing in this period
Speaker 4: is like you can literally track the spread of anarchism,
Speaker 4: like by where there are a bunch of Italians in
Speaker 4: Argentina too, It's like anywhere there are Italians, anarchy spreads.
Speaker 3: It's like it's a me anarchism. Yeah, that's that's gonna
Speaker 3: set somebody off. My apology is to the Italian community.
Speaker 3: I shouldn't have said that.
Speaker 4: Yeah they had, They hadn't invented fascism yet. This is
Speaker 4: back when the Italians were still cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm probably gonna get a letter hopefully.
Speaker 3: You know, there's nothing else what's attached to it. Italians
Speaker 3: already had a history with the anarchist movement as we know.
Speaker 2: I mean some people would.
Speaker 3: Of course, you're familiar with folks like eric co mana tester,
Speaker 3: so there's no surprises there. Label and political radicalism court
Speaker 3: sparks first in the Italian Worker Society or Society Operao
Speaker 3: Italiana in eighteen sixty, which was formed to look out
Speaker 3: for the interests of its members, and later on in
Speaker 3: the mid eighteen seventies you had these veterans from Gary
Speaker 3: Bali's campaigns, and by the way, Gary Bali is one
Speaker 3: of the figures responsible for the Italian unification. And then
Speaker 3: you also had other radicals, forming Thought and Action, a
Speaker 3: political association with Massinian principles. Messini, by the way, Giuseppe
Speaker 3: Mussini was an Italian Republican who advocated for liberty and
Speaker 3: democracy and class collaboration and all that. Jazz Marx once
Speaker 3: called him an everlastin old ass which is just really
Speaker 3: funny and I had to include that there. He's just
Speaker 3: like me for real anyway. And then in eighteen seventy
Speaker 3: six more radical splinter group became an official section of
Speaker 3: the First International in Alexandria, which is one of the
Speaker 3: earliest attempts to create a worldwide association of workers and
Speaker 3: socialist groups. I don't know if it could happen. He
Speaker 3: has ever discussed, like the history of the International.
Speaker 2: It's before but it gets messy, Oh god, it's yeah,
Speaker 2: it gets.
Speaker 3: Messy, It gets cattie, it gets like we had to
Speaker 3: spill that tea at some point.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's fucking wild, like especially especially once you get
Speaker 4: into like the seventeen different Fourth Internationals, and it's a
Speaker 4: time like the the Second International is such a disaster
Speaker 4: that Hoseny Mubarik is part of it when he gets
Speaker 4: overthrown like it's a it's it's it's a good time.
Speaker 4: And by a good time, I mean an incredibly bad time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: Honestly, I just have to throw my head back and
Speaker 3: laugh quite hotly when I hear folks talking about, you know,
Speaker 3: why can't they left unite?
Speaker 2: You know, like where's the leftist unity?
Speaker 3: Why can't we just come to like nah, this has
Speaker 3: been taking place since nineteenth century.
Speaker 4: My absolute favorite version of this is people being people taught,
Speaker 4: people being like, Ah, mar Marx wouldn't want there to
Speaker 4: have been so much discord on the left. It's like,
Speaker 4: have you ever read any Marx like that? That is
Speaker 4: a man who's writing is about sixty percent yelling at
Speaker 4: someone whose ideas he's also stolen, like by volume. Like
Speaker 4: one of his most famous, like one of the things
Speaker 4: that you get designed to read from marks in college
Speaker 4: is the German Ideology, which is like four hundred page
Speaker 4: of him being annoyed by people whose ideas are slightly
Speaker 4: different than his. It's like like, this is this is
Speaker 4: this is an ancient tradition.
Speaker 3: The irony of Marx calling somebody else an avalastian old
Speaker 3: ass will not be lost on me. And quite frankly,
Speaker 3: this idea of oh Max wouldn't want this, Marx wouldn't
Speaker 3: that really comes from that sort of messiahification of Marx.
Speaker 2: I just coined that to him. You know, I could
Speaker 2: send me my flowers in the.
Speaker 3: Male because essentially what people are doing is treating Marx
Speaker 3: and marx ideas and Marxism. It's just like Christianity two
Speaker 3: point zero. You know, it's kind of like how you know,
Speaker 3: people would have been saying, like, oh, Jesus wouldn't want
Speaker 3: all this division in the church, except he just replacing
Speaker 3: Jesus Marx and the chewch with the left.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Like Marx has this famous line where he goes like
Speaker 4: if he's reponding to like the first like French Marxist,
Speaker 4: and he goes, if this is Marxism, then I am
Speaker 4: not a Marxist. Oh yeah, and then everyone proceeded to
Speaker 4: ignore him but call themselves Marxists. Well this is great
Speaker 4: things have gone.
Speaker 2: This is yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean even in their lifetimes, all of these figures
Speaker 3: that we respect now, they didn't really like the admirers,
Speaker 3: like Mala Testa was quite embarrassed that he had fans.
Speaker 4: I recall, yeah, no, it to be clear, to be clear,
Speaker 4: that is that is the appropriate were actually having fans.
Speaker 4: It is a terrifying thing, right sure, Flea and terror
Speaker 4: exactly exactly.
Speaker 3: Back to Alexandria, right where the First International's first official section,
Speaker 3: one of its sections came about. And it was one
Speaker 3: of the earliest attempts to create a world wide association
Speaker 3: of workers and socialist groups and expanded and it formed
Speaker 3: sections in Cairo and in Port Said and in Ismailia
Speaker 3: or Ismailia Ismailia. And they even had the idea of
Speaker 3: spreading socialist propaganda and different languages like Italian and Greek
Speaker 3: and Turkish and Arabic to reach more folks in the
Speaker 3: quote unquote East. They want to take the ideas of
Speaker 3: the First International beyond chest European communities, you know, try
Speaker 3: and reach out to the locals. Unfortunately, for those familiar
Speaker 3: the history of the First International, it fizzled out, so
Speaker 3: you know, they couldn't really fully execute their plans. But
Speaker 3: you know, they got to get them credit for trying
Speaker 3: to make a difference beyond their own little circles. Meanwhile,
Speaker 3: Egypt was in the midst of a deep political crisis.
Speaker 3: The military was pissed because of the disastrous Egypt to
Speaker 3: European War. The upper ranks the civil service, the army,
Speaker 3: in the business world had become dominated by Europeans, who
Speaker 3: were paid much more than native Egyptians. The country's inability
Speaker 3: to service its debt from cost the infrastructure projects and
Speaker 3: lavish spending by maayel It's rue at the time led
Speaker 3: to European control over its treasury in eighteen seventy six
Speaker 3: and other European treasure pressure. Ismayel was to pose in
Speaker 3: eighteen seventy nine replace their son Telfiek, who aimed to
Speaker 3: basically satisfy each his creditors by any means necessary. And
Speaker 3: so this tumultuous political climate provided both challenges and opportunities
Speaker 3: for the anarchists in Egypt. A revolt led by an
Speaker 3: Egyptian officer of the Egyptian Army, Ahmed Urabi, sort of
Speaker 3: deposed Telfik, establish a constitutional government and n British and
Speaker 3: French influence over the country. Although he was characterized as
Speaker 3: anti foreign, Urrabi received support from some foreign elements, including
Speaker 3: the very same Italian workers in Alexandria and a lot
Speaker 3: of the anarchists in the area. Now, as we know,
Speaker 3: anarchists are not really advocates of nationalism, so they will
Speaker 3: fight for national liberation causes. So anarchists and nationalists foul
Speaker 3: themselves on the same side when it came to fighting
Speaker 3: against European imperialism in Egypt. So when the British were
Speaker 3: causing trouble, anarchists like Malchester teamed up with nationalists led
Speaker 3: by Urabi to resist foreign domination. However, the the British
Speaker 3: and French governments, who were intent on protecting their investments
Speaker 3: and nationals, confronted Urabi, which resulted in British forces bombard
Speaker 3: in Alexandria and eventually occupying the country in eighteen eighty two.
Speaker 3: Throughout the early years of British occupation, the anarchist movement
Speaker 3: in Egypt faced both internal divisions and factionalism. Both internal
Speaker 3: divisions and factionalism, similar to what was happening in other
Speaker 3: parts of the world. Anarchists and socialists had been uneasy
Speaker 3: comrades under the umbrella of the International during the eighteen seventies,
Speaker 3: but the defection of a particularly locally influential figure named
Speaker 3: Andrea Costa from libertarian socialism from libertarian Socialism in eighteen
Speaker 3: seventy nine caused a significant schism.
Speaker 2: Within the local movement.
Speaker 3: Let me reread that so anarchists and socialists had been
Speaker 3: uneasy comrades under the umbrella of the International during the
Speaker 3: eighteen seventies, but the defection of one particularly locally influential
Speaker 3: figure named Andrea Costa from the School of Libertarian Socialism
Speaker 3: in eighteen seventy nine caused a significant schism within the
Speaker 3: local movement, and the movement also suffered other interial divisions,
Speaker 3: particularly with the enduring conflict between anti organizationalists and anarcho
Speaker 3: syndicalists on the role of collective association in achieving anarchist
Speaker 3: aims quote. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the
Speaker 3: former trend appears to have been in the ascendency, but
Speaker 3: the growth of the labor movement anarcho synicalists expanded their influence.
Speaker 3: Other disputes reflected the power of personalities. Ugo Parini, a
Speaker 3: key figure staunch anti organizationalist, was notorious for his uncompromising
Speaker 3: style and was a persistent obstacle to create a cooperation
Speaker 3: among anarchists. Not until after his death in nineteen oh
Speaker 3: six was a national program of action agreed, which provided
Speaker 3: a solid basis for collaboration within the Egyptian movement. Now,
Speaker 3: I didn't find any rightings by Ugoprini himself to speak
Speaker 3: his piece, but it sounds like he might have been
Speaker 3: a e alas and old ass himself, if you know,
Speaker 3: after the moment he died, they were able to finally
Speaker 3: come together and come to agreement on something that means
Speaker 3: pros like a significant obstacle to the organization of efforts.
Speaker 3: But you know, he fought with his principles and he
Speaker 3: died by them, so you know some respect there. So
Speaker 3: until the end of nineteenth century, the anti organizationalists seem
Speaker 3: to have had the upper hand, but with the growth
Speaker 3: of the labor movement, anarchist syndicalists gained a lot more influence.
Speaker 3: Tut tut leftist disunity strikes again. The real downside of
Speaker 3: this history is that the anarchist movement was still quite
Speaker 3: European and quite male, and the rights and nationalist movements
Speaker 3: were not exactly helping matters. However, while the majority of
Speaker 3: anarchists women, there was a women's section establishing Chiroage in
Speaker 3: the eighteen seventies, so there was some female participation happening
Speaker 3: as well. You know, it's the real, real barby moment.
Speaker 3: There you know, real win for feminism. The ethnic diversity
Speaker 3: of the anarchist movement in Egypt did expand over time,
Speaker 3: though although Italians remained the dominant group until World War One,
Speaker 3: they were one attracted Greeks, Jews, Germans, and various Eastern
Speaker 3: European nationalities arabifhone. Egyptians also began to play a lot
Speaker 3: more significant role, as seeing in the involvement in industrial actions,
Speaker 3: educational activities, and anarchist meetings during the early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 3: and the occupational backgrounds of these anarchists were just as
Speaker 3: diverse as the ethnicities. Skilled artisans, including carpenters, masons, tailors,
Speaker 3: and painters were among the majority. Some came from the
Speaker 3: petit bourgeoisie like cruisers and tabanawas, while others were involved
Speaker 3: in trade or word for merchant hoses, and the movement
Speaker 3: also include professionals like doctors, lawyers, and journalists. By the
Speaker 3: late nineteenth century, the anarchistic community started to shift its
Speaker 3: focus towards the new working class, such as cigarette workers, printers,
Speaker 3: and employees of large utilities like tramway companies. However, despite
Speaker 3: this diversity, and despite all the calls for internationalism. Local
Speaker 3: nationalist associations still held a lot of power because they
Speaker 3: provided their communities with welfare services and social events and
Speaker 3: all that. It's kind of like how immigrants in new
Speaker 3: countries even today will typically like group together in enclaves
Speaker 3: and communities to share their culture and to share their
Speaker 3: support economic and otherwise, when in a situation where everyone
Speaker 3: around you is perceived as foreign, and you can some
Speaker 3: measure of security and say, if you know, what's a
Speaker 3: cultural proscilation, that is a thing that immigrants tend to do,
Speaker 3: and these workers were immigrants to Egypt, and so they
Speaker 3: kind of did the same thing. Unfortunately, many of these
Speaker 3: national associations were controlled by bourgeois interests in the Greek community.
Speaker 3: For example, the powers of the bourgeois o higarchy in
Speaker 3: funding and controlling community institutions really worked to keep workers
Speaker 3: in line with what the authorities wanted, because if you
Speaker 3: stepped out of line from what this oligarchy wanted, you know,
Speaker 3: you kind of like lose access to those essential community institutions.
Speaker 3: And if you try, if you still have like a
Speaker 3: family to take care of, a family that you might
Speaker 3: have brought to Egypt or started in Egypt, or really
Speaker 3: just struggling against meat or you know, your fish out
Speaker 3: of water and you don't really know any other languages,
Speaker 3: you just know your own people. To be isolated like
Speaker 3: that is really hazard a situation to be in, and
Speaker 3: so that's how they kept people in line. But that's
Speaker 3: in terms of the European nowists. There's also some rise
Speaker 3: in Egyptian nationalism. They also had some sway originally Egyptian
Speaker 3: nationalists called signs of militant labor as part of a
Speaker 3: European disease an alien Egyptian context, which, by the way,
Speaker 3: I've noticed a lot of.
Speaker 2: Right wing organizations and movements.
Speaker 3: Tend to apply that pseudo anti imperial label to things,
Speaker 3: so you would see it with for example, some right
Speaker 3: wing African nationalist groups would describe the presence of homosexuality
Speaker 3: in the country as a consequence of European imperialism. European
Speaker 3: cludism is completely foreign to any kind of African context,
Speaker 3: history or whatever, which.
Speaker 2: Is entirely false. But they do use that sort of like.
Speaker 3: False anti imperialism to build up their power base and
Speaker 3: build up their reactionary base, So it's a partner. You
Speaker 3: can't observe a lot of these right Way movements and
Speaker 3: particularly global South right way movements. Interestingly, though the Egyptian
Speaker 3: nationalists who were calling in militant labor European disease, the
Speaker 3: opinions turned around kind of quick when they saw how
Speaker 3: potent it was for exercise and power. In nineteen oh nine,
Speaker 3: the Watani Party openly backed the formation of the Manual
Speaker 3: Trades Workers Union, which was a diverse body of Egyptian
Speaker 3: urban workers, because they recognized the party finally recognized both
Speaker 3: the need to constitute a broader national community and the
Speaker 3: political potential of the workers in the struggle against British occupation. Now,
Speaker 3: before the different nationalists came around on this, the anarcho
Speaker 3: Synicolists had already begun trying to attract more Egyptian workers
Speaker 3: into their internationalists anarchist struggle. They knew how They knew
Speaker 3: that to make a real impact they had to connect
Speaker 3: with native Egyptian workers.
Speaker 2: But it's a thing, you know.
Speaker 3: The international union structure wasn't always practical for them. Many
Speaker 3: occupations in Egypt were pretty much exclusive to Egyptians, and
Speaker 3: many occupations in Egypt were pretty much exclusive to Europeans,
Speaker 3: so forming those unions was easier, said than done, but
Speaker 3: I didn't stop the anarchists from trying. You know, they
Speaker 3: saw the importance of promoting lab organization and militancy among
Speaker 3: the Egyptian working class, and so when the cab drivers
Speaker 3: and Alexandria went on strike in nineteen oh three, the
Speaker 3: anarchists were there to gas them up. The anarchists who,
Speaker 3: of course trying to emphasize what the workers had in common,
Speaker 3: the lack of boundaries that labor has that doesn't care
Speaker 3: for things like nationality, or religion or race, that all
Speaker 3: workers had the same needs, the same struggles, and the
Speaker 3: same aspirations for their well being. Of course, the nationalists
Speaker 3: had their own political visions, so while anarchists emphasized international
Speaker 3: solidarity and shared interests, nationalists will resort into nativist appeals
Speaker 3: and organizational tactics to splinter the labor movement and break
Speaker 3: up at internationalist orientation. To give them some credit, though,
Speaker 3: the Returning Party did recognize the importance of allying with
Speaker 3: foreign workers and urged Egyptian workers during the Trams strike
Speaker 3: of nineteen eleven to unite and strengthen yourselves and increase
Speaker 3: your numbers through combination and through unity with the European workers,
Speaker 3: your comrades, and let me get to nineteen nineteen and
Speaker 3: the quote unquote nineteen nineteen revolution. It's kind of a
Speaker 3: significant moment in Egyptian history, and anarchists were there, so
Speaker 3: let's talk about it. In nineteen nineteen, the British government
Speaker 3: imposed new taxes and restrictions on civil liberties, which further
Speaker 3: fewel the discontent and united Egyptians from various social, economic,
Speaker 3: and political backgrounds. The spark that ignited the revolution was
Speaker 3: a deportation of Egyptian nationalist leaders Sad Saglu and other
Speaker 3: political figures by the British authorities for opposing their policies. Irresponse,
Speaker 3: massive protests erupted across the country, with strikes, demonstrations, and
Speaker 3: civil disobedience becoming widespread. Egyptians from all walks of life,
Speaker 3: including workers, students, intellectuals, and peasants, took part in the movement.
Speaker 3: They were influenced, in part by the strategies and tactics
Speaker 3: of the syndicalist presence in the region and abroad at
Speaker 3: the time. The revolution gained momentum and the demands of
Speaker 3: the protesters became more explicit, calling for full independence, a constitution,
Speaker 3: and an end to British rule. The British authorities initially
Speaker 3: tried to suppress the protests with force, which of course
Speaker 3: led to violent clashes and bloodshed. However, the resilience and
Speaker 3: unity of the Egyptian people ultimately forced the British government
Speaker 3: to recognize the scale of the uprising and the strength
Speaker 3: of the nationalist movement. In nineteen twenty two, the United
Speaker 3: Kingdom unilaterally declared Egypt's independence. Do the British continue to
Speaker 3: exude considerable influence over Egyptian affairs, One could argue that
Speaker 3: the specter of anarchism would raise its head again in
Speaker 3: Egypt's history, particularly during the Hour of Spring in twenty eleven,
Speaker 3: when anarchic tactics can be found across the Middle East
Speaker 3: and North Africa. In the next part, I'll be talking
Speaker 3: more about what anarchists would doin in Egypt in the
Speaker 3: late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. But for now, I
Speaker 3: hope that today's anarchists in Egypt and elsewhere can keep
Speaker 3: the flame of freedom burning or power to all the
Speaker 3: people peace. Oh one, this has been Andrew. You can
Speaker 3: follow me on eat dot com, slash Andrewism and support
Speaker 3: the Patreon, a picature dot com slash Saturn. See y'all
Speaker 3: next time. Welcome to take it up in here. I'm
Speaker 3: Andrew of the channel Andrewism, and I'm here.
Speaker 4: With Mia who didn't miss them learning today.
Speaker 3: I just wanted to shed lights on just some of
Speaker 3: the interesting history of the anarchists move went in Egypt.
Speaker 3: This is part two, first part really, but just went
Speaker 3: into the historical context and progression and how the anarchist
Speaker 3: community emerged in Egypt, you know, fueled by this growing
Speaker 3: Mediterranean network of migration, labor, mobility and communication.
Speaker 2: Of course, it started.
Speaker 3: With the Italian community, known for their anarchism in that time,
Speaker 3: but they soon gained the support of other groups sharing
Speaker 3: a radical vision of social emancipation. I learned all this
Speaker 3: from the book Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and
Speaker 3: Post Colonial World, particularly the section written by Anthony Gormann
Speaker 3: on Egyptian history. In the years leading up to World
Speaker 3: War One, anarchos cynicalism, represented by the International Union, played
Speaker 3: a leading role in organizing and developing a militant labor movement,
Speaker 3: advocating for international solidarity among workers. They adapted well to
Speaker 3: Egypt's diverse society, embracing ethnic and religious pluralism and internationalism
Speaker 3: while opposing capitalism. Anarchists, along with socialists and liberals, contributed
Speaker 3: to the advancement of secular thoughts and Egyptian intellectual life,
Speaker 3: leaven significant impact on their society. However, the anarchist movement
Speaker 3: faced challenges due to the state's coercion through surveillance, prosecution,
Speaker 3: and deportation. The authorities portrayed them as dissolute political adventurers
Speaker 3: pushing an alien ideology. Despite their achievements in formulating and
Speaker 3: anti capitalist discourse and advocating for social emancipation, other forces
Speaker 3: like the Egyptian Communists and Egyptian National Movement would take
Speaker 3: on some of the ideas with a louder and more
Speaker 3: prominent voice. Do they just want to give more details
Speaker 3: on the movement and what exactly they were doing in
Speaker 3: their heyday? Clearly, the anarchists went to Egypt was not
Speaker 3: confined to the local It was all about connected with
Speaker 3: anarchists from different countries, making international friendships and fighting for
Speaker 3: their shared ideals. The anarchists in Egypt got involved with
Speaker 3: the conference in Verva's and conferences in London and Italy
Speaker 3: and hung out with anarchists from Istanbul, Greece, Tunisia and more.
Speaker 3: Egypt became the spot for anarchists in the eastern Mediterranean,
Speaker 3: and they'd made connections all the way to the United
Speaker 3: States and South America.
Speaker 4: It's kind of interestingly playing a similar role to like
Speaker 4: early nineteen hundreds Japan in terms of the anarchist movement,
Speaker 4: where yeah, it's you know, get you get these sort
Speaker 4: of like regional hubs that develop and people sort of
Speaker 4: like moved through and around them, which I think is
Speaker 4: really interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, agreed, agreed, and each of being a hub,
Speaker 3: you know, a lot of big name anarchists to are visiting, oh,
Speaker 3: you know, a big name talking people like am Claire
Speaker 3: cypriani Elis Recluse, Aricoma ro Testa, Luigi Kaliani, and Pietro Gory.
Speaker 3: And of course with these agitators in the mix, the
Speaker 3: authority has got a little new of us. But the
Speaker 3: real life flood of the movement with not these influential figures,
Speaker 3: they were the publications that this community was producing and
Speaker 3: reading and distributing. The anarchists in Egypt didn't just read
Speaker 3: from newsletters all around the world though that was a
Speaker 3: part of it, but they also contributed.
Speaker 2: Their own articles.
Speaker 3: But always happening in Egypt, they're connected, informed and motivated
Speaker 3: by the international community they had built. There are a bunch
Speaker 3: of publications dedicated to workers is use, offering insights, debates,
Speaker 3: and discussions on common difficulties on matters of labor organization
Speaker 3: and strategy. Facilitated by an increasingly developed international transport system,
Speaker 3: particularly steamership services, the International Anarchist press served as a
Speaker 3: vital channel the dissemination and diffusion.
Speaker 2: Of the movement's ideas.
Speaker 3: It was the anarchist Library before the anarchist Library in
Speaker 3: terms of.
Speaker 2: How they went about organizing and propriation.
Speaker 3: In Egypt, the anarchists there recognized the unique challenges of
Speaker 3: the local situation.
Speaker 2: That they have to deal with.
Speaker 3: For the European anarchists, promoting the message of emancipation and
Speaker 3: combat and the exploitation, ignorance and injustice caused by capitalism,
Speaker 3: the states and religious authority would be no easy task
Speaker 3: in a region where, for one, they're already being seen
Speaker 3: as part of the onicle and attempts of political domination
Speaker 3: by Western powers, and also in a region with very
Speaker 3: deep historical religious divisions, you know, such as the Crusades
Speaker 3: and the British French colonization. It's really one of the
Speaker 3: major projects I suppose the European anarchists needed to communicate
Speaker 3: to the local population was that their ire did not
Speaker 3: lay with Europeans as a whole. It lay primarily with
Speaker 3: the European ruling class. And so when it came to
Speaker 3: critique and societal issues and has strongly attacked the evils
Speaker 3: of capitalism, and of course that had the best reception
Speaker 3: among the Egyptian workers. Of course, this isn't to say
Speaker 3: that the European workers in Egypt were like completely in
Speaker 3: common with the Egyptian workers. Despite the fact that the
Speaker 3: ire of the Egyptian workers should really lie primarily with
Speaker 3: the European ruling class that was responsible for the imperialization
Speaker 3: of their country and the expectation of their people. The
Speaker 3: presence of the European workers did also contribute to the
Speaker 3: exploitation because those European workers were paid so much better
Speaker 3: than Native worn workers were. It was experienced and privileges
Speaker 3: that the Native One workers did not.
Speaker 2: Have access to.
Speaker 3: Interestingly, although anarchists typically advocate for emancipation from all religious authorities,
Speaker 3: Islam wasn't specifically targeted in their literature, and there was
Speaker 3: probably a pragmatic consideration for whether anti religiou rhetoric would fly,
Speaker 3: considering they could just be reported because of course that
Speaker 3: was a crime. They still took on a hostile attitude
Speaker 3: towards Egyptian state, though condemn its course of actions, surveillance culture,
Speaker 3: and abusive power, but they didn't confront it head on.
Speaker 3: The program of action was far more focused on the
Speaker 3: goal of social transformation through the use of propaganda, education,
Speaker 3: and workers associations. Because of the mixed conditions in Europe
Speaker 3: and in Egypt, the ideal people of different races, religions,
Speaker 3: and nationalities united in solidarity had some real potency to it.
Speaker 3: So the internationalist mission was a very central component in
Speaker 3: their messaging at public conferences and at labor meetings, but
Speaker 3: it really was more so about the speaking the propaganda
Speaker 3: of the word rather than the propaganda of the deed.
Speaker 3: In fact, interestingly, for that time, the anarchists in Egypt
Speaker 3: didn't really engage in much propaganda of the deed at all,
Speaker 3: propaganda the deed being you know, political violence and assassination attempts.
Speaker 3: For those who know you know a bit about the
Speaker 3: anarchists of that time. Propaganda of the deed was what
Speaker 3: they were known for. They had some some big name
Speaker 3: assassinations in the bios. For example, Franz fudinan I believe
Speaker 3: was assassinated by an anarchist.
Speaker 4: Wait, no hold on, France Ferdinand is the guy who
Speaker 4: was killed by Gavrio Prinsept, the guy who started World
Speaker 4: War One.
Speaker 3: Right, I've seen some so says call him a nationalist,
Speaker 3: souses call him an anarchist.
Speaker 4: I don't think he was an anarchist.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he was exposed to socialist, anarchist and communist writings
Speaker 3: when he was younger, through school and through his roommate
Speaker 3: Danilo Irich, but he was more so associated with nationalists,
Speaker 3: particularly when he got around to assassinate in Franz Ferdinand.
Speaker 3: Nazis and fascists did call him an anarchist and a socialist,
Speaker 3: but it seems as though although he was inspired by
Speaker 3: nationalists and anarchists, he was more so in the nationalists
Speaker 3: side of the equation.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean they did kill a few Habsburgs, which always
Speaker 4: always a good thing to have less Habsburgs in the world.
Speaker 4: You can you can you can make you can make
Speaker 4: a chart over time and what access is good and
Speaker 4: the other access is habsburg. You can see that they're
Speaker 4: inversely correlated.
Speaker 2: Yeah, have spigs or something else.
Speaker 3: But yeah, the anarchists in Egypt not too much into
Speaker 3: the political violence and assassinations. They were focused really on
Speaker 3: promoting the ideas through spoken and written communication, you know,
Speaker 3: like public meetings, demonstrations, in the press, and the press
Speaker 3: was really the crucial axis of their efforts and disseminating
Speaker 3: the ideas and sustaining their identity. They had local properly,
Speaker 3: they had local publications like that Tribuna Liberal, Lepero Looks
Speaker 3: and others, which save to spread anarchist thought and discuss
Speaker 3: ideas and issues of social emancipation. The weekly paper l'apero
Speaker 3: mostly promoted anarcho syndicalism, and then the paper Ill dom
Speaker 3: Dominie came up and decided to adopt a more tridently
Speaker 3: libertarian tone. And then you have Rise Again or Or,
Speaker 3: which is another people another weekly that promoted a very
Speaker 3: strong anti clerical line. And then there was the people
Speaker 3: who Ergatis, which was or the Worker, and that was
Speaker 3: an organ for the emancipation of women and the worker,
Speaker 3: and it provided primarily for a Greek language readership are
Speaker 3: see a lot of these papers will tailor towards specific languages,
Speaker 3: so that Greek had Italian and you also.
Speaker 2: Had French like Leugnon and le Idea.
Speaker 3: But despite its polygod character, the anarchist press in Egypt
Speaker 3: doesn't seem to have included an Arabic language newspaper, which
Speaker 3: is kind of weird when you're surrounded by Arabic speaking people. However,
Speaker 3: anarchism had regularly featured in the mainstream Arabic newspapers since
Speaker 3: nineteen since the eighteen nineties, usually however in reports and
Speaker 3: the activities in the movement abroad, not locally in Egypt.
Speaker 3: At the same time, there were also journals like Al
Speaker 3: Muktataf and Al Hilal, which carried articles discussing the origins
Speaker 3: and development of anarchist thought and practice. It seems as
Speaker 3: though in eighteen ninety seven there was also a figure
Speaker 3: who engaged with socialized ideas, but that particular publication seems
Speaker 3: to have been closed down quite quickly by the authorities,
Speaker 3: particularly for feature in the work of Salama Musa and
Speaker 3: Shibli Schumayl, who were two Egyptian writers who were clearly
Speaker 3: influenced by anarchist ideas. Something that just occurred to me
Speaker 3: is that what it could be influencing this is that
Speaker 3: the Italians, in the Greeks and the French and all
Speaker 3: these different people who are writing about these anarchist ideas
Speaker 3: in Egypt, It's possibly they had a bit more leeway
Speaker 3: and it came to the local authorities that locals themselves
Speaker 3: would not have. Their foreign status may have provided them
Speaker 3: with slight immunity in comparison. And this is just me
Speaker 3: spitball in, but it's possible that araborphone writers and speakers
Speaker 3: would be taken on significantly more risk if they were
Speaker 3: to agitate in the same ways that these.
Speaker 2: You know, migrant workers were advocating.
Speaker 3: And then there's also the component and that speculation, but
Speaker 3: there is a proven component of financial difficulties and limited
Speaker 3: literacy rates among the Egyptian population that made it difficult
Speaker 3: to distribute Arabic language material, religious and anarchism, you know,
Speaker 3: because a lot of the workers in Egypt who spoke
Speaker 3: Arabic were not literate. What did help though, because you know,
Speaker 3: the anarchists were about that life. They would go to
Speaker 3: cafes and read the newspapers out loud to reach their
Speaker 3: target audience. The first podcasters exactly exactly, the first podcasters
Speaker 3: for real, as the anarchist movement in Egypt was really
Speaker 3: commemorating important political events, celebrating the principles through posters, leaflets
Speaker 3: and flyers celebrating the animalu history of events like the
Speaker 3: Parist Commune in May Day really spread that message at
Speaker 3: international solidarity among the workers.
Speaker 2: Anchists in Egypt also.
Speaker 3: Very fond of showing solidarity to their international figures like
Speaker 3: Francisco Ferrer, who was a very influential Spanish anarchist thinker
Speaker 3: who did a lot of work in the field of
Speaker 3: anarchist education. He created for their schools, which influenced figures
Speaker 3: like Goldman to create their own modern schools in the
Speaker 3: US and elsewhere. And he was arrested and then executed,
Speaker 3: which led to a lot of protests both locally and internationally,
Speaker 3: making him something of a martyr for the anarchist cause.
Speaker 3: And so the outrage expressed at the execution of Ferrero
Speaker 3: was not simply just a protest against state attorney, but
Speaker 3: also recognition of his status as an advocate for cycle education,
Speaker 3: which is an important vehicle for you know, social emancipation
Speaker 3: before Francisco Ferrever was executor, though anarchists in Egypt were
Speaker 3: already working on educational programs. In fact, they launched their
Speaker 3: most ambitious project, the Free Popular University or Universita Popularity
Speaker 3: Liberal or UPL, in Alexandria in nineteen oh one. The
Speaker 3: UPL aimed to provide free evening education to the popular
Speaker 3: classes and received you great support across Alexandria and society.
Speaker 3: Courses included you know, the works of Tolstoy and Bakunin,
Speaker 3: the arts, and pragmatic topics like worker negotiation strategies. However,
Speaker 3: the upl's radical nature also brought criticism, with the Italian
Speaker 3: authorities initiating legal proceedings against the UPR lecturer for some
Speaker 3: remarks he made about the assassination of the Italian king
Speaker 3: Umberto First, I of course leave you to speculate what
Speaker 3: those comments and remarks may have been. But despite some
Speaker 3: initial public support, its critics accused the UPL of being
Speaker 3: based on depraved principles. Now I mentioned this school before
Speaker 3: in the episode did on Islam and Anarchism, and like
Speaker 3: I said in that episode, ouric speakers wouldn't quickly marginalized
Speaker 3: from the education, and the UPL gradually became more aimed
Speaker 3: toward and controlled by upper class interests. In fact, within
Speaker 3: a year, reliably bourgeois elements had arrested control of the
Speaker 3: UPL from its anarchist phone and had ratid controlled the
Speaker 3: UPL from its anarchist founders and proceeded to transform it
Speaker 3: into a vocational college that, among other things, taught shorthand, accountancy,
Speaker 3: and languages. So, despite its very brief existence as a
Speaker 3: revolutionary project, the UPL marked an important movement for anarchism
Speaker 3: in Egypt and inspired other movements seeking educational reform. The
Speaker 3: upl's impacts and vision influenced egypt Egyptian nationalists, who established
Speaker 3: the Higher Schools Club in nineteen oh five, which also
Speaker 3: emphasized educational means for political purposes. Anarchism in Egypt had
Speaker 3: a significant impact on the development of the labor movement.
Speaker 3: As a new working class emerged towards the end of
Speaker 3: the nineteenth century, anarchois cynicalism emerged as a powerful force
Speaker 3: advocating for formal collective organization as the instrument of social revolution.
Speaker 3: Of course, each just's labor movement was entirely new, as
Speaker 3: killed have been part of the traditional Ottoman order, regulating
Speaker 3: trade and providing mutual lead. But the modernization efforts of
Speaker 3: Muhammad Ali no Relation and Egypt's integration into the international
Speaker 3: capitalist system changed that landscape, affecting the role of guilds
Speaker 3: and shape in the working class. Foreign workers, like I
Speaker 3: just mentioned before, came into Egypt alongside native Egyptian labor,
Speaker 3: but despite the differences between them, evidence does show a
Speaker 3: strong cooperation and collaboration between the groups.
Speaker 2: The native Egyptian working class was.
Speaker 3: Affected by a variety of factors, but there was a
Speaker 3: model of collaboration that was emotion between European and Egyptian workers.
Speaker 3: The Cigarette Rollers Union, for example, was initially a Greek
Speaker 3: body in Cairo, but later became more inclusive as their
Speaker 3: successful strike and eating nine to nineteen hundred marked a
Speaker 3: milestone in Egyptian industrial militancy. However, their subsequent strikes fixed However,
Speaker 3: subsequent strikes faced brutal confrontations with the police, leading to.
Speaker 2: Divisions among the workers.
Speaker 3: By the end of the first decade of the century,
Speaker 3: the Anacosynicalist International Union had emerged as a significant force
Speaker 3: based on universalist principles and international solidarity. The optimism for
Speaker 3: the future of a socialist center in Cairo was a
Speaker 3: reflection of the broader movement within the working class led
Speaker 3: by anarchists and syndicalists. Anarchism first appeared in Egypt among
Speaker 3: Italian political refugees and workers during the eighteen sixties, Nurtured
Speaker 3: by a development international network of labor transporting communications expanded
Speaker 3: beyond Italian circles, attract members from across Egypt's diverse communities
Speaker 3: the heterogenos through the discourse of radical social emancipation and
Speaker 3: propaganda and public action declaring the universality of humankind and
Speaker 3: the crime the evils of capitalism state power. On this dogma,
Speaker 3: the anarchist movement would come into force in Egypt's history.
Speaker 3: In the years after nineteen hundred, Anarchist cyndicalism played a
Speaker 3: central role in development of the labor movement, ar circulating
Speaker 3: the rights of workers in struggle against capital, against capital
Speaker 3: and promoting internationalists activism.
Speaker 2: Get wildly rejected.
Speaker 3: Yet while they rejected nationalism as an organizing principle, anarchists
Speaker 3: did at times make common cause of the nationalists against
Speaker 3: imperialism and arguably had a reverberating influence on the strategies
Speaker 3: and tactics of the nationalist movement. That's all I have
Speaker 3: for today on this brief moment in Egyptian anarchist history.
Speaker 3: But I hope it illuminated very interesting chapter and context.
Speaker 3: That's fair.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think there's another kind of important, broader
Speaker 4: lesson from this that is I think mostly forgotten, which
Speaker 4: is that you know, from this period of I don't know,
Speaker 4: roughly the late eighteen hundreds through about nineteen seventeen, like
Speaker 4: in most parts of the world except for basically like
Speaker 4: Western Europe, or not even Western Europe, like apart from
Speaker 4: basically like the Germany's, if you're talking about socialism, there's
Speaker 4: like anywhere in the world, there's a very very good
Speaker 4: chance the thing you're actually talking about is anarchism. And
Speaker 4: you know, there's been a sort of systemic attempt by
Speaker 4: both liberal and sort of later communists like historians to
Speaker 4: sort of like wipe this historical record clean and make
Speaker 4: it look like everything was always sort of like the
Speaker 4: sort of on rush of Marxism, but that just wasn't true.
Speaker 4: And they were very powerful anarchist movements on every continent,
Speaker 4: and they did a lot, They did a lot of
Speaker 4: really interesting things and yeah, yeah, that that really.
Speaker 3: Needs to be respected and recognized and it hasn't so far,
Speaker 3: so fully this and if folks check out the book,
Speaker 3: they can get some more insights on some of the
Speaker 3: other actions that have taken place in that time. Again,
Speaker 3: the book is anarchism and syndicalism in the colonial and
Speaker 3: post colonial world. It really illuminates a lot of that
Speaker 3: lost history. Thanks for joining me and we on this
Speaker 3: episode of That Could Happen Here Again. You can follow
Speaker 3: me Andrew on the YouTube channel Andrewism and support on
Speaker 3: patron dot com slash Saint Drew.
Speaker 4: It it could Happen here. Yeah, that's the podcast that
Speaker 4: you're listening to. It's also a thing that is happening.
Speaker 4: The thing that is happening is it is a kind
Speaker 4: of rough time to be a transperson in the US
Speaker 4: and also in most other countries. And you know, we
Speaker 4: do a lot of episodes on this show about how
Speaker 4: it's rough and why it's rough and the specific things
Speaker 4: that are happening. But also sometimes we do we do
Speaker 4: the other part of the podcast, which is to put
Speaker 4: it back together part of the podcast, or in this one,
Speaker 4: I this is more of a bring to birth a
Speaker 4: new world from the ashes of the old episode. And
Speaker 4: in order to talk about doing that, we're talking to
Speaker 4: Samantha Medina, who's an organizer for Donut Workers United and
Speaker 4: also the Coalition of Independent Unions and Shineyid who is
Speaker 4: an organizer for the CiU and also the IWW And yeah,
Speaker 4: both you two welcome to the show.
Speaker 6: Hey, thanks for having us, good to be on.
Speaker 4: Great to talk to both of you. And so the
Speaker 4: specific thing that Yeah, I wanted to talk about today
Speaker 4: is the Trans Day of Solidarity that is being organized
Speaker 4: in Portland right now. And yeah, I wanted to I
Speaker 4: guess we should start with what is this event, who
Speaker 4: is doing it, and then we can get into why
Speaker 4: it is being done.
Speaker 9: Sure thing. So, the Trans Day of Solidarity is an
Speaker 9: event being put on right now by the Coalition of
Speaker 9: Independent Unions, and it's an event that's basically about both
Speaker 9: celebrating trans people in the labor movement and the worker's
Speaker 9: movement as a whole, highlighting the importance of workplace in
Speaker 9: union organizing for trans communities as a way for us
Speaker 9: both to survive but also to struggle towards our own liberation.
Speaker 9: And finally, it's a way of it's a way of
Speaker 9: sort of us clarifying how we can start using workplace
Speaker 9: struggle as a means of turning the tide against the
Speaker 9: current genocide with this.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that covers most of it. I think the only
Speaker 6: thing that I'd like to add is a lot of
Speaker 6: what this event is around is bringing awareness to the
Speaker 6: trans community and specifically our experience within the labor movement
Speaker 6: and on the job. And it is a way, as
Speaker 6: Shaneide mentioned, to kind of like highlight exactly what unions
Speaker 6: do and can do for trans people well at the
Speaker 6: same time also giving us a moment to remind unions
Speaker 6: that they should be doing more. Even if what they're
Speaker 6: already doing is great, they could always do more, and
Speaker 6: especially in a time right now where trans people are
Speaker 6: facing the discriminations particular to us across this country right now,
Speaker 6: and as she mentioned, the world, but focusing on the
Speaker 6: United States, it's really important that the avenues that are
Speaker 6: there to protect us are aware of how to protect us.
Speaker 6: So I think this is our opportunity to kind of
Speaker 6: remind unions to step it up a little bit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I mean, I think I think another thing
Speaker 4: that's kind of important about this in particular is yeah,
Speaker 4: you know about bunch of YouTube are intimately aware of this,
Speaker 4: but I don't know if overrepresented is the right term.
Speaker 4: But like trans people, like literally right now in particular,
Speaker 4: are effectively the vanguard of new union organizing. They are
Speaker 4: you know, enormously like quote unqule I guess, I guess
Speaker 4: overrepresentati or whatever that's the word you want to use
Speaker 4: in in you know, like among union organizers a lot
Speaker 4: of actually and then this I think is you know,
Speaker 4: another thing I'm excited about for this is that like
Speaker 4: you all are kind of like at the forefront I
Speaker 4: guess of like what the new sort of union organizing
Speaker 4: stuff is and how it's how it's sort of you know,
Speaker 4: how how it's been working, and so like that the
Speaker 4: fact that this is like the one place where there's
Speaker 4: actually a lot of us and that you know, is
Speaker 4: a place where there's enough of us that it actually
Speaker 4: matters is important and that you know that that works
Speaker 4: in a lot of directions at the same At the
Speaker 4: same time.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, I think it's good to acknowledge that, like, yeah,
Speaker 6: there are a lot of trans people that are organizing
Speaker 6: their workplaces. There's a lot of trans people taking part
Speaker 6: in their unions, and you know, a lot of that
Speaker 6: I think comes out of necessity, like if we're not
Speaker 6: there to discuss our needs with these unions or to
Speaker 6: create our own unions at a necessity where like maybe
Speaker 6: our CIS coworkers don't understand the struggle that we face
Speaker 6: on the shop floor, so by reminding them, we're able
Speaker 6: to make it better. You know, Like all that's great
Speaker 6: and true and everything, but I think it's also really
Speaker 6: good to acknowledge that like LGBTQ people in general, whether
Speaker 6: they just be trands or otherwise, have been organizing and
Speaker 6: organizing their workplaces for decades now. So I think a
Speaker 6: lot of this like, yeah, we're seeing a lot more
Speaker 6: trans people involved, but we're also seeing a lot more
Speaker 6: recognition and visibility of trans people than ever.
Speaker 9: Bookedore right, well, and part of the reason we're so
Speaker 9: involved is because it's a matter of basic survival. Right.
Speaker 9: The average trans masculine and non binary person make about
Speaker 9: seventy percent of the media and US wages, whereas transpendent
Speaker 9: people make sixty percent. And this is below like compared
Speaker 9: to SIS people. You know, that's that's wild, right. The
Speaker 9: level of homelessness of discrimination of job, loss of hours
Speaker 9: being reduced, punishment of sexual harassment on the job is
Speaker 9: just you know, it's it's unconscionable and it always has been.
Speaker 9: Even in the good days. It was garbage and miserable
Speaker 9: and honestly took a lot of us out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I mean, you know, like part of part
Speaker 4: of the thing with that RUND is like that all
Speaker 4: of that has knock on effects, right, you know, if
Speaker 4: you can't get a job and the job you can
Speaker 4: get pay less. A lot of this forces people, you know,
Speaker 4: like the rate of homelessness is unbelievably hot. People get
Speaker 4: evicted constantly, and this, you know, this, this, this all
Speaker 4: this ties together with sort of like transhousing struggles, because
Speaker 4: that's a huge thing. And yeah, the conferences, this is like, yeah,
Speaker 4: a lot of a lot more of us end up dead.
Speaker 4: And the way that we don't end up dead is
Speaker 4: by fight. Is by fighting in one of the places
Speaker 4: that you know, like one of the places we've gotten
Speaker 4: good at is fighting in the workplace.
Speaker 9: Absolutely, And I like, I mean, I'm talking from my
Speaker 9: own experiences, you know, as an organizer and as an
Speaker 9: IWW member for god seventeen years now, Like wow, yeah,
Speaker 9: it's like I think about all the major campaigns that
Speaker 9: I've seen, and all of them, all of them have
Speaker 9: had trans people at as core organizers for each and
Speaker 9: every shop, from the Canvasser's strikes to Burgerville to a
Speaker 9: number of like fast food shops and service sector shops
Speaker 9: and retail shops. Like every single time, there are folks
Speaker 9: that are are trends that are playing key rules. Which
Speaker 9: is given that we're what probably between two and four
Speaker 9: percent of the population at least, uh, you know, at
Speaker 9: least according to current testaments, probably gonna be higher, but
Speaker 9: you know that's shouldn't be possible.
Speaker 5: Yes, that is shocked.
Speaker 9: It makes no sense except for the fact that well,
Speaker 9: survivability bias. Motherfuckers, it's this or we're dead.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like very well, no, no, no, it's I mean
Speaker 6: that is the blatant truth, right, And I mean, like
Speaker 6: even if we're not talking about life and death, I mean,
Speaker 6: it's the difference of whether we have access to a
Speaker 6: bathroom to use, you know, yeah, like you know, like yes,
Speaker 6: of course this is also about life and death. But like,
Speaker 6: you know, I think another thing that trans people base
Speaker 6: a lot is like access to health care or really
Speaker 6: the lack thereof access to health care, and especially healthcare
Speaker 6: that will actually get us, you know, the medication that
Speaker 6: we need to be on or the surgeries that we need,
Speaker 6: because again, these are issues that help with dysphoria, and
Speaker 6: we all know the statistics on how dyspory affects people
Speaker 6: of all ages, and that is again a matter of
Speaker 6: life and death. So like, I don't think that's wrong
Speaker 6: to not sugarcoat that stag.
Speaker 9: Yeah, right, And there's another side to it too, is that, like,
Speaker 9: this is also a point of community. This is a
Speaker 9: point of actually like folks from you know, it's meeting
Speaker 9: up with other trans folks, but it's also like working
Speaker 9: together with others like with CIS coworkers and friends. Right,
Speaker 9: this is a point of belonging and togetherness and of
Speaker 9: being able to really be there for your neighbors and
Speaker 9: your friends and your coworkers in ways that like and
Speaker 9: to be a part of community, which is something that
Speaker 9: is often strict of us. Right. Yes, it's about survival
Speaker 9: and it's about what we need to do in order
Speaker 9: to keep breathing, but it's also about we need to
Speaker 9: do to live, you know, to go beyond survival, to
Speaker 9: have joy, and to have enough money to make it through,
Speaker 9: and you know, maybe people to actually have something for ourselves,
Speaker 9: maybe be able to not have the constant anxiety but
Speaker 9: instead spend more time being happy about who we are.
Speaker 9: Ceacy to overlook that. But again biased sample source, but
Speaker 9: almost all my fondest memories are from being side by
Speaker 9: side with my fellow workers.
Speaker 6: Right absolutely. And I think also, you know, like time's
Speaker 6: gone long enough now where you know, trans people are
Speaker 6: starting to be something that people are aware of, something
Speaker 6: people are talking about. Whether that's in the best ways
Speaker 6: or not, We're at least more than we've been. And
Speaker 6: I you know, I think like organizing in general, community
Speaker 6: in general, whether that's you know community, uh, within the
Speaker 6: city you live in or within your workplace. You know,
Speaker 6: like a lot of our success at being able to
Speaker 6: live the lives that we want to have, or be
Speaker 6: the people that we want to be and be respected
Speaker 6: for that really does come down to our family members,
Speaker 6: our co workers, our friends, and ultimately complete strangers who
Speaker 6: we need to rely on.
Speaker 10: You know, I.
Speaker 6: Hate to use the word ally, but we need our
Speaker 6: allies more than ever and it's about time that they
Speaker 6: step up to and that starts typically speaking in your
Speaker 6: community and in your workplace. I think it's also really
Speaker 6: good to address the fact that, like, you know, when
Speaker 6: we're talking about trans issues and organizing around them and
Speaker 6: like organizing workplace in your community and all that, Like,
Speaker 6: it's it's also important to acknowledge how intersectional the trans experiences.
Speaker 6: And that's something I really wanted to stry to we
Speaker 6: got talking about specifically about unions and things like that,
Speaker 6: because also unions are an incredibly intersectional piece of politics
Speaker 6: and life that we need to appreciate. Because when we
Speaker 6: talked about these statistics affecting trans people, they affect disabled
Speaker 6: trans people and black and brown trans people at much
Speaker 6: much more much higrates then they affect white trans people.
Speaker 6: And I think that unions being something and not just unions,
Speaker 6: I mean every aspect of organizing and community building really
Speaker 6: needs to pay attention to this. But I think this
Speaker 6: is something that is so ingrained in unions that unions
Speaker 6: have been fighting for this sort of protections that are
Speaker 6: very intersectional, you know, like whether they're protecting women in
Speaker 6: the workplace, whether they're protecting black and brown people, whether
Speaker 6: they're protecting disabled people, or whether they're protecting trans people.
Speaker 6: That is a large part of why you unions were established.
Speaker 6: You know, we talked about wages and working hours a lot,
Speaker 6: and that is all fine and dandy, and it's wonderful,
Speaker 6: and that's something that is a base core value of unions.
Speaker 6: But I don't think it's celebrated enough how much work
Speaker 6: unions did in equality in this country. And I think
Speaker 6: this is just a continuation of that tradition. And trans
Speaker 6: people just happen to be one of the largest topics
Speaker 6: right now, and we tend to have one of the
Speaker 6: largest targets on our back, more than we've ever had before.
Speaker 6: And so yeah, I think that's why we discussed unions
Speaker 6: in relation to this, because for you know, working class folk,
Speaker 6: that's where a lot of our organizing begins.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think I think it's actually honest, it's
Speaker 4: had an interesting impacts on the kind of union organizing
Speaker 4: as happening because you know, like one of one of
Speaker 4: the sort of consequences of transferbient discrimination in workplaces is
Speaker 4: that you get a lot of trans people in what
Speaker 4: is okay, I refuse to call it service sector. I'm
Speaker 4: gonna there's gonna be a whole episode that's been yelling
Speaker 4: about the sort of service sector that's coming to a
Speaker 4: recording thing near you, specifically like job jobs and fast
Speaker 4: food jobs that are very low wage, like high turnover things,
Speaker 4: and particularly fast Who's been a very interesting because that's
Speaker 4: a that's a sector that like a lot of trade
Speaker 4: unions just completely ignored, like they just gave up on
Speaker 4: and you know, like they've been starting to organize like
Speaker 4: Starbucks in the past few years, right, but like you know,
Speaker 4: like if you want to look at the people who've
Speaker 4: actually been trying to organize fast food workers, it turns
Speaker 4: out it's a bunch of trans people because because because
Speaker 4: who works, because who actually does this stuff?
Speaker 11: Right?
Speaker 9: Turns out turns out, Yeah, there's.
Speaker 6: A lot to be said about that, Like with larger unions,
Speaker 6: and larger unions, especially within the trades, have done a
Speaker 6: lot of great work, you know, and that's lovely and
Speaker 6: I appreciate them for that. But on the other hand,
Speaker 6: they really did turn their back on the service sector
Speaker 6: industry for the silliest reason possible, which is that high
Speaker 6: turnover is just too difficult and we want to talk
Speaker 6: about people, Yeah, it's just too difficult, you know, who
Speaker 6: wants to organize something difficult, right, like that might cost
Speaker 6: too much money or not make them enough money, and
Speaker 6: which I find highly hypocritical of unions in general. I mean,
Speaker 6: like not of all unions, but like if that is
Speaker 6: a stance that unions will take to not organize the
Speaker 6: service industry, being a union seems to be exactly why
Speaker 6: you would target those industries, right, because those are where
Speaker 6: workers need it most. And if we want to talk
Speaker 6: about high turnover rates being the reason, who do we
Speaker 6: think is affected the most by high turnover rates? You know,
Speaker 6: like it is hard to find a job as a
Speaker 6: trans person, let alone keep a job for any length
Speaker 6: of time. There's oftentimes no upward mobility for trans people
Speaker 6: in that job, and so you pace a variety of
Speaker 6: life issues when you're not making enough money, which inevitably
Speaker 6: leads to you losing your job and adding to the
Speaker 6: high turnover rates in these companies. This is exactly why,
Speaker 6: And we can get into you know, what we've been
Speaker 6: up to and what we're doing later, but that's exactly
Speaker 6: why the CiU and the IWW and other organizations like
Speaker 6: us do what we do, is because we believe in
Speaker 6: helping the workers that need it most, who are underrepresented
Speaker 6: and not taken care of by the larger units.
Speaker 9: Because we are those workers, right, I mean, that is
Speaker 9: the thing. We're able to do this and put you know,
Speaker 9: I mean, we'll put the fucking hours in because that's us.
Speaker 9: We're doing this because it's the only way out. Right. So,
Speaker 9: like when we schedule something like or like create an
Speaker 9: event like the Trans Day of Solidarity, we're doing this
Speaker 9: because both on the backbone of years of experience, but
Speaker 9: especially like collectively but also bringing in new organizers because
Speaker 9: we knew how. We can think back to how we
Speaker 9: were brought in, right, we can talk think back to
Speaker 9: our friends, our allies, and our especially our transfellow workers
Speaker 9: who were the ones who mentored us well before the
Speaker 9: tipping point in a lot of cases, right, because this
Speaker 9: is why we're here. And like thinking about who this affects, right,
Speaker 9: I mean, like, it affects trans people deeply, and it
Speaker 9: can cut off our access to the healthcare that many
Speaker 9: but not all of us very much need to keep going.
Speaker 9: And the threats above us, you know, only increase as
Speaker 9: the like you know, the oppressions you face are are increasing. Right,
Speaker 9: if you're a transpression of color, if you're disabled, like
Speaker 9: you were saying, right, like shit gets worse, it gets harder,
Speaker 9: the sword over your head dangles a little closer, so
Speaker 9: we work to figure a way to get out from
Speaker 9: under it. But it's also like why the Transitay of Solidarity,
Speaker 9: Like when we talk about it, it's it's an event
Speaker 9: that that is what it is because it's designed to
Speaker 9: not simply be us just speaking into the wind, but
Speaker 9: it's meant to be a practical thing. Right. The the
Speaker 9: whole event itself is is like a rally with you know,
Speaker 9: trans speakers from you know a number of different shops
Speaker 9: and unions in town. But it's also then just quickly
Speaker 9: becomes just a flying picket, right, And this is a
Speaker 9: tradition that I think we do miss a little bit
Speaker 9: in this country. The flying picket's an old one and
Speaker 9: it's a it's a fucking goldie. It's where you get
Speaker 9: a big old mob of people and you just start
Speaker 9: going to places all over your town and throwing fucking pickets.
Speaker 9: It's everything you love about a breakaway march and also
Speaker 9: a picket. At the same time, it has direct economic
Speaker 9: leverage to it. You can do you know, people, It's
Speaker 9: it took a minute. But and you know this is
Speaker 9: also coming from someone who's organized in premierly in Portland,
Speaker 9: so there's a certain bias here. Your locale may vary,
Speaker 9: but if you organize enough pickets in your city, people
Speaker 9: might cross them at first, they get a lot less
Speaker 9: likely to the more you do them over the years.
Speaker 9: So the more pickets to throw, the less likely people
Speaker 9: are to cross them. And if they are not likely
Speaker 9: to cross them, that impact that you know, increases their impact.
Speaker 9: So you know we're gonna be given our speech, is sure,
Speaker 9: and we are going to speak to our experiences. That's critical.
Speaker 9: And then we're also going to ruin some people's day
Speaker 9: or you know, make their day if you're the.
Speaker 4: Workers, Yeah, ruin some bosses day exactly, just always the
Speaker 4: best kind of day.
Speaker 9: Well, it's also part of the reason, listen, should bosses
Speaker 9: have good days? I'm going to go on a limb
Speaker 9: and say no never ever ever you want to, yeah,
Speaker 9: damn straight. At the bare minimum, you get at least
Speaker 9: one less good day than us.
Speaker 6: And you know what, you know what if the bosses
Speaker 6: don't like having these bad days, then they can just
Speaker 6: go find another job. Yes, exactly, it's not that same deal.
Speaker 9: Right, they can actually contribute to their communities, you know,
Speaker 9: do some real work for a change, which in this
Speaker 9: case is sometimes just working a fucking till.
Speaker 4: That's okay, speaking speaking of things that suck, we need
Speaker 4: to take an ad break. This is the best ad
Speaker 4: pivot I've been able I've been able to think of
Speaker 4: in the last like six minutes. So we're taking it
Speaker 4: right now. Now, we're going to get this good again
Speaker 4: and we're back. So one of one of the things
Speaker 4: that I also wanted to talk about is about I
Speaker 4: guess just talking a bit about what the Coalition of
Speaker 4: Independent Unions is and how it's sort of formed, and yeah,
Speaker 4: I don't know the sort of potentials they're in because
Speaker 4: it's it's a really interesting organization coalition.
Speaker 6: Yeah, absolutely, So the CiU, it's got a long history
Speaker 6: if we really dig deep into it. I mean, effectively,
Speaker 6: this idea started after organizing within Portland for the last gosh,
Speaker 6: I think people may people have been organizing here forever.
Speaker 6: But let's say, how long ago did Burgerville Workers Union start, Shanaan.
Speaker 9: Let's see. We there's that's a question. If you want
Speaker 9: to talk about the official date we went public Shore
Speaker 9: twenty sixteen. If you want to talk about the antecedents,
Speaker 9: you'll find it in the Industrial Research Organizing Group Precarious Workplace. No,
Speaker 9: it is Low Wage Workers Subcommittee the Portland General Membership
Speaker 9: Branch of the IWW circa August of twenty thirteen.
Speaker 4: Incredible, way the way Still you're welcome.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Oh, money, money, I'm do you know how many
Speaker 9: fucking acronyms do we have?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 9: My god, listen the number of things I had to
Speaker 9: take the GMB when I was BST, despite not actually
Speaker 9: being the tea part of the BST, the only tea
Speaker 9: part I'm not part of. Oh. I could tell you
Speaker 9: about the GOB and the GEB until the cows come home.
Speaker 9: But the point is they're antecedents. The CiU is a
Speaker 9: relatively new organization with deep roots in Portland. It kind
Speaker 9: of came out of the flurry of independent unions that
Speaker 9: kind of in fast food service and retail that flourished
Speaker 9: in the wake of the Burgerville Workers Union. Burgerville Workers
Speaker 9: Union itself goes public in God, that was April of
Speaker 9: twenty sixteen, Because of course it's been that fucking long.
Speaker 9: It was in the works a while before that. God,
Speaker 9: all those meetings. The earliest antecedents are arguably the Portland
Speaker 9: General Biership branch of the IWW's Industrial Organizing Research Group,
Speaker 9: the Precarious Worker Subgroup, or maybe it was a little
Speaker 9: wage Workers subgroup August of thirteen, But that's Antasus, right,
Speaker 9: this kind of goes public. This itself is built on,
Speaker 9: you know, the Jimmy Johns Workers Union, especially for on
Speaker 9: the Twin Cities, and earlier in the two thousands, and
Speaker 9: then of course before that, the Starbucks Workers Union that
Speaker 9: had multiple different campaign flourishings. I think the earliest in
Speaker 9: the late nineties early aughts in New York City on
Speaker 9: which honestly you'll see some articles mention this on which
Speaker 9: the foundations of the modern Starbucks Workers United now rests.
Speaker 9: So what we've seen now in the wake of all
Speaker 9: of this shit, right, is you have an incredibly militant
Speaker 9: working class coming forward and they aren't popping off. They're
Speaker 9: not waiting for permission from any org to just start
Speaker 9: fucking organizing their workplace, sometimes filing for for union elections,
Speaker 9: sometimes not the ones that have been filing for contracts.
Speaker 9: There are, I have complicated feelings, but there are real gains.
Speaker 9: You can make from contracts right that it is a
Speaker 9: lot easier to get certain victories than you can and others.
Speaker 9: Now there's also limitations, right, But the CiU comes from
Speaker 9: a number of different unions coming together, you know, don't
Speaker 9: work as united a few others to basically like actually
Speaker 9: preserve you know, democracy in their workplace, to pool resources
Speaker 9: around you know, trainings around contract bargaining and elections, as
Speaker 9: well as to rely on each other for direct for
Speaker 9: direct action assistance and things like that. And you know,
Speaker 9: the the IWW has also got a thread in all
Speaker 9: of this. But yeah, it's it's essentially of like, you know,
Speaker 9: we're not trying to own everything, right. The CiU exists
Speaker 9: as a platform for all the different types of independent
Speaker 9: union activity that are occurring, right, and to create a
Speaker 9: base on which we can actually start talking to each
Speaker 9: other more, to cooperate and interact with each other. Right.
Speaker 9: There is more of a contract focus in the CiU. So,
Speaker 9: you know, I'm a wob with experience in duel carding.
Speaker 9: You know, you have your contract union on the one hand,
Speaker 9: and you're fighting union on the other. And this allows
Speaker 9: folks to sort of approach union organizing and labor organizing
Speaker 9: from any level of experience and any number of backgrounds.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 9: I think that's the real strength of the CiU is
Speaker 9: not to instead to constrain the upswell of worker miltancy,
Speaker 9: but instead to give it a place to help put
Speaker 9: down some roots while also allowing even more militant struggle
Speaker 9: to intertwine within those growths.
Speaker 6: So I think that's a really great explanation the CiU
Speaker 6: and how the CiU formed, and the purpose that the
Speaker 6: CiU provides two workers all. I mean, so far, the
Speaker 6: CiU is growing rapidly. We've been talking with a lot
Speaker 6: of workers, and primarily in Oregon and in Portland, but
Speaker 6: even workers outside of that purview. And I have a
Speaker 6: lot of hope that the CiU is going to be
Speaker 6: able to help unionization in a way that other unions
Speaker 6: are not willing to at the moment or having difficulty
Speaker 6: breaking into. And so far, so good. I mean, I
Speaker 6: think we have gosh, I think there's like at least
Speaker 6: trying to do the math right now in my head.
Speaker 6: I do lose count sometimes, but I think we got
Speaker 6: about six different shops involved in the CiU currently, six
Speaker 6: including my own exactly six week up shops including.
Speaker 9: My own no, that's fine. Yeah, yeah, Oh honey, there's
Speaker 9: so much more to come.
Speaker 4: There's so much to come.
Speaker 6: Oh, they're going to learn why we picked this city, all.
Speaker 4: Right, crows.
Speaker 6: But it's going really well, and we have a lot
Speaker 6: more campaigns that are going to go public in the future.
Speaker 6: But one thing that we really noticed while organizing all
Speaker 6: of these campaigns, and you know, whether we ourselves organize
Speaker 6: them or whether we had a hand in assisting them
Speaker 6: organize themselves throughout the city, one thing that all of us,
Speaker 6: various organizers started to realize is that we represent a
Speaker 6: large amount of trans folks at all these jobs. And
Speaker 6: now some of that could be chalked up to the
Speaker 6: fact that we live in Portland and we kind of
Speaker 6: live in the trans mecca, so of course you're going
Speaker 6: to come across a lot of trans workers. But here's
Speaker 6: the deal that we kind of noticed is that trans
Speaker 6: workers regardless of living in Portland, Oregon or you know,
Speaker 6: the fact that we have so many trans people living
Speaker 6: here for a lot of reasons. I won't get into that.
Speaker 6: We all know, which is why we moved here in
Speaker 6: the first place.
Speaker 9: Refugees were Let's be real, let's run away refugees.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but we noticed that there's a lot of trans
Speaker 6: workers working, as you reluctantly put it earlier, service industry jobs,
Speaker 6: and not just service industry jobs, a variety of jobs,
Speaker 6: but most of which are you know, minimum wage, poverty wage,
Speaker 6: let's be honest, jobs that offer almost zero upward mobility
Speaker 6: for trans folks. And so that's the thing that we
Speaker 6: started looking at is the ladder, and as you go
Speaker 6: up the ladder, you see less and less and less
Speaker 6: trans folks. So down here at the bottom working, you know,
Speaker 6: fast food jobs, working, sweaty donut jobs, working, you know,
Speaker 6: in I mean the restaurant industry as a whole, I
Speaker 6: think is a lot of we assist as well as
Speaker 6: you know, potentially some grocery store workers and other people
Speaker 6: like that. We don't have a whole lot of representation
Speaker 6: in our workplaces that we make up, you know. I mean,
Speaker 6: we can look at some of the larger industries in
Speaker 6: town that do provide unionization for workers, and there's many,
Speaker 6: but you know, I think it's easy to look at
Speaker 6: like a lot of the auto industry or the warehouse
Speaker 6: industries and things like that, and of course they have
Speaker 6: trans workers, but it's an overwhelming amount working within the
Speaker 6: service industry, and so as we started organizing more and
Speaker 6: more service industry shops, we started realizing that we are
Speaker 6: representing a lot of trans people. And what's really important
Speaker 6: to us is that if we're going to be representing
Speaker 6: trans people in the workplace, then we should give them
Speaker 6: a platform and a voice to be able to speak
Speaker 6: about their concerns and their issues that they haven't otherwise had.
Speaker 6: And that's why the CiU decided to put on this action,
Speaker 6: you know, and we chose it when we chose it
Speaker 6: for a very particular reason, and to be honest, we
Speaker 6: thought about doing it over Pride weekend, and I think
Speaker 6: that would have been lovely. But on the other hand,
Speaker 6: you know, Pride is about a celebration of existence, and
Speaker 6: there's a lot of visibility during Pride already, so we
Speaker 6: kind of step back. We reflected on that for a
Speaker 6: little bit, and we decided that Labor Day is not
Speaker 6: exactly a time of year where you hear about people
Speaker 6: talking about LGBTP rights and trans rights. I mean, of
Speaker 6: course there's a little bit of that going on, I'm
Speaker 6: not sure and to say that there's none, but it
Speaker 6: seems like a really great opportunity for us to host
Speaker 6: this event over Labor Day week and give trans workers,
Speaker 6: the working class an actual platform and a voice to
Speaker 6: express their concerns issues and give their thanks. At the
Speaker 6: same time to the unions who represent them and like
Speaker 6: I said before, it could represent them even better. So
Speaker 6: this is our way for reminding them and also at
Speaker 6: the same time to follow up picket reminding Portland that
Speaker 6: if you don't take care of your community and specifically
Speaker 6: in this case, or trans working class community, then we
Speaker 6: will make ourselves heard and you will listen to us
Speaker 6: one way or another. And if we have to take
Speaker 6: to the streets in order to have our voice heard,
Speaker 6: we are more than happy to do that.
Speaker 9: Read the promise, black the threat. That's an old slogan,
Speaker 9: but again it's when we really need to bring.
Speaker 6: Back and city birds. City birds are very important all this,
Speaker 6: but I know nothing is.
Speaker 9: More important, but listen, listen, We're in Portland. The obligatory
Speaker 9: crow conversation is just part of the bargain. The Liberty
Speaker 9: weekend tends to be very important because this has been
Speaker 9: a lot of retail and food and entertainment business happens,
Speaker 9: and frankly, given you know, the whole genocide. We decided
Speaker 9: we were going to help, you know, show the power
Speaker 9: of organized labor by bring up of a wrench into that, right,
Speaker 9: So why we chose Labor Day getting into sort of
Speaker 9: like what the Trans Day of Solidarity is. We're going
Speaker 9: to be having a speaker and rally at four pm
Speaker 9: at Pioneer Square in Portland, Oregon on Saturday, September second.
Speaker 9: This is a huge, huge weekend for food service or
Speaker 9: entertainment and yeah, for retail. And while we're having trans
Speaker 9: speakers from a number of different campaigns and you can
Speaker 9: speak from four to you know, wrapping up at around five,
Speaker 9: We're then going to start moving on a mobile picket line,
Speaker 9: a flying picket all over downtown Portland because we need
Speaker 9: to bring joy to a lot of workers and we're
Speaker 9: ruin a lot of bosses' days. This is leverage and
Speaker 9: we'll use it. We'll just cost them as many, you know,
Speaker 9: as much money as we possibly can. We'll be hitting
Speaker 9: a number of different stores. It looks like we'll be
Speaker 9: hitting well you'll see it the march, but we'll be
Speaker 9: going all over the city. We have everything covered in
Speaker 9: terms of needs and amenities, there's going to be chants
Speaker 9: and leaflets, there'll be medics a plenty, they'll be all
Speaker 9: sorts of safety concerns will be addressed by or organizers
Speaker 9: on the ground. So please come, one, come all. We
Speaker 9: actually should have a marching band that'll be pretty fun
Speaker 9: that I didn't expect to land up. It'll be a
Speaker 9: Union marching band, no less.
Speaker 4: Nice, nice. I love to see it.
Speaker 9: It's gonna be pretty great. So if you like trans
Speaker 9: people and making bosses cry, you should come to this.
Speaker 4: What time if we do?
Speaker 9: This is starting again four pm the at Pioneer Square
Speaker 9: in downtown Portland, and then we'll be doing the march
Speaker 9: throughout the city from row five o'clock.
Speaker 6: And I do recommend that folks wanting to come out
Speaker 6: to the event be ready to chant, bring your walking
Speaker 6: shoes because we have a bit of a trek ahead
Speaker 6: of us making bosses miserable across town. And uh, make
Speaker 6: some signage, bring, bring picket signs, bring you know in
Speaker 6: in picket signs and support of both trans people, uh,
Speaker 6: working class folks, union workers, or just reminding bosses to
Speaker 6: stop being ship heads. Whatever you want to put on
Speaker 6: your sign, it's lovely. I will give you a hint
Speaker 6: as to one of the locations that we will be picketing.
Speaker 6: And I think it's okay for me to mention this,
Speaker 6: but you know, well, we'll make sure to picket the
Speaker 6: world's worst tourist trap also one of the absolute one
Speaker 6: of the absolute most difficult.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 7: You can't struggle that I've ever been a part of
Speaker 7: only being one so far particularly, but you know it
Speaker 7: really irks me. So anyways, if you're interested in that,
Speaker 7: come on down and you can see the World's Worst
Speaker 7: turns trap on your way.
Speaker 4: And for people who are not in Portland, I do
Speaker 4: want to remind people it's it's probably not enough time
Speaker 4: to do it this year, but you too, You too
Speaker 4: can have a trans Day of solidarity. You could also
Speaker 4: have it on a different day. We can have one.
Speaker 4: If we planned this correctly, we could in fact have
Speaker 4: three hundred and sixty five days of trans of transolidarity.
Speaker 4: We could take all of the days. I don't know
Speaker 4: this is people can have like the Leapier Day or
Speaker 4: something like that. We'll get ther.
Speaker 9: We already have May Day. It's called you know, there's
Speaker 9: no need for us a labor day. I really feel
Speaker 9: like if we keep doing this every year. We can
Speaker 9: just take it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we can. We can get rid of fake every
Speaker 4: day and make it based Labor Day again exactly.
Speaker 9: I mean it's trans Labor Day.
Speaker 6: I mean, I don't know, that's a lot. I mean
Speaker 6: I'm only visible one day of the year, and I
Speaker 6: only remember things one day of the year.
Speaker 4: I don't know, I know, Okay, okay, okay, there's there's
Speaker 4: one day. We got one day of pride. There's like,
Speaker 4: isn't there like a bisexual visibility day or something?
Speaker 5: There is one?
Speaker 9: There is, Yes, bisexuals only appear for one day.
Speaker 4: It's at least three days, and we know a four
Speaker 4: right before. There's like two other trans ones. We we
Speaker 4: could possibly have a full five days that we were visit.
Speaker 9: I'm just gonna put forward that, like listen, if you
Speaker 9: also want to, you know, and if you can get
Speaker 9: something together for Sunday, September third, we could just make
Speaker 9: trans Data Solidarity followed by trans Day of Wrath, you know,
Speaker 9: because if the picket line has to go too long, well,
Speaker 9: you know, we get mny ownery.
Speaker 4: Well and also okay, like I have been watching you
Speaker 4: all make up its wrath MONTHO, it's not enough Pride's
Speaker 4: wrath tipe jokes for too long and there has been
Speaker 4: not enough wrath. So I'm calling you for more wrath days.
Speaker 4: We need to actually do the day.
Speaker 6: Absolutely. Oh so gonize your workplace.
Speaker 12: Oh, absolutely organize your workplace fine, you know, and if
Speaker 12: you find out that like the people that own your
Speaker 12: company are fascists or helping to fuel the genocide, organize
Speaker 12: even harder.
Speaker 9: Help get friends involved, have them try and get on
Speaker 9: jobs to help take those motherfuckers down. Remember, there's so
Speaker 9: much you can do to cost the people that are
Speaker 9: trying to kill us a lot of money, well also
Speaker 9: making your lives so much better.
Speaker 2: So do your part.
Speaker 6: Hope to see you all again, Well not again, I
Speaker 6: hope to see you all there and again. It's going
Speaker 6: to be September second, four pm Pioneer Square, downtown Portland, Oregon,
Speaker 6: and be there for the rally. Listen to people's voices.
Speaker 6: We are doing this for a reason. It's important that
Speaker 6: we give trans folks a platform and support us on
Speaker 6: the picket line. We would really appreciate this other. Oh,
Speaker 6: you can also find a link to all this on
Speaker 6: the Coalition of Independent Union's Facebook page. We also have
Speaker 6: an Instagram. You can find us on just just type
Speaker 6: in Coalition of Independent Unions or CiU.
Speaker 4: And you can find that in the decripsion Perfect.
Speaker 6: Perfect And if you need any more information, please feel
Speaker 6: free to hit up either of those accounts. I'm'd be
Speaker 6: happy to inform you on whatever you need.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm with that. Wishing everyone a happy Transda solidarity.
Speaker 4: If you're a boss, wishing you a bad Transda solarity. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and everyone, go go out into the world, make more
Speaker 4: trans day or stas of solidarity, make more bosses, sad,
Speaker 4: make workers happy. This is within your power to do.
Speaker 4: And yeah, go go into the world and make mischief. Hi.
Speaker 10: Everyone, it's me James today and I'm joined by Hulia
Speaker 10: Messner from Seawatch. She's one of the spokespeople for sea Watch.
Speaker 10: Sea Watch your organization at rescues Mediterranean rescues migrants in
Speaker 10: the Mediterranean.
Speaker 5: Hud Hi, good morning, welcome.
Speaker 11: Hi, thank you so much for your invitation.
Speaker 10: Yeah, not good money for you. I guess could you
Speaker 10: start off by explaining to us perhaps what sea watch
Speaker 10: does and why there's a need for it to do
Speaker 10: that as well?
Speaker 11: Yeah, of course, So Seawatch is a Civility and Search
Speaker 11: and Rescue Organization. So we are trying to save people
Speaker 11: from distress at sea, in the Mediterranean Sea. So you
Speaker 11: can imagine a situation being very cruel at the European
Speaker 11: external borders right now. So far more than two two
Speaker 11: hundred people drowned only this year while trying to flee
Speaker 11: to the European Union and the area we cover, people
Speaker 11: are mostly fleeing from Tunisia and Libya for example, to Italy,
Speaker 11: but also trying to reach Malta for example. So what
Speaker 11: we are trying to do is actually really rescuing bar
Speaker 11: with ships. So currently we have two ships. One is
Speaker 11: prepared at the moment for its first operation and the
Speaker 11: second one had just had rescue on the weekend and
Speaker 11: is now currently blocked initially. And on the other side
Speaker 11: we also have monitoring airplanes surveying the area and trying
Speaker 11: to monitor the human rights situation over the Mediterranean and
Speaker 11: trying to monitor firstly state violence but also secondly trying
Speaker 11: to give information when the airplanes are finding boats under
Speaker 11: stress then for people being rescued.
Speaker 5: Okay, so there's a lot there.
Speaker 10: I think that we should probably break down for people
Speaker 10: and the first thing I think is you said that
Speaker 10: one of your boats is blocked.
Speaker 5: Now, Yes, maybe people won't.
Speaker 10: Be familiar with the way that certain European countries have
Speaker 10: reacted to the migration coming across the Mediterranean. So can
Speaker 10: you explain what blocking constitute.
Speaker 11: Yeah, so, in Europe, like since a few years, in
Speaker 11: several years, we also see an increase in ultra right
Speaker 11: wing movements and also ultra right governments. So what is
Speaker 11: happening now, especially in Italy where we are operating from,
Speaker 11: is that we have a ultra right wing government under
Speaker 11: the President Georgia Miloney installed and the government is currently
Speaker 11: trying to hinder will see rescue because it's a way
Speaker 11: to actually hinder and also block migration. So in the
Speaker 11: beginning of the year, for example, there was a decree
Speaker 11: put in place that really makes it so much harder
Speaker 11: for us to operate. And at the moment after our
Speaker 11: rescue on the weekend, we are blocked for twenty days,
Speaker 11: meaning that we cannot go out and do our usual
Speaker 11: work in the Mediterranean, but our ship has to stay
Speaker 11: import because Italian authorities are claiming that we violated the decree,
Speaker 11: which is actually going against international law.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 10: So I think when you say that they're trying to
Speaker 10: hinder migration in the Mediterranean. That's quite a nice way
Speaker 10: of saying, I guess, because what this means is that
Speaker 10: they are making that migration even more dangerous than it
Speaker 10: already is by not allowing people to be rescued. Right,
Speaker 10: and as you said, it's already incredibly dangerous, and the.
Speaker 11: More right, the Mediterranean Sea is a graveyard. Like as
Speaker 11: I said, more than twenty two hundred people died this
Speaker 11: year only crossing, and thousands of people died since twenty
Speaker 11: and fourteen, like numbers can be seen like with the
Speaker 11: IUM or the International Organization of Migration for example, that
Speaker 11: a're monitoring also the situation in the central central Mediterranean.
Speaker 11: And what this place or this external border actually constitute
Speaker 11: constitutes is a crime scene, a crime scene again for
Speaker 11: crimes against humanity because state states are like purposefully really
Speaker 11: intentionally letting people drown.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and yeah, it's tragic, it's really horrible. Can you
Speaker 10: explain a little bit about like the way that I guess,
Speaker 10: just the mechanics of people crossing the vessels they use
Speaker 10: where they like the journey people have seen the Mediterranean
Speaker 10: at all, like depending on where they live aby. See,
Speaker 10: they might live on the med but if they don't know,
Speaker 10: maybe they've seen beaches and beach holidays in Spain or something.
Speaker 10: And obviously that's that's not all of it. So can
Speaker 10: you explain a little bit about the conditions of the crossing.
Speaker 11: Yeah, so people are all people that we rescue mostly
Speaker 11: are trying to flee from Tunisia as well as Libya.
Speaker 11: So the situation in Libya, for example, is really horrible,
Speaker 11: is very violent. There's a lot of documentation of torture camps,
Speaker 11: of rape, of murder, of slave trade, and people that
Speaker 11: comes come from the sub Sahuarent region and are trying
Speaker 11: to flee to the European Union are crossing Libya for example,
Speaker 11: but also in Tunia at the situation at the moment
Speaker 11: is very dire. Is it's very racist. There's like racist
Speaker 11: violent campaign started by the Tunisian president in the beginning
Speaker 11: of the year especially, so we see a lot of
Speaker 11: institutional racism, We see a lot of racism and also
Speaker 11: a lot of islands on the streets. So people are
Speaker 11: really trying to flee from the country and people are
Speaker 11: using all means possible of pause because they have to.
Speaker 11: There's no easy way to come to Europe. Then people
Speaker 11: fleeing cannot just take a train or an airplane actually,
Speaker 11: and then like trying to reach shores of the European Union,
Speaker 11: of a boat is they only means, so they're really
Speaker 11: forced to do that. And boats that are used are
Speaker 11: for example, inflatable boats, but also metal boats. And these
Speaker 11: metal boats especially are very very dangerous because they are
Speaker 11: only like constructed really not in good conditions, so they're
Speaker 11: really easy to sink.
Speaker 6: So as soon as.
Speaker 11: Water comes in, these boats are actually sinking. So people
Speaker 11: are also mostly not wearing life wet, so it's really dangerous.
Speaker 11: Like the number of people on the boat is way
Speaker 11: too high for their capacities. So most boats as soon
Speaker 11: as they go on to see they are actually in
Speaker 11: distress and they are in need of rescue.
Speaker 10: Okay, yeah, and then let's talk about some of the
Speaker 10: rescues that see what has been able to do, because
Speaker 10: some of them have resulted in the really big numbers
Speaker 10: of people you've been able to save? Right, I think
Speaker 10: there was one in twenty seventeen, which is fifty something people,
Speaker 10: Is that right?
Speaker 11: Yeah? I mean could very well be twenty seventeen. I
Speaker 11: didn't work with sewers. So I don't know which rescue
Speaker 11: me you mean exactly, But for example, just now, on
Speaker 11: the weekend, we rescued seventy two people actually out of
Speaker 11: distress at sea with our ship Aurora.
Speaker 10: Okay, so let's talk about like what that rescue looks like.
Speaker 10: I guess what happens is maybe they and the aircraft
Speaker 10: spot so the ship is in distress. Is that right,
Speaker 10: and then your ship can respond and go to them.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 11: For example, there's also another organization it's called Alarm Phone.
Speaker 11: They are like a distress hotline where people in distress
Speaker 11: at seek and call, and they are also giving them
Speaker 11: the information to all ships in the area and of
Speaker 11: course two authorities. So on the weekend, our Aurora actually
Speaker 11: first supported another civil search and rescue ship from Open
Speaker 11: Arms with their rescue and then was led to this
Speaker 11: particular distress case also with the help of our monitoring
Speaker 11: flights operations which are called airborne, and the people were
Speaker 11: then rescued on Friday, as said, seventy two people. And
Speaker 11: then normally what you have to do is of course
Speaker 11: informed like the competent authorities in the area, so state authorities,
Speaker 11: and according to international law, then state authorities have to
Speaker 11: coordinate the rescue, so we of course communicated, communicated with authorities,
Speaker 11: and authorities only after a while actually assigned us to
Speaker 11: the port of Trapani. So Trapani is in Sicily, on
Speaker 11: the island of Sicily, and it was much farther way
Speaker 11: than the nearest port, which was on the island of
Speaker 11: Lump So you have to imagine, of course, distreads and
Speaker 11: the rescue cases are very dangerous situations and people of
Speaker 11: course need immediate support and need immediate transfer to the
Speaker 11: land where medical help can like intensely happen, et cetera.
Speaker 11: Because people might be on sea for several days, they
Speaker 11: might be in psychological but as well in physical pain
Speaker 11: and stress. They might have burns from actually a fuel
Speaker 11: and seawater mixed, for example, and of course dehydration is
Speaker 11: a very very big danger and risk for people in
Speaker 11: distress at sea. So after we rescued and after we
Speaker 11: got assigned the port of Trapany, we made very clear
Speaker 11: to the authorities that Trapani is way too far and
Speaker 11: that according to international law we need to go to
Speaker 11: a Lump producer because it's the most suitable nearest port.
Speaker 11: But then we got noticed that we are not allowed
Speaker 11: to go to Lum Producer actually, and that meant that
Speaker 11: we were in total forced to stay on CEA for
Speaker 11: thirty seven hours, and also for those people in distress
Speaker 11: and rescued, they were forced to stay more than twenty
Speaker 11: four hours additionally on sea, like having to really endure
Speaker 11: those really difficult this really difficult situation. The next day, Saturday,
Speaker 11: we were still on see the sun like really burned
Speaker 11: relentlessly by that point, and people were facing dehydration. One
Speaker 11: person actually fainted, and it became really increasingly dangerous the
Speaker 11: situation on board, which is why we community communicated more
Speaker 11: and more with authorities and they were then forced after
Speaker 11: a while to let us enter to Lump Producer because
Speaker 11: the situation was really dire and people needed to disembark
Speaker 11: this embark on land.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I think that's a really good summation of like
Speaker 10: some of the sort of like hostility you encounter from states.
Speaker 10: Another thing that see, what she's encountered at least in
Speaker 10: the past, is either negligent or like interference by state
Speaker 10: agencies at sea. I'm not sure if it's a navy
Speaker 10: or the coast Guard. I think it was maybe the
Speaker 10: coast Guard, the Libyan coast Guard whod interfered with a
Speaker 10: rescue and this may have been before you started to
Speaker 10: It's find it.
Speaker 11: Yeah, but the so called Libyan Coast Guard is an Yeah,
Speaker 11: it is an actor that is really violent, violently intercepting
Speaker 11: people that are trying to reach European shores and are
Speaker 11: also violently interfering with rescues of civil search and rescue ships.
Speaker 11: So we saw for example, shooting, like shootings in the air,
Speaker 11: like in the direction of our airplanes, but also in
Speaker 11: direction of other search and rescue ships. For example, we
Speaker 11: saw intimidations, We saw violations of international law and human
Speaker 11: rights by the so called Libyan Coast Guard. Because what
Speaker 11: is happening is that the European States, the European Union
Speaker 11: is actually supporting the socoed Libyan Coast Guard to intercept
Speaker 11: people at sea, so to really block people from getting
Speaker 11: to the European Union.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and it seems to be like a strategy throughout
Speaker 10: the European Union.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 10: It's rather than supporting people as they come, making this
Speaker 10: journey less dangerous, they're trying everything they could do to
Speaker 10: keep people in North Africa to stop them coming to
Speaker 10: Europe at all.
Speaker 11: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, We see this on a very practical
Speaker 11: level in the Mediterranean Sea, but we also see this
Speaker 11: on a political level, so with externalization policies, with deals
Speaker 11: with Tunisia. For example, just recently there has been a
Speaker 11: deal between the European Union and Tunisia with a lot
Speaker 11: of money involved to actually trying to block migration again
Speaker 11: and to increase the support for the Tunian Coast Guard,
Speaker 11: for example. But we also see a lot of political
Speaker 11: talks between Italy and Libya. Libya is also now a
Speaker 11: former colony of Italy, so there's very close ties and
Speaker 11: ties and a lot of influence. And just a couple
Speaker 11: of days ago there was the transfer of two ships
Speaker 11: from Italy to do so called Libyan Coast Guards. So
Speaker 11: they're really also, yeah, supporting this very violent, very dangerous
Speaker 11: actor with technical.
Speaker 4: Means m hmm.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 10: And obviously, like people who listen to all our episodes
Speaker 10: will be aware, like there's increased violence in the Sahel.
Speaker 10: There's not a large shale protests in Syria this week,
Speaker 10: it's not as if the people will. There will still
Speaker 10: be dangerous situations for people to flee, and what the
Speaker 10: EU is doing is making that dangerous journey more dangerous
Speaker 10: rather than sort of accepting that it's a thing that
Speaker 10: happens to humans and trying to make it less deadly.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Absolutely, And it's like it's a very politically induced situation
Speaker 11: and we are like the European Union is supporting human
Speaker 11: rights crimes, like with the money of the European Union,
Speaker 11: human rights crimes are actually committed. So a couple of
Speaker 11: weeks ago we saw the quotations from Tunian authorities of
Speaker 11: people on the move to the Tunian Libyan border, so
Speaker 11: to the desert, and people were actually left there to die. Literally.
Speaker 10: Another way that you guys encountered state level hostility is
Speaker 10: with these legal actions, right that have been taken against you,
Speaker 10: against seawatch, against individuals who are part of sea watching,
Speaker 10: against vessels that Seawatch aren't. Can you explain some of those.
Speaker 11: Yeah, So for example, I mean the most recent one
Speaker 11: with the blockade of our ship, so it's blocked like
Speaker 11: according to state authorities because we or they claim we
Speaker 11: violated the Italian decree that I just talked about, and
Speaker 11: they actually said that we had to request a port
Speaker 11: in Tunisia and bring people back to Tunisia, which would
Speaker 11: have been completely against international law because Tunia cannot be
Speaker 11: considered a safe board or a safe country of origin.
Speaker 11: So now we are in the process of like waiting
Speaker 11: for the Aurora actually to be de blocked again. But
Speaker 11: also Italian authorities of course trying to criminalize person like persons.
Speaker 11: For example, in the case of Carula Rocket, who was
Speaker 11: a captain with us in twenty nineteen and who who
Speaker 11: had to enter also the port of Lamproducer because of
Speaker 11: the very very difficult situation on board, because the ship
Speaker 11: was forced to stay several days really on the Mediterranean
Speaker 11: Sea and the situation became very dire. So there was
Speaker 11: also proceedings against her in person. So really people that
Speaker 11: are trying to show solidarity and support people on the
Speaker 11: move to claim their human right to claim asylum are
Speaker 11: criminalized on the basis of the accusations that are just
Speaker 11: completely not true. For example, was also like all the
Speaker 11: charges against her were dismissed, there was no legal.
Speaker 6: Ground for them.
Speaker 10: M Yeah, but that harassment obviously still hinders your work,
Speaker 10: right even even if the charges are dismissed, like the
Speaker 10: time that the ship can't go out, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 11: And it also is also a means to like to
Speaker 11: to implement fear now in people's minds, because of course
Speaker 11: it is super scary to be to be accused by
Speaker 11: a state to have actually violated law and you are
Speaker 11: facing charges of years in prison, and like only that,
Speaker 11: fear can already do a lot. But we don't only
Speaker 11: see this in Italy. We also see this a lot
Speaker 11: in Greece, for example, a country which is also really
Speaker 11: trying to criminalize humanitarian and politically or like humanitarian workers
Speaker 11: that are standing in solidarity with people on the wove.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and so people might not be as familiar with
Speaker 10: the landscape of migration. So maybe you could just explain,
Speaker 10: like where the boats are based, because you talked about Greece,
Speaker 10: so I know that that Maltese authorities have also like
Speaker 10: bought cases against Sea Watch. Can you explain the different
Speaker 10: landscape I guess of where your boats are based and
Speaker 10: where they tend to sort of end up relocating or
Speaker 10: taking people to once they've been rescued.
Speaker 11: Well, we take people who've been who's been, who've been
Speaker 11: rescued a lot to Italy, but we're also of course
Speaker 11: trying to coordinate with Maltese authorities who author the legal
Speaker 11: responsibility to take people in that Maltese authorities or Malta
Speaker 11: the state is actually really irresponsive, so we really see
Speaker 11: as little engagement of the country as possible. We see
Speaker 11: a lot of hindering of migration. We see very special
Speaker 11: cases with Malta where Malta Maltese authorities are actually, for example,
Speaker 11: communicating to merchant vessels who are finding or who are
Speaker 11: in vicinity of distress cases that they should just hand
Speaker 11: out fuel to the boats or hand out water. So
Speaker 11: those distress cases, those boats are actually making their way
Speaker 11: to Italy on their own, so they are out of
Speaker 11: Maltese responsibility.
Speaker 10: Oh wow, yeah, so it's kind of passing the back along. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 10: It's just so sad and how similar so much this
Speaker 10: is to the way the US deals with people coming
Speaker 10: across our land the border, which is often dear to
Speaker 10: say they have they been back to Mexico, which again
Speaker 10: is a violation of international law and it's not a
Speaker 10: safe place. And again people in the US have been
Speaker 10: criminalized for providing drinking water to people in the desert,
Speaker 10: right and even if it doesn't work, it scares people.
Speaker 11: Yeah, And it's like, definitely it's not only a European
Speaker 11: kind of situation. It's the situation at borders in general,
Speaker 11: because borders are in the end like a construct to yeah,
Speaker 11: to safeguard in like like I don't know how to say,
Speaker 11: like in the cordination marks you're a parent space.
Speaker 10: Yes exactly, yeah, and to kind of yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 10: enforce some kind of notion who's in, who's out, and
Speaker 10: who's the other and who's the same. I wonder one
Speaker 10: thing that people will be wondering is obviously see waches
Speaker 10: a large scale operation with quite substantial assets, and people
Speaker 10: may be wondering, how you see which funded? How do
Speaker 10: you get you know, you need experienced captains, you need
Speaker 10: maybe people who experienced in rescue operations that see pilots.
Speaker 5: So where do all these people come from?
Speaker 11: Well, like they come I mean also from the general public.
Speaker 11: We have so many volunteers that are working with us.
Speaker 11: Really also we have people that are writing us and trying,
Speaker 11: like trying to support and of course like everybody can
Speaker 11: or anyone can have a look at the website. We
Speaker 11: have job offers on the website usually as well, and
Speaker 11: like if you want to support, really have a look
Speaker 11: and also try to reach out in case of any questions,
Speaker 11: and like Seawatch and also other civil sea rescue organizations
Speaker 11: are really sustaining themselves and are financed by donations. So
Speaker 11: we are solely financed by donations, and we are really
Speaker 11: like trying to keep the work up as much as
Speaker 11: much as possible, and we have lots of different opportunities
Speaker 11: as well to support not only by working with us,
Speaker 11: but also in spreading our message on social media. So
Speaker 11: that's maybe the easiest for everyone who has social media accounts.
Speaker 11: Just like search Seawatching, you'll probably find our accounts on Twitter,
Speaker 11: on Instagram, on Facebook, but also on TikTok for example,
Speaker 11: like inform yourself, educate yourself and share the message, talk
Speaker 11: to your families while having dinner, talk to your friends,
Speaker 11: and also support really self organized groups of people on
Speaker 11: the move. So for example, you can inform yourself by
Speaker 11: finding refugees in Libya the group or refugees in Tunisia
Speaker 11: on Twitter and they are actually talking about their situation
Speaker 11: in the country. But also like like on on miggression groups.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I wonder like talking about refugees in Tunisia and
Speaker 10: Libya has sort of reminded me recently, we discussed on
Speaker 10: an episode like the presences of Wargner group in Africa
Speaker 10: right specifically they've been in Libya before, they are now
Speaker 10: in the Sahel in Central African Republic, in different places,
Speaker 10: and how people have reacted very differently to a presences
Speaker 10: of Aargner group in Ukraine to the presences of Wagner
Speaker 10: group in Africa. And I wonder this isn't to say
Speaker 10: that people I don't want to be construed to saying
Speaker 10: that people shouldn't have solidarity with people fleeing con conflict
Speaker 10: in Ukraine, because they should and those people have every
Speaker 10: right to a.
Speaker 5: Safe place too.
Speaker 10: But has there been a change in the tone or
Speaker 10: just the material support for you guys since the conflict
Speaker 10: in the Ukraine grew broader of the Dombats and Crimera
Speaker 10: into the full scale invasion.
Speaker 11: I mean, we see like we are in a situation
Speaker 11: of like multiple crisses. Now. Of course we saw the
Speaker 11: invasion of Russia in Ukraine, but we're also we're facing
Speaker 11: climate change, We're facing dire economical situations, et cetera. So
Speaker 11: also our generations went down in the in the past year, definitely,
Speaker 11: but we are still also are so lucky to have
Speaker 11: like a very strong solid like solidary basis of people
Speaker 11: supporting us. So I think it's like it's kind of
Speaker 11: both a little bit.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I always think like with respect to the solidarity,
Speaker 10: and I've never really like every time so that there's
Speaker 10: a larger scale crisis at the southern border of the
Speaker 10: United States, right, Like recently, the United States government, very
Speaker 10: similar to what you were describing, was keeping people in
Speaker 10: the open desert and leaving them there for days without
Speaker 10: food or water, and hundreds of people mobilized to help them,
Speaker 10: people who you might not expect to be particularly radical
Speaker 10: in their politics or you know, in the sort of
Speaker 10: direct action people, but they were great and everyone helped
Speaker 10: and answer result, no one died. One young woman died
Speaker 10: in Texas in CBP custody. And like I always think
Speaker 10: if people could see it then, like you were saying,
Speaker 10: they can see your videos, people, there's a very human
Speaker 10: response to never want that to happen to another human being.
Speaker 10: It's just hard when there's there's so much going on.
Speaker 11: Yeah, And also it's I think it's completely understandable that we, like,
Speaker 11: not every person can concern themselves with all the topics
Speaker 11: all the crisis situations we're facing right now, and like
Speaker 11: no one expects that of us, but we can expect
Speaker 11: of stay because it's day of duty that like they
Speaker 11: are taking care of people actually, and they are really
Speaker 11: trying to set the base for everyone to like to
Speaker 11: claim the human right and it states themselves that actually
Speaker 11: like wrote down those human rights because of a certain situation.
Speaker 11: So I mean, especially in Europe, we really have like
Speaker 11: we're just considering our history is just considering the history
Speaker 11: of Germany. We just like it's it's platant ignorance and
Speaker 11: also completely against any historical evidence, against any historical work
Speaker 11: we've done, what the situation now is and what we're
Speaker 11: actually doing at the external borders like committing human rights
Speaker 11: crimes and like ignoring the situation actually like increasing the
Speaker 11: dangers for people on the move on daily basis. And
Speaker 11: I think, I mean it's not only I mean you
Speaker 11: also mentioned this before. Now, like it's also situation you're
Speaker 11: facing in the US, and we really have to like
Speaker 11: build strong transnational movements and strong transnational ties to like
Speaker 11: work against state violence order violence in general.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I think that that's an excellent point that this
Speaker 10: is part of a broader kind of state violence that
Speaker 10: everyone should be opposed to like it hurts everyone in
Speaker 10: the end. And yeah, as both of us being European people,
Speaker 10: we've seen that like very obviously, but we know government
Speaker 10: seem to have forgotten. One thing that you mentioned that
Speaker 10: I wanted to talk about before we finish was climate change,
Speaker 10: because you said, you know, we obviously like the it's
Speaker 10: very hard for someone living in Europe or North America
Speaker 10: this year to pretend that climate change isn't happening, like
Speaker 10: with soaring temperatures, hurricane in California, wildfires everywhere. Can you
Speaker 10: explain a little bit, because I think one thing that
Speaker 10: people fail to connect is and maybe that's largely due
Speaker 10: to not bad reporting perhaps, but like it doesn't get
Speaker 10: mentioned in reporting when we talk about migration, we don't
Speaker 10: talk about climate change, and we talk about climate change
Speaker 10: and talk about migration. But the two go hand in hand, right,
Speaker 10: Like the people, certainly many of the people that I
Speaker 10: see our certain border coming from areas most affected by
Speaker 10: climate change. Is that something that see what sees too
Speaker 10: like as parts of the world that are more marginal
Speaker 10: for people to live in get even harder to live in,
Speaker 10: those people coming being forced to leave.
Speaker 5: I guess, well.
Speaker 11: Look at science now and at research and like millions
Speaker 11: and millions of people more will be possibly be because
Speaker 11: of climate change in the next in the next years.
Speaker 11: We can't deny that fact. And we as European states
Speaker 11: and European societies are a big part of why this
Speaker 11: is actually happening and why climate change is increasing in
Speaker 11: the in the speed that it is increasing right now.
Speaker 11: So we have a huge responsibility to take care and
Speaker 11: like to support people actually on the move. And I
Speaker 11: mean as seawatch, we don't make any difference as of
Speaker 11: why people are fleeing, people are in the stress, said see,
Speaker 11: people are being rescued. That's it. That's the only responsible like,
Speaker 11: that's the only perspective we have supporting people that are
Speaker 11: in distressed at SEE, because if you are calling an ambulance,
Speaker 11: they also don't ask, oh, hey, why are you actually
Speaker 11: calling the ambulance like the jew and why are you
Speaker 11: in this situation? The ambulance just coming. And this is
Speaker 11: this should also be always the case in the Mediterranean.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, yeah, or anywhere else people at SEE. So
Speaker 10: I wonder, like the last couple of I think they
Speaker 10: wanted to ask you more broad but you spoke earlier
Speaker 10: about the rise of right wing governments and movements in Europe.
Speaker 10: And when we obviously talk about the history of the
Speaker 10: right wing in Europe and we think about fascism, and
Speaker 10: I know people who listen to this podcast will be
Speaker 10: very invested in like their their history and current struggle
Speaker 10: of anti fascism. And would you say it was fair
Speaker 10: it would be fair to cast what see what she
Speaker 10: is doing within the broader spectrum of opposing fascism or
Speaker 10: opposing I guess of nationalist state violence, right wing state violence.
Speaker 11: Absolutely, we are part of antifascist movement. We are anti
Speaker 11: fascists by court, so we definitely define ourselves as antifacious activists.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Nice, And I wonder last thing that people want to
Speaker 10: show the solidarity you mentioned some ways, is there anything
Speaker 10: in particular, like I know people have contacted me about
Speaker 10: volunteering for sea, which before en have directed them to
Speaker 10: your website, But when we do have a lot of
Speaker 10: listeners in Europe, and they are particular things that you're
Speaker 10: looking for in volunteers. Obviously, anyone can donate and they
Speaker 10: should if they have money, But what are you as
Speaker 10: are certain qualifications you desperately need or so.
Speaker 11: I mean, we of course, always looking for people that
Speaker 11: are supporting our operations, especially on sea, but also with
Speaker 11: our airplanes of course, So if you have captains qualifications
Speaker 11: or other qualifications that allow you to go to see
Speaker 11: and sale, or engineering qualifications for example, or medical qualifications
Speaker 11: as well, we're always looking for nurses for doctors supporting
Speaker 11: on the ships, then please just like have a look
Speaker 11: at the website and reach out. We have a specific
Speaker 11: form as well where you can just also sign in
Speaker 11: for interest basically, and then our crewing department takes care
Speaker 11: and sees like who and like when it's actually fitting.
Speaker 10: Okay, yeah, that's great pla people can reach out and
Speaker 10: before we finish up, is there anything else that you'd
Speaker 10: like to share with people that you think we haven't
Speaker 10: got to.
Speaker 11: I think we didn't talk about FRONTACS for example, or.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, let's do it. Do you explain frontext to people?
Speaker 11: Yeah, So FRONTICICS is the European Border Protection Agency I'm
Speaker 11: so called actually of course god and border agency and
Speaker 11: FRONTICS is it's also surveying and working on the Mediterranean
Speaker 11: Sea and like responsible for for border protection specifically in
Speaker 11: general or it actually has a double mandate, so border
Speaker 11: protection on the one side, but also coast guard duties
Speaker 11: Europeans on the other side. What we criticize is of
Speaker 11: course that FONTECS does so called border protection and does
Speaker 11: not actually support people on the movement, people in distress.
Speaker 11: So this double mandate does not work at all. We
Speaker 11: see a lot of non coordination, a lot of a
Speaker 11: lot of non information and also a lot of violence
Speaker 11: of context. So for example, FANTECS or there was a
Speaker 11: report from Human Rights Watch for example, and that fontext
Speaker 11: is complicit in pullbacks by the so called Libyan Coast
Speaker 11: Guard because there is actually communication between FONTECS and the
Speaker 11: so called Libyan Coast Guard, and the so called Libyan
Speaker 11: cost guard. Cost Guard can then detect boats in the
Speaker 11: stress their location with this information but provided by FONTICS
Speaker 11: and bring people or force people back to Libya for example.
Speaker 11: So FANTAICS is really an actor that we criticize hugely
Speaker 11: and that we actually working towards their abolishment because how
Speaker 11: the organization or the institution is working right now does
Speaker 11: not have anything to do with the legal.
Speaker 6: Rights of people.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and people will.
Speaker 10: We spoke with Ruth Kinner, who who's a professor in
Speaker 10: Love for about lifeboats in the UK, because the UK
Speaker 10: has a notionally it has a very real distinction between
Speaker 10: rescuing people at sea and doing border reinforcement and those
Speaker 10: two different things, no different, Yeah, if people like It's
Speaker 10: also in crop Parkins book Mutual eight, he talks about
Speaker 10: the value of lifeboats and volunteer organizations such as your own,
Speaker 10: that it's very foundational to people talk a lot about
Speaker 10: mutual aid, but this is like one of the I guess,
Speaker 10: like foundational examples of it. So like, can you explain
Speaker 10: what a better system? And obviously I'm not asking you
Speaker 10: to like solve all the world's problems, but like, would
Speaker 10: what would it? We can make relatively few changes, I guess,
Speaker 10: and make this so much more humane and not have
Speaker 10: someone's little children around in the Mediterranean so that I
Speaker 10: don't know, people don't have to live next to someone
Speaker 10: who speaks a different language from them, or whatever people's
Speaker 10: fears are of migrants, can you explain what that would
Speaker 10: look like?
Speaker 11: I mean, we need freedom of movement, that's for sure. Like,
Speaker 11: and this is also one of our basic demands. We
Speaker 11: need freedom of movement for everyone. We need people to
Speaker 11: have legal and safe pathways through Europe, so safe passage.
Speaker 11: We need a system that, in accordance to the needs
Speaker 11: and the wants of people, people are actually also redistributed
Speaker 11: over the European Union and can join their family members
Speaker 11: for example, or their friends, their support systems while trying
Speaker 11: to flee violence, while trying to flee from places where
Speaker 11: they cannot live in the end, So this is really
Speaker 11: like what we are focusing on in the end to
Speaker 11: have people coming to Europe through safe passages. So and
Speaker 11: this is really what needs to be established. And of
Speaker 11: course in this current situation, as a first step, we
Speaker 11: need a European coordinated search and rescue program with the
Speaker 11: only mandate to rescue votes in distress, to rescue people
Speaker 11: in distress, to actually make sure that the situation, the
Speaker 11: death trap that the Mediterranean seas actually constituting at the moment, stops,
Speaker 11: Like this situation has.
Speaker 6: To stop immediately.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and it could stop very quickly, right the level
Speaker 10: of resources at state type available to deploy, they could
Speaker 10: make this go away very quickly.
Speaker 11: I think they could have. There wouldn't be actually focused
Speaker 11: on externalization and blocking people to come.
Speaker 10: Yeah, And I think, like, I don't know, when you
Speaker 10: think about that, that's a conscious choice and the results
Speaker 10: of that. It's very, very sad. And I mean in
Speaker 10: the UK we seem to just talk about it openly now,
Speaker 10: like they have whole campaigns about stopping small boats. But yeah,
Speaker 10: I think people need to realize that, like, it's not
Speaker 10: boats that they're stopping, it's little children that they're consigning
Speaker 10: to risking their lives.
Speaker 11: Yeah, children, it's women, it's men, it's non binary persons,
Speaker 11: it's everyone who wants to reach safety, and everyone deserves
Speaker 11: to be rescued. Everyone deserves to be to live nor
Speaker 11: questions asked.
Speaker 10: Yeah, no, I think that's a wonderful place to end. Actually,
Speaker 10: I think it's a hard statement to disagree with. Can
Speaker 10: you what are your Twitter handles? Where can people find
Speaker 10: and follow seawatch.
Speaker 11: Do watch crew?
Speaker 5: Okay, and that's all over, that's your U r L
Speaker 5: as well.
Speaker 11: Yeah, so let me have a look. So I'm not
Speaker 11: saying saying anything wrong, but Seewatch crew so at Seawatch
Speaker 11: Crew all together and US and small is actually our
Speaker 11: German account and our international account is at Seawatch underline
Speaker 11: in I n t L for international, and then we
Speaker 11: also have an Italian account for all Italian speakers.
Speaker 10: Okay, perfect, Yeah, we'll make sure that we link to
Speaker 10: those two. And thank you very much for your time
Speaker 10: this afternoon, your time, morning, my time.
Speaker 11: Thank you so much for the request for talking to us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, of course, welcome back to it could happen here
Speaker 1: a podcast about things falling apart, and you can't spell
Speaker 1: falling apart without Republican Party, or at least several of
Speaker 1: the letters fall into the party you use that for
Speaker 1: that are also in this Garrison. Hello, how are you
Speaker 1: doing good well with Garrison in Atlanta?
Speaker 13: Yeah, yes, I just got back from a visit in
Speaker 13: Portland where we watched many upsetting things.
Speaker 5: Bak, we didn't.
Speaker 1: Watch a lot of upsetting things, Yeah.
Speaker 13: Probably the most upsetting of which was the first of
Speaker 13: the twenty twenty four Republican primary.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, boy, it sure was nice watching those Indonesian war
Speaker 1: criminals reenact their crimes. Really cleared my mind after watching
Speaker 1: the Republican debate.
Speaker 13: Yeah, that was a really good palette cleanser.
Speaker 1: So, you know, this is not the most timely thing
Speaker 1: because we didn't want to just like do a reaction
Speaker 1: podcas has where we talked about here's what we thought about.
Speaker 1: You know, vi Vec's answer or anonymous white man number
Speaker 1: four is answer to you know, these various questions.
Speaker 13: I thought Chris Christy was very put together.
Speaker 4: Very on.
Speaker 5: Message.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now we wanted to look at like wait for
Speaker 1: some polls to come out and and actually kind of
Speaker 1: both talk about what happened and kind of what worried us,
Speaker 1: and also how it seems to be playing, uh with
Speaker 1: the bass and the American voters in general, because all
Speaker 1: of this matters, because again, the Republicans are I mean,
Speaker 1: we are all a little bit the architects of collapse
Speaker 1: here and in our in our lovely society. But the
Speaker 1: Republicans they like to they like to really pump that
Speaker 1: shit into a higher gear. So, you know, I think
Speaker 1: the thing that kind of stuck out to both of
Speaker 1: us most and the thing that's been one of the
Speaker 1: primary kind of takeaways that one of the main things
Speaker 1: people have talked about after the debate, uh was, was
Speaker 1: Vivek's performance. Vivek Ramaswami, who is prior to I even
Speaker 1: made a little comment prior to it that I didn't
Speaker 1: I didn't know much about him or think he was
Speaker 1: much of an entity in this because, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: in in part because that's true. He was somebody who
Speaker 1: is just kind of coming onto the scene in politics.
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk a little bit about how he
Speaker 1: started that because there was some stuff I was unaware
Speaker 1: of here prior to him announcing his candidacy. He's one
Speaker 1: of these guys who kind of started because he comes
Speaker 1: out of biotech. He's a quote unquote entrepreneur, and specifically
Speaker 1: he's the kind of shitty entrepreneur who like has managed
Speaker 1: to get rich largely without actually contributing anything, like primarily
Speaker 1: buying up patents for drugs in development that he profits
Speaker 1: on but then later are found not to work. Is
Speaker 1: a big part of how where his fortune comes from.
Speaker 1: And he started kind of about really about a year ago,
Speaker 1: I think, trying to brand himself as a kind of
Speaker 1: political influencer, specifically through like social media. And he had
Speaker 1: been getting a lot of attention, like as a result
Speaker 1: of the success of his because he's one of these
Speaker 1: guys he's good at using social media. He gets up
Speaker 1: to you know, he's had a couple one hundred thousand
Speaker 1: followers when he announces his candidacy, and prior to announcing
Speaker 1: his candidacy, he had done well enough at kind of
Speaker 1: building a brand for himself that in twenty two or
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, early twenty twenty two, he and the
Speaker 1: Daily Wire start putting together a contract and they want
Speaker 1: to bring him on, presumably for like a frightening, like
Speaker 1: a deeply upsetting amount of money, to do something that
Speaker 1: they haven't really done before, which is just kind of
Speaker 1: launch a like a show based around him that's like
Speaker 1: a news and politics show, which was a little bit
Speaker 1: different kind of than a lot of the deals that
Speaker 1: like they've had before, where it's more like, you know,
Speaker 1: here's Matt Walsh's podcast where he's going to, you know,
Speaker 1: try to get people killed. Here's Been Shapiro's podcast where
Speaker 1: he's going to get angry at the Barbie movie. This
Speaker 1: was like, we're launching a news and culture like a
Speaker 1: news and politics podcast, and Vivek's going to be like
Speaker 1: the face of it, right, yeah, with.
Speaker 13: Like attempts at actual like a political analysis, mostly from
Speaker 13: a libertarian perspective.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, And so that's the idea and kind of
Speaker 1: midway through after you know, a significant amount of time
Speaker 1: in development and according to kind of what Jeremy Boring,
Speaker 1: who's the CEO of a Daily Wire, said after they
Speaker 1: had spent a bit of money kind of working on
Speaker 1: sort of the concept for this, he backs out rather suddenly,
Speaker 1: boring later said his priorities were changing and we could
Speaker 1: have chosen to be aggressive about it. We did spend
Speaker 1: a little bit of money on the prep that we've
Speaker 1: been doing. Like so, I think there's a little bit
Speaker 1: of bad blood there actually between them. But he bounces
Speaker 1: from this deal with the Daily Wire to announce his
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four campaign run. And this seems to have
Speaker 1: kind of started in early part, like earlier on in
Speaker 1: this year, start of twenty twenty three, when he has
Speaker 1: this meeting with a small group of who were described
Speaker 1: in this ABC News article as conservative operatives, to discuss
Speaker 1: his exciting plans. I'm going to read a quote from
Speaker 1: that article. I'm going to run for president. Ramaswami sat
Speaker 1: on the call. Ramaswami pitched himself as a candidate who
Speaker 1: could make serious waves in the Republican primary at the meeting.
Speaker 1: When met with some skepticism, Ramaswami argued that his candidacy
Speaker 1: could also dissuade Florida Governor Ron De Santis from entering
Speaker 1: the race. According to a source who was on the call.
Speaker 1: In the lead up to his announcement, Ramaswami would tell
Speaker 1: several other conservative activists that he believed that if he ran,
Speaker 1: it could stop DeSantis from running or impact his viability
Speaker 1: as a candidate if he did enter the race. Sources
Speaker 1: said his campaign has turbocharged Ramaswami's social media presence, with
Speaker 1: his number of followers on Twitter known as x nearly quadrupling,
Speaker 1: ballooning from a little over two hundred and thirty six
Speaker 1: thousand prior to announcing his candidate to see to now
Speaker 1: nearly a million followers just six months later. And so,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a couple of things that's interesting to
Speaker 1: me about that. One that he's sort of he pitched
Speaker 1: himself as I can stop DeSantis from running. And it's
Speaker 1: a little unclear to me if these are guys that
Speaker 1: specifically like hate Dysantis, or if it's more they don't
Speaker 1: want him running against Trump, they don't want like a
Speaker 1: fight between those two guys.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm saying.
Speaker 13: Postpone his political trajectory a little bit.
Speaker 1: And it was also, you know, before the debate, it
Speaker 1: was kind of looking like because he was he was
Speaker 1: creeping up on Dysantis yea, and like the last couple
Speaker 1: of polls before the debate, taking and beating him in
Speaker 1: a couple of states, which was interesting, you know, it
Speaker 1: was kind of looking like it was working. And then
Speaker 1: in the aftermath of the debate. We'll talk more about
Speaker 1: Poles later and we'll talk about other candidates, but it
Speaker 1: looks like he's kind of either plateaued or lost a
Speaker 1: bit of support, even though a significant number of Republicans,
Speaker 1: most in some polls think that he won the debate,
Speaker 1: which is interesting to me. Now, when you and I
Speaker 1: watched this, kind of the thing that that concerned us
Speaker 1: was that we both saw him as sort of messaging
Speaker 1: to the Nick Fuintes crowd. And what I mean by
Speaker 1: that is young conservative activists who are at least willing
Speaker 1: to dance with explicitly white nationalist ideas and who have
Speaker 1: some sympathies with the insurgent right, including with acts of
Speaker 1: violence committed by the insurgent right. You know, And obviously
Speaker 1: Vivek is not he's not Nick Fuintes, he's not a Nazi,
Speaker 1: he's not going to make jokes about the Holocaust. But
Speaker 1: he does talk about certain things in a similar way,
Speaker 1: particularly this idea of like the fact that immigration is
Speaker 1: altering our national character. He talks national which is something
Speaker 1: you hear a lot sometimes in more explicit terms from
Speaker 1: these like basically these Nazis right, So it's it's kind
Speaker 1: of a he's taking this term and he's washing it
Speaker 1: a little bit.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I mean he throughout the debate, he definitely was
Speaker 13: like very quick to betray himself as like the most
Speaker 13: conservative person on stage whenever there'd be a question about
Speaker 13: like like how extreme are you on this topic, and
Speaker 13: they didn't raise it that way, but that's essentially what
Speaker 13: they're asking. He was the first person to raise his
Speaker 13: hand every time, and he did it very enthusiastically. Many
Speaker 13: of the other people on stage had a lot of
Speaker 13: like half raised hands. Yeah, we both noticed that Dysantis,
Speaker 13: before raising his hand on a certain question, looked both
Speaker 13: ways across the stage to see who else was raising
Speaker 13: their hand before he raised his. But every single time
Speaker 13: Vivik was the first guy to like jolt his hand up.
Speaker 13: He was very it was very very intentionally positioning positioning
Speaker 13: himself as the most extreme option on the on the
Speaker 13: table there. And it wasn't just I think the content
Speaker 13: of what he was saying that that made kind of
Speaker 13: parallels between him and people like Nick Fuentez are just
Speaker 13: kind of younger, younger conservative of like content creators and influencers.
Speaker 13: It was also like the way he talked, like his
Speaker 13: his his speech pattern, how fast he was.
Speaker 5: Very high school debater.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, it just it's it was reminiscent of all
Speaker 13: of like the horrible shit that I watched for my job,
Speaker 13: like whenever I've watched through a whole bunch of like
Speaker 13: like like zoomer conservative content creators.
Speaker 4: It was.
Speaker 13: It was that, but now on the debate stage. And
Speaker 13: this is something I even like kind of talked about
Speaker 13: in the last uh the Santis fash wave thing is
Speaker 13: like where we are about to hit this big wave
Speaker 13: of conservative zoomers who are going to be starting to
Speaker 13: run for office, who were raised in this media environment,
Speaker 13: and they're going to act like all of these kind
Speaker 13: of commentators that we see on like YouTube, that we
Speaker 13: see on Rumble, that we see on Twitch. They're going
Speaker 13: to be emulating that style.
Speaker 1: I want to put a pin in that because we're
Speaker 1: going to come back to this with a with some
Speaker 1: audio from Nick himself that expresses a similar opinion. But
Speaker 1: I want to note a couple of the things that
Speaker 1: he specifically expressed that I found, we found very fascy,
Speaker 1: and that I cansider to be really concerning. Top of
Speaker 1: the list is the fact that he has openly stated
Speaker 1: his desire to bomb Mexico.
Speaker 5: That is a real problem.
Speaker 11: Uh.
Speaker 1: And the degree to which a significant number of folks
Speaker 1: on that stage weren't completely willing to put that off
Speaker 1: the table is deeply concerning. That's not great, that's a
Speaker 1: that's a Now. The upside is that, like, maybe that's
Speaker 1: crazy enough that there's no chance Independence will vote for it,
Speaker 1: But you never fully want to say that in America.
Speaker 1: There's no way to know, no way to know whatsoever.
Speaker 1: The other thing is that, you know he has so
Speaker 1: Nick and a lot of these guys on the fascist
Speaker 1: youth right, they're huge into removing people from being able
Speaker 1: to vote. You know, Nick himself is basically a monarchist, right,
Speaker 1: like he wants a Catholic monarchist.
Speaker 13: He's like a Catholic monarchist fascist.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And by the way, this is not a fringe opinion.
Speaker 1: Michael Knowles, who is one of the major personalities that
Speaker 1: the Daily Wire, one of the largest conservative news organists
Speaker 1: in the country. Has just recently went on a rant
Speaker 1: talking about all the benefits of monarchy and protecting freedoms,
Speaker 1: by which he means the property of rich people.
Speaker 13: Knowles is also a tradcat justice Yeah.
Speaker 1: Knowles is also a Catholic traditionalist. Yeah, and so these guys,
Speaker 1: you know, they both talk about that. And the thing
Speaker 1: that Vivek is doing that is sort of the more
Speaker 1: acceptable because you can't get up on stage yet at
Speaker 1: a Republican debate and talk about the need for a
Speaker 1: king right, but you can talk about the need to
Speaker 1: cut people out of the franchise right. You know, Nick
Speaker 1: being much more extreme and having the freedom to be
Speaker 1: more extreme, talks a lot about repealing the Nineteenth Amendment,
Speaker 1: taking the right to vote away from women. Vivek is
Speaker 1: not going to say that, but he did say this.
Speaker 1: Young people don't value a country that they just inherit.
Speaker 1: That's why I've said every high school senior, I believe
Speaker 1: she'd have to pass the same civics test that an
Speaker 1: immigrant in this country has to pass in order to
Speaker 1: become a voting citizen of the country. If that eighteen
Speaker 1: year old wants all the privileges of citizenship as well.
Speaker 1: This is deeply con learning for a number of reasons,
Speaker 1: including the fact that any barrier you're put to voting
Speaker 1: is going to reduce the number of people, specifically people
Speaker 1: who are likely to vote for Democrats who do it.
Speaker 1: But number two, like who gets to determine those tests? Well,
Speaker 1: we're already seeing the way in which the state positions,
Speaker 1: and like states like Florida on education are fundamentally changing
Speaker 1: the amount of information kids are allowed to get, they
Speaker 1: also theoretically would have the ability to fundamentally change the
Speaker 1: nature of this test, you know, so that you know,
Speaker 1: you have to express certain opinions and be inculcated in
Speaker 1: certain opinions in order to be able to vote.
Speaker 2: This is a real problem.
Speaker 5: Vivek, you know, concerns us both for this. Again.
Speaker 1: We will talk about his kind of popularity in a second,
Speaker 1: but I wanted to because when we both kind of felt,
Speaker 1: you know, this is a guy who has a lot
Speaker 1: of that fuintes energy he's bringing. And so I looked like,
Speaker 1: what is Nick been saying about this guy? And I
Speaker 1: found this video from a website you're gonna hate called
Speaker 1: Zoomer Nash News Garrison. It's a substack that just a Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like a lot of clips from Yeah Nick Show
Speaker 1: and stuff. So we're gonna we're gonna start watching this
Speaker 1: Zoomer National News clip because there's a couple of points
Speaker 1: that he makes in the first couple of first few
Speaker 1: minutes of it that I think are are unfortunately worth
Speaker 1: listening to and then discussing and then being unhappy.
Speaker 9: Yeah, the only person that is going to be good
Speaker 9: for is Vivak.
Speaker 8: It's bad for DeSantis because he can't confront Trump. It's
Speaker 8: bad for everybody else for the same reason. The only
Speaker 8: person that's good for is Vivak, who's going to get
Speaker 8: a bigger stage. And that's why I wanted to talk
Speaker 8: about tonight because it's interesting about the Vak. He's an
Speaker 8: interesting phenomenon. He's a child of immigrants from India.
Speaker 9: I think his parents are from India.
Speaker 8: And they moved to Ohio and he became a self
Speaker 8: made nearly a billionaire. I think he's got an eight
Speaker 8: figure net worth, nine figure net worth. I read on
Speaker 8: Wikipedi he's got nine hundred and fifty million dollars. So
Speaker 8: he's a self made nearly a billionaire, first generation Asian
Speaker 8: immigrant who as far as I know, didn't really have
Speaker 8: a much of a public profile or any kind of
Speaker 8: a political presence, and just took the country by storm
Speaker 8: with a viral social media campaign. I think people just
Speaker 8: like what he says, at least that's what it appears
Speaker 8: to be. And he's been controversial. I think a lot
Speaker 8: of people like him. I think even people that don't
Speaker 8: like him have commended him on his campaign, which has
Speaker 8: been successful. He's competitive with DeSantis. DeSantis had a bigger
Speaker 8: war chest than Trump. He had a bigger war chester
Speaker 8: than any governor in the United States has ever had.
Speaker 8: I think he had raised two hundred million dollars in
Speaker 8: the last cycle, and he had the support of the
Speaker 8: Jews in Israel, and oh his mine to governor and
Speaker 8: back maybe the next best known politician in the race
Speaker 8: next to Trump and governor of a major state. And
Speaker 8: so in other words, he's got all these advantages, and
Speaker 8: this other guy who really started from scratch is now
Speaker 8: competitive with him. And I'll say too, it is unfortunate
Speaker 8: his look because you know, I know that probably a
Speaker 8: lot of Republicans are not totally on board with like
Speaker 8: Hindu Indian and I'm not making any kind of comment
Speaker 8: on that. I think that's just how things are, just
Speaker 8: like with Bobby Jindal or some of these other guys
Speaker 8: that ran. When I see an Indian guy running with
Speaker 8: a name like vivek Ramaswami, let's not pretend I think
Speaker 8: that's that's also a disadvantage for him, probably because the
Speaker 8: Republican voter base is all white.
Speaker 6: It's ninety percent white.
Speaker 4: And I know that they're they.
Speaker 8: Undertake great pains to convince the world they're not racist
Speaker 8: or xenophobic or something like that. But you know, I'm
Speaker 8: sure they are not in love with that idea. Quite frankly,
Speaker 8: I'm not in love with that idea. I want a
Speaker 8: Christian to be president, not a Hindu. And I also
Speaker 8: would prefer a president whose name I could pronounce, like
Speaker 8: Joe Biden, not vivek Ramaswami.
Speaker 1: Now, all right, that's quite a line from Nick. I
Speaker 1: think what he's actually saying there, Like, I think that's
Speaker 1: that's a joke, right, That's quite a line from Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think he's making he's making a little bit of
Speaker 1: a bit there, I don't think. But but and that
Speaker 1: becomes a little bit clear a bit later on, because
Speaker 1: he he talks about you know, he's talking about there
Speaker 1: kind of both how impressive, you know, objectively, the success
Speaker 1: of avex campaign has been, and how it points to
Speaker 1: the fact that he has done some stuff right, even
Speaker 1: while he's saying I don't think he can win with
Speaker 1: the Republican voter base the way that it is, which
Speaker 1: I think is you know, partly shown by kind of
Speaker 1: some of these polls that that come out showing him
Speaker 1: losing support. But he he comes in a little bit later,
Speaker 1: a couple of minutes later, and he talks about why
Speaker 1: he likes Vivik, what he finds intriguing about him, and
Speaker 1: I think that this is kind of valuable to hear.
Speaker 8: It's really more like an advertising pitch. It's like a
Speaker 8: marketing pitch. It's the it's the perfect stereotype of like
Speaker 8: a canned used car salesman political pitch. That's what they're
Speaker 8: all like, Mike penns, Chris Christy. You could say they're
Speaker 8: like full of shit, like That's how it would characterize it.
Speaker 8: They're like another full of shit conventional, polished politician. And
Speaker 8: they also all went through the steps. They're one state
Speaker 8: wide elections, you know, they're all governors or senators, Chris Christy,
Speaker 8: Nikki Haley, Asa Hutchinson, Bergham, DeSantis, they're all governors. Tim
Speaker 8: Scott's a senator, and they have that canned full of
Speaker 8: shit polish political thing. Both Yang and Vivek not only
Speaker 8: are they not white, they're Asian and children of immigrants,
Speaker 8: but there's also something that characterizes them that they're kind
Speaker 8: of like a new type of campaign where it's super smart.
Speaker 8: When you listen to Vivek, it sounds a lot more
Speaker 8: like a podcast. It sounds a lot more like a
Speaker 8: polemical commentator like me, or like Tucker or like whoever,
Speaker 8: like Alex Jones for that matter, although that's a specific
Speaker 8: sort of thing, but maybe you understand what I mean.
Speaker 8: They're they're almost talking like they're talking to American people
Speaker 8: who have a higher IQ.
Speaker 13: So sure, sure, buddy, your average podcast listener, your average
Speaker 13: high IQ podcast.
Speaker 1: This sounds smart like a podcaster, right, you know, we
Speaker 1: all know that about podcasters.
Speaker 13: It's it's it's super interesting that he made the exact
Speaker 13: same uh like observation that we did well when watching
Speaker 13: the debate, we like turn to each other. He's like, ohh,
Speaker 13: he's doing nick flood tests.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, and Nick Flinn test has has a similar
Speaker 1: idea about him. So, you know, I think he's he
Speaker 1: really does worry me. You know, as we've stated his
Speaker 1: his polling isn't better in the wake of the debate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but his personal brand has never been better, and that
Speaker 1: he's everywhere every big network's been having him on to
Speaker 1: talk about shit like this has increased his visibility not
Speaker 1: just on social media but as a political commenter and
Speaker 1: kind of the things that he's saying, because they are
Speaker 1: so much more extreme than stuff you know, even a
Speaker 1: guy like Pince was willing to say, I think that's
Speaker 1: a real problem. I think it's a problem that's going
Speaker 1: to be with us for a while because he's very young.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, I mean based on some of the poll stuff, Like,
Speaker 13: I'm not worried about him as someone who I think
Speaker 13: will be president. That's not my concern. My concern is
Speaker 13: how he's going to be both influential and he's Yeah,
Speaker 13: he's setting himself up to be influential, and I guess
Speaker 13: even even more so, it's he's like an indo cater
Speaker 13: of what the future of the GOP is going to be.
Speaker 13: And that's the big thing that is like causing me
Speaker 13: concern because, Yeah, it's the type of thing I've been
Speaker 13: thinking about more and more the past year as we've
Speaker 13: had our first wave of like zoomer candidates and also
Speaker 13: you know millennial candidates that are they starting to fill
Speaker 13: up Philip offices.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I you know, I looked into I went
Speaker 1: to Nick's telegram too, because I kind of wanted to
Speaker 1: see is there more that he's been saying, and he
Speaker 1: has actually been sharing a lot about Vivec. One of
Speaker 1: the things I found was just like Vivek has called
Speaker 1: specifically for Fuintes to be unbanned from Twitter.
Speaker 5: Nick is one of the few.
Speaker 1: People Elon is like, I am not willing to truck
Speaker 1: with this motherfucker keep him off of my website. Uh,
Speaker 1: And Vivek is is really not okay with that, which
Speaker 1: does point to, like, you don't specify that like most
Speaker 1: Republicans kind of prefer to believe pretend that Nick doesn't
Speaker 1: exist in public. So the fact that he's going to
Speaker 1: bad for him like this does point to the fact
Speaker 1: that he sees value and he sees a political future
Speaker 1: and the people that Nick speaks to.
Speaker 5: For himself, right, this is.
Speaker 13: He's like very aware of this side of the political interests,
Speaker 13: Like he knows what their talking points are, He's familiar
Speaker 13: with how they speak, like he he's he's able to
Speaker 13: understand that this is like an actual, like political contingent.
Speaker 13: They may not be as reliable in showing up to
Speaker 13: the polls, but it is, you know, as more and
Speaker 13: more boomers, Uh die off, Sorry, no offense. Some of
Speaker 13: these are the people that are some of these are
Speaker 13: the people that are gonna, you know, start filling in
Speaker 13: filling in the voting gaps.
Speaker 1: The other thing that he shares a lot from Vivec,
Speaker 1: and there was like the specifically a clip from the
Speaker 1: debate where Vivec talks about like cutting aid to Israel, right,
Speaker 1: and obviously being the guy, we're not We're not pro
Speaker 1: the Israeli States. So I'm not against that from a
Speaker 1: certain point of view, but I'm not for the same
Speaker 1: reasons that Nick.
Speaker 5: Very different reasons.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it is worth noting that, like that's another
Speaker 1: reason why Nick likes this guy, right, So yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's kind of the core of the vivic stuff I
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about. The next thing to bring up
Speaker 1: is sort of how shit polling after this now, as
Speaker 1: we've noted, there's been like, you know, I found an
Speaker 1: MSN article that was a I believe it was actually
Speaker 1: just them republishing a Washington Examiner article. Lovey, it's really
Speaker 1: solid to hear that Washington Examiner is kind of a
Speaker 1: right wing rag. They analyzed five poles taken just before
Speaker 1: and after the debate. Trump saw a decrease in two
Speaker 1: of those poles and no change in the other three.
Speaker 1: This decrease, it's not insignificant that the two poles show
Speaker 1: him both bush him down something like six points, which
Speaker 1: is not nothing, right, Yeah, but that he's still up
Speaker 1: by around forty So it's also not like a seed change.
Speaker 1: You know, it does suggest a couple of things. One
Speaker 1: of the things that suggests is that there is value
Speaker 1: to him, especially since it looks like he has lost
Speaker 1: some of his ability to message and some of his
Speaker 1: ability to rile people up because of the way social
Speaker 1: media has changed. He doesn't really use Twitter anymore. You know,
Speaker 1: he made a post recently, but.
Speaker 13: He made the first posting in years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, got Elon very excited. But he can't really and
Speaker 1: and he you know, he loves to rant on truth
Speaker 1: social but it doesn't break through the same way stuff
Speaker 1: on Twitter did, and it's possible nothing on Twitter can
Speaker 1: break through that way anymore because of how much changed
Speaker 1: it is. You know, it's not the same Twitter that
Speaker 1: he wrote.
Speaker 13: Absolutely, it's not the same Twitter it was in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 13: twenty six now not even the same Twitter it was
Speaker 13: in twenty twenty. Like, no, it is no then severely
Speaker 13: altered as as a platform and how it affects real
Speaker 13: so real world events.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: I think the thing that you're seeing here is that
Speaker 1: he does have his core, which is, you know, a
Speaker 1: third or more of the GOP who will be right
Speaker 1: or die for the rest of their lives presumably, but
Speaker 1: there is a softer chunk of support that is eroded
Speaker 1: by him the fact that he's not in the limelight,
Speaker 1: the fact that he wasn't up there, you know, slinging
Speaker 1: mud and arguing and you know, talking with these other
Speaker 1: candidates and so yeah, this is this is kind of
Speaker 1: a thing you could It's probably a mistake. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying a mistake from a point of view being good
Speaker 1: for the country, but a mistake in terms of like
Speaker 1: his campaign that he wasn't up there, which is kind
Speaker 1: of worth acknowledging and probably worth continuing to study, and
Speaker 1: it may be it may have the effect of pushing
Speaker 1: him to take part in some of the other debates.
Speaker 1: DeSantis has said he thinks Trump will be at the
Speaker 1: third debate.
Speaker 2: Who knows.
Speaker 1: In terms of how everyone else did, DeSantis went up
Speaker 1: a little bit about a two point bump, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, not terrible, but it's also not significant, especially
Speaker 1: given the size of Trump's lead. It's not the kind
Speaker 1: of given the amount of cash burn he's been going through,
Speaker 1: it's not the kind of rays he needed to keep
Speaker 1: his campaign vibe.
Speaker 13: It was what he did not do a performance that
Speaker 13: people were kind of expecting him to do, and I
Speaker 13: think everyone kind of assumed he would tried really hard
Speaker 13: to come out as the as like the obvious front runner,
Speaker 13: and he kind of flopped at the debate in at
Speaker 13: least in my opinion, he came off as very like muted,
Speaker 13: very like low key. He didn't he didn't really say
Speaker 13: much one way or the other. He was so obsessed
Speaker 13: with with what other people like, trying to make sure
Speaker 13: that what he was saying was okay based on what
Speaker 13: everyone else was saying on stage. It was very weird.
Speaker 1: It was very weird and not the kind of energy
Speaker 1: that suggests I am building a political machine, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: and carry me into office. Pence went up by about
Speaker 1: four points to seven percent of voter support. Nicky Haley
Speaker 1: jumped about five points. And I would say I think
Speaker 1: DeSantis and Pence and probably Haley have are in here
Speaker 1: because they really think they can win. You know, there's
Speaker 1: a couple of those governors and stuff whose names I've
Speaker 1: I've already forgotten that.
Speaker 4: So nobody knows.
Speaker 13: Yeah, is like everyone knows Chris Christy is not going
Speaker 13: to be the president like we know, and he's not.
Speaker 1: He's not really He's running to get a TV show
Speaker 1: on MSN, right, maybe a book deal too. I guess
Speaker 1: it's possible that's part of Haley's ambition to I don't really,
Speaker 1: I don't have his greatest sense for what's going on.
Speaker 13: Yeah, It's how they're all treating Trump is interesting because
Speaker 13: they're also all like kind of auditioning to be vice president,
Speaker 13: but some of them don't want that job because they're
Speaker 13: they're being like very like like anti Trump. On stage,
Speaker 13: the most most people were soft to Trump.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think Vivek was both auditioning for like
Speaker 1: the future of his political I don't think he reasonably
Speaker 1: expects to be president this election. I think he may
Speaker 1: think he can win that in the future. And I
Speaker 1: think he sees this as look, I'm young, and I'm
Speaker 1: going to start building and he and if that's the case,
Speaker 1: then he has done the first thing that he would
Speaker 1: need to do to be a real candidate one day,
Speaker 1: which is make a national name for him self as
Speaker 1: a guy in politics. I think he may be auditioning
Speaker 1: for vice president. And Trump recently commented like, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not against the idea necessarily.
Speaker 13: Yeah, he said he was like impressed with his performance
Speaker 13: at the debaters or something along those lines.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 13: And I mean the immediate reaction from almost almost every
Speaker 13: kind of big like influential, millennial gen x kind of
Speaker 13: right wing content creator person. They were all saying that
Speaker 13: the VEC like very clearly won. Yeah, like all of
Speaker 13: all of all of the Daily Wire people were very
Speaker 13: we're very pro the VEC and kind of riding that train.
Speaker 6: Ye.
Speaker 13: Musk recently, even even even even before the debate, switched
Speaker 13: sides from from being the Dysantis guy to being the guy.
Speaker 13: So it was a lot of a lot of like
Speaker 13: the intellectual dark right type type stuff of like like
Speaker 13: online tech conservative. They were all very quick to jump
Speaker 13: on the yeah, the X train, and based on his
Speaker 13: performance at the debate, they were happy with his overall
Speaker 13: demeanor and messaging.
Speaker 1: Yeah and.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So you know, again, as it kind of stands, has
Speaker 1: anything changed, Well, yes and no, Like the overall sweep
Speaker 1: of the primary, Donald Trump is so far ahead that
Speaker 1: it does seem unlikely that he's going to lose. But well,
Speaker 1: we've also seen it's possible for him to bleed support
Speaker 1: and if you remember far back to twenty fifteen, twenty
Speaker 1: sixteen when he was in these debates with the other
Speaker 1: Republican candidates, he didn't really bleed support, like he was
Speaker 1: very consistently moving forward. So that is interesting. That does
Speaker 1: suggest some things about how the situation has changed. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it's also interesting you know, Poles kind of show that
Speaker 1: voters did. And maybe one of the reasons why Vivik's
Speaker 1: performance didn't boost his campaign overall is that he entered
Speaker 1: into it with the highest expectations of any of the
Speaker 1: debaters among like Republican voters. Probably this is because you know,
Speaker 1: in the speeches and stuff he's been given before. He's
Speaker 1: a debate guy, like that's obvious about him anytime you
Speaker 1: hear him talk. So I think people weren't expecting him
Speaker 1: to do well, and so maybe it didn't. You know,
Speaker 1: if people are expecting you to perform well and then
Speaker 1: you win, it's not as impressive as a you know,
Speaker 1: if you kind of come come out or left field there.
Speaker 1: So maybe that's part of why he's not seeing stuff.
Speaker 1: One of the things that's interesting to me is the
Speaker 1: stuff that was talked about at the debate compared to
Speaker 1: what actually Republican voters care about. The thing that came
Speaker 1: up first in the debate is the thing that is
Speaker 1: number one, getting inflation or costs under control. Obvious that
Speaker 1: that's going to be top of the list for a
Speaker 1: lot of voters. Forty four percent of Republicans consider controlling
Speaker 1: immigration to be a primary concern, which did come up
Speaker 1: a bit. One of the things that pissed off a
Speaker 1: lot of the Daily Wire crew is the fact that
Speaker 1: there wasn't really a lot of talk about wokeness or
Speaker 1: trans people during the debate, because that kind of shit
Speaker 1: is not like fighting liberalism and wokeness and President Biden
Speaker 1: like it all gets kind of like lumped together about
Speaker 1: a third, you know, of the electorate. That's their their
Speaker 1: big concern among Republicans.
Speaker 13: It's primary for it. It's primarily for like online clicks
Speaker 13: and for driving engagement on whatever Facebook thing you want
Speaker 13: to do to harass the school board. It is not
Speaker 13: the uh, the prime focus of the presidential.
Speaker 1: Yes, and like the issues with trans people and stuff
Speaker 1: on its own does not come up here as like
Speaker 1: a major It's nobody's primary concern among Republican voters. Like
Speaker 1: it's these weirdo freaks on the internet. Which isn't to
Speaker 1: say that like they have good attitudes towards that, but like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it makes sense that that's not going to be what
Speaker 1: you put front and center in the debate. One thing
Speaker 1: that's interesting to me is that both election security and
Speaker 1: limiting abortion, which are huge issues and we're big parts
Speaker 1: of the debate, are very much minor side show issues
Speaker 1: for voters. About ten percent of voters consider of Republican
Speaker 1: voters consider election integrity their primary concern. About six percent
Speaker 1: considerate a limiting abortion a top priority, which is teeny right,
Speaker 1: Like it's not a popular thing. They just have to
Speaker 1: because of that hardcore of the base. They have to
Speaker 1: signal for it.
Speaker 13: The Veck was the only first on stage to claim
Speaker 13: that climate change is not real.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes, which was interesting, especially as this hurricane
Speaker 1: batters Florida. And that's deeply negative too, right, the complete
Speaker 1: denial of reality. It doesn't take long, and Vivek did
Speaker 1: not do this, but it's not a long journey to
Speaker 1: go from I don't believe climate change is real to
Speaker 1: I think those fires were started with lasers from space,
Speaker 1: you know, and they're and versions of that, right, which
Speaker 1: is deeply concerning to me. But uh yeah, that's uh,
Speaker 1: that's you know, the Republican debate and and Vivek Ramaswami
Speaker 1: that's kind of uh are our thinking on him? As
Speaker 1: he embraces Nick Fuintes, thought, boy, I don't love saying that.
Speaker 13: Yeah no, But like my main my my main takeaway
Speaker 13: from this debate was that this was based on the performance.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna cut out, have danil cut off from
Speaker 1: that my main performance. My main opinion was this was
Speaker 1: based and then yeah, there we go. Garrison's debate analysis,
Speaker 1: thank you.
Speaker 13: Please, based on the VEX performance was that this really
Speaker 13: was like the first glimpse of the types of like
Speaker 13: long term results of the al Right era in like
Speaker 13: actual like organized politics. Yes, it's it's, it's it is.
Speaker 13: It is. It is our first peek at like this
Speaker 13: upcoming online conservative wave of zoomers and millennials who are
Speaker 13: you know, between my age and Robert's age, who are
Speaker 13: gonna be running for office in the next ten years,
Speaker 13: who were heavily influenced by the online alright era. And
Speaker 13: that's very worrying. I mean, we saw a little bit
Speaker 13: of that with DeSantis' campaign staff sharing videos, videos that
Speaker 13: were approved by like a lot of people in his staff.
Speaker 13: It wasn't it wasn't just one guy. We we have
Speaker 13: we have since found out that those videos were like
Speaker 13: approved like in a in a in like a specific
Speaker 13: like propaganda like chat that these people had I think
Speaker 13: I think on signal. Yeah, So like it is, it is.
Speaker 13: It is part of like this this this wave that
Speaker 13: we're just starting to see glimpses of here. And it's
Speaker 13: not great, no, I you know it it it It
Speaker 13: remains to be seen like if these things will actually
Speaker 13: like pan out in elections, though, I mean, like it
Speaker 13: doesn't seem like the vac is gonna do very well
Speaker 13: as an actual presidential candidate during this race. Previously, when
Speaker 13: when when when Republicans have kind of ran on these
Speaker 13: very kind of online topics, like back in the twenty
Speaker 13: twenty two midterms, it it failed to give them kind
Speaker 13: of yeah, the return on investment. So it's we'll still
Speaker 13: kind of see how how kind of viable this strategy is.
Speaker 13: But I mean, we're only going to have more and
Speaker 13: more zoomers and millennials running for office. Like It's yeah,
Speaker 13: as we saw today, Mitch McConnell's literally disintegrated before our
Speaker 13: very eyes. Yes, and more and more of these kind
Speaker 13: of old guard of neocons or Trump guys are going
Speaker 13: to age out in the next ten years, twenty years,
Speaker 13: and you know it's it's gonna we are. We are
Speaker 13: really going to see this new wave of politicians come in.
Speaker 13: It is interesting how much of jen X just has
Speaker 13: not been a has not been a generation that occupies office.
Speaker 1: No, well again, Garrison, you have not watched enough Mike
Speaker 1: Judge cartoons, but that was made very clear in the
Speaker 1: cartoon Daria.
Speaker 13: Yes, that is true.
Speaker 1: Yes, so I I think so I kind of want
Speaker 1: to end I think the nope that was not Mike Judge,
Speaker 1: What what was I thinking?
Speaker 5: Why did I say.
Speaker 1: That I'm an I I'm a I'm a fool? Oh wait,
Speaker 1: because it's a spin off of Beavis and Budded. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's why. Okay, all right, I solved that mystery, Thank God.
Speaker 1: Now the mystery I haven't solved. And and the thing
Speaker 1: I want to bring you to is, like we've said,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't think ire of us think his
Speaker 1: presidential campaign has electoral shot. Uh, but what about him
Speaker 1: is VP? Do you think that's that's likely?
Speaker 4: Personally?
Speaker 13: There there's I mean, there's certainly a chance. Uh, there's
Speaker 13: a chance. Trumps indicated that that that there's a chance.
Speaker 13: I believe Trump said he's a very very very intelligent person.
Speaker 13: He's got good energy, and he could uh and he
Speaker 13: could be some form of something great, great Trumpian dialogue.
Speaker 13: I'll tell you, I think he'd be very good as
Speaker 13: as vice president.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's which you know, I think the fact
Speaker 1: that his his his overall numbers aren't trending up might
Speaker 1: hurt him in that although maybe it'll make Trump feel
Speaker 1: more secure that he's not going to like take anything
Speaker 1: from him, you know, although maybe the fact that he
Speaker 1: has gone so viral. It would would upset Trump because
Speaker 1: he kind of seems to have preferred having a non
Speaker 1: entity as his VP.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I don't know, because it is like, Yeah.
Speaker 13: My previous prediction was that he would try to get
Speaker 13: herschel Walker. That maybe kind of out of date. Now, Yeah,
Speaker 13: that is certainly another one of these guys that that
Speaker 13: could be in line. Certainly out of out of everyone
Speaker 13: else on the debate stage, he was, Yeah, I think
Speaker 13: the most the most Trumpian and the most like Trump
Speaker 13: friendly guy. Yeah. The one other election kind of restriction
Speaker 13: that he proposed that we have yet to mention is
Speaker 13: to raise the voting age to twenty five Yes, on
Speaker 13: top of having those Civics tests. But yeah, I mean
Speaker 13: I I think it's possible, but it's it's a little
Speaker 13: too far out to say for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well that is Uh, I think
Speaker 1: where we're gonna we're gonna bring her to an end
Speaker 1: for the night. Uh yeah, this has been it could
Speaker 1: happen here until we could happen it certainly could Uh
Speaker 1: you know, stay, uh did people give you a little concerned? Hey,
Speaker 1: We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week. From
Speaker 1: now until the heat death of the universe.
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