Speaker 1: Alzone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 1: All right. It is the official it could happen here
Speaker 1: predictions episode, And to start off here at Gear has
Speaker 1: some of our wins and some of our losses from
Speaker 1: last year's That's right.
Speaker 3: I took a peek back at our predictions of the
Speaker 3: past to see how correct we are. We got all
Speaker 3: of them right, Great job, folks, Let's continue on. No,
Speaker 3: I will say, obviously the big dub for the year
Speaker 3: goes to Sophie, who said that Kissinger would die.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you got that one, said that.
Speaker 4: Good.
Speaker 1: Thank you for reminding me that I'm a genius.
Speaker 5: Wow.
Speaker 3: We all said to know, there's no chance he's too
Speaker 3: psychically powerful, but you maintained, and it turns out all
Speaker 3: we needed was a little hope.
Speaker 2: That's all we needed.
Speaker 1: Wow, I really should use these powers. I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't know.
Speaker 2: You're going to take out next Yeah.
Speaker 1: We'll get there.
Speaker 2: Who your prediction might death prediction for us?
Speaker 1: Just for funzies, We once had a side note we
Speaker 1: once had back in the beginning times when we actually
Speaker 1: went to an office. God at at at I heard
Speaker 1: we once had a prediction of when George H. H W.
Speaker 2: Bush was going to die and I was also right.
Speaker 3: So oh, okay, well, Sophie, now you have to be
Speaker 3: very careful, which one guess, very careful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've been watching hard. I've been watching the show You,
Speaker 2: which is primarily about how being a serial killer is
Speaker 2: a great idea, and I feel I feel whyting like
Speaker 2: White Woman was that so that I can protect myself
Speaker 2: in case Sophie is secretly murdering people, which would just
Speaker 2: two in a row, two in a row. That's all
Speaker 2: I'm gonna say.
Speaker 1: If I was, it would be in your honor.
Speaker 3: So so let's talk about two things Robert got wrong Robert.
Speaker 3: Robert said that there was a decent chance, which I
Speaker 3: think there was, but it just didn't happen that Nick
Speaker 3: Fuentes and Kanye West would die together in under some
Speaker 3: mysterious circus.
Speaker 2: I still feel like that favor, so I think we
Speaker 2: I still think we got a shot. I honestly I
Speaker 2: think so too. But it didn't happen last year.
Speaker 3: The other thing Robert predicted is that there would be
Speaker 3: a SKA total supremacy that obviously didn't happen.
Speaker 2: That that happened. I'm sorry that happened. Did you miss
Speaker 2: me informing Cody Johnston about the Mighty Mighty Bosstones George
Speaker 2: Floyd album this year?
Speaker 1: Because I did, and it was you, unfortunately did And
Speaker 1: if you have.
Speaker 2: A one of the worst things to say happened to human.
Speaker 1: Gun, Yes, please continue.
Speaker 3: It's Mia predicted that there would be kind of a
Speaker 3: new sort of like DeSantis style Republican challenger approaching. I
Speaker 3: think Ramswami perfectly fits the sort of thing that Mea
Speaker 3: was talking about, and this is the kind of new
Speaker 3: figure that enters politics.
Speaker 1: But he also kind of gives Andrew Yang in a
Speaker 1: way as well.
Speaker 2: Sure sure, sure, yeah, yeah, he's he's the fascist Andrew Yang.
Speaker 1: He's fascist Andrew Yang, and he's insufferable. He's in fucking insufferable.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, massive, so fucking insufferable.
Speaker 3: Mia also predicted that Mike Pence would try to run
Speaker 3: for president. The rest of us disagreed and was Nea
Speaker 3: was proving, Yeah, that was easy.
Speaker 2: For fifty percent on that. I don't know how much
Speaker 2: we'd say he really ran for president.
Speaker 1: He jogged at most, and then he realized the only
Speaker 1: person that would vote for him was mother.
Speaker 4: And then he was.
Speaker 2: Like, I don't think she would. Yeah, I think she'll
Speaker 2: say she will, but she's gonna she's gonna pull the
Speaker 2: lever for Trump at the end of the day.
Speaker 1: Yeah they are.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about some deaths. Mia said that Nom Chansky
Speaker 3: would die. Sharen said Joe Biden would die. I think
Speaker 3: although they didn't physically.
Speaker 2: Die, the last.
Speaker 6: Vestige of their like respectability basically count right. Basically they
Speaker 6: torpedoed all the the last bit of like uh respect
Speaker 6: they had.
Speaker 3: For for for people who would typically be aligned with them.
Speaker 7: Roughly, Biden has just been he's looked like he's on
Speaker 7: death death's door for forever.
Speaker 3: I similarly thought that Stephen Crowder was gonna die and
Speaker 3: instead he just he just kind of metaphorically died because
Speaker 3: he made up a series of horrible business decisions and
Speaker 3: now is ostracized from much of the online right, So
Speaker 3: that's cool.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: The one that Sophie's upset about is that she she
Speaker 3: wanted Crypto dot Com to lose the name of the
Speaker 3: arena instead instead the Miami Instead, the Miami Heat Arena
Speaker 3: is no longer called the FTX Arena. I'm happy about
Speaker 3: that as well. Crypto dot Com is still holding strong.
Speaker 3: So so there we go, and I.
Speaker 1: Take that very personally and it is Staple Center, Thank
Speaker 1: you so much.
Speaker 2: Now, I will say that's I feel like I'm going
Speaker 2: to roll that prediction in the next year. Let's run
Speaker 2: death prediction as well.
Speaker 3: James James said that there'd be more immigration bullshit, which
Speaker 3: obviously happened, as James has been covering that most of
Speaker 3: this last year. Also, James said that Twitter would die,
Speaker 3: which is true because it's no longer Twitter.
Speaker 2: It's no longer Twitter. Correct, It's just like it's just
Speaker 2: like how Henry Kissinger changed his name. So true.
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, I will say the most impressive kind of
Speaker 3: niche prediction, this is the last one, came from Sharen
Speaker 3: oh Sharene said that there would be the return of
Speaker 3: the flip phone, and searches for flip phones were up
Speaker 3: fifteen thousand percent last year among jung z and millennials,
Speaker 3: and foldable phones sold forty four percent more compared to
Speaker 3: twenty twenty two. So three really was the return of
Speaker 3: the flip phone. So there we go.
Speaker 7: I think it's going to continue because of what's happening,
Speaker 7: it will go and all the tension that's going on
Speaker 7: over there. I think we're going to continue seeing a
Speaker 7: switch away from iPhones.
Speaker 3: So that's that's proof of why we are all completely
Speaker 3: trustworthy and never wal wrongs.
Speaker 1: And what were you wrong about? Garrison?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you really skipped over your bit, Garrison. Oh, I.
Speaker 3: Thought that Harry Styles would would there'd be some damning
Speaker 3: information that come out and he would just plummet.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately that didn't happen.
Speaker 3: The Styles is still is still hanging in there, so
Speaker 3: Styling here's to hopin.
Speaker 2: Hey, So Sophie's favorite musician, not.
Speaker 1: My favorite musician, but it puts on a good show.
Speaker 2: All right, all right. Predictions for this next year, Oh wait,
Speaker 2: I I need to take one.
Speaker 5: I need to take one other l which is that
Speaker 5: I significantly overestimated my countrymen, and I thought that we'd
Speaker 5: see another wave of revolts from people dying from COVID
Speaker 5: in China and we didn't.
Speaker 2: I don't know why country would suck ass like everyone else. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's because that's because COVID is not real.
Speaker 3: All right, Well, let's uh, let's let's blaze past that
Speaker 3: one and.
Speaker 1: When we get back, when we get back from this
Speaker 1: uh this break, we're gonna we're gonna start going through
Speaker 1: some predictions.
Speaker 4: And we are back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So that's why I just don't really think the
Speaker 2: vaccines were it.
Speaker 3: So twenty twenty four is in a election year, obviously,
Speaker 3: so there will be some election related predictions. Let's do
Speaker 3: I don't want to immediately just go to like who's
Speaker 3: gonna win. Let's do some V picks. Yeah, let's let's
Speaker 3: do some VP picks because this is this is gonna
Speaker 3: be a Joe Biden versus Trump race, right like, unless
Speaker 3: one of them drops dead before November.
Speaker 2: Ideally murder suicide. That's that's my hope for them for once.
Speaker 2: I don't disagree with Robert, But.
Speaker 3: Do we think that Kamala Harris is gonna it's gonna
Speaker 3: it's gonna stick in? Uh, the the Democrat VP spots.
Speaker 2: Got so it's hard to imagine she wouldn't. She's a
Speaker 2: dog ship candidate, Like, yeah, their best The best person
Speaker 2: I think they could run is Witmer. Like if i'm
Speaker 2: if I'm like war gaming the Democratic Party trying to
Speaker 2: give him the best shot. It's throwing Witmer in.
Speaker 1: But Joe Biden at least make a Really Joe, it's
Speaker 1: gonna he's gonna stick. He's gonna stick with Kamala for sure.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, which is unfortunate because.
Speaker 1: There's bet definitely better that. It's like, definitely, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: say better. There's definitely like more strategic people that But
Speaker 1: I mean, if we were going by strategy, we wouldn't
Speaker 1: the Democrat. I mean, yeah, it wouldn't. It wouldn't be
Speaker 1: Biden Trump again, if we were going by what's best
Speaker 1: for the country.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 3: As for Trump, last year, I said that I think
Speaker 3: herschel Walker could be a potential of VP ban, which
Speaker 3: I think is still true, but there's not as not
Speaker 3: as much as it used to be.
Speaker 5: Trump Trump would become the third organization to become completely
Speaker 5: screwed by picking herschel Walker, like three executive organizations have
Speaker 5: bet everything on herschel Walker had lost.
Speaker 3: That's the biggest thing is that is that Trump doesn't
Speaker 3: like losers and herschel Walker is kind of only ever lost. Now,
Speaker 3: obviously we've talked about this before. The Ramaswami's is maybe
Speaker 3: a potential, but he could be too loud for Trump.
Speaker 3: He could kind of steal the spotlight.
Speaker 1: He's not the attention. Okay, does each person want to yea,
Speaker 1: does each person want to go around? Let's go around
Speaker 1: the horn? So, so, Garrison, who is your pick?
Speaker 3: I mean, I was mostly tossing between Favec and herschel Walker,
Speaker 3: but I it's I'm not confident in either of those.
Speaker 3: But there's there's no other names that really come to mind,
Speaker 3: because most of the other people on the debate stage
Speaker 3: either were too hostile to Trump or just didn't seem
Speaker 3: like people Trump would really get behind.
Speaker 2: M Yeah, I think Bobby Kennedy, I think you could
Speaker 2: actually do it.
Speaker 5: I think Okay, Admittedly, admittedly, my biggest reason for thinking
Speaker 5: this is not actual political analysis is.
Speaker 2: That we live in the dumbest of all possible world.
Speaker 2: Dumbest world is Bobby Kennedy.
Speaker 3: That is that that is true, This is this is
Speaker 3: the dumbest timeline.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe Nicky Haley if he can overcome.
Speaker 3: Just like, yeah, but with Haley, Hailey's been kind of
Speaker 3: not like attacking Trump fully, but she has not been
Speaker 3: super pro Trump on this stage. I think she may
Speaker 3: have alienated him too much. I was also thinking, like,
Speaker 3: you know, who's like, uh a more like docile woman
Speaker 3: that Trump would want to run beside.
Speaker 7: But yeah, but Nick Haley has has the reach that
Speaker 7: I think she'd smart him. And like everyone is against
Speaker 7: every candidate until they're picked for fucking VP.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think.
Speaker 1: I think that there's there's several different people that he
Speaker 1: could pick. He could pick uh, Carrie Lake, he could
Speaker 1: pick Sarah Huckabee Sanders, he could pick oh man, what
Speaker 1: is that governor's name, Christine Yes, I think thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you. He could pick Christine. No. But like there's
Speaker 1: if he's gonna go woman, he's gonna go I think
Speaker 1: one of those three because I think he's already bad mouth.
Speaker 1: He's already bad mouthed Nikki Hayley enough. But I think
Speaker 1: I think what's what people are forgetting is he might
Speaker 1: just pick somebody that he knows won't turn on him.
Speaker 2: He might just pick his fucking daughter.
Speaker 1: Like I was gonna say, I was gonna say actually
Speaker 1: his I mean he might, he might. He might pick
Speaker 1: Jared Kushner, the cush bomb.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's get that. That's the fucking election I want. Robert,
Speaker 2: Do you have a pick? I mean, I suspect he's
Speaker 2: that that Biden and fucking Harris are going to run.
Speaker 2: Although you know, again, if I'm talking about who I
Speaker 2: think actually would be the smart pick for the dims,
Speaker 2: it's Whitmer and or Andy Basheer, who's the Democratic governor
Speaker 2: of uh Kentucky. Super popular, like really good at talking
Speaker 2: to kind of working class voters, has been successful in
Speaker 2: a red state. We're in this weird situation where almost
Speaker 2: anyone kind of assides Kamala Harris who were to run
Speaker 2: against Trump would win easily. And if Trump were to
Speaker 2: be replaced by like Nicky Hayley, she would just absolutely
Speaker 2: pants Biden. This is what all of the data shows
Speaker 2: at the moment. So we're in this really odd moment
Speaker 2: of like we have. It's like it's the opposite of
Speaker 2: the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object. It's like the
Speaker 2: very mobile object meeting the very light force. They're both
Speaker 2: just sort of sliding around the room.
Speaker 3: Coughing baby versus coughing baby.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's two babies with tuberculosis in a steel
Speaker 2: cage while Joe Rogan narrates the fight, which I would
Speaker 2: watch a country. So I don't know. I don't know
Speaker 2: who the fuck Trump is going to pick. Uh yeah,
Speaker 2: probably probably his daughter Jacob. He might you know, I
Speaker 2: wouldn't be I wouldn't be wildly shocked if he were
Speaker 2: to go with christ what's her name? She ran as
Speaker 2: a Democrat last time.
Speaker 8: But I did think about that too.
Speaker 2: She's sucking mental now, she's she's been out of her mind.
Speaker 2: I think shocked.
Speaker 3: I think that she's a regular Fox News contributor.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think he doesn't want someone who is like.
Speaker 1: He hates Fox News now Theolarity until they avaked him.
Speaker 2: He needs unpopular enough that I think Trump might see
Speaker 2: him as a loser. Tolci's not a loser. She's also
Speaker 2: not a threat to him being in the spotlight, and
Speaker 2: he he might decide to roll those bones. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: did think about that.
Speaker 1: All right, do we do we want to switch over
Speaker 1: to another category?
Speaker 2: Gear? Sure?
Speaker 1: Does anybody have a general prediction that they would like
Speaker 1: to share?
Speaker 2: Sure? I think a daily wire host is gonna.
Speaker 3: Have something funny happen to them, any anything related to
Speaker 3: based on how much like there's gonna be probably a
Speaker 3: whole bunch of rallies happening in twenty twenty four in
Speaker 3: a leading to the election, I think there's can be
Speaker 3: a lot more on the ground stuff that than there
Speaker 3: was in twenty twenty three. I think animosity has only
Speaker 3: really risen these past three years, and I think that
Speaker 3: we could see the return of pieing as a as
Speaker 3: a as a widespread tactic.
Speaker 2: God God from your mouth to God's er scar.
Speaker 3: So you can you can put that one together, all.
Speaker 1: Right, I'll go my prediction as a two part and
Speaker 1: it falls under the Kim ye Oh my first My
Speaker 1: first prediction is that Kanye people are going to forget.
Speaker 1: People are going to forget he's going to put out
Speaker 1: a new album. Uh, and people because he's already started
Speaker 1: to like do the thing that Kanye does where he
Speaker 1: plays plays an album at a random club and or
Speaker 1: plays a listening party event. And yeah, people are going
Speaker 1: to forget He's gonna He's gonna do that. And then
Speaker 1: Kim has been hanging out with Ivanka a lot, and
Speaker 1: she is almost in law school, and I think she
Speaker 1: is going to have some kind of a feeler into the.
Speaker 2: Field of politics this year. Oh my god, what if
Speaker 2: she's VP.
Speaker 1: I actually that thought actually did go through my brain.
Speaker 2: But I don't think.
Speaker 1: I don't think she's there yet.
Speaker 2: But we are not ready.
Speaker 3: We are not ready for a Trump Kardashian ticket. I'm sorry,
Speaker 3: I am moving. I am moving back to Canada. That's
Speaker 3: simply not happening.
Speaker 1: The reality TV ticket would be, you know, just so
Speaker 1: America of us.
Speaker 3: This is then.
Speaker 8: Trump would have technologed the Armenian genocide, would make relations
Speaker 8: with Turkey very difficult.
Speaker 2: That was she would and vice presidency would be very
Speaker 2: good for our media. It would for the goods, it
Speaker 2: would be amazing.
Speaker 1: But like, but like, since since Trump's been out of office,
Speaker 1: Ivanka kind of went underground, and you know, most people
Speaker 1: have not been seen with her. And in the last
Speaker 1: couple of months, she has been photographed with Kim. Kim
Speaker 1: has posted her. They've been doing things together, they've been
Speaker 1: coordinating outfits. It's yeah, and so I think we might
Speaker 1: see some kind of thing between the two of them
Speaker 1: there or Kim is going to start making her way
Speaker 1: into a political career of some kind. Yeah, although I
Speaker 1: do think that not you know, some of the work
Speaker 1: that she's done helping getting innocent folks out out of
Speaker 1: prison has been pretty dupe. I will say now that
Speaker 1: is my prediction the kimyer.
Speaker 2: I hate this country.
Speaker 8: I think we probably will go back. We just did
Speaker 8: this episode spoiler. We're recording in twenty thirty three. I
Speaker 8: predict that by this time next year we will probably
Speaker 8: go back to something approaching title forty two, which will
Speaker 8: be terrible given that, like as Robert said, kind of
Speaker 8: we're seeing increased conflicts all over the world. People are
Speaker 8: coming here, they won't be able to that will have
Speaker 8: massively destabilizing an influence on Mexico as it did last time,
Speaker 8: an impact on Mexico. I'm also really what my concern
Speaker 8: prediction this year is violence against migrants in places where
Speaker 8: they're extremely vulnerable as we go through the election cycle,
Speaker 8: which will never to be demonize them from both fucking parties.
Speaker 8: So that's become a really big especially with this stupid
Speaker 8: practice of bussing people across the country and then dumping
Speaker 8: them onto the streets like that.
Speaker 2: That's my big concern for twenty four Yeah, uh, you
Speaker 2: know what, fuck it?
Speaker 5: I can be wrong, all right, So my this is
Speaker 5: my this is my my, a thing that I've been
Speaker 5: waiting for to happen. That's gonna be one of the
Speaker 5: just most one of the worst things that's gonna happen. Eventually,
Speaker 5: at some point this is gonna happen. We're going to
Speaker 5: get an attempt by the Republicans to seriously come after
Speaker 5: interracial marriage, and it is going to form the most
Speaker 5: insane political coalitions you have ever heard of in your
Speaker 5: entire life. It is going to be like this nightmare
Speaker 5: word coalition of just like the open white supremacists, the
Speaker 5: like Asian MRA people, a bunch of like you're gonna
Speaker 5: see a bunch of these completely deranged, like career like
Speaker 5: nom like nominally left wing Korean at no nationalist groups.
Speaker 5: I you're gonna see like the like Andrew Tate people.
Speaker 5: There's gonna be this. It's gonna to have this this
Speaker 5: just absolute nightmare coalition behind it. It probably won't work,
Speaker 5: but it is going to be one of the worst things.
Speaker 5: And I don't know if I I hope it doesn't
Speaker 5: happen next year, but I think I think the election
Speaker 5: year someone could actually decide that this is going to
Speaker 5: be the time they're going to try and do it.
Speaker 6: That.
Speaker 2: That is the sort of shit that I when I
Speaker 2: think about, like what could upset the election in Joe
Speaker 2: Biden's favor, it would be the Republicans launching a crusade
Speaker 2: like that and like too hard, too fast, yeah, and
Speaker 2: on something that like everyone up until the moment it happens,
Speaker 2: would assume was just not up for debate, right, Like,
Speaker 2: I don't know it might happen if they let go
Speaker 2: after gay marriage, but everyone's kind of braced for that.
Speaker 2: If they were if they were to launch a crusade
Speaker 2: against interracial marriage, Yeah, that is the kind of thing
Speaker 2: that might might just sink them. Everyone might just go, well,
Speaker 2: I guess we have to u for Biden again because
Speaker 2: this is just out of its mind.
Speaker 3: I mean, one thing that Republicans have been talking more about,
Speaker 3: and I think it's maybe possible that there'll be one
Speaker 3: or two states that that actually moves on this is
Speaker 3: abolishing no fault divorce. I think that is something that
Speaker 3: could happen in like one or two red states this year.
Speaker 3: I don't know how much that would actually impact national elections,
Speaker 3: but that is something I think the Republicans are starting
Speaker 3: to focus more on.
Speaker 2: Specifically like Republican media influencers, largely because they all have
Speaker 2: had their wives leave them.
Speaker 7: Chariny Well, yeah, I do think that flip phones are
Speaker 7: going to continue being.
Speaker 2: Popular, especially dumbling down.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 7: I mean, I'm first of all, I was right. Second
Speaker 7: of all, I have a couple ones I hope aren't true,
Speaker 7: but I think they will be.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 7: I have a feeling that and I think there's gonna
Speaker 7: be something similar to the Muslim band but in specific
Speaker 7: like about Palaesi in Israel. I think that there's going
Speaker 7: to be something scary that targets and entire people that
Speaker 7: I don't want to be true, but it just feels
Speaker 7: like we're we're going up that route.
Speaker 2: So I feel like there's gonna I have.
Speaker 5: I have a thing about what that's going to be.
Speaker 5: I think I think what's going to be. And this
Speaker 5: is something we've been seeing in Florida. There's going to
Speaker 5: be a giant push to ban Chinese citizens and mooting
Speaker 5: property because this is this is already happening in Florida.
Speaker 5: There's there's been this whole and like like like Florida's
Speaker 5: right now in the process of doing this thing where
Speaker 5: they're trying to prevent people who spent like one year
Speaker 5: in uh in China from like being a universities. I
Speaker 5: think it's going to be this giant like they're they're
Speaker 5: they're going to do one of these like Chinese people
Speaker 5: can own property things.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I didn't know that. That's really unsettling.
Speaker 8: They're closer than you would sink to already doing a
Speaker 8: version of a Muslim band not targeting Palestine.
Speaker 2: But well and Trump has promised in countries that's.
Speaker 7: What I mean, that's it happened before, Like why wouldn't
Speaker 7: it happen again. It just feels really unsettling that it's
Speaker 7: that's the possibility of it happening again.
Speaker 2: Well, and Trump has promised that if he wins again,
Speaker 2: where he's moving straight to deportation of Muslims, Like, I
Speaker 2: think we will like that that he's he said that
Speaker 2: that's what we're gonna do.
Speaker 7: I also think that there's going to be an uproar
Speaker 7: about a historical figure who is white being played by
Speaker 7: a black person. Another another one of those.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's like every week already, it's already starting. Charine,
Speaker 2: you are correct, because next year what Denzel is going
Speaker 2: to be planning playing Hannibal Barka in a movie about
Speaker 2: the Second Punic War, which any person who is not
Speaker 2: out of their mind is like, that's inspired. He's the
Speaker 2: possible person playing that guy. But it's going to piss
Speaker 2: off a bunch of people, even though even James.
Speaker 1: But we're the one who listened to that James Bond podcast, right.
Speaker 5: Kill James Bond the name of the podcast. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 5: I just gotta say this, tea girl, James Bond. It
Speaker 5: would set the world on fire. It would be the
Speaker 5: funniest thing that's ever happened.
Speaker 2: Yes, do it? God?
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah that way. Yeah, the Civil Wolf will begin
Speaker 8: because of trans James Bond.
Speaker 2: So true, so true. I see. I take a different tact,
Speaker 2: which is that we should find the most Cajun man
Speaker 2: alive and finally give the people what they want, which
Speaker 2: is Cajun James Bond. I mean that would also go hard,
Speaker 2: like James Bond making a like instead of instead of
Speaker 2: a Martini shaken not stir, and he likes a nice
Speaker 2: ETU fe like, come on, let's do it, let's let's
Speaker 2: be heroes.
Speaker 3: I I know we wanted to close with the with
Speaker 3: the with the death segment. I think because of Kissinger,
Speaker 3: we already took so many dubs there that I one
Speaker 3: thing that is on my mind is surely it's possible
Speaker 3: there'll be more kind of protests pop the mobilizations like
Speaker 3: this summer before the election. But I'm more interested in
Speaker 3: what's gonna happen after the election, because no matter who wins,
Speaker 3: which either I already don't have a strong feeling one
Speaker 3: way or another, there's potentials for Obviously, if Trump wins,
Speaker 3: I think they'll be.
Speaker 1: Massive another January sixth type event.
Speaker 8: If pussy hats are gonna come back. If Trump wins,
Speaker 8: there will be win that's my prediction. They'll be like
Speaker 8: probably at least two strong weeks of intense rioting across
Speaker 8: the country. Yeah, I think we'll see more firm suppression
Speaker 8: than we did in twenty twenty in a lot of cases,
Speaker 8: which will be interesting because at this point Biden will
Speaker 8: still be technically in charge, but everyone's going to treat
Speaker 8: it like it's a Trump problem. On the other hand,
Speaker 8: if Biden wins, are we going to get stopped to
Speaker 8: steal too? Or will a second or will or will
Speaker 8: a second defeat in a row almost be more of
Speaker 8: like a death kneel for this sort of like mega mobilization.
Speaker 2: I get that.
Speaker 3: I think that that's also a possibility that too low
Speaker 3: is in a row could just just like disillusion a
Speaker 3: whole bunch of people who otherwise kind of want to
Speaker 3: do a stop still too.
Speaker 2: But it may just it may just not happen.
Speaker 1: We literally can we can't. We can't. Let pick more, judge.
Speaker 2: I'll tell you what will happen. Uh is because I
Speaker 2: I I am aware of the predictive programming that the
Speaker 2: Obamas have been putting out movie leave the world behind.
Speaker 2: We're gonna we're gonna have a military coup and they're
Speaker 2: going to use the Havana syndrome gun to make while
Speaker 2: they while they re you know, fix fix politics one
Speaker 2: way or the other. Don't know which side is going
Speaker 2: to do it, but somebody is going to drop the
Speaker 2: Havana syndrome gun.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Let's let's take a quick break and come back
Speaker 1: with our death predictions. How does that sound? Everybody?
Speaker 2: And we're back.
Speaker 1: Robert, Who's gonna die? Who's gonna die? Robert Roberts.
Speaker 2: Uh, you know what my pick this year is? Everybody,
Speaker 2: I think this is the year we all get it.
Speaker 2: I think, uh, somebody's gonna push push the button and finally, finally,
Speaker 2: the world's atomic stockpile will bring us all sweet release.
Speaker 3: Okay, my my serious prediction. I think Putin will be assassinated.
Speaker 7: That'd be cool, dude, I was going to say, I
Speaker 7: have a feeling that there's going to be some type
Speaker 7: of assassination that will like rock the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, decent chance of sod eats it. Still, I think, God,
Speaker 2: you know, the only reason I wouldn't say that, that's
Speaker 2: like the guy I most want to see die in
Speaker 2: the world and probably won't be until he does. But
Speaker 2: like aired one's up there. But asad just nobody, nobody
Speaker 2: else has that body count right now, no one can
Speaker 2: touch him. That's the thing. That's the thing. Babe's going
Speaker 2: for it. But still he's got to kill. I mean,
Speaker 2: like like that, I I just don't know he's he's
Speaker 2: a survivor. Unfortunately, like you have to, you do kind
Speaker 2: of have to acknowledge that about him, Like homologous Vigor,
Speaker 2: he's pretty good at not getting killed so far. I
Speaker 2: just don't know whereas like Putin hasn't really been tested
Speaker 2: this way yet and I I do kind of think, yeah,
Speaker 2: I think that there's there's a chance. I don't know that.
Speaker 2: I think it's a high chance.
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, I mean I think every day we get
Speaker 3: close and closer to an Elon Musk overdose.
Speaker 2: Well and all and our lives so so true.
Speaker 1: Ja.
Speaker 8: Yeah, my prediction is that with the will of God,
Speaker 8: Morrissey will finally fucking die and rid us if he's
Speaker 8: annoying bullshit, Oh my god, because.
Speaker 1: Wow, not that that is not what I was expecting, sir.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in Chilla, we will see the end of Morrissey
Speaker 2: this year. Friends, has everybody?
Speaker 1: Has everybody gone? Because is it? Marturn? With my with
Speaker 1: my power?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, yeah, I really.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying more Sea. I really thought about this,
Speaker 1: and it's time. It's time, David, Misscavage, It's fucking time.
Speaker 2: Okay he said it first. Maybe from the person who
Speaker 2: predicted Kissinger. Yeah, and someone else. She picked someone else, right,
Speaker 2: who else did you get, Sophy?
Speaker 1: I don't know who else did I get?
Speaker 2: I I don't have anything you said something about when
Speaker 2: you were in the office. Oh, George H. W.
Speaker 3: Bush, Oh yeah, yes, yes, yeah, yeah, we could be
Speaker 3: two for two here.
Speaker 1: But but I think I think it's it's gonna be
Speaker 1: a misscavage. But you know that. But you know he'll
Speaker 1: just jump into another body.
Speaker 7: But you know what, I wish. This is a wish
Speaker 7: that I don't think will come true. But uh, McConnell,
Speaker 7: I think.
Speaker 2: I mean that it seems very likely he has a
Speaker 2: short circuit in front of a camera. Yeah we have
Speaker 2: he will die live on TV.
Speaker 3: When we have seen the android flip on and off
Speaker 3: multiple times, I think it's very clear that one day
Speaker 3: he just won't boot back up.
Speaker 2: What she could die too. I think I think McConnell's
Speaker 2: gonna die the way he lived with Fintanel that got
Speaker 2: snuck into his heroin. You know, that's that's just I think.
Speaker 1: And on that note, Turtle bye bye, are we free?
Speaker 1: We're free?
Speaker 4: Bye?
Speaker 1: Welcome to It could happen here. It is twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: A lie, it's twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1: Robert has just pissed everybody off for the last three
Speaker 1: minutes and fourteen seconds.
Speaker 2: That listener Sophie is gaslighting you. It is until December when.
Speaker 1: They listen to this, it'll be twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: You don't know that.
Speaker 1: I do know that I'm in charge. Okay, moving on,
Speaker 1: We're going to do some listener questions today, but I
Speaker 1: just wanted to, you know, give a shout out to
Speaker 1: each member of our team. We have Shrien lani Enis,
Speaker 1: we have James Stout, we have Mio Wong, we have
Speaker 1: Garrison Davis, and we have Big Bobby E.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1: And we're going to answer some listener questions. Thank you
Speaker 1: for those, to those who have submitted, anybody else want
Speaker 1: to say anything before I start?
Speaker 2: Besides Robert, thank you about half of those. Yeah, you
Speaker 2: need to have a chat with yourselves. You know who
Speaker 2: you are. I don't think they do. I don't think
Speaker 2: our listeners are very self actualized. All right, Sophie take
Speaker 2: it away to each of you.
Speaker 1: Any book recommendations for introduction to anarchist history and or theory.
Speaker 2: If I may.
Speaker 8: There's a book called Great Anarchists by Dog Section Press.
Speaker 8: It's written by Ruth Kinner, who's been on the podcast.
Speaker 8: It's got very short bios of different great anarchists. I
Speaker 8: think you will enjoy it. I think you can get
Speaker 8: the PDF for free online. I like to print them
Speaker 8: out and put them in as little libraries that rich
Speaker 8: people like to have in their neighborhoods and red pill them,
Speaker 8: black pilled them slowly that way. So yeah, great. Anarchists
Speaker 8: by dog Section Press. From Dog Section Press by Ruth McKinnon.
Speaker 2: My one is kind of it's slightly more specialized, but
Speaker 2: Anarchism in Latin America is a great book. Also, the
Speaker 2: cover is just gorgeous, so you'll have that around all
Speaker 2: the time. But yeah, it's really good.
Speaker 1: It's great.
Speaker 5: Basically it goes country by countries through Latin America and
Speaker 5: talk about athor anarchist movements and it's great.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not it's sort of anarchists, I suppose. But
Speaker 3: I've been doing a lot of union stuff recently, so
Speaker 3: I've been thinking a lot about the concept of work,
Speaker 3: so I have kind of returned to this really good
Speaker 3: book I think put out titled work, very very basic
Speaker 3: look into sort of like anarchist almost like anti work theory.
Speaker 3: It's just a nice book to interrogate how the concept
Speaker 3: of like work in labor exists in your own head.
Speaker 3: I've appreciated that one through the years.
Speaker 1: Sharin or Robert, either of you.
Speaker 7: I second all those answers amazing answers everybody, Well, and.
Speaker 2: I cannot read, so I'm gonna second those answers.
Speaker 3: Robert recommends the book, isn't it like the No God's
Speaker 3: No Master's Akpress one with the Chaos Stars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's got a lot of like old anarchist essays
Speaker 2: and shit, starting in like the eighteen hundreds, So if
Speaker 2: you're interested in that kind of history, you can read that,
Speaker 2: all right.
Speaker 1: The next question, I think this will be different depending
Speaker 1: on the type of episode and like what show people
Speaker 1: are writing it for. But I got several different people asking,
Speaker 1: you know, how long it takes to research rate like
Speaker 1: an average episode, So we're talking like not talking like
Speaker 1: a series such as Garrison's Stop Coop City series, but
Speaker 1: like an average episode where you're talking about something and
Speaker 1: it's a scripted episode, but you're talking about something.
Speaker 3: Sure, Yeah, I mean some episodes take months, if but
Speaker 3: an average episode usually if I'm putting it together, it
Speaker 3: might take me like four days from start to completion.
Speaker 3: Like I'm thinking of my of my DeSantis fast Wave episodes.
Speaker 3: Usually you'll have like maybe two days of more research
Speaker 3: and then two days of like well, then like one
Speaker 3: day of like scripting, and then editing that script on
Speaker 3: like the fourth day and then you record. So yeah,
Speaker 3: maybe maybe around that. I mean some episodes come together faster,
Speaker 3: some episodes come together longer. It really really varies.
Speaker 7: Shoot shoo, Yeah, I would agree with that timeline. I
Speaker 7: think three to four days sounds about right. I've been
Speaker 7: trying to take an extra day just to read through
Speaker 7: the script, like multiple times, just because I've been it's
Speaker 7: just better for like my performance.
Speaker 2: It's like, where does that sounds?
Speaker 9: So?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would say, like when you write a script,
Speaker 1: the worst thing you can do is immediately read it
Speaker 1: after you've finished writing it.
Speaker 7: And I've made that mistake before. I would definitely have
Speaker 7: so taking time is important.
Speaker 1: Yeah, James mea Robert, anything you want to add.
Speaker 8: I spent thirty five years preparing for the sheet Pocas.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it really depends on the episode. If it's an interviewer,
Speaker 2: I'll spend maybe a couple of hours, you know, studying
Speaker 2: up on everything the person has said. If it's a
Speaker 2: scripted episode, a scripted half hour to forty five minutes
Speaker 2: of the show is generally five to seven pages. That's
Speaker 2: maybe an hour or two to write, and then four
Speaker 2: to six hours of research, which although it kind of depends,
Speaker 2: you know, because a lot of it's based on just
Speaker 2: sort of like ongoing research, right where whereas like something
Speaker 2: will happen in the news and we'll do some studying
Speaker 2: up on that event, but we're also keeping in touch
Speaker 2: with like like when we have episodes on terrorist attacks
Speaker 2: and whatnot. Like I don't know how to actually like
Speaker 2: lay out how much time goes into those episodes, because
Speaker 2: it's a large part of it is just the process
Speaker 2: of like keeping up with the way terror is evolving
Speaker 2: in America. We will have beats, right, Like we will
Speaker 2: have that we just keep up with.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like we're not counting all the time that we
Speaker 3: spend like in telegram just like watching right but the
Speaker 3: gram but yeah, yeah, sure sing second time this year
Speaker 3: Garrison's found themselves too old to understand a youth reference.
Speaker 1: My next question, what conspiracy theory or unsolved mystery do
Speaker 1: each of you believe in?
Speaker 2: The dangerous question and first answer on air, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I just want to point out that Garrison sent
Speaker 1: me this question to ask, so it must be an
Speaker 1: answer in mind. Yeah, are a Garrison danger Davis?
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, I I don't know what what even I'm
Speaker 3: not sure if I believe in anything that would be
Speaker 3: classified as a conspiracy theory, I would have to I
Speaker 3: would have to think on this.
Speaker 2: Actually, I don't know. I don't believe in it. I
Speaker 2: fucking love Bohemian Grove stuff.
Speaker 8: It's like one of the ogs you know, from like
Speaker 8: the beginnings of the Internet, and it just can't get
Speaker 8: enough about people who have just never deviated from the
Speaker 8: Bohemian growth. That dude who went there with the combination
Speaker 8: AR fifteen shotgun and tried to destroy Bohemian Grove legend.
Speaker 2: I love reading about that stuff. It's nonsense, but it's fun.
Speaker 5: I mean, like I actually have Oh oh no, go
Speaker 5: please okay, or we're doing we're doing We're doing this one.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 5: If you if you were on the live show, you've
Speaker 5: heard this. You were not on the live show. You
Speaker 5: have which is that?
Speaker 2: Okay?
Speaker 5: From from from the late nineteen seventies until the early
Speaker 5: nineteen eighties when it was busted by the Italian police,
Speaker 5: the Italian government is run by a rogue Masonic lodge
Speaker 5: called the Peach Organization. God, I know it's propaganda due
Speaker 5: very various elements.
Speaker 2: Okay. So there's this thing going on here.
Speaker 5: There's various elements use the Red Brigades as as a
Speaker 5: way to assassinate Eldo Morrow. They take them to a
Speaker 5: hotel that is like it's run by like one of
Speaker 5: the Red cardinals is one of those sort of the
Speaker 5: communist cardinals is like in this building is like a
Speaker 5: NATO weapons is like someone a NATO weapons dealer.
Speaker 2: An Italian general of the regulaser. I think I see
Speaker 2: a red laser hovering over. This is all real?
Speaker 5: This was right, Look, this is the raight three.
Speaker 2: It's the thing is the thing is that?
Speaker 5: Okay, so every conspiracy theory on earth is real, but
Speaker 5: it was only real from about nineteen seventy seven to
Speaker 5: nineteen eighty three in Italy, Like all of them are
Speaker 5: there at the same time, like during the alder Morro assassination,
Speaker 5: like the the two groups trying to free Elder Morrow
Speaker 5: are the Pope on the one hand, and then well
Speaker 5: iatually Sadure's there's the Pope who's working through an Israeli
Speaker 5: guy in the castnet, and the other for him is.
Speaker 2: It's the pfl piece. She's got one of them, the pup.
Speaker 5: What he had gotten, Okay, like one of the one
Speaker 5: of the one of the guys who make sures, who
Speaker 5: make sure that the elder Morrow dies is he's like
Speaker 5: a now and he's now insane Alex Jones conspiracy guy,
Speaker 5: Like he's on Alex Jones all the time.
Speaker 2: He was like, he's the hostage. Yeah, yeah, he's the guy.
Speaker 3: That guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's a he's a regular fixture. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So like the people try to kill it. Like the
Speaker 5: both the US the Soviets, independently of each other, are
Speaker 5: both trying to make sure this guy dies. Same with
Speaker 5: the East Germans, the fucking oh what's it called, the
Speaker 5: miner Mainhoff group, the weird Germany also revolves all right.
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, I am I am a nine to eleven truther.
Speaker 2: Uh in there, God, I don't believe that when you
Speaker 2: call nine to one one it goes anywhere. I think.
Speaker 2: I think they're just hooking you up to an AI.
Speaker 2: It's it's a con people.
Speaker 1: Oh shit, Rudy Giuliani has to pay those Georgia election
Speaker 1: workers one hundred and fifty million dollars.
Speaker 2: I feel like he's got that. Yeah, I feel like
Speaker 2: he's got that hanging around. It will be good.
Speaker 1: No, but he literally defamed the ship out of those lovely,
Speaker 1: lovely people.
Speaker 2: He I mean, defamation is like of what he does.
Speaker 3: Okay, new new favorite conspiracy theory. Panera Bread made the
Speaker 3: deadly lemonade on purpose, as are whatever who cares wait genocide.
Speaker 2: That's where we see. I fully support the lemonade that
Speaker 2: kills you. I think we need more lemonade that kills Pete.
Speaker 1: We're gonna take a quick guide break. We'll be right back,
Speaker 1: and we are back. What are you most excited to
Speaker 1: work on this year? Slashould be a part of create.
Speaker 2: What are we most excited to work on? Next year?
Speaker 2: And I've been stockpiling a lot of and so I
Speaker 2: I I got some plans. I got some plans. I
Speaker 2: got some plans. Do we believe or not? That's that's
Speaker 2: the real question. I don't know. That's that's someone else's
Speaker 2: job to decide.
Speaker 8: I can tell you from experience that the ATF will
Speaker 8: visit your employer if you conclude instructions on how.
Speaker 2: To make in your in your work. It's legal. Go ahead,
Speaker 2: and they'll still believe you.
Speaker 1: Go ahead, Garrison.
Speaker 3: I'm planning to attend a whole bunch of more kind
Speaker 3: of occult conferences or paranormal conventions and and get get
Speaker 3: more into the high strangeness world this year. That's that's
Speaker 3: something I'm I'm excited about.
Speaker 1: I'm really excited. We're launching a weekly show with Jimmie
Speaker 1: Loftus starting in the spring that I'm very excited to
Speaker 1: be producing. So look out for that.
Speaker 5: I Okay, I've been working on this for a fucking
Speaker 5: year now, but it's coming next year, which is my
Speaker 5: episodes on the lab leak stuff.
Speaker 2: I have a corkboard that makes that entire Italy.
Speaker 1: Corkboard.
Speaker 5: I've spent so many hours talking to epidemiologists losing my mind.
Speaker 2: But it's coming, it will happen. I'm very excited about it.
Speaker 3: You you have been talking about these episodes for quite a.
Speaker 2: While, literally a year. It's Robert I have agreed to
Speaker 2: do a podcast that is going to be a nightmare,
Speaker 2: but you'll you'll all love it. You'll all love it
Speaker 2: as it ruins my life. And uh, I don't know,
Speaker 2: probably eventually the Robert E. Lee episodes, we'll get those out.
Speaker 2: You know what I've been doing. I've been working on
Speaker 2: a te Lawrence series of episodes, so that I'm very
Speaker 2: excited about. Amazing Lawrence of Arabia, the guy who invented
Speaker 2: the concept of insurgency. So that'll that'll be good. That'll
Speaker 2: be a good series.
Speaker 8: I hope Robert and I get to go back to
Speaker 8: me and Ma and do maybe a visit to some
Speaker 8: different groups. That would be cool. I would like that.
Speaker 8: I'm excited to do more migration stuff. Yeah, spend more
Speaker 8: time and on different parts of the migration journey, because
Speaker 8: I think that's something I've wanted to do for a
Speaker 8: long time, and.
Speaker 2: Like I've seen a lot of people do really shitty
Speaker 2: versions of it.
Speaker 8: So I'm excited to give you a cracket at not
Speaker 8: doing a cringe voyeuristic.
Speaker 2: Version of that.
Speaker 1: Everyone else have an answer to that? Did your answer, Shreanny,
Speaker 1: I didn't.
Speaker 7: I feel like I have two answers, like one, I'm
Speaker 7: not excited at all, because I feel like the most
Speaker 7: when I'm most motivated, it's when i'm the most angry,
Speaker 7: and so I'm not excited for things to make me
Speaker 7: angry and upset. But I am looking forward to I
Speaker 7: think I like when I have people on that are
Speaker 7: like experts or they have knowledge that I don't, and
Speaker 7: so I like the possibility of having more conversations that
Speaker 7: are enlightening, I suppose. And yeah, I also I would
Speaker 7: like to talk more about corn and food, so maybe
Speaker 7: I should focus on that.
Speaker 2: Maybe I should focus on something could happen here.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, that's that's something I look forward to, something
Speaker 7: to be fun.
Speaker 3: We definitely want to do more farm animal episodes, yes,
Speaker 3: and food, more food episodes. But no, you bring up
Speaker 3: a good point about how this kind of whole show
Speaker 3: works is that all of the best stuff we make,
Speaker 3: in my opinion, is always related to things that we're
Speaker 3: passionate about, and passion can come in a few forms.
Speaker 3: Anger something that is a big driver of passion, but that's,
Speaker 3: you know, usually less fun. So it's always nice and
Speaker 3: we can be able to cover something that we are
Speaker 3: passionate about, but it comes from not a place of anger,
Speaker 3: but it comes from a place of like, like like
Speaker 3: genuine like intense interest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like, I genuinely love corn.
Speaker 7: I loved the conversation about sheep, So I look forward
Speaker 7: to the possibility of making things not just when I'm
Speaker 7: like enraged and more when I'm like that's a good point.
Speaker 7: That's a good point that passion can can come from
Speaker 7: different things. Because I was just as passionate talk about
Speaker 7: corn than I was to talk about an important thing
Speaker 7: that happened.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I have I have a specific question that
Speaker 1: I vetted to James ahead of time, which is, do
Speaker 1: you have any stories about meeting fans or listeners? I
Speaker 1: r l.
Speaker 6: I do.
Speaker 8: I'm not just stepping on to you. Please approach Robbit
Speaker 8: when he's buying groceries. But but yeah, yeah, no, dou
Speaker 8: do it.
Speaker 4: Don't.
Speaker 2: He's very ticulish. I always armed in the grocery store,
Speaker 2: so please don't do that. That's why you kind of
Speaker 2: tickle them. Don't tick or rubber guys. It's weird.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so loads of people are not loads, but a
Speaker 8: lot of people who've listened to our podcast who come
Speaker 8: to help in Aucumber, and they're all very nice, and
Speaker 8: I've enjoyed building Gortz and making sandwiches and ladeling out
Speaker 8: beans with them immensely, and it genuinely does make me
Speaker 8: really happy because it can like when we do the podcast,
Speaker 8: we see like each other in our little rooms and
Speaker 8: then it just goes out into the ether and you
Speaker 8: never know who's listening.
Speaker 2: And so it's really cool when people listen and.
Speaker 8: Then like show up and do something that meaningfully makes
Speaker 8: the world a better place, and that makes me feel
Speaker 8: very hopeful.
Speaker 2: And that's another like passion thing.
Speaker 8: Like I think, especially the mutual aid stuff we've done
Speaker 8: at the border, it makes me feel really hopeful that
Speaker 8: like we can do things just fine without the state
Speaker 8: and without the resources of masters of capital and without
Speaker 8: any major sort of orcs or like institutions behind death,
Speaker 8: Like we can just help each other and do amazing things.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, when people show up for that, it's cool.
Speaker 8: Slightly way when they show up listening to the podcast
Speaker 8: and I hear myself in their car is it's not okay?
Speaker 8: But other than that, yeah, I trying to catch up
Speaker 8: with those people. Yeah, yeah, I too would be trying
Speaker 8: to catch up if I had to listen to all
Speaker 8: the stuff we put out.
Speaker 2: I think it's honestly really cool that people show up
Speaker 2: for that kind of stuff. It makes it, It makes
Speaker 2: so much of the weird parts of being a podcast
Speaker 2: host worth it when stuff like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's been something that that me has been pointing
Speaker 3: out recently, how we seem to be one of in
Speaker 3: terms of like, you know, podcasts that that that cover
Speaker 3: the sorts of things we do. We're our fan base
Speaker 3: seems to be relatively offline in a lot of ways,
Speaker 3: and a lot of a lot of them. Actually, a
Speaker 3: lot of the people actually do a lot of real
Speaker 3: world stuff, which is great. Like that's that that That's
Speaker 3: kind of the entire point is that most of the
Speaker 3: things we talk about, there's there's there's he said, you
Speaker 3: have the power to change it in small ways. You know,
Speaker 3: it's no like large immediate effects, like you solve the
Speaker 3: problem immediately, but there's there's always small things that can
Speaker 3: that can slowly change the tide of many of the
Speaker 3: problems that we discuss every day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're gonna through to an ad break here. Unless
Speaker 1: you have Cooler Zone Media and Android listeners. That is
Speaker 1: coming soon. It's a little bit out of our control
Speaker 1: on that end, but we do ask about it constantly
Speaker 1: and it will be happening.
Speaker 2: If you have a Cooler Zone account, you cannot die.
Speaker 2: That's fun, that's a good it's the true fact. So
Speaker 2: purchase it, render yourself immune to the passage of time,
Speaker 2: and we're back.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna ask. I'm gonna ask what's everyone's favorite Christmas movie?
Speaker 3: Okay, so I I have already talked about my annual
Speaker 3: Batman Returns watch party, which was a great, a great
Speaker 3: success this year. It was a big hit. I made tons.
Speaker 3: I made about probably like four dozen lot because it
Speaker 3: was a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: We got to wow, Wow, Robert, you show this for
Speaker 2: jobs kind of humor. That's crazy, what a dub.
Speaker 3: But no, we got I got a nice group of
Speaker 3: people to to google at Danny Dibrito vomiting black U
Speaker 3: for approximately two hours. So that was a big win.
Speaker 3: It's it's by far the best Christmas movie in my
Speaker 3: in my no.
Speaker 7: I agree, it's my favorite one by far, and Bangery,
Speaker 7: me and my family have lost it consistently since I
Speaker 7: was like a child like but like since I was
Speaker 7: like two years old. Oh, we just were obsessed with it.
Speaker 7: And I don't remember if you said this last year,
Speaker 7: and I already this is like a repeat of the conversation.
Speaker 7: But I agree, that's the best Christmas movie I can
Speaker 7: think of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Michael Keaton, total domination. Here we go.
Speaker 7: Best best Batman by miles. He's just miles away from So.
Speaker 1: When I was growing up, my parents used to ditch
Speaker 1: my brother and I and go to the Laker game on.
Speaker 2: Christmas and we just explained so much. Yeah, so much, Sophie.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, Like I love you, I love your parents
Speaker 1: and I and I respect it. But my brother and
Speaker 1: I used to watch like we would spend the entire
Speaker 1: day watching all the like Hobbin and Lord of the
Speaker 1: Rings movies.
Speaker 2: Nice.
Speaker 1: That just feels that feels like Christmas to me.
Speaker 3: Sure, Yeah, especially especially the animated ones definitely have that
Speaker 3: kind of like fantasy jolly kind of feel.
Speaker 2: Totally.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I yeah, anybody else.
Speaker 2: I like to watch love actually, but it's very pretty dreams.
Speaker 2: It's so basic of you.
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'm secretly basic white lady. Every time I watch
Speaker 8: you into something else problematic that I hadn't previously fought before.
Speaker 8: And it's getting to a point where I should probably
Speaker 8: stop talking about it in public.
Speaker 1: That's amazing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, now the audience knows who the biggest wife guy
Speaker 3: on the team is.
Speaker 1: Definitely Javes. This is a question for Robert, looking back
Speaker 1: on season one, if it could happen here, do you
Speaker 1: still see a second civil American Civil War as a
Speaker 1: likely or plausible event in our near future?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I think it's possible. We're going to
Speaker 2: look back on where we are right now as the
Speaker 2: earlier stages of it. Right, civil conflict is pretty widespread.
Speaker 2: I think one of the differences, like, for example, one
Speaker 2: of the big differences with that the Texas, California, Waians
Speaker 2: Yeah four Civil War movie is it's it's clearly imagining
Speaker 2: like a large scale military conflict. I don't find that
Speaker 2: particularly likely. But you do have one major political party
Speaker 2: stating that when we take power in twenty twenty four,
Speaker 2: are guy's going to act as a dictator. He's going
Speaker 2: to imprison and execute his political opponents. And you have
Speaker 2: widespread acts of violence and violent threats that are occurring
Speaker 2: as part of a as part of the political conflicts
Speaker 2: that have existed in this country for a while, they've
Speaker 2: all transitioned to being kind of explicitly acts of public
Speaker 2: violence or at least public threats of violence. You're seeing
Speaker 2: this around, for example, a lot of the discourse surrounding
Speaker 2: what's happening in Gaza. Right, you just had that case
Speaker 2: where like some fucking like grade school teacher threatened to
Speaker 2: cut a student's throat for criticizing Israel. Like the degree
Speaker 2: to which people who are if you'll forgive the less
Speaker 2: technical or pieces of shit feel emboldened to use and
Speaker 2: threaten violence in the furtherance of their political agendas. Is
Speaker 2: something we may wind up seeing. Is like, yeah, we
Speaker 2: were in it by this point. So again I'm not
Speaker 2: a believer, and a big part of it could happen
Speaker 2: here is like I don't I don't think any mass
Speaker 2: civil conflict in the United States is going to be
Speaker 2: armies fighting over states, right, yeah, because that's that's simply
Speaker 2: not realistic. But I do think we are in what
Speaker 2: any reasonable person would call a mass civil conflict. And
Speaker 2: you know, my big question is whether or not we're
Speaker 2: going to see it as a civil conflict or as
Speaker 2: an extension of a global conflict which includes outright shooting
Speaker 2: wars but also mass information warfare. In this kind of
Speaker 2: planetary struggle between the idea at least if not the
Speaker 2: promise that democracy is the kind of goal, and the
Speaker 2: strongly held belief by large groups of people that we
Speaker 2: need an authoritarian system governed effectively by the people who
Speaker 2: are presently in power. Right, you are seeing this kind
Speaker 2: of struggle between the idea that we should have a
Speaker 2: system in which people are allowed to pick their leaders
Speaker 2: and this idea that, like the winners of the last
Speaker 2: twenty years of capitalism and politics, should be able to
Speaker 2: solidify their hold forever. So my big question is whether
Speaker 2: or not we're going to come to see where we
Speaker 2: are right now as the early stages of a civil
Speaker 2: conflict that's going to get progressively more violent and have
Speaker 2: a progressively higher body count. Or are we going to
Speaker 2: see this as part of a global military and political
Speaker 2: struggle that is going to kind of shake out the
Speaker 2: next hundred years of kind of the political status quo
Speaker 2: on Earth, and in a similar way to like World
Speaker 2: War Two, you know, more or less laid out the
Speaker 2: next eighty or ninety or something like that.
Speaker 1: I've got two more questions.
Speaker 2: Sounds good.
Speaker 1: First, do you each of you have a favorite episode
Speaker 1: you've put out?
Speaker 2: We're all trying not to say the come episode the
Speaker 2: same time. I really have.
Speaker 1: I have some really bad at all, really some bad news.
Speaker 1: That was the most I just downloaded episode of Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Everybody loves Look, Everybody loves loves talking about Come Yeah?
Speaker 1: Are you fucking s I'm with you, Sharinye with you?
Speaker 2: Sorry, So I have you've been out voted.
Speaker 1: I'm never I'm never out voted I have ultimate veto powers.
Speaker 3: Guys to struggle was talking about right here.
Speaker 2: Side disgusting.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's it's certainly hard to even pick one
Speaker 3: episode just from this year.
Speaker 2: I mean, but it's the com episode. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I will say this episode was fun to put together.
Speaker 3: I we we really delved into the the trenches there
Speaker 3: that few.
Speaker 2: Would you say it would you say? It really came together.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm going to answer these questions for each
Speaker 1: of you with each of your work, because I'm a
Speaker 1: fucking professional. Garrisons Skopcop City. Where has been just that
Speaker 1: I really tell I tell this to go out. They're
Speaker 1: the most amazing storyteller. You really feel like you are.
Speaker 1: You're able to visualize everything going on with the words
Speaker 1: that they say, and I think it's an important story
Speaker 1: that they've been on top of since the beginning. I
Speaker 1: don't think any covers labor issues in the way that
Speaker 1: Mia does, and I think Mia has really done that
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty three, and we'll continue that in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four in a way that's not being covered in
Speaker 1: mainstream media. And I think that those stories are extremely
Speaker 1: important and have made a significant impact on labor and
Speaker 1: union culture and strikes and fighting for what's right. James Man,
Speaker 1: It's like I want to say, I want to say
Speaker 1: the work you do at the border, but I really
Speaker 1: love when you talk about things that are silly, and
Speaker 1: I think they're equally as important. But James, James talking
Speaker 1: about sheep and the joy that James had when he
Speaker 1: talked about sheep is really special.
Speaker 2: But also the.
Speaker 1: Work that you've done talking about the word MEMR and
Speaker 1: helping people at the border has been extremely impactful to
Speaker 1: our listeners.
Speaker 2: Shoe Shoe.
Speaker 1: Is a historical almanac to all things in the Middle
Speaker 1: East and has I think educated not just the audience
Speaker 1: but also all of us on things that really everyone
Speaker 1: should know. And I think that she's brilliant and I
Speaker 1: love you.
Speaker 2: She read Robert, Hey, Sophie, it's the cup episode, right,
Speaker 2: That's definitely not the episode.
Speaker 1: But it's really hard to pick my favorite Robert episode
Speaker 1: because I record with him like most days. But I
Speaker 1: think that what Robert has done specifically within Bastards in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three was really get on top of the
Speaker 1: bastards we're all surviving right now, which I think he
Speaker 1: did a really great job talking about Andrew Tait. I
Speaker 1: think he did an incredible job getting an episode out
Speaker 1: immediately about Stockton Rush, the guy who killed these people
Speaker 1: under the.
Speaker 2: Submersial really really the hero of the year, right, the
Speaker 2: guy responsible for the great feel good story of twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three. So much better a time we need, we need.
Speaker 2: I feel like we can solve most of the world's
Speaker 2: problems with another eleven or so of those subs. And
Speaker 2: it is true, and a similar socioeconomic group on board them.
Speaker 1: You're definitely not not wrong there.
Speaker 2: I'd just like to say, you know, if you're wondering
Speaker 2: why the New York Times in the Washington Post are
Speaker 2: too big a cowards to do a come episode like
Speaker 2: we did. You know, there's an old quote. If you
Speaker 2: want to know who rules, you ask who you can't criticize.
Speaker 2: That's all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying, Garrison, I
Speaker 2: see you, I see you doubting me. But you know
Speaker 2: it's true. You know it's true. Anyways, Yeah, it's a
Speaker 2: slash no fat All right, that's should ask another question,
Speaker 2: But like, really, what's what's the point.
Speaker 8: What's the point we've climax guys, Sweeten, Oh my god,
Speaker 8: thank you, James.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 2: I appreciate the teamwork James. Someone had to.
Speaker 1: Robert, but my my apologies to Ian for this night.
Speaker 2: We have an edit.
Speaker 1: But yeah, anybody have any final thoughts, anything, anything, James,
Speaker 1: do you have anything you want to plug in terms
Speaker 1: of donations or anything?
Speaker 10: Yeah?
Speaker 8: I do, actually, uh so we have a fundraiser for
Speaker 8: what we're doing at the border.
Speaker 2: It would be really lovely if.
Speaker 8: You could give us some of your money because I
Speaker 8: have spent all of the money that I have, uh
Speaker 8: and some money that I don't have. It's GoFundMe dot
Speaker 8: com slash cucumber hyphen migrant hyphen camps or TinyURL dot
Speaker 8: com slash border aid.
Speaker 2: G f M. How do they spell cucumber.
Speaker 8: That's a good question because that's c U M b
Speaker 8: A so like it's Spanish. Yeah, you can also tiny
Speaker 8: rl slash border aid, g FM, TinyURL dot com.
Speaker 2: That's that's an easy one to remember.
Speaker 1: Great, and we'll be back tomorrow. This is a daily show.
Speaker 8: Bye, hello everyone, and welcome to it Could Happen Here podcast,
Speaker 8: returning from our holiday break to discuss the exciting topic
Speaker 8: of infectious diseases in Gaza and for that we're joined
Speaker 8: by an all star cast of experts. We have joining
Speaker 8: us today Saskia Popescu, who's an infectious disease epidemiologist and
Speaker 8: assistant professor at the University of Maryland.
Speaker 2: Welcome Saska, Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 9: Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 8: Yeah, of course, yeah, you're welcome. It's not just you.
Speaker 8: We've also got Cave Carve is back.
Speaker 7: I'm back, baby, that's actually my first time. This is Sharene.
Speaker 7: Also i'm here. This is my first time meeting Cove.
Speaker 7: So this is a real trick.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, I've done you wrong, Sharen, I'm sorry I
Speaker 2: didn't introduce you. That's okay, it's probably in the description
Speaker 2: or something that I'm here. No one's yeah, make a
Speaker 2: valuable contribution. People will know you're here.
Speaker 8: But yeah, it's all of us, And yeah, we're talking
Speaker 8: today because like I think the origin, sorry, of this
Speaker 8: particular episode is like a few weeks ago, there was
Speaker 8: a very funny thing on the internet about people in
Speaker 8: the I d F getting diarrhea, which is funny object.
Speaker 2: That's what the dn id F stands for. Actually, yeah,
Speaker 2: the kid to saying, but sorry, no, it's donny.
Speaker 10: Don't you ever apologize. Yeah, yeah, you do, not apologize for.
Speaker 2: Any opportunity just to ship on them. You're good.
Speaker 8: Yeah, expect many. It's half an hour at least of this.
Speaker 8: Don't be driving because you might laugh too much. But no,
Speaker 8: it's very funny. It's the name of our group chat.
Speaker 8: It's the as really Diarrhea Forces. But aside from that,
Speaker 8: like this raises a more important question, right, which is
Speaker 8: that people in Gaza don't have access to very many
Speaker 8: medical supplies to begin with. Weird things are embargoed like
Speaker 8: tornic keys, which you've spoken about in this podcast before.
Speaker 8: They also have obviously a very resource constrained environment to
Speaker 8: begin with, and then a number of their hospitals have
Speaker 8: been bombed since then, which obviously further reduces their access
Speaker 8: to medical care. Also, they have less aclos to things
Speaker 8: like running water now because they're being bombed to an
Speaker 8: incredible degree. And so Saskia has joined us today to
Speaker 8: like explain the risk of the spread of infectious disease,
Speaker 8: maybe give us an update on like what's already happening
Speaker 8: and the risks of what could happen. So I guess
Speaker 8: maybe we should start off with really basic stuff and
Speaker 8: explain what infectious diseases are and like how they're different
Speaker 8: from noncommunical diseases gets people aren't familiar, would one if
Speaker 8: you like to do.
Speaker 9: That, Yeah, I'm happy to so infectious diseases, you know,
Speaker 9: when we talk about diseases in general, as you mentioned,
Speaker 9: there are chronic diseases, things like diabetes, cancer. When we
Speaker 9: talk about infectious diseases, meaning they're communicable for the most part,
Speaker 9: that means that they are spread through various sources human
Speaker 9: to human, like influenza. There's things like anthrax that you
Speaker 9: can equali Campellobacter that you can get from soil, from food,
Speaker 9: and the zoonotic diseases that they are also spread through animals,
Speaker 9: so things like ebola mirrors which is Middle East respiratory syndrome, coronavirus.
Speaker 9: So infectious diseases are viruses, bacteria, fungi, parasites, and they
Speaker 9: really love to take advantage of high stress environments for
Speaker 9: bread and unfortunately this is one of them. So this
Speaker 9: is a very What we see with infectious diseases a
Speaker 9: lot is that conflict and environments where people are stressed,
Speaker 9: resources are stressed, and the environment is under continuous bombardment.
Speaker 9: There's densely populated spaces, no access to health, clean food,
Speaker 9: and water, et cetera. I mean, I could probably go
Speaker 9: on for five minutes about what makes an infectious disease spread,
Speaker 9: is going to amplify it. So these are diseases that
Speaker 9: take advantage of these environments.
Speaker 10: I'll add that the situation is just a perfect setup
Speaker 10: for infectious disease to run rampant. There's over one point
Speaker 10: nine million people that have been displaced. Of that, one
Speaker 10: point four million are living in overcrowded shelters at this point.
Speaker 10: And in the best scenario from what I've seen, there's
Speaker 10: one toilet for every two hundred and twenty people. Now,
Speaker 10: if you ever lived in like a house of like
Speaker 10: five people and there's like one case of diarrhea, you'll
Speaker 10: realize how terrible that is. Now you amplify that to
Speaker 10: two hundred and twenty at the minimum, and that's the
Speaker 10: best case scenario. I've heard its highest one per seven
Speaker 10: hundred people in some places. And then you know, people
Speaker 10: have to go in the streets, they have to know
Speaker 10: where there's water supplies, and you're you're going to be
Speaker 10: infecting those areas. There's one shower for every like four thousand,
Speaker 10: five hundred people again in best case scenario. So it's
Speaker 10: a huge number of people getting concentrated into smaller and
Speaker 10: smaller areas and without the infrastructure there to handle that
Speaker 10: in any way. And when that happens, I mean, we
Speaker 10: are going to see I am really worried about seeing
Speaker 10: in the end of this more depths from infectious disease
Speaker 10: than from the bombardments.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, that's that's like a It almost feels like
Speaker 7: a double another weapon that they're that they're that they've
Speaker 7: used because they're not letting them have a chance to
Speaker 7: recuperate or have a sanitary place to do surgeries or anything.
Speaker 7: Because if they're doing surgery with unsanitary conditions, they can
Speaker 7: get infect like the wounds can get infected, and that's
Speaker 7: a whole nother thing. Or even just like having waste
Speaker 7: in the street, like making it, like having it fester.
Speaker 7: It just it's it's really I think people forget that
Speaker 7: it's not just like a building was destroyed, people were killed.
Speaker 7: It's there's lasting effects that linger for probably generations.
Speaker 2: You know. It's just I don't know what really is infuriating.
Speaker 9: I think the crazy part is the World Health organization.
Speaker 9: So the WHO recently released some data as to what
Speaker 9: is being reported to them in terms of disease, and
Speaker 9: they said, so far, Now keep in mind these are
Speaker 9: just reported numbers, and that means it's just the tip
Speaker 9: of the iceberg. In most cases, one hundred thousand cases
Speaker 9: of diarrhea and those are in young children, So half
Speaker 9: of those are in young children out of the age
Speaker 9: of five, which means it can be deadly. And this
Speaker 9: number is just twenty five percent higher than what we
Speaker 9: have seen reported pre conflict. And in terms of respiratory infections,
Speaker 9: the things like covid, influenza and pneumonia, one hundred and
Speaker 9: fifty thousand cases. And that's just the numbers that we
Speaker 9: know about. But we're also seeing cases and outbreaks of
Speaker 9: things like meningitis, skin rashes, babies, LCE, chicken pox, which
Speaker 9: is highly infectious. And you know, we worry in those
Speaker 9: cases about when people are in these close quarters and
Speaker 9: their bodies are already strained, because one thing we do
Speaker 9: know is that when your bodies physiologically under stress meaning
Speaker 9: no sleep, malnutrition, you know, not access to clean water
Speaker 9: to wash your hands, not you're dehydrated, et cetera, you're
Speaker 9: at an increased risk for disease and severe disease. So
Speaker 9: that means that people are at higher risk to get
Speaker 9: it and then to spread it in these environments, and
Speaker 9: that's what's really scary because it becomes a hot spot
Speaker 9: for transmission. And you mentioned that this feels like a
Speaker 9: secondary effect in many ways. It's almost like a secondary conflict,
Speaker 9: if you will, and one that will leave lasting implications
Speaker 9: because what we do know is that disease and conflict
Speaker 9: go hand in hand. When I think about it a lot,
Speaker 9: it's and we've seen this unfortunately throughout time, is that
Speaker 9: conflict can bring disease and it can amplify disease. When
Speaker 9: I say bring disease, we know that people in these
Speaker 9: spaces soldiers can bring in disease that are reinspread around.
Speaker 9: But we've also seen sexually transmitted diseases in the past
Speaker 9: being spread through sexual assault and sexual violence, and that's
Speaker 9: one thing I definitely worry about it. Unfortunately, we know
Speaker 9: that's happening and it's not something we're going to see
Speaker 9: reported for a while, but things like that can and
Speaker 9: do occur, and it's a very scary situation.
Speaker 10: If I can tack on a little bit to the
Speaker 10: diarrhea subject here because I am a GI and liver doc.
Speaker 10: I mean, in a typical month in Gaza, there is
Speaker 10: about two thousand cases of diarrhea and kids under five,
Speaker 10: and in the last month there was over forty thousand cases.
Speaker 10: And for kids that aren't getting water, they're not getting
Speaker 10: the recommended amount of like daily water, like it's like
Speaker 10: seven to eight leaders in refugee situations is what's recommended.
Speaker 10: These people are getting like one to two leaders per
Speaker 10: whole families, so they're not staying hydrated. And these are
Speaker 10: kids that are most vulnerable. That's the part that is
Speaker 10: really hard for me. And I've actually seen people sort
Speaker 10: of downclay it, like just like, well, diarrhea, you know,
Speaker 10: that's what you get, but in these situations, it's it's
Speaker 10: going to be very serious for these kids. And the
Speaker 10: other thing we're seeing is cases of jaundice. They're noting
Speaker 10: that people are becoming that, which to me suggests that
Speaker 10: there's hepatitis A and hepatitis E, which is you know,
Speaker 10: you get through fecal oral contamination. And hepatitis E in
Speaker 10: particular is what concerns me because there's pregnant women and
Speaker 10: when pregnant women get hepatitis E, it's worse for them.
Speaker 10: There's that that's a really bad situation. And when that happens,
Speaker 10: I mean, these are these are women who are already
Speaker 10: not getting support, They're already under nourished, They're not able
Speaker 10: to produce breast milk, they are going to be sick,
Speaker 10: They're not going to be able to feed their kids.
Speaker 10: It's I mean, I can't. I can't imagine, honestly, I mean,
Speaker 10: I know, it's it's funny. We can say these things,
Speaker 10: we can talk about the numbers, but it is like
Speaker 10: to actually wrap my brain around it breaks my brain.
Speaker 10: I cannot, like imagine the numbers of people that are
Speaker 10: sick and are in these hospitals, not just being treated,
Speaker 10: but like the NASA Hospital, which is one of the
Speaker 10: two hospitals in Gaza. You know, there are like a
Speaker 10: three hundred and fifty bed hospital. There are already over
Speaker 10: like a thousand patients, and not to mention the many thousands,
Speaker 10: over seventy thousand people just staying there, you know, for
Speaker 10: for refuge. It's absolutely a nightmare. I can't. I can't
Speaker 10: write my brain around it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, Like often I know when I speak to colleagues
Speaker 8: who are there or at the journalist say they'll go
Speaker 8: to hospitals a in the hope that they'll be safe,
Speaker 8: which hasn't proven to be true sadly, which is pretty
Speaker 8: messed up. But be you know that they have many generators, right,
Speaker 8: so they can charge and and tell the world what's happening,
Speaker 8: or try to. It seems like some of the word
Speaker 8: isn't listening, but yeah it there. Cospitals are incredibly overgrowded.
Speaker 8: I wonder like if we could go back to diarrhea
Speaker 8: and there's.
Speaker 2: Not like a fun topic, stoke about it. Yeah, fix score, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's ready, time to shine. Yeah, life's work.
Speaker 8: So, like I think it was diarrhea that I read
Speaker 8: kills more people than conflict annually.
Speaker 10: Oh yeah worldwide sure, yeah yeah, well I mean Saskia
Speaker 10: probably has better numbers on it than I do, actually,
Speaker 10: but worldwide, yeah, it's probably the number one, number one killer.
Speaker 8: So like let's just break that because I most of
Speaker 8: like by the very nature that's being a podcast, right,
Speaker 8: most are people listening are in the in the kind
Speaker 8: of the in the neoliberal core or the global north,
Speaker 8: whatever you want to call it, right, Like they have
Speaker 8: a smartphone and they've downloaded this, and it might be
Speaker 8: difficult to understand how you die from diarrhea, which is
Speaker 8: like an inconvenience in a lot of places. So can
Speaker 8: you just explain that for people so they can they
Speaker 8: can understand and how the conditions that we see in
Speaker 8: Gaza would compound.
Speaker 10: That Saska, Do you want me to go first?
Speaker 9: Oh? All you, I'll talk about how it spreads.
Speaker 2: You can talk, okay.
Speaker 10: So, I mean, the there's a couple of issues that
Speaker 10: can happen. There's a lot, but I mean dehydration is
Speaker 10: going to be a major one, and loss of electrolytes.
Speaker 10: I mean, these people can get so badly dehydrated that
Speaker 10: their circulatory system isn't working properly. Or they can lose
Speaker 10: the amount of electrolytes that they need and they're not
Speaker 10: replacing and that can cause cardiovascular issues as well. So
Speaker 10: it's a terrible way to die. I mean, you know,
Speaker 10: cholerara and these terrible like diarrheal epidemics that you know,
Speaker 10: we think of of mostly in the past. They're terrible.
Speaker 10: They're terrible ways to go and especially if you don't
Speaker 10: have the I mean, it's treatable usually it's treatable. You know,
Speaker 10: you get fluid rehydration, you get electrolyte management. It's it's
Speaker 10: pretty manageable in the right situation. But if you don't
Speaker 10: have that, it's gonna be a devastating thing to the
Speaker 10: body over time, and for young kids sooner rather than later.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so maybe we should explained how it spread.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I mean the scary part. So there's multiple pathogenes
Speaker 9: that can cause diarheal illness, and for the most part,
Speaker 9: we see bacteria and viruses. If you've had neurovirus, which
Speaker 9: is the cruise ship bug, that is highly transmissible, meaning
Speaker 9: it just goes through households and environments very very quickly.
Speaker 9: During outbreaks. You can't just use hand sanitizer and a
Speaker 9: simple disinfectant. You need bleach. And if you're if we're
Speaker 9: thinking about the best case scenario, and I've seen you know,
Speaker 9: diarreheal illnesses go through schools, hospitals, you name it. We
Speaker 9: still struggle to contain those. Now, put yourself in an
Speaker 9: environment with this level of stress, and you know the
Speaker 9: thirty six hospitals in Gazda Gaza, twenty six have been damaged,
Speaker 9: twenty one are not functional at all thirteen are partially
Speaker 9: functioning and two are barely functioning. So we know that
Speaker 9: access to care is a challenge. Resources I can't even imagine.
Speaker 9: So that means the capacity to treat patients with antibiotics,
Speaker 9: with fluids, everything, and now can paint it, which is
Speaker 9: the disinfection you know, all the infection prevention essentially, And
Speaker 9: I don't even want to think about contact tracing in
Speaker 9: public health interventions because it doesn't exist. It's an entirely
Speaker 9: collapsed system. You know, this is a humanitarian crisis. So
Speaker 9: when you know, when you have people in close quarters
Speaker 9: and there's a lot of high touch items because a
Speaker 9: lot of diarreal illness is spread through touch. It's you know,
Speaker 9: contaminated hands and objects, and then you know, you touch
Speaker 9: your mouth, you eat with your hands, et cetera. That's
Speaker 9: how these things are spread. So between the bathroom not
Speaker 9: having access, you know, not having access to restrooms. You know,
Speaker 9: we mentioned the toilet situation, there's also one shower for
Speaker 9: every forty five hundred people, So we know that people
Speaker 9: are not able to clean themselves effectively, and this is
Speaker 9: a ripe condition for diarreal illness to spread, and they
Speaker 9: it spreads very quickly, very efficiently, and it is exceedingly
Speaker 9: hard to get rid of. And it worries me because
Speaker 9: a lot of these diseases, it's not just like you
Speaker 9: get at one time and you have immunity to it.
Speaker 9: It can keep going awaydun and if you have a
Speaker 9: situation like that where you cannot clean effectively, you can't
Speaker 9: treat effectively, then we're just going to see it continuously compound.
Speaker 9: And that's absolutely terrifying because you know, we were talking
Speaker 9: about pregnant women earlier. There's fifty thousand pregnant women right
Speaker 9: now in Gaza and they are malnourished. That's just at
Speaker 9: the tip of the iceberg. And we see that so
Speaker 9: many children there are malnourished. And these are very dangerous
Speaker 9: infections for vulnerable people. And on the best of days,
Speaker 9: we struggle to contain diarreal illness. So my big concern
Speaker 9: is this and respiratory viruses, to be honest with you,
Speaker 9: because when you have this many people in close quarters
Speaker 9: and ignore the fact that they are extremely you know,
Speaker 9: physically strained and stressed right now, which is when your
Speaker 9: immune system struggles, it's going to spread and it's going
Speaker 9: to be exceedingly hard to contain it. So this is
Speaker 9: an environment where we're going to see diarreal illness spread
Speaker 9: and it's going to unfortunately kill a lot more people
Speaker 9: then we will even realize. It's going to take years
Speaker 9: to understand implications of this, you know, if we even
Speaker 9: consider that access to clean water and food, and we've
Speaker 9: been talking a lot about malnourishment, which is huge, but
Speaker 9: I'm also concerned to the quality of food that they're
Speaker 9: getting too, and the water, all of it. Everything about
Speaker 9: the situation is going to spread disease. It's you know,
Speaker 9: I know that sounds quite dramatic, but it's entirely true.
Speaker 7: No, I mean, I'm glad you're emphasizing that, because I
Speaker 7: don't think people realize the gravity of of like a
Speaker 7: second wave of death like that that happens like not
Speaker 7: even not with weapons.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 7: But no, I'm glad you emphasize that. Let's uh, let's
Speaker 7: take our first break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 9: And it reminds me too of when we saw UN
Speaker 9: peacekeepers in Haiti and they introduced polera, and you know,
Speaker 9: and that's it's an unfortunate reality when you are bringing
Speaker 9: in groups of people to in this you know, for
Speaker 9: in Haiti, they were trying to help the situation. In
Speaker 9: this case, it's not surprising. I mean, there's a really
Speaker 9: good book called Contagions and Chaos that actually talks about
Speaker 9: how infectious diseases can amplify conflict or create it. And ultimately,
Speaker 9: I think we're just going to see this as a
Speaker 9: rolling in health issue until there's a ceasefire and until
Speaker 9: there's really substantial work in there to resource and to
Speaker 9: take care of people.
Speaker 7: I mean, it's scared any Kyve. You mentioned that you
Speaker 7: had a question for Saskia.
Speaker 10: I do you know You've written and you talked a
Speaker 10: lot about the intersections of science and policy, particularly in
Speaker 10: terms of COVID nineteen. We've seen that global threats elsewhere
Speaker 10: can affect Americans, and I'm wondering, is there a way
Speaker 10: to try and appeal to Westerners who aren't that interested
Speaker 10: yet and why they should care about infectious diseases that
Speaker 10: are rising or become rampant in other places. Is there
Speaker 10: an argument you can make to these people who may
Speaker 10: not care that much about the Palestinian people per se.
Speaker 9: Oh, there's the political answer I should give you, and
Speaker 9: then there's the real answer, which is political answer saying
Speaker 9: that you know people do care, and you know we're
Speaker 9: just having the console in your mind them. But the
Speaker 9: real answer is, look, we just came out of three
Speaker 9: and a half years of a pandemic and at this point,
Speaker 9: if people don't give a shit, they're not going to.
Speaker 9: And I know that's crude for me to say, but
Speaker 9: it's I've been working in this and we've seen it
Speaker 9: from Ebola to mers too, empocs, and in now coming
Speaker 9: out of COVID. I think we can safely say that,
Speaker 9: you know, it's not a matter of if, but when.
Speaker 9: But people really like the saying that is infectious disease
Speaker 9: knows no borders, and to a certain extent that is true.
Speaker 9: Infectious diseases they don't know that, but it ignores the
Speaker 9: fact that some countries are are more equipped to handle them,
Speaker 9: and that borders our pores concept. So in this case,
Speaker 9: I think from an American perspective, where it is a
Speaker 9: very complicated relationship Americans have and I'm not getting into that.
Speaker 9: When it comes to Israel, the reality is that it
Speaker 9: shouldn't matter if it's a conflict. If you see an
Speaker 9: outbreak somewhere, you should be worried for those people, and
Speaker 9: it shouldn't matter if it's going to impact you. But
Speaker 9: now that we have lived through a pandemic, a historical event,
Speaker 9: I would like to think people would see this and
Speaker 9: realize any one of these diseases can come to the States,
Speaker 9: it can strain global resources. And I'm hopeful that with
Speaker 9: the amount of attention that's coming to this and that
Speaker 9: the work that the WHO and the UN have been
Speaker 9: drawing attention to it, that will change. But I get
Speaker 9: a little nervous every time we talk about infectious diseases
Speaker 9: and conflict areas, because I find that America and it's
Speaker 9: not just us, that people in high income countries disassociate
Speaker 9: because that is a conflict related issue, but it's not
Speaker 9: Conflict can mean many different things, and it's essentially saying,
Speaker 9: this is an issue that's going to bubble out of control.
Speaker 9: And if we were in a situation where there was
Speaker 9: no clean food and water, we had no access to
Speaker 9: health services, in medicine, fuel was an issue, in power,
Speaker 9: no communication, and I just read that three Palestinian internet
Speaker 9: providers went down, so they have no way to contact
Speaker 9: outside world. They have housing, safe passes, et cetera. Any
Speaker 9: one of those impacted US, we would be experiencing it.
Speaker 9: And I will leave that question with one comment. That's
Speaker 9: to say we are a very well resourced country. The
Speaker 9: US invests so many resources into health, global health, security, biopreparedness,
Speaker 9: all of the above, and we were one of the
Speaker 9: worst performers when it came to COVID response. And I
Speaker 9: say that having worked in health care during that and
Speaker 9: doing epidemiology, and I think this should be a continuous
Speaker 9: wake up call that it's we're one disease away from
Speaker 9: an international crisis, and when we see this, it should
Speaker 9: really speak to the fact that it is global health.
Speaker 9: It's not national health, not local health, it is global health.
Speaker 2: That's my ted talk, the good tech talk.
Speaker 8: I guess like if I could piggyback on that, there
Speaker 8: is not a single war that I have covered, either
Speaker 8: remotely or in person, where I have not then seen
Speaker 8: those people arrive our border where I live. Like I
Speaker 8: was in Syrian Kurdistan in October. I am seeing people
Speaker 8: leaving Turkey, more and more Turkish Kurdistan, but also Syrian Kurdistan,
Speaker 8: or people who went to Syria went back to Turkey
Speaker 8: at our southern border.
Speaker 2: Right now, I am seeing.
Speaker 8: People from conflicts all over the world at our southern
Speaker 8: border right now, and every single conflict, because we tend
Speaker 8: to stick our nose into every single conflict, it ends
Speaker 8: up here right because we tell people we support them
Speaker 8: and then we abandon them, and they come here thinking
Speaker 8: that we were going to support them. I also add
Speaker 8: that every time there is infectia disease outbreak going forward,
Speaker 8: it will be used in the same way that COVID
Speaker 8: was to prevent asylum. So the title forty two that
Speaker 8: was used to like quote unquote catch and release migrants
Speaker 8: at the southern border allowed border patrol to eject people
Speaker 8: without processing their asylum came. That's a public health law,
Speaker 8: it's dot a migration law. Biden's already indicated that he
Speaker 8: would love to do the same thing again, and like,
Speaker 8: you don't even need an excuse with this in focused
Speaker 8: disease stuff, right The laws are already there, and it
Speaker 8: was already in place for several years, so it's kind
Speaker 8: of stood the test of the courts. And this will
Speaker 8: impact even if you don't give a shit about people
Speaker 8: in Palestine, and maybe you should examine what's up with
Speaker 8: your morality if you do like this will impact you
Speaker 8: because people will come here, and it will impact you
Speaker 8: because people who should come here won't be able to
Speaker 8: and that will mean that people who have done nothing wrong,
Speaker 8: who trusted us when we lie to them. You know,
Speaker 8: people Americans seem to care about afghanstanare than other people.
Speaker 8: Like I've spoken to a hundred roods of Afghan women
Speaker 8: in our border and like they were stuck under Title
Speaker 8: forty two in very dangerous situations in places like Mexico.
Speaker 8: So even if you only care about those people, you
Speaker 8: should still care about this. I guess can I add
Speaker 8: something to I think, please, you know, to.
Speaker 9: Avoid fueling isolationism, because I think that happens all the
Speaker 9: time when we talk about these global health issues. Every
Speaker 9: resource that has to be put to helping this health
Speaker 9: crisis that is bubbling out of a humanitarian crisis is
Speaker 9: a resource that's not back where it's supposed to be
Speaker 9: addressing global health issues. Meaning so for example, when we
Speaker 9: saw the people outbreak in West Africa in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 9: after there were you know, we started to actually realize
Speaker 9: the implications to malaria control, tuberculosis, HIV. So when we
Speaker 9: have to throw a bunch of emergency resources at a crisis,
Speaker 9: those are coming out of somewhere else. And I too
Speaker 9: that people don't realize that we're you know, as the who,
Speaker 9: the un everywhere, MSS is having to help this situation
Speaker 9: because there's no access to care, and again is a
Speaker 9: health crisis. That means we're going to start to see
Speaker 9: other things pop up elsewhere, and that really worries me
Speaker 9: because we are already very strained when it comes to
Speaker 9: global health resources. We just again came out of a pandemic.
Speaker 9: So everyone's tired, everyone's burnt out. We've got health systems
Speaker 9: and a lot of and we're seeing even in the
Speaker 9: US where a lot of funding for like the CDC
Speaker 9: is being pulled and NIH. So now that we're out
Speaker 9: of kind of coming back into this panic neglect cycle,
Speaker 9: I worry that a lot of the resources that we're
Speaker 9: having to pull to address this crisis are going to
Speaker 9: then ultimately leave a lot of other places at risk
Speaker 9: or infectious diseases, for long term health implications. So it
Speaker 9: is a lot bigger than one area or people you know,
Speaker 9: having to flee to the US. It's all of these things,
Speaker 9: and too often we approach this with a very short
Speaker 9: sighted this and we have, we don't you know, we
Speaker 9: have finite resources when it comes to global health response,
Speaker 9: and when we have to use them because you know
Speaker 9: we're not you know, approaching this effectively or appropriately, then
Speaker 9: we're going to see larger applications.
Speaker 8: Yeah, even like we can just keep building off each
Speaker 8: other stuff and it's not here from the other two.
Speaker 8: Even recently, I was trying to buy some humanitarian daily
Speaker 8: rations for the border, which are people aren't familiar. They're
Speaker 8: like MRIs for refugees, and make sure we eat one
Speaker 8: on our live show once. It's very salty, Yeah, very salty.
Speaker 8: That's good for the electrolytes. But like that is the
Speaker 8: State Department. It's buying the back of surplus retailers at
Speaker 8: the minute, which like means that there's obviously like a
Speaker 8: critical lack of supply of these things. Same with UNHCR shelters,
Speaker 8: and like that means that someone else doesn't get to eat, right,
Speaker 8: because we've just massively increased burden of.
Speaker 2: People who desperately need to eat.
Speaker 8: Like it's not like these things were chilling before, like
Speaker 8: there were you know, hunger is still a massive problem
Speaker 8: in the world, despite us having so much food here
Speaker 8: and so like the say, Yet the same is true
Speaker 8: of medical supplies, like you said, right that that means
Speaker 8: that somebody else doesn't get them, that money doesn't go
Speaker 8: to something else very important that it could be going to.
Speaker 7: Can I ask about something I just learned about the
Speaker 7: past couple of days. So on December twenty fifth, the
Speaker 7: Jerusalem Posts reported that an IDF soldier died of a
Speaker 7: fungal infection, and apparently he was hospitalized and eventually he died,
Speaker 7: and at least ten other soldiers have been diagnosed with
Speaker 7: infections of some sort. I think what kind of made
Speaker 7: me annoyed is that there is a headline from the
Speaker 7: Times of Israel that said, as a soldier with fungal
Speaker 7: infection dies, fears a grow of Gaza diseases spreading into
Speaker 7: Israel and apparently they're examining whether the infections originated the
Speaker 7: Hamas tunnels and all this stuff. I think, while I
Speaker 7: that's it, really it really bothered me because I looked
Speaker 7: at all of these articles. I mean, most of them
Speaker 7: are obviously Israeli sourced, but it still was the same
Speaker 7: rhetoric of there's diseases in Gaza and our soldiers are
Speaker 7: getting them, and the Honestly, the takeaway in all of
Speaker 7: these was we have to worry about Israeli public health
Speaker 7: and the Israeli citizens. It wasn't about anything about the
Speaker 7: Gazins or anything like that. And I was just I
Speaker 7: guess I wanted to ask, is there any truth at
Speaker 7: all to the idea that there can be certain infections
Speaker 7: localized to that degree even though it's like a very
Speaker 7: small country in general. And I guess it's it's really
Speaker 7: I feel like it's a fear mongering tactic using health
Speaker 7: as a weapon.
Speaker 2: But I don't know. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Speaker 10: Even the fungus has gone woke. I can't believe it.
Speaker 10: They've weaponized fungus, sasky. I'll let you address it, but
Speaker 10: I would say this, I mean, I think the fear
Speaker 10: I just did an episode of my podcast on funguses
Speaker 10: and talking about the last of us and seeing like
Speaker 10: the truth that there's really a concern, especially with global
Speaker 10: climate change, and it is I mean, the thought of
Speaker 10: a fungus affecting humans in that way who were not
Speaker 10: in some way under their body under stress or immunal suppressed,
Speaker 10: it's it's not that likely. And I definitely agree from
Speaker 10: what I'm hearing that like this is just another way
Speaker 10: to be like, look at these dirty people, we should
Speaker 10: bomb them to them.
Speaker 7: Everything related to Palestinians is oh, they're all it's all
Speaker 7: the plague, like they're scary, they're barbaric, and also they're
Speaker 7: going to make you sick. It's it's really infuriating. They're
Speaker 7: just going at every angle. I just I found the
Speaker 7: quote that made me mad.
Speaker 2: Can I read it?
Speaker 10: Okay, I'm going to read it.
Speaker 7: Basically, it says the war between Israel and moss has
Speaker 7: led to the destruction of large swaths of Gaza and
Speaker 7: internal displacement of the vast majority of its population, resulting
Speaker 7: in what is called the humanitarian crisis for the Palcians.
Speaker 7: It is called that because it is that body what
Speaker 7: if law. These conditions have led to the outbreaks of
Speaker 7: various diseases, which can potentially threaten the well being of
Speaker 7: hundreds of thousands of IDF troops fighting in Gaza. They
Speaker 7: can also ultimately spell trouble for public health in Israel.
Speaker 2: I just can't believe that's the takeaway all.
Speaker 10: At Saskia, do you want to address the spread of
Speaker 10: fungal infection in a situation like this.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I mean, look again, this is a situation where
Speaker 9: disease is going to be spread and that includes Ida soldiers.
Speaker 9: They are risk because guess what, they all have to
Speaker 9: go back to their bunks and sleep at night in
Speaker 9: close quarters. Do we see diseases spread easily in militaries,
Speaker 9: of course, I mean it would be insane not to
Speaker 9: think that. But trying to, you know, source it in
Speaker 9: Palestinians and Gazas is slightly ridiculous because there's no epidemiological
Speaker 9: evidence of that. But it's also kind of weird to
Speaker 9: me that they're saying a fungal infection. That's a very
Speaker 9: specific thing, and bungle infections aren't fast infections for the
Speaker 9: most part. You know, when we do see them, I
Speaker 9: think from a regional perspective. If you live in the
Speaker 9: Southwest like I do. Galley fever is a fungal infection.
Speaker 9: It's in the dirt though, it's a spore in the dirt,
Speaker 9: and it's not spread between people though. That's that's the
Speaker 9: key part. It is you inhale it and you get
Speaker 9: it and it takes months in a lot of cases,
Speaker 9: but you know, you can you see fungal infections. Yeah,
Speaker 9: that could be contaminated water, you know, inhalation, through showers,
Speaker 9: things like that. I mean, there's ways for that to happen.
Speaker 9: But we really just for the most part see those
Speaker 9: infections spread from an individual source, not an individual person.
Speaker 9: They tend to really not be they're environmentally spread, you know.
Speaker 9: And I'm not a fungal expert. I can just speak
Speaker 9: to the ones that I've seen. Really, we don't see
Speaker 9: them spread between people, and so I think that it's
Speaker 9: it's a weird choice to say, and I worry a
Speaker 9: little bit that they're just again to your point, trying
Speaker 9: to say like, oh, look, our soldiers are getting sick.
Speaker 9: You know, the sacrifice they're making, right, yeah, is so much.
Speaker 9: And here's the thing. Conflict is where we're going to
Speaker 9: see disease spread no matter what. And I if you're
Speaker 9: so worried about soldiers getting fungal infections from Gaza, then
Speaker 9: maybe keep the people in Gaza safe and then they're
Speaker 9: you know, either way you paint this, if you're trying
Speaker 9: to blame it on them, they keep them safe and
Speaker 9: they won't be able to spread disease. Very simple.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they did cite contaminated soil.
Speaker 9: Okay, that's a contamination thing, like environmental.
Speaker 7: Yeah, this one that the tibiologist said that these soldiers
Speaker 7: have come back with serious anti microbial resistant infections that
Speaker 7: they've picked up through contact with contaminated soil, among other factors.
Speaker 2: Like one, I feel like it's like a very direct statement.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of.
Speaker 9: There's a lot to unpack there. Again though, if it's
Speaker 9: in the soil, it's an environmental exposure. That is like,
Speaker 9: that's not anyone's fault from an anti microbial perspective that
Speaker 9: I'm having a hard time believing that value fever, as
Speaker 9: I mentioned, is really hard to treat, so sometimes it's
Speaker 9: not responsive to some of the medications you give. But
Speaker 9: you know you're gonna get anti microbial infections more so
Speaker 9: from people and contaminated objects, because that means that it
Speaker 9: has to have been exposed to antibiotics and become resistant
Speaker 9: to the infections. But there's that feels like very messy, uh,
Speaker 9: you know, reporting on their part or communications, because not
Speaker 9: a lot of that makes sense to me. And either way,
Speaker 9: if they're saying it's from the environment, congratulations, you've just
Speaker 9: proven you're not getting it from people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you. For getting into that.
Speaker 7: I just the the Hammas tunnels, the Hamas terror tunnels,
Speaker 7: sorry in their words, their terror tunnels. They're going to
Speaker 7: investigate whether infections have originated from there.
Speaker 2: It just it's also just that doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 2: So I'm glad to have two doctors here agree, and
Speaker 2: that's all I wanted.
Speaker 10: I mean, I will say this cocady of mycosis is
Speaker 10: valley fever, and we like, you know, she just mentioned
Speaker 10: it's we see it here in California. It's the reason
Speaker 10: why we used to say, if you're driving it down
Speaker 10: Central Valley, California, down the Eye five, you should roll
Speaker 10: up your window and and not breathe in the air
Speaker 10: because there's a possibility of getting it from that so
Speaker 10: o way they say that, well they I don't think
Speaker 10: they do so much anymore.
Speaker 2: There's a whole number of reasons why you don't want
Speaker 2: to be breathing.
Speaker 10: Yeah, there's a lot of cow farms out there too.
Speaker 10: It gets a little bit nasty out there in the
Speaker 10: I five. But but I mean, it's what is an
Speaker 10: endemic thing. It's like, if they don't want to be
Speaker 10: exposed to it, stay out of that area.
Speaker 9: Yeah. Yeah, but You're not going to get it from
Speaker 9: other people. That's the kicker. It's not spread from people.
Speaker 8: It is very common to a tribute effect your diseases
Speaker 8: that come from conflict to you'll enemy, right. It's like
Speaker 8: if you look at like the nineteen eighteen pandemic flu, right,
Speaker 8: and all the different things that people call that flu
Speaker 8: and the people to whom they attributed it, like, you
Speaker 8: can see that we've been doing that for more than
Speaker 8: one hundred years. It's it's part of the process of
Speaker 8: dehumanizing people who you're trying to kill.
Speaker 2: It happened with COVID too, No, it's yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 2: that was a whole different situation. I guess humans just
Speaker 2: don't learn.
Speaker 10: I suppose.
Speaker 8: So I wonder Saskia, like we obviously this is a
Speaker 8: terrible situation, and it's one that's like super easy to
Speaker 8: feel very disempowered with because you know, as much as
Speaker 8: you march around and do things, it doesn't seem to
Speaker 8: be stopping. There is there anything that like people can
Speaker 8: do advocate for, like take action on, that could make
Speaker 8: this slightly less bad.
Speaker 9: I mean, a ceasefire, I encourage people to donate to
Speaker 9: unisf and obviously you know, MSF, a lot of the
Speaker 9: wonderful organizations doing work there, and probably my my biggest
Speaker 9: one right now, especially since we're around the holidays and
Speaker 9: people are spending a lot of time with family and
Speaker 9: likely getting into some heavy conversations around the dinner tables.
Speaker 9: Make sure you're well informed and you're not spreading misinformation
Speaker 9: and disinformation online because that's been a huge aspect of this.
Speaker 9: You know, we saw with the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.
Speaker 9: You know, Russia took direct action to spread misinformation and
Speaker 9: disinformation and we're struggling with that in the United States
Speaker 9: right now with this. So I encourage people to stay
Speaker 9: informed of this, to really utilize good resources and not
Speaker 9: pull things from social media. If you're going to share something,
Speaker 9: you know, do so from an accurate source. I really,
Speaker 9: you know, the who un have been really good at
Speaker 9: doing continuous updates and sharing that information. Human Rights Watch
Speaker 9: at all of the above, and on top of again,
Speaker 9: donating and really being an advocate for a ceasefire to
Speaker 9: me is the biggest thing because also reminding people, hey,
Speaker 9: this is currently a localized crisis, but infectious diseases and
Speaker 9: humanitarian crisis crises, excuse me, rarely stay that way.
Speaker 10: I would also plug the Palestinian Medical Relief Society the PMRS.
Speaker 10: They're the on the ground people. They've been there since
Speaker 10: nineteen seventy nine. They are founded by Palestinian doctors. It's
Speaker 10: mostly a Palestinian run and they're doing I think, really
Speaker 10: good work down there as best they can. And there
Speaker 10: where actually the who gets most of their information or
Speaker 10: a lot of it at least it's coming from their
Speaker 10: updates from the PMRS people on the ground, So that's
Speaker 10: another local source to look at if people are interested
Speaker 10: in getting involved.
Speaker 2: I think you got you sure to wrap it up.
Speaker 7: Yet, I was just thinking how unfortunate it is that
Speaker 7: people don't care enough. So you have to be like,
Speaker 7: it's not only going to stay localized, Like it's not
Speaker 7: just that probably, you know what I mean. I hate
Speaker 7: that we have to go there because, especially after going
Speaker 7: through a pandemic yourself, if that is still not enough
Speaker 7: for you to have any kind of empathy, that's that's
Speaker 7: just insane to me.
Speaker 2: That's uh.
Speaker 9: The one consistent thing I've seen is a lot of
Speaker 9: people say, oh, this conflict is you know, very There's
Speaker 9: a lot of history, and I don't really want to
Speaker 9: get involved and yeah, and you know, to us, I
Speaker 9: do understand that there is a long, complicated history that
Speaker 9: not a lot of people are well informed of. But
Speaker 9: inform yourself. And that doesn't mean you can't have empathy.
Speaker 9: You can you know, denounce the moss and also denounce
Speaker 9: anti Semitism. Yeah, these things are not really intrusive. And
Speaker 9: it's it's impressive to me that we're still after you know,
Speaker 9: it's not even been three months and we've lost twenty
Speaker 9: thousand people that we know of a mess. We're seeing
Speaker 9: journalists killed left and right as well. It's it's impressive
Speaker 9: to me that people are still saying, oh, I don't
Speaker 9: I don't really want to comment on that, or you know,
Speaker 9: it's it's it's very messy.
Speaker 10: In the medical I'm sorry, James. In the medical world,
Speaker 10: I've seen doctors complain about more about the word provider
Speaker 10: and how it's used. Then the fact that three hundred
Speaker 10: medical professionals have been killed, some of them while doing
Speaker 10: their duty in the hospital. Like, that's a part that
Speaker 10: kind of surprised me from a medical perspective. And you know,
Speaker 10: I think I mentioned it to you before. I'm grateful
Speaker 10: for coming on your show, because I think a lot
Speaker 10: of the overlap between doctors who listen to our show
Speaker 10: and they listen to yours, and they're very vocal and
Speaker 10: they're online, and they are the ones who are really
Speaker 10: giving me hope in these situations because and there's a
Speaker 10: lot of people in medicine and this is a medical issue.
Speaker 10: I mean, I'm not even talking about any of the history.
Speaker 10: That's nothing. That's not what I'm on. What it's important
Speaker 10: to me right now, it's about this healthcare crisis that
Speaker 10: is worsening and progressively worsening, and it is it is
Speaker 10: a bit of a bummer that I'm not seeing a
Speaker 10: little bit more interest in addressing it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would hope.
Speaker 8: I would say that most people, like insider outside of
Speaker 8: medical community could maybe agree that like the correct number
Speaker 8: of hospitals to bomb is zero hospitals and that but that, yeah,
Speaker 8: there isn't a reason why you bomb a hospitalities, shouldn't.
Speaker 7: Anthony Blincoln said like a year or about Ukraine and Russia.
Speaker 7: Russia bombed hospitals and schools. There's no way that's normal.
Speaker 7: And then like there's a video where it's like cross
Speaker 7: sectioning into like right now, how He's like, we're always
Speaker 7: going to support Israel. So it's like, no, it's not normal.
Speaker 7: Bombing hospitals and schools is never normal or okay. It's
Speaker 7: crazy that Israel went from being like we would never
Speaker 7: bomb a hospital to bombing dozens of them and nothing happening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I like, yeah, I guess just felt like
Speaker 2: lick completion.
Speaker 8: Again, it's not okay when Turkey bombs hospitals in Northeast
Speaker 8: area either, Like I was there when they bomb one
Speaker 8: they bombed another one. Since it's not okay when the
Speaker 8: Hunter and mean mail bomb's hospitals and at this one
Speaker 8: hospital left standing in the whole of Corny State right now,
Speaker 8: and like this is happening there too, when we're not
Speaker 8: like not caring about those people because this is a
Speaker 8: topic of the day or whatever.
Speaker 2: Like it's also not.
Speaker 9: Okay to use white phosphorus on armed civilians across the
Speaker 9: board were Yeah, like in general, it's horrific, and I
Speaker 9: just I think it's it's you know, and there was
Speaker 9: there were a couple of reports and I think that
Speaker 9: there's still data coming out about it that bodies had
Speaker 9: organs stolen from them. Yeah, which is just horrific, and yeah,
Speaker 9: it doesn't really practice what Israel.
Speaker 7: Has done for a while though. Israel's uh, they said
Speaker 7: they stopped it and then they're continuing to do it.
Speaker 7: But it's like they're notorious for bringing to returning bodies
Speaker 7: that have been like autopsyed or having all their organs removed.
Speaker 7: And I want to just point out that for Muslim burials,
Speaker 7: the body is like it's very important that the body
Speaker 7: is whole, and the same for Jewish burials. But it's
Speaker 7: just a really disgusting just point blank and then also
Speaker 7: really disrespectful.
Speaker 9: But yeah, sorry interrupted, No, no, I mean it's and again,
Speaker 9: you know, I think there's still a lot of information
Speaker 9: coming out about that and how many that court, et cetera,
Speaker 9: because I, like I mentioned before, I think information right
Speaker 9: now is really challenging. Accurate information, of course, is exceedingly difficult,
Speaker 9: so I'm always very careful, you know what we say.
Speaker 9: But to me, you know, the Washington Post just released
Speaker 9: a really good article and in death analysis of the
Speaker 9: attacks on the Al Shifa hospital, because that's the biggest
Speaker 9: hospital in Gaza, and for a while, you know, IDF
Speaker 9: was saying, well, this is where Hamas has been operating
Speaker 9: they have a tunnel networks, and there was there was
Speaker 9: a good breakdown of why this is inaccurate and at
Speaker 9: the end of the day, now there's no acceptable reason
Speaker 9: to bomb a hospital, and drawing attention to the fact
Speaker 9: that this was occurring and misinformation is being shared is huge.
Speaker 9: So I'm hopeful that you know and very grateful to
Speaker 9: be on this podcast and talk with you all because
Speaker 9: the more information we can communicate about this situation, but
Speaker 9: also about the fact that there are much larger consequences
Speaker 9: of this from just even an infectious disease perspective is
Speaker 9: so critical because I don't think people realize that, and
Speaker 9: again they disassociate when they hear it's the conflict, it's
Speaker 9: a result of conflicts. It is so much larger than that.
Speaker 9: It will you know, we will see it in the States.
Speaker 9: We will see the ramifications of this and if nothing
Speaker 9: else again coming out of COVID, I'd like to think
Speaker 9: that we realize that we are part of a much larger,
Speaker 9: interconnected world and infectious diseases are simply a plane flight away.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, very true. Thank you both so much for
Speaker 2: your brains and your knowledge of for coming on the show.
Speaker 10: It's uh, thanks for having us.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you so much for having us, of course, and
Speaker 8: before we go, i'd like to ask you if you
Speaker 8: have anything you'd like to plug like white people can
Speaker 8: find you good. You've mentioned a couple of good resources,
Speaker 8: but other information resources that.
Speaker 2: Kind of thing that you'd like to share.
Speaker 10: So, in terms of the resources, I am following a
Speaker 10: couple members of the PMRS. They have a Twitter feed
Speaker 10: but it's not very active, but the who gets a
Speaker 10: lot of the same information and they do a good
Speaker 10: job of updating in terms of where you could learn more.
Speaker 10: I just did an episode on the healthcare crisis in
Speaker 10: Gaza on my podcast, The House of Pod, which James
Speaker 10: has been on and stream. I'm trying to get you
Speaker 10: to come on.
Speaker 2: So I'm down.
Speaker 10: We're going to keep working on you and Saskia too.
Speaker 10: I mean, you're all invinded. I'm recording this. I'm just
Speaker 10: gonna release it on my podcast as well. And yeah,
Speaker 10: so listen to us there. I'll be doing more episodes
Speaker 10: on this topic as well in the in the coming months.
Speaker 9: Cool perfect, I'm marrying all of those resources I really
Speaker 9: been looking to. Of course, I'm the Public Health Parents,
Speaker 9: So who you know Seth, Human Rights Watch and my
Speaker 9: big go tos as you know, again as all the
Speaker 9: sources we've already mentioned, and I really I want to
Speaker 9: give a shout out to a colleague of mine, Jessica
Speaker 9: Alti Rivera, who is really really wonderful in this space
Speaker 9: and has been doing a lot of science communication on
Speaker 9: her Instagram. I tend to be a little bit more
Speaker 9: on the cesspool that is formally Twitter, but you know,
Speaker 9: I'm I think there's some really wonderful people out there,
Speaker 9: this entire group included, that are actively working to share
Speaker 9: information but also how people can get engaged and involved.
Speaker 9: So shout out to her and just all of the
Speaker 9: hard work that a lot of key journalists are doing
Speaker 9: in this space, because again, if you have no communication
Speaker 9: out it's really hard to get accurate information.
Speaker 2: Well, thanks guys for listening. Why are you laughing?
Speaker 1: James?
Speaker 2: Can I wrap us out? Or is this too monotone
Speaker 2: of up? Send it?
Speaker 7: No, that's the show again, Thanks again for both of
Speaker 7: you being so outspoken. I think, especially reminding everyone that
Speaker 7: it's actually not complicated, because it's it's also like a
Speaker 7: medical issue. It's not exactly when you just look at
Speaker 7: the numbers, look at body count, look at families. That's
Speaker 7: I think what our main focus should be. And I
Speaker 7: appreciate you both because I know it's a tricky out
Speaker 7: there to be outspoken.
Speaker 10: So thank you, Thank you guys, thanks so much.
Speaker 3: Welcome to it could happen here at the show about
Speaker 3: the slow end of the world and all the small
Speaker 3: little things that are kind of pushing us that way.
Speaker 3: Isn't that exciting?
Speaker 9: New Year?
Speaker 4: Knew me?
Speaker 2: Not not really.
Speaker 3: I'm kind of doing the same stuff, mostly staring into
Speaker 3: the abyss and seeing what stares back. Staring at the
Speaker 3: abyss with me today is Mia Wong. Hello, thank you
Speaker 3: for joining me. Oh boy, the abyss is is looking
Speaker 3: real choppy today, real abyssle.
Speaker 2: You could say, the waves coming out of it are
Speaker 2: staring back at you real hard.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So we're gonna talk today about anti semitism, So
Speaker 3: I guess content warning in case you don't want to
Speaker 3: hear a whole bunch of anti Semitic stuff. I'm not
Speaker 3: just gonna be repeating anti Semitic things. It's just this
Speaker 3: is just the topic for the whole episode. So yeah,
Speaker 3: the past few months there has been a pretty dramatic
Speaker 3: rise in anti semitism, ranging from physical attacks, vandalism, and
Speaker 3: lots of rhetoric. Now, there's a few as that I
Speaker 3: think make this a little bit tricky to talk about,
Speaker 3: which is why it's taken me a while to put
Speaker 3: this together. Firstly, I want to avoid getting into like
Speaker 3: oppression Olympics here, right, talking about one bad thing does
Speaker 3: not negate many other bad things that are happening concurrently.
Speaker 3: Having a discussion about a very troubling rise in antisemitism
Speaker 3: and a state backed ethnic cleansing do not need to
Speaker 3: be mutually exclusive topics of discussion. Right. We can say
Speaker 3: both of these things are actually pretty bad. And today
Speaker 3: we're going to be talking specifically about anti semitism. And
Speaker 3: I think you know, this show has had a history
Speaker 3: of reporting on anti fascist movements and attempts to stop
Speaker 3: fascist entryism and promoting of anti semitism. So this topic
Speaker 3: is well within our regular wheelhouse and there is a
Speaker 3: decent bit to talk about. Now. The second thing that
Speaker 3: makes this topic a little bit tricky is that some
Speaker 3: of the big extremism research groups that typically do the
Speaker 3: most cataloging of anti Semitic incidents have proven themselves to
Speaker 3: be slightly unreliable on this topic for the past four months.
Speaker 3: And that's not just my opinion, that's also the opinion
Speaker 3: of current and former ADL employees who have been coming
Speaker 3: out against Director Jonathan greenblatz leadership choices, particularly since the
Speaker 3: October seventh Hamas attack. Now, due to the nature of
Speaker 3: their job versus my job, ADL analysts have a lot
Speaker 3: more dedicated time and resources to cataloging alleged anti Semitic incidents,
Speaker 3: but under greenblatz direction, the whole of their data from
Speaker 3: the past four months is heavily skewed to include anything
Speaker 3: expressing anti Zionism as being included in their data about
Speaker 3: anti semitism, and even anything deemed too sympathetic to Palestinians
Speaker 3: as being a driver of anti Semitism. So that's the
Speaker 3: kind of situation we have here with. You know, there's
Speaker 3: many issues the ADL has had in the past, which
Speaker 3: we may talked about in the future, but typically they've
Speaker 3: done an okay job the past few years, specifically cataloging
Speaker 3: anti semitism during the rise of the alt right. Their
Speaker 3: data is often relatively reliable on this topic. Some of
Speaker 3: their other data and other practices are very open to criticism.
Speaker 3: But this is kind of one other factor that's gonna
Speaker 3: make this a little bit tricky. Now, as like an example, right,
Speaker 3: this is this is we can we can talk about
Speaker 3: these things in abstract. I'm gonna talk about something from
Speaker 3: Atlanta because this is something I have some experience in.
Speaker 3: So on the ADL's big map of anti Semitic incidents
Speaker 3: from October seventh to the present, if you zoom into Atlanta,
Speaker 3: there's two incidents that are right next to each other.
Speaker 3: One is a banner drop done by the Goiam Defense League,
Speaker 3: which is a group of neo Nazis.
Speaker 2: Oh God.
Speaker 3: Basically, they made some banners expressing pro Hitler statements alongside
Speaker 3: slogans like free Palestine, and they put them up above
Speaker 3: a really big road in Atlanta. Right, So this is
Speaker 3: pretty standard neo Nazi anti Semitism using kind of anti
Speaker 3: Zionism as this sort of mask But I mean Hitler
Speaker 3: very thid, Yes exactly, that's not really it's not really
Speaker 3: masked because you also have a Hitler banner. But like
Speaker 3: you know, if someone only sees one banner, be like, oh,
Speaker 3: it's a Palestine banner, but no, it's actually a Nazi banner.
Speaker 2: So we have this incident logged. We also have another
Speaker 2: incident blogged right beside it from a protest a few
Speaker 2: days later, which was an Inner faith rally in support
Speaker 2: of Palestine against the ongoing ethnic cleansing that's happening in
Speaker 2: Gaza with thousands and thousands of people being killed. So
Speaker 2: we have this banner drop and we have this rally,
Speaker 2: and both of these things are labeled as an anti
Speaker 2: Semitic incident. They're both like equal in the eyes of
Speaker 2: this data, which just isn't true. I was, I was
Speaker 2: at this rally. I did not hear.
Speaker 3: Anything anti Semitic coming from the speakers. Many of the speakers,
Speaker 3: if not the majority of the speakers, were Jewish. There
Speaker 3: were a group of Jewish counter protesters who showed up
Speaker 3: who started many fights, fights which were very quickly de
Speaker 3: escalated by the people who were putting on the rally.
Speaker 3: There was this one woman who was carrying an Israeli
Speaker 3: flag on his flagpole who kept hitting people with it.
Speaker 3: So there was a lot of there's a lot of
Speaker 3: things going on at this rally, but this was not
Speaker 3: an anti Semitic rally, And in fact, the Jewish counter
Speaker 3: protesters were extremely vitriolic. They were expressing explicit desire for
Speaker 3: genocide of Palestinians, like very very gross stuff. It was,
Speaker 3: it was really disgusting. So both of these incidents, though,
Speaker 3: are seen as equal, which just show that's just an
Speaker 3: easy example to kind of show how this data isn't
Speaker 3: really reliable that the ADL is putting together here. Now,
Speaker 3: I really don't feel like it's my place to go
Speaker 3: through the eightyeals database and decide what is and is
Speaker 3: not antisemitism, right, Like, that's I don't have the time,
Speaker 3: nor the money normally the authority to be like the
Speaker 3: arbiter of what is and isn't anti semitic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Garrison, Garrison turning into the anti Semitism commissar.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's that's not That's not me, right. I have
Speaker 3: a background in anti fascist research. I have a background
Speaker 3: in neo Nazia driven anti semitism, Right, these are the
Speaker 3: things I usually specialize in. But still, this is a
Speaker 3: this is a massive this is a massive field. Antisemitism
Speaker 3: is a complicated topic. Rhetoric can be complicated, and having
Speaker 3: not attended or reviewed every single rally or incident in question,
Speaker 3: I'm simply not equipped to make informed judgments. So for
Speaker 3: that reason, this episode I will focus mostly on physical attacks, threats,
Speaker 3: and vandalism as opposed to the much more murky waters
Speaker 3: of rhetoric, online rhetoric and you know, just these these
Speaker 3: there's been probably thousands of rallies across the United States.
Speaker 3: I've not been to everyone, I've not watched every single speech,
Speaker 3: I've not heard every single offhand comment, so I'm not
Speaker 3: going to deal with those. Instead, I'm going to be
Speaker 3: focusing on physical like in like IRL and things that
Speaker 3: have a very clear result of the action. So this
Speaker 3: mostly attacks throughout vandalism. Anyway, moving on though, I guess
Speaker 3: actually the one other thing about stats is that when
Speaker 3: talking about this rise anti semitism, because there's been a
Speaker 3: lot of articles from mainstream news outlets being like, here's
Speaker 3: the rise antisemitism, and here's the stats, another thing pointing
Speaker 3: towards why these stats are unreliable and the reason why
Speaker 3: I'm not going to be using them largely is because
Speaker 3: many of the stats included and these articles are crime stats,
Speaker 3: and these crime stats are also proving to be heavily unreliable.
Speaker 3: For example, the Metropolitan Police claimed that there was a
Speaker 3: one thousand and three hundred and fifty percent increase in
Speaker 3: anti Semitic hate crimes in London during the first two
Speaker 3: two and a half weeks of October, with two hundred
Speaker 3: and eighteen anti Semitic offenses in London during that time
Speaker 3: period compared to only fifteen in twenty twenty two. But
Speaker 3: included in these stats are incidents like the police in
Speaker 3: London arresting a man for tearing down some of those
Speaker 3: hostage posters. That's one of the hate crimes that they
Speaker 3: include in this, and also the met said that that's
Speaker 3: the Metropolitan Police said that chanting from the river to
Speaker 3: the sea near Jewish people or near Jewish buildings during
Speaker 3: a protest would be deemed unlawful. And I think there
Speaker 3: is a debate to be had whether if you're just
Speaker 3: protesting outside of a random Jewish building, that's probably not
Speaker 3: great and that could be an indicator of anti Semitism,
Speaker 3: but having that chant be deemed unlawful for just being
Speaker 3: near other Jewish people, Like I said, at the rally
Speaker 3: in Atlanta, there was a whole bunch of Jewish counter
Speaker 3: protesters who came to start fights. So like, you're going
Speaker 3: to be around Jewish people if you're a march you're
Speaker 3: marching around, or if you're outside in Israeli embassy that's
Speaker 3: a that's an it M I opinion, a very valid
Speaker 3: target for protest that would be considered a Jewish building.
Speaker 3: So all of these stats are heavily heavily skewed by
Speaker 3: these by by these sorts of reasons for how how
Speaker 3: how the met is, including.
Speaker 2: Things as being anti Semitic hate crimes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I mean like this, like if you just
Speaker 5: think about what the rationale is there for a second,
Speaker 5: Like is a group of anti Sionist Jews chanting from
Speaker 5: the river to the sea around themselves a hate crime?
Speaker 2: Exactly rightight? Like this is nonsense? Like so, and also
Speaker 2: you know what I mean.
Speaker 5: And also like this is the British police, Like those
Speaker 5: are the most anti Semitic motherfuckers this side of like
Speaker 5: the Ukrainian neo Nazis or something.
Speaker 3: And like I do not doubt there was an actual
Speaker 3: increase of anti Semitic attacks bendless hate speech. That that
Speaker 3: is what we're talking about in this episode. We will
Speaker 3: be getting into many incidents, but it is difficult to
Speaker 3: pin down some of what these really big stats actually
Speaker 3: represent because if tearing down one of those silly Hamas
Speaker 3: wanted posters is being labeled a hate crime on the
Speaker 3: same level as drawing a swastika on a synagogue. That
Speaker 3: data is basically useless, and now I think it's also
Speaker 3: worth mentioning, just very very briefly, the Metropolitan Police also
Speaker 3: recorded a one hundred and forty percent increase in Islamophobic
Speaker 3: incidents during those first two and a half weeks of
Speaker 3: October's that's forty two incidents in twenty twenty two compared
Speaker 3: to one hundred and three incidents in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 3: And while that percentage is lower than the anti Semitic
Speaker 3: stat it also indicates how much more common Islamophobia in
Speaker 3: London is because the regular amount of reported incidents from
Speaker 3: last year is so much higher than the regular reported
Speaker 3: amount of anti Semitic incidents. Like having forty two incidents
Speaker 3: per like two and a half weeks, be the normal
Speaker 3: stat is not great and maybe someone should look into
Speaker 3: why British people are so islamophobic. I mean that there's
Speaker 3: that that's a whole episode in and of itself. Is
Speaker 3: Amophobia in the UK is a massive, massive problem. But
Speaker 3: just as a comparison, I thought I might as well
Speaker 3: say that we will get to Honkah next. But it
Speaker 3: has already been thirteen minutes of me talking about stats
Speaker 3: and giving disclaivers, so that means it's time for an
Speaker 3: ad break. I'm not going to do a silly ad transition.
Speaker 3: Just listen to the ads. All right, we are back,
Speaker 3: since we just finally escaped the holiday season, Let's begin
Speaker 3: by talking about Honkkah. Public manoras, often without any extra
Speaker 3: like iconography tying them to the state of Israel, were
Speaker 3: a frequent target of vandalism and anti Semitic messaging. During
Speaker 3: the months of December, a far right member of parliament
Speaker 3: in Poland used a fire extinguisher to blow at the
Speaker 3: candles on a minora in the lobby of parliam A
Speaker 3: public menora in London had its light bulbs smashed with
Speaker 3: a free Palestine sticker placed onto the front, and then
Speaker 3: days later it was found toppled over and left in pieces.
Speaker 3: There's many of these incidents. I'm just gonna name a
Speaker 3: few more, just because at a certain point it kind
Speaker 3: of becomes redundant. But I think these things are worth
Speaker 3: talking about. An eleven foot, three hundred and fifty pound
Speaker 3: menora next to Lake Mari in Oakland was cut up
Speaker 3: and destroyed in mid December, with pieces being thrown into
Speaker 3: the nearby lake. A message was graffitied that led We're
Speaker 3: gonna find you. You're on alert. It was also reported
Speaker 3: that there was graffiti left nearby that read free Palestine
Speaker 3: in Arabic.
Speaker 2: But I can't confirm that.
Speaker 3: The picture they have online does not match what free
Speaker 3: Palestine in airboth looks like. But I'm not an expert
Speaker 3: on Arabic, so i just can't confirm that, but that
Speaker 3: is being reported in local Jewish newspapers. Manora sand sculpture
Speaker 3: commissioned in Palm Beach was destroyed and left defaced with
Speaker 3: a swastika outside of synagogue in a suburb of Washington,
Speaker 3: d C. A Manora was toppled over on the eve
Speaker 3: of Honka, and two manoras were vandalized and damaged in
Speaker 3: Brooklyn in early December by masked individuals. So one other
Speaker 3: similar incident I will talk about, which is kind of interesting,
Speaker 3: is that there was this pro Palestine protest at Yale
Speaker 3: where a one of the protesters climbed up onto this
Speaker 3: massive I don't know how tall it was, but it
Speaker 3: was huge. They had to climb up pretty high on
Speaker 3: this big public menora and placed a Palestinian flag kind
Speaker 3: of around one of the little arms on the manora.
Speaker 3: But very quickly, like within seconds of this happening, other
Speaker 3: pro Palestine protesters, noticing this is kind of disrespectful, asked
Speaker 3: this person to take it down, like like almost almost immediately.
Speaker 3: This is a very a very quick exchange, and this
Speaker 3: kind of sparked some people talking about, you know, is
Speaker 3: it okay to put Palestinian flags on manora? Is it
Speaker 3: okay to vanelize manoras? Which the answer is no, The
Speaker 3: answer you shouldn't vandalize a manora. That's generally not great.
Speaker 3: But you know, people were saying and specifically pointing towards
Speaker 3: like pictures of IDF soldiers who've been taking territory in Gaza,
Speaker 3: who've been putting up manoras in Gaza, or like the
Speaker 3: Israeli military doing these photo ops with big manoras in
Speaker 3: different parts of gazas being like, hey, when there's this
Speaker 3: active ethnic cleansing going on and soldiers are using this
Speaker 3: religious iconography and it's being associated directly with this, with
Speaker 3: this ongoing ethnic genocide, how can you blame people who
Speaker 3: are going to be treating this symbol with hostility, and
Speaker 3: I think there's a few problems with this idea. I'm
Speaker 3: going to quote from this Jewish artist who goes by
Speaker 3: Underscore a Nunnery, who I think phrased this really well quote.
Speaker 3: Jewish symbols shouldn't be associated with Zionism or ceded to
Speaker 3: them just because Zionists abuse them. If the manora were
Speaker 3: put up by Zionists, as some explicit the Zionist display,
Speaker 3: then putting up a Palestadian flag would be an active resistance.
Speaker 3: If it's not, then it's just cementing the Zionist conflation
Speaker 3: and exploitation of Jewish identity. There are more non Jewish
Speaker 3: Zionists than there are Jews, unquote. And this gets at
Speaker 3: a point which I think is really important when you're
Speaker 3: talking about anti Zionist activism. Attacking symbols of Jewish culture
Speaker 3: in the name of anti Zionism only strengthens the cause
Speaker 3: of Zionism by affirming the conflation of Judaism and Zionism,
Speaker 3: or Judaism and the State of Israel. This conflation helps
Speaker 3: Zionists shield their actions by abusing the Jewish identity and
Speaker 3: making these two things be more like intersectional. So I
Speaker 3: think that is one a strategic reason for ya this
Speaker 3: is a bad idea, and two it's maybe slightly anti Semitic.
Speaker 3: So that is my little holiday section just because I
Speaker 3: saw a whole bunch of stuff around these manoras and
Speaker 3: I didn't feel about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like this sucks, like please don't do this.
Speaker 3: And I've seen some people like also using the comparison
Speaker 3: of like would you would you also criticize indigenous people
Speaker 3: in America for graffitiing or taking down images of like
Speaker 3: Christian iconography and like, No, because the oppression faced by
Speaker 3: Christians and the oppression faced by Jewish people are two
Speaker 3: different things. Like these are these are actually historically these
Speaker 3: are very different things. So no, these things actually cannot
Speaker 3: be compared in my opinion. But now I'm going to
Speaker 3: talk about some international incidents because I think we have
Speaker 3: a tendency to overfocus on America when there's a whole
Speaker 3: bunch of other stuff happening and you know, the rest
Speaker 3: of the world. Back in October, a historic synagogue in
Speaker 3: Tunisia was burned down by a mob of hundreds of
Speaker 3: people in response to reports that in Israeli airstrike hit
Speaker 3: a hospital in Gaza.
Speaker 2: This sucks.
Speaker 3: I shouldn't have to explain why burning down a historical
Speaker 3: synagogue is antisemitic because you don't like something the state
Speaker 3: of Israel did.
Speaker 2: That's just that. Just isn't that just isn't like, that's
Speaker 2: just not se shit like come on. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So a month later in November, someone posted the video
Speaker 3: online of themselves pouring fuel and setting fire to the
Speaker 3: only synagogue in Armenia. The entrance was damaged in the
Speaker 3: arsen attack, but no one was hurt. The only synagogue
Speaker 3: in Vortswaft, Poland. Sorry I pride butchered that, but it
Speaker 3: is a hard word, but the only synagogue in this
Speaker 3: town of Poland to survive the Holocaust was defaced with
Speaker 3: graffiti that read quote Israel criminals and murderers unquote and
Speaker 3: then like a week I guess. Earlier that week a
Speaker 3: group of teenagers also destroyed a an aura in this
Speaker 3: same town. In mid October, Maltov cocktails were thrown at
Speaker 3: a synagogue in Berlin after Hanukkah. In Belgium, a Jewish
Speaker 3: materi was vandalized with swastikas on gravestones in late no
Speaker 3: In In late November, a mult have cocktail was thrown
Speaker 3: at a Jewish community center in Montreal. Earlier that month,
Speaker 3: shots were fired at two different Jewish schools in Montreal
Speaker 3: in three different incidents, and four Holocaust memorials in Germany
Speaker 3: were vandalized with a mix of antisemitic and anti Zionist messages.
Speaker 3: So again, like when I was looking at these ones
Speaker 3: once in Germany, the actual content of about half of
Speaker 3: these messages were not anti Semitic. But the act of
Speaker 3: doing this at a at a at a Holocaust memorial
Speaker 3: just is like it it it gives me the ick.
Speaker 3: And there's arguments could be made that this does actually
Speaker 3: play into antisemitic troops, like you're what, You're blaming dead
Speaker 3: Jewish people for the actions of the current state of Israel.
Speaker 3: Like that's it's it just And also half half of
Speaker 3: these messages left at these at these Holocausts were also
Speaker 3: just blatantly at anti Semitic, like very clearly like Nazi
Speaker 3: style stuff.
Speaker 2: I don't have time to go over all of the
Speaker 2: incidents across the Europe. There is a great deal many.
Speaker 2: There's many, many, many that I've not mentioned.
Speaker 3: These are just a few. Like I said, I'm focusing
Speaker 3: on like vandalism, very very clear cut stuff, people doing
Speaker 3: arson attacks, right, it's just very very basic stuff. This
Speaker 3: stuff in Montreal not great, Montreal, Canada, get your shit together.
Speaker 3: Although unfortunately not surprising but still upsetting is Jews being
Speaker 3: barred from shops across Turkey. And oh there's a whole
Speaker 3: a whole bunch of very gross government government sponsored anti
Speaker 3: semitism across Turkey campaigns to prohibit the sale of land
Speaker 3: to Jewish people. A lot of a lot of bad
Speaker 3: stuff in Turkey. But that's not incredibly surprising.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean it's aired Wan, Like, yeah, he fucking
Speaker 5: sucks ass and he oh yeah. Airedwan is a man
Speaker 5: who has personally ordered children to be burned alive with firebombs,
Speaker 5: so you know this is not out of character for him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I guess, uh finally this this one one
Speaker 3: other thing about Honkah is that so last month, right
Speaker 3: after the end of Honkah, bomb threats were sent out
Speaker 3: en mass to more than four hundred Jewish Jewish centers
Speaker 3: and synagogues across the United States. This was most likely
Speaker 3: orchestrated by the same kind of small number of individuals.
Speaker 3: All of the messages were very similar. None of these
Speaker 3: were incredibly credible, but it still sparked a whole bunch
Speaker 3: of bomb sweeps and concerned because when Jewish synagogues get
Speaker 3: bomb threats, that's not an empty threat either, Like this
Speaker 3: is like there is historical precedent.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, and I also like I think, I think the
Speaker 5: everything that's important about this too is like this, this
Speaker 5: is you know, this is like one of the things
Speaker 5: is the culmination of everything that Wright's been doing for
Speaker 5: the last like eight years has been the development of
Speaker 5: like this quadre of people who do bomb threats.
Speaker 3: Calling in bomb threats as a tactics. Yes, no, there's
Speaker 3: the concerted effort form threats at hospitals that provide transgender care,
Speaker 3: abortion clinics. There was a string of weirdly organized bomb
Speaker 3: threats against schools about a year or two ago. But
Speaker 3: I think I think Robert did an episode.
Speaker 5: On yeah now and now we're here at you know,
Speaker 5: we're at bomb threats you can synagogues, which is terrifying.
Speaker 3: According to the Secure Community Network, a nonprofit security organization
Speaker 3: that tracks threats made against Jewish communities, bomb threats and
Speaker 3: swatting incidents, basically freight trying to get a swat team
Speaker 3: to show up somewhere because you lied about there being
Speaker 3: like an ongoing crime or something. But bomb threats and
Speaker 3: swatting incidents targeted against Jewish centers saw over a five
Speaker 3: hundred percent increase in twenty twenty three compared to the
Speaker 3: previous year, which I have no reason to believe is incorrect.
Speaker 3: So on that note, I know, I don't really think
Speaker 3: we could have a bomb threat segue to adds, I
Speaker 3: really don't really don't know. Don't do bomb, don't do
Speaker 3: bomb threat specypically, this is what I got. Yeah, typically, anyway,
Speaker 3: do you know what else is to bomb these ads? Okay, fine,
Speaker 3: all right, we are back. Maybe the worst air transition
Speaker 3: we've ever done. That's not true, That is definitely not true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, okay, you're right. Okay.
Speaker 3: So during this last section, I'm gonna talk a little
Speaker 3: bit more about data aggregation. So, like I said previously
Speaker 3: in this episode, due to the nature of what my
Speaker 3: job is and the nature of what an ADL analyst's
Speaker 3: job is, they just have a lot more time to
Speaker 3: dedicate towards specifically logging anti Semitic incidents. So I did
Speaker 3: look through their data set and I've made some extrapolations
Speaker 3: based on some of the findings and some of the
Speaker 3: open source data that they have regarding specific in so
Speaker 3: on that note, the ADL has logged around one thousand
Speaker 3: and one hundred anti Semitic incidents since October seventh, not
Speaker 3: related to protest rallies. So this is specifically all the
Speaker 3: incidents that are not related to these big pro Palestinian
Speaker 3: Interfaith many Jewish led rallies. Now I'm not saying that
Speaker 3: nothing anti Semitic has not happened at any of those rallies,
Speaker 3: but these rallies were logged simply as quote anti Israel
Speaker 3: rallies which featured over anti Semitism, anti Zionism, and or
Speaker 3: expressions of support for terror. So crammed in the middle
Speaker 3: of that explanation is just anti Zionism. So that is
Speaker 3: one thing they are just counting as being enough to
Speaker 3: be logged as an anti Semitic incident. So again, I'm
Speaker 3: not going through the over like one thousand rallies that
Speaker 3: they have logged here just because I don't have the
Speaker 3: time and I don't feel like it. But yes, just
Speaker 3: for full transparency, that is the information. I'm not going
Speaker 3: to be looking at instead, I'm looking at these one
Speaker 3: thousand and one hundred other incidents not related to these protests.
Speaker 3: So these one thy one hundred harassment and vandalism incidents
Speaker 3: include things from anti Zionist slash, anti Israel stickers and
Speaker 3: graffiti being left at universities and synagogues, the latter which
Speaker 3: I believe is in poor taste, but also you know
Speaker 3: swastikas being painted on synagogues, extremely anti Semitic messages being
Speaker 3: left at Jewish centers, and street harassment targeting visibly Jewish people,
Speaker 3: as well as just overt to neo Nazi activity under
Speaker 3: the banner of free Palestine. Now, of these over one
Speaker 3: thousand and one hundred incidents, I'd say that a very
Speaker 3: small minority of them are principled anti Zionist activism, which
Speaker 3: has been mislabeled. Most of the data in these one
Speaker 3: thousand incidents is just blatant anti semitism, I an specifically
Speaker 3: directed to words, just regular Jewish people, people writing kill
Speaker 3: Jews and bathroom stalls, threats being sent to Jewish people
Speaker 3: mentioning Hitler or Hermas, a lot of just extremely gross
Speaker 3: stuff like there's too many, There's too many, Just like
Speaker 3: threats that mentioned the word Jews that I just can't
Speaker 3: even read them all, nor do I want to, because
Speaker 3: it's just gross. Like there is a truly upsetting number.
Speaker 3: Which is why I wanted to make this episode in
Speaker 3: the first place, is because I've been seeing this pretty
Speaker 3: big rise of anti Semitism. Other people have as well,
Speaker 3: and I felt like this wasn't probably being as talked
Speaker 3: about as much as it should be among the anti
Speaker 3: fascist left, because you know, everyone's focusing on this ethnic
Speaker 3: cleansing that's happening, because that is very bad. But meanwhile,
Speaker 3: there's this other massive problem that if you care about
Speaker 3: fascist entryism, if you care about anti Semitic behavior and
Speaker 3: actions being either allowed to happen in leftist spaces or
Speaker 3: just happening in general, Like a lot of the stuff
Speaker 3: is being done by fascists who are not who are
Speaker 3: not you know, going to a pro Palestine rally because
Speaker 3: they believe in anti imperialism. But there's just a lot
Speaker 3: of this stuff happening, which is why I think it
Speaker 3: is need needing to be talked about.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: There are a number of instances that are logged in
Speaker 3: these one thousand, one hundred incidents here, such as you know,
Speaker 3: for I'm just gonna I'm gonna pull from actual examples.
Speaker 3: But also this is kind of generalizing because this was
Speaker 3: also reflecting a small trend things like pro Palestine phrases
Speaker 3: being yelled at random Jewish people on the street, having
Speaker 3: like Antizionist stickers being poorly placed in different locations like
Speaker 3: at a Jewish cemetery, vandalizing non political Jewish owned businesses
Speaker 3: with anti Zionist phrases, even like breaking the windows of
Speaker 3: random Jewish owned businesses with no ties to Israel or
Speaker 3: the IDF and leaving anti Zionist phrases or pro Palestine
Speaker 3: phrases graffitied next to these broken windows. Now, while the
Speaker 3: content of what's being actually said in these incidents may
Speaker 3: not be like anti Semitic in nature by itself, right,
Speaker 3: like just having very basic anti Sionist phrases being graffeited
Speaker 3: that may not be anti Semitic itself, like that combination
Speaker 3: of words. This sort of activity, though, plays into a
Speaker 3: classic anti Semitic kind of trope, as if every like
Speaker 3: random Jewish person is somehow in part responsible for the
Speaker 3: actions of Israel, and it also conflates Jewish identity with Zionism,
Speaker 3: which is the problem that we were talking about before
Speaker 3: when we started this episode, right when I was talking
Speaker 3: about the stuff with Hanuka just a few hours ago
Speaker 3: as of time of recording, the corvalis anti fascist branch.
Speaker 3: I guess, yeah, yeah, I think they're a member of
Speaker 3: Torch put out this thread about how the GDL, the
Speaker 3: Going Defense League. We talked about them previously in this episode.
Speaker 3: They're a big group of organized neo Nazis that spread
Speaker 3: a lot of anti Semitic stuff, How they hijacked a
Speaker 3: city council meeting to spread anti Semitic stuff during a
Speaker 3: discussion of a during a discussion about a ceasefire resolution.
Speaker 3: And I think they kind of ended their thread by
Speaker 3: talking about how it is extremely important to call out
Speaker 3: the conflation of the Jewish people with the genocidal actions
Speaker 3: of the State of Israel and assertions that the media
Speaker 3: is controlled by Jews or that regular Jews have some
Speaker 3: kind of say in everything that's happening. Right, it gets
Speaker 3: in this kind of like cabalish notion. Now back to
Speaker 3: kind of the data that I was talking about, these
Speaker 3: sorts of incidents are vastly, vastly outweighed by the number
Speaker 3: of just overt jew hatred, invoking of anti Semitic conspiracy theories,
Speaker 3: calling for the death of Jews, and swastikas. But I
Speaker 3: still think it's extremely important to mention because the targeting
Speaker 3: of random Jewish people in business is itself that is
Speaker 3: a form of anti Semitism, and this activity helps to
Speaker 3: reinforce the abuse of the Jewish identity by inextricately linking
Speaker 3: it to Zionism, which only strengthens the Zionist ideology. So
Speaker 3: that's that's that's my little mini rant about the way
Speaker 3: we've been seeing some of these things play out. Now,
Speaker 3: many of these over a thousand incidents logged use anti
Speaker 3: Zionism as a sort of cover for just spreading anti Semitism,
Speaker 3: particularly from known white supremacist and neo Nazi groups. The
Speaker 3: GDL is a good example. There's also groups like White
Speaker 3: Lives Matter and a number of others that I could
Speaker 3: name that when you're looking through the ADL's data on
Speaker 3: these one thousand or so incidents, a large large amount
Speaker 3: of them are done by the Goam Defense League, the GDL,
Speaker 3: And this is this is this is a strategic thing
Speaker 3: for them, right They're seeing the kind of moment that
Speaker 3: people are in culturally, the way people are talking about Israel,
Speaker 3: and if they can find a way to squeeze in
Speaker 3: their neo Nazi talking points kind of under this very
Speaker 3: very thin Palestine kind of veneer, that's great for them.
Speaker 3: If they can get people to start almost mindlessly repeating
Speaker 3: their style of talking points, that's great for them. Right,
Speaker 3: it makes sense why they're putting so much time and
Speaker 3: dedication to this, because they're trying to use this moment
Speaker 3: and abuse the thousands of people who might be more
Speaker 3: susceptible to this right now to spread their ideology and
Speaker 3: to do and to do entryism like this is a
Speaker 3: part of what their tactic is. So while it's true
Speaker 3: that many of these incidents do come from explicitly Nazi groups,
Speaker 3: there's also just a really upsettingly and shockingly large number
Speaker 3: of them that come from students, students from middle school
Speaker 3: to college who are ostensibly anti Israel but are going
Speaker 3: about it via targeting randomish people and spreading anti Semitism,
Speaker 3: whether that's intended or not. But a lot of the
Speaker 3: talking points are just anti Semitic talking points. Now, I
Speaker 3: can't I'm not in the heads of anybody I'm not
Speaker 3: talking to the twelve year old in some middle school
Speaker 3: in Colorado who's leaving anti Semitic messages in a bathroom stall,
Speaker 3: but the effect is kind of the same. And just
Speaker 3: the sheer number of specifically like like like middle school,
Speaker 3: junior high, high school, instance, that are logged among this
Speaker 3: thousand was just incredibly incredibly distressing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I I mean, I think I think a
Speaker 5: lot of what's going on here is that, like the
Speaker 5: US is a culturally Christian society, right like it has
Speaker 5: like of the developed countries, the US is like one
Speaker 5: of the most Christian and American Christianity. And this is
Speaker 5: true of like in different ways of like just basically
Speaker 5: all of the major Christian de nominations are enormously anti Semitic,
Speaker 5: like and there are any Seminican theory in different in
Speaker 5: different in weird ways. Like I mean, I spent some
Speaker 5: time recently for something else, like reading about like this
Speaker 5: argument between like the Evangelicals who are like, we need
Speaker 5: to we need to have all the Jews go back
Speaker 5: to Israel so that we can bring about the Second Coming.
Speaker 5: And they were gonna fight with the the hard line
Speaker 5: like right wing Lutherans and the hard, hardline right wing
Speaker 5: Lutherans are like, what the fuck do you mean? Like no,
Speaker 5: like the Holy Land belongs to us, not the Jews.
Speaker 5: What the fuck are you guys doing? Right, It's like,
Speaker 5: this is the baseline of American society, right, it's unbelievably
Speaker 5: anti Semitic in ways that you know, are are just
Speaker 5: sort of passed down through like like culture are culturally
Speaker 5: received and absorbed in ways that people don't like see
Speaker 5: or understand or think about, because it's just it's it's
Speaker 5: the wall, it's the water that American that you know,
Speaker 5: you swim in in American culture in this or it's
Speaker 5: like like this hegemonic Christian society, and that means that
Speaker 5: like even people with like at least in their heads,
Speaker 5: good intentions get caught up in this shit.
Speaker 2: It's funning, yeah, and bad.
Speaker 3: And there's also at the same time, a very concerned
Speaker 3: effort to slide in the anti Jewish extremism, anti Semitic rhetoric,
Speaker 3: to slide that in sometimes covertly, sometimes not into lots
Speaker 3: of mainstream discourse and exchanges and social media specifically, TikTok
Speaker 3: has been really has been really bad at this, which
Speaker 3: is where a lot of young people spend probably the
Speaker 3: majority of their day if they're going to be looking
Speaker 3: at their phone, and it's it's I said, I didn't
Speaker 3: want to get into like social media rhetoric. But also
Speaker 3: just like as someone who spent a lot of time
Speaker 3: on four chan and eight chan looking specifically at Nazis,
Speaker 3: the way Twitter currently works is like it is just
Speaker 3: four chan eight chan level stuff pretty commonly, Like if
Speaker 3: I look at the quote tweets of any of almost
Speaker 3: any tweet made by a Jewish person, there is just
Speaker 3: some of the most atrocious, unmoderated anti semitism that I've
Speaker 3: seen on a platform like Twitter, Like this is this
Speaker 3: is really like eight chan level stuff, I think, And
Speaker 3: this isn't intentional to slide this stuff in to make
Speaker 3: it look normalized. The ADL reported a nearly one thousand
Speaker 3: percent increase in the daily average of violent messages mentioning
Speaker 3: Jews and Israel in a white supremacist and right wing
Speaker 3: extremist channels on Telegram in the days following the October
Speaker 3: seventh massacre. So this is something that is specifically being
Speaker 3: done in far right spaces. I'm going to quote again
Speaker 3: from this corbalis against fascism. The struggle for the liberation
Speaker 3: of Palestine is one of the most pressing of our time.
Speaker 3: It's imperative that we shut down anti Semitic attempts to
Speaker 3: co op that struggle immediately. Which if you care about
Speaker 3: the liberation of Palestine and palestadining and peep, well, this
Speaker 3: is something you also need to be concerned about, because
Speaker 3: these two things are linked. There's twenty seven assaults have
Speaker 3: been reported. Around eight of these assaults are stemming from
Speaker 3: fights which broke out at protest rallies. I'm not going
Speaker 3: to get into those ones as much because that can
Speaker 3: be tricky because I've seen Zionists start fights like right
Speaker 3: next to me before and then claim a victimhood like no,
Speaker 3: you're the one that started that. You swung a flagpole
Speaker 3: at these people, and then they de escalated very quickly.
Speaker 3: And I'm sure there's incidents of the reverse happening. But
Speaker 3: a majority of these assaults that have been reported are
Speaker 3: very clear cut anti Semitic attacks targeted against Jewish people,
Speaker 3: some of which are quite frightening to read about. There's
Speaker 3: been a large number of a vehicle attacks. There was
Speaker 3: one incident of someone breaking into a Jewish family's home
Speaker 3: and assaulting people inside their own home. Then also there's
Speaker 3: been a number of incidents of just assaulting people as
Speaker 3: they leave synagogues. I've seen very off start fights with
Speaker 3: people right next to that is That is kind of
Speaker 3: what I had to say about this rise in anti Semitism,
Speaker 3: because I saw this being a major problem that was
Speaker 3: being not talked about as much as it should be.
Speaker 3: Because this is it is higher than what we've seen
Speaker 3: in years, not to even mention the rise in Islamophobia,
Speaker 3: which is also a massive rise is in Islamophobia has
Speaker 3: been happening the past four months, including resulting in murders.
Speaker 3: Right just in the four weeks after October seventh, the
Speaker 3: Council on American Islamic Relations logged an unprecedented number of
Speaker 3: Islamophobic incidents. The research and advocacy director Corey Saylor said
Speaker 3: in the statement, quote, both Islamophobia and anti Arab racism
Speaker 3: are out of control in ways we have not seen
Speaker 3: in almost ten years. The one thousand, two hundred and
Speaker 3: eighty three complaints we have received over the past month
Speaker 3: represent a two hundred and sixteen percent increase in requests
Speaker 3: for help and reports of bias the islamophobic and anti
Speaker 3: Palestinian rhetoric that have been used to justify both violence
Speaker 3: against Palestinians and Gaza and silence supporters of Palestinian human
Speaker 3: rights here in America have contributed to this unprecedented surge
Speaker 3: in bigotry. It's just been bad the past four months. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's just things have been bad. There's been murders, there's
Speaker 3: been assaults. It's it's it's it's it's it's horrible. And
Speaker 3: I think both of these things are things that need
Speaker 3: to be need to be interrogated more, the islamophobic incidents
Speaker 3: as well as anti Semitic incidents. So that's what I
Speaker 3: wanted to to talk about as I have been slowly
Speaker 3: slowly logging more synagogue attacks, more death threats, all of
Speaker 3: these sorts of stuff. So yeah, that's kind of all
Speaker 3: I have to say, uh today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's reel bad. I don't know, I mean,
Speaker 2: it's that out there.
Speaker 3: I mean, if you care about this ruggle of deliberation
Speaker 3: of Palestine and the people in Palestine, you need to
Speaker 3: if you see, if you see anything that plays into
Speaker 3: these sorts of antisemitic tropes that we've talked about blaming
Speaker 3: just random Jewish people for what's going on, Attacking random
Speaker 3: Jewish owned businesses, without any ties to the IDF, without
Speaker 3: any ties to the State of Israel, just all of
Speaker 3: this stuff. It needs to be called out because this actually,
Speaker 3: this sort of thing only strengthens the ideology of Zionism.
Speaker 3: So if you call yourself an anti Zionist, it is
Speaker 3: your imperative duty to be on the watch for this
Speaker 3: sort of thing and stop it if you see it.
Speaker 3: That's kind of the thesis at the end of this.
Speaker 3: All right, Well, without further ado, I think we will
Speaker 3: end this episode. Stay safe out there, everybody. Hopefully this
Speaker 3: new year won't be complete chaos for all of us.
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 1: It Could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
Speaker 1: find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
Speaker 1: coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.