Speaker 1: Al Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
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Speaker 3: Right, Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about
Speaker 3: things falling apart and also sometimes about how things have
Speaker 3: been falling apart for a while now. And today we're
Speaker 3: going to talk about how things were also bad in
Speaker 3: falling apart in the two thousands, which a profoundly cursed
Speaker 3: time period. And specifically we're going to talk about I
Speaker 3: think a part of the anti war movement that does
Speaker 3: not get much attention, which is the port militarization resistance
Speaker 3: that happened and sort of two thousand and six, two
Speaker 3: thousand and seven, and with us today to talk about
Speaker 3: this is two people who were part of this movement.
Speaker 3: If Juliana Neuhauser, Hello, hello, and Brendan Maslaska's done, Yeah,
Speaker 3: both of whom were organizers and activists while this was
Speaker 3: going on. Yeah, I think, thank you, thank you both
Speaker 3: for being here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thanks for having us so.
Speaker 3: Yeah, as I was saying a bit in the intro,
Speaker 3: I think that this is a part of the anti
Speaker 3: war movement that is not very well known. I think
Speaker 3: I think a lot of people know about the initial
Speaker 3: stuff that happened in two thousand and three, and people might
Speaker 3: know about some of the stuff that was happening against
Speaker 3: the war in Afghanistan, like right when it started, but
Speaker 3: I don't think most people know that it like you know,
Speaker 3: even after a two thousand and three sort doesn't work,
Speaker 3: that it continues, and then it continues sort of informs
Speaker 3: that are that are very interesting, and so I guess
Speaker 3: I want you to to to start out, I want
Speaker 3: to ask how we sort of got from the early
Speaker 3: part of the anti war movement into this, and how
Speaker 3: you she got involved.
Speaker 5: I would say that there's this narrative about the movement
Speaker 5: against the word Iraq, that there is the largest protests
Speaker 5: in human history, at least at that point. I don't
Speaker 5: know if it's still true against the invasion, and then
Speaker 5: it didn't work, and everyone kind of went.
Speaker 3: Home and ended there.
Speaker 5: And to a certain extent that's true. But like you said,
Speaker 5: the people that didn't go home went an interesting direction.
Speaker 5: And so at the time there were direct action was
Speaker 5: not as acceptable as it is now. This movement was
Speaker 5: largely dominated either by big liberal coalitions or PSL front
Speaker 5: groups that were basically indistinguishable in what they actually did,
Speaker 5: which was basically nothing and in the best of cases
Speaker 5: and then the worst of cases kind of insurgency. But
Speaker 5: then there were small groups of people that at when
Speaker 5: we saw that it didn't work, and we saw that
Speaker 5: these giant, peaceful marches from one part of town to another,
Speaker 5: or voting for John Carey or whatever, it didn't work,
Speaker 5: that we started to look for other options.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you know, I got involved, you know, i'd
Speaker 4: say with the anti war movement. That idea of how
Speaker 4: wars unjust was really taught to me from a very
Speaker 4: young age. I mean, my parents were, you know, children
Speaker 4: of the sixties, and they had family members fighting in
Speaker 4: Vietnam and you know, friends dying in Vietnam, and we're
Speaker 4: against the protests back then. So I grew up here
Speaker 4: in the stories and of course stories from family members,
Speaker 4: particularly one of my grandfathers, both of them who were
Speaker 4: veterans in World War Two. One of them was a
Speaker 4: marine in the you know, in the Pacific Theater, and
Speaker 4: still into his seventies, eighties and nineties until his final days,
Speaker 4: was just dealing with horrific PTSD and had always taught
Speaker 4: me from young age never to get involved. So I,
Speaker 4: you know, and I remember when when the very clearly,
Speaker 4: you know, I'm sure it's on everyone's minds now, and
Speaker 4: when the invasion of Afghanistan started, when the invasion of
Speaker 4: I Rock started, I was at that massive demonstration in Washington,
Speaker 4: d C. That Juliana just mentioned, and I ended up.
Speaker 4: I'm from Utica, New York. I went to a rural
Speaker 4: high school just outside of Utica, you know, russ Bell
Speaker 4: generally speaking, impoverished and also very conservative area of New York.
Speaker 4: And you know, I had the recruiters bothering me, military
Speaker 4: recruiters in high school, recruiting my friends, and they were
Speaker 4: just everywhere in the hallways. So it was very present
Speaker 4: with me when I was younger. I moved out to Olympia, Washington,
Speaker 4: two thousand and six, and that's one a new student
Speaker 4: activist group, Students for Democratic Society was launched. That's how
Speaker 4: Julianna and I first met. We were both in separate
Speaker 4: chapters of that new organization in the Pacific Northwest, and
Speaker 4: the protests started just a few months after I moved
Speaker 4: out there in Olympia in two thousand and six.
Speaker 3: So wait declared for this or second because I've never
Speaker 3: quite been clear in this history. So there was a
Speaker 3: second SD, like Students for Democratic Society that was like
Speaker 3: unrelated to the first one.
Speaker 5: Born briefly at the end of the bushop Master.
Speaker 3: That explains a lot of things that are you.
Speaker 4: Baffling, We're not that old. Yeah, we're definitely in the
Speaker 4: in the second you know, the rebirth of it, So
Speaker 4: you know, I think it took on some things in spirit,
Speaker 4: you know, but also was i'd say different in many ways,
Speaker 4: and it was very active to me at least, it
Speaker 4: was very exciting to be a member of the New
Speaker 4: STS because they're over a dozen chapters in the Pacific Northwest,
Speaker 4: and it was a great way to connect with young
Speaker 4: activists all over the US.
Speaker 3: So SDS is emerging in this time period. One of
Speaker 3: the other things I was interested about is something something
Speaker 3: you were talking about in the early part of this,
Speaker 3: which has to do with the way that these giant
Speaker 3: both the sort of answer coalition PSL Frank Group and
Speaker 3: I guess the ISO was still around back then coalitions
Speaker 3: work versus how like anything else worked on. So was
Speaker 3: was SDS sort of like consciously set up and in
Speaker 3: opposition to those groups?
Speaker 5: I don't think it was conscious, but there was just
Speaker 5: like I mean these days, I mean, like there's a
Speaker 5: lot of controversy around PSL with like anarchist versus tanky politics.
Speaker 5: None of that mattered at that time, Like, none of
Speaker 5: that mattered. The only thing that mattered was the answer,
Speaker 5: which was the PSL Front Group was completely fucking useless.
Speaker 5: Like they completely indistinguishable from any peace police liberal Democratic
Speaker 5: Front group. There was literally no difference, just in terms
Speaker 5: of their esthetics maybe like is there a donkey or
Speaker 5: a hammer and sickle on something. That's the only difference
Speaker 5: we saw. So I don't I don't think there was.
Speaker 5: It wasn't There wasn't like a conscious like political opposite
Speaker 5: attention to it. It was just like they're not doing anything,
Speaker 5: and so we had to look in another direction.
Speaker 4: Actually, you know, it's hard to keep track of the
Speaker 4: alphabet soup of authoritary communist groups at times. But this
Speaker 4: was actually answer for those who don't recall, it was
Speaker 4: a front group for the Workers World Party the w which, yeah,
Speaker 4: I mean it's it's hard to keep track, right, Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's the same thing, like.
Speaker 3: I think, so okay, So for people who are sort
Speaker 3: of unaware of this, there's a network of connected but
Speaker 3: sometimes feuding like weird stalinist cults that kind of kind
Speaker 3: of like they hold on through like the set of
Speaker 3: the eighties and nineties and they start sort of rebuilding
Speaker 3: again around the anti war movements in that period. That
Speaker 3: that's the PSL's the WOP. That's answer like, and I
Speaker 3: think that's like most like modern anti war groups are
Speaker 3: also still these people, which is incredibly depressing.
Speaker 1: Something.
Speaker 3: Want to talk a bit about it towards the end
Speaker 3: of this, but yeah, just for people who have not
Speaker 3: spent like the last half decade the in the trenches
Speaker 3: of extremely weird anti war politics. So yeah, so I
Speaker 3: think we should get into how the sort of the
Speaker 3: first action starts in a limb.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So, and there were actually a couple actions that
Speaker 4: happened in the year preceding that, you know, before I
Speaker 4: moved out to Olympia in two thousand and six. It
Speaker 4: was not yet under the banner of PMR Port Militarization Resistance.
Speaker 4: That was a name that was officially coined in you know,
Speaker 4: in May and June of two thousand and six. And
Speaker 4: so just to give you an idea, Olympias it's a
Speaker 4: college town, or at the Evergreen State College is there.
Speaker 4: It's also the capital of Washington State, so you have
Speaker 4: that going on. It's also a military town. It's a
Speaker 4: little over twenty miles south of what we called Fort Lewis.
Speaker 4: It's now called JBLM j BLUM or Joint Base Lewis McCord.
Speaker 4: It's an Army and Air Force base. Now it's one base.
Speaker 4: So you had all these you know, different kind of
Speaker 4: elements in you know, in tandem in that town and
Speaker 4: the public port. The Port of Olympia is one of
Speaker 4: about seventy or so public ports in the state of Washington,
Speaker 4: some of which are I mean, they're used for all
Speaker 4: kinds of things, you know, for our commercial, private industry,
Speaker 4: but also the military and the US government. So, you know,
Speaker 4: I heard from someone I don't even remember who that
Speaker 4: the military was sending a ship to the Port of
Speaker 4: Olympia in late May of two thousand and six, and
Speaker 4: this happened for ten or so days, and it was
Speaker 4: just kind of a natural instinct for a whole bunch
Speaker 4: of us to go down to the Port of Olympia.
Speaker 4: It was the war machine in our backyard, and the
Speaker 4: idea was to just block the vehicles. It started out
Speaker 4: with just like less than ten people, a number of
Speaker 4: folks getting arrested, and that very rapidly culminated into larger
Speaker 4: protests every single day, an act of blockades people those
Speaker 4: of us like Julian and myself and other folks using
Speaker 4: civil disobedience or what we preferred to call civil resistance
Speaker 4: to try and stop or at the very le slow
Speaker 4: down these striker vehicles and to give folks an idea
Speaker 4: of what a striker vehicle is. You can look it
Speaker 4: up online, but it's kind of halfway between. You know,
Speaker 4: a tank in a hum vy doesn't have the slacks
Speaker 4: you know that a tank would have. It's you know.
Speaker 4: And they were being used in both Iraq and Afghanistan
Speaker 4: for raids of residential areas. They were really on the
Speaker 4: front lines of the war in both those countries, and
Speaker 4: that's what we were trying to stop.
Speaker 5: I only got involved later because I wasn't living in
Speaker 5: Olympia at the time. I was in another STS chapter,
Speaker 5: but my roommate was from Olympia and he had been
Speaker 5: involved in that first round of protests in Olympia before
Speaker 5: moving up to Balingham. Yeah, and so like hearing his story,
Speaker 5: it's got me very excited because just like, finally someone's
Speaker 5: someone's doing something like someone's they're not.
Speaker 3: Just like.
Speaker 5: It's like everything else was just so liberal, like whether
Speaker 5: it's marching from one place to another or writing to
Speaker 5: your congress people or occupying their office. It was like
Speaker 5: asking someone else to do something which you knew from
Speaker 5: the beginning they were never going to do. Yeah, and
Speaker 5: finally this is finally someone was like actually getting into it.
Speaker 5: I think the first one of the things that happened
Speaker 5: here was that they started to avoid that there's there's
Speaker 5: kind of a geographical thing that I think for people
Speaker 5: who either don't know was Washington or because they're normal
Speaker 5: people don't know like the port.
Speaker 3: Areas of these news very.
Speaker 5: Well, because it's like like unless you're a long shoreman,
Speaker 5: like why would you go down to like the port
Speaker 5: of Tacoma. Yeah, yeah, but uh, they kept moving it
Speaker 5: around because Olympia is also not very big and so
Speaker 5: it's there's really only two roads into the port, which
Speaker 5: is very small, and so it was it's very easy
Speaker 5: to block it. And so then I think the first
Speaker 5: time that I got involved was in two thousands seven
Speaker 5: when they had moved it because they kept moving it
Speaker 5: around to try and switch things up and.
Speaker 3: Wait before they're they're the ship around.
Speaker 5: Is No, it's like they had to make a military shipment.
Speaker 5: They would It's like like once the ship wasn't the port,
Speaker 5: they would just have to go through with it. Then
Speaker 5: you know, it's like every every six months or so,
Speaker 5: they had to make another military shipment and they would
Speaker 5: change the port usually each time to try and let
Speaker 5: basically to avoid us. It doesn't seem like this is
Speaker 5: like normal past. Yeah. The first time I had gone
Speaker 5: down was in the Coma, which is a much much
Speaker 5: much more industrialized port than Olympia. It's you know, it's
Speaker 5: like a big port, more normal port, I guess, And
Speaker 5: that one was honestly pretty crazy because you're just trapped
Speaker 5: in this giant industrial maze basically at the mercy of
Speaker 5: the riot cops. The best success we had was definitely
Speaker 5: at the Port of Olympia. I think the in two
Speaker 5: thousand and seven in Olympia was definitely and it's like
Speaker 5: the glory moment, which was when people were able to
Speaker 5: on and off like actually hold the port and control
Speaker 5: it in the a An exits.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I want to, you know, just emphasize that
Speaker 4: like the one the military changing their approach right to
Speaker 4: avoid us so jumping from port to port with these
Speaker 4: different shipments. They actually went so far because we were
Speaker 4: so successful as a movement in the Pacific Northwest to
Speaker 4: ship striker vehicles by rail out of the Pacific Northwest
Speaker 4: and even going so far as to ports in Texas.
Speaker 4: But you know, one thing that we did is that
Speaker 4: we built up contacts with other activists with long short
Speaker 4: workers all up and down the West coast in California.
Speaker 4: There are other activists we are connected with in Texas, Hawaii,
Speaker 4: New Jersey, and New York. There is a desire in
Speaker 4: the anti war movement and you know, in some extent
Speaker 4: maybe it's like it was small, but with some folks
Speaker 4: in the labor movement, especially in Oakland where the ISLWU
Speaker 4: the you know, longshore Workers Union. It's a lot more
Speaker 4: militant than say in a place like Olympia. Yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 4: I mean people wanted to replicate this model because, as
Speaker 4: Juliana said, we wore successful in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 4: we shut down the port of Olympia for a total
Speaker 4: of it was essentially two days. They were not they're
Speaker 4: not shipping anything in or out. We set up blockades.
Speaker 4: We're willing to throw down with the police in the street.
Speaker 5: And one of the things that was cool about that
Speaker 5: blockade is that one of the there's two entrances, like
Speaker 5: I said, and one was completely blockaded, and then the
Speaker 5: other one we had like a moving I don't really
Speaker 5: know what it was, but something with wheels that we
Speaker 5: could move in and out to open it up, and
Speaker 5: so then we could allow like civilian cargo to move
Speaker 5: in and out, but then like we would feel it
Speaker 5: back in place to block military shipments.
Speaker 3: So we were you able to actually like stop them
Speaker 3: from like wet while in that wanted to come, actually
Speaker 3: like stop them from moving your stuff altogether, or do
Speaker 3: you actually cleared up by the police and they moved it, it.
Speaker 5: Would eventually get cleared out by the police. It's like
Speaker 5: we were never able to. It's like we were we
Speaker 5: we held it for two days. That those protests took
Speaker 5: place over a series of two weeks or more or less.
Speaker 5: We were only able to fully hold it for two
Speaker 5: days before eventually they would peer us out. But one
Speaker 5: of the things is that this does it did create
Speaker 5: problems for the army because when you work with a port,
Speaker 5: you know, it's like you've got like a certain timeframe
Speaker 5: that you've contracted with the port to do whatever it
Speaker 5: is is you're going to do, and it's not too
Speaker 5: happy if you take longer than you said.
Speaker 3: You would or yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: And the other thing I want to add is, you know,
Speaker 4: I think the other really important element with this whole
Speaker 4: movement going on is the Pacific Northwest was it is
Speaker 4: specifically western Washington, where the two of us were living.
Speaker 4: It was it was, uh, you know, the center and
Speaker 4: in a sense it was the heart of the anti
Speaker 4: war movement in the country at that time. One because
Speaker 4: of this militant direct action that we were, you know,
Speaker 4: we were building up in the streets and trying to
Speaker 4: throw a wrench in the gears of the war machine
Speaker 4: to to at the very least slow it down. Which
Speaker 4: in some ways we did, but you know, we were
Speaker 4: up against so much. But the other added element, of course,
Speaker 4: is the g I resistance and the soldiers who are
Speaker 4: resisting I've all also known as the Rock Veterans against
Speaker 4: the War was very active there. They set up a
Speaker 4: GI coffeehouse across you know, literally across the street, uh,
Speaker 4: you know, the the gates for one of the entrances
Speaker 4: for Fort Lewis. There are a whole bunch of soldiers
Speaker 4: that were going a wall. We had friends who were
Speaker 4: active duty soldiers who had fought in you know, Iraq
Speaker 4: and Afghanistan that were a wall and they were hiding,
Speaker 4: you know, refusing to go back into these striker brigades
Speaker 4: that joined us in port militarization resistance. There are a
Speaker 4: whole you know, long list of soldiers that were very
Speaker 4: publicly saying, you know, I'm refusing to fight in Iraq
Speaker 4: or Afghanistan for you know, various reasons. And so we
Speaker 4: are very much connected with this movement too, and I
Speaker 4: think the higher ups in the military they're they're hyper
Speaker 4: aware of that. They studied us very well, you know,
Speaker 4: to the point of actually spying on us. So that's
Speaker 4: like a whole other element of the story too.
Speaker 3: So one of the things that I've heard from talking
Speaker 3: to other people who were involved in this was that like, wow,
Speaker 3: like during these protests, like the level of police militarization
Speaker 3: just like skyrocketed, and like I remember, I was you
Speaker 3: faid about this. It was like, you know, if you
Speaker 3: go back and look at like old system of a
Speaker 3: down videos, you know, they'll have these things, Yeah, and
Speaker 3: you'll see these you see these riot police and like
Speaker 3: you look at them and it's like these people they
Speaker 3: look so much less armored than like the people that
Speaker 3: we have now. And one of the things that I
Speaker 3: thought was interesting about this was that like this is
Speaker 3: I think one of the points where you start getting
Speaker 3: the modern riot police showing up, but that are just like,
Speaker 3: you know, completely concased in like armor. And yeah, I
Speaker 3: want to talk about just like the police response to this,
Speaker 3: because I think that's that's another thing I think. I
Speaker 3: think there's no there's a kind of a tendency to
Speaker 3: sort of project back what the police look like in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one, just onto the whole history of police,
Speaker 3: and I think it's like it's it's it's gotten worse
Speaker 3: even in the last twenty years.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, so I live downtown in Olympia and
Speaker 4: probably just like a six minute walk away from the
Speaker 4: Port of Olympia and also very conveniently just a few
Speaker 4: blocks away from the police station. So so lucky.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 4: So we actually saw, you know, we could see from
Speaker 4: the front of down on the road, down on the
Speaker 4: sidewalk from the front of our house. Uh, some of
Speaker 4: the military shipments going by. And we we did see
Speaker 4: that absolutely, and at times it was it was terrifying.
Speaker 4: I mean I lived in an activist house we jokingly
Speaker 4: called HQ because that's just you know, where it because
Speaker 4: of its proximity to the port. That's where a number
Speaker 4: of us were having meetings, uh, you know, around these
Speaker 4: protests early on in two thousand and six. And yeah,
Speaker 4: I mean we like they look like RoboCop and it's
Speaker 4: something I had I you know, I hadn't like I
Speaker 4: had been to like mass marches and demonstrations like the
Speaker 4: RNC protests and DNC protests in Boston, New York and
Speaker 4: like in Washington, d c uh and so I would
Speaker 4: see these like riot cops, but they were I mean
Speaker 4: ubiquitous in these port protests. It was like a whole
Speaker 4: army of them that was sent out. I mean when
Speaker 4: Juliana said that things got kind of crazy at the
Speaker 4: Port of Tacoma protests, I mean there was like a
Speaker 4: police riot, you know, like the cops went absolutely nuts there,
Speaker 4: shooting people with tear gas and pepper balls and brutalizing people.
Speaker 4: I had never before witnessed anything like that. And it
Speaker 4: got to the point in you know, in Olympia where
Speaker 4: we kind of knew early on that we were being
Speaker 4: traced by the police to the extent where, you know,
Speaker 4: one friend of ours was followed from our house to
Speaker 4: the bus station to take a bus to school by
Speaker 4: the police and then was stopped and essentially assaulted by
Speaker 4: them on the street. And we had another fellow activists,
Speaker 4: and you know, a roommate of mine who was going
Speaker 4: out to driving out with a few friends, a few
Speaker 4: fellow activists from Olympia to Aberdeen, about an hour's drive.
Speaker 4: So Aberdeen, there's a port of grays Harbor there, pretty
Speaker 4: conservative small town. It's where Kirk Cobain is from.
Speaker 5: Home of the famous Kurt Cobain teamed McDonald's.
Speaker 4: Uh, they served billions and and billions served in that
Speaker 4: one McDonald's and Kirk Cobain's McDonald's. But yeah, I mean
Speaker 4: they you know, they they were they were following. They
Speaker 4: had orders the Washington State Patrol two, you know, pull
Speaker 4: over a car ful full of known anarchists. There was
Speaker 4: alert gone out to all the police departments. They pulled them,
Speaker 4: They pulled them over, They made him walk the line.
Speaker 4: He was hadn't you know, wasn't drinking at no drugs
Speaker 4: like nothing in his system. But they he was driving
Speaker 4: under like one mile per hour under the speed limit.
Speaker 4: They arrested him for duh d W I you know,
Speaker 4: eventually fought the chargers sued them, uh and you know
Speaker 4: what a big settlement out of all that. But that's
Speaker 4: just one example of many of the lengths that the
Speaker 4: police would go to. It was pretty severe. Even there's
Speaker 4: a house of a bunch of anarchist younger anarchists called
Speaker 4: the pitch Pipe Info Shop in Tacoma, and that was
Speaker 4: also a big target. The police were swarming around them
Speaker 4: all the time.
Speaker 5: They had like cameras set up like specifically just outside
Speaker 5: the info shop, like there weren't surrounds cameras there before.
Speaker 5: But then there's like, oh well just conveniently put them
Speaker 5: on this one specific street corner.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think like those One of the things I
Speaker 3: was reading about this is you have that stuff. And
Speaker 3: then also I think one of the sturiest parts of
Speaker 3: this is that like army intelligence gets involved and yeah,
Speaker 3: do you want to talk about the man named quote
Speaker 3: unquote John Jacob, who was in fact not.
Speaker 4: That Yeah, so you know, I'm curious what memories you
Speaker 4: have of our our good dear friend John Jacob Juliana.
Speaker 4: I don't think I ever actually knew him in person,
Speaker 4: but he was the moderator of the list serve, wasn't he. Yes,
Speaker 4: he's one of the moderators of our listsers.
Speaker 5: Now that I look back on it, I'm like the
Speaker 5: apartmentalization resistance the SYRUP was always just like this dramatic
Speaker 5: shit show. It's like, looking back on it, I was like, oh,
Speaker 5: by a cop that did nothing, absolutely nothing to like
Speaker 5: establish order or uh it was on purpose.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I think there's definitely some things that happened, Like,
Speaker 4: you know, looking back from our vantage point today, it's like, Okay,
Speaker 4: things make a little more sense at the time though,
Speaker 4: And we're in this movement, right, and so that means
Speaker 4: like meeting people where they're at. We would find all
Speaker 4: kinds of people that would like want to join the
Speaker 4: movement like I like I said earlier, like active duty
Speaker 4: soldiers that were joining. So I met this guy named
Speaker 4: John Jacob and he sent an email out to me.
Speaker 4: I was one of the contacts for the Olympia STS group,
Speaker 4: and it's like, hey, you know there's kind of like
Speaker 4: a parent organization that's some old like elder activists are
Speaker 4: in to kind of mentor us called Movement for a
Speaker 4: Democratic Society. Very small, never really took off, but like
Speaker 4: I'm interested in getting involved. We met up in public
Speaker 4: and he seemed like an alright guy. I mean he was,
Speaker 4: you know, forty ish early forties. He told me had
Speaker 4: like you know, been in the military for years, and
Speaker 4: he actually still worked at Fort Lewis, so he was
Speaker 4: always open about that, but it only went that far.
Speaker 4: He didn't ever tell us what he actually did there,
Speaker 4: and it wasn't abnormal for you know, we had many
Speaker 4: folks that worked active duty you know, on base and
Speaker 4: civilian civilian roles or soldiers. As I mentioned that, we're
Speaker 4: in port militarization resistance. So he gets involved and he
Speaker 4: gets really involved with port militarization resistance. He goes to protests,
Speaker 4: he gets pretty close with this group of anarchists I
Speaker 4: mentioned who lived in Tacoma, and he seemed like a
Speaker 4: really solid guy to most of us. And you know,
Speaker 4: things happens as we progress, and you know, as the
Speaker 4: military responded to our you know how effective we were
Speaker 4: in the anti war movement and the GI resistance movement
Speaker 4: by changing their tactics. We noticed that, Okay, when we
Speaker 4: first started the protests, we had the ability to catch
Speaker 4: the police by surprise by setting up, you know, a
Speaker 4: blockade here, or having a surprise action there at this
Speaker 4: time or this port, et cetera, et cetera. And as
Speaker 4: time progressed, we found out that, you know, we were
Speaker 4: having these making these decisions for tactics in our strategy.
Speaker 4: We thought that we're in private and then for whatever reason,
Speaker 4: the police kind of knew about where we were going
Speaker 4: to be before we even showed up. And that I
Speaker 4: remember that clearly happening in two thousand and seven the
Speaker 4: Port of Olympia.
Speaker 5: Yeah, in Takoma. There is a lot of things like that,
Speaker 5: Like there was one time when there are like some
Speaker 5: people who had a meeting in a closed room. Like
Speaker 5: all their they had taken, like the batteries out of
Speaker 5: their cell phones. They had simply written on the whiteboard
Speaker 5: the time and place they were going to have their
Speaker 5: next meeting, which is going to be in a diner
Speaker 5: near the port. And so that way, if like if
Speaker 5: for any reason the room was bugged, it wouldn't be
Speaker 5: caught up because it was just written on a board.
Speaker 5: And then it was like a small meeting too, so
Speaker 5: it's like there weren't and then when they got to
Speaker 5: that diner, there's like full of cops like clearly waiting
Speaker 5: for them. Like at that point, it's like it was
Speaker 5: very clear there was some level of infiltration involved.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think were from early on, like you know,
Speaker 4: we we knew our history. I mean, you know, one
Speaker 4: of our fellow activists in PMRS and a friend of ours,
Speaker 4: Peter Bohmer, is a professor at the Evergreen State College.
Speaker 4: He was in the original STS back in the sixties,
Speaker 4: and you know, he was essentially a political prisoner for
Speaker 4: a couple of years in both Massachusetts and California. I mean,
Speaker 4: the Feds essentially tried to assassinate them back in the
Speaker 4: seventies when he was active in the anti war movement
Speaker 4: in San Diego. Like, we knew, you know, former Black Panthers,
Speaker 4: and we read our history, so we knew about the
Speaker 4: history of co intel pro the counterintelligence program of the
Speaker 4: sixties and seventies, and the war on the anti war
Speaker 4: and civil rights and black power, American Indian movements, et cetera.
Speaker 4: So we knew, you know, just intuitively early on. But
Speaker 4: there was one thing that happened in particular which prompted
Speaker 4: some of us to file for a public records request
Speaker 4: with the City of Olympia. And another activist is walking
Speaker 4: down the street in Olympia. I'm a member of the
Speaker 4: Wobblys and Dustal Workers of the World Union, and we
Speaker 4: had like one of those metal newspaper boxes downtown and
Speaker 4: it was locked to a poll, you know, with a
Speaker 4: bike lock. And there are some city workers there with
Speaker 4: a pickup truck and they're cutting the lock to the
Speaker 4: paper box and they threw it in their pickup truck,
Speaker 4: and so, you know, this friend of ours was there
Speaker 4: was like, what the hell, what are you doing? What's
Speaker 4: going on? And one of the workers just kind of
Speaker 4: shrugged and was like, I don't know, the police told
Speaker 4: us to do this, and they drove off like they
Speaker 4: stole you know, our essentially like our union property or whatever.
Speaker 4: So we had you know, our our lawyer friend Larry
Speaker 4: Hildes and the National Lawyer's Guild you know, call and
Speaker 4: kind of threatened the city and and then a number
Speaker 4: of us got together were like, hey, you know, let's
Speaker 4: do like a public records request with the City of
Speaker 4: Olympia freedom of information law right, and so we did.
Speaker 4: And the request was, you know, just requesting any all
Speaker 4: information the city had any exchanges communications by email, et
Speaker 4: cetera between the police and like other agencies about anarchists,
Speaker 4: I WW students for a Democratic Society, And their initial
Speaker 4: search that the city clerk did yielded something like thirty
Speaker 4: thousand responses. So she's like, okay, I got to narrow
Speaker 4: this down. And I don't know, I was working on
Speaker 4: the request at the time, and for some reason, like
Speaker 4: I don't know, we're port protests, we're near a military base,
Speaker 4: communications between the army, not thinking anything, and so the
Speaker 4: initial responses it actually got you know, maybe one hundred,
Speaker 4: one hundred and thirty or so different documents, just copies
Speaker 4: of emails, et cetera, that we're little puzzle pieces for
Speaker 4: this massive puzzle. And it was just a few of them,
Speaker 4: and it was, you know, there was an email talking
Speaker 4: about our guy in the Navy going to a PMR
Speaker 4: meeting to get some intel. There's you know, all kinds
Speaker 4: of things like that. There were a few emails in particular,
Speaker 4: and the email address was something like John John J.
Speaker 4: Towery at you know, Army dot us whatever the email
Speaker 4: address was. So there's a crew of active that got together,
Speaker 4: put their heads together, did some research quietly for a
Speaker 4: few months, and eventually found out by publicly accessible information
Speaker 4: like voter registration records and also finding out something about
Speaker 4: like a motorcycle club called like the I don't know,
Speaker 4: like the Brown Butte Club or the Brown Butt Club
Speaker 4: or something and the like. Found out that this John
Speaker 4: Towery guy that was in this motorcycle club and had
Speaker 4: his you know, was registered to vote outside of Tacoma
Speaker 4: in this town there. It was actually John Jacob. It
Speaker 4: was this guy that we thought was a fellow activist,
Speaker 4: an anarchist and a friend, you know, I thought he
Speaker 4: was a personal friend of mine. Turns out he was
Speaker 4: actually essentially an Army intelligence officer working for something called
Speaker 4: a Force Protection Unit at Joint Face Joint based Lewis McCord,
Speaker 4: and also working with a whole list of different agencies
Speaker 4: and what turned out to be like a man massive
Speaker 4: surveillance network that was national in scope. This guy was
Speaker 4: sent by the Army along with many others to infiltrate us,
Speaker 4: to spy on us, and to disrupt us was huge.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And that's one of the things that I've always
Speaker 3: thought it was really interesting about this is like, so,
Speaker 3: like I learned about port militarization resistance basically because I
Speaker 3: was like poking around the history of like informants and
Speaker 3: I ran into this and I was like what because
Speaker 3: And then that was what I thought. One of the
Speaker 3: things I thought was really interesting about this is that like,
Speaker 3: like I think that this chapter of the anti war
Speaker 3: movement is even on the left, is like not very
Speaker 3: well known, but like the serious dis is which the
Speaker 3: Army seems to have taken it is really remarkable. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm wondering what you think about that.
Speaker 5: One thing we have to emphasize is is that we
Speaker 5: were not a large group of people. Yeah, Like the
Speaker 5: number of people who are actively involved in Port military
Speaker 5: I guess ressistance at its speak was at how many
Speaker 5: people do you think it was, Brandon.
Speaker 4: Well, it depends. I mean I'd say they're proudbably like
Speaker 4: at its peak, maybe probably four to fifty people that
Speaker 4: would like consistently show up to things, you know, maybe
Speaker 4: a slightly smaller, very core group, but we would have
Speaker 4: demonstrations with like and then like four hundred people, you know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and like that would be like the max like
Speaker 5: there is It's like there were like the peaceful like
Speaker 5: kind of like support actions, you know, you would get
Speaker 5: like a couple hundred people, and then like for the
Speaker 5: stuff like where it's like the first night that that
Speaker 5: the part of the entrance to the part of Olympia
Speaker 5: was occupied, it would be like like forty to fifty people.
Speaker 5: These were not These were not very large groups of people.
Speaker 5: I feel like, and like I said, it's like one
Speaker 5: thing that we need to keep in mind was that
Speaker 5: the peace police were much stronger back then than they
Speaker 5: are now nowadays. Like as we saw last year, it's
Speaker 5: like people of learned to throw down, but that was
Speaker 5: not the case at the time. And so this is
Speaker 5: a very very small group of people, and I think
Speaker 5: we accomplished a lot from with how small it was.
Speaker 5: If it had been larger, it would have accomplished way more.
Speaker 3: But even.
Speaker 5: That small core of like forty to fifty people with
Speaker 5: maybe expanding out to like a larger group of a
Speaker 5: couple hundred, had them that scared that they went that
Speaker 5: far to try and disrupt it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is one of the things I've been
Speaker 3: thinking about a lot recently. Of this has seas to
Speaker 3: be a very consistent thing, which is that like the
Speaker 3: two things that are guaranteed to like just have a
Speaker 3: hammer drop on you if you touch them is pipelines
Speaker 3: and ports. And that was something you know, we've talked
Speaker 3: a lot on here about pipeline protests, but I was
Speaker 3: interested in what you two think about, because, Yeah, this
Speaker 3: this is like a very particular moments right now in
Speaker 3: which you're dealing with all these logistics chain failures, and
Speaker 3: I was wondering if you do think there's anything that
Speaker 3: we can learn from how your versions of the sort
Speaker 3: of of port demonstrations worked for potentially trying to leverage
Speaker 3: that in the future, especially with like contract negotiations for
Speaker 3: port workers in Oakland coming up next year.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, it is this
Speaker 4: old saying and the IWW, direct action gets goods, right,
Speaker 4: And I think it really boils down to that it's
Speaker 4: building up you know, mass movements and social movements from
Speaker 4: below that rely on direct action, that rely on civil
Speaker 4: is this civil disobedience? Yeah, and the pipeline protests that
Speaker 4: have been ongoing where Indigenous people have been on the
Speaker 4: front lines of that for many, many years now. I mean,
Speaker 4: the kind of repression and surveillance that we face really
Speaker 4: pales in comparison to the kinds of you know, surveillance
Speaker 4: of repression that folks were facing at Standing Rock for example.
Speaker 4: You know, I think, of course, one of the well
Speaker 4: one of the main differences is that it was primarily
Speaker 4: the military, you know, with us, right that was surveilling us,
Speaker 4: because this was very specifically, you know, a war issue
Speaker 4: and a military issue. But yeah, I mean I think,
Speaker 4: you know, like I think there's a big questions like
Speaker 4: what what do we have to do? That's that's new
Speaker 4: And to me, I say, you know, for both that
Speaker 4: kind of militant action, but also for the labor movements,
Speaker 4: like it's not you know, we don't have to reinvent
Speaker 4: the wheel. There are things that have a tried and
Speaker 4: true track record of getting the goods, and that is
Speaker 4: you know, these more disruptive kind of actions and movements,
Speaker 4: and so one of them would be you know, I
Speaker 4: guess my suggestion would be to like go back to
Speaker 4: the basics, and even like I would say, now, you
Speaker 4: know this, Remember this is at a time when like
Speaker 4: Facebook was around, right, like, but we weren't really using
Speaker 4: that for our organizing. We really relied on like face
Speaker 4: to face meetings, you know, phone calls and building up
Speaker 4: trust with people and building up our capacity to like
Speaker 4: take actions and make change. You know, I think I'm
Speaker 4: not saying throw out everything that you know, that at
Speaker 4: least some of the good that social media has to offer,
Speaker 4: but like I think going beyond that and going back
Speaker 4: to these older tactics. And then for the labor movement,
Speaker 4: like the big thing is you know, and it's just
Speaker 4: like a bigger question for for mainstreaming in particular. I mean,
Speaker 4: they're the whole idea of like union contracts is that
Speaker 4: workers also lose a lot. Yeah, they get some things,
Speaker 4: but business owners and bosses have rights carved out in
Speaker 4: those contracts. And with the long shore workers, I mean
Speaker 4: The difficult thing with that, of course, is like there
Speaker 4: would be some symbolic strikes that, of course, like longshore
Speaker 4: workers have done and continue to do, you know, around
Speaker 4: like the Warren Rock historically supporting movement, Abu Jamal may Day,
Speaker 4: et cetera, like in Oakland, but they have some things
Speaker 4: for that written into their contracts, and you know, for
Speaker 4: all these other like unions, it's like, well, you know,
Speaker 4: we can't strike at all for the next two years,
Speaker 4: the next three years, whatever the life of the contract is. Like,
Speaker 4: I think it's a bigger question and challenge for the
Speaker 4: labor movement to move beyond that and not be put
Speaker 4: in this straight jacket of contracts like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that that, particularly, like the the no
Speaker 3: strike clause part of contracts, I think is an interesting
Speaker 3: thing because it I don't know, there's not I mean,
Speaker 3: there are some unions that will actually do stuff around
Speaker 3: fighting it, but mostly people just sort of don't care.
Speaker 3: And I think you wind up in a situation where
Speaker 3: it seems like you kind of have to plan your
Speaker 3: tactics around when contract negotiations are happening, because otherwise you
Speaker 3: can't actually get people to do anything more of in
Speaker 3: like a one day symbolic strike.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and or you know, the challenge is, like, you know,
Speaker 4: we have this great American tradition that's not unique to
Speaker 4: the US. It's universal really, and it's one that resonates
Speaker 4: with me breaking the law right and like we're you know,
Speaker 4: we're like civil disobedience. That is that what we are
Speaker 4: doing in the streets and blocking the ports. We were
Speaker 4: breaking the law and we knew it. And that's what
Speaker 4: the civil rights movement, the Black freedom movement did in
Speaker 4: the nineteen sixties. But like we have recent exams samples
Speaker 4: of workers breaking the law in mass like the West
Speaker 4: Virginia teacher strikes that happened a few years ago, Like
Speaker 4: teachers in every single county in that state went on strike.
Speaker 4: They broke the law, and they want something out of that.
Speaker 4: And I think that's what we really need to encourage people,
Speaker 4: is this idea of breaking out of like the norm
Speaker 4: and breaking the laws, which you know, the laws that
Speaker 4: are in place, which are not there to you know,
Speaker 4: expand our freedom, they're there to contract it.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: One of one of my friends had a joke about
Speaker 3: what was the exact line. It was, it's it's only
Speaker 3: illegal if you get caught and it only matters if
Speaker 3: you lose, which I think is a good way of
Speaker 3: thinking about both. Yeah, and you know, yeah, I think
Speaker 3: it's also like it's worth mentioning that like the other sides,
Speaker 3: the law doesn't matter to them at all, Like they
Speaker 3: just tear it up and like light it on fire constantly.
Speaker 3: So don't don't bind yourself if you can, if you
Speaker 3: can not get caught and not like go to prison
Speaker 3: for the rest of your life. Don't bind yourself by
Speaker 3: a bunch of like paper that the other side just
Speaker 3: doesn't care about.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's an excellent point, because that's the big thing,
Speaker 4: you know, with the army and law enforcement in general,
Speaker 4: like surveillance of us. They were in the police just
Speaker 4: their actions, their brazen actions on the street, like the
Speaker 4: Ryot police, they were just breaking.
Speaker 1: The law all the time.
Speaker 4: They absolutely have a deep visceral hatred of the Bill
Speaker 4: of Rights, of civil rights and civil liberties. And so
Speaker 4: there were a number of, you know, court cases that
Speaker 4: sprung out of you know, this movement. There was a
Speaker 4: case called Panagoacas Vitari another Juliana Panagoacas was another PMR
Speaker 4: member coplaintiff in that case. And you know, it was
Speaker 4: a case against the Army that you know, we wage
Speaker 4: and brought up to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
Speaker 4: and you know, eventually lost and it could have brought
Speaker 4: it to the Supreme Court but didn't. But you know,
Speaker 4: like the the other thing is like the violation of
Speaker 4: the Posse Commentatos Act. It was a whole other thing.
Speaker 4: You know, we don't have to get like so tied
Speaker 4: up into like the legalistic I think, but like the
Speaker 4: point your point is valid. Like they don't care about
Speaker 4: the laws that are already there. They'll they'll just intentionally
Speaker 4: break them, break their own laws that they have set up,
Speaker 4: and you know, they'll just get a slap on the
Speaker 4: wrist because that's really all that's all that happens to them.
Speaker 3: I think, I think I think that's a good note
Speaker 3: to end on break the law. It's fake. It's also bad.
Speaker 3: Do you two have anything you want.
Speaker 4: To plug other than that, other than you know, encouraging
Speaker 4: people to break the.
Speaker 3: Law your local.
Speaker 4: Port Yeah, yeah, I mean I think it's you know,
Speaker 4: I guess just encourage people to do as you know,
Speaker 4: it sounds like what we're doing by having us on
Speaker 4: the show, and like there are some in our very
Speaker 4: recent history, you know, movements and wins that we all
Speaker 4: as activists today can still learn from. And I think
Speaker 4: part of that, you know, I don't want to call
Speaker 4: us elders because we're not that old, but like one
Speaker 4: part of that is like making sure like our movements
Speaker 4: are still like multi generational and like we we learned
Speaker 4: from each other and also as as Julianna and I did,
Speaker 4: like I mentioned earlier, like we learned from the movements
Speaker 4: of the past, SDS, the Black Panthers, the Black Freedom Movement,
Speaker 4: et cetera. But there's a lot that you know, these
Speaker 4: these struggles I think have to offer us today.
Speaker 3: All right, well, think thank you, thank you both for
Speaker 3: talking coming on and talking with.
Speaker 5: Us, for having us.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 3: Well, this is this has when it could happen here
Speaker 3: I find us at have your pod on Twitter, Instagram,
Speaker 3: and the rest of our stuff is a cause on
Speaker 3: media at the same somewhat accursed social media places. I
Speaker 3: don't know why I'm saying somewhat, they're just a cursed
Speaker 3: yeah see you next time whenever.
Speaker 6: That is, Hey everyone, it's James.
Speaker 7: I am just recording an introduction for today's episode, which
Speaker 7: we recorded on Sunday night. I'm recording this on Monday
Speaker 7: night and you will hear this on Tuesday morning. That's Tuesday,
Speaker 7: twenty eighth of November. I just wanted to include another
Speaker 7: ask for donations right up front here, because we are tired,
Speaker 7: broke and sad. I spent last night sleeping out by
Speaker 7: the migrant camp in Nocumber, one of the camps. It
Speaker 7: was extremely cold like and I had a good sleeping
Speaker 7: bag right much much worse for people who have blankets.
Speaker 7: I had a young woman completely breaking down and crying
Speaker 7: this morning, understandably because it's terrible and people have been
Speaker 7: there for five six days now. We ran out of
Speaker 7: food all our distribution sites today. We just desperately need
Speaker 7: more help and we need a much larger scale operation,
Speaker 7: but we can't find that. So if you're able to help,
Speaker 7: please please do. I know it's a difficult time of year.
Speaker 7: I'm not asking you to give money that I wouldn't give.
Speaker 7: I'm thousand plus dollars deep in this. I'm not asking
Speaker 7: you to do things that I wouldn't do. Spending half
Speaker 7: my week out there like, I'm not just preaching something
Speaker 7: that I am not part of this is something I'm
Speaker 7: very much part of. I think it's very important to
Speaker 7: me and it would mean a lot to me if
Speaker 7: people could help. However they can, either materially or with
Speaker 7: their time. Thank you very much, and I hope you
Speaker 7: enjoy the episode.
Speaker 3: Hi.
Speaker 7: Hello, it's me James, the guy who does podcast who
Speaker 7: talks to you when you're driving to work, and today
Speaker 7: on this podcast it Could Happen Here, which is about
Speaker 7: the world falling apart and people who are putting it
Speaker 7: back together. I am joined by two friends of mine.
Speaker 7: We are in the desert in a Cumba at the
Speaker 7: Cumba Hot Springs Hotel, which is open now thankfully. We've
Speaker 7: just spent most of today and the last two months
Speaker 7: doing mutual aid project out here. So if you guys
Speaker 7: like to introduce yourselves in any way you think it's relevant,
Speaker 7: that would be great to start off with, and then
Speaker 7: we can talk about what's been going on here.
Speaker 1: I am Haval.
Speaker 8: I use their them pronouns. I live in San Diego
Speaker 8: but now currently living in her cumber helping out with
Speaker 8: the migrant crisis at the border.
Speaker 1: Hi.
Speaker 9: I'm Alo like alo Vera. I use she her pronouns,
Speaker 9: and I've been doing mutual aid for a couple of
Speaker 9: years now and recently have come into the scene of
Speaker 9: helping with the refugee crisis at the border.
Speaker 3: Massive thank you.
Speaker 7: Okay, So I think to start off with, can one
Speaker 7: of you or both of you describe just what we've
Speaker 7: seen today. I think it's very hard for people to
Speaker 7: get a grasp of like how the scale of what's
Speaker 7: happening and how bad it is here.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 8: So today we are in the wake of a holiday
Speaker 8: where CBP takes off, well most of them are taking
Speaker 8: off for the holiday, and probably what is a iss
Speaker 8: action as well, who picks up the migrants. So there's
Speaker 8: a huge backlog of people not getting picked up, stuck
Speaker 8: in these open air detention sites. And this is some
Speaker 8: of the highest numbers that we've seen in a long
Speaker 8: time since like the beginning of this what happened in September, right, Yeah,
Speaker 8: And it's insane, like the amount of people that we've
Speaker 8: were running out of food. Basically we barely made it
Speaker 8: buy on peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the world famous
Speaker 8: peanut butter.
Speaker 7: They're coming here because we feed them. They just want
Speaker 7: the sandwich.
Speaker 3: And it was wild.
Speaker 8: It was it's it's like the desperation is getting worse
Speaker 8: because as it gets colder, you know, people are suffering more,
Speaker 8: they're you know, shivering more, so it's using.
Speaker 1: More energy, They're more hungry.
Speaker 8: When we show up, they're tailing our van as we
Speaker 8: pull up, which doesn't didn't always happen, And yeah, the
Speaker 8: desperation is real.
Speaker 3: We saw what like three sixty.
Speaker 8: I think at one camp Willows and then at another
Speaker 8: camp it was one fifty at another camp totally what
Speaker 8: seven math is hard?
Speaker 7: Yeah, and it varies throughout the day. Right, Like, I'm surprised.
Speaker 7: We should explain, maybe ALA can do this. What is
Speaker 7: it open at detention site?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 7: OADS is yacronom we use. What does that look like?
Speaker 9: So an opener to tension center. From what I've seen,
Speaker 9: is literally just people left out in the desert with nothing.
Speaker 9: The shelter that they have has either been built themselves
Speaker 9: by the shrubs and you know the manzanita bushes that
Speaker 9: they find around there that they also burn which creates
Speaker 9: awful smoke, as well as what we provide them in
Speaker 9: terms of tarps, blankets, tents. What I've seen in the
Speaker 9: open air detention centers is Essentially, when Border Patrol has
Speaker 9: the start of a quarter, they have the money to
Speaker 9: really get people out of there. You have a lot
Speaker 9: of people just processed very quickly. It doesn't pile up.
Speaker 9: And then because of that, all the infrastructure that we
Speaker 9: put into these places, and all of you know, the
Speaker 9: infrastructure that these refugees build themselves, right this is not
Speaker 9: provided by Border Patrol, gets basically ruined. And so you
Speaker 9: have soiled blankets that have become the tops of tents
Speaker 9: because that's their only use at this point, have not
Speaker 9: enough shelters, so people are sleeping just among the rocks
Speaker 9: and trees because it's the best they can. Yeah, and
Speaker 9: I think one of the most notable points of these
Speaker 9: open air detention centers is legally speaking, Border Patrol gets
Speaker 9: around this by not really calling them detention centers, saying
Speaker 9: that they're not detained and that technically they're free. But
Speaker 9: the reality is there's nowhere for them to go without
Speaker 9: getting you arrested or deported. But because of this loophole,
Speaker 9: Border Patrol has no obligation to feed them, and so
Speaker 9: when they do feed them at the start of the quarter,
Speaker 9: when they have the budget at which they blow it's oranges,
Speaker 9: it's crackers. It's not enough to live off of when
Speaker 9: you're stuck there for five days. I spoke to a
Speaker 9: Kurdish migrant today who had been there for five days.
Speaker 9: And you know, we've heard of people staying there for
Speaker 9: an entire week, just stuck in these camps as they
Speaker 9: overflow with people because they're not cleared due to whether
Speaker 9: it be a holiday season or whatever it might be
Speaker 9: that puts us in this circumstance.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and obviously most people won't have been here. You
Speaker 7: can look on a map or Google Maps that you
Speaker 7: want to, but all of this is happening like literally
Speaker 7: in the shadow of the border wall in some cases,
Speaker 7: or right next to the border wall. Sometimes it's a
Speaker 7: little bit next, a little bit further away. And just
Speaker 7: to explain why there are these locations where they are,
Speaker 7: you guys want to explain like how people are getting
Speaker 7: to the because cucumber. If you've got Google Maps, if
Speaker 7: you're not driving, like, you can put it up and
Speaker 7: you can look right, we're like an hour and a
Speaker 7: bit east of San Diego, about seventy miles east of
Speaker 7: San Diego, closer to our centro than San Diego. So
Speaker 7: can you explain how people are ending up here by
Speaker 7: the hundreds or thousands.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so.
Speaker 8: Talk to many migrants and they stay in a hotel
Speaker 8: in TJ.
Speaker 1: I have no idea which one, and wouldn't give.
Speaker 8: The information if I did, but yeah, they stay in
Speaker 8: a hotel in TJ, and they get separated by nationality.
Speaker 8: So they take their passports from them and put them
Speaker 8: in stacks and separate them by their nationalities. So you'll
Speaker 8: get you know, Chinese nationalists together, you'll get people that
Speaker 8: are from Turkey together, mostly Kurdish, and then you'll get
Speaker 8: whatever their nationality is. And I'm sure the outliers get
Speaker 8: just lumped into whatever is the most you know, like yeah,
Speaker 8: language group exactly. And then they get in the morning,
Speaker 8: I guess at like five or six am. They drive
Speaker 8: all the way out from TJ to Hakamba and get
Speaker 8: dropped off at there's three points where there's breaks in
Speaker 8: the walls, and these walls obviously they don't go over
Speaker 8: the mountains because Trump was trying to build distance rather
Speaker 8: than actual stopping people, and so these breaks in the
Speaker 8: walls are very easy to cross. It's literally just walking over.
Speaker 8: There was some remnants of concertina wire or bob wire
Speaker 8: like in the area, but it's all ripped and super
Speaker 8: easy to cross, and so the coyotes will drop them
Speaker 8: off near or bits away from that point and have
Speaker 8: them walk in when that's where border patrol. After they cross,
Speaker 8: border patrol will intercept them give them wristbands for the
Speaker 8: day they arrived.
Speaker 1: We actually just saw this last week.
Speaker 8: They must have ran out of wristbands because they were
Speaker 8: giving like Sunday wristbands when it was like a Wednesday.
Speaker 7: Yeah, everybody said fuck, like and that makes.
Speaker 8: Our job more complicated too, not only their job, I'm sure,
Speaker 8: because they're trying to process them in order, but our
Speaker 8: job because we're trying to record how long have people
Speaker 8: been here. I remember I was talking to a Chinese
Speaker 8: nationalist and had to call a translator just to see
Speaker 8: like because they had a Sunday wristband and I think
Speaker 8: it was Tuesday or something already, and I was like, wait,
Speaker 8: you got you've been here for two days. And they
Speaker 8: were like like trying to explain what the language barrier wants.
Speaker 8: The translated like, no, we got here three hours ago.
Speaker 8: We kept thinking they got here three days ago. They
Speaker 8: kept showing the number three on their hands and so yeah,
Speaker 8: they give them these risk bands and then tell them
Speaker 8: to wait in these areas that are very close to
Speaker 8: where they are intercepted, and border patrol will tell them
Speaker 8: there's cameras all over the dead that we're watching you,
Speaker 8: so don't leave, and if you leave, it'll mess up
Speaker 8: your migroprocess or your asylum process, and so they most
Speaker 8: of them stay. We've actually have seen a lot of
Speaker 8: people walking on the eighty here trying to get to
Speaker 8: town because they're desperate, they're cold, they're hungry, and they're.
Speaker 1: Probably just like fuck this, you know.
Speaker 8: But it's interesting too, how like border patrol in all
Speaker 8: media aspects denies the existence of these camps.
Speaker 7: Yeah, they're not explicitly to me right later, they don't exist,
Speaker 7: or they don't detain people, people that they what they'll
Speaker 7: say to people aren't detained here, that they're free to go.
Speaker 1: Which technically they are and they can walk.
Speaker 8: But I had a Kurdish friend that I met at
Speaker 8: one of the camps that we call Moon Camp, and
Speaker 8: twenty year old from Turkey, and he said that him
Speaker 8: and a bunch of friends that he was traveling with
Speaker 8: just walked to the subway up the street got a
Speaker 8: subway sandwich, and then border patrol showed up after they
Speaker 8: had ordered their food, yeah, and said you have to
Speaker 8: go back with us, but finish your food here, because
Speaker 8: imagine that walking in was being taken back with some
Speaker 8: way be like, oh, we can just leave and get
Speaker 8: out of here. Like so they finished their sandwiches and
Speaker 8: then he took them straight back. So that is detention.
Speaker 8: If you can't leave, then you're in detention.
Speaker 1: That's the debt. By definition.
Speaker 7: I feel like, yeah, and I don't think people think
Speaker 7: they are free to leave. And I don't think people
Speaker 7: certainly they're not told what situation they were in, right
Speaker 7: and think so maybe they would assume that, but there's
Speaker 7: also not very many places for them to go.
Speaker 3: We are in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 9: So from what I've talked to different people, you know,
Speaker 9: on top of just like crossing the border, there's also
Speaker 9: an entire period where these people are traveling and all
Speaker 9: of them travel in different ways, and some of them
Speaker 9: are traveling all the way from South America through Panama
Speaker 9: through the jungle, and you know, people are dying on
Speaker 9: the route over here, and some of them are lucky
Speaker 9: enough to just fly in.
Speaker 7: And and you know, right, Yeah, they have to fight
Speaker 7: to Cancun.
Speaker 9: Fly into Cancun, and then make their way over to
Speaker 9: TJ and make it through the border. And I have seen,
Speaker 9: like for myself with my own eyes, you know, burns
Speaker 9: from motorcycle exhaust from you know, the different methods that
Speaker 9: they've used to get here. And I've seen spider bites,
Speaker 9: I've seen, you know, injuries that are infected that have
Speaker 9: been infected for a long time because they've been that
Speaker 9: way since they were in the jungle, and it's inadequate.
Speaker 9: I had a woman that I was helping give medical
Speaker 9: care to whose ankles were swollen from a steroid that
Speaker 9: she was given that she should not have been given
Speaker 9: and that she had a bad reaction to. And yeah,
Speaker 9: that's just been their reality traveling here and trying to
Speaker 9: get here. On top of that, I think that speaking
Speaker 9: of medical issues and speaking on what you were saying
Speaker 9: earlier about the threats of becoming undocumented, the threats of
Speaker 9: you know, being forced to stay in these camps, there's
Speaker 9: even fear of having a medical emergency. So like when
Speaker 9: EMS comes out, when we call nine to one one
Speaker 9: or Border Patrol calls nine one one, right they're not
Speaker 9: like working in connection with border patrol. They're just going
Speaker 9: to a hospital as if it was you know, someone
Speaker 9: house person on the street going to the hospital. And
Speaker 9: so they end up there, and if they're not given
Speaker 9: the proper information to get a court tape, to finish
Speaker 9: their asylum process and to really like be submitted properly
Speaker 9: into the country, they are at risk of becoming undocumented.
Speaker 9: And I think that fear has spread among people, and
Speaker 9: I've definitely noticed personally that there is fear to have
Speaker 9: nine to one one call to be taken away in
Speaker 9: an ambulance because they fear you know, becoming undocumented or being.
Speaker 3: At risk or separated.
Speaker 9: Separated has been a big thing because if they end
Speaker 9: up having their process either take longer or just be
Speaker 9: stuck in the hospital or whatever it may be, they're
Speaker 9: away from their family, they have to go through a
Speaker 9: different process. They're not processed at the detention center is
Speaker 9: the same way or at the same time. So it's
Speaker 9: just it's a it's a there's a lot of fear,
Speaker 9: and I think that's led to a lot of unnecessary harm.
Speaker 9: And we do our best in terms of medical care,
Speaker 9: but there's you know, we're limited. We you know, it's
Speaker 9: over the counter, it's you know, it's we can't do much.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and it's a street medicine really, yes, exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 7: Like we have some doctors and nurses and other qualified
Speaker 7: medical people come and help, but they don't have the
Speaker 7: diagnostic tools that they need. Right, Like today we headed
Speaker 7: somebody who had clearly some high issues and like the
Speaker 7: best we can do is say this person needs to
Speaker 7: go to hospital. But then in this case, they were
Speaker 7: able to take the person's partners. Sometimes they won't take
Speaker 7: the person's partner. Sometimes a person could be separated from
Speaker 7: their children, and so they're obviously very afraid of that.
Speaker 7: And and to compound that, I think like the release
Speaker 7: that they're not released in the way they had previously
Speaker 7: been released, that they're dumped onto the street at certain
Speaker 7: transit centers, right and then and again it falls onto
Speaker 7: volunteers nonprofits to help them get to.
Speaker 3: Where they're going to go.
Speaker 7: The scale of the mutual aid operation is really impressive,
Speaker 7: and it's something that I don't think is like we
Speaker 7: don't talk about it enough, people don't really understand it.
Speaker 7: So could maybe we just start, like literally what we
Speaker 7: do every day in a day. I've got to have
Speaker 7: volity here every day.
Speaker 8: Yes, yeah, One thing I forgot to mention is I
Speaker 8: am here every single day now full time, ten plus
Speaker 8: hours a day.
Speaker 1: It's eight days a week. And so yeah, every day
Speaker 1: we wake up, I wake up.
Speaker 8: Around like six am, and we try to get to
Speaker 8: the first camp, which is down the street from where
Speaker 8: I'm staying, around seven thirty or eight.
Speaker 1: O'clock in the morning.
Speaker 8: And the previous night we have loaded the van up
Speaker 8: with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because they have a
Speaker 8: good hold. You don't need to keep them really refrigerated
Speaker 8: much or you know, the YadA YadA, and so it's
Speaker 8: just peeb and j's water and fruit and we give
Speaker 8: them each one at least sometimes more if we have
Speaker 8: the capability, and then we another person who is also
Speaker 8: here full time will hit another camp on their way
Speaker 8: because it's on their way to meet up at a
Speaker 8: central location we call the Youth Center or the YC
Speaker 8: where all of our donations end up, whether it's clothes, blankets,
Speaker 8: food items, non perishables, perishables. We have a fridge and
Speaker 8: in that place, once we get there, we'll assess what
Speaker 8: we need to do is do we need to make
Speaker 8: more food? Do we have enough to go feed the
Speaker 8: third camp, which we call one seven seven, which is
Speaker 8: all the way in Boulevard a little outside of Hakamba,
Speaker 8: And if we have enough, we'll just hit we'll leave
Speaker 8: and hit that spot and then come back and start dinner.
Speaker 8: And in the meanwhile, we have a lot of volunteers
Speaker 8: that will show up and make peanut butter and jelly
Speaker 8: sandwiches because that is our easy go to staple.
Speaker 1: It's quick to give out.
Speaker 8: It's you know, not a whole lot of prep time
Speaker 8: to make, you know, five hundred sandwiches, which seems like
Speaker 8: a lot, but we've gone through probably tens of thousand
Speaker 8: those sandwiches by this point.
Speaker 7: So he gave out a thousand PB ANDJS today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 8: Yeah, we ran out like today, I gave out everything
Speaker 8: and there was even people where like the two we
Speaker 8: got everybody in the line, which was I think I
Speaker 8: think that was around three sixty. No, no, it was
Speaker 8: three sixty when we did account and so in the morning, yeah,
Speaker 8: and we ran out, and but we had two So
Speaker 8: like a lot of the times, especially the micros that
Speaker 8: have been there multiple days, they'll jump in. There's like
Speaker 8: always two people or three people that are like, I'm
Speaker 8: here to help Kurdish people, our amazing help and are
Speaker 8: always willing to step up. But yeah, this morning at
Speaker 8: Willow one of the camps, we had two guys that
Speaker 8: were kind of controlling the line and helping keep them back,
Speaker 8: and one of them like send them to us one
Speaker 8: at a time. And at the very end of it,
Speaker 8: I had nothing for them, and I was like going
Speaker 8: to hook them up with a cop sandwiches and a
Speaker 8: little have anybody who helps, I'll cook them up with
Speaker 8: a cups of extra sandwiches or food items or water
Speaker 8: or cigarettes even, And yeah, I had nothing for them
Speaker 8: except for kids sandwiches or kid sandwiches kid packs. So
Speaker 8: we make these little sandwich bags full of like different
Speaker 8: candies and you know, granola bars and things that kids
Speaker 8: would like to eat and give them a lot of
Speaker 8: nutrition and stuff. So I just gave them extra that.
Speaker 8: And once other migrants saw me giving those things out
Speaker 8: that I had been holding and telling other people know,
Speaker 8: these are for kids, then everybody swarmed and it was
Speaker 8: just like, Okay, well I'm giving all the kid whoever's there,
Speaker 8: whoever's arm is there. They're getting you know, a kid's
Speaker 8: pack and got rid of literally all of our food.
Speaker 8: And I think we put in like twelve plus cases
Speaker 8: of water, forty packs, and they were all gone except
Speaker 8: for maybe like ten or fifteen waters. It was one
Speaker 8: of the more dire mornings that we've had, especially, Yeah,
Speaker 8: at these camps.
Speaker 9: I know that three sixty was the the number that
Speaker 9: you guys got in the morning, but I believe that
Speaker 9: by the time that we were working in the evening,
Speaker 9: at least when I was doing medical check, the number
Speaker 9: that I was getting told either around the camp or
Speaker 9: from Border patrol was five hundred at Willows. So and
Speaker 9: this is you know, these are numbers that even Border
Speaker 9: Patrol is like freaking out over. They are, you know,
Speaker 9: worried because they can't deal with this quantity of people
Speaker 9: and keep them processing while there's still a consistent flow.
Speaker 9: And that's you know, it puts a lot of strain
Speaker 9: on us because, like you were saying, we're running out
Speaker 9: of food. We don't have enough to feed five hundred people,
Speaker 9: you know, every day, even though we're just doing you know,
Speaker 9: two meals a breakfast and as best we can a
Speaker 9: dinner and trying to make sure that that dinner is
Speaker 9: a hot meal because it is frigid out here. I
Speaker 9: slept in my van and I kept having to wake
Speaker 9: up to try and warm up and do something to
Speaker 9: keep myself from freezing. And I, you know, I can
Speaker 9: only a imagine what it's like for them with what
Speaker 9: minimal equipment they have. Some of them don't even have tents.
Speaker 9: So it has been a lot. I know that today,
Speaker 9: running medical, I've seen a lot of people with colds,
Speaker 9: and I am suspicious that that perhaps there is COVID
Speaker 9: running around, that perhaps there is, you know something, there's
Speaker 9: definitely something, some kind of very severe illness. Going through
Speaker 9: the camps and being in this freezing cold is not
Speaker 9: helping anyone's immune system. And on top of that, I've
Speaker 9: seen broken fingers and some other stuff. And that's that's
Speaker 9: been my today has been treating that and then helping
Speaker 9: out with dinner, which I will say I tried a
Speaker 9: little bit of the lentils and rice, and I can
Speaker 9: say we are feeding them well.
Speaker 3: It is delicious, delicious food.
Speaker 9: Thank you, Sam Schultz, an amazing cook and an amazing
Speaker 9: helper for us making sure that we, you know, are
Speaker 9: able to do this for like you were saying, for
Speaker 9: a long time, you know, this was put on you know,
Speaker 9: one family of locals to really, yeah, one family of
Speaker 9: Quakers to really take care of these people day in
Speaker 9: and day out. And it wasn't until you came here
Speaker 9: and were able to actually like be here full time
Speaker 9: that there was even just an extra hand around. And
Speaker 9: you know, right, volunteers are here during the week. But
Speaker 9: the reality is is we are all still stuck at work,
Speaker 9: we all still live in this healthscape. We're all still
Speaker 9: stuck grinding those gears and making ends meet. And so
Speaker 9: coming out here for a lot of us is you know,
Speaker 9: like for me, is a weekend task. It's you know,
Speaker 9: it's what we can do. It's what we have the
Speaker 9: ability and the time and the gas money for. And
Speaker 9: on top of that, a lot of us spent a
Speaker 9: lot of our own money. I know that I've spent
Speaker 9: like at least a grand and a half on just
Speaker 9: like supplies for these runs, on supplies for whatever I can.
Speaker 9: And you know, sometimes we get we're able to get
Speaker 9: reimbursed by our mutual aids, and sometimes the money runs
Speaker 9: dry and we just you know, we need a lot
Speaker 9: of support out here that we don't have, that we
Speaker 9: don't get and I feel like we really felt that
Speaker 9: today running out of food.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was bleak today.
Speaker 7: And of course the thing is like we can feed
Speaker 7: five hundred people and do this gug gantu an effort,
Speaker 7: and then we have to feed the same number tomorrow.
Speaker 7: And like if we clear out us that we on
Speaker 7: top of like those of us who are able to
Speaker 7: go out to do medicals, to do feeds, sometimes some
Speaker 7: of us go out and construct shelters or to check
Speaker 7: that there aren't people who are sick and the shelters
Speaker 7: who aren't getting care that they need, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 7: Like you said, people have to cook, right, people have
Speaker 7: to make pbjs. People have to resupply our stuff and
Speaker 7: drive it up from San Diego, which is an hour
Speaker 7: and fifteen minutes away. Like it's a gargantu an effort
Speaker 7: that it's exclusively taken on by volunteers, and like a
Speaker 7: relatively small group of volunteers considering the scale of the
Speaker 7: task at hand. I wonder like if you would like
Speaker 7: talk about your volunteering experience a little bit. I think
Speaker 7: it's been great, Like it's a very diverse group of people.
Speaker 7: We've had so many. We have the Schultz family who
Speaker 7: are Quakers who are amazing, who have been like spearheading
Speaker 7: this since the start. We have like obviously a lot
Speaker 7: of anarchist people, and a lot of people from various
Speaker 7: migrant advocacy and aid groups. Uh, that's what we have,
Speaker 7: the Black Panthers the other day. That's probably a ton
Speaker 7: of people I'm missing.
Speaker 1: But yeah, in church groups, church career, I.
Speaker 8: Mean, the whole the YC was kind of given to
Speaker 8: us and I think now we're renting it to my knowledge,
Speaker 8: but that was given to us by the what's the
Speaker 8: church Methodist church here in Hukumba. And then there's a
Speaker 8: group of Mormons and they're just kind of unaffiliated from
Speaker 8: their church in a way, like they're not. There was
Speaker 8: just a family that saw the need and some of
Speaker 8: the elders were helping load up the beans that they've
Speaker 8: the other day. You know from the house that the
Speaker 8: lady that makes it and then another lady Mormon lady
Speaker 8: makes us these roles and we'll just like give us
Speaker 8: like hundreds and hundreds of bread rolls, which everybody loves,
Speaker 8: even the volunteers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've been eating the bread homemade roles. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: super good.
Speaker 8: So that Yeah, like you said, mutual aid groups, anarchists,
Speaker 8: just individuals. Random people will show up they heard it.
Speaker 8: We had a couple people show up that heard it
Speaker 8: on National, NPR, KPBS, and you know, then they orgs
Speaker 8: border kindness. I'll look Gelato will come out here and
Speaker 8: send volunteers and whatnot. But it's hard to really rely
Speaker 8: on volunteers. Like we have a sign up sheet and
Speaker 8: everything so we can kind of gauge what the day
Speaker 8: is going to be like. But sometimes people don't show up,
Speaker 8: and sometimes especially around the holiday times, it gets really
Speaker 8: thin because everybody's got their own lives and things to do.
Speaker 8: And but yeah, I mean I started volunteering just on
Speaker 8: my weekends when I was working full time at my
Speaker 8: dead end jup back at home in San Diego, and
Speaker 8: I would, you know, saw the need. I was down
Speaker 8: at Whiskey eight in San de Sidro pretty much every
Speaker 8: day after work and on the weekends, and then when
Speaker 8: they started doing street releases at IRIS station in San Diego,
Speaker 8: I would just be there full time and on my
Speaker 8: weekends just be there until in Deaf and Haitian Bridge
Speaker 8: started showing up and kind of took in Detention Resistance
Speaker 8: and they kind of took over that scene, and so
Speaker 8: I the need was like, oh, Jakamba needs help.
Speaker 1: So I just would come.
Speaker 8: After that, I just started coming out here every weekend
Speaker 8: from I would get off on a Thursday at like
Speaker 8: two pm, take care of my cats at home for
Speaker 8: a second, then drive out, help out whatever I could
Speaker 8: by the time I got here, spend the night somehow
Speaker 8: either I never had to sleep in my car, but
Speaker 8: I would be ready to.
Speaker 1: And then I have some friends.
Speaker 8: Here that would put me up for the night and
Speaker 8: stay Thursday night to Friday, call day Friday, and all
Speaker 8: day Saturday until I had to go home because I
Speaker 8: worked at five am on Sunday. And then all that
Speaker 8: week I would just be at w Wait going down
Speaker 8: after work. And so I haven't had a day off
Speaker 8: since this really started. I mean, I think I got
Speaker 8: the flu for a week five days right am.
Speaker 1: I had a fever four or five fucking.
Speaker 8: Days in a row, which is horrible, but so not
Speaker 8: really a day off technically, but yeah, and then I
Speaker 8: since I had been coming out here every weekend and
Speaker 8: dedicating my time to Hukumba and had so many ties
Speaker 8: with like the locals and I know, the people who
Speaker 8: owned the hotel out here that we are currently at,
Speaker 8: and just you know, showed face and it showed a
Speaker 8: strong work ethic, I guess to help feed these people,
Speaker 8: and the passion of you know, and the amount of
Speaker 8: care that I gave and attention to these people and
Speaker 8: listening to them, and the Schultz family, who are like
Speaker 8: the main on the ground people since day one were like, yeah,
Speaker 8: this this person needs to be out here. We want
Speaker 8: to have all out here full time, and I'll love
Speaker 8: Clado got a grant to to basically fund that, and
Speaker 8: so once that money came through, I just took a
Speaker 8: sabbatical from my nine to five and I was like, peace,
Speaker 8: I got more important things to do than give Jeff
Speaker 8: Bezos more money. You know, so he needs more yachts, clearly, Yeah, clearly, yeah,
Speaker 8: and more space trips you know. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So yeah.
Speaker 8: So ever since then, I've just you know, I'm lucky
Speaker 8: enough to have that, and you know, showed that, you know,
Speaker 8: dedication to where I can be out here. And honestly,
Speaker 8: like some people may think like, oh, because I'm getting paid,
Speaker 8: I'm a boss or I'm a lead and like to me,
Speaker 8: it's like, no, we're all leading, and I'm still just
Speaker 8: doing the same work.
Speaker 1: I'm just now able to be here.
Speaker 8: Well on payroll forty eight hours a week, but in
Speaker 8: reality it's ten hour days, eight days a week.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's all the time.
Speaker 7: And like, yeah, I think it's really important that people
Speaker 7: know actually that we have a very very verseque group.
Speaker 7: It's not everybody is necessarily like committed to horizontal organizing
Speaker 7: as the be all and end all, but that's how
Speaker 7: we operate and it works really well.
Speaker 8: Yeah, especially Sam and the Quakers, they're very good at listening.
Speaker 8: There's the American Friends Society.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, it works so well.
Speaker 7: Like when I was thinking the other day, I was
Speaker 7: out here and it was the day before the holiday,
Speaker 7: and first of all, we had this moment where this
Speaker 7: lady pulled up and she was like, hey, who's in charge.
Speaker 7: We were all like everyone's in charge, and the lady
Speaker 7: was like what how does that? How did you? And
Speaker 7: then but then like another time, we had a bit
Speaker 7: of a crisis. We ran out of balls when we're
Speaker 7: trying to feed people, and like one of us came up.
Speaker 3: With yeah, and the zip blocked back.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we made so we were like, we didn't have bowls,
Speaker 7: we had sandwiches, So we gave them a sandwich and
Speaker 7: then took the zip block back back and filled it
Speaker 7: with beans and like it. You know, it wasn't the
Speaker 7: person who'd been here for the longest or done the
Speaker 7: most sessions, but it was a great idea and it
Speaker 7: got us out of a difficult situation. And like, I think,
Speaker 7: because we organize with respect for each other, we can
Speaker 7: listen to each other and incorporate those ideas and that
Speaker 7: you had something to say.
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, I just I want to highlight the community
Speaker 9: that I've seen build here. I know that in terms
Speaker 9: of nine hierarchical organizing, I personally have seen you know,
Speaker 9: everyone step up and lead, even people who are there
Speaker 9: their first day. Right if there is a task to
Speaker 9: be done and they say they know how to do
Speaker 9: it and they have a good idea, they're leading it,
Speaker 9: they're spearheading it. There is you know, there's no second
Speaker 9: guessing or egos that I've seen, at least not to
Speaker 9: such a degree that it's been harmful. And I think
Speaker 9: that that has given us a lot of power and
Speaker 9: has allowed sort of our creativity to get us through this.
Speaker 9: I think it's a testament to what non hierarchical organizing
Speaker 9: means and how you know, lack of hierarchy and lack
Speaker 9: of a dedicated leader doesn't mean a lack of leadership.
Speaker 9: I think it falls on all of us to lead.
Speaker 9: It falls on all of us to bring what we
Speaker 9: know to the table, whether that be from the experience
Speaker 9: that we've had coming here and working here and knowing
Speaker 9: the details and the minutia of what's going on specifically
Speaker 9: here in Hakamba with this project, or what we bring
Speaker 9: to the table from our past experiences. And I think
Speaker 9: that that has really beautifully coalesced into a really efficient
Speaker 9: system as best as we can do, as best as
Speaker 9: we can manage. You know, we've really made do and
Speaker 9: kept people alive in a huge way.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And I think kept people alive is right, Like
Speaker 7: if if I don't know how this would have gone
Speaker 7: down if we weren't here, because I don't know if
Speaker 7: they would have kept doing it, but certainly more people
Speaker 7: would have been very unwell or passed away. Like I
Speaker 7: think we can all think of a different medical emergency
Speaker 7: what we've had to intervene to stop it getting much worse.
Speaker 8: Yeah, like just last week, I think, did you come
Speaker 8: out the day after something? It rained on all of
Speaker 8: us and there was like a heavy downpour.
Speaker 1: We weren't even ready.
Speaker 8: We thought it was, oh, it might be like a
Speaker 8: little drizzle or it might be light rain here, and
Speaker 8: they're scattered.
Speaker 3: But then we set up and.
Speaker 8: We're cooking and getting ready for to do lunch or
Speaker 8: after breakfast and getting ready to do our dinner and stuff.
Speaker 1: And it just started downpouring on us.
Speaker 7: And I was driving and I told.
Speaker 8: You, oh, yeah, you shut up that day and literally
Speaker 8: like we in as we got to we were like,
Speaker 8: oh fuck, we got it, Like move now. So we
Speaker 8: just got all the ponchos that we had a bunch
Speaker 8: of ponchos, got them all in the car, drove to
Speaker 8: the first camp that we had fed that morning, and
Speaker 8: we're just started handing out ponchos as the rain's coming down.
Speaker 8: They're walking in as you know, the coyotes dropped them off,
Speaker 8: and that's a long hike. Had the Moon camp from
Speaker 8: where they end up to where they break in the
Speaker 8: wall is what thirty minute walk, ye so or so,
Speaker 8: and so they are arriving in the pouring rain, their
Speaker 8: socks are getting wet. It is super cold, especially at
Speaker 8: Moon because of the location. It's just ridiculously cold, and
Speaker 8: that's like case for hypothermia. And we're there to you know,
Speaker 8: to stop them from getting so wet. We're giving them
Speaker 8: trash bags for their bags, ponchos.
Speaker 1: For their being their persons.
Speaker 8: I remember seeing this little girl, she must have been
Speaker 8: like five or six, and then we had cardboard and
Speaker 8: because we didn't think it was going to be so
Speaker 8: pooring before we when we loaded up the van and
Speaker 8: we had cardboard to keep you know, the ground drive
Speaker 8: for them to like lay on in their tents or whatever.
Speaker 8: And people took the cardboard out of the van and
Speaker 8: we're like blocking the rain and shielding this little child
Speaker 8: from getting wet, you know. And it's super windy at
Speaker 8: Moon too, at that camp. It's the location.
Speaker 1: It gets a lot of the the wind from whatever
Speaker 1: that passes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it comes up from yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7: I think everything you said, which we should probably touch on,
Speaker 7: is like perhaps it's because of the way we organize,
Speaker 7: because we don't have like strict rolls and jobs or
Speaker 7: low leadership things. But like, and you'd mentioned it before,
Speaker 7: but like nine times out of ten, we end up
Speaker 7: doing things with people, not for people. Right, Like the
Speaker 7: other day, I know, like a Kurdish guy and I
Speaker 7: set up a ton of tents, so Colombian dude and
Speaker 7: I built this amazing shelter and it wasn't for hit
Speaker 7: and his family, it was for anyone who needed it.
Speaker 9: I definitely have seen that sort of collaboration with the migrants,
Speaker 9: and I feel like it doesn't.
Speaker 3: Feel like charity. It feels like mutual lid.
Speaker 9: And on top of that, when I'm hearing from them,
Speaker 9: you know they you know, they're helping us out. But
Speaker 9: then on top of that, they're saying, I'm going to
Speaker 9: get processed and I'm coming back.
Speaker 3: I'm helping, and I'm.
Speaker 9: Have you been in touch with anyone who has come
Speaker 9: back yet?
Speaker 3: Well? Yeah.
Speaker 8: Actually, like early on in IRIS, when I was doing IRIS,
Speaker 8: there was like a few people that were staying a
Speaker 8: few days before they traveled onward and they just wanted
Speaker 8: to be around and help. There was also a dude
Speaker 8: we just called him Columbia because he was from Colombia.
Speaker 8: It's kind of that nickname stuck and he stuck around.
Speaker 8: I mean, he got sponsored by are pretty much loosely
Speaker 8: sponsored by one of the organizers that was helping out
Speaker 8: of Wa and he stuck around.
Speaker 1: He came out to Ukumba a bunch of times.
Speaker 8: He killed it on everything he did, cooking dishes, whatever,
Speaker 8: you know, cleaning up whatever.
Speaker 1: He just he just saw that need.
Speaker 8: And yeah, I mean I've been in contact with a
Speaker 8: couple of people that said they would come out, and
Speaker 8: you know, I don't pressure them. I don't and a
Speaker 8: A I want pressure them to come out because they
Speaker 8: came here for you know, better life and all that.
Speaker 8: But at the same time, it's just hard to get
Speaker 8: back to some people because I've given them brought to
Speaker 8: way too many Kurdish people to get back to everyone
Speaker 8: on WhatsApp and that's you know, I got signal, I
Speaker 8: got regular text and.
Speaker 1: Then whatsappened That kind of gets buried.
Speaker 7: So Yeah, there was some Afghan folks out here in September,
Speaker 7: a few afgand folks who would come out. I think
Speaker 7: they had arrived either in May or perhaps earlier. But
Speaker 7: there were some afcron folks who came out and we're
Speaker 7: able to help us, of course, like it's great because
Speaker 7: we don't all have all the languages we need, and
Speaker 7: we don't have all the skills we need, and so
Speaker 7: the more people we can incorporate, even if temporarily well
Speaker 7: they're here, then like the better we can help people, right.
Speaker 8: Right, yeah exactly, yeah, yeah, I mean, but I think
Speaker 8: definitely the the the vibe is there that they want
Speaker 8: to come help.
Speaker 1: And yeah, like the other day I was feeding. We're
Speaker 1: doing a hot.
Speaker 8: Dinner and we set up and everything, and then all
Speaker 8: these Kurdish people because I you know, will.
Speaker 10: Wear this caffee like a like a scuff yeah, with
Speaker 10: the scarf that that you gave me, uh all the
Speaker 10: way from comieshla, and so they recognize it.
Speaker 1: And then I know, the saying is bitja Kurdistan. When
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 8: You you from Turkey, oh you Kurdish because most of
Speaker 8: the people from Turkey are Kurdish, not all the most,
Speaker 8: And so you know, we'll start talking and then you know,
Speaker 8: they get all excited and then they would just want
Speaker 8: to help, you know. And I think even regardless of
Speaker 8: if I said that or not, or had the scarf on,
Speaker 8: they would still just want to help.
Speaker 1: Remember one time.
Speaker 8: I was surrounded, it was just me serve being one
Speaker 8: of the things because we'll serve multiple things water like
Speaker 8: a soup, and then a rice or a bread or whatever,
Speaker 8: and then maybe some hand wipes or something. And so
Speaker 8: we just had it was just me in the middle,
Speaker 8: surrounded my Kurdish people, and I remember the dude next
Speaker 8: to me.
Speaker 3: It was just like someone videotape.
Speaker 8: Yeah, we Kurdish people help really well, yeah, tell the world,
Speaker 8: you know.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and then like even yeah, when we're not doing
Speaker 7: food soup, it's like guys will often come up to
Speaker 7: me and be like, hey, do you have bin bags.
Speaker 7: We'd like to clean up. We'd like it's a mess
Speaker 7: here and we'd like to clean up.
Speaker 8: Yeah, we're unloading every time I'm loading, Like that's as
Speaker 8: cell phone charging station. Everyone like it doesn't matter, you
Speaker 8: know what nationality. Someone is there to help. They're like, oh,
Speaker 8: can I grab the table? Can I do this? How
Speaker 8: can I plug this?
Speaker 1: In a lot of times there plugging and I'm like, no,
Speaker 1: I got this the certain way. I like to plug
Speaker 1: this all in that makes sense and.
Speaker 3: Relatively high risk activity.
Speaker 7: I don't want any electrocution or like the other day,
Speaker 7: I was chomping some stuff with an axe and a
Speaker 7: guy wanted to help and I was like, look, if
Speaker 7: I hurt myself, then I can get to hospital. If
Speaker 7: you hurt yourself, it's going to be a rough I
Speaker 7: mean that.
Speaker 1: Could have been a stick it out. Yea, he might
Speaker 1: have purposely hurt himself at that point.
Speaker 3: He had his whole family.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but yeah, we build shelters and like, some people
Speaker 7: are are really good at that, and they're good at
Speaker 7: tying knots, and they're good at seeing things in three
Speaker 7: D and some people are not. So like often just
Speaker 7: get a team of people who can help, and then
Speaker 7: you'll get a team of people who need shelter. So
Speaker 7: we'll just career to round booting shelters for people. And
Speaker 7: it's fun, Like it can't I'm sure it's not a
Speaker 7: very stimulating environment out there, you know. So being engaged
Speaker 7: in a talk, completing stuff and helping people, I'm sure
Speaker 7: he's rewarding.
Speaker 8: Or like, yeah, even tonight we had a dude from
Speaker 8: Turkey who just like was holding his head. Tia one
Speaker 8: of our local residents. She lives around here. Medically, she's
Speaker 8: doesn't have a whole lot of medical experience other than
Speaker 8: being a mother or a grandmother and working in as
Speaker 8: a pharmacy tech and knowing a little bit about it
Speaker 8: and learning and being super badass. She came to me
Speaker 8: and she's like, look, this guy has a headache. Here's
Speaker 8: a migraine, and he has medication from so this is
Speaker 8: obviously like an ongoing situation. And my eyes were hurting
Speaker 8: just from all the smoke from the fires that they
Speaker 8: were starting.
Speaker 1: In the area.
Speaker 8: And he's just sitting there holding his head, clearly, just
Speaker 8: absolutely miserable. So she took him in her car just
Speaker 8: to like give some heater and to warm them up
Speaker 8: and to try to make him feel better, get him
Speaker 8: away from the smoke. And she's like, yo, we gotta
Speaker 8: get this guy. He's here traveling alone from Turkey. He
Speaker 8: doesn't have anybody. So we went and found some more
Speaker 8: I think he was Kurdish as well. We went and
Speaker 8: found another Turkish person or Kurdish person from Turkey, and
Speaker 8: I grabbed this this person and I was like, hey,
Speaker 8: I have somebody here who has a gnarly migraine and
Speaker 8: they just they.
Speaker 1: Need their heir alone. They don't have shelter they need.
Speaker 8: And so this guy came over and talked to him
Speaker 8: and was like, look I got we got a tent
Speaker 8: over here, come camp with us. Like that's the kind
Speaker 8: of shit that we have to deal with, you know
Speaker 8: what I mean, Just like the migrants will like getting
Speaker 8: a migrant to help another migrant, you know, it's just
Speaker 8: like it's community.
Speaker 1: That's what like Mutual eight is about.
Speaker 9: I think that and that specific situation, I had been
Speaker 9: talking to the group that took him in. I had
Speaker 9: been talking with them and chatting with him, and I
Speaker 9: sat by the fire with them just talking about you know,
Speaker 9: what was your experience like and trying to get warm
Speaker 9: because God, it's cold out there, even for us volunteers,
Speaker 9: and you know, we're far away from the fires, and
Speaker 9: it's really hard because you know, this road is cleared
Speaker 9: and so there's you know, there's no warmth out there
Speaker 9: by where they have to stand to get food. But
Speaker 9: what do I what I want out of highlight was
Speaker 9: that because we are interacting with these people as equals,
Speaker 9: because we are coming here and seeing them as people,
Speaker 9: and we spend the time to talk with them and
Speaker 9: to build commune with them, we can build those connections
Speaker 9: which allow people like the gentleman with the migraine to
Speaker 9: you know, be taken in and to have, you know,
Speaker 9: basically a temporary family while he's there and make sure
Speaker 9: that he's taken care of. And that's I think something
Speaker 9: that really highlights the strength of this type of organization
Speaker 9: and this type of work and this type of you know,
Speaker 9: the way that our politics, the way that our ideals
Speaker 9: really shine in this kind of setting.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think it's right. Like I've been around a
Speaker 7: lot of humanitarian crises and you know, refuse situations, and
Speaker 7: I think we're doing it really excellent. Do you have
Speaker 7: a stectually given the minimal funding and and sort of
Speaker 7: scale of access to resources that we have, we could
Speaker 7: do a lot more if we had a lot more money,
Speaker 7: but we don't.
Speaker 8: You know, we're cooking on like a fucking burner with us. Yeah,
Speaker 8: we took up to a pro painting that's made out
Speaker 8: of an old cag that's just like if you turn
Speaker 8: it on wrong and let the gas bleed, you will
Speaker 8: blow yourself up. So it's just like like Sam Shaw is,
Speaker 8: you know, responsible for everybody at the youth center where
Speaker 8: we do stuff, So he doesn't really like other people cooking,
Speaker 8: does it. I Mean, even though I know how to
Speaker 8: do it, he's like, doesn't even like me doing it
Speaker 8: because he's responsible for me if anything were to happen.
Speaker 8: So it's like our capacity is super limited. We don't
Speaker 8: have enough burners, we don't have enough containers. So we
Speaker 8: have a couple one really nice like locking containers that
Speaker 8: hold hot food and keep the food hot, but not
Speaker 8: enough to serve upwards of six hundred people at all
Speaker 8: three camps, and not enough vans, like it would be ideal,
Speaker 8: like in my situation to send a van that has
Speaker 8: charging capabilities to charge everybody's cell phone, to feed everybody,
Speaker 8: to give them water and all their needs, blankets, medical
Speaker 8: to each camp all at once. Instead of us driving,
Speaker 8: it's cooking a massive amount of food of the UTH
Speaker 8: center and hoping we have enough to hit all three camps.
Speaker 8: Because the numbers we can try to call border patrol
Speaker 8: offices and get numbers, but the numbers are always a
Speaker 8: little skewed or just off, you know, or sometimes lately
Speaker 8: they have just been straight up not giving us the
Speaker 8: fucking numbers, like being dicks.
Speaker 1: Especially uh Campo.
Speaker 8: Border Patrol Office, which because we deal with two different
Speaker 8: Campo takes care of the boulevard open.
Speaker 1: Air to time and say, and then the Boulevard Border
Speaker 1: Vitel takes care.
Speaker 8: Of the willows in the moon camp in a kamba
Speaker 8: and straight up the boulevard Border Patrol called Campo Nazis.
Speaker 8: Like they treat their employees like nats. They're just Nazis,
Speaker 8: and I've seen it in fact.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but yeah, like we have to interact with board
Speaker 7: patrol a lot to get people the help that they need, right,
Speaker 7: but like, yeah, they're definitely some cases where like there
Speaker 7: have been certain people who are they the agent I
Speaker 7: spoke to you today for a border puol agent. He
Speaker 7: was very accommodating. He took the person who was in
Speaker 7: medical distress and their partner. He drove them himself to
Speaker 7: where they could be ms and ensure that the pretuity
Speaker 7: they go to hospital, Like I don't have a whole
Speaker 7: lot of knowledge what happened afterwards that we don't have.
Speaker 7: We're not entitled to their private medical information and not
Speaker 7: should we be. But like other times, it could be
Speaker 7: much harder. So it's just luck of the drawer, right,
Speaker 7: Like we there's so much we don't control, I guess, yeah,
Speaker 7: and like we don't know exactly, Like we can't control
Speaker 7: who goes when, who has the highest level of need,
Speaker 7: you know, like constantly people are be coming up to
Speaker 7: me and being like, hey, like today I was warming
Speaker 7: up milk for babies in my camping stove right and
Speaker 7: it was three or four babies, and they were like,
Speaker 7: do you think they'll take us first? We have babies,
Speaker 7: And like, I think most of the people there would
Speaker 7: rather give up their space and let that baby go
Speaker 7: out because no one wants to see a fucking baby
Speaker 7: shivering out there, like it's fucked, it's terrible, but we
Speaker 7: don't know, and we can't tell you and we can't
Speaker 7: help you. And so like a lot of that stuff's
Speaker 7: outside of our control. But the stuff that's within our control,
Speaker 7: I think we've done a really good job of. I
Speaker 7: wonder like if people are listening, I think I just
Speaker 7: want to convey that we're all just weird, like a
Speaker 7: group of like we're not like ragcaging, extremely like Motley Crue,
Speaker 7: and but we we're really doing excellent work. I think
Speaker 7: if it may blow our trumpet, but like if people
Speaker 7: want to come and help, first of all, I would
Speaker 7: like you probably can people think that they can't didn't
Speaker 7: have anything useful like a bag problem with you do
Speaker 7: like if you can, if you can like lift a
Speaker 7: ladle or like a palette of water bottles, or drive
Speaker 7: a vehicle, or like.
Speaker 8: Multip multiple languages, sometimes it's like yeah, or even just right,
Speaker 8: or even just one language other than English, because I
Speaker 8: mean even some people speak perfectly English out there, and
Speaker 8: so just going out there and paying attention to them,
Speaker 8: even if you don't have the capacity to cook food
Speaker 8: or to serve food or whatever, if you can go
Speaker 8: talk to people and you're sociable and you can make
Speaker 8: connections and listen to their needs.
Speaker 1: And you know, there's.
Speaker 8: Google Translate, there's we have a list of translators, like
Speaker 8: a form with numbers, so if you have a language barrier,
Speaker 8: you can just call start calling down the line of
Speaker 8: numbers of Mandarin or this language or that language, and
Speaker 8: you can get I got a hold of somebody one
Speaker 8: time for Mandarin to figure out how many days they
Speaker 8: had been there, and it was like called a couple
Speaker 8: of people, first no answer, and then finally someone picked up.
Speaker 8: And so it's yeah, you know, anybody always you could
Speaker 8: always find something. Honestly, one thing that I missed doing,
Speaker 8: which when I first started coming out here, we had
Speaker 8: a little bit more volunteers, especially I was coming out
Speaker 8: on the weekends, when the weekends typically we have more
Speaker 8: volunteers because people have jobs and the weekdays and week
Speaker 8: days we have less. But I was when I first
Speaker 8: started coming out to Komba on the weekends, I started
Speaker 8: bringing my guitar and my bongos and my you know,
Speaker 8: different instruments, tambourines, and I remember we gave out all
Speaker 8: the instruments to the migrants at night while we were
Speaker 8: giving them dinner to they were around the campfire and
Speaker 8: so that they can play and enjoy themselves and lift
Speaker 8: their spirits and so like that would be rad to
Speaker 8: have somebody on spot all the time with a guitar
Speaker 8: and like jamming with the migrants and lifting their spirits
Speaker 8: because it's they're miserable. And one dude from Muzbekistan once
Speaker 8: told me spoke really good English, and in fact he
Speaker 8: told me about there's like commercials and so he worked
Speaker 8: at like a center where they send people over here.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 8: Yeah, like he was on the call center or whatever
Speaker 8: for it or something like that. But well, I was like, well,
Speaker 8: like how was it? Like I he was like, honestly,
Speaker 8: we're just bored. Yeah, like they're just waiting and at
Speaker 8: that time, like the weights were like four or five days.
Speaker 1: You know, it changes, it vary.
Speaker 8: As it goes from two to three to four or five,
Speaker 8: and the distensions, and sometimes they get out the same
Speaker 8: day if they're lucky. But yeah, it was just we're
Speaker 8: bored and we're just waiting and they're anxious, and which
Speaker 8: also just tears at their spirit while they're you know,
Speaker 8: their first day in America, you know.
Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly, Yeah, like welcome to America, sleeping with Jesseet.
Speaker 7: It's like just above freezing.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and here's no blankets, no structures, no anything, no food,
Speaker 8: no water, and if you're lucky, border patrol will bring
Speaker 8: crackers and water for not enough people.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and yeah, a bunch of US waiters turn up
Speaker 7: with blankets and that's it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 9: And I know that even if it's you know, I
Speaker 9: try and include other people. But even just like I
Speaker 9: go out there with my guitar sometimes and there's a
Speaker 9: lull and or we're waiting to pack up or whatever,
Speaker 9: and I'll be playing and I think that little moments
Speaker 9: like that mean everything for these folks. And I know
Speaker 9: that I've you know, I'll bring up that I have.
Speaker 9: You know, on a day that I don't have my guitar,
Speaker 9: I'll bring up that I play it and the migrants
Speaker 9: will be all excited, wanting me to bring it out
Speaker 9: or wanting me to to you know, whatever the activity
Speaker 9: may be, just to stimulate, you know, their minds a
Speaker 9: little bit. I mean, this is it's it's really bleak
Speaker 9: and being there for for days, for just stuck in
Speaker 9: the desert with nothing to do, right, And I mean sometimes,
Speaker 9: you know, I've seen a soccer ball out there that
Speaker 9: the kids play with, and that's that's so heartwight warming.
Speaker 9: Things like that that really, you know, we want these
Speaker 9: people to feel like they can still be in community
Speaker 9: with each other like they're not. And I feel like
Speaker 9: things like that really help to repair that sense of
Speaker 9: desperation because right now, with the level of desperation, we
Speaker 9: do see a lot of fighting for supplies, a lot
Speaker 9: of fighting for resources because it's it's hard. It's hard
Speaker 9: out there. People want to make sure that their kids
Speaker 9: have blankets. People are so cold they can't sleep, and
Speaker 9: I feel like things that bring them together, activities that
Speaker 9: really make them feel like a community out there and
Speaker 9: help us feel in community with them allows us to
Speaker 9: have a more cohesive relationship and allows things to go
Speaker 9: more smoothly. And I think it's, you know, in some cases,
Speaker 9: more important than the supplies themselves, because it makes sure
Speaker 9: that they go to the right places. It helps us triage,
Speaker 9: It helps us, you know, it's its own tool for
Speaker 9: survivals from.
Speaker 8: It, it could distract them from their suffering. You know,
Speaker 8: if they can have an ounce of joy, you know,
Speaker 8: and this horrible condition, in these horrible conditions, it'll distract
Speaker 8: them enough to smile and to laugh and to not
Speaker 8: be miserable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I have a normal moment. Yeah.
Speaker 7: So I wonder if people want to help, what other
Speaker 7: ways that they can help.
Speaker 8: Ways it can help are are coming out here directly,
Speaker 8: hands on the ground. Money donating money is another huge
Speaker 8: need because a lot of the supplies that we need
Speaker 8: cost money. We need a new kitchen, We need you know,
Speaker 8: a dishwashing station because we're currently just dumping all of
Speaker 8: our dish washing water into a lawn that has a
Speaker 8: small drain. Yeah, and yeah, I look to Alatto is
Speaker 8: one organization that takes money that you can donate to.
Speaker 1: Border Kindness is another one.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I know, Detention Resistance is out here a lot.
Speaker 8: The most direct way too, is would be donating directly
Speaker 8: to Sam Schultz himself.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: So yeah, and just you know, following those same organizations,
Speaker 8: They're a Free Shit Collective is another one.
Speaker 1: They mostly focus on W eight.
Speaker 8: But this is all related, right, Like, I we had
Speaker 8: this man from Turkey who came with his dog bom
Speaker 8: bomb or bam bam, like he said Flintstones, but they
Speaker 8: say bomb bomb, I guess. And he was stuck in
Speaker 8: one of the camps and so you know, we re
Speaker 8: like took his dog because he was not going to
Speaker 8: be taken from the camp. He spent the night alone
Speaker 8: because they had enough room for him. They're just like,
Speaker 8: they don't know how to process a fucking dog, I guess.
Speaker 8: So we took his dog for him and so he
Speaker 8: could get processed. And once he ended up out of
Speaker 8: detention at Central, which is where they released them, we
Speaker 8: reunited his dog with him. Very emotional on both sides
Speaker 8: of the separation.
Speaker 1: And the reuniting.
Speaker 8: So you know, there's all these organizations you can you know,
Speaker 8: volunteer down in Central at the when they release you
Speaker 8: can you know this and so yeah, but following all
Speaker 8: these accounts share the stories.
Speaker 1: You know what I mean.
Speaker 8: On your social medias be it Twitter, I'll never call
Speaker 8: it the other thing, or you know, Instagram, Facebook, whatever
Speaker 8: your media is.
Speaker 1: Discord YadA YadA.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think even sharing the stories is really powerful.
Speaker 7: People could translate, they can reach out, they want to
Speaker 7: do that. I looked up the r L it's for
Speaker 7: border Kindness. It's link tr dot ee slash border kindness,
Speaker 7: and for it's al alado a l O t r
Speaker 7: O l a d o dot org slash donate.
Speaker 1: And they pay me to be out here, so please
Speaker 1: don't it to them.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, help them border kindas. Jackie and James are great,
Speaker 8: They're always out here. It's yeah, either one is wonderful.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: I also wanted to highlight the lovely mutual aid groups
Speaker 9: that do a lot of work. There's not as many
Speaker 9: of them directly putting their efforts out here, but I
Speaker 9: know that they have helped me work out here and
Speaker 9: make sure that I have the funds I need to,
Speaker 9: you know, do little store runs that are necessary on
Speaker 9: a on a moment's notice at times because we we
Speaker 9: run out of something and we can't wait for a
Speaker 9: bulk order supply and the you know there. There are
Speaker 9: these mutual aid groups, you know, they they put in
Speaker 9: the work to reimburse folks when we do things like that,
Speaker 9: when we have to go make runs because we can't
Speaker 9: bulk order, we can't do it the most efficient way
Speaker 9: because we have a need right now. And that has
Speaker 9: saved us in a lot of different moments, especially I
Speaker 9: used to volunteer down at W eight in sanny Sidro,
Speaker 9: and that was the primary way that we got resources
Speaker 9: was through these mutual aid groups who who fundraise and
Speaker 9: and I yeah, I just wanted to highlight them and
Speaker 9: highlight the So there's the Rose Cup Collective. I know
Speaker 9: that they do a lot of fundraising. I know that
Speaker 9: you were saying free Ship, Free Shit Collective. There's a
Speaker 9: few freestore SD Yeah, there's a there's a few different
Speaker 9: ones who you know, their funds help keep us running,
Speaker 9: especially in the hardest of times right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because we're all broke. We're so broke. We we
Speaker 3: have no money, any money.
Speaker 8: I'm on the migrant diet because I'm broke and eating
Speaker 8: the food that we feed them when there's leftovers.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we've been a lot of PB and J and
Speaker 7: beans help us, help us feed ourselves and that was wonderful.
Speaker 7: Thank you so much. Yeah, everyone listening to your.
Speaker 3: Do name, thank you. Yeah, and come down here.
Speaker 7: If someone came from San Francisco in May, come back,
Speaker 7: Like there are places you can stay are in the
Speaker 7: desert if you want to come and help. But even
Speaker 7: if you have language skills like we there were so
Speaker 7: many ways you can help.
Speaker 4: Come down.
Speaker 9: I've always had a place to stay, even though I like,
Speaker 9: like of all I've I've always been ready to sleep
Speaker 9: in my van, but always had a spot to say,
Speaker 9: come down. It's you know, it's worth it. It's there's
Speaker 9: a vortex they called the locals call it. Call it
Speaker 9: a vortex. You know. You you come here and it's
Speaker 9: like every past lifetime has has been here, and you're
Speaker 9: you're destined to be here. There's something special about this
Speaker 9: town and I've really fallen in love with it since coming.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, I hope more people come.
Speaker 7: It would mean a lot to me if like we
Speaker 7: could do something cool and like further support something that's
Speaker 7: very important to me and I think very important for
Speaker 7: the world.
Speaker 1: Totally. It's sick.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, howdy, welcome back to It could happen here.
Speaker 2: A podcast about about those wacky gen Z kids. Uh,
Speaker 2: and how all of the things that the mainstream media
Speaker 2: used to say about millennials I have now embraced to
Speaker 2: say about gen Z who are destroying the world through
Speaker 2: their through their greed and evilness and good knees comparatively. Yeah, Miah,
Speaker 2: how are you doing? You're you're gen Z?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I'm on okay, I am on the exact
Speaker 3: borderline of I am either the oldest Zoomer or the
Speaker 3: youngest millennial.
Speaker 2: So you're you're a day walker, right like you're the
Speaker 2: you're the Blade of gen Z. Yeah, yeah, okay, so
Speaker 2: you could go out in the sunlight onions, but you
Speaker 2: still need blood.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I get it, I get it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, who's the Chris Christal I guess I'm the Chris Christofferson.
Speaker 2: If we're doing the original Blade movie, which I watched
Speaker 2: over Thanksaving Break, pretty good. I hadn't seen it in
Speaker 2: like fucking twenty years, but solid movie, solid movie.
Speaker 3: I feel like it's kind of downhill from the Blood Rim.
Speaker 3: But the Blood Rave is pretty sick. It's all every
Speaker 3: everything in culture was downhill from Blood Rave. But yeah,
Speaker 3: it's got some it's got some good bits to it still,
Speaker 3: you know what doesn't have good bits to it the
Speaker 3: institution of marriage.
Speaker 2: That I mean, I don't disagree with that, but I
Speaker 2: was going to say the Washington Post editorial.
Speaker 3: Board, Ah, you know, yeah, so.
Speaker 2: We are talking is that this is an episode about
Speaker 2: some gin z panic shit that came out recently that
Speaker 2: I felt was worth digging into because of the pretty
Speaker 2: interesting ways in which it's wrong if you were, you know,
Speaker 2: celebrating being with your family, eating turkey or just shooting
Speaker 2: up Heroin alone in the bathroom. Last week, on November
Speaker 2: twenty second, twenty twenty three, the Washington Post Editorial Board
Speaker 2: published an opinion column with the provocative title, if attitudes
Speaker 2: don't shift, a political dating mismatch will threaten marriage.
Speaker 3: Hell yeah, yeah, I want this destroy the institution.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, we're doing this through a political dating mismatch.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: I think an article with roughly this premise drops every year,
Speaker 2: sometimes a couple of times a year, on a couple
Speaker 2: of different places. This time it came in through the
Speaker 2: Washington Post Editorial Board, and the basic premise of this
Speaker 2: specific article is that gen Z and millennial men are
Speaker 2: growing more conservative while women are growing more progressive. This
Speaker 2: threatens marriage as an institution because all these closed minded
Speaker 2: gen Z lib broads won't date Republicans right. That is
Speaker 2: literally like the point of the article is a gen
Speaker 2: Z liberal women they are less willing to date outside
Speaker 2: of their political beliefs, and men are getting more conservative,
Speaker 2: so it's really a danger for marriage. Now, I understand
Speaker 2: if your first impulse is to say something like, well,
Speaker 2: when has the Washington Post editorial board ever been right
Speaker 2: about a single goddamn thing? And that is a correct
Speaker 2: attitude to have.
Speaker 3: Sometimes they make the decision not to publish an article.
Speaker 3: There are some days where they don't write anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you have to. That is a good decision. If
Speaker 2: they made that decision every day, I would be fully
Speaker 2: supportive of the Washington Post editorial board. And if they'll
Speaker 2: hire me, I can make that decision for them every day.
Speaker 2: I'm very good at not doing anything. That said, even
Speaker 2: though it is correct to say the Washington Post editorial
Speaker 2: boarder basically always wrong, I've still run into overwhelming numbers
Speaker 2: of my peers who think this article is silly, but
Speaker 2: still buy into the basic points in this piece. This
Speaker 2: is generally married to a widespread belief which is actually
Speaker 2: cited in the article that toxic male influencers like Andrew
Speaker 2: Tait have tilted huge numbers of young men to the right.
Speaker 2: So even though people will be like, well, it's stupid
Speaker 2: to expect people to date, you know, folks who believe
Speaker 2: horrible political things that would hurt them, it's true that
Speaker 2: men are getting more young men are getting more conservative, right,
Speaker 2: and this is I think generally down to this belief
Speaker 2: that has I don't think people examine often. They just
Speaker 2: sort of like they get concerned about the popularity of
Speaker 2: guys like Tate, which is valid, he's concerning, but assume
Speaker 2: that does mean that, like, yeah, we're losing the young men.
Speaker 2: They've all been tilted towards these guys. And so without
Speaker 2: discounting the damage of dudes like Tate, I wanted to
Speaker 2: give a breakdown of how common the so called right
Speaker 2: word tilt of young men actually is because spoilers, this
Speaker 2: is a pernicious bit of disinformation, and I think it
Speaker 2: kind of blackpills a lot of people unnecessarily. Let's start
Speaker 2: with the obvious point here. Young men are not growing
Speaker 2: more conservative across the board than men of other generations.
Speaker 2: So first off, I want to read you a quote
Speaker 2: from this Post editorial. Since mister Trump's election in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: the percentage of young women ages eighteen to thirty who
Speaker 2: identify as liberal has shot up from slightly over twenty
Speaker 2: percent to thirty two percent. Young men have not followed suit,
Speaker 2: If anything, they have grown more conservative now that claim
Speaker 2: is based, You want to guess, did they cite a
Speaker 2: bunch of different sources to prove like that it's a
Speaker 2: really widespread problem, or do they have a single statorial
Speaker 2: board they have?
Speaker 3: Those people could not find a second study if you
Speaker 3: nailed it to their face, they share, couldn't they share?
Speaker 3: Couldn't they googled real quickly? Or I'm not even gonna
Speaker 3: give them credit for googling. One of their friends who
Speaker 3: works at a right wing think tank sent them a
Speaker 3: survey from that right wing think tank, because that the
Speaker 3: entire statistical basis of that claim is a study by
Speaker 3: the American Enterprise Institute, which is a center right think
Speaker 3: tank that tends to produce center rights surveys. And even then,
Speaker 3: the study that they are actually citing doesn't show what
Speaker 3: the Post editorial board claims. Again their claims, young men
Speaker 3: have not followed suit if anything, they have grown more conservative, right,
Speaker 3: young men, So they are talking across the board about
Speaker 3: gen Z and millennial males, right, I'm going to quote
Speaker 3: from that study. Previous research identified a growing gap and
Speaker 3: ideological orientation between young men and women. The gender gap
Speaker 3: in liberal identity is notable among members of Generation Z,
Speaker 3: but it's relatively modest. Forty three percent of gen Z
Speaker 3: women identify as liberal compared to thirty five percent of
Speaker 3: gen Z men. However, the gender divide among white, non
Speaker 3: Hispanic gen Z adults is considerable, close to half. Forty
Speaker 3: six percent of gen Z women are liberal, a far
Speaker 3: greater share than white gen Z men, among whom only
Speaker 3: twenty eight percent identify as liberal. Among gen Z adults,
Speaker 3: white men are significantly more likely than white women to
Speaker 3: identify as politically conservative thirty six percent versus twenty six percent.
Speaker 3: So you see what number one the study is doing there?
Speaker 3: Is it saying forty three percent of gen Z women
Speaker 3: all gen Z women identify as liberal, whereas and then
Speaker 3: it goes to thirty six percent of white gens Z
Speaker 3: men identify it. It's switching it on them, right. And
Speaker 3: while it does eventually acknowledge the differences where because it
Speaker 3: says that like across the board, all gen Z men
Speaker 3: thirty five percent or conservative, forty three percent of gen
Speaker 3: Z women are liberal. That's not a massive gap, right.
Speaker 3: The Washington Post editorial board just makes the claim that
Speaker 3: young men have grown more conservative, which is not supported
Speaker 3: by the study. And also the study is specifically talking
Speaker 3: about how gen Z white men have gotten more conservative. Right,
Speaker 3: very different things being claimed here. So the Post just
Speaker 3: ignored what was actually in the survey to claim all
Speaker 3: young men, not just young white men, are more conservative,
Speaker 3: not just gen Z white men are more conservative. Now,
Speaker 3: this is weird, But even if you take the study,
Speaker 3: which is misrepresented by the editorial board at its face value,
Speaker 3: that study does not gel with all of the other
Speaker 3: data that we have. Now, when I went through this,
Speaker 3: it was hard to find good data on just gen
Speaker 3: Z men. That is not broken out in most of
Speaker 3: the studies that we get. But we do have some
Speaker 3: information on how gen Z adult men voted as a
Speaker 3: group in the twenty twenty two midterms, and that data
Speaker 3: is telling. Based on the twenty twenty two midterms, seventy
Speaker 3: one percent of young women, that's a that's gen Z
Speaker 3: mostly gen Z eighteen to twenty nine, So I think
Speaker 3: gen Z taps out at twenty six right now. So
Speaker 3: presumably a percentage of the people in this are technically millennials,
Speaker 3: but they're yeah, they're like you, they're day walkers. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's like what like, oh my god, I can't I
Speaker 3: can't do math live on air.
Speaker 2: I think it's like twenty seven to forty something is
Speaker 2: the millennials.
Speaker 3: But I'm gonna say it's close enough to this. This
Speaker 3: is closes. It's only like.
Speaker 2: Three years of people, yeah, right exactly, and they're the
Speaker 2: three years that are that are right in the middle.
Speaker 2: But of that of these voters in the twenty twenty
Speaker 2: two midterms, seventy one percent of young women voted for Democrats,
Speaker 2: twenty six percent voted for Republicans, fifty three percent of
Speaker 2: young men voted for Democrats, forty two percent voted for Republicans.
Speaker 2: And among LGBT, and again this is not broken down
Speaker 2: male or female, ninety three percent voted for Democrats, and overall,
Speaker 2: among non LGBT youth, fifty eight percent voted for Democrats,
Speaker 2: thirty eight percent voted for Republicans. So again not massive
Speaker 2: discrepancies here, and one thing that may help to explain
Speaker 2: this that again is not really broken down in the
Speaker 2: Washington Post editorial is that while gen Z white men
Speaker 2: have are more conservative compared to like gen Z millennial
Speaker 2: white men, gen Z itself is a lot less white
Speaker 2: than prior generations, which means overall gen Z men are
Speaker 2: not really getting more conservative. About fifty five percent of
Speaker 2: gen Z is white compared to about seventy percent of boomers. Right,
Speaker 2: So this is one major reason why. Again this because
Speaker 2: again if you actually factor in all of gen Z,
Speaker 2: there's not this huge worry about like a marriage discrepancy
Speaker 2: as long as you assume that people, you know that
Speaker 2: interracial dating is not a problem for most people the
Speaker 2: way it is for apparently the Washington Post editorial board.
Speaker 2: Now there's a couple of caveats here. One is that
Speaker 2: midterm voters are historically more engaged and educated than voters
Speaker 2: of other generations. However, that may not necessarily hold true
Speaker 2: with gen Z or millennial voters today due to a
Speaker 2: variety of factors. One worthwhile point is that young people
Speaker 2: tend to be driven far more by what they encounter
Speaker 2: through social media, which is probably part of why gen
Speaker 2: Z and millennial voters consider abortion to be a more
Speaker 2: important thing to vote on than the economy by a
Speaker 2: margin that bears no resemblance to older generations. This is
Speaker 2: why we've actually seen unless four elections soaring youth voter turnout,
Speaker 2: particularly during the midterms, record levels of youth voting, Which
Speaker 2: doesn't mean it's completely wrong that midterm voters may be
Speaker 2: a bit more engaged and educated, but that's probably less
Speaker 2: of a factor for young voters that it is for
Speaker 2: older generations. Right, some of the conventional wisdom about who
Speaker 2: votes when is not as accurate when we're talking about
Speaker 2: younger people. This is not something that you can prove objectively,
Speaker 2: but there's there's significant, sort of circumstantial evidence around this.
Speaker 2: Speaking of circumstances, you know what circumstances get me to
Speaker 2: spend my money?
Speaker 3: Is it being served products and services.
Speaker 2: It's well, it's when those products and services advertise on
Speaker 2: this podcast and only this podcast. So check that shit out, homies,
Speaker 2: ah and we're back.
Speaker 3: So yeah.
Speaker 2: One of the you know, overall points to make that
Speaker 2: I think goes against this kind of panic a lot
Speaker 2: of people have that gen Z is somehow being like
Speaker 2: pilled away from progressive politics, is that as a result
Speaker 2: of stuff, primarily abortion. Gen Z voters supported Democrats over
Speaker 2: Republicans in the midterm elections by and astonishing twenty seven points.
Speaker 2: This is again a large part of this came down
Speaker 2: to abortion, which gen Z voters prioritize by a higher
Speaker 2: amount than any other generation. One of the things that
Speaker 2: was noted in one of the studies I found is
Speaker 2: like a potential line of hope for Republicans is that
Speaker 2: while this and this is part of where I think
Speaker 2: some of the fear mongering and these Washington Post articles
Speaker 2: comes from, although I don't think it says what they
Speaker 2: think it says is that lower numbers of young people
Speaker 2: support specific parties. Right, so only about thirty percent of
Speaker 2: gen zs align with Democrats compared to twenty four percent
Speaker 2: of Republicans. And if you just look at that, that's
Speaker 2: way less.
Speaker 3: That seems like.
Speaker 2: You're seeing like these numbers sort of kind of tighten up.
Speaker 2: But again, they still voted over Democrats of Republicans by
Speaker 2: twenty seven points. It's just that gen Z is less
Speaker 2: loyal to political parties, which doesn't necessarily mean that progressivism
Speaker 2: is in danger, just means that most young people hate
Speaker 2: the Democrats.
Speaker 3: Too, and that could. And the other thing is like
Speaker 3: the thing that actually legit and I think this is legitimately.
Speaker 3: A part of it is like, well, okay, so what happened.
Speaker 3: What's happening to all those people? And the answer is
Speaker 3: they're becoming socialists And it's like, well that doesn't help
Speaker 3: the public cans either, Yeah.
Speaker 2: So yeah, and it's it's I mean, part of it
Speaker 2: is that more young people identify with like kind of
Speaker 2: more politically radical chunks of progressivism. Part of it is
Speaker 2: that a lot more of them identify as independent and
Speaker 2: may not have may not identify themselves super much as
Speaker 2: a specific political chunk, but in general, like they vote progressive,
Speaker 2: they just don't have any faith in like the ossified
Speaker 2: political structures in our society, which is a rational thing
Speaker 2: to do as a young person.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So I also want to address kind of the elephant
Speaker 2: in the room with this piece, which is that the
Speaker 2: Washington Post editorial Board's obsession with political divide among the
Speaker 2: young harming marriage specifically, is also kind of gay panicky, right,
Speaker 2: because one of the reasons why there seems to be
Speaker 2: this divide that they see as like this threatens marriage
Speaker 2: is that a higher percentage of gen Z kids are
Speaker 2: less interested in straight marriage. And these gen Z kids,
Speaker 2: male and female, are not getting more conservative, but they're
Speaker 2: also presumably not going to do the kind of marriage
Speaker 2: that the Washington Post editorial board was right. I'm going
Speaker 2: to quote from a Time magazine right up here. In
Speaker 2: late twenty twenty and early twenty twenty one, gen Z
Speaker 2: was the only US generation in which a majority believed
Speaker 2: there are more than two genders. As recently as the
Speaker 2: first half of twenty twenty, this was a minority opinion
Speaker 2: even among Gen zs, a remarkable amount of change over
Speaker 2: just six months. In contrast, there was only a small
Speaker 2: uptick in this belief among older generations. That type of
Speaker 2: data is finally available. Starting in June twenty twenty one,
Speaker 2: the US Census Bureau offered four options on its Household
Speaker 2: Pulse survey question about gender male, female, transgender, and none
Speaker 2: of these. The last a rough gauge of those who
Speaker 2: identify as non binary, gender fluid, or another gender identity.
Speaker 2: With that more terrible way of phrasing that court, it's
Speaker 2: not a great way. It's better than nothing, but yeah,
Speaker 2: it's not God with more than with more than a
Speaker 2: million respondents. The survey is large enough to provide accurate estimates.
Speaker 2: The results are clear. Gen Z young adults are much
Speaker 2: more likely to report identifying as either trans or non
Speaker 2: binary than other generations. Well, only one out of a
Speaker 2: thousand boomers report they are transgender one tenth of one percent.
Speaker 2: Twenty three out of one thousand gen Z young adults
Speaker 2: two point three percent identify as trans twenty times more.
Speaker 2: By this estimate, there are now more TRANSI young adults
Speaker 2: in the US than the number of people living in Boston,
Speaker 2: which is great because I have long felt that what
Speaker 2: we need to do is arm trans people to take
Speaker 2: over the city of Boston. I believe this for years,
Speaker 2: and I think we can finally make it happen.
Speaker 3: Okay, but here's the problem, though, you still have to
Speaker 3: live in Boston afterwards. Well, I guess we could take
Speaker 3: the city of Boston and live somewhere else and then
Speaker 3: sort of like, yeah, you dous from it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, presumably, yeah you could. You could basically become like
Speaker 2: collectively the landlords of Boston and then use it to
Speaker 2: afford rented in a better place.
Speaker 3: This is viable, I believe, I believe in our lifetime.
Speaker 2: So we can tell, and this will finally increase gen
Speaker 2: z's like home ownership numbers. Right if collectively all of
Speaker 2: the transn non binary people own Boston.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a workable plan.
Speaker 2: I think I'm going to continue that quote. Fewer than
Speaker 2: one percent of boomers identify as non binary, compared to
Speaker 2: more than three percent of gen Z young adults. Combined
Speaker 2: with the more than two percent to our trans, that
Speaker 2: means one out of eighteen young adults identified as something
Speaker 2: other than male or female in twenty twenty one or
Speaker 2: twenty twenty two, which is again, it's not true because
Speaker 2: half of the note it's not it's not it's not
Speaker 2: the time because again two percent are trans, which presumably,
Speaker 2: based on this survey and how it's asked, presumably means
Speaker 2: identify as either male or female, whereas three percent our
Speaker 2: non binary of some sort may not, may not identify
Speaker 2: as either male or It doesn't say that this is
Speaker 2: this is this is not well written, but the day
Speaker 2: is interesting. It suggests five to six percent of gen
Speaker 2: Z our trans are non binary, which is a wild
Speaker 2: departure from previous generations. Right, And also that's a significant
Speaker 2: chunk of this These gen Z numbers that are not
Speaker 2: being included in this Washington Post because presumably a decent
Speaker 2: chunk of these people will want to get married. They
Speaker 2: just don't I identify in a way that the gen
Speaker 2: Z that the Washington Post editorial board respects.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: And again, one of the things that's interesting about this,
Speaker 2: and contra to all this fearmongering about Andrew Tates destroying
Speaker 2: all the men, is that male or female gen Z
Speaker 2: and millennial voters overwhelmingly support LGBT rights more than they
Speaker 2: support almost anything else. And this is consistent across the board,
Speaker 2: and markedly higher than it is for other generations.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Presumably this seems to include even like more independent or
Speaker 2: even more conservative gen Z and millennial voters.
Speaker 3: Right, They're just.
Speaker 2: Across the board less shitty on this, I'm guessing presumably
Speaker 2: because a lot of their friends are trands or non
Speaker 2: binary or just queer, and that that makes them less
Speaker 2: bigoted about this stuff. And again doesn't really fit in
Speaker 2: to this this narrative. Right, And this is again part
Speaker 2: of why I'm not as doomer about you know, there's
Speaker 2: this there's this big fear. Oh, you know, progressives are
Speaker 2: desert young people are deserting progressivism. Which is going to
Speaker 2: do musclectorally, and I'm just not seeing that in the numbers.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: Again, everything that's been going on with like the Biden
Speaker 2: administration's you know, support of Israel certainly may and probably
Speaker 2: will have an impact politically, but it's not necessarily it's
Speaker 2: not very clearly not a result of young people getting
Speaker 2: pilled by Andrew Tate. Right, that's not why that's happened.
Speaker 3: And there's there's a thing I wanted to talk about
Speaker 3: with the Andrew Tate stuff too, because like everyone's treating
Speaker 3: this as like a completely new phenomena and it's like
Speaker 3: most of the people who are talking about this should
Speaker 3: be old enough to remember gamer Gate, Like this stuff
Speaker 3: has all happened before, and it was like, yeah, like
Speaker 3: gamer Date did produce a bunch of fascists, and also
Speaker 3: the millennials were still unbelievably further left than like the
Speaker 3: generations that came before them. Yeah, so like it's like
Speaker 3: this is this is this is just a thing. Like
Speaker 3: every generation has a a giant thing where there's like
Speaker 3: a bunch of right wing like yeah, a big push.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like this just happens periodically. It's just like
Speaker 3: a part of it. It's a part of Baltics. It sucks,
Speaker 3: it's bad, but it's also like not a thing to
Speaker 3: be humored about.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: I do think another thing that is happening here is
Speaker 2: that the kind of people who become members of the
Speaker 2: Washington Post editorial board have this, have this brainworm, this
Speaker 2: sickness that infects members of the American media worse than
Speaker 2: almost anyone else, which is like they're always looking for Ah,
Speaker 2: contrary to popular wisdom. You think this, but the reality,
Speaker 2: you know, it's the it's Malcolm Gladwell syndrome, right where
Speaker 2: you've got to come up with some like clever thing
Speaker 2: that shows that you're smart because you don't buy into
Speaker 2: the standard wisdom, which is always wrong. I mean, there's
Speaker 2: and that and so that they have to believe that
Speaker 2: whatever is really happening is the opposite of what's obvious happening, right,
Speaker 2: which is why this Actually young men are getting more conservative,
Speaker 2: and it's I'm the only one who realizes, and I've
Speaker 2: got to warn every one of the danger to marriage.
Speaker 2: Speaking of which, here's another quote from that Washington Post article.
Speaker 3: In another era, political or ideological differences might have had
Speaker 3: less impact on marriage rates, but increasingly the political is personal.
Speaker 3: A twenty twenty one survey of college students found that
Speaker 3: seventy one percent of Democrats would not date someone with
Speaker 3: opposing views. There is some logic to this marriage across
Speaker 3: religious or political lines. If either partner considers those things
Speaker 3: to be central with their identity, can be associated with
Speaker 3: lower levels of life satisfaction, and politics is becoming more
Speaker 3: central to people's identity. This mismatch means that someone will
Speaker 3: need to compromise, as the researchers Lymonstone and Brad Wilcox
Speaker 3: have noted, about one in five young singles will have
Speaker 3: little choice but to marry someone outside of their ideological tribe.
Speaker 3: The other option is that they decline to get married
Speaker 3: at all. Not an ideal outcome considering the data showing
Speaker 3: that marriage is good for the the societies and individuals alike.
Speaker 3: And again, this is only the case that one five
Speaker 3: number is ignoring queer people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, because they are largely ignoring non white people, right,
Speaker 2: Like it's it's it's just not accurate, Like, yeah, maybe
Speaker 2: a lot more young white men are going to be single,
Speaker 2: and there's problems that will occur to you to that, right,
Speaker 2: because for one thing, that's the group that tends to
Speaker 2: like load up on guns and shoot up public places.
Speaker 2: Not saying it's not a problem, but it doesn't mean
Speaker 2: that our society is doomed because no one's getting married.
Speaker 2: It means that there's some serious problems with young white
Speaker 2: men that we need to deal with.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well there's there's There's two other things that I
Speaker 3: think are interesting there. One is, Okay, you can tell
Speaker 3: when these people like formed their political beliefs because they're
Speaker 3: complaining about the personal is political, which is this is
Speaker 3: ninety shit like that is that is like that is
Speaker 3: like like old school ass like this is this is
Speaker 3: like stuff people were like I don't know, it's it's
Speaker 3: like it's like political correctness where it's like it's the
Speaker 3: previous version of the same panic that everyone's having. Now
Speaker 3: this is from the nineties, so it's like all of
Speaker 3: these people are just like absolute dinosaurs who they've like
Speaker 3: dragged out to write this like weird fearmongering thing. And
Speaker 3: the second thing is I think is interesting too, is
Speaker 3: like just the deep, ingrained, sort of very conservative assumption here,
Speaker 3: which is that marriage is good for society, which I
Speaker 3: don't think is anywhere near as straightforward a proposition as
Speaker 3: to Washington Post is making it seem like and you know,
Speaker 3: and like they have racistical arguments. I mean, the cistics
Speaker 3: that I've seen, like you know, just just sort of
Speaker 3: likeasistics that I've seen based on American society is that
Speaker 3: like women who aren't married are way happier than they
Speaker 3: are in marriages, and you know, like men do worse.
Speaker 3: But like you know, but like I mean, this is
Speaker 3: one of these things there's like we don't know, like
Speaker 3: there has not been a version of America where we
Speaker 3: haven't where the institution of marriage wasn't like our thing
Speaker 3: that hasn't existed for like two or three hundred years, Right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: we don't know the Washington Post know what an American
Speaker 3: society without, like where people don't get married looks like
Speaker 3: like they have no idea, but they're just sort of
Speaker 3: assuming that it's like the apocalypse because they're weird conservatives
Speaker 3: in the nineties.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and a lot of I mean, and again, a
Speaker 2: massive part of what we're seeing here is less it's
Speaker 2: objectively good, like marriage is the result of all of
Speaker 2: these kind of positive mental health outcomes and more well,
Speaker 2: when people are like, have relationships and loved ones and
Speaker 2: like a family system supporting them. They're less likely to
Speaker 2: commit suicide, They're more likely to have someone notice if
Speaker 2: they take ill. They're just like healthier in general. But
Speaker 2: that doesn't that doesn't necessarily mean that it's marriage specifically,
Speaker 2: and more like yeah, not being alone, right, Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 2: I want to continue and just kind of go through.
Speaker 2: I think we've trashed this article enough, but I did
Speaker 2: find a lot of interesting stuff about gen Z and
Speaker 2: young voters that I wanted to get into. But first,
Speaker 2: here's some more fucking ads, pigs, you have, filthy mongrels.
Speaker 2: Slop it up, suck it down. Anyway, we'll be back
Speaker 2: in a minute, and we're back. So one interesting thing
Speaker 2: I found. I tried to stick to just stuff from
Speaker 2: like twenty twenty one or later for this, in part
Speaker 2: because of the Andrew Tait of it. All Right, I
Speaker 2: wanted to like try to find stuff that was like, Okay,
Speaker 2: since that guy came onto the scene, has there been
Speaker 2: some sudden shift because people treat him like the pied
Speaker 2: piper of fucking fascism, which, again, he's a problem, but
Speaker 2: I don't think that's broadly accurate. So one of the
Speaker 2: studies I found was a twenty twenty one survey from
Speaker 2: MTV AP and o RC right, And it was interesting
Speaker 2: because it showed something I didn't really, something I had
Speaker 2: kind of bought into, was at least less supported by
Speaker 2: the evidence than I might have thought, which is like
Speaker 2: the level of doomerism in young people politics. Gen Z
Speaker 2: actually shows optim like that they are more optimistic than
Speaker 2: a lot of older people, both in the state of
Speaker 2: the world and their role in improving it. Two thirds
Speaker 2: of gen Z feels like their generation is motivated to
Speaker 2: make positive change in the country. Part of I think
Speaker 2: where we get some of the feelings of doomerism is
Speaker 2: that only about fourteen percent think that they can have
Speaker 2: an impact on what the government does.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that that is an entirely reasonable assessment
Speaker 3: of I mean just like looking at polling data on
Speaker 3: Palestine or like absolutely, no, not we had a very
Speaker 3: rational take actually yeah, yeah, it's like we had we
Speaker 3: had an entire uprising, like people people fought the Secret
Speaker 3: Service at the gates of the White House, and the
Speaker 3: product of it was the government was like, no, we
Speaker 3: should give more money to cops. Yeah, it's like, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's like, Okay, we're like defunding the New York Public
Speaker 3: Library System to buy encrypted radio like things for police units.
Speaker 3: Like it's like, yeah, like this is objectively true that
Speaker 3: you have very little influence over the government, like.
Speaker 2: A perfectly reasonable thing to say. Yeah, but yeah about
Speaker 2: is interesting too. Another thing that I was kind of surprised.
Speaker 2: Half of Gen Z people think their standard of living
Speaker 2: is better than their parents, but about half also think
Speaker 2: that the world their generation is facing is worse than
Speaker 2: what most other people, most other generations have dealt with.
Speaker 2: So like, they think that their problems are are worse
Speaker 2: than like what boomers and Gen X and millennials we're
Speaker 2: dealing with, but they think they're about half of them
Speaker 2: think they're living better lives. This is pretty similar to
Speaker 2: how millennials feel. Gen X feels very different. Gen X
Speaker 2: or is the most pessimistic generation about the state of
Speaker 2: the world, which actually makes kind of sense if you
Speaker 2: realize that, like a lot of Gen Z kids are
Speaker 2: the children of Gen X people, right, So like they
Speaker 2: think their standard of living is better than their parents
Speaker 2: because Gen X is miserable, Yeah, which you know interesting.
Speaker 2: Gen Z and millennials are more accepting than Gen X
Speaker 2: of depictions of same sex couples in media, and hold
Speaker 2: more positive views of LGBT people, which again, gen X
Speaker 2: is the worst generation. We all have to agree on
Speaker 2: that one.
Speaker 3: It's just terrible. It really really didn't work out in
Speaker 3: two thousands.
Speaker 2: Were just a disaster, calamity, calamity. So I wanted to
Speaker 2: kind of break down some stuff from this survey that
Speaker 2: was interesting, just kind of on on how the generations
Speaker 2: support various policies. So, in terms of their support for
Speaker 2: prohibiting workplace discrimination on the basis of gender identity, sixty
Speaker 2: two percent of Gen Z and sixty two percent of
Speaker 2: millennials support that, only fifty three percent of Gen X does,
Speaker 2: which is still actually not like a massive gap. Right
Speaker 2: when it comes to this is interesting when it comes
Speaker 2: to requiring Americans to mask in public places like stores
Speaker 2: and restaurants, fifty four percent of millennials support that, fifty
Speaker 2: three percent of Gen X do but does but fifty
Speaker 2: two percent of Gen Z does, which is all potentially
Speaker 2: within kind of a margin of error.
Speaker 3: That's like noise, Like, yeah, that might just be noise.
Speaker 2: It's about equivalent, right, It's pretty Most of this is
Speaker 2: actually pretty for all of our shitting on gen X.
Speaker 2: Most of this is actually pretty close. For acquiring vaccinations,
Speaker 2: Millennials seem to support it higher than anyone else forty
Speaker 2: nine percent, gen Z at forty three percent, which is significant.
Speaker 2: Kind of gen X is right in the middle at
Speaker 2: forty five When it comes to supporting a nationwide ban
Speaker 2: on air fifteens and other similar semi automatic rifles, gen
Speaker 2: Z and gen X are at forty two percent for
Speaker 2: gen X forty four percent for gen Z, whereas millennials
Speaker 2: are at forty seven percent. Now, a lot of this breakdown,
Speaker 2: because I dug into the actual numbers, is the difference
Speaker 2: between men and women, and conservative men and liberal women
Speaker 2: right who are liberal women are a lot more common
Speaker 2: and more likely to support these kinds of bands, whereas
Speaker 2: conservative men aren't, but that drags the overall numbers down.
Speaker 2: It's just interesting to me that there seems to be
Speaker 2: less support with gen Z over that they're closer to
Speaker 2: gen X. Increasing security at the border fifty This is
Speaker 2: where there's a huge gap, fifty five percent of gen
Speaker 2: X for increasing border security. Millennials in gen Z are
Speaker 2: at thirty eight and thirty seven percent, So that's really
Speaker 2: like gen X really seems to buy into the we
Speaker 2: need more border secure, whereas deutes are are like no,
Speaker 2: fuck that shit, yeah yeah. Gen X or gen Z
Speaker 2: and millennials both tied at forty eight percent support for
Speaker 2: a universal basic income. Only thirty six percent of gen
Speaker 2: X supports this, again another significant gap. One interesting thing
Speaker 2: is that gen X and millennials at thirty eight and
Speaker 2: thirty six percent support reducing regulations on businesses. Only thirty
Speaker 2: one percent of gen Z supports this. That's a significant difference.
Speaker 2: I find that kind of interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I wonder how much of them also is just
Speaker 3: like like like you are okay, you are in, You're
Speaker 3: a zumer, You're never are you over owning a business?
Speaker 3: Like first off, thank you?
Speaker 2: I as I think it may it may be, and
Speaker 2: I don't I don't know that this has been studied.
Speaker 2: It may be that because gen Z are so so
Speaker 2: many of them want to be influencers to do some
Speaker 2: other kind of job and like internet content creation that
Speaker 2: and a lot of them have done kind of work,
Speaker 2: made some amount of money in that field that tends
Speaker 2: to be independent contractor work. And there's some pretty onerous
Speaker 2: tax regulations. You know, if you've ever been an independent
Speaker 2: contract about how you've got to pay taxes. It may
Speaker 2: have something to do with that. I don't know, though,
Speaker 2: Like I this hasn't been broken down like granularly that
Speaker 2: I've seen, but I did find that kind of interesting.
Speaker 2: And then here's kind of depressing but interesting reducing funding
Speaker 2: for law enforcement agencies. Thirty four percent of millennials support that,
Speaker 2: thirty percent of gen Z supports that, which is enough
Speaker 2: of a gap to suggest like might be somewhat less
Speaker 2: popular among gen Z than millennials. Only eighteen percent of
Speaker 2: gen X feels the same, which is a huge gap,
Speaker 2: and that is kind of interesting to me. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's all I'm telling.
Speaker 3: I think there's one I think there's one last kind
Speaker 3: of interesting thing about this is that those numbers, the
Speaker 3: numbers on like police funding and a lot of the
Speaker 3: sort of like if you just look at the graphs
Speaker 3: that were in the Washington Post article, a lot of
Speaker 3: that is it looks a lot like there's there's there's
Speaker 3: a giant spike dream the uprising, and then it sort
Speaker 3: of like tails off after it. Yeah, and so and
Speaker 3: so that's the thing that I think is like like that,
Speaker 3: I don't you know, and this is I think a
Speaker 3: thing I think is kind of important is like these
Speaker 3: this stuff is all malleable and moment something happens, everyone,
Speaker 3: everyone's beliefs change really quickly. Yeah, and that's the thing
Speaker 3: and like like that that's a that's the thing with
Speaker 3: these sort of like you know, with with the sort
Speaker 3: of doombers and right Andrew Tat is like yeah, like
Speaker 3: but people, people's actual political beliefs and what they're willing
Speaker 3: to do for them can change very very very quickly
Speaker 3: in in in moments where they're sort of you know,
Speaker 3: I mean there's there's a bunch of people getting shot
Speaker 3: by cops in the street, right right, like that that
Speaker 3: that changes people really really quickly. And I think that's
Speaker 3: why the gap is so high both between overall Americans,
Speaker 3: which are at twenty eight percent for defunding police, and
Speaker 3: between Gen X and Gen Z millennials. Is that a
Speaker 3: lot more Gen Z millennials people got like beaten by
Speaker 3: the cops in twenty twenty, and that this does show well,
Speaker 3: again it's an uphill battle. Most Americans, a super majority
Speaker 3: of Americans do not support that way. More young Americans do,
Speaker 3: and it's probably because so many of us got our
Speaker 3: asses checked. And also I want to like like like
Speaker 3: if if you look at what was happening, like the
Speaker 3: numbers dream the uprising, right, like the number of people
Speaker 3: who supported the burning of the third Presinkle was like
Speaker 3: fifty percent. Yeah, so like these are things that change
Speaker 3: really quickly in the moment too, and now we're in
Speaker 3: the sort of long backlash and that's you know, and
Speaker 3: that's that's driving like some of these numbers. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: like don't it, don't don't be cynical things. Things can
Speaker 3: and will get better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes they will, and they there's a pretty dramatic difference.
Speaker 2: Maybe it'll take a couple more of the general uprisings
Speaker 2: where people get there as kicked, which is not great
Speaker 2: to think about, but like, these are pretty stark differences
Speaker 2: in the generations, and I think that that's kind of
Speaker 2: worth noting. And I don't know, celebrating me be the
Speaker 2: wrong term, but I don't think it's pessimistic now in
Speaker 2: terms of stuff that is pessimistic. I want to end
Speaker 2: on a note of like where I kind of think
Speaker 2: some of the lazy, dumbass pundit brain on this is
Speaker 2: coming from. And I maybe I'm wrong about this. But
Speaker 2: I have a little conspiracy theory that involves AI because
Speaker 2: I did kind of at the end of digging up
Speaker 2: a bunch of these studies, reading through I don't know,
Speaker 2: like fifteen articles or whatnot, and you know, the actual
Speaker 2: like entirety of three or four different big surveys, I
Speaker 2: decided just to hop onto one of the AI search
Speaker 2: engines that I use occasionally that is usually not helpful,
Speaker 2: just to see what it said. And I asked, like,
Speaker 2: what is the most recent data on how young gin
Speaker 2: z men are voting?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: And it gave me mostly useless shit, Like the resources
Speaker 2: were bad. But one of the things that said, because
Speaker 2: it breaks down the different sources and like summarizes them
Speaker 2: for you. So it says here the Atlantic is kind
Speaker 2: of one of the sources. It recommends the Atlantic Reporter
Speaker 2: that gen Z and millennials are more likely to vote Republican.
Speaker 2: This could indicate a shift in political leadings among these demographics. Now,
Speaker 2: the article that it is linking there is an article
Speaker 2: called is gen Z coming for the GOP? Not all
Speaker 2: young people are Democrats? By Ronald Brownstein, And it does
Speaker 2: not say that, It does not say anything like that.
Speaker 2: It certainly does not say, and I will tell you
Speaker 2: what it fucking says, right, because it's wildly fucking different.
Speaker 2: An analysis of previously unpublished election data from Catalyst, a
Speaker 2: democratic targeting firm, by Michael pod Orzer, a former political
Speaker 2: director for the AFLCIO, shows that even the emergence of
Speaker 2: these new voters may not break the larger political stalemate
Speaker 2: that has partitioned the country in a seemingly immovable blocks
Speaker 2: of bread and blue states. Podewzer's analysis of the Catalyst data,
Speaker 2: shared exclusively with The Atlantic, found that over the past
Speaker 2: four elections, gen Z voters have broken heavily for Democrats
Speaker 2: and blue states and provide to the party's solid margins
Speaker 2: and closely contested swing states. But in red states, with
Speaker 2: a few prominent exceptions, Podhorzer surprisingly found that even gen
Speaker 2: Z voters are mostly supporting Republicans. Now, when you dig
Speaker 2: into the data, first off, that does not show that
Speaker 2: gen Z people are voting more for Republicans. It's the
Speaker 2: opposite of that. The vast majority of them are voting
Speaker 2: for Democrats, but in red states the number and it's
Speaker 2: not finding in red states that gen Z are more
Speaker 2: likely to support Republicans than previous generations, they are more
Speaker 2: progressive than previous generations. They're just still majority supporting Republicans
Speaker 2: in deep red states. Now again, if you read that quote,
Speaker 2: it's also saying there are some red states where gen
Speaker 2: z are voting overwhelmingly for Democrats, and in purple states
Speaker 2: they are wildly progressive compared to previous generations. It is,
Speaker 2: again the opposite of what that AI summary is wondering
Speaker 2: how many lazy pundits are doing this because they suck
Speaker 2: at shit and we're just like, oh, well, the Atlantic
Speaker 2: says they're more Republicans. Like, no, if you read the article,
Speaker 2: it does not say that. It's a pretty good article.
Speaker 3: Yeah, asolutely well, and this is actually there's one thing
Speaker 3: I want to mention about that polling data two, which
Speaker 3: is that the twenty twenty two election was really weird
Speaker 3: because the twenty twenty two election was supposed to be
Speaker 3: it was supposed to be a red wave election, and yeah,
Speaker 3: there actually was one, but it was it only happened.
Speaker 3: It happened in deep red states. Yes, and it happened
Speaker 3: in New York. And that that has to do with
Speaker 3: the New York media market, which is part of also
Speaker 3: why all these people's brains have been completely destroyed. But
Speaker 3: I don't actually like, it's actually genuinely unclear to me
Speaker 3: that this is even predictive of how those same people
Speaker 3: and deep red states are going to vote in like
Speaker 3: the next like four to eight years, because that was
Speaker 3: because again this this this, this was a mid term
Speaker 3: election with a democratic president. That is, when you're supposed
Speaker 3: to have the opposition like win a bunch of seats
Speaker 3: and stuff like that, and like it didn't go the
Speaker 3: way it was supposed to and so and so I
Speaker 3: think it's actually even that part is more is more
Speaker 3: like even the tiny note of it where they're like
Speaker 3: more like gen Z people voted Republicans, Like I, I
Speaker 3: don't know, I don't even know if that's gonna hold
Speaker 3: in the long run. But all of these pun like, yeah,
Speaker 3: the fact that they probably are just reading AI.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wonder like coming across that dog shit something
Speaker 2: like just completely wrong. It's very funny. Made me feel
Speaker 2: a little bit better about the computers coming for us.
Speaker 2: All made me feel a little bit worse about the
Speaker 2: intelligence of pundits. But yeah, it's you know, and one
Speaker 2: of the things that is kind of if you're concerned
Speaker 2: about twenty twenty four. That is a worthwhile concern, and
Speaker 2: that is a real problem is that while young people
Speaker 2: are overwhelmingly progressive as voters, this is not evenly distributed
Speaker 2: across the country, and a lot of the gains in
Speaker 2: voters that progressives have seen are going to be clustered
Speaker 2: in states that were already overwhelmingly blue, and when it
Speaker 2: comes to an elect a presidential election, those are wasted votes, right,
Speaker 2: And a lot like that this and this is a
Speaker 2: problem that the Republicans dealt with a lot during the
Speaker 2: Obama years, right where there would be massively more Republican voters,
Speaker 2: but they would be clustered in these areas that dims
Speaker 2: were never going to win, and so it didn't help
Speaker 2: them electorally.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: That is kind of worth noting. It's potentially a thing.
Speaker 2: Although a lot of the gains when people are freaking
Speaker 2: out about like, oh, you know, Biden's numbers among non
Speaker 2: white voters have gotten worse, that is probably true, almost
Speaker 2: certainly true to some extent, But a lot of those
Speaker 2: vote gains are clustered areas that were so heavily read
Speaker 2: it may not have any impact on the hills for
Speaker 2: all electorals.
Speaker 3: I will say the one, the one place for that
Speaker 3: matter actually does matter is Michigan, Yes, because and Michigan
Speaker 3: had a huge Muslim population who are unbelievably pissed at
Speaker 3: Biden for you know, offering them the deal We're going
Speaker 3: to murder your family, and also you have to vote
Speaker 3: for us, which.
Speaker 2: Is like I'm not doing the Will Stancil thing and
Speaker 2: saying there's nothing to worry about.
Speaker 3: No, I'm saying there are places where it does matter yere,
Speaker 3: but like, yeah, yeah, it's unclear, and a lot of
Speaker 3: what may be happen. Well, a lot of what is
Speaker 3: certainly happening, although this doesn't mean that there won't be
Speaker 3: because I think there's a good chance there will be
Speaker 3: an electoral impact. But a lot of what is objectively happening,
Speaker 3: both on the left and the right, is increasing numbers
Speaker 3: of voters who are in states that would never never
Speaker 3: going to be in play electorate world. Yeah, right, the
Speaker 3: electoral college is bullshit, you know. Yeah, It's like like
Speaker 3: I've I've lived in Illinois my entire life. It is
Speaker 3: not possible for me to cast a vote that matters. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Like it just isn't. Yes, just how the system works, right,
Speaker 3: It's like it's a great, great, great job, good job. Yeah,
Speaker 3: he wrote the constitution.
Speaker 2: So anyway, I think that's that's about enough to get into.
Speaker 2: I hope this has been edifying and useful to people.
Speaker 2: Uh Mia, you got anything else to say before we
Speaker 2: roll out here?
Speaker 3: Uh Molotov twenty twenty four, just like Malotav twenty twenty Yeah,
Speaker 3: don't the Washington Post. Okay, I want to close in
Speaker 3: the note that the Washington Post editorial board managed to
Speaker 3: find the one socialist in the entire US who's anti
Speaker 3: abortion maker, a steam maker or writer for them.
Speaker 2: So less Yeah, it's but what are you speaking for?
Speaker 2: Why is it important that we have this voice of
Speaker 2: a person like fucking hell?
Speaker 1: Got it?
Speaker 2: It's tiring, speaking of tiring, I'm tired.
Speaker 3: So now we're done.
Speaker 11: Goodbye. Ah.
Speaker 2: I have slain the God of Abraham and cast his
Speaker 2: ruin upon the mountain side, and now I am the
Speaker 2: Lord and Savior of all. Podcasting Robert Evans, This is
Speaker 2: it could happen here a podcast about things falling apart
Speaker 2: and about my slow descent into theistic narcissism. Here with
Speaker 2: me today, Garrison Davis and me along, How are you
Speaker 2: guys doing great.
Speaker 3: He wasn't like this like fifteen minutes ago, that there's
Speaker 3: been a rapid radicalization process.
Speaker 12: Yeah, speaking speaking of rapid radicalization.
Speaker 2: I downed a bottle of this alive ancient mushroom lick elixer,
Speaker 2: and it has overpowered me.
Speaker 12: Not a sponsor too, free free, free advertising.
Speaker 2: But if they want to pay us, I will probably
Speaker 2: stop claiming to have slain the God of Abraham. This
Speaker 2: is this Week in Terrorism. Uh, a show title we've
Speaker 2: never used before and may never use again, but we
Speaker 2: wanted to.
Speaker 3: We're probably gonna have to use it again.
Speaker 2: None of the terrorism we're talking about has occurred this week.
Speaker 3: It all occurred in previous weeks. We were out last week.
Speaker 2: We wanted to talk about some of our recent terrorism
Speaker 2: attacks to discuss kind of what we're seeing in radicalization
Speaker 2: of the people who were carrying out usually shootings, but
Speaker 2: not exclusively. We're actually going to start with a hammer attack. Yeah,
Speaker 2: what we're seeing out there because.
Speaker 12: Very British style. Actually, I think we're ending on a
Speaker 12: stabbing too.
Speaker 2: S ending on a stabbing. Most of these are not shootings.
Speaker 3: I'm a liar.
Speaker 2: It's the mushroom juice.
Speaker 11: But Yeah, we're.
Speaker 2: Gonna start by talking about the attack on Paul Pelosi, who's,
Speaker 2: of course Nancy Pelosi's fuck buddy.
Speaker 3: Some people call him a husband.
Speaker 2: I think that's an archaic term, but yeah, he got
Speaker 2: assaulted in his house by this guy, Brian Depayap. This
Speaker 2: was like a year or so ago, and he just
Speaker 2: recently got convicted of a bunch of stuff. He's going
Speaker 2: to be going to forever prison. But we're going to
Speaker 2: talk about that attack essentially. I wanted to start with
Speaker 2: kind of a little bit of audio of the attack itself.
Speaker 2: This is from police body camera, and basically what happened
Speaker 2: is this guy Brian broke into the Pelosi's backyard, which
Speaker 2: was not guarded. Nancy was away from the house. She
Speaker 2: had their security detail. Capitol Police does not protect spouses
Speaker 2: and family members of Congress people. And he used a
Speaker 2: hammer in one of the two very large backs he
Speaker 2: brought with him to bust into the house and then
Speaker 2: had a conversation with Paul Pelosi that he insists was
Speaker 2: very polite until the police showed up, at which point
Speaker 2: he started bashing him in the skull with a hammer.
Speaker 2: And we're going to get into more of what happened,
Speaker 2: but I wanted to I want to start by playing
Speaker 2: that audio. This is right at the point that the
Speaker 2: police opened the door.
Speaker 3: How you doing?
Speaker 4: What's going on?
Speaker 8: Man?
Speaker 3: That's the guy? What drop the hammer? What is har one?
Speaker 2: And so what is actually happening in the video is
Speaker 2: this guy Brian, who is like he's got a big,
Speaker 2: very large hammer in his hands and like there's a
Speaker 2: very mild struggle going on for it. Pelosi has one
Speaker 2: hand on the hammer, which is a reasonable thing to
Speaker 2: want to do in this situation, and the guy just
Speaker 2: looks kind of stunned. And the police show up and
Speaker 2: they're like, yeah, man, drop the hammer, and he says no,
Speaker 2: and they, to be fair to the police, pretty reasonably
Speaker 2: take a step towards him, and he pulls the hammer
Speaker 2: away from Paul and hits him in the head several times.
Speaker 2: The police tackle him off. Paul got hit, hurt very badly.
Speaker 2: This is a pretty ugly attack. He's an old man.
Speaker 2: He got hit in the head with a hammer several
Speaker 2: times by a much younger man. Pretty ugly. One of
Speaker 2: the things that becomes clear if you watch the earlier
Speaker 2: footage of this guy in their backyard, because they have
Speaker 2: a security camera, and if you watch this footage, is that, like,
Speaker 2: this is not a guy who had a super clear
Speaker 2: plan about what he was going to do. This is
Speaker 2: a guy who was kind of flying by the seat
Speaker 2: of his pants, and when the police came in kind
Speaker 2: of irrationally like based on his existing plans, decided to
Speaker 2: swing at him. And when he was at court, like
Speaker 2: some of the things to Pape said were very interesting,
Speaker 2: he basically like, you know, he busts into their backyard.
Speaker 2: Paul Pelosi in his pajamas, confronts him when he hears it,
Speaker 2: and Depap asks, are you Paul Pelosi? Where's Nancy? Where
Speaker 2: is Nancy? And Pelosi's like, she's not home, She's going
Speaker 2: to be gone for several days. And de Pap started
Speaker 2: threatening to tie Pelosi up. He does this like ten times.
Speaker 2: Eventually Paul's able to get away briefly to go to
Speaker 2: the bathroom where he has a cell phone, and he
Speaker 2: calls the police and like while he's on the phone
Speaker 2: with a dispatcher, you can hear de Pap like telling
Speaker 2: him to hang up.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: The police get there and he attacks him. The first
Speaker 2: thing that happens in the wake of this this is
Speaker 2: obviously big news, and the entirety of right wing media
Speaker 2: basically decided that this was Paul Pelosi's lover, and.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I was under the impression from reparable sources that
Speaker 12: this was this was Paul's gay lover.
Speaker 3: Is ye I was told that.
Speaker 2: Immediately comes out. Marjorie Taylor Green spreads this, Tucker Carlson
Speaker 2: spreads this. Elon Musk spreads this. Representative Carla Tinni spreads
Speaker 2: this again because this is very clearly a right wing
Speaker 2: attack motivated by right wing media on unelectedly pretty brutal attack,
Speaker 2: not on an elected leader. Sorry, I'm the husband of
Speaker 2: an elected leader, right And I wanted to quote really
Speaker 2: quickly from an MSN write up on this that talks
Speaker 2: about like why Depap says he did this. Depap explained
Speaker 2: that he broke into the Pelosi home in order to
Speaker 2: lure University of Michigan Anthropology and Women's Study professor Gail
Speaker 2: Rubin to their house. Ruben's research, according to her professional bio,
Speaker 2: focuses on LGBTQ studies, gay and lesbian ethnography, sexual populations
Speaker 2: and geographies, sexology, and feminist theory. She is known for
Speaker 2: her nineteen eighty four essay Thinking Sex, which is considered
Speaker 2: a founding text.
Speaker 1: Of queer theory.
Speaker 2: Paul was never a target, De Pap said in court,
Speaker 2: explaining that he was only using the pelosis to get
Speaker 2: to my other targets and that he felt really bad
Speaker 2: for Paul Pelosi. He explained that he spent six hours
Speaker 2: a day watching political commentary on YouTube before he was arrested,
Speaker 2: where he learned that everything was a lie coming from
Speaker 2: the press. He listened off common right wing grievances, according
Speaker 2: to NBC News, to explain why he broke.
Speaker 1: Into the home.
Speaker 2: He claims to have heard about Gail Ruben from anti
Speaker 2: LGBTQ activist James Lindsay, who is the same person who
Speaker 2: claims to have popularize the groomers slur against LGBTQ people.
Speaker 2: The PAP said that he regularly listened to Lindsay's podcast.
Speaker 2: The takeaway I got is that she wants to turn
Speaker 2: our schools into pedophile molestation factories. To Pap said, so,
Speaker 2: one of the things that's really interesting to me is
Speaker 2: that this guy's in the home of one of the
Speaker 2: most powerful people in the entire country, who is worth
Speaker 2: one hundred million dollars or more so also extremely wealthy person.
Speaker 2: But she's not his target. His target is this woman's
Speaker 2: studies professor who James Lindsay has convinced him is trying
Speaker 2: to molest all of the kids in America.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: This is again, this is entirely stochastic terrorism. This is
Speaker 2: the fault. James Lindsay wanted stuff like this to happen.
Speaker 2: That's why he does what he does. This is on him,
Speaker 2: and it's a very clear example. This is if you
Speaker 2: go into the stude's backstory, he was not always like this.
Speaker 2: He used to be, I think a pro nudity activist,
Speaker 2: but like was not a guy who was like wildly conservative.
Speaker 2: And then the pandemic hits and he's spending all day
Speaker 2: playing video games alone, increasingly isolated, and he starts going
Speaker 2: down these YouTube and podcast primarily listening to these right
Speaker 2: wing podcasters. Lindsay's one of them. He's also a huge
Speaker 2: Timpool listener. Who is this super right wing guy who
Speaker 2: believes that, like, we're already in a shooting civil war
Speaker 2: with the left, And yeah, these are all big groomer guys,
Speaker 2: these are all women's studies professors are the most dangerous
Speaker 2: people in the country, and this is a vulnerable dude
Speaker 2: who the pandemic isolated from what social networks he had had,
Speaker 2: and he just kind of completely loses his shit. It's
Speaker 2: a very clear radicalization path. And it's a big bummer
Speaker 2: because this is a deeply mentally unwell man who was
Speaker 2: taken advantage of by a right wing media ecosystem that
Speaker 2: exists to churn exactly this kind of guy towards violence
Speaker 2: against their ideological opponents.
Speaker 12: Now, it is certainly interesting, is this attack was more
Speaker 12: deeply weird than what we all initially thought, like, oh,
Speaker 12: like someone was trying to kill Pelosi, right, is, Like.
Speaker 2: I'm not surprised someone would try to do that. I'm
Speaker 2: not saying it's just I'm not like saying that because fucker,
Speaker 2: I'm saying that. Like, I'm not surprised. She's incredibly powerful.
Speaker 2: Of course people want to kill her. Yeah, she's like
Speaker 2: the way it is.
Speaker 12: Yeah, we all saw what happened on January sixth. The
Speaker 12: come on, guys, Yeah, but.
Speaker 3: Like this is normal politics.
Speaker 12: Yes, But like the idea that you're like holding holding
Speaker 12: Pelosi is a hostage to get like a gender theory
Speaker 12: women's studies professor is just so much more like like
Speaker 12: highlighting the type of American brain rot that is just
Speaker 12: totally taking over large swaths of the media, of the
Speaker 12: media ecosystem at this point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think one of my favorite details from this
Speaker 2: is that if you go into like his court case,
Speaker 2: why he chose to attack the home of again Nancy Pelosi,
Speaker 2: super wealthy, powerful person with a security detail, is because
Speaker 2: he believed this Gail Rubin, this professor lived in a
Speaker 2: fortress that he.
Speaker 3: Could not break into.
Speaker 2: This woman's studies professor lives in an underground bunker.
Speaker 12: It was easier to get to the speaker of the
Speaker 12: house's home that it is a woman studies professor's house.
Speaker 3: I think it's interesting too that it was specifically James Lindsay,
Speaker 3: who I don't know. Have we talked about him.
Speaker 4: Really on the show.
Speaker 12: I'm I'm sure in passing.
Speaker 2: But we had a big Twitter fight with him earlier
Speaker 2: this year.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've had held yeah, my, you know. So he's
Speaker 3: an interesting he's like kind of like a proto Chris
Speaker 3: Rufo like, but he's interesting because he's one of these
Speaker 3: people who makes a very classic mistake in in when
Speaker 3: you're trying to become a media person which is that
Speaker 3: he tries to do theory bullshit and it's on it
Speaker 3: it's it's nonsense like and hey like it's it's you know,
Speaker 3: but his things he's trying to derive basically, like effectively,
Speaker 3: what he's trying to do is derive a theory radical
Speaker 3: basis for the whole like Judeo Bolshevik conspiracy, which he
Speaker 3: was one of the big sort of cultural Marxism people. Yeah,
Speaker 3: well he is.
Speaker 12: He is probably most known for propagating the critical race
Speaker 12: theory kind of debacle that happened a few years ago
Speaker 12: that was mostly spearheaded by this guy, James Lindsay.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And he's trying to he's like his project is
Speaker 3: intellectual project. He's trying to trace this line from Hegel
Speaker 3: through Marx, through Gromsey, through Mouth, through the Frankfurt School,
Speaker 3: through the sixties radicals, and it's it's It's interesting though,
Speaker 3: because what he's doing is he's he's he's he's part
Speaker 3: of this really systemic attempt to completely and we saw
Speaker 3: this this this is the result of this is this
Speaker 3: Paul Pelosi attack. It's to completely obscure the actual power
Speaker 3: relations of American society to the point where Yeah, the
Speaker 3: thing we've been talking about happens where because this person
Speaker 3: thinks that this Marxist conspiracy from gender studies professors is
Speaker 3: actually the thing that controls the US. He is like
Speaker 3: kidnapping one of like the husband of one of the
Speaker 3: most powerful people in the United States because he thinks
Speaker 3: that as a way to get to a gender studies professor.
Speaker 3: It's it's this, it's this interesting I think, like, I
Speaker 3: don't know, it's I think it's this interesting demonstration of
Speaker 3: of how of how right wing ideology is specifically designed
Speaker 3: to act to like conceal the actual power relations to
Speaker 3: society and then blame like queer people for it. It's like.
Speaker 2: It's taken Lindsey comes out of academia too, right. He's
Speaker 2: like this professor at a in watch.
Speaker 3: But he's like he's like a math professor or something.
Speaker 3: He's like no, no, It's like.
Speaker 2: It's basically the gist of what why. What happens is
Speaker 2: he realizes you're never going to get rich being a
Speaker 2: math professor, but if you become a right wing thought leader,
Speaker 2: you know there's money in that. So he makes the
Speaker 2: series of bullshit claims about how he's being oppressed by
Speaker 2: fucking evil progressive fascism. And yeah, this is why. Also
Speaker 2: all of his grievances are so focused around academics. It's
Speaker 2: because he still has academia brainworms, where everything that matters
Speaker 2: is like what this handful of upper middle class professors
Speaker 2: at fancy ivy league schools argue about.
Speaker 12: He also believes that queer people are engaging in a
Speaker 12: form of ancient hermetic magic, which is.
Speaker 2: That party Harrison. If I know you at all, that
Speaker 2: part's true, Like that's accurate.
Speaker 3: It's so funny that he got there because like, like when
Speaker 3: I was arguing with him, he was trying to argue
Speaker 3: that Mao had read this Gramsey, who's this Italian Marxist
Speaker 3: theory she demonstrably cannot have read because Gramsey's prison notebooks
Speaker 3: don't come out until like art translated in Chinese, until
Speaker 3: after Mao dies. So it's like it's it's physically impossible
Speaker 3: for him to have done this. But it's funny because
Speaker 3: like he's gone from that to like the queer hermetic
Speaker 3: like yes, yes, to destroy the.
Speaker 12: Who do we want to talk about next? Because I
Speaker 12: have I have, I have my Dayton Shooter, and I
Speaker 12: know we we.
Speaker 3: Have we have a list of let's do, let's let's do,
Speaker 3: let's do date and shooter and then close out with
Speaker 3: the two antipas.
Speaker 2: And yeah, so yeah, I'm not I don't know shit
Speaker 2: about this, so dating me up, motherfuckers.
Speaker 12: So a few days before Thanksgiving, well home, we should
Speaker 12: we should take geo.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, speaking of Thanksgiving, you know what, I'm thankful
Speaker 2: for the fact that we're supported by advertisers and we're back. Okay,
Speaker 2: let's talk about this fucking Dyton shooting.
Speaker 12: A few days before Thanksgiving, someone walked into a Walmart
Speaker 12: in Beaver Creek, Ohio with I believe it was a
Speaker 12: it was a high point forty five caliber carbine.
Speaker 2: With wow high point Okay, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 12: He shot four people before eventually dying of a self
Speaker 12: inflicted gunshot wound. Victims were transferred to the hospital. It
Speaker 12: looks like nobody actually died besides the shooter. So hey,
Speaker 12: that's a win, great, great job medical medical teams. But
Speaker 12: upon looking into this this guy's home, it's very very
Speaker 12: kind of standard stuff. Ever since twenty sixteen, we have
Speaker 12: Nazi flags, we have Nazi books. He's he went to
Speaker 12: a Christian online school. He was twenty years old. He
Speaker 12: spent almost all of his time at home on the internet.
Speaker 12: He did not believe the Holocaust was real. He had
Speaker 12: been to the hospital before for mental health evaluations. The
Speaker 12: FBI referred to his beliefs as a quote loosely organized
Speaker 12: movement of individuals and groups that espouse some combination of racist,
Speaker 12: aidy Semitica, zenophobic, Islamophobic, misogynistic, and homophobic ideology, which is
Speaker 12: a very very broad broadway of saying. Yeah, he was
Speaker 12: like a far right nut job. He was very very
Speaker 12: typical kind of Nazi guy. He had two swastika flags.
Speaker 12: Now because he died, it's where people are still putting
Speaker 12: together like what exactly led to him to like do
Speaker 12: this specific act because they can't like talk to him.
Speaker 12: But yeah, it was very very typical sort of thing
Speaker 12: of this guy deciding to go into a Walmart and
Speaker 12: do a shooting. This is something that other Nazi accelerationists
Speaker 12: have done before. It's something that will probably keep happening.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean for sure.
Speaker 12: It's it's it's it's, it's it's it's it's not like
Speaker 12: a big story, it's it's just another thing that's happened.
Speaker 12: But it is weird, the sort of like normalization of
Speaker 12: it of like oh yeah, not see to the Walmart
Speaker 12: shooting again. Isn't actually a story anymore. It's just like no,
Speaker 12: it's just it's just another Tuesday.
Speaker 2: No, And this is like what the right wants, by
Speaker 2: the way, is that like when they do these mass shootings,
Speaker 2: it does not make the news, and whenever they can
Speaker 2: blame a shooting on a queer, a trans person, they
Speaker 2: try to keep it, make it be the only thing
Speaker 2: anyone talks about, right, Like this is this is part
Speaker 2: of the plan, you know. Yeah, And it's a bummer
Speaker 2: that it's it's worked, just because like, h it's impossible
Speaker 2: to stay at an equal level of anger every time
Speaker 2: this happens. It's so common, you know, like you just can't.
Speaker 2: You can't continue existing and have the same reaction to
Speaker 2: these that you had in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 12: Yeah, So I mean like that, I don't have much
Speaker 12: else on this because it's just it's this guy who
Speaker 12: played video games alone for most of his life, went
Speaker 12: to a Christian online homeschool, never really interacted with the public.
Speaker 12: It was almost solely existed within this like medio ecosystem online,
Speaker 12: which pushed him towards buying a book on the history
Speaker 12: of the SS and buying multiple Nazi flags and not
Speaker 12: thinking the Holocaust is real. And this, this is the
Speaker 12: inevitable result of this sort of thing. So I guess
Speaker 12: do we want to segue to Vermont for our next next?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 12: Something happened? I think less than a week later, it
Speaker 12: sure did.
Speaker 2: But first, Garrison, speaking of segues, did you realize that
Speaker 2: the guy who bought the segue company died in a
Speaker 2: segue crash in Scotland?
Speaker 11: Ye?
Speaker 3: Segment off of.
Speaker 1: Garrison.
Speaker 3: He sure did you know?
Speaker 12: This is this is why I think there is a
Speaker 12: little bit of magic that is reel, because every once
Speaker 12: in a while, the funniest thing happens.
Speaker 2: Oh man, what a what a stupid product?
Speaker 3: Segues.
Speaker 2: I remember when those first came out and people were like,
Speaker 2: this is the future of transportation. And then everyone who
Speaker 2: was not completely brain dead was like, of course they're not.
Speaker 3: Look at how dumb those things look. Nobody's gonna want
Speaker 3: to drive these.
Speaker 12: I mean, if I was a self educated finance guy,
Speaker 12: I'm sure I would be able to to to to
Speaker 12: estimate the life cycle of the sega.
Speaker 2: You're not gonna make it if you if you just
Speaker 2: walk like a peasant, you gotta get a one wheel
Speaker 2: that explodes.
Speaker 3: It's so funny to me too, because it's like like
Speaker 3: a thing there. Like I genuinely think is a real
Speaker 3: kind of shift in our modes of transportation, is that
Speaker 3: people really did start using electric bikes more and then
Speaker 3: as a lost to those are three and stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a huge amount.
Speaker 1: Actually.
Speaker 2: Instead no, it's like, yeah, we don't need you don't
Speaker 2: need to fuck with the form factor. People are happy
Speaker 2: using bikes. They're just too slow and sometimes too much
Speaker 2: effort is required. So you make that easier and then
Speaker 2: people don't drive as fucking much. Great idea. Speaking of
Speaker 2: a bad idea, let's talk about this other mass shooter
Speaker 2: in Vermont from from last week. This actually happened on
Speaker 2: Thanksgiving Day, So this guy, I think it was on
Speaker 2: Thanksgiving Day.
Speaker 12: It may have been like a day or two later.
Speaker 2: It was Saturday night, so that would have been. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that would have been like the day or two after,
Speaker 2: two days after Thanksgiving. So two days after Thanksgiving, you know,
Speaker 2: you've got these three twenty year old Palestinian men who
Speaker 2: are in town visiting family. You know they're doing I
Speaker 2: think they go over and do they do a Thanksgiving
Speaker 2: dinner with some friends. They're over another people's.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, this big thing they were leaving was it
Speaker 3: was they Yes, they went to an eight year old's
Speaker 3: birthday party. Yes, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2: They're with one of them's uncle who lives in Burlington.
Speaker 2: And these kids are all students at different Northeast I think,
Speaker 2: all Northeast colleges. One's from Brown University, once from Haverford,
Speaker 2: one is from Trinity College. Two of them are citizens
Speaker 2: and the other is I think naturalized or at least
Speaker 2: a permanent resident. And at some point after you know
Speaker 2: they're they're hanging out at this event, family event, They're like,
Speaker 2: let's go on a walk. You know, it's a nice night.
Speaker 2: Let's let's have us a walk around. And they're they're
Speaker 2: walking around. They're near an apartment building and this forty
Speaker 2: eight year old man named Jason j Eaton steps off
Speaker 2: his porch, pulls out a gun, and apparently without saying anything,
Speaker 2: fires at least four shots at these three young men.
Speaker 2: Two of them are shot and they're torso. A third
Speaker 2: is shot in the lower extremities. They are all alive. Still,
Speaker 2: they're all expected to live and think one of them
Speaker 2: was more seriously injured than the others, but they're all
Speaker 2: like going to survive, thankfully. And then Eaton flees on foot.
Speaker 2: I think like the next day the police catch up
Speaker 2: with them. He used a three to eighty pistol, if
Speaker 2: that matters to you, which is a fairly small handgun,
Speaker 2: which probably explains why everybody's survived. And yeah, so that's
Speaker 2: the extent of like what physically happened on the day. Again,
Speaker 2: Eaton doesn't say anything before he starts shooting. There's no
Speaker 2: evidence that he knew these guys. They are apparently speaking
Speaker 2: in a mixture of Arabic and English as they walk by,
Speaker 2: which and also at least I think two of them
Speaker 2: were wearing like Palestinian color sort of shimogs or kefias.
Speaker 3: I don't think that.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's like like not like the
Speaker 2: colors of the Palestinian flag, but like the color palette
Speaker 2: there is used in that specific it's white and black, yeah, scarps, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: yeah exactly. Eaton was a finance broker and advisor kind
Speaker 2: of part time. I don't know how much money he
Speaker 2: actually made from it.
Speaker 12: Yeah, he was like working on a farm part time. Yeah,
Speaker 12: he was employed at Edward Jones a few years ago.
Speaker 12: He's kind of yeah, he's this this libertarian finance bro.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so yeah, people found his social pretty quickly.
Speaker 2: There's like an archived Twitter, which is really standard standard
Speaker 2: libertarian stuff. He talks about like, he complains about the
Speaker 2: Fed an awful lot. He quotes Elon Musk a number
Speaker 2: of times. He seems to be a fan of him,
Speaker 2: but he's also a huge fan of Bernie Sanders and described, yes,
Speaker 2: like the only good man in politics pretty much.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 12: I think it's kind of like it's kind of like
Speaker 12: the Joe Rogan libertarian of like right, right, yes, very much.
Speaker 12: So you like Bernie because he's like he like curious
Speaker 12: about like the people. He's not like he's not like
Speaker 12: falling for like the big finance corporation stuf blah blah
Speaker 12: blah blah blah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's like it's this old sort of like
Speaker 3: the oh my god, what I've forgotten his name, the
Speaker 3: liberitarian guy from the two thousands and early twenty tens
Speaker 3: who were the Riddler suits. No, he was a congressman.
Speaker 3: He was like he was like one of the fashions
Speaker 3: in occupy was like these weird libertarians and it's like
Speaker 3: this seems like that's like the ideological as sentence of
Speaker 3: those people who didn't turn into like neo Confederate like
Speaker 3: yeah people.
Speaker 2: And it's in his old archived Twitter account, he describes
Speaker 2: himself like His profile describes him as radical citizen patrolling democracy,
Speaker 2: which he spells with a K, and crapitalism for oath keepers,
Speaker 2: well oath creepers. I don't know entirely what all of
Speaker 2: that means, and then hashtag wild type with the little
Speaker 2: atomic symbol, which I guess means he likes science. He
Speaker 2: describes himself as a dad and a part time farmer,
Speaker 2: a reformed yes stockbroker, and his archived account includes a
Speaker 2: link to his subs stack, which is our DKL radical.
Speaker 2: He describes it as yeah, wander wandering ramblings of a
Speaker 2: reformed broker on the ADHD ASD spectrum. He's claiming at
Speaker 2: least to have ADHD and autism. It's uh, he's deleted.
Speaker 2: By the time we got to them. Everyone got to
Speaker 2: the most of the posts on his sub stack. The
Speaker 2: only thing on there is a really extensive post where
Speaker 2: he's like talking about how how restaurants can keep dishwashers employed.
Speaker 2: He seems to have worked this one and be angry
Speaker 2: that they're not always paid fair wage commensurate to back
Speaker 2: on the Lion or in front of the Lion staff,
Speaker 2: I guess, which is like not unreasonable, but an odd
Speaker 2: thing for him to be so focused on.
Speaker 12: He has a really interesting online footprint. Yes, at least
Speaker 12: like everything like pre pandemic is like he's like this
Speaker 12: regular libertarian finance guy. Like there's not like there's nothing
Speaker 12: too concerning. He's like or he's yeah, he's like retweeting
Speaker 12: like the Libertarian Party of Tennessee saying that they like
Speaker 12: Bernie Sanders, and like he's he has like this podcast
Speaker 12: where he talks about penny Stalks, and it's like it's
Speaker 12: a lot of like you see a lots of these
Speaker 12: types of guy around and most of them are just
Speaker 12: like guys in their forties, because that's what he was,
Speaker 12: Just like a libertarian guy in his forties who lived
Speaker 12: in Vermont.
Speaker 2: So like yeah, so you know, as you kind of stated, Garrison,
Speaker 2: he's pretty normal up until he gets like COVID hits,
Speaker 2: and that seems to be what pushes him over the limit.
Speaker 2: I want to read a quote from Vice News here,
Speaker 2: who's done a lengthy breakdown of his social media presence.
Speaker 2: One post from March twenty twenty two titled thought crime.
Speaker 2: It's an anti vax screed that labels COVID nineteen as
Speaker 2: a government conspiracy. The scale and scope of this operation
Speaker 2: was next level, he wrote. He also shared other anti
Speaker 2: vax sentiments on his LinkedIn, and wrote last year that
Speaker 2: he'd started deleting or unpublishing certain posts because my ideas
Speaker 2: make some people not want to hire me. He also
Speaker 2: has an Instagram account, which is largely dedicated to sharing
Speaker 2: images from his farm. Only one post hints at any
Speaker 2: ideological or political outlook, which is a screenshot from the
Speaker 2: Urban Dictionary definition of America with a K, a word
Speaker 2: used to describe the worst sense of the United States,
Speaker 2: i e. Imperialism, corruption, and the global exportation of American culture.
Speaker 2: His Instagram links to another blog, which has the same
Speaker 2: name as his substack and contains rambling podcasts about the
Speaker 2: financial system. He's uploaded documentation of his various qualifications over
Speaker 2: the years. One document indicates that he was a Boy
Speaker 2: Scout leader between at least twenty seventeen and twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2: Don't worry everyone, the boy Scouts are not letting this
Speaker 2: guy continue to be an adult leader.
Speaker 12: Yeah, it's the homepage of his website just reads together
Speaker 12: no King. And there's a lot of stuff that looks
Speaker 12: like it's been deleted, a lot of weird financial advice
Speaker 12: under the name radical Citizen spelled all stupid. But you
Speaker 12: like I I've I found his YouTube pretty quick. I
Speaker 12: found his LinkedIn pretty quick. There's a lot of like
Speaker 12: vaccine's his His YouTube starts with a lot of like
Speaker 12: vaccine hesitancy stuff. Yeah, and then on his LinkedIn he
Speaker 12: moves into like full full like weird like COVID conspiracies,
Speaker 12: vaccine denial, vaccine conspiracy theories. And I will say, I've
Speaker 12: never seen a shooter post like this on LinkedIn before.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's interesting, really unique. It's it's a really unique thing.
Speaker 12: Like so you'll find stuff like this on like Reddit,
Speaker 12: you'll find stuff like this on Twitter, but having having
Speaker 12: a shooter share this types of conspiratorial content on LinkedIn
Speaker 12: and then talk about how he has to delete some
Speaker 12: because he's not getting hired because LinkedIn's a place to
Speaker 12: help you get hired Like that's like it's it's it's
Speaker 12: a really weird platform. Yes, this could just be his
Speaker 12: like libertarianness showing and like they they use they use
Speaker 12: LinkedIn because it's like for like business and finance. But
Speaker 12: it is certainly weird, like the way he was using
Speaker 12: it is unlike most most like either like like cod COVID,
Speaker 12: conspiracy shooters, vaccine shooters or whatever his motivation was for this,
Speaker 12: for targeting three Palestinian people. It's it's certainly certainly a
Speaker 12: unique facet of this incident.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so I don't know. I mean, in some
Speaker 2: ways this is a pretty standard case, and that like
Speaker 2: not the specific things that this guy is starting point,
Speaker 2: but just the fact that this is a guy who's
Speaker 2: clearly open to some level of right wing politics and
Speaker 2: thought influencers. And it seems as if COVID nineteen drove
Speaker 2: him off a wall ideologically.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if this
Speaker 3: winds up being a very you know, if we wind
Speaker 3: up finding out that a specific motivation for this santi
Speaker 3: Palsonian racism, because yeah, well yeah we know it also
Speaker 3: probably is.
Speaker 12: But his mom describes him as a Christian who takes
Speaker 12: his spirituality very seriously. She said that he thought the
Speaker 12: whole state of the world was kind of like a
Speaker 12: big mess right now, like everything everything spiritually is kind
Speaker 12: of falling apart, is what his mom said. Because he
Speaker 12: he was he was at Thanksgiving dinner with his family
Speaker 12: like two nights before this happened. They said he seemed
Speaker 12: to act be acting like like his usual self. Not
Speaker 12: not saying like, you know, not saying that he was
Speaker 12: acting good, but like he was acting.
Speaker 3: Normal for him.
Speaker 12: Yeah, but no, he certainly had some some degree of
Speaker 12: religious affiliation. He talked about using his religious status as
Speaker 12: to get like vaccine exemptions for his kids. So there's
Speaker 12: stuff stuff like that that that that that does tie
Speaker 12: to his religious background, which which could certainly contribute to
Speaker 12: to anti palestining and violence.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I I don't know, if I had to
Speaker 2: assume kind of how this went down without more evidence,
Speaker 2: my guess would be he was having a bad day probably,
Speaker 2: you know that kind of after the holiday depression. That's
Speaker 2: not uncommon. He's like listening to or reading some sort
Speaker 2: of listening to some sort of weird conspiracy podcast, or
Speaker 2: he's just falling down another rabbit hole online He gets
Speaker 2: angrier and angrier, and he hears some people talking in
Speaker 2: Arabic outside, looks out his window sees a Palestinian Kefia
Speaker 2: and decides, I'm going to just start shooting. I don't
Speaker 2: actually know, like, I don't know what else it could be.
Speaker 2: He can't have These people were not like regular walkers
Speaker 2: in his neighborhoods, so this can't have been like he
Speaker 2: wasn't laying in wait for them. This seems like from
Speaker 2: you know, it must have been like a spur of
Speaker 2: the moment thing, right.
Speaker 12: He waited for the ATF to come to his door,
Speaker 12: he said. He said, like I've been expecting you or
Speaker 12: I've been waiting for you or something, and he said,
Speaker 12: I don't want to say anything without a lawyers like
Speaker 12: he he had like, you know, like the libertarian script
Speaker 12: of like here's what you say if the police are
Speaker 12: coming to arrest you.
Speaker 3: Is like, yeah, he didn't.
Speaker 12: He didn't like kill himself at the end of this
Speaker 12: act of violence that a lot of other shooters do.
Speaker 12: He was very very like put together weirdly.
Speaker 2: And he's he's lawyered up. I guess we'll learn more, but.
Speaker 12: Yeah, no, it's it's it's certainly interesting. I mean, I've
Speaker 12: scrolling through the past two years of LinkedIn posts where
Speaker 12: he posted a lot on like LinkedIn's like social platform,
Speaker 12: and it's a big mix of like big mix of
Speaker 12: like financial conspiracy theories and COVID conspiracy theories and vaccine
Speaker 12: conspiracy theories. I can certainly see how the way the way,
Speaker 12: like libertarians in general the past three years, past, like
Speaker 12: five years, six years, maybe even since, like the Tea
Speaker 12: Party realistically have just have been getting increasingly aligned with
Speaker 12: like other aspects of the far right where uh, it
Speaker 12: contributes to like transphobia, or it contributes to racism, xenophobia, homophobia. Yeah,
Speaker 12: like that that that has big that that Venn diagram
Speaker 12: is slowly becoming more of a circle. And I can
Speaker 12: certainly see if this guy, this guy obviously was listening
Speaker 12: to podcasts, if he was making he was making a
Speaker 12: financial podcast at some point, yeah, he Like, I can
Speaker 12: totally see if if you're listening to libertarian podcasts, you
Speaker 12: slowly getting all of these other kind of beliefs that
Speaker 12: have been seeping in to almost the entirety of the
Speaker 12: libertarian political project. If you see, like a few years ago,
Speaker 12: he was retweeting posts from like the libertarian parties of
Speaker 12: these various states, and now many of those accounts.
Speaker 3: Are just run by Nazis, Like, yeah, it is.
Speaker 12: It is, like, yeah, watching how the posting trends of
Speaker 12: like official libertarian party affiliated accounts have changed the past
Speaker 12: few years, specifically the New Hampshire account.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh my god, quite is quite something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's it's not always what you'd think because
Speaker 2: the the the Louisiana Libertarian Party is like super chill, reasonable,
Speaker 2: anti racist, you know, guy, whereas yeah, the New Hampshire
Speaker 2: Libertarian Party, dude is like just a straight up Nazi. Yeah, interesting, interesting,
Speaker 2: good stuff. Should we do our second AD break? Did
Speaker 2: we already do that?
Speaker 3: Did we already do it? Anyway?
Speaker 2: Daniel? If we didn't do a second ad break, here's
Speaker 2: our second ad break. Ah, we're back after either our
Speaker 2: second AD break or that will be edited out because
Speaker 2: we already did too. We forgot which Daniel will figure
Speaker 2: it out, and you the listener will never know if
Speaker 2: I fucked up. Dani'll keep it in if I fuck up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And speaking of speaking of stuff that's fucked up, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: So the last thing I want to talk about is
Speaker 3: this is this is an older This is from like October, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: this is from October fourteenth, and I think it's specifically
Speaker 3: this is this is seven days after the sort of
Speaker 3: Amos attack that started all of the sort of stuff
Speaker 3: that's been happening in palestein Yeah, so in Plainfield, which
Speaker 3: is this kind of Yeah, it's like a it's.
Speaker 12: A really far suburb of Chicago.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's in these things where it's like it's
Speaker 3: in the kind of I don't know, almost a borderline
Speaker 3: of is it a suburb like it is, it's a
Speaker 3: place that sucks ass Yeah, and no offense to anyone
Speaker 3: living there with yeah, no, like there are good people there,
Speaker 3: but some of them I assume are good people. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So on on the fourteenth, a seventy one year old
Speaker 3: man named Joseph Kuspa who was the landlord of a
Speaker 3: Palestinian woman and her son and you know, okay, so
Speaker 3: this story, this story just sucks. They had actually so
Speaker 3: these this family and their landlord had been like pretty
Speaker 3: close friends. Like the family had considered him like like
Speaker 3: a like they considered him like a grandfather. And this
Speaker 3: guy comes through the door and the six year old
Speaker 3: kid runs up to go hug him, and he stabs
Speaker 3: the kid twenty six times and kills him, nearly kills
Speaker 3: his mom. He's screaming like the entire time about like, Yeah,
Speaker 3: he's screaming, You Muslims have to die. You're killing our
Speaker 3: kids in Israel. You Palestinians don't deserve to live. And
Speaker 3: this is a I think this is a kind of
Speaker 3: a kind of different kind of shoot of well not
Speaker 3: sually a different kind of like killing than the ones
Speaker 3: we've been talking about, because this is a very sort
Speaker 3: of like wake of two thousand and one killing where
Speaker 3: you have this enormous, enormous spike in Islamophobia, very specifically here,
Speaker 3: you have this incredible spike in in anti Palastinian racism,
Speaker 3: and you have this this period like especially in the
Speaker 3: week I mean, and this is still happening to this day,
Speaker 3: but in like the week after, in the week after
Speaker 3: this all started, you could say fucking anything. You could say.
Speaker 3: You could you could like you could talk about fucking
Speaker 3: turning the Gaza strip into glass, like you could talk
Speaker 3: about fucking dropping nukes, you could talk about killing every
Speaker 3: single Palestinian on earth. And it was and no one
Speaker 3: fucking said anything, Right, all these fucking people. All of
Speaker 3: these fucking all these fucking journalists said nothing all like
Speaker 3: the president, Like the president only starts talking about his
Speaker 3: homophobia after this fucking kid gets stabbed the death and
Speaker 3: you know, and this guy is listening to right wing
Speaker 3: talk radio, which is why you know, this is like
Speaker 3: this is a this is an older like this, this
Speaker 3: is a this is a s pecific kind of killing
Speaker 3: that like I think is very very similar to the
Speaker 3: the enormous number of Muslims who were killed and I
Speaker 3: will seek people too, because these people are just really racist. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and Pealstinian people who are just killed right after nine
Speaker 3: to eleven, because there's just this wave of the US
Speaker 3: that gets into one of these sort of murder frenzies,
Speaker 3: like one of these sort of racist frenzies. And this
Speaker 3: kid gets stabbed to death and yeah, this guy, you know,
Speaker 3: and I mean and like I think, I think the
Speaker 3: think about this case right like this is you know,
Speaker 3: this is a radicalization in terms like in terms of
Speaker 3: like going from going from literally like this kid is
Speaker 3: running up to hug him because like he had built
Speaker 3: like a treehouse for the family before this, right, like
Speaker 3: the like and over the course of like seven days.
Speaker 3: This guy goes from that to like we need to
Speaker 3: kill all Muslims and we need to like stab them
Speaker 3: to death, right, Like it's it's horrible and and this
Speaker 3: is you know, like this kind of stuff just keeps happening,
Speaker 3: and you know, like the only time, the only the
Speaker 3: media literally only covers this stuff, like in terms of like, oh,
Speaker 3: it's costing a Democrats support and it's like, you guys,
Speaker 3: just I don't know the extense of which the media
Speaker 3: has been utterly and completely complicit in anti Palasinian racism
Speaker 3: has been appalling, and you know it's killed people now, yeah,
Speaker 3: and there will there will be no reckoning with this
Speaker 3: because the US media does this shit all the time
Speaker 3: and no one cares.
Speaker 2: And yeah, by by a wide margin. The most disturbing
Speaker 2: thing about this is just and I think what separates
Speaker 2: this from the two thousand and one stuff because this,
Speaker 2: this version of this attack in two thousand and one
Speaker 2: would have just been some racist stranger who saw, you know,
Speaker 2: a Muslim person or just a person he assumed look
Speaker 2: like they were Muslim and attacked but did not have
Speaker 2: a relationship with them. This guy is super close to
Speaker 2: this kid, right, This is like an example of how
Speaker 2: fairly integrated this community was. And it's the again an
Speaker 2: example kind of what we're seeing in most of these
Speaker 2: other attacks we've talked about, say of that nazi is
Speaker 2: like these people who are a lot more normal. And
Speaker 2: then I'm going to guess if we when we find
Speaker 2: out more about the dude who stabbed that kid, a
Speaker 2: lot of his drift happened after COVID, right. You know,
Speaker 2: it's a product of this right wing media ecosystem that
Speaker 2: again exists purely to do this sort of thing, but
Speaker 2: it's also a product of COVID. Right, it's a product
Speaker 2: of this lockdown that just fucking shattered so many people.
Speaker 12: It's the one other thing I will mention because it
Speaker 12: is relevant because the trial is starting. Is another extremely
Speaker 12: targeted attack with the.
Speaker 3: Murder of Brianna Jai.
Speaker 12: Yeah, the perpetrators were very familiar. They were they were
Speaker 12: interested in killing her specifically because Brianna was trans that.
Speaker 3: I don't I don't know if we talked about this
Speaker 3: on the show that I don't think we did.
Speaker 1: I don't think it happened.
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah no, But with with with the trial happening,
Speaker 12: we're we've gotten text exchanges between the two people who
Speaker 12: were involved in the killing, and it's it's very very
Speaker 12: very telling the way they were talking about Brianna like
Speaker 12: as this as this like object and very very very
Speaker 12: specifically like like almost like stalking and gaining familiar with her,
Speaker 12: specifically to kill her out of like fascination.
Speaker 3: Oh wait, So so for people who don't know what
Speaker 3: this is, Brianna was I think she was fifty sixteen sixteen,
Speaker 3: sixteen year old trans girl in the UK who was
Speaker 3: stabbed to death by two other kids. And yeah, so
Speaker 3: the trial's like happening right now and it's it's really
Speaker 3: really fucking sucks. Yeah she was, she was killed earlier
Speaker 3: this year. Yeah, and yeah, I mean, if you, if you,
Speaker 3: if you want to understand what transphobes think about trans people,
Speaker 3: like those texts are as clean as an example that
Speaker 3: you're going to get about how like all of the
Speaker 3: fucking right wing media people and all of the sort
Speaker 3: of like you know, like all of the most sort
Speaker 3: of like absolutely like committed transphobes think about transfer, But
Speaker 3: how they talk about us like in in closed like
Speaker 3: like behind closed doors where they think you will never
Speaker 3: see it. And this this is just this is just
Speaker 3: how they talk about us, and this is what happens
Speaker 3: is people like people fucking weirder trans people and yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well then yep, all right, well folks, this has
Speaker 2: been uh it could happen here? A podcast about terrorism?
Speaker 3: Goodbye? Do we do? We want to try to end
Speaker 3: in SETI literally any other way? I'm not sure you know.
Speaker 2: No, Garrison, We're not.
Speaker 11: That's the end of the podcast. Goodbye.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the could happen Here? A podcast with the
Speaker 3: It is Henry Kissinger, and the happening here is that
Speaker 3: he's dead as a door nail. I'm your host via
Speaker 3: log with me on this joyous day after Kissinger's dead.
Speaker 3: Is Garrison Davis and James Stout. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Who Hello, very excited.
Speaker 12: Had had a fun night in the group chat last night.
Speaker 12: I did send over the Hordy Hendrika Singer copy pasta
Speaker 12: without reading it to two of the group chat, and
Speaker 12: I feel like that was that was a good call.
Speaker 3: Fully at the exit. Within within thirty seconds of you
Speaker 3: sending that, I got the same I got the same
Speaker 3: message in another group chat, and it was it.
Speaker 12: Was spreading around pretty quick. I wanted to jump on it.
Speaker 12: Soon before before other people were going to share it.
Speaker 12: So so yeah, that is that is, that is my duty.
Speaker 12: I mean it's it's certainly upsetting he lives till one hundred,
Speaker 12: but we will celebrate his death nevertheless.
Speaker 7: Yes, it would be nice if he died sooner.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it was nice. Well, we don't we don't
Speaker 3: know how he died. He could he could have died horribly.
Speaker 3: We actually don't know. Really, Yeah, he died anything.
Speaker 12: In his home in Connecticut, surrounded by his hopefully according
Speaker 12: to the actual statement.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Well, look, he he lived a little longer and died
Speaker 7: a lot more pleasantly than a lot of the people
Speaker 7: he was life he ended, which is sad.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 12: It is sad, But it's also funny. He he died
Speaker 12: knowing he's probably one of the most hated men in
Speaker 12: the world.
Speaker 3: Pretty funny parties in the fucking street, like there was
Speaker 3: so there was there was a giant pro Palestine protest
Speaker 3: in Chicago last night and there's videos of them finding
Speaker 3: out live while they're in the streets that kissing, just dying,
Speaker 3: and this giant cheer goes up. People having a great time.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I was texting my friends who were down at
Speaker 7: the border. Uh, Camery Kissinger is dead. Spread the word
Speaker 7: among the people of the nations that he destroyed.
Speaker 3: Pretty good, pretty good stuff.
Speaker 12: I mean it's we we we all, we all had
Speaker 12: a fun time last night, as I'm sure many many
Speaker 12: of you listeners did. But slowly some organizations started to
Speaker 12: trickle out very embarrassing statements.
Speaker 11: Uh.
Speaker 12: The first one I saw was from the A d
Speaker 12: L who had a quite quite the quite quite the
Speaker 12: statement I'm gonna I want to find the I want
Speaker 12: to find it actually on on x, the new hot
Speaker 12: social media app, because it's because because the community note
Speaker 12: on it is just magnificent.
Speaker 3: Ye.
Speaker 12: Really really gives you a good look at the mind
Speaker 12: of Kissinger, and it's fun to laugh at the people
Speaker 12: who are like propping him up as some like great
Speaker 12: Jewish statesman.
Speaker 3: So yeah.
Speaker 12: Henry Kissinger was a towering intellect, diplomat and practitioner who,
Speaker 12: not without controversy, helped shape American foreign policy with a
Speaker 12: lasting impact worldwide. A refugee from Nazi Germany and the
Speaker 12: first Jewish Secretary of State, he was unapologetic about his
Speaker 12: heritage and his embrace of the importance of American global
Speaker 12: power and democratic values, which I like that they call
Speaker 12: him a practitioner. Just a funny thing to say.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but there are a number of in that post.
Speaker 12: Oh, absolutely problem. The funniest is that during a meeting
Speaker 12: of the Washington Special Actions Group, Kissinger said, quote, if
Speaker 12: it were not for the accident of my birth, I
Speaker 12: would be anti Semitic. Any people who have been persecuted
Speaker 12: for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.
Speaker 3: Yeah, here's here's here's another one. That one's fun It's
Speaker 3: another one. The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union
Speaker 3: is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if
Speaker 3: they put Jews in gas chambers in the Soviet Union,
Speaker 3: it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.
Speaker 12: And that was a realism, amazing stuff like it's it's
Speaker 12: it has. It has certainly been wild to watch any
Speaker 12: any shred of credibility that the ADL has had just
Speaker 12: absolutely go down the drain in the past two months
Speaker 12: by their own volition, just ruining decades of like of
Speaker 12: of research into anti Semitic extremism, by just tarnishing every
Speaker 12: single piece of research they've done, by how they've how
Speaker 12: they've been behaving the past two months.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean they past three or four years, they've
Speaker 7: really been over like.
Speaker 3: To the bottom there. They're like they're like fully going
Speaker 3: back to their like selling information to a partid South
Speaker 3: Africa days. Yeah, so praising pim praising.
Speaker 12: Henry Kissinger is someone who admitted that he would be
Speaker 12: anti Semitic if he wasn't born Jewish.
Speaker 3: It was just like, what the fuck are you doing? Anyway?
Speaker 12: That was that was one of the first one of
Speaker 12: the first organizations to come out in in memoriam of
Speaker 12: mister Kissinger after after his his devastating passing last night.
Speaker 7: Sorry, I've I made a post about this ADL post
Speaker 7: and I'm just scoping the replies because there are a
Speaker 7: lot of normal people on on x dot com these days.
Speaker 7: Someone that there's a group which appears to exist to
Speaker 7: lobby for the ADL to lose its nonprofit status, and
Speaker 7: I'm just going to say that these are the people
Speaker 7: that a d L should be focusing their because this
Speaker 7: is this is the old school anti Semitism. That is
Speaker 7: a giant fucking problem and we all need to reject. Like,
Speaker 7: there is some hateful shit on x dot com and
Speaker 7: sadly it's in my replies.
Speaker 12: Yeah, there is there, there's plenty to go around, and
Speaker 12: the fact that they feel the need to defend water Kissinger.
Speaker 3: This guy's running for governor of Missouri.
Speaker 7: So yeah, just as a podcast, I think we can
Speaker 7: safely say, don't vote for Darryl McClanahan.
Speaker 3: Klan is in his.
Speaker 12: Name, this is our this is this is the here's
Speaker 12: first anti endorsement for the twenty twenty four election season.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, I'm just gonna say don't don't vote for
Speaker 7: this guy.
Speaker 12: So so true. Well, God, I'm glad. I'm glad we
Speaker 12: could all bond over over over that, as I bonded
Speaker 12: over the many, many funny, funny memes in the meme
Speaker 12: chats that I'm in rocketing on all scillas Twitter has
Speaker 12: been preparing for this night for years. We have been training,
Speaker 12: We've been training for so long. People have stayed on
Speaker 12: throughout Elon's catastrophe, just just for this night, and now
Speaker 12: are finally free. They could, yeah, finally be released into
Speaker 12: the pasture.
Speaker 3: Go live on.
Speaker 7: I'm surprised we didn't crash Twitter with yeah, hopefully his
Speaker 7: last words, well, I wonder what they'll post about me.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I'm sure he was thinking about posting when he
Speaker 12: was going out.
Speaker 3: That makes sense. He would have been a post hoping.
Speaker 3: It was like, oh no, it burns, Oh god, yes,
Speaker 3: Anthony bore Day with brass knuckles at the gates of Hell.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, So okay, all right, so what are we
Speaker 3: doing for the rest of this episode? So okay, If
Speaker 3: if you want to do an episode that is the
Speaker 3: entire history of the stuff Kissinger did. Robert did a
Speaker 3: six part Behind the Bastard episode on it. You can
Speaker 3: spend like twelve hours of your life doing learning.
Speaker 13: About having the worst time. Yeah, yeah, I always of
Speaker 13: a self help book. Is a self harm book audiobook
Speaker 13: that Rob has made for.
Speaker 12: You, Yes, but with three funny people giving commentaries.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's very funny. You should. Yeah. However, comma, so
Speaker 3: we have been talking about how I mean people are
Speaker 3: like people are partying in the streets in Cambodia, like there.
Speaker 3: Kissinger's death has been a source of celebration for almost
Speaker 3: everyone on Earth, but that is not what this episode
Speaker 3: is about. This episode is about the one country on
Speaker 3: Earth that isn't celebrating. That country is China and on
Speaker 3: the country. Not only is China not celebrating the death
Speaker 3: of Henry Kissinger China is quite possibly the most popular
Speaker 3: American in the history of China to this day. Like
Speaker 3: right now, if you went and pulled like the favorability
Speaker 3: rating of like every famous American, you can think of
Speaker 3: the person what the highest rating is almost certainly going
Speaker 3: to be Henry Kissinger. And you know, I mean, and
Speaker 3: this is this is and this is not just a
Speaker 3: sort of like a popular thing, although again he is
Speaker 3: enormously popular among ordinary Chinese people. This is a thing
Speaker 3: that goes from the state down. Xi Jinping, he's actually
Speaker 3: weirdly one of the last world leaders to talk to Kissinger.
Speaker 3: So Kissinger went to visit China in July, and him
Speaker 3: and Chijinping have this like great heartfelt reunion. They have
Speaker 3: a great time. Xijinping says quote. The Chinese people never
Speaker 3: forget their old friends, and Sino US relations will always
Speaker 3: be linked with the name of Henry Kissinger. In the
Speaker 3: wake of Kissinger's death, the Chinese government said, from Reuter's quote,
Speaker 3: Kissinger made historic contributions to the normalization of China US relations,
Speaker 3: and Chinese people will forever remember him for his quote
Speaker 3: sincere devotion and important contributions, Wang added, the Chinese Premier
Speaker 3: and the four Minister also sent messages of condolences to
Speaker 3: Kissinger's family and to Secretary of State Anthony Blincoln. So
Speaker 3: he is getting like he is getting as good a
Speaker 3: reception in China as any American has ever gotten. And
Speaker 3: if you if you can understand how this came to be,
Speaker 3: how like every other country in the region fucking hates
Speaker 3: Kissinger like everyone else despises him. And if you can
Speaker 3: understand why China, why he is like the most popular
Speaker 3: American in Chinese history, you can understand the entire arc
Speaker 3: of the twentieth century and how we ended up with
Speaker 3: the horror that we all live in today. But first,
Speaker 3: speaking of the horrors that we all live in today,
Speaker 3: is breaking.
Speaker 7: Yeah hopefully one of our yeah, hopefully, Henry Kissing your
Speaker 7: collectible coins that they minted ten years ago and now
Speaker 7: been released to the market, and this will be the
Speaker 7: first of any adverts for them. They're only going to
Speaker 7: grown value, insulate yourself against inflation with these Hammery Kissinger coins.
Speaker 3: And we are back. So this story, the story of
Speaker 3: how Kissinger became the most popular man in China, or
Speaker 3: the most popular American in China, begins in Shanghai, nineteen
Speaker 3: twenty seven. Oh, it is the year nineteen twenty seven.
Speaker 3: For over a decade, China has been lost Inger Series
Speaker 3: C Wars. Kissing is seven four four years old.
Speaker 7: Yeah, four years old, child Kissinger.
Speaker 3: Child Kissinger is presumably unaware of the developments in China. Oh, oh,
Speaker 3: say that he was. He was keeping tabs absolutely at
Speaker 3: four years old. Yeah, he was. Even back then.
Speaker 7: He was a quote foreign policy realist.
Speaker 12: A towering intellect of this stature doesn't doesn't start his twenties.
Speaker 12: He starts like it his toddler years.
Speaker 7: Choice of words. By the way, towering intellect. Just looking
Speaker 7: at him, the pictures of him in China where he
Speaker 7: where he's dwarfed, and it's it's just very funny to
Speaker 7: look at this guy's grabbing, towering and it's like he's
Speaker 7: gonna be like five foot nothing.
Speaker 3: His intellect is towering, not his not his, not his person.
Speaker 7: Short King, short king, King, sure King would have been
Speaker 7: a great tweet if the ADELA called him a short king.
Speaker 7: I'm ironically I would have stand that.
Speaker 3: Yes, you were saying so, as as as as little
Speaker 3: tiny baby as Kissinger is looking on China's Communist Party
Speaker 3: is locked in a tenuous alliance with the Chinese Nationalist Party,
Speaker 3: which is the glooming Dong.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they suck so with the aid of the Soviets.
Speaker 3: And when I say the aid of the Soviets, I
Speaker 3: mean the Soviets basically rebuilt the Nationalist Party from the
Speaker 3: ground up. Yeah, the Nationalists have turned into a juggernaut.
Speaker 3: They have, they are, they have swept aside like every
Speaker 3: world ord army. They face their marching triomphant across the country,
Speaker 3: and ahead of their advance, a massive uprising led by
Speaker 3: the communists finally drives the warlords out of Shanghai, and
Speaker 3: Chinese working class stands victorious. They and they alone stand
Speaker 3: triumphant over the greatest city in China. It is the
Speaker 3: last time they will control this city for forty years.
Speaker 3: The new leader of the Nationalist Party is Chang Kai Shek,
Speaker 3: a proto fascist drug lord who the Soviets, for some
Speaker 3: inexplicable reason, thought was going to work for them and
Speaker 3: was going to like build a socialist state at China.
Speaker 3: Deeply unclear why they thought this. I don't know. Don't
Speaker 3: have stalin running your foreign policy. I don't have.
Speaker 7: Started running shit like as a Yeah, yeah Christmas.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so geez, he's no kissing jerk, Like what can
Speaker 3: we say?
Speaker 7: Yeah, also dead, though thankfully killed.
Speaker 3: Similar numbers of communists were get we are one sentence
Speaker 3: away from that. So, under the direction of Moscow, the
Speaker 3: communists in China convinced the Chinese working class to open
Speaker 3: the gates of the city to allow the nationalist army inside.
Speaker 3: The nationalist army immediately begins slaughtering the Chinese working class.
Speaker 3: By by the end of the white terror that this
Speaker 3: is going to unleash, the nationalists will have killed one
Speaker 3: million people, most of them Chinese workers and peasants. Basically
Speaker 3: like the entire you know, like like basically the entire
Speaker 3: urban Chinese left dies in this like like the the
Speaker 3: in this slaughter, and with them dies basically the entire
Speaker 3: internationalist wing of the Chinese Communist Party. Because the internationalist wing,
Speaker 3: the wing that had you know, very close connections to Moscow,
Speaker 3: were all like in Shanghai, and they were all but
Speaker 3: the most importantly not that they were all literally in Shanghai,
Speaker 3: but they were all part of the urban Communist Party
Speaker 3: and they get just completely wiped out. And this is
Speaker 3: the part of the Shanghai Rising. That for our purposes
Speaker 3: is important because it's the first moment where the rift
Speaker 3: between the Soviets and the Chinese Communist Party begins to form. Now,
Speaker 3: in the wake of the Shanghai massacre, Stalin sends the
Speaker 3: CCP instructions that are just nonsense, Like he's telling them
Speaker 3: to stay aligned with the Nationalist Party, but to oppose Shangkai.
Speaker 3: Shecheck like and literally there's descriptions of the meeting when
Speaker 3: like this this telegram comes in. The CCP leaders are
Speaker 3: like sitting around this I think it's a radio. They're
Speaker 3: sitting around this radio, and they get the they like
Speaker 3: they get the instructions, and they're just like these people
Speaker 3: are just burying their hands in their face because like
Speaker 3: this is nothing, it is nonsense, and you know, and
Speaker 3: this is sort of this is that's like the last
Speaker 3: gasp of the old Communist Party leadership. Those people are
Speaker 3: just gone, and in their place rises Mao. Now Mao
Speaker 3: is not from the urban wing of the party. He
Speaker 3: is from like Mao was a peasant organizer, right, He's
Speaker 3: from the whirl wing, and his wing of the party
Speaker 3: tends to be more nationalist and less sort of like
Speaker 3: subservient to Moscow. Than the urban wing of the party,
Speaker 3: and with Stalin basically getting the entire urban Communist Party
Speaker 3: and like every other urban leftist in the country killed,
Speaker 3: you know, the people that are left are MAO and
Speaker 3: the sort of peasant organizations who have a distrust of
Speaker 3: the Soviets that they're going to maintain for basically their
Speaker 3: entire lives. Now, obviously relations between the CCP and Stalin
Speaker 3: improve as like World War two happens, but there's a
Speaker 3: basically the moment the war ends, there's a series of
Speaker 3: incidents that sort of trained relations. One is that this
Speaker 3: is less an incident, but Stalin seems to not have
Speaker 3: thought that the CCP was gonna win the war, like
Speaker 3: he seems to have thought that the nationalists are going
Speaker 3: to beat them. And one of the things that he
Speaker 3: does is basically de industrializes Japan's giant industrial belt and
Speaker 3: occupied Manchuria. This is a completely intact industrial belt. It
Speaker 3: is one of the largest like intact industrial belts in
Speaker 3: the world, and Stalin, like in classic Soviet fashion, takes
Speaker 3: the factories, takes them apart, puts them on trains, and
Speaker 3: ships them across across the so sorry to rebuild this
Speaker 3: Ovia economy, yep.
Speaker 7: One of the first is many such incidents.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is a catastrophe for the CCP because
Speaker 3: even after the CCP wins the war, because they've now
Speaker 3: you know, so it's like Shanghai is in ruins, Beijing,
Speaker 3: like most of China is just in ruins because of
Speaker 3: I mean, like, what year are they on if effectively
Speaker 3: continuous fighting and the after the war. China's industrial base
Speaker 3: in this is nineteen forty nine, right, Their industrial base
Speaker 3: is smaller than Russia's in nineteen seventeen, which is just nuts,
Speaker 3: it is and this is small, yeah, and this is
Speaker 3: the conditions that the everything, the entire course of twenty
Speaker 3: century Chinese history are defined by these conditions, right, And
Speaker 3: these specific conditions are this is basically a production bottleneck, right.
Speaker 3: And I've talked about this on the show before. This
Speaker 3: is one of the one of the sort of most
Speaker 3: important things in twentieth century Chinese like political economy, is
Speaker 3: that you know, the CCP is trying to simultaneously expand
Speaker 3: its agricultural production to feed people and also expand its
Speaker 3: industrial capacity. It's mostly trying to expand it to its
Speaker 3: industrial capacity. The problem is they can't expand their industrial
Speaker 3: capacity without expanding their agricultural capacity, and they can't expand
Speaker 3: their agricultural capacity without expanding their industrial capacity. And their
Speaker 3: attempt to just blow through this by like mass use
Speaker 3: of human labor is the great lead bored. It's complete catastrophe, right,
Speaker 3: this is just gonna fuck like whatever like intentions like
Speaker 3: the Chinese Revolution had, this is just going to fuck
Speaker 3: them because the combination of this and their ideology is
Speaker 3: just going to doom the entire project. And you know
Speaker 3: this and the other thing about this period, the Soviets
Speaker 3: are really really patronizing, like they talk about like constantly
Speaker 3: and like diplomatic things, like they talk about the Soviet
Speaker 3: like the Chinese is like their younger brothers. There's like
Speaker 3: this weird like thing going on. This isn't enough to
Speaker 3: substantially threaten their alliance, but the relationship between the USSR
Speaker 3: and China is never as it's never quite as firm
Speaker 3: as people.
Speaker 1: Think it is.
Speaker 3: Now. The thing that really like kickstarts the break between
Speaker 3: the USSR and China is Khrushev's secret speech denouncing Stalin.
Speaker 3: So this gets like leaked. Krushchev makes the speech where
Speaker 3: he was like wow, Stalin did some fucked up stuff
Speaker 3: they called the personality was bad, actually, and this pisss
Speaker 3: off an enormous number of people. Mau forever like problems
Speaker 3: malhas with Stalin. He takes a very hard line on this,
Speaker 3: where he's like, no, I'm like, the Soviets are now revisionists,
Speaker 3: they have abandoned the path of Marcs Leninism. I am
Speaker 3: now the only anti revisionist in the world. And you know,
Speaker 3: and this whole thing like results in these worstening relations
Speaker 3: between China and the Soviet Union, with the CCP basically
Speaker 3: calling the Soviets like weak neck bureaucratic social imperialists and
Speaker 3: the Soviets looking at like the great leap forward and
Speaker 3: being like, what are these maniacs doing? And this tension
Speaker 3: escalates to the sixtieses both sides start massing troops on
Speaker 3: the Chinese Soviet border. Now meanwhile, so so okay, the
Speaker 3: sixties goes.
Speaker 4: On, and.
Speaker 3: Control of the Soviet Union has fallen to Leoned Breshnev,
Speaker 3: who is an absolute maniac, deeply weird, deeply not very
Speaker 3: good guy, and he in response to the Council Communist
Speaker 3: uprising in Prague in nineteen sixty eight, Breshnev rolls tanks
Speaker 3: in kills everyone, and then declares the Breshnev Doctrine, in
Speaker 3: which Breshnev claims the right to overthrow any socialist government
Speaker 3: who the Soviets decided we're trying to become capitalists, which
Speaker 3: I mean, this is the Soviet's right like that that
Speaker 3: what that actually means is that they don't align with USSR.
Speaker 3: So Breshnev means this to be about Eastern Europe, right.
Speaker 3: MAO looks at this and goes, oh shit, Breshnev is
Speaker 3: going to try to overthrow be and this does not
Speaker 3: go well. So and you know, I know the looking
Speaker 3: at it, he's looking at like the Soviet troops massing
Speaker 3: on the border, and he's like, oh shit. And this
Speaker 3: is where things get absolutely wild. In nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 3: there are a giant series of border skirmishes between this
Speaker 3: between Soviet and Chinese troops. People are killing each other
Speaker 3: across this enormous this is like continent sized border. People
Speaker 3: are like like like like companies of Chinese and Soviet
Speaker 3: troops are like firing artillery at each other. Everyone is
Speaker 3: completely losing their minds. And this is actually like one
Speaker 3: of the reasons why, Like every once in a while
Speaker 3: you'll get these things from the Himalayas and China's border
Speaker 3: with India, where everyone's like hitting each other with sticks,
Speaker 3: and the reason you're hitting each other with sticks is that,
Speaker 3: like the Chinese were like, wait, hold on, it's actually
Speaker 3: a bad idea to have guys with guns on the
Speaker 3: border of a nuclear power. Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, they have some amazing, amazing browls.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you know, but like and the funny thing
Speaker 3: like that, that's the reasonable version of this. In sixty nine,
Speaker 3: they're having the unreasonable version of this, where the Soviets
Speaker 3: are looking at the situation and they're going, oh shit,
Speaker 3: we can't win a war with China because their calculation
Speaker 3: is that they will eventually be overwhelmed by a combination
Speaker 3: of human wave attacks and the fact that like an
Speaker 3: enormous portion of the China is the Chinese population has
Speaker 3: been trained in guerrilla warfare. And their second problem is
Speaker 3: that the Chinese population is to disperse for them to
Speaker 3: all be killed by a Soviet nuclear weapons. And the
Speaker 3: CCP makes the same assessment and it's like, Okay, if
Speaker 3: we fight this war, like the human wave attacks are
Speaker 3: just going to eventually are going to crush them. We're
Speaker 3: going to use force numbers that can't kill us all
Speaker 3: with nukes. So the Soviets plan for this is they
Speaker 3: are like drawing up plans to line the border with
Speaker 3: China with nuclear land mines to stop the chese. It's nuts.
Speaker 3: Everyone is losing their minds normal times. Yeah, Like I've
Speaker 3: seen rumors. This is the thing I don't have actually
Speaker 3: good sources on. I've seen a lot of rumors that
Speaker 3: both both the Soviets and China like reached out to
Speaker 3: the US try to get them the nuke. The other side,
Speaker 3: it's everyone is everyone is completely losing their minds. And
Speaker 3: you know, so at this point, like both sides kind
Speaker 3: of back down because both of them realize that, like
Speaker 3: fighting this war is the stupidest thing that anything could
Speaker 3: possibly do, because there's there's like there is there was
Speaker 3: a little tiny shred of sanity left in both sides.
Speaker 3: That's like, do we like actually what to have a
Speaker 3: nuclear war? And they're like no, okay, but this marks
Speaker 3: the permanent solidification of what's called the Sino Soviet split.
Speaker 3: And do you know what else is it is? It
Speaker 3: is a Sino Soviet split. It's the split between the
Speaker 3: part of the episode that's ads and the part of
Speaker 3: the episode that's episode.
Speaker 12: That is a very important split that does relate to
Speaker 12: the worker councils of the Soviet state, as if the
Speaker 12: Soviets got their wish for world domination, we wouldn't be
Speaker 12: pivoting to an AD break instead, this would be purely
Speaker 12: workers sponsored.
Speaker 3: I don't know, here's the.
Speaker 12: App all right, I for one, am very excited to
Speaker 12: get those Coininger limited edition NFT collectibles. I think it's
Speaker 12: a real solid investment. So I know it sounds a
Speaker 12: little far fetched, but hey, in ten years, you can
Speaker 12: sell it to some guy from the CCP and.
Speaker 3: You might make a lot of money. So yeah, food
Speaker 3: for thought or the ad.
Speaker 12: That's right, that's right. You can sell it to Pit Cabbage.
Speaker 12: He could buy that for like ten grand. All if
Speaker 12: you spend one thousand dollars and in ten years you
Speaker 12: could be getting ten grand from pit Cabbage.
Speaker 3: And that sounds like that sounds like a great deal.
Speaker 7: That's a that's a ten percent discount as well with
Speaker 7: the discount code. Garrison Davis. Sorry miss back in script.
Speaker 3: So the back in nineteen sixty nine basically from from
Speaker 3: from yeah, yeah, so it basically from this point on,
Speaker 3: the USSR and the People's Republic of China are enemies.
Speaker 3: This is what's called the Sino Soviet split. And Mao
Speaker 3: begins casting around for allies, and into this breach steps
Speaker 3: a man accursed through history. Who's who's towering footfalls echo
Speaker 3: through the halls of power. I am talking, of course,
Speaker 3: about Charles de Gaulle. Yeah, most Frenchman two exists. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so Degall has been devising a strategy to pull China
Speaker 3: away from the USSR and towards the West. And this
Speaker 3: is the origin of what's called Triangle diplomacy. Now Kissinger
Speaker 3: steals this idea and goes and does it. But this
Speaker 3: was not Kissinger's idea. This was this was a plan
Speaker 3: that was already kind of in motion that he stole
Speaker 3: from the Gaull.
Speaker 12: Good artists copy great artists, steal Kissinger was anything.
Speaker 3: It wasn't artist great artists.
Speaker 7: What the Tony Blair Foundation said, It's not as Joe
Speaker 7: God fucking make jokes because everything's too fucked.
Speaker 3: I'm quoting the Tony Blair Foundation. That was it. There was,
Speaker 3: there was, there was there was some oh god, I
Speaker 3: can't remember his name. So someone in the seventies declared
Speaker 3: that satire the day, the day that Henry Kissinger won
Speaker 3: the Nobel Peace Prize the day Satire died. And he
Speaker 3: was right. And this is why satire doesn't work any work.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Tony Blair is now pissing on its grave.
Speaker 3: A yeah, so all right, but the you know, okay, So,
Speaker 3: so this triangle diplomacy thing, Kissinger basically takes it over.
Speaker 3: And the key element of this plan is is to
Speaker 3: use China as a bulwark against the Soviets, both in
Speaker 3: East and Southeast Asia and in places like Central Africa.
Speaker 3: But in order to do this they have to actually
Speaker 3: like establish contact with China, a thing they haven't had
Speaker 3: in like thirty years. Wow, I guess twenty. Ah whatever,
Speaker 3: Hey complicated. I'm not going to go through the entire
Speaker 3: diplomatic history of China, but you know, if you and
Speaker 3: this is the origin of one of Kissinger's most famous crimes,
Speaker 3: which is Operation search Light, which is Pakistan's genocide and Bangladesh.
Speaker 3: They kill about three million people. If you want to
Speaker 3: really detailed account of this, go listen to the Behind
Speaker 3: the Basses episodes. The short version of this is that
Speaker 3: Pakistan has been a Chinese ally for a while for
Speaker 3: a lot of reasons, one of which is China's antagonism
Speaker 3: with India, which peaked in nineteen sixty two when China
Speaker 3: just straight up invaded and he'speeded border region, conquered it
Speaker 3: and then like handed Nehru his ass in the process
Speaker 3: of what became known as a Sino Indian War. And
Speaker 3: this is an incredible betrayal, by the way, like Neihru,
Speaker 3: who was the Prime Minister of India, Nehru had turned
Speaker 3: down a permanent seat on the UN Security Council because
Speaker 3: because he was being given the seat as a way
Speaker 3: to make sure China didn't get it, and he turned it.
Speaker 3: He turned down that seat to get China onto the
Speaker 3: Security Council like out of out of like, not out
Speaker 3: of geopolitical like. This was basically a pure like ideological
Speaker 3: I'm doing this because it's the right thing to do thing,
Speaker 3: and Mao returns him by fucking invading India. So because
Speaker 3: of this and because of like you know, India Pakistan
Speaker 3: don't like each other. This is this is known. The
Speaker 3: Pakistani government is very close to China. Pakistani troops are
Speaker 3: trained by the Chinese army. They are armed with Chinese
Speaker 3: weapons and with Kissinger's blessings, so he could use the
Speaker 3: Pakistani government as an intermediary to negotiate with China. The
Speaker 3: Pakistani government seeds to kill three million Bangladeshis.
Speaker 4: It is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is. It is among the worst crimes of
Speaker 3: the twentieth century. It's a crime that it is broadly forgotten.
Speaker 3: China's complicity in it is forgotten. The American's complicity in
Speaker 3: it is barely remembered, basically only when people talk about Kissinger.
Speaker 3: But this was one of the worst things that happened
Speaker 3: in like one of the worst centuries in human history.
Speaker 3: But you know, for Kissinger, this is an enormous success, right,
Speaker 3: He gets everything that he fucking wants out of it.
Speaker 3: He doesn't give a shit about Bangwadeshis. Then you know,
Speaker 3: this is a tradition that has like echoed through the
Speaker 3: like the e ods of the liberals have ever since
Speaker 3: the US successfully opens diplomatic channels with China. And soon
Speaker 3: Kissinger and Nixon are going to meet Mao in China,
Speaker 3: And I'm going to read from Mao talking to Kissinger
Speaker 3: so you can understand who these people are. The tree
Speaker 3: between our two countries at present is very pitiful, is
Speaker 3: gradually increasing. You know, China is a poor country. We
Speaker 3: don't have very much. What we have in excess is women, Kissinger.
Speaker 3: There are no quotas or terrible for those, Chairman Mao,
Speaker 3: So if you want so, if you want them, we
Speaker 3: can give you a few of those, some tens of thousands,
Speaker 3: Prime Minister show of course, on a voluntary basis. Chairman Mao,
Speaker 3: let them go to your place. They will create disasters.
Speaker 3: That way you can lesson our burdens. Laughter. Sometime later, Mao,
Speaker 3: do you want our Chinese women, We can give you
Speaker 3: ten million laughter. Jesus, the Chairman is improving his offer bow.
Speaker 3: By doing this, we can let them flood your country
Speaker 3: with disaster and therefore impair your interest in our country.
Speaker 3: We have too many women, and they have a way
Speaker 3: of doing things. They give birth the children, and our
Speaker 3: children are too many. I mean, this is like a
Speaker 3: deeply CCP moment, like, yeah, this is like this is
Speaker 3: one of these stings. Was like there are people in
Speaker 3: the United States to this day who call themselves Maoists
Speaker 3: and like and think that this guy was like on
Speaker 3: the fucking left, and it's like, how do you fucking
Speaker 3: read that? Like him, just him just doing this fucking
Speaker 3: banter with the Butcher of Bangladesh and be like no, no, no,
Speaker 3: this is the guy who figured out to keep the
Speaker 3: key to achieving like socialism, right, he is the guy
Speaker 3: you figured ou how to end the class system, end imperialism.
Speaker 3: Is this fucking guy poling it up with fucking Henry
Speaker 3: fucking Kissinger, Like it's terrible, Like I just yeah, it's not.
Speaker 7: I meant the king to being a mauist is not
Speaker 7: reading this though true.
Speaker 3: I've seen maoists on Twitter trying to defend this. They're like, well,
Speaker 3: it was only like a temporary thing because the Soviets
Speaker 3: were threatening the New China and like, you know, and
Speaker 3: I'm one of the things that one of the real
Speaker 3: problems they have is that so in Angola, there's a
Speaker 3: civil war in Angola. There is a a faction that
Speaker 3: are the good guys, and then there's a faction that's
Speaker 3: being backed by apartheid South Africa and backing the apartheid
Speaker 3: South Africa fashion. Yeah, so you know, and this is
Speaker 3: the thing they have to justify and they can't. And
Speaker 3: this actually and you know, one of this actually has
Speaker 3: impacts in the US because like American maoists are confronted
Speaker 3: with this and are like what the fuck.
Speaker 7: Like what is this?
Speaker 3: And there are some of them who just like ignore
Speaker 3: it and quadruple down. There are some of it who
Speaker 3: become disillusioned.
Speaker 7: You could even pick a different tanky, like like Cuba
Speaker 7: heavily supported the m p l A and I go,
Speaker 7: for instance, like yeah, at.
Speaker 3: Least and just like yeah, moved to like Castro or something.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 7: Trotsky's right there, He's right there with an ice pick
Speaker 7: in his head.
Speaker 3: So true.
Speaker 13: Should have happened to Kissinger a fucking incredible alternate history
Speaker 13: lives and Kissinger dies lives.
Speaker 3: To one hundred.
Speaker 12: The world is so much it's the world's are like
Speaker 12: a great place, but it is a much better place
Speaker 12: in that alternate history.
Speaker 3: Can you imagine if Trotsky had held on long enough
Speaker 3: for social media to exist? You know, oh my god,
Speaker 3: it's him and the one the person I've been most
Speaker 3: sad right now than never gone on there was Goredal.
Speaker 3: He would have been killed it he would Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, there's a few people you just think would have
Speaker 7: been magnificent.
Speaker 3: Vodal has a famous a Kissinger moment where he's he's
Speaker 3: he's watching he runs into a Kissinger like in the
Speaker 3: Sistine Chapel, like looking at the part that's like looking
Speaker 3: at the hell part of it. Vidal goes, Kissinger is
Speaker 3: apartment hunting.
Speaker 13: Very funny, very yeah, yeah, yeah, that is brains.
Speaker 3: So many of these. There's there another famous one where
Speaker 3: the the absolutely dog Ship American author Norman Baylor punches
Speaker 3: him and he's like falls over because he's got punched.
Speaker 3: While he's on the ground, Vandal goes, words failed Norman
Speaker 3: Baylor again. Yeah, really incredible guy, real time posting. We
Speaker 3: see it. Yeah, tragic, tragic had never made it it.
Speaker 3: Lots of tragedies unfolding. One of them is that you know,
Speaker 3: this whole thing of like like kissingered bantering with Mao
Speaker 3: like this it works like the US and China established
Speaker 3: mathomatic relations. And this is a this is a seismic
Speaker 3: shift in sort of Chinese popular culture and media and
Speaker 3: consciousness because from the Korean War until like the seventies, right,
Speaker 3: the way people think about America and the way they're
Speaker 3: portrayed in Chinese media is like as the great imperialist enemy, right,
Speaker 3: like the last time there was contact between the US
Speaker 3: and China. It is a bunch of Chinese troops doing
Speaker 3: bayonet charges, like wearing sandals in the fucking snow, doing
Speaker 3: bayonet chargers through their own artillery barages to kill American
Speaker 3: troops like that. That is like like the amount of
Speaker 3: hatred like there is is unbelievable. And you know, it's
Speaker 3: funny because like the US like really forgot that war,
Speaker 3: but like China did not, right, and suddenly like America
Speaker 3: is China's friend. And the human face of this absolutely
Speaker 3: Parkle shift in basically the entire ideological system of Chinese communism.
Speaker 3: The face of this shift in in the just the
Speaker 3: image of what America is, which is like it doesn't
Speaker 3: it's not quite mapping on, but it's like like America,
Speaker 3: like it's it's kind of like how Baptists think about
Speaker 3: the devil, right like that that that is the role
Speaker 3: that America has in Chinese like popular sort of culture
Speaker 3: like up until this point, and then suddenly it's completely
Speaker 3: pivot on its head. And the face of this shift
Speaker 3: is Kissinger. And you know and this, uh, this is
Speaker 3: pingpong Eurasia is what you're doing right now? This yeah,
Speaker 3: happened to this all happened due to table tennis, and
Speaker 3: I won't hear any other way. Oh god, I was
Speaker 3: I specifically did it include that the table tennis diplomacy
Speaker 3: at this because I was like, I hate the ship, but.
Speaker 7: Yeah, liberals really get on that ship. They talk about
Speaker 7: I think Joseph was a big diplomacy guy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it's like, you know, but I I think,
Speaker 3: like thing on diplomacy is an example of like how
Speaker 3: circumscribed the contact between the U to the US and
Speaker 3: China is right, Like again, like we're talking about like
Speaker 3: like ping pong teams playing each other. This is like
Speaker 3: the big diplomatic and cultural exchanges going on between China
Speaker 3: and the US. There's nothing. And this is something that
Speaker 3: you have to sort of understand if you want to
Speaker 3: understand this pivot is how isolated China was. Right Like
Speaker 3: the US through this entire period is pretending that the
Speaker 3: nationalists in Taiwan or the legitimate government of all of China,
Speaker 3: they have blocked off effectively all trade with China. They've
Speaker 3: blocked off basically all trade from the US. They've blocked
Speaker 3: off a huge amount of international trade and and you know,
Speaker 3: and this this this is something that really really cripples
Speaker 3: the Chinese economy. Like you know, you can't quite blame
Speaker 3: it for like the famines because like I mean, for example,
Speaker 3: like the CCP was exporting grain to the USSR while
Speaker 3: greatly before what was happening, right like, but I mean,
Speaker 3: it didn't fucking help that. And one of the the
Speaker 3: other big consequence of this is that it is almost
Speaker 3: impossible for Chinese people to go to China. Like you
Speaker 3: you basically can't do it. And this is an enormous
Speaker 3: deal because there are tens of millions of Chinese people
Speaker 3: across the world who can't go back to China. These
Speaker 3: people can't see their families, they can't see their friends,
Speaker 3: they can't go to the graves of their ancestors, they
Speaker 3: can't they can't go home. And this happened with my family,
Speaker 3: Like my grandpa didn't see his brothers and sisters for
Speaker 3: forty years after the war. Forty years just did not
Speaker 3: see his family. And you know, and it's only when
Speaker 3: Kissinger and that this is the way that it's seen
Speaker 3: in China. It's only when Kissinger re establishes relations, which
Speaker 3: Kissinger goes out there and advocates and The way they
Speaker 3: see it is he's advocating for China in the US,
Speaker 3: which is kind of true. But the way they see
Speaker 3: this is only when Kissinger reestablishes diplomatic relations, that's when
Speaker 3: it becomes possible for you to see your family again.
Speaker 3: And you know, like I cannot emphasize enough how big
Speaker 3: of a deal this is in China in the diaspora, Like,
Speaker 3: if you are in the diaspora, you can't get fucking
Speaker 3: messages in you Like a lot of people don't know
Speaker 3: whether their family is still alive because the last time
Speaker 3: they saw them was the war or and when I
Speaker 3: say though war, like that could be World War two,
Speaker 3: that could be the Revolution, that could be people liking
Speaker 3: before that. And you know, this is a huge deal
Speaker 3: in the diaspora too, to the point where like a
Speaker 3: lot of the people who had been like in the
Speaker 3: in the Asian American movements in sixty eight, like people
Speaker 3: who had been like Yellow Peril, Yellow Power, people who
Speaker 3: are like ally with the Black Panthers, Like these people
Speaker 3: are trying to get jobs in the Nixon State departments
Speaker 3: because they want to be there to like help reopen
Speaker 3: diplomatic relations with China. It is it is like, this
Speaker 3: is like it is one of the sort of apocaum
Speaker 3: moments of the second half of the twentieth century. Is
Speaker 3: this this these diplomatic relations opening up again. And in
Speaker 3: the Chinese media, they don't really want Nixon to be
Speaker 3: the face of it because now there's this is not great.
Speaker 3: But so they they put they put Kissinger as like
Speaker 3: the human face of all of this, and you know,
Speaker 3: and and there's there's and there's a lot of benefits
Speaker 3: of China from this. They're getting these massive technological transfers
Speaker 3: from the US, and this is one of the things
Speaker 3: that it's in I think it's a very underrated factor,
Speaker 3: but this is one of the factors that makes their
Speaker 3: their technology. Like sorry, let me say that again. This
Speaker 3: is one of the factors that makes it's one of
Speaker 3: the incredibly underrated factors that makes their industrialization program work.
Speaker 3: And there's a lot of places where people try similar
Speaker 3: industrialization programs to what China is going to pull off,
Speaker 3: Like Venezuela, for example, tries this, and Venezuela's program completely
Speaker 3: fails because they don't have access to the technology that
Speaker 3: the US got from basically sucking up or that China
Speaker 3: got from sucking up to the US, and Kissinger is
Speaker 3: directly responsible for a lot of like a lot of
Speaker 3: these technology transfers, and for this, Kissinger is labeled as
Speaker 3: as like as a friend of the Chinese people like this,
Speaker 3: This is literally the way that it's talked about in
Speaker 3: the Chinese media, and even sort of beyond just him
Speaker 3: being labeled like a friend of the Chinese people, like
Speaker 3: he is like Okay, so there's like one or two
Speaker 3: other Americans who you can sort of like publicly express
Speaker 3: admiration for. Who are people who like effectively defected the
Speaker 3: China or just move to China and like we're there
Speaker 3: for the revolution. But those aren't like major figures, right,
Speaker 3: Like they're like communist journalists or stuff like that, or
Speaker 3: like anthropologists, like they're not. This is the first like
Speaker 3: actual public American figure that you were allowed and you
Speaker 3: are encouraged to be like yay, this guy fucking rules.
Speaker 3: And in a very short amount of time, Kissinger becomes
Speaker 3: enormously popular as the man who you know, he's the
Speaker 3: guy who restored Chinese American relations. He's the guy who
Speaker 3: allowed all these people to see to see their families
Speaker 3: and the saytion to terror regime I mean he doesn't
Speaker 3: actually end them, but he's helping people work around them,
Speaker 3: and the sanctions eventually sort of come down. But you know,
Speaker 3: all of this comes with the price. And this brings
Speaker 3: us to another Kissinger crime, which is a Kissinger in
Speaker 3: the coup against Chile's democratically elected president Salvadur Ayende. So
Speaker 3: this coup is fully green lit by the US, like
Speaker 3: Kissinger is involved with it. Pinochet is going to murder
Speaker 3: forty thousand Chilans. We talked about this on the show
Speaker 3: a few times before, but what we haven't really talked
Speaker 3: about much is that after this, after the coup, Chile
Speaker 3: is like completely diplomatically isolated. No one wants anything to
Speaker 3: do with them because this just like maybe like absolute maniac,
Speaker 3: massive murderer has just deposed like a sovereign government. Like
Speaker 3: even like the even the UK like won't like refuses
Speaker 3: to like talk to them, right like like and when
Speaker 3: when like the Brits won't talk to you because you've
Speaker 3: done too many crimes?
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, you've really fucked it there, like the guys
Speaker 7: who who's prime Minister's son living doing coups?
Speaker 3: Yeah, but there is one country other than the US
Speaker 3: that will do that, will that will like do that,
Speaker 3: will make deals with Pinochet. And that country is China,
Speaker 3: and China funny funnels millions of dollars like to some
Speaker 3: literally to Pinochet directly and to the Chilean government. And
Speaker 3: this is a time where China is not rich, but
Speaker 3: and this is millions of dollars like in in like
Speaker 3: nineteen seventies money. It's it's a lot of money. And
Speaker 3: and China is absolutely broke, and they're fucking sending it
Speaker 3: to and they're they're sending it to fucking Pinochet, and
Speaker 3: like and and like to get a sense of how
Speaker 3: weird this stuff is in China, right, Like a lot
Speaker 3: of people in China think that Pinochet is a socialist
Speaker 3: because he's being portrayed positively in the Chinese media, so
Speaker 3: they assume that he's a socialist. Like this is the
Speaker 3: kind of shit that's like just the absolute brain worms
Speaker 3: that are happening in China at this point, because they're
Speaker 3: their connection to the outside world is really really tenuous,
Speaker 3: and the Chinese media is suddenly gassing up all of
Speaker 3: these just like horrific right wing dictators. Now, as as
Speaker 3: Kissinger Star sends in China, the CCP begins pulling its
Speaker 3: own kissingers. So this is this is a this is
Speaker 3: a kind of a story we only learned about pretty recently,
Speaker 3: I think in like the last two years. Being Japing
Speaker 3: was the first like Chinese communist leader to visit the US.
Speaker 3: And so he got he's in Washington, DC, and he
Speaker 3: takes time out of his schedule to have a secret
Speaker 3: meeting with the CIA where he goes to the CIA
Speaker 3: office to set up like list to set up CIA
Speaker 3: listening posts in China to spy on the USSR.
Speaker 1: And one of the.
Speaker 3: Products of this, you know, so that that's that's the
Speaker 3: sort of low level stuff that Chine is getting involved with.
Speaker 3: The high level stuff is in nineteen seventy nine, China
Speaker 3: invades Vietnam. They killed tens of thousands of people, They
Speaker 3: devastate both the Chinese and music economy. And this is
Speaker 3: one of the things that you know, this is a
Speaker 3: decisive thing in the Cold War, Right, China has like
Speaker 3: Donna Kissinger, They've invaded fucking they've invaded Vietnam. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: you know, and one of the one of the sort
Speaker 3: of modern iterations of this right has been you know,
Speaker 3: there's there's a long period of sort of like China's
Speaker 3: alignment with the US. And one of the other things
Speaker 3: that happens that China like becomes increasingly tied to Israel.
Speaker 3: And this is one of the things that that's like
Speaker 3: true of China to this day is like there are
Speaker 3: a bunch of surveillance cameras in the West Bank that
Speaker 3: are that are that the Israelis used to surveil Palestinians
Speaker 3: that are built in China, right the same the same
Speaker 3: cameras that are being used in shing Jan. A lot
Speaker 3: of like Chinese h what's it called. It was like
Speaker 3: Chinese police sometimes special forces units like trained with Israeli
Speaker 3: like trainers. There's a lot of like they do like
Speaker 3: cow like quote unquote kunter terrorism exchanges and and the
Speaker 3: other big aspect of this is that a huge part
Speaker 3: of the Israeli tech industry and a huge part of
Speaker 3: their sort of like defense complex is fueled directly by
Speaker 3: both Chinese resources and by Chinese raw materials, and also
Speaker 3: by things like transistors that they're importing from China. And
Speaker 3: this is the product of the sort of long arc
Speaker 3: of Kissinger's work in China and Kissinger's work sort of
Speaker 3: peeling off Egypt from the Palestinian like Soviet camp. And
Speaker 3: this ultimately is the price of opening relations with the US.
Speaker 3: It's not a price that's paid by the Chinese ruling class. Instead,
Speaker 3: what happens is that every dissident in China, every fucking
Speaker 3: child in Cambodia, every teenager in these Teamwar and every
Speaker 3: veteran in Vietnam, Mao sells them the fuck out, staying
Speaker 3: Shaw Ping sells them out, ku Chaital sells them out,
Speaker 3: Xijinping sells them out. They take American money, they take
Speaker 3: American technology, They shake hands with Kissinger, and they let
Speaker 3: Bangladesh burn. And for this, Kissinger would remain astead fast
Speaker 3: ally at the Chinese capitalist classes entire life. When the
Speaker 3: CCP butchered the last gas of the Chinese working class
Speaker 3: at Tienemen, Kissinger stood by the CCP and basically is
Speaker 3: one of the few Americans straight out doing pr for them.
Speaker 3: He does it again when China's tried to enter the
Speaker 3: World Trade Organization. He like, this is the last thing
Speaker 3: he was doing before he fucking died, was going it
Speaker 3: was going to China and allying himself for the Chinese
Speaker 3: ruling class. And you know he meets Chijien Ping and
Speaker 3: is greeted as an old friend. And this is how
Speaker 3: you get to the thing that's been happening today, which
Speaker 3: is like all of these Chinese, like the Chinese Foreign Ministry,
Speaker 3: and a bunch of time making Chinese government officials like
Speaker 3: releasing these statements about how doctor Kissinger is a good
Speaker 3: friend of the Chinese people. And this ultimately is what
Speaker 3: Kissinger represents, the prospect of the alliance between the American
Speaker 3: and Chinese capitalist class built on the blood of the
Speaker 3: working class of five continents. It is a world in
Speaker 3: which there is peace and prosperity for the bourgeoisie, where
Speaker 3: there was starvation and death for everyone else. This still,
Speaker 3: to this day is the regime that rules the US,
Speaker 3: it is the regime that rules China. And they are
Speaker 3: being united for one final time in their love of
Speaker 3: one Henry Kissinger. And yeah, that's basically all I've got.
Speaker 3: I guess the last thing I can say is one
Speaker 3: of the things that I think I hope people will
Speaker 3: understand about this is that the way that the American
Speaker 3: left thinks about China, like the way that it the
Speaker 3: way that it's politics function, are completely illegible in China, like,
Speaker 3: there are no like in the US. It is very
Speaker 3: common to have someone who is like pro Palestine, who
Speaker 3: is like socialist, who is like pro LGBTQ like rights,
Speaker 3: who like you know, who considers this selves Nancy imperialist
Speaker 3: who is also pro CCP and also fucking hates Kissinger.
Speaker 3: And this is not a position that exists in China.
Speaker 3: There is nobody like this, nobody, fucking like, no one
Speaker 3: at all believes this because it's just it's a not
Speaker 3: a coherent political position. Is it is an American projection
Speaker 3: of politics on the China because again, meanwhile, like the
Speaker 3: actual thing that's happened in China is because of the
Speaker 3: way the media has covered Kissinger. The thing they covered
Speaker 3: is the normalization of US China relations, and not all
Speaker 3: of the fucking genocides that he did. And so they
Speaker 3: have the same fucking whitewashed view of Kissinger that like
Speaker 3: right wing Americans do and that the American ruling class does.
Speaker 12: And this is truly, truly has been the century of
Speaker 12: Kissinger from twenty three to twenty three.
Speaker 3: But but fuck that, the center of Kissinger is over.
Speaker 3: Now is the century of the social revolution. We're fucking
Speaker 3: going for his ass. We're gonna tear apart everything he
Speaker 3: ever built. That motherfucker's gonna watch from hell as we
Speaker 3: destroy everything he ever created his entire life time.
Speaker 7: That's why we're taking a week off to go to
Speaker 7: Chile and begin the social revolution that Kissinger destroyed again
Speaker 7: as a podcast.
Speaker 12: We we we do now have to choose the new
Speaker 12: most evil person alive. Uh, there's there's been quite a
Speaker 12: there has been quite a few in the running. We
Speaker 12: have we have Chinese up there, obviously, we have uh
Speaker 12: W Bush, we have.
Speaker 3: We have net and Yahoo. We have making a strong
Speaker 3: case right now. Yeah, we have him off.
Speaker 7: Maybe he wanted to take the seat, take the throne.
Speaker 3: Yeah, made a decently strong case.
Speaker 12: Sure, sure there is there is, There is a decent
Speaker 12: list running. I think only time will tell for who
Speaker 12: will truly have a lasting impact of similar evil. But yes,
Speaker 12: that there is now a new new open position for
Speaker 12: most evil person Alive. So many people are throwing their
Speaker 12: hat into the ring. We will see how this contest
Speaker 12: plays out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you will. You will hear it when when
Speaker 3: that fucking person dies. You're shirt on this show too,
Speaker 3: and we will enjoy it. Yeah, let's be make it
Speaker 3: up here and go have a good time. Enjoy, Enjoy
Speaker 3: for this, Enjoy. By the time you're hearing this, the
Speaker 3: second ever sunrise in one hundred years that does not
Speaker 3: have Henry Kissinger under it. Yeah.
Speaker 7: Somewhere today, somewhere in the world, a baby has been
Speaker 7: born in a post Kissinger world, and we can we can.
Speaker 3: All the most evil baby has been born and we
Speaker 3: have to heal. Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, somewhere thanks to the cyclops I'm Sarah. Henry Kissinger
Speaker 7: is attack.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 7: So if you're squeezing out a baby this month, just
Speaker 7: be careful.
Speaker 3: It's all I'm saying.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 3: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 12: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 12: cool Zone Media dot or check us out on the
Speaker 12: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 3: You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
Speaker 3: monthly at Coolzonemedia dot com, slash sources. Thanks for listening.