Speaker 1: Also 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
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Speaker 3: Hello, and welcome, take it up. And here I'm joined
Speaker 3: once again.
Speaker 4: By your Sadavas.
Speaker 3: Hello, Hello, Hello, And recently I was reading through a
Speaker 3: photo book called Humans by Brandon Stanton. It features interviews
Speaker 3: of people on the streets all over the world. He
Speaker 3: starts it off and he kind of became well known
Speaker 3: online for the Humans of New York series. I'm not
Speaker 3: sure if you've heard of that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, So he did that for a while and
Speaker 3: he ended up traveling to other parts of the world
Speaker 3: and doing basically the same thing, just interview people on
Speaker 3: the street, getting their insights, hearing their struggles, hearing their story.
Speaker 3: And when I saw the book in the library, I
Speaker 3: just I picked it up or it decided to read
Speaker 3: it through and it's really profound in a sense, and
Speaker 3: you get a sense of the spectrum of humanity, of
Speaker 3: what people are going through, of the highs and lows
Speaker 3: of the human experience. And I mean, it can make
Speaker 3: you laugh on one page and make you cry for
Speaker 3: the next page. And seeing that variety of humanity reminded
Speaker 3: me of another book that I read and finished recently,
Speaker 3: which is called Humankind Hopeful History by Rutka Bregmant. A
Speaker 3: friend of mine had given it to me because he
Speaker 3: said it had changed his whole view on the world.
Speaker 3: And so I wanted to talk about some of the
Speaker 3: concepts that I picked up in that book, like the
Speaker 3: origins and critiques of veneer theory, why most people are
Speaker 3: actually pretty decent, and the problems with some of the
Speaker 3: narratives of our wickedness and the next up. So would
Speaker 3: I want to get into some of the reasons why
Speaker 3: people do bad and what we can do about it?
Speaker 4: Sounds exciting because there is a lot of bad right now.
Speaker 3: That is there is I mean as on that stuff.
Speaker 3: I mean, what would you say is the most common
Speaker 3: perspective you hear on humanity? On human nature?
Speaker 4: I don't know, like there's there's this clash between like
Speaker 4: this like liberal humanist version and then this like Christian
Speaker 4: moralist version I guess like in the States right now,
Speaker 4: but that's been going on for decades, if not centuries.
Speaker 3: By liberal humanists on Christian I mean, I think I
Speaker 3: get a sense of what the Christian moralist version is, right,
Speaker 3: that we are all sinful, destined for hell and ey salvation,
Speaker 3: that that version.
Speaker 4: Of the story, yeah, you know, more or less.
Speaker 3: And the liberal humanist perspective is I.
Speaker 4: Mean, I don't know, like this this this forever search
Speaker 4: for like what human rights are and like human decency.
Speaker 4: So we come up with like governments and rules to
Speaker 4: actually like govern over our morals as a democratic process
Speaker 4: that continues to evolve over the course of like hundreds
Speaker 4: of years. We're like, you know, on the moral arc
Speaker 4: of the universe, just not fully you know there yet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've heard that perspective, I think most commonly and
Speaker 3: decent in my space, as I tend to hear the
Speaker 3: you know, people are wicked, people are sinful and religious cases,
Speaker 3: or people are violent, people are selfish, and that kind
Speaker 3: of in that similar namrelving where we have these systems
Speaker 3: in place to kind of check our impulses, to kind
Speaker 3: of keep us regulated and to keep society functioning. And
Speaker 3: Bregman opens his book by discussing the idea of civilization
Speaker 3: being a thin mask that covers our true savage instincts.
Speaker 3: He calls it the Vinea theory, and he spends the
Speaker 3: rest of the book basically pointing out all the different
Speaker 3: errors in that judgment. I mean, he doesn't claim that
Speaker 3: we're all good people, happy, go lucky, saying so anything
Speaker 3: like that, but he does see it for the most part,
Speaker 3: most people are pretty decent that I know that clashes
Speaker 3: with all a lot of people are accustomed to hearing,
Speaker 3: and there are some very notable exceptions. But despite the
Speaker 3: efforts of elite to paint and purport a different picture,
Speaker 3: there's actually a lot more leaning towards our decent, if
Speaker 3: not good nature and the contrary. But of course, of
Speaker 3: these kind of conversations, you always had to go back
Speaker 3: to the debate between Thomas Hobbes and Sean Jackers, So
Speaker 3: we can't escape these guys. Hobbes, of course, had the
Speaker 3: perspective in Leviathan, which was written in sixteen fifty one,
Speaker 3: that in the absence of a strong central authority. Human
Speaker 3: beings would live in a condition of perpetual war, with
Speaker 3: every man against every other man, a war of war
Speaker 3: against all. As it would have put it so to him,
Speaker 3: people are naturally self interested and driven by the desire
Speaker 3: for power and survival. So without laws or a sovereign
Speaker 3: to keep them in check, individuals would act purely on
Speaker 3: their own instincts, lead into constant conflict over resources, safety,
Speaker 3: and dominance. Life in this state of nature would be
Speaker 3: solitary for nasty, brutish, and short. A couple of years later,
Speaker 3: a couple of decades later, Rousseau was writing in the
Speaker 3: Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men,
Speaker 3: and he basically flipped hobbsview on its head. He believed
Speaker 3: that humans in the state of nature were peaceful, cooperative,
Speaker 3: and guided by basic needs and compassion, and there was
Speaker 3: a development of hierarchies and institutions that had led to inequality.
Speaker 3: Jealousy and competition were basically corrupted human age. In his words,
Speaker 3: man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.
Speaker 3: Do you take a side in this debate?
Speaker 4: By the way er not to be the centrist option,
Speaker 4: But I don't know. I think I think both these
Speaker 4: things play into each other. I definitely don't believe in
Speaker 4: the idea that like this state is the only thing
Speaker 4: that reigns people in and stops them from doing a
Speaker 4: moral acts. Right, It's the same thing as like without
Speaker 4: without God or without the Bible, then everyone would just
Speaker 4: be like raping and murdering it. Meanwhile, actual Christians obviously
Speaker 4: rape and murder all the time anyway. But like, no,
Speaker 4: like this this idea isn't the only thing that keeps
Speaker 4: you from becoming this like you know, savage like inhuman monster.
Speaker 4: People can be morally good without this this like religious notion.
Speaker 4: And I think in some ways the state can also
Speaker 4: operate as a religious notion to these people, where you know,
Speaker 4: the police is the only thing that's keeping you from
Speaker 4: becoming this like horrible monster who's for a typerone around you.
Speaker 4: But I also have my sympathies to the like alternate
Speaker 4: side of that, And I can see there's a great
Speaker 4: deal of oppression and horrific violence that can only happen
Speaker 4: at scale under the organization of a state. So I
Speaker 4: will pick the annoying centris option.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know that there's a lot of people who
Speaker 3: have the sense that you know, the state and the laws,
Speaker 3: all that standing between us and the purge or mad
Speaker 3: Max or something like that. Sure, exactly, So, yeah, I
Speaker 3: don't think that Hobbes's over generalization of human nature as
Speaker 3: inherently violent and selfish holds up when you look at
Speaker 3: the diversity of human experience and human societies. I mean,
Speaker 3: that's not to say that violence and conflict were absent
Speaker 3: in a world out state, but you know, contact, matters, resources, environment,
Speaker 3: group size, all those things would have played roles. I
Speaker 3: don't think that we should be accepting Rousseau's romantic light either,
Speaker 3: So I guess I'm in the centris with you. The
Speaker 3: truth does seem to lie somewhere in that middle ground.
Speaker 3: That human nature is flexible and then it's shaped by social, ecological,
Speaker 3: and historical contexts of what's getting the weeds of humanity's
Speaker 3: origins is stimulating as an exercise, but there's only so
Speaker 3: much we can know about the past for certain. What
Speaker 3: we can't know for certain is the present, And what
Speaker 3: we've seen in the present is that when disaster strikes,
Speaker 3: people have tended to help each other. In Hurricane Katrina
Speaker 3: in two thousand and five, the official response was famously
Speaker 3: criticized for being slow and disorganized. And yet despite media
Speaker 3: attempts to pay in these people as looters and thugs
Speaker 3: and all these different things, community members, neighbors, volunteers all
Speaker 3: stepped up to rescue people, to mobilize food, shelter and
Speaker 3: basic aid, to expropriate when necessary, to get people what
Speaker 3: they needed, long before federal agencies gone on the scene. Similarly,
Speaker 3: in a more recent occurrence, after the Cranfelt Tower fire
Speaker 3: in the UK in twenty seventeen, the official channels had
Speaker 3: failed the people of that tower. Many diet as a result.
Speaker 3: Regulations that were supposed to protect people were not enforced
Speaker 3: or were absent. And yet it was community members who
Speaker 3: sprang into action to provide water and shelter and food
Speaker 3: and clothes and emotional support even when the twin towers
Speaker 3: fell on Spement eleven, two thousand and one. And this
Speaker 3: is an example that brag when I actually spent some
Speaker 3: time talking about people actually helped people descend the stairwells
Speaker 3: in an orderly fashion. You know, they would say, you know,
Speaker 3: after you going down the stairs, and passers by would
Speaker 3: go in and help others to evacuate and assist the
Speaker 3: wounded law before the emergency services arrived. So people acted
Speaker 3: and prioritize helping others even in a disaster scenario. And
Speaker 3: yet what do we see in dystopian fiction. In apocalyptic fiction,
Speaker 3: you see people just like driving around shooting guns in
Speaker 3: the air. You see the purge, you see the mad Max,
Speaker 3: you see the zombie apocalypse scenarios. In Rebecca Solnet's book,
Speaker 3: A Paradise Built in Hell, she found that disasters peeled
Speaker 3: back the layers of society and revealed the empathy, cooperation,
Speaker 3: and care at humanity's core. She noted that when disaster
Speaker 3: strikes is when people most often reveal the better natures.
Speaker 3: And yet those negative narratives tend to have more sway
Speaker 3: in the popular imagination.
Speaker 4: No, and this is like so true. I remember in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty, during the wildfires on the West Coast, the
Speaker 4: anarchist response was to set up these like giant like
Speaker 4: mutual aids centers. Were people fleeing from the fire, you know,
Speaker 4: like not like other anarchists, just like regular people fleeing
Speaker 4: from the fire could get necessities and figure out housing. Meanwhile,
Speaker 4: right wing militias were setting up checkpoints monitoring to make
Speaker 4: sure Antifa wasn't, you know, like raiding people's homes as
Speaker 4: they were fleeing from the fires. Like these were the
Speaker 4: two options you had. You had you had anarchists actually
Speaker 4: helping the people who were who were fleeing from this
Speaker 4: horrific fire and setting up like massive, massive, like aid
Speaker 4: distribution centers. Meanwhile right wing militias were pulling people over
Speaker 4: at gunpoint making sure Antifa wasn't up to any shenanigans.
Speaker 4: And similar stuff happened last year during Hurricane Helene on
Speaker 4: the East Coast, where you had a whole bunch of
Speaker 4: like Southeast anarchists in the Appalachians do mutual a disaster response.
Speaker 4: Meanwhile right wing militias were spreading rumors about like FEMA
Speaker 4: fraud and all of all of this crazy stuff, not
Speaker 4: actually helping anybody. But it was anarchists doing a large
Speaker 4: a large amount of the actual like water distribution and
Speaker 4: like medical assistance on the ground as the federal response
Speaker 4: was delayed and insufficient.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I was aware of the anarchist efforts
Speaker 3: during these disasters, but I wasn't. I didn't know about
Speaker 3: that that situation with the riving militias setting up checkpoints.
Speaker 3: That's not shocking, but still wild, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, it's so funny because those are the people,
Speaker 4: you know, claiming that, you know, without the government, we
Speaker 4: would have the purge, the anarchists would just go around
Speaker 4: doing all kinds of crazy crimes. I get when things
Speaker 4: actually happen, their attempts to like deputize them as like
Speaker 4: their own police force actually creates those conditions. Meanwhile, anarchists
Speaker 4: are the ones actually helping.
Speaker 3: People exactly exactly. And yet despite these situations, these these
Speaker 3: things happen again and again, we still have these popular narratives.
Speaker 3: You don't know, the narrative I see referenced all the
Speaker 3: time Lord of the Flies.
Speaker 4: Yes, of course, of course.
Speaker 3: All the time. Right, It's basically become a cultural shorthand
Speaker 3: for the idea that people are just savage at heart,
Speaker 3: that this veneer civilization is the only thing keeping us
Speaker 3: in check. I mean, these days, I do see people
Speaker 3: joking that it's because those were British boys.
Speaker 4: So true, actually, so true.
Speaker 3: But while I get the joke, I think it's also
Speaker 3: important to remember that it's like people are taking this
Speaker 3: work of fiction as if it's an anthropological study. Yeah,
Speaker 3: when it's just something that a guy made up as
Speaker 3: an analogy for, you know, the situation during World War Two.
Speaker 4: I think it's also good to remember that the British
Speaker 4: are people too. I have a British co worker, so
Speaker 4: you know, we have to we have to show them
Speaker 4: a little bit of human human dignity exactly exactly.
Speaker 3: People embrace the story because it confirms what they want
Speaker 3: to believe in this climate of cynicism. But Bragman actually
Speaker 3: tells a story in the book about a true instance
Speaker 3: of when a shipwreck of young boys occurred. Of course,
Speaker 3: they weren't British boys. There were Tonguean boys as and
Speaker 3: from the country of Tonga. So in nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 3: six Tonguan boys we were stranded on a remote island
Speaker 3: for over a year, and rather than descended into violence,
Speaker 3: they survived through cooperation. You know, the built a garden,
Speaker 3: they shared duties. They didn't do any human sacrifices. You know,
Speaker 3: they created a rotor system to get things done. There
Speaker 3: result conflict. When people were in conflict, they would go
Speaker 3: on time out. They would put each other on timeout
Speaker 3: and go on opposite side of the island until the
Speaker 3: you know, cooler heads prevailed, they figure out ways to
Speaker 3: deal with their conflicts, to organize themselves without authority and
Speaker 3: without chaos. But the problem is that these fictional narratives
Speaker 3: become so powerful instead of the real ones that they
Speaker 3: have a similar effect to the placeboy effect. In fact,
Speaker 3: it's the placeboy effect's evil twin, the no sea Boy effect.
Speaker 3: I've heard about the placebo effect before, and I'm sure
Speaker 3: you have as well, But for those who don't know,
Speaker 3: it's basically where someone's health actually improves after receiving what's
Speaker 3: basically a dummy treatment like a sugar pill or a
Speaker 3: fake surgery or a saline injection. The body heals itself
Speaker 3: because the mind of the person believes it's being healed.
Speaker 3: The mind turns that trust into medicine. I mean, that's
Speaker 3: just that's amazing to me even now, and they'll quite
Speaker 3: understand how it works yet, but it's still really cool.
Speaker 3: But there's another dimension to the placeboy effect that I
Speaker 3: hadn't heard about before, but it makes intuitive sense. I
Speaker 3: suppose it's called the no seaboy effect, and Bregman is
Speaker 3: the one who introduced me to that concept. So the
Speaker 3: no Seawoy effect is where, instead of belief healing you,
Speaker 3: it's belief that makes you sick. So people experience real pain,
Speaker 3: real symptoms, and even real illness, not because there's an
Speaker 3: actual physical cause, but because in their minds, the ex
Speaker 3: expect to be harmed, so their minds to that fear
Speaker 3: of harm into actual harm and injury. And there was
Speaker 3: one case study that he used where a child had
Speaker 3: drunk a coke and photo was poisoned and then just
Speaker 3: created this mass hysteria almost with dozens of children in
Speaker 3: hospitals with headaches and nausea and pardic attacks because they
Speaker 3: drank coke, to the point where Coca Cola actually had
Speaker 3: to recall all of those drinks, even though tests had
Speaker 3: shown that there was nothing in the drinks that were
Speaker 3: making people sick, but their body still responded as if
Speaker 3: there was because they believed they heard the story, they
Speaker 3: heard about it, they saw what happened to others, and
Speaker 3: they believed it would happened to them. And that's the
Speaker 3: no super effect in action, right, So we get the concept.
Speaker 3: So Bregman actually stretched these concepts beyond the field of medicine,
Speaker 3: and he basically made the point that what if these
Speaker 3: contents are abate into how we view each other. You know,
Speaker 3: so what if I believe that people are selfish and
Speaker 3: cruel and violent by nature? Actually makes it so, you know,
Speaker 3: if you expect the worst from people, you'll act on that.
Speaker 3: You know, you might be colder or more defensive, or
Speaker 3: more likely to punish or preempt betrayal. And what happens
Speaker 3: as a result is that, you know, people pick up
Speaker 3: on that energy. They're spawning kind they withdraw, they retaliate,
Speaker 3: and then that cycle ends up feeding itself. And so
Speaker 3: the belief that negative belief becomes a social reality, a
Speaker 3: self fulfilling prophecy. So we end up building institutions that
Speaker 3: are based on that cynical expectation. We design policies that
Speaker 3: are based around the punishment we are, train ourselves to
Speaker 3: see strangers as threats rather than as neighbors. And then
Speaker 3: when we have a fallout, as when that prophecy is
Speaker 3: fulfilled by our own actions, we can then say, well,
Speaker 3: see I was right. You know, people are awful. But
Speaker 3: what we don't see is that our expectations and the
Speaker 3: systems we build around those expectations are part of what
Speaker 3: ends up making it that way. I think an easy
Speaker 3: example to going to is with prison. Right, people expect
Speaker 3: criminals to act like animals, to act like monsters to beasts,
Speaker 3: and so they create prisons, and then those prisons treat
Speaker 3: them like animals, monsters and beasts, and people respond to that.
Speaker 3: You know, you treat people like animals, they're going to
Speaker 3: behave like animals. So then the question that Bragmann poses
Speaker 3: is what happens if we decide to treat people like
Speaker 3: their good you know, trusting their intentions, leaning into care,
Speaker 3: and building our systems around the assumption that most people
Speaker 3: are decent. So how do we make that leap? I
Speaker 3: said before that you know, we don't really necessarily need
Speaker 3: to go into the past to see how people behave
Speaker 3: in the present, but it's a good idea to get
Speaker 3: a sense of how we evolved.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 3: A lot of people have a brutal perception of human evolution.
Speaker 3: You know, they track comparisons between us and chimpanzees, or
Speaker 3: you know, they make it see first of all, like
Speaker 3: norn bernobos entirely and also ignoring the fact that we
Speaker 3: are our own species with our own evolutionary history. You know,
Speaker 3: people that are very cynical and honestly insultant, like view
Speaker 3: of like the cave men of our past, but our
Speaker 3: histories are actually pretty soft. In fact, Bragman argues in
Speaker 3: favor of something called self domestication theory, which has a
Speaker 3: little bit of anthropological and evolutionary biological back in. And
Speaker 3: so the basic claim of this theory is that the
Speaker 3: reason Homo sapiens survived and other ancient humans didn't isn't
Speaker 3: because you were the strongest, or the smartest, or the
Speaker 3: most cunning, or because you were friendlier. That we evolve
Speaker 3: to be more social, cooperative, playful, and trusting. Self domestication
Speaker 3: theorists basically compare humans as to the other Homo species
Speaker 3: as wolves. That we domesticate ourselves to become less aggressive,
Speaker 3: or faces softened, our bodies became less robust, and our
Speaker 3: openness and friendliness allowed us to build relationships, to build groups,
Speaker 3: to raise children, community, and to survive. And so if
Speaker 3: we accept our theory, we acknowledge that and build that
Speaker 3: into our foundation, that we did evolve our capacity to
Speaker 3: be kind, that it is something that is within our humanity,
Speaker 3: that it's not a fragile gloss over savagery or a
Speaker 3: morality that's given to us by religional law. Then we
Speaker 3: can basically become who were capable of becoming, you know,
Speaker 3: we can create systems that allow us to develop that.
Speaker 3: And this sounds really optimistic, This sounds really happy, go
Speaker 3: lucky and woo. And we are going to get into
Speaker 3: some of the darker chapters of our humanity in the
Speaker 3: next episode. But I wanted to wrap this one up
Speaker 3: by unpacking the death of Catherine Kitty Genevieve's in nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty four. It's another example the Breckman refers to in
Speaker 3: his book, and it's one of the classic case studies
Speaker 3: that was used for a long time to illustrate the
Speaker 3: apathy and cold hotness of humanity. Because the New York Times,
Speaker 3: which as we all know, is a reputable and trustworthy institution,
Speaker 3: The New York Times claimed that she was stabbed in
Speaker 3: the street while thirty eight neighbors looked on and did
Speaker 3: nothing right. This was the quintessential story that was used
Speaker 3: to say, you know, look at that, bystand the effect
Speaker 3: humans just don't care, you know. There was used as
Speaker 3: an example of apathy, of urban de kay, of everything
Speaker 3: wrong with us. But the story was wrong. The reporters
Speaker 3: will to help this story and it was wrong. I mean, yes,
Speaker 3: she was murdered, but people did try to help. Someone
Speaker 3: called the police, but this was in a time before
Speaker 3: nine one one, so it was yet to call like
Speaker 3: the local station, and then the response process was a
Speaker 3: bit slow. One neighbor actually rushed out and held her
Speaker 3: as she died, held her in their arms. So the
Speaker 3: press spun this story as like some bleak tale, and
Speaker 3: the few of psychology ate it up because it was
Speaker 3: part of a trend at the time to create this
Speaker 3: perception of humanity. But the real story was a lot
Speaker 3: more hearing, a lot more human. I mean, it was
Speaker 3: messy and somebody still murdered her. But this idea of
Speaker 3: the vistandary fact that has been so inflated, A lot
Speaker 3: of the key studies that have been used as examples
Speaker 3: of them have been chipped away at over time, and
Speaker 3: that's one of the main stories that has been pretty
Speaker 3: thoroughly debunked at this point. So I like where bread
Speaker 3: One's been going. But we've glossed over the dark side,
Speaker 3: you know, the shadow of our humanity. You know, even
Speaker 3: he acknowledges in this book that we do bad stuff
Speaker 3: as well. So the next episode we are going to
Speaker 3: wade into that, but how you feel in about humanity
Speaker 3: so far.
Speaker 4: I think I actually do have an underlying optimism like
Speaker 4: beneath how I move around in the world, which is
Speaker 4: which is kind of odd considering the sort of stuff
Speaker 4: I do for work, but it is true, and I
Speaker 4: think part of that is what just keeps me going.
Speaker 4: I don't know, like, yeah, I've certainly been around my
Speaker 4: fair share of like doomers and nihilists over the years,
Speaker 4: and at the very least those people don't seem to
Speaker 4: be very happy and don't seem to be enjoying life,
Speaker 4: and sometimes it's hard to enjoy life, absolutely, but I
Speaker 4: think you need to be able to find a place
Speaker 4: for yourself within a world that has like evil as
Speaker 4: a almost inherent component and find your way either through that,
Speaker 4: sometimes around that, but oftentimes through it. And I think
Speaker 4: that's I mean, that's that's just been a part of
Speaker 4: like growing up. We're certainly growing up in like a
Speaker 4: weird time, but I think that's kind of always been true,
Speaker 4: Like that's that was that was true one hundred years ago.
Speaker 4: So I don't know, I a part of me and
Speaker 4: maybe this is just over the optimistic, but but part
Speaker 4: of me continues to resist being a doomer despite all
Speaker 4: of the bad news that is trying to infiltrate my
Speaker 4: brain at all times, which is which is a very
Speaker 4: profitable industry, right. I mean that's somewhat kind of what
Speaker 4: this show is, right. It kind of does play into
Speaker 4: those instincts for sure, which is which is something that
Speaker 4: like we critique amongst ourselves often and we try to
Speaker 4: always find that balance as well. But but yeah, like
Speaker 4: the doom cycle is like a is a is a
Speaker 4: huge industry, and there's there's people that absolutely want you
Speaker 4: to always be panicking all the time. Yeah, and that
Speaker 4: drives consumer choices, that drives ad revenue, right.
Speaker 3: I mean Bregman puts forward a very compellent argument in
Speaker 3: the book actually that the news is a public health
Speaker 3: asset totally.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, like absolutely, and like I have to keep
Speaker 4: up with the news all the time, and I don't
Speaker 4: think it affects me that much anymore. And certainly in
Speaker 4: you know, doing a daily news show, we try to
Speaker 4: be very selective in the things that we cover. We
Speaker 4: don't cover everything all the time. We try to cover
Speaker 4: the things that, like our our hosts feel is both
Speaker 4: like within their wheelhouse and that people who listen to
Speaker 4: the show should know about write certain things that you
Speaker 4: might not be hearing about in like a mainstream news.
Speaker 4: But but no, the news has a massive h thing
Speaker 4: spiritual evil to it as well. There is there is
Speaker 4: a sinister undercurrent to to like the news like as
Speaker 4: like an industry indeed, and that's something that we are
Speaker 4: also always like butting up against. Well on that, on
Speaker 4: that optimistic note.
Speaker 3: Yeah, until next time, we'll follow it to all the people. Peace, Hello,
Speaker 3: and welcome to it happen here last episode I was joined.
Speaker 4: By your savior.
Speaker 3: Hello, Ada's here again because we're gonna get more into
Speaker 3: what we spoke about last time. Last episode, we painted
Speaker 3: a hopeful account of humanity's nature. Could see if my
Speaker 3: reading of Rutka Bregman's Humankind a hopeful history. So I
Speaker 3: probably fed into the anarchists so utopia narrative a bit
Speaker 3: with that previous episode. But the truth is that I'm
Speaker 3: not really being optimistic. I'm being realistic. But realism has
Speaker 3: been confused with cynonicism for so long that even acknowledging
Speaker 3: both sides of the coin can be seen as overly
Speaker 3: Utopia can be bad. And we'll get into the why.
Speaker 3: But for whatever reason, they are bad. That is why,
Speaker 3: as anarchists have consistently argued, nobody should have authority. Now,
Speaker 3: there will always be outliers, and this explanation I'm about
Speaker 3: to share it is not going to get into every
Speaker 3: unique case of badness, but we are going to get
Speaker 3: into some of the reasons that people do bad and
Speaker 3: what we can do about it. As I said last episode,
Speaker 3: we took issue with this idea of civilization as a
Speaker 3: thin venail, and we're put forward the premise the Keemans
Speaker 3: are mostly pretty decent. In fact, I didn't mention it
Speaker 3: last episode, but we don't even really like to kill
Speaker 3: each other. Contrary to popular belief, brag when actually shares
Speaker 3: that in World War Two, studies showed that many soldiers
Speaker 3: didn't shoot their weapons even in combat. Trained soldiers had
Speaker 3: a difficult time actually pulling the trigger and killing people.
Speaker 3: There are exceptions, as I said before, but in a
Speaker 3: lot of cases it's very difficult for people to actually kill.
Speaker 3: Military strategies ended up changing once authorities realized this, and
Speaker 3: the training programs of soldiers was redesigned to overcome this resistance.
Speaker 3: But that reluctance to killing does also indicate that it
Speaker 3: takes some effort to overcome our general decency toward each
Speaker 3: other because most people, again most on all are not
Speaker 3: natural born killers. So again, how do we do bad?
Speaker 3: You know, all sorts of atroctees have been carried out
Speaker 3: by humans, both in ancient and modern times. What do
Speaker 3: you think is the course.
Speaker 4: Self preservation in some way, either physical or psychological. I'm
Speaker 4: not an anthropologist, I'm not a sociologist. Most of my
Speaker 4: experiences with people is both queer people and then looking
Speaker 4: at Nazis and like political extremists, so it's maybe not
Speaker 4: the best sample side for the general population. I think
Speaker 4: I tend to exist kind of on the perimeter of
Speaker 4: most human experience, but probably some form of either psychological
Speaker 4: or physical self preservation in my experience slash opinion.
Speaker 3: That's interesting. I didn't think of it. I think it
Speaker 3: comes close to what Bregman ends up getting into. But
Speaker 3: I think self preservation, well, we'll get into that in
Speaker 3: a bit. You know, it's it's difficult to square that
Speaker 3: with just how brutal some of these disasters have been.
Speaker 3: You know, these atrocities that have taken place around the world,
Speaker 3: organized systemic industrial cruelty, you know, things like the Holocaust totally.
Speaker 4: It's interesting because I think it's two paradoxical instincts that
Speaker 4: play off each other. There's this self preservation and there's
Speaker 4: also I believe in I thin guess some version of
Speaker 4: the death drive, and I think those can can interact
Speaker 4: in really odd ways. But I desk drive, yeah, is
Speaker 4: specifically like specifically like like fascism, and like you know,
Speaker 4: you can see this in like the genocides of the
Speaker 4: twentieth century and twenty first centuries, like specifically, but no,
Speaker 4: like fascism as like a political embodying of the death drive,
Speaker 4: which is I think also an aspect. I think these
Speaker 4: things exist together in parallel while being paradoxical, and that's
Speaker 4: what produces a lot of the incongruity around things like fascism, right,
Speaker 4: it is it is like an inherently paradoxical system.
Speaker 3: When you say self preservation, are you just talking about
Speaker 3: on the individual level, or are you seeing like community
Speaker 3: self preservation as well?
Speaker 4: Both both but also I think not even just physical
Speaker 4: but also like psychological like being able to like continue
Speaker 4: being able to continue existing as yourself, either within a
Speaker 4: group of people or just you as an individual. Like
Speaker 4: psychological things that you need to do to make yourself
Speaker 4: feel like you're in community or that you are safe,
Speaker 4: that you have meaning, or that you have purpose as
Speaker 4: well as the physical aspects.
Speaker 3: And you're saying that that lends itself to atrocity.
Speaker 4: I think it can.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, well that actually is strikingly close toward
Speaker 3: Bragman ends up uncovering.
Speaker 4: Look at the reasons that people will talk about, for
Speaker 4: like why the genocide and Gaza is like necessary, right
Speaker 4: it is it is playing off both of those impulses.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean all sorts of genocides when you
Speaker 3: hear the descriptions of them, and this is what you
Speaker 3: hear of the people who perpetuated them, what their explanations
Speaker 3: or justifications, you know, from the Holocaust to Rwanda to Palestine.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's me and mar you know, totally.
Speaker 3: It is deeply evil. It's that something we can look
Speaker 3: away from it. It really is difficult to square with
Speaker 3: the most humans a decent thesis when you look at
Speaker 3: how some of these society is, even the ordinary people,
Speaker 3: for example, the citizen population of Israel, Evan, the civilian population,
Speaker 3: even they are like disturbing the genocide. Oh in their rhetoric,
Speaker 3: and so you know, it's like, how do we reach
Speaker 3: that point? How do we get there? How does an
Speaker 3: order marry human bab grow into.
Speaker 4: That it can happen to you. It can happen very easily,
Speaker 4: and I think it can happen in a short time
Speaker 4: span and you can get out of it. I think
Speaker 4: maybe not just as easily, but you can't get out
Speaker 4: of it also in a fast time span. I think
Speaker 4: it's like that you are not immune to propaganda. Idea
Speaker 4: you can look at like in Nazi Germany, Robert has
Speaker 4: talked about quote unquote the little Nazis, the regular Germans
Speaker 4: who ended up partipating and becoming Nazis, and you are
Speaker 4: not immune from that, and that can happen as a
Speaker 4: response to a whole bunch of traumatic impulses as well.
Speaker 4: Whereas I think people now even use like politics just
Speaker 4: to You're like this like idea of politics as permission
Speaker 4: to be like an overtly cruel person to other people,
Speaker 4: either like in your life or online. Right, you will
Speaker 4: you will use use various political topics and that gives
Speaker 4: you permission to unleash unmitigated hostility against people that you
Speaker 4: now perceive as being like immoral or you perceive as
Speaker 4: being like ontological and means exactly exactly.
Speaker 3: I mean, there were particular studies that were undertaken in
Speaker 3: the twentieth century that are often used to sort of
Speaker 3: explain that. You know, after the fall of Nazi Germany
Speaker 3: and the post World War II era, people will seeking
Speaker 3: explanations for atrocity and so so experiments were done and
Speaker 3: are now pointed to as explanations for how this could
Speaker 3: have taken place. You know. So one particular experiment that's
Speaker 3: really well known as the Stanford prison experiment, right, this
Speaker 3: idea that you take random students and give them a
Speaker 3: position of power and they become statistic gods. You know,
Speaker 3: it proves just how thin the ven ale civilization really is,
Speaker 3: or already the evil the civilization could empower. But at
Speaker 3: least for that particular experiment, the reality was never so straightforward.
Speaker 3: You know, the gods were literally coached and encouraged to
Speaker 3: be cruel. You know, they were actually putting on performances.
Speaker 3: The prisoners were also expected to form. So rather than
Speaker 3: being like an actual scientific experiment, it was more like
Speaker 3: guided theater.
Speaker 4: I mean it inadvertently it becomes an interesting experiment in
Speaker 4: like humans desire to like please authority, right exactly exactly,
Speaker 4: to like perform to the expectations of the people who
Speaker 4: are actually running this experiment, and how capable you are
Speaker 4: of falling into these roles under like under that paradigm exactly.
Speaker 3: I mean, you see that in Nazi Germany as well,
Speaker 3: a lot of the people were doing things to please
Speaker 3: the fear, you know, like they didn't necessarily know or
Speaker 3: there was a lot of wiggle room from what I've read,
Speaker 3: to interpret the fear as wishes, yeah, as people who
Speaker 3: wanted to rank up and rise up in the in
Speaker 3: the organization, but interpret things in a way that they
Speaker 3: would presume would please Pitta and his.
Speaker 4: Desires moving towards the fear.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly exactly. That's the that's the name the phenomenon.
Speaker 3: So I mean when when the sound for person experim
Speaker 3: when people tried to recreate the experiment for television, you've
Speaker 3: got it made for pretty boring TV because it was
Speaker 3: bad science in the first place. It's not something that
Speaker 3: people do not actually, it's it's what they do when
Speaker 3: they are pushed, when they are prodded, you know, when
Speaker 3: certain expectations et ceter It's kind of similar with this
Speaker 3: other famous experiment that that Bragman talks about, which is
Speaker 3: the Stanley Milcrumb's Obedience experiment, where volunteers were told to
Speaker 3: administer increasingly painful electric shocks the stranger just because I
Speaker 3: got in a lamp code told them to. It's like
Speaker 3: another instance of you know, we doing these things just
Speaker 3: to please authority, even to the point of murder, because
Speaker 3: you know, the the dial of the electric shock was
Speaker 3: deadly after a certain point, and you could hear the
Speaker 3: screams of the the victim, of course, the fake screams,
Speaker 3: but you know, the participants could hear them. But what
Speaker 3: Bregman ended up uncovering is that most of the participants
Speaker 3: wouldn't follow the orders blindly. They were following the orders, yes,
Speaker 3: but they were doing it because they believed that they
Speaker 3: were doing something good, something good for the good of science.
Speaker 3: That even though the shocks were uncomfortable, that it wasn't
Speaker 3: something they wanted to do, there was a noble sacrifice
Speaker 3: in the name of progress. Even so, the participants weren't
Speaker 3: in the front. You know, they were distressed, they were shaken,
Speaker 3: they were sweat, and they were begging to check on
Speaker 3: the learner, but they also said things like he agreed
Speaker 3: to be in the experiment, you know, or this will
Speaker 3: help science, right, or I don't want to do this,
Speaker 3: but I have to, demanded lab code, who is telling
Speaker 3: them to continue? Please continue, Please continue. He was calm,
Speaker 3: he was professional, and also even how in the nudges
Speaker 3: that he used were framed made a difference. So if
Speaker 3: he was directly ordering them and telling them you have
Speaker 3: to do this, surprise, many people would actually be more
Speaker 3: likely to resist a direct order framed in that way
Speaker 3: for such an experiment. But a more subtle nudge just
Speaker 3: like know what, you know science, the experimental requires this,
Speaker 3: you know, the experiment needs to do this. A more
Speaker 3: subtle it tended to get people to continue. And the
Speaker 3: people who were interviewed who did take it up to
Speaker 3: those higher volagers, they said they did it because they
Speaker 3: believed they were contributing to scientific development. So it's really
Speaker 3: this misguided belief in a higher cause that also contributes
Speaker 3: to atrocity. It's very easy to get this idea that, oh,
Speaker 3: you know that those are just monstrous people. You know,
Speaker 3: we have this idea in pop culture that these the
Speaker 3: Nazis are like cartoonish monsters. They are monstrous, but they
Speaker 3: are monstrous people.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 3: They are, at the end of the day, people who
Speaker 3: do evil with the belief that they're doing good. It's
Speaker 3: a very extent. I know that there were some who
Speaker 3: you know, recanted or who knew what they were doing wrong,
Speaker 3: but they had other pressures that were pushing them in
Speaker 3: a direction. Right. There are many explanations we will behavior
Speaker 3: and all sorts of situations, but a lot of the
Speaker 3: people they thought that they were contributing to the right thing.
Speaker 3: It's not that they didn't care, but they were taught
Speaker 3: to care in the wrong direction. The bad guys don't
Speaker 3: think that they're bad guys. And whether we're talking about
Speaker 3: the Nazis of the past or Designers of today, they
Speaker 3: construct these elaborate narratives to frame themselves as the righteous ones.
Speaker 3: You know, as far as the Nazis are concerned, they
Speaker 3: are purge in Germany of a serious threat to the
Speaker 3: well the in and the safety of their future and
Speaker 3: all that stuff. Right, Designers today, you ask them, even
Speaker 3: though they're pariahs of the world at this point, you
Speaker 3: ask them why they believe that this must continue, and
Speaker 3: they will say you know, we have to defend ourselves,
Speaker 3: we have a right to defend ourselves. YadA, YadA, YadA.
Speaker 3: There are true believers within these groups, you know, who
Speaker 3: are able to commit some of the worst acts, committed
Speaker 3: ideologues who host of their trustees, who express no remortes,
Speaker 3: who take pride in their role, and people reach that
Speaker 3: point of ideology through a process of radicalization. You know,
Speaker 3: we look at the ten stages of genocide, I think
Speaker 3: is the framework people have used before to point out
Speaker 3: how a segment of a population can become a target
Speaker 3: of genocide. It's not like one day you wake up
Speaker 3: and it's just like, oh, we're going to genestid this
Speaker 3: group of people. It's a process.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 3: First you start off with classification. You create a separate
Speaker 3: group of people, separate category of poison. You make them
Speaker 3: signify themselves in some way, carry id cards or some
Speaker 3: kind of insignia on their clothing or whatever. They begin
Speaker 3: to face discrimination or some kind the discrimination, you know,
Speaker 3: is ramped up through dehumanizing language. You compare them to vement,
Speaker 3: to rodance disease. And that's just the thing, and we're
Speaker 3: going to get to that. But part of how you
Speaker 3: get people who would otherwise be here or compassionate about
Speaker 3: their fellow human is through distance. Right, So the people
Speaker 3: who who are most of bloodthirsty tend to be very
Speaker 3: far from the front lines. You know, people who are
Speaker 3: demanding that World War One continue, for example, they were
Speaker 3: very far from the actual fighting versus at the actual
Speaker 3: front lines of World War One. You had soldiers playing
Speaker 3: football together during Christmas. That's a separate story. But you
Speaker 3: create distance, You either create physical distance or you create
Speaker 3: psychological distance. And dehumanization is one of the ways you
Speaker 3: create psychological distance. You distance people from seeing their fellow
Speaker 3: human being as a human being. Segregation is another way
Speaker 3: of creating that distance, which then lends itself to the humanization.
Speaker 3: Comparing people to women too, animals, anything other than human
Speaker 3: as another step in the humanization and can people to
Speaker 3: separate themselves from those people. And then they create specific groups.
Speaker 3: The next stage to create specific groups and organization to
Speaker 3: enforce discriminatory policies. You further broadcast operate the propaganda to
Speaker 3: polarize population. And then we'll step seven, eight, nine, and
Speaker 3: ten go from actually preparing the removal relocation of people
Speaker 3: to the persecution, the extermination of the group and finally
Speaker 3: the denial that such a crime ever could So that
Speaker 3: process it can take years, it can take decades, but
Speaker 3: it's something that can turn even the most regular Polson
Speaker 3: into virulent proponent of Rhanna side if they are not
Speaker 3: fastidious in their opposition to any such language, especially in
Speaker 3: the early stages, because they get fed the steady stream
Speaker 3: propaganda of all the actions are justified, their loyalty to
Speaker 3: their inn group becomes tested by their willingness to engage
Speaker 3: in those harmful actions. The still with that group will
Speaker 3: do whatever their tool is good, even if it leads
Speaker 3: to other people being hood and it just creates an evil,
Speaker 3: but it's an ordinary evil. It's an evil that is
Speaker 3: convinced that it's a virtue. It is wrapped up in
Speaker 3: ideology and social conformity because you know, humans are social
Speaker 3: creatures and it drives us to cooperate. But that sociality
Speaker 3: can be narrowed down to test our in group. And
Speaker 3: that's where Breakman actually gets into an interesting point about empathy,
Speaker 3: right because we tend to see empathy as a positive thing,
Speaker 3: and it can be, but as Bregman notes, drawn from
Speaker 3: psychologists Paul Bloom's work, empathy can also make us partial, irrational,
Speaker 3: and even cruel, because it can narrow our focus to
Speaker 3: those people who are like us and ignore others. That's
Speaker 3: why soldiers can fight and kill other people because they
Speaker 3: feel empathy for their in group, their homeland citizens, or
Speaker 3: their comrades and arms. Their loyalty and affection for the
Speaker 3: people they care about supersedes the lives of the people
Speaker 3: that they don't care about. Now, of course, I want
Speaker 3: to look at systems, so we're talking about this because
Speaker 3: I don't think that this hijacking of empathy is inevitable.
Speaker 3: You know, nationalism, propaganda, these things play a role in
Speaker 3: how people end up being separated in this way, and
Speaker 3: it's in groups and our groups. But you know, there
Speaker 3: is also indications that in group and our group separation
Speaker 3: can occur even in the absence of a stake, So
Speaker 3: it is something we have to be continuously vigilant of.
Speaker 3: Another aspect of as a systemic analysis or approach is
Speaker 3: looking at how our position within society also shapes how
Speaker 3: we operate, how we treat people, how we think, and
Speaker 3: how we act. Bragmant cites neuroscience research that demonstrates how
Speaker 3: authority literally changes how we think. Powerful people become less empathetic,
Speaker 3: and I'm more to see others as tools rather than
Speaker 3: independent people. You know this is not new information, per see.
Speaker 3: You know the enviolence that powerful people are in both
Speaker 3: shapes them and are shaped by them, they say, and
Speaker 3: has long gone that power corrupts and absolute power croups
Speaker 3: absolutely and spaces like Silicon Valley, like Wall streets, like Washington, DC,
Speaker 3: like corporate boardrooms and all the other upper echelons of government.
Speaker 3: They divorce rulers and authorities from ordinary people, their insular
Speaker 3: spaces that keep them from being challenged or being grounded
Speaker 3: by the impact of their actions and others, so powerful
Speaker 3: people don't have to care. And I think such hierarchies
Speaker 3: are attractive to people who already are inclined to do bad,
Speaker 3: even if they believe that they're doing good. The authoritarians,
Speaker 3: the supremacists, the abusers, They are attracted to those positions.
Speaker 3: But even good intention people could lose themselves in authority too,
Speaker 3: because authorities as a whole existed in this bubble that
Speaker 3: rewards their worst instincts. Sheep in the system around their
Speaker 3: worst instincts, around distrust, selfishness, exploitation, and so on, to
Speaker 3: reward themselves and their patterns of behavior, and thus, through
Speaker 3: the social more seaway effect, people end up filling that
Speaker 3: expectation created by the system.
Speaker 4: I guess my only comment here is that these systems
Speaker 4: are not just exclusive to like state power or like
Speaker 4: corporate authority. These same mechanisms reproduce themselves in all sorts
Speaker 4: of social arrangements, including like radical politics, and frankly especially
Speaker 4: radical politics. You can see it's a lot with groups,
Speaker 4: whether they're communists, whether they're anarchists, whether they're I don't know.
Speaker 4: Social democrats probably have this problem, but no specifically like
Speaker 4: in anarchist scenes, you see this happen constantly. It is
Speaker 4: almost funny how how much these things just get natively recreated,
Speaker 4: and like in group out group in amics are always
Speaker 4: are always a big issue. I mean, like you can
Speaker 4: also point to the book Cultish, which explains how American
Speaker 4: culture is pretty defined by like cult like tendencies, not
Speaker 4: saying that every single group is a cult, but cult
Speaker 4: dynamics play into a large part of everyday American life,
Speaker 4: and that's both good and bad. Sometimes being in a
Speaker 4: cult is fun until it's not very fun. So these
Speaker 4: dynamics themselves are not necessarily you know, bad, but there's
Speaker 4: something to be like mindful of.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, So in being mindful of it, you know,
Speaker 3: that's an aspect of it. You know, we have to
Speaker 3: find solutions to this academic of badness, of behaviors being
Speaker 3: reinforced by these systems that are cause harm to people
Speaker 3: and harm to the world. And so what I always
Speaker 3: advocate for and we's big and small. I wouldn't call
Speaker 3: it the one solution to everything, but it's it does
Speaker 3: encompass a lot, but it's just understanding and taking on
Speaker 3: a dynamic social revolutionary approach to change, you know, from
Speaker 3: the effort to do to confront the existence system to
Speaker 3: stand up against it, but it's also the things that
Speaker 3: you do to put forward an alternative, to put forward
Speaker 3: and to practice alternatives. So one of the things that
Speaker 3: we can do is to create what you know, perpetuate
Speaker 3: a positive and trusting take on human decen see, you know,
Speaker 3: to create that social placeboy effect that can shape how
Speaker 3: people treat each other for the better, but that can
Speaker 3: be boiled down to just be nicer to each other.
Speaker 3: So there's more we've done than that. Of course, on
Speaker 3: the systems front, we also to change how we educate
Speaker 3: each other in radical spaces and also in terms of
Speaker 3: how we raise children. We have to organize, you know,
Speaker 3: alternative economic systems and alternative social arrangements that get us
Speaker 3: in the habit of trust, of trust and people's freedom,
Speaker 3: of practicing freedom, and also of emphasizing greater intrinsic motivation
Speaker 3: in people as well. You know, a lot of our
Speaker 3: society is built around control and mechanisms of control through
Speaker 3: extrinsic forms of motivation, you know, like punishments and prisons
Speaker 3: and grades and bonuses and wages, all the different things
Speaker 3: that are meant to keep us going here now. But
Speaker 3: I think a system that more leans into intrinsic motivation
Speaker 3: is something that we should be working toward. You know,
Speaker 3: that people do things so they're in SAE for reasons
Speaker 3: that we are driven by. That I think is far
Speaker 3: more sustainable long term and more fulfilling long term than
Speaker 3: continuing to be stuck with the punishments and rewards that
Speaker 3: come from outside. Yes, we have to develop a revolutionary
Speaker 3: consciousness that is also very much grounded in you know,
Speaker 3: people's intrinsic motivation to have their needs mets, to pursue
Speaker 3: their interests to care for others. And that is why
Speaker 3: I think we'll sy tea in for as long term,
Speaker 3: because you can create all these bonuses and incentives externally,
Speaker 3: but I don't think it's something that will last. There are,
Speaker 3: you know, experiments in earth with a greater emphasis on
Speaker 3: intrinsic motivation, not even necessarily radical experiments by see. But
Speaker 3: Bregman actually looks at examples of schools that don't have
Speaker 3: grades or fixed curriculums, and that companies that don't have managers,
Speaker 3: that are run entirely by employees. I mean, anarchists have
Speaker 3: been known about these, but he emphasizes that the people
Speaker 3: in these environments thrive because they've been trusted to direct themselves.
Speaker 3: They can bring off the best in themselves because they've
Speaker 3: been given the room to do so, you know. And
Speaker 3: spaces like free schools and maker spaces and cooperatives they
Speaker 3: give us the room to develop our cooperation and creativity.
Speaker 3: And of course the system is are going to stand
Speaker 3: by as these transformations take place. It might tolerate or
Speaker 3: even celebrate some like the examples that Bregmann had looked at,
Speaker 3: but those are always going to be treated as exceptions.
Speaker 3: And the second, he tried to make them the norm.
Speaker 3: I think you're going to face some real challenges because
Speaker 3: ordinary people one of these things, but the rulers don't.
Speaker 3: It's like the example that I had brought up earlier.
Speaker 3: You know, the famous nineteen fourteen Christmas Truce during World
Speaker 3: War One, where British and Jeman soldiers put down their guns,
Speaker 3: they sang songs, they played football, but eventually the high
Speaker 3: command crack down these truces. The fratnization of people who
Speaker 3: are different from each other was a threat to the
Speaker 3: war machine because these systems are invested in maintaining hostility
Speaker 3: and division, and so we have to consciously and openly
Speaker 3: stand up against hostility and division to build systems that
Speaker 3: bring out the best in people. I don't think that
Speaker 3: a hopeful view of human nature should be seen as utopian.
Speaker 3: As I said earlier, is realistic. Cynicism is not realism.
Speaker 3: They're not the same thing. Having hope is not being
Speaker 3: that you are completely deluded of the dark side or
Speaker 3: dark aspects of humanity and humanity's possibilities. But it means
Speaker 3: that you don't limit yourself to that outcome, that you
Speaker 3: challenge that narrative, and that you seek to do better
Speaker 3: and to create something better, and that's really what I
Speaker 3: care about, and that's all I have to share, All
Speaker 3: power to all the people this.
Speaker 5: Hi everyone, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 8: It's me James today and I'm joined by georgeen Jedmai from.
Speaker 5: Hengl, this human rights organization.
Speaker 8: Also a journalist who's worked for the Curdish Peace Institute
Speaker 8: who we've had on the show before, who I've also
Speaker 8: worked with, and the founder of the Kurtis Dan People's
Speaker 8: page on Instagram.
Speaker 5: Welcome to the show. Thanks, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 7: Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm so glad
Speaker 7: to be here today with you.
Speaker 8: Yeah, of course, And what we're going to talk about
Speaker 8: today is Rogia lat or Eastern Kurdistan, right, and how
Speaker 8: this figures into I guess what's happening currently in Iran,
Speaker 8: what has been happening in Iran, And like, I think
Speaker 8: it's really important to give a little more explanation and
Speaker 8: background on particularly like the different ethnic groups in Iran
Speaker 8: than people generally get when they consume legacy media here.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so if I want to talk about this, like
Speaker 7: we need to talk about the history or at least
Speaker 7: one hundred and twenty one hundred and fifty years, so
Speaker 7: a lot. But today's structure of what we know as
Speaker 7: Iran is made up of several different ethnic groups from Persians, Turks,
Speaker 7: I mean, Azerbaijani Turks, Turkummands Herds, Baluchi's, Ahwazi, Arabs, and
Speaker 7: so many others. But I would say the dominant population,
Speaker 7: the dominant ethnic group, and the dominant culture and language
Speaker 7: is definitely Persians. Yeah, And if I want to be
Speaker 7: more clear, this dominant ethnic group has been exploding and
Speaker 7: colonizing and destroying all the lands and the communities and
Speaker 7: societies from non Persian regions including Kurdistan, Baluchistan, Azerbaijan, Ahwas
Speaker 7: and many other regions and this geographical region called Iran.
Speaker 7: And this mainly started during the former monarchy Pahlavis, and
Speaker 7: it was intensified after the nineteen seventy nine Islamic Revolution
Speaker 7: led by ayato O la Romeni, and as usual, the
Speaker 7: Kurdish people were the first to stand against this newly
Speaker 7: established regime. In nineteen seventy nine, a few months after
Speaker 7: the so called revolution, the Kurds were demanding their rights,
Speaker 7: specifically the right to self determination and also federalism, which
Speaker 7: was responded by a heavy hit by heavy attacks and
Speaker 7: under the jihad order of Ayatolla Romeni, which led to
Speaker 7: the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians and destructions
Speaker 7: of several hundred villages and massive executions of Kurdish people
Speaker 7: across the what we know as Eastern Kurdistan or Rochalad.
Speaker 7: And following that the oppression continued, and also it was
Speaker 7: done against other ethnic groups, specifically Baluchi's and also the
Speaker 7: Awazi Arabs and also the Azerbaijani Turks, but in Kurdistan
Speaker 7: and Baluchistan it has always been more intense and more brutal.
Speaker 7: And then in late nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties
Speaker 7: they killed two of the Kurdish leaders, doctor Abdur Rahman
Speaker 7: Kazenlou and doctor shut Off Candy in Europe during some
Speaker 7: negotiations and thus ended up in Kurt being in a
Speaker 7: worse situation. And then until around early two thousands, I
Speaker 7: think around two thousand and four or three, the PKK
Speaker 7: built or established its wing in Roschalat known as the
Speaker 7: Free Kurdistan Party or Pajakh sorry Free Kurdistan Live Party
Speaker 7: in Roschalat, and then but unfortunately this party was not
Speaker 7: not really as strong as the KDPI or Comala that
Speaker 7: were already in the fight with the Iranian states. Since
Speaker 7: nineteen forty six and so on, this oppression has been
Speaker 7: just intensifying by mass execution of Kurdish people, the mass
Speaker 7: execution of the political prisoners and activists, and imprisonment of
Speaker 7: the different people in the Kurdish society, from language teachers
Speaker 7: to environmental activists to children, women, anyone, and this whole
Speaker 7: impression that I've been mentioning about, like that that's happening
Speaker 7: in East Kurdistan. It has also resulted in a humanitarian
Speaker 7: phenomenon called kulbarry. Kulbart's are a group of people that
Speaker 7: are extremely underprivileged. They have no access to anything, so
Speaker 7: they are somehow forced to go into some sort of
Speaker 7: war that they have to carry goods between the borders
Speaker 7: of East Kurdistan and South Kurdistan or North Kurdistan specifically
Speaker 7: between Iraq, Iran and Turkey. And every year we have
Speaker 7: numbers in our organizations you can check. We have a
Speaker 7: specific statistics section for these coal wars. Every year, hundreds
Speaker 7: of them get killed, just for example, in since the
Speaker 7: beginning of twenty twenty five, twenty two of them have
Speaker 7: been killed and injured. And among these people there are children, women,
Speaker 7: old people. So this is also another form of oppression
Speaker 7: that this regime has been using. Any start people, because
Speaker 7: this is actually one of the biggest forms of oppression,
Speaker 7: if I want to talk about it. There are over
Speaker 7: one hundred and fifty thousand cod bars in East Kurdistan
Speaker 7: that are somehow forced into this type of work because
Speaker 7: they have no other means of income and the government,
Speaker 7: the reigning government actually like limitits all the if I
Speaker 7: want to call it a colonny developments in East Kurdistan.
Speaker 7: This has been going on for decades. And then we
Speaker 7: come to twenty nineteen again there was another so I
Speaker 7: want to call it uprising or master tests across Iran
Speaker 7: when the regime killed over one five hundred people. I
Speaker 7: mean before that, there were also tests almost every year,
Speaker 7: but that was like one of the biggest one. It
Speaker 7: was in November twenty nineteen and they caught down the
Speaker 7: internet for twelve days. I remember I was at the
Speaker 7: university at that time. And then they killed one thy
Speaker 7: five hundred people, specifically so many people in Kurdistan. They
Speaker 7: even throw that kills people into like lakes and rivers,
Speaker 7: and then after like months and days people found the
Speaker 7: bodies like in the nature jeez. And then we come
Speaker 7: to twenty twenty two and in September when they the
Speaker 7: morality police killed Gina Amini, the Kurdish woman who was
Speaker 7: apparently not ware caring a proper hijab or the Islamic
Speaker 7: oh or whatever you want to call it yea. She
Speaker 7: was killed by the Iranian morality police in Tehran, which
Speaker 7: led to the as we know it. I don't know
Speaker 7: if we can call it a revolution or uprising or
Speaker 7: just mass tests called Jinjiana Zadi or women life freedom movement.
Speaker 7: And this also again because it was inspired by Kurtz
Speaker 7: the first victim was occurred again. Obviously, it started in
Speaker 7: Kurdistan and it spread so fast. Just in a few days,
Speaker 7: the entire Kurdish cities were testing, and then it was
Speaker 7: followed by other Iranian cities like Tehran. She was but
Speaker 7: it was not as intense as in Kurdistan. I think
Speaker 7: it was three days after her death. The Kurdish parties
Speaker 7: Kadpi and Komala and some others that are not very
Speaker 7: well known like pak and also Pajakh or the Free
Speaker 7: Life Kurdistan Party. They announced a general strike across Kurdistan
Speaker 7: and they called on people to close down everything and
Speaker 7: go on a full lockdown to protest the killing of
Speaker 7: Gina Amini, which was responded by I think over one
Speaker 7: hundred missiles or something from the IRGC and the Iranian
Speaker 7: regime and it killed I think eighteen if I'm not wrong,
Speaker 7: but it killed several people in the camps belonging to
Speaker 7: these parties in today's Iraqi Kurdistan or as we call
Speaker 7: it South Kurdistan. There were also like family members of
Speaker 7: the Kurdish politicians and Kurdish Pishmarga that were in those
Speaker 7: refugee camps that are also supported by the UN. They
Speaker 7: were killed there, and then the protests just got intensified,
Speaker 7: and I was also there. We were reporting every day
Speaker 7: about all the things that were happening. Also, the Baluch
Speaker 7: people joined the protests, and at the same time of
Speaker 7: those days, a fifteen years old Baluchi girl was raped
Speaker 7: and killed by an IRGC commander or member in Baluchistan,
Speaker 7: and people also protested that. And there was a Friday
Speaker 7: which is known as the Bloody Friday of Zahidan people
Speaker 7: in Baluchistan. They went to a big mosque in the
Speaker 7: city of Zahidan and they were doing their Friday prayers
Speaker 7: as Mauslims, and then they started protesting and this was
Speaker 7: responded by the Iranian regime forces and over one hundred
Speaker 7: people were massacred on that day, which also led to
Speaker 7: mass execution of more political and just random prisoners in Baluchistan.
Speaker 7: And then the protests just went on and there was
Speaker 7: a really heavy repression so far, I think over maybe
Speaker 7: between five hundred to six hundred people were killed. These
Speaker 7: are like the official ones, and also several other of
Speaker 7: these protesters, specifically from Kurtistan, were executed. Some of them
Speaker 7: were executed in public to spread more fear among people,
Speaker 7: but people were not given up. And then it continued
Speaker 7: until twenty twenty three until I think it was around
Speaker 7: maybe in March, I'm not really remembering the exact date,
Speaker 7: but it was also in twenty twenty three that they
Speaker 7: started attacking schools, like girls' schools, with some sort of
Speaker 7: gases that nobody actually knows that what type of chemical
Speaker 7: gases they were using, and unfortunately we have them, like
Speaker 7: we've reported on. Then some school children, like some kids
Speaker 7: they were killed by these gases, and they were specifically
Speaker 7: targeting girls' schools because they are like separate. They don't
Speaker 7: they're not together in the union system integrate. Yeah, and
Speaker 7: then this went on and people were still protesting, but
Speaker 7: on unfortunately it somehow stopped. And if I want to
Speaker 7: analyze that and related to like to talk about the reasons.
Speaker 7: One of the main reasons I think also many other
Speaker 7: political activists and analysts also agree on that that the
Speaker 7: opposition what as we know as the Iranian opposition, was
Speaker 7: not truly united. Yeah. There was a huge effort specifically
Speaker 7: from the Kurdish parties like Comala and Abdullah Motadi. They
Speaker 7: tried to create some sort of collaboration with the so
Speaker 7: called Iranian oppositions, specifically the monarchists like the Pahlavis and
Speaker 7: some other groups. But unfortunately these groups, I mean it
Speaker 7: was in the middle of an uprising, like a movement
Speaker 7: that hasn't been happening since maybe forty years. Instead of
Speaker 7: working together for a common goal like the Iranian opposition
Speaker 7: group specifically the Parlavis and also the other ones like
Speaker 7: if I want to say, like the mass and like
Speaker 7: all the people that work with her, instead of working
Speaker 7: towards a common goal. They started discriminating against minorities. They
Speaker 7: started ignoring and denying and also censoring the minorities, the
Speaker 7: same minorities that were the most active against the regime,
Speaker 7: that had the biggest number of sacrifices in the protests
Speaker 7: and also in prisons. They just started spreading their own
Speaker 7: typical nationalism. I mean, I would even call them ultra
Speaker 7: nationalistic sentiments. And for example, if I want to give
Speaker 7: like one of the biggest things that we always talk about,
Speaker 7: these people who are apparently against the regime, they have
Speaker 7: some red lines, and their main red line has always
Speaker 7: been the so called Iranian territorial integrity. So like the
Speaker 7: these type of sentiments and discussions, it's somehow created like
Speaker 7: a lot of mistrust between the Kurdish groups, the Baluchi groups.
Speaker 7: Also like with Hawazi Arabs and Azerbaijani Turks and all
Speaker 7: these groups, they couldn't trust each other because the dominant group,
Speaker 7: the Persians or the Iranians or those who identify as Iranians,
Speaker 7: they ignored us, they ignored our suffering, they ignored our identity.
Speaker 7: They were just repeating what the regime has been saying
Speaker 7: since over forty years but in a different form. So
Speaker 7: this somehow created a lot of mistrust and also the
Speaker 7: people inside, like I was there when that was happening,
Speaker 7: and I was working NonStop every day of recording, writing, texting,
Speaker 7: being on interviews. The people actually lost their hope because
Speaker 7: there was no united position, there was no united structure
Speaker 7: to say that, yeah, we're advocating for you. I mean,
Speaker 7: in the first few months it was really great. For example,
Speaker 7: here in Germany they had a very big demonstration and
Speaker 7: over eighty thousand people from all across Europe. They traveled
Speaker 7: to Berlin for that demonstration. It was great, and all
Speaker 7: the groups from Iranians, Turks, Arabs, Balucci is like everybody
Speaker 7: was there. But unfortunately following that, the people like specifically
Speaker 7: who is of Palavi, the so called crown Prince of Iran,
Speaker 7: who is another like his story is like very also
Speaker 7: like crazy, yeah, he and his group and his circle,
Speaker 7: and also people like Massi al Najatte, And I would
Speaker 7: say all the celebrities because they are not truly they
Speaker 7: are not politicians. They have no political study they have
Speaker 7: they haven't done any specific political work. They are just
Speaker 7: celebrities like Nazai Bulnadi. She played in some movies. Yet
Speaker 7: she really great actress, but not a good politician, like
Speaker 7: these things that celebrities who truly don't understand or they
Speaker 7: don't want to understand what people inside Kurtistan, Iran and
Speaker 7: Baluchis don't want. They pretended to be our voices and
Speaker 7: they never listened to us. And then this just made
Speaker 7: a lot of distraws and a lot of also hate
Speaker 7: between the people. Yeah, so that's why I can say
Speaker 7: that it just failed after that, and unfortunately many many
Speaker 7: of the people who were arrested during that time, they
Speaker 7: are still in jail, and just a few days ago
Speaker 7: five of them were sentenced to death and we made
Speaker 7: a report about them. So like every day did they
Speaker 7: get sentenced to death? And I personally know many of
Speaker 7: these people who were injured, and they are now here
Speaker 7: in Germany. They were brought here but by some humanitaring
Speaker 7: with us. Some of them are my friends. So like,
Speaker 7: it just failed. At the same time, I also have
Speaker 7: to mention that one of the reasons that it also
Speaker 7: failed it was the regime's extensive propression. They militarized the
Speaker 7: entire cities, specifically in Kurdistan and Baluchistan for example. In Kurdistan,
Speaker 7: they already have over two thousand military bases and checkpoints
Speaker 7: all over the Kurdistan region, and during that time, they
Speaker 7: had like tanks and military vehicles and the entrances, like
Speaker 7: in the gates of every city and also town they
Speaker 7: were checking out people like I personally get during these
Speaker 7: two years, I really didn't go out much, maybe once
Speaker 7: a week or once in attendees, just to I don't know,
Speaker 7: to go and eat something out, you know, like I
Speaker 7: was always home, Yeah, because I couldn't go out and
Speaker 7: because my work was important. And then they were just
Speaker 7: controlling people. They were arresting people, and even like from
Speaker 7: the stories that I have worked on before, these injured people.
Speaker 7: They also they were hiding in small villages and even
Speaker 7: in the mountains, but the regime forces were everywhere looking
Speaker 7: for these people and these activists. So it was like
Speaker 7: a holy military lockdown in the region. And there are
Speaker 7: many crazy stories. I don't know if you have time
Speaker 7: enough time to talk about, like some different and specific
Speaker 7: things that happened, and it was really scary at that time.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I would like you to share that with us,
Speaker 8: because I think one thing people don't understand is that
Speaker 8: the Iranian regime has a colossal capacity.
Speaker 5: For violence against the certain citizens.
Speaker 8: I think if we talk about like some specific instances
Speaker 8: and then maybe we can talk about recently that has
Speaker 8: been a bombing campaign against some nuclear facilities and some
Speaker 8: IIGC commanders, and like I think if you start with
Speaker 8: your anecdote about what happened during this last uprising, that
Speaker 8: will help people understand why, like the consequence of this
Speaker 8: bombing campaign are not good for people who want to
Speaker 8: have freedom in Iran, right, people inside the country at least. So, yeah,
Speaker 8: tell us some things about that capacity for repression.
Speaker 7: Yeah, So, like the bombing happened, and we saw, we
Speaker 7: all saw how crazy and how insane, like it was
Speaker 7: like movies. I couldn't believe my eyes when it happened.
Speaker 7: It was really crazy. And yeah, that was like the
Speaker 7: war between two brutal states, Israel and Iran, who both
Speaker 7: have no respect for dignity of humans. Nothing, absolutely. Yeah,
Speaker 7: the first thing that happened it was that, Yeah, they
Speaker 7: targeted I think so far as far as I remember
Speaker 7: from our statistics, over three hundred and fifty or around
Speaker 7: that were the IRGC commanders or the officials from the
Speaker 7: nuclear programs than like really the judges who have sentenced
Speaker 7: thousands of people to death, Like, the targeted people were
Speaker 7: mainly these type of people, and also there were also
Speaker 7: some civilians I think maybe around eighty or nineties civilians
Speaker 7: whom some of them were actually like family members of
Speaker 7: these IERGC members, and also some children. And also there
Speaker 7: was a lot of destruction, specifically in Tehran, many buildings,
Speaker 7: including the Evan prison.
Speaker 5: Yeah it'shere, they hit the prison, the.
Speaker 7: Center of the Iranian broadcast and all these places were
Speaker 7: targeted and many officials were killed, also civilians. But the
Speaker 7: Iranian regime's response to that was not fully against Israel,
Speaker 7: who was bombing Iranian ier GC bases. In the first days,
Speaker 7: they started attacking civilians. They started arresting every I don't know,
Speaker 7: some random people and so far I think last time
Speaker 7: we checked hundreds of people across specifically in Kurdistan they
Speaker 7: were arrested, and some others were already like in these days,
Speaker 7: they got executed because they were accused of spinach for
Speaker 7: Israel or working for Israel. Just a few weeks ago,
Speaker 7: I think five or four or maybe three, I don't
Speaker 7: recall the numbers right now. But some Kurdish political prisoners
Speaker 7: who were accused of working for Israel were executed in
Speaker 7: my hometown Formia in ist Kordistan, and then so many
Speaker 7: others were also arrested, and then I think some others
Speaker 7: were also tortured. At least I remember one case which
Speaker 7: we worked on it. There was one case that was
Speaker 7: tortured to death because he was accused of working for
Speaker 7: Israel and things like that. This was like one of
Speaker 7: the responses that the Iranian regime started doing. And one
Speaker 7: of the things that this regime did in the first days,
Speaker 7: it was that they took lots of military vehicles and
Speaker 7: like I don't know, equipments inside schools. For example, in
Speaker 7: the city of Saradash it's a really amazing beautiful Kurdish
Speaker 7: city on top of some mountains. It's beautiful. There's a
Speaker 7: high school in the city center, exactly in the city center,
Speaker 7: and they took lots of military equipment and stuff inside
Speaker 7: the school and they threatened the school manager, if you
Speaker 7: don't give us the key right now, we will arrest you.
Speaker 7: We will do this and that. And they also did
Speaker 7: that in the city of Kermanshah. They also did that
Speaker 7: in the I remember because I worked under report. It
Speaker 7: was in the neighbor in the neighborhoodhood called the Zilabad
Speaker 7: and they took some military equipments next to a hospital
Speaker 7: which was also born and the hospital was damaged and
Speaker 7: some people were injured. That was one of the things
Speaker 7: that the regime did. And at the same time, I
Speaker 7: don't know if you know about this, but in Iran
Speaker 7: the military service is compulsory, like Israel, like many like Switzerland,
Speaker 7: like many countries, but in Iran it's torture. It's some
Speaker 7: sort of repression against young men. So across Kurtistan, for example,
Speaker 7: in a military base in my hometown in Urma, it's
Speaker 7: called Almahdi. It's a very big military base. I know
Speaker 7: that some soldiers who are like civilians, but they are
Speaker 7: forced into it. They're like teenagers, I don't know, nineteen
Speaker 7: twenty or twenty one, like you were.
Speaker 5: Young guys, yeah, very young that really don't want.
Speaker 7: To be there, but they are forced to. They were
Speaker 7: saying that their commanders threatened, if you leave the military base,
Speaker 7: we will arrest you, we will torture you, and we
Speaker 7: will execute you for betraying for like I don't know,
Speaker 7: for training your country or things like that, or working
Speaker 7: for Israel. This was like one of one of the
Speaker 7: concerns that many families had before on those days, because
Speaker 7: I talked with some people, like our neighbor's son was
Speaker 7: also in a military base. He's like nineteen. Yeah, they
Speaker 7: were putting lots of pressure on civilians while ignoring that
Speaker 7: what Israel is doing every day. They were bombing all
Speaker 7: the military bases, I don't know places, and like they
Speaker 7: were even bombing places that nobody even knew that they existed.
Speaker 7: But their focus was, like the regime's focus was on
Speaker 7: civilians who were just scared, who were just trying to
Speaker 7: protect their families. Yeah, and this was just like what
Speaker 7: they started doing. And yeah, I mean it's it's still
Speaker 7: going It still is going on, and they're arresting people
Speaker 7: all the time, and as usual, the majority of the
Speaker 7: focus and repression is again happening in Curtis on against
Speaker 7: Kurdish people. Yeah.
Speaker 8: I think it's very important people understand like that Iran
Speaker 8: is not like an ethno state, well it is an
Speaker 8: ethno state, that that that is not ethnically monolithic like
Speaker 8: the territory of Iran and the Persian ethno state do
Speaker 8: not necessarily like line up. I think people will also
Speaker 8: be very confused about like when we hear quote unquote
Speaker 8: Iranian opposition in this country, right, right, it's often like
Speaker 8: I think there's this knee jack. Oh that's good, right,
Speaker 8: these are people who are opposed to this regime which
Speaker 8: is brutally cracking down on people. But often then, as
Speaker 8: you say, it's associated with like monarchists for the most part.
Speaker 8: And then we have these various like anything in Kurdistan, right,
Speaker 8: like it's an alphabet suit, but like there is like
Speaker 8: there are seventy five different like initial groups of initials.
Speaker 8: Can you explain who some of these actors are? Right?
Speaker 8: We have on we have the Iranian monarchists, we have
Speaker 8: the KDP, I have all these different groups pagiacht like
Speaker 8: you say, the KCK group. Can you explain some of
Speaker 8: these people are the people say they understand?
Speaker 7: Yeah, if I want to talk about Kurtisan, I would
Speaker 7: go to the first Mother and Kurdish Party called KDPI,
Speaker 7: which was founded in nineteen forty five and it was
Speaker 7: the founder of the Kurdistan Republic. And also then there's
Speaker 7: the Koma Law Party, which is also like a socialist
Speaker 7: communist Leftist Party which also has several branches, but they're
Speaker 7: all basically the same. And also there are other parties
Speaker 7: like pak yeah, yeah, the Freedom Party of Kurdistan, and
Speaker 7: also we have Pajaq the Free Life Kurdistan Party or
Speaker 7: I don't know if it's that, it's the same in English.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Kaddistan Free Life Party.
Speaker 7: Yeah. These are the main political parties and actors in
Speaker 7: East Kurdistan. However, there are also like smaller parties like
Speaker 7: Abbot and also some parties that are affiliated like they
Speaker 7: are like very small groups that are affiliated with for example,
Speaker 7: the Iranian Communist Party, which is not also really big.
Speaker 7: But the main ones right now are Kdpi and Tomola,
Speaker 7: who both of them have like a long history of
Speaker 7: fighting against the regime and also against the monarchists the
Speaker 7: Pahlavi regime. They were i would say, really really active
Speaker 7: until like twenty twenty three. They played a very very
Speaker 7: important role in the revolution in like in Kurdiston specifically
Speaker 7: because they were the ones who were announcing like strikes
Speaker 7: and they were working together and like organizing things and
Speaker 7: helping people out to resist. Obviously, there was no arm
Speaker 7: struggle at that time or conflicts because they said we're
Speaker 7: not going to fight because if we bring the fights
Speaker 7: and conflict inside Kurdistan, the regime will destroy the city
Speaker 7: with styles. This is exactly what they said at that time,
Speaker 7: because there was a demand from people that yeah, the
Speaker 7: Peshmarga forces should come in the cities and fight alongside
Speaker 7: with us, but they said no, if you do this,
Speaker 7: the regime will destroy the cities. These are the main
Speaker 7: forces in Kurdistan, and of course they have different ideologies.
Speaker 7: Pajak is like the PKK's wing, or if I want
Speaker 7: to be more official, it's a member of the KCK
Speaker 7: or Kjaks we'll say. And KDPI is like as I said,
Speaker 7: the history goes back to nineteen forty five and Comala
Speaker 7: in the early seventies and also Pak I'm not sure
Speaker 7: when it was founded, but it was also like it
Speaker 7: was founded one by one of the members of the
Speaker 7: KDPI who say as Dampana and they are more of
Speaker 7: a military I would say, well organized military group. That
Speaker 7: they also played a good role against the ISIS in
Speaker 7: twenty seventeen and eighteen, specifically in Kerkuk in South Kurdistan
Speaker 7: or Iraqi Kurdistan and about the Iran in a position
Speaker 7: if I want to say, yes, we have the monarchists,
Speaker 7: the Rizapah Leavi and his group. They have like a
Speaker 7: whole long list of parties. Basically they're all the same
Speaker 7: but they have different names, and they are all right wing,
Speaker 7: and they all focused on the territorial integrity of Iran.
Speaker 7: But they also pretend that they care also about democracy,
Speaker 7: but that's that's a lie. And then we have people
Speaker 7: like Massi Haleine Jot who is more of she's an
Speaker 7: activist and she's she's internationally known for her activism against
Speaker 7: the compulsory hy job, but she doesn't have any specific
Speaker 7: party or organizations. She's just an activist and a journalist obviously.
Speaker 7: And also there are other several people that work with her,
Speaker 7: like Nazani Bunyadi who also works with like Pa Lavis.
Speaker 7: And also there is another one who also played a
Speaker 7: big role. His name is Hamid Ismailiun. He is one
Speaker 7: of the members of the families of the people who
Speaker 7: were killed in that plane that was shot by missiles
Speaker 7: biology see in twenty twenty in Tehran. And again there
Speaker 7: were many Kurds inside that Ukrainian plane as well. This
Speaker 7: person was Smailun. He is one of the members of
Speaker 7: like he lost his entire family in that plane crash
Speaker 7: or attack. He organized many, many great and big demonstrations US, Canada, Australia,
Speaker 7: I think even in the US and specifically in Germany.
Speaker 7: The one in Berlin was the biggest. Also, he doesn't
Speaker 7: have a party, but he also somehow backed down after
Speaker 7: like what Alavis did, for example, like or the monarchists
Speaker 7: did with the whole opposition groups. There are also some
Speaker 7: leftist groups and individuals, but unfortunately they're not truly leftists.
Speaker 7: So I want to give you a name. There is
Speaker 7: a person called as Easy. He is also well known
Speaker 7: in the US. I don't know. He wrote some books
Speaker 7: and he works with really like international media. Just a
Speaker 7: few days ago he posted something that said we we
Speaker 7: the leftists of Iran. We we are in love with
Speaker 7: our homeland and we care about our homeland and we
Speaker 7: don't He just posted something that was that was really nationalistic,
Speaker 7: like a typical Persian Iranian sentiment. That was that does
Speaker 7: that going on and it's got lots of criticism from
Speaker 7: different groups. And then we have the the Awazi Arabs.
Speaker 7: They also have some parties, but they are not really
Speaker 7: strong or active or well organized, like the Kurdish ones,
Speaker 7: the Turks the other by Johnny Turks. They also have
Speaker 7: some groups, but they're also not very active or organized.
Speaker 7: And many of these groups they are heavily affiliated with
Speaker 7: the azer Bay Johnny government or the Turkish regime and
Speaker 7: specifically the MHP party in Turkey, like the ulternational Turkish party.
Speaker 5: Yeah right, yeah.
Speaker 7: And then the Baluchis, I can say they are more
Speaker 7: organized because they have this I don't want to call
Speaker 7: him a leader, but like the the highest, the highest
Speaker 7: level mollah in Baluchistan, Molavi Abdula. He is like the
Speaker 7: most popular mula in that region, and he was one
Speaker 7: of the people that was organizing protests and he was
Speaker 7: giving lots of speeches like during the Friday prayers in Baluchistan,
Speaker 7: and a lot of people were. They still like they
Speaker 7: follow him and they follow his words. But unfortunately he
Speaker 7: is also like appointed as the Imam of the Friday prayers,
Speaker 7: if I want to be more specific, in Baluchistan by
Speaker 7: Kameny himself, the Iranian Supreme Realer. But it's like a
Speaker 7: little bit hard to understand that where he stands exactly
Speaker 7: because on one side, he he's appointed by the regime.
Speaker 7: But on the other side, he's also like acting as
Speaker 7: a political leader or advocate in Baluchistan. I think they
Speaker 7: also have some armed groups, but they are mainly Islamists,
Speaker 7: and I would say, but they're also not very very
Speaker 7: will organized. Yeah, they do attack the IRGC members and
Speaker 7: these agents who are oppressing people on a daily basis
Speaker 7: sometimes and sometimes they get killed. And also sometimes just
Speaker 7: a few days ago, there was a fight between these
Speaker 7: people and like civilians in the village and also the
Speaker 7: IRGC courses and I think two women were killed and
Speaker 7: more than ten or eleven were injured. Jeez, but this
Speaker 7: this fights and conflicts and they're always happening in Baluchistan.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it can be hard, I think especially people aren't familiar, right,
Speaker 8: like the Pak to distinguish from PJAK, like have definitely
Speaker 8: been making a big effort on the internet, I will say,
Speaker 8: like with their Peshmega right like in the last three
Speaker 8: weeks since the US entered the Israel's bombing campaign, like
Speaker 8: to appear like this and they are very well organized
Speaker 8: Pesh Mega like I think they say they were cook.
Speaker 8: I think maybe they're in Kubani.
Speaker 5: As well, like maybe they Yeah, they joined in yeah, ye.
Speaker 7: The Pajakh was specifically in Rajava and they were also
Speaker 7: fighting against ISIS because like they are like as I said,
Speaker 7: they are, they are a member of KCK, and there
Speaker 7: are allies of PKK, so they're all are interconnected and
Speaker 7: they all work together.
Speaker 5: I think the PAK also worth in Rushava, right.
Speaker 7: I am not sure, but I think members of PAK
Speaker 7: joined like the fight in Rojava, like as individuals, because
Speaker 7: the fight in was also something that people from all
Speaker 7: over Kurdistan went.
Speaker 8: There, Yeah, from northern Kerdistan to yeah. Yeah, And these
Speaker 8: are very organized groups, but like there isn't I guess
Speaker 8: there is a kind of insurgency. But as you say,
Speaker 8: like if these groups just took our bambs in the
Speaker 8: cities and the IIGC would destroy everyone in those cities, right,
Speaker 8: that's a I think people sometimes one day like why
Speaker 8: they don't just start fighting and then there is fighting
Speaker 8: to be clear, But like as you say, the regime
Speaker 8: punishes civilians, right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean this is not the first time that
Speaker 7: the regime does this. Every time that Israel does something
Speaker 7: to the regime, because this is not the first time
Speaker 7: that Israel has killed someone in Iran. Like some IRGC
Speaker 7: member or nuclear agent, nuclear scientists or whatever. Every time
Speaker 7: this happened during the past few years, instead of responding
Speaker 7: to Israel as a state, they responded to the Kurdish people.
Speaker 7: I think it was just two years Again, in twenty
Speaker 7: twenty two, they literally bombed a civilian house in Erbin,
Speaker 7: the capital of Iraqi, Curtisan, and they killed an entire family,
Speaker 7: like it was like maybe a six seven months old
Speaker 7: baby and her father. They always respond to Kurtz when
Speaker 7: they get attacked or bombed or damaged or whatever by
Speaker 7: Israel or America.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's like a soft target attarget they feel they
Speaker 5: can safely attack, you know, versus like we know now
Speaker 5: that they around pre warned the United States it was
Speaker 5: going to attack its basis, you know, following this bombing raid,
Speaker 5: and it was more of a performative thing than a
Speaker 5: like a serious attempt to attack US basis.
Speaker 8: And even like this week I saw in Slea money
Speaker 8: like they round is sending shahedrones.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Actually during the past maybe ten days, this is
Speaker 7: like last night there was an attacking slay money. But
Speaker 7: this is like I think the fourth or third time
Speaker 7: that there have there have been like several drone attacks
Speaker 7: on different places. So, yeah, this is something that the
Speaker 7: Rhalem has been doing one of the other funny things.
Speaker 7: I mean, this is not funny exactly, but it's weird.
Speaker 7: I just yesterday and actually two days ago. I'm not
Speaker 7: really good with dates and numbers, that's okay. Just two
Speaker 7: days ago they conducted like a cyber attack on this
Speaker 7: TV channel, Iran International, which is also advocating for monarchists,
Speaker 7: and they expose like some newt photos and like private
Speaker 7: photos and videos of some of the staff that work there,
Speaker 7: and they are threatening that we will publish more if
Speaker 7: you don't stop or whatever. This is also like another
Speaker 7: strategies that the regime uses when they lose something, when
Speaker 7: they get attacked. They also like target activists, journalists, or
Speaker 7: for example they threatened their families or they threaten them
Speaker 7: here inside Europe or in America or Canada or wherever
Speaker 7: they are. Yeah, this is like as we call it,
Speaker 7: it's the transnational repression of the regime and it's been
Speaker 7: going on forever. And again if you look at the numbers,
Speaker 7: most of the attacks have been on Kurdish activists. For example,
Speaker 7: during the past thirty years, over I think around six
Speaker 7: hundred non political activists have been killed by the regime
Speaker 7: outside of Iran, and nearly four hundred and fifty or
Speaker 7: something of them were Kurdish. Yeah, this is also another
Speaker 7: thing that the regime has been doing, and in these
Speaker 7: days they have intensified.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: They have a long history of transnational repression and like
Speaker 8: participating in the repression of other.
Speaker 5: Revolutions, right.
Speaker 8: Like, of course they were massive backers of the Asad regime interior.
Speaker 8: You know, all around the region. They will find the
Speaker 8: wrong side to line up on it and do that.
Speaker 7: Again.
Speaker 5: Of course, people will also be familiar they were supporting Kusbala,
Speaker 5: for instance in Lebanon.
Speaker 8: One thing I've heard is that like the regime has
Speaker 8: been really cracking down on Afghan people, like mass devotations
Speaker 8: of Afghan people who have come to Iran, right and
Speaker 8: especially in the wake of this bombing campaign. Can we
Speaker 8: talk about that briefly.
Speaker 7: Yes, of course. I think that's one of the most
Speaker 7: horrible things that happened after the war. So far. We
Speaker 7: know that just in June they deported over thirty thousand
Speaker 7: Afghans and it's still going on, Like they mass support
Speaker 7: tens of thousands of Afghan refugees every day, and just
Speaker 7: something that was really horrible to me when I read it.
Speaker 7: There were six thousand kids that were unregistered and they
Speaker 7: were separated from their parents and they were sent back
Speaker 7: to Afghanistan alone.
Speaker 5: Jesus.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and they are haunting down Afghan migrants in different
Speaker 7: cities across around, especially in Tehran because most of them
Speaker 7: are there. Yeah. And the thing is that the Afghan
Speaker 7: I think there are all worth three million gone migrants
Speaker 7: in Iran or maybe more. Nobody knows the exact numbers
Speaker 7: because the Iranian government never ever publishes the true statistics,
Speaker 7: but there are millions of them in Iran and they
Speaker 7: are not actually allowed to They were not allowed actually
Speaker 7: like they're getting kicked out right now, but they were
Speaker 7: not allowed to work in Kurdish cities. They were only
Speaker 7: allowed to work in Persian speaking cities like Tehran, mashat Hiros,
Speaker 7: Isfahan and these big industrial cities. So like right now,
Speaker 7: if you look at the internet, they are being hunted
Speaker 7: down by Iranian agents everywhere and they're being forced to
Speaker 7: go back to Afghanistan. And one of the things that
Speaker 7: I want to mention that's been going on from a
Speaker 7: humanitarian perspective that really really makes me sad, and also
Speaker 7: it reflects a very ugly reality about the Persian or
Speaker 7: the Iranian society and the amount of racism and fascism
Speaker 7: that exists among them, not just by the regime, by
Speaker 7: the people as well. There have been hundreds of videos
Speaker 7: and footage online. You can also check just search and
Speaker 7: you will see that random citizens, young people, they are
Speaker 7: attacking Afghan people in the city and I don't know,
Speaker 7: in subways, in the parks, in cheese, in public places.
Speaker 7: Just yesterday I saw a very heartbreaking video because like
Speaker 7: Afgone people, they also have a different look. You can
Speaker 7: easily say that they're not Iranians. An Afghan teenager was
Speaker 7: being attacked by eggs Jesus and they were just throwing
Speaker 7: eggs at him and then they poured like lots of
Speaker 7: some powder and then like some juice and like coca cola.
Speaker 7: I don't know what was that. They were just throwing
Speaker 7: everything at him. And on the other another video that
Speaker 7: I saw, they stopped a man maybe he was thirty
Speaker 7: or something. They forced him to kiss the hand of
Speaker 7: a stray dog. And then yeah, that would be like, yeah,
Speaker 7: he's kissing a dog. But in the Middle East culture
Speaker 7: when you force someone to kiss a dog.
Speaker 5: It's very disrespectful.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's really disrespectful, and like they're also I read
Speaker 7: on the internet that many Afghuns reported that, like, for example,
Speaker 7: in Tehran, they were renting a house or an apartment
Speaker 7: or something, and they were living in those apartments and
Speaker 7: the landlord reported them to the police. It's like what's
Speaker 7: happening in the US. It's something like ice, but it's
Speaker 7: Iranian but more brutal. Then the police just came and
Speaker 7: took them all. And now the landlords are refusing to
Speaker 7: give back the passion money to Afghans, and many of
Speaker 7: them are being forced out without any food, without any
Speaker 7: support anything, and especially the women. Like I also read
Speaker 7: about like a doctor that fled Polybon and he was
Speaker 7: in Tehran and now if he goes back to Toliban
Speaker 7: will definitely kill him because he was like against Tolliban. Yeah,
Speaker 7: I mean, it's it's it's a very horrible humanitarian situation.
Speaker 7: And the people, like in Baluchistan, they are also suffering.
Speaker 7: But I saw many videos and also some of the
Speaker 7: activists published lots of footage that they were they were
Speaker 7: bringing food, water, I don't know, medicine, and things like
Speaker 7: that on the on the road to give it to
Speaker 7: those people who are going back, and they were offering
Speaker 7: I don't know whatever they had. And in Afghanistan there
Speaker 7: is also happening, but it's just so crazy because both
Speaker 7: the regime and also the anti regime media are trying
Speaker 7: to portray Afghans as the problem. Just exactly like how
Speaker 7: the far right parties in Germany, like IFD, they are
Speaker 7: portraying refugees and migrants are as the main problem.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a global thing. It happens here.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's it's exactly the same. Yeah, and like yeah,
Speaker 7: unfortunately the even the Iranian opposition has not been clear.
Speaker 7: But again because there is some sort of solidarity that
Speaker 7: encourage pollutes and Afghans and also other minorities. Yeah, it's
Speaker 7: the minorities that talk about this. It's the minority groups
Speaker 7: and organizations who try to raise awareness over this. Unfortunately,
Speaker 7: I think nobody can stop it because they're doing it anyways.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and like we shouldn't support an opposition politics. It
Speaker 5: is just another ethnot like.
Speaker 8: We see that in Syria right now, right, Like, yeah,
Speaker 8: they haven't even changed the name. We have this revolution,
Speaker 8: tens of thousands, maybe one hundreds of thousands of people
Speaker 8: definitely died, Yeah, to build something better, and we still
Speaker 8: have the Syrian Arab Republic.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's maybe the Alahites are.
Speaker 8: Being persecuted and they weren't before, but like that shouldn't matter, right, Like,
Speaker 8: if we're building trying to build something better.
Speaker 7: I mean they are just remnant of Isis. So what
Speaker 7: can you expect?
Speaker 8: Yeah, exactly, Yeah, it's uh, yeah, it's very sad to see,
Speaker 8: you know, after after so much killing and dying, I
Speaker 8: guess to finish up, I think people in the US
Speaker 8: do not get very good coverage of what's happening in
Speaker 8: a run right, Like I said that, as you say,
Speaker 8: dominated by monarchist outlets, we tend to have good resources
Speaker 8: which allow them to kind of get to the top
Speaker 8: of people's feeds or they're getting like press TV stuff,
Speaker 8: right that just like straight up regime propaganda.
Speaker 5: Now, where can people find.
Speaker 8: Like good resources to understand what's what's happening in around
Speaker 8: Like from the perspective of you know, the majority of
Speaker 8: people who just want to live a free life, and
Speaker 8: especially like you know, the women in particularly in a
Speaker 8: round right, have an extremely difficult and repressive every that
Speaker 8: the regime dominates every aspect of their lives, Like where
Speaker 8: can people find reasonable coverage that acknowledges that.
Speaker 7: Honestly, if I want to talk about media like TV
Speaker 7: channels or just media websites, there is no media like
Speaker 7: Iranian media that truly reflects what's happening in Iran. There
Speaker 7: are like many leftists and also right wing medias. For example,
Speaker 7: if I want to go like a very leftist media
Speaker 7: called Radio Zamani, they are not really good. Like then
Speaker 7: we have Iran International, BBC, Persian Voice of America, Persian Independent,
Speaker 7: Persian like there are many many media that all of these,
Speaker 7: like I would say the big media, they are heavily
Speaker 7: dominated and I would say exploited by the ultranationalist people.
Speaker 7: And also there are people who are related to IRGC
Speaker 7: and this organization called Nayak that is like the regime's
Speaker 7: lobby group in the US, and these individuals that work there,
Speaker 7: they truly don't reflect what's happening there. And I mean
Speaker 7: it's kind of hard because if people want to understand
Speaker 7: what's happening, maybe they should read everything they're posting and
Speaker 7: then analyze that, hey, this makes sense and this doesn't
Speaker 7: but that just a little bit hard. But also on
Speaker 7: the other side, I would suggest that people should follow
Speaker 7: more human rights organizations, which again some of them, if
Speaker 7: I want, I don't know if it's okay to say
Speaker 7: their names, some of them and the people for example,
Speaker 7: the Burrumant Organization, they did lots of great work, but
Speaker 7: recently again they showed some sort of racism and like
Speaker 7: censorship against minorities, especially Kurt and people like Lot and
Speaker 7: buzz Agane. They are like also doing some human rights
Speaker 7: work in the US, and even people like Massi and
Speaker 7: all these I would say known activists, and even here
Speaker 7: in Germany, they are not truly reflecting what's happening. They're
Speaker 7: just focused on the Persian and they're like they talk
Speaker 7: about minorities time to time, but only when it fits
Speaker 7: into their agendas, into their ideologies and perspectives. But there
Speaker 7: are other organizations which I'm working with, like Hangout Organization
Speaker 7: for Human Rights. Until two thousand, late twenty twenty three,
Speaker 7: I guess we were mainly focused on East Kurdistan, but
Speaker 7: right now we report human rights violations from all over Iran,
Speaker 7: like yeah, but we try our best, and I think
Speaker 7: I could say that we are one of the best
Speaker 7: when it comes to all these things, and we don't
Speaker 7: care about what people think. We just report what's happening
Speaker 7: or what happened. And there are other organizations like Iran
Speaker 7: Human Rights they're also good. For example, there is another
Speaker 7: one called Tawana. They are like a very big organization,
Speaker 7: but unfortunately they advocated for the monarchists again just a
Speaker 7: few months ago, so it's kind of hard to see
Speaker 7: that who is truly on the side of people. And
Speaker 7: when you look at the human rights organizations. I'm not
Speaker 7: saying this because I'm Kurdish, but this is what I
Speaker 7: see and I think it's true. The only organizations that
Speaker 7: truly reflect what's happening without caring about people's backgrounds or
Speaker 7: ethnicity or whatever. It's our organization. Hang Out and also
Speaker 7: like organizations like Curtis on Human Rights Network, but unfortunately
Speaker 7: the majority of the others are are really clear. So
Speaker 7: for Kurdish issue, I would say definitely hang out and
Speaker 7: also on my page Kurdistani people I also like write
Speaker 7: a lot of things, and also Kurdish Piece Institute and
Speaker 7: Kurtish Center for Studies. They have lots of other Kurdish
Speaker 7: journalists and experts that write a lot of really good
Speaker 7: articles about the situation there. And if I want to
Speaker 7: mention names, I would say Rojen Mukhliani. She is like
Speaker 7: a really great researcher. She lives in our land. There
Speaker 7: is another professor called Camraan Martin. He also writes really
Speaker 7: great analysis on situation and like the things that people
Speaker 7: even don't think about. They're writing with so many different
Speaker 7: international organizations and institutes. Yeah, there are like these individuals
Speaker 7: and activists.
Speaker 8: Thank you so much for joining us. That was really
Speaker 8: that really helped, I think for people to understand things.
Speaker 8: Tell us about your your Kurdistan People page. Where can
Speaker 8: they find that on on Instagram?
Speaker 7: Yeah, thank you for inviting me and thank you for
Speaker 7: letting me speak. Yeah, I have this page Kurdistani People.
Speaker 7: I usually post about all over Kurdistan the things that matter.
Speaker 7: Obviously I can't do it all the time, but yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: I post a lot of things. And there are other
Speaker 7: pages that are also collaborate with, like Kurdish Activism or
Speaker 7: everything about Kurtistan, where just a group of people who
Speaker 7: work together. Obviously, like our organization, I think it's it's
Speaker 7: very very important for people to follow and support it
Speaker 7: hang Out Organization for Human Rights and also Kurdistan Human
Speaker 7: Rights Network that's also like another one that you can follow. Yeah,
Speaker 7: and also like GA I talked about some names and
Speaker 7: individuals and researchers. Yeah, you can also follow them for
Speaker 7: more professional analysis about East Kurdistan or Rochalot.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Great, well, thank you Sam for joining us. We
Speaker 5: really appreciate your time.
Speaker 7: Thank you, Thank you very much.
Speaker 5: Hi everyone, and welcome. What could happen here?
Speaker 8: It is a second episode about Kurdistan. I am very
Speaker 8: lucky to be joined today by Vladimir van Wilgenberg, who
Speaker 8: many of you will know is a journalist covering Kurdistan.
Speaker 8: It's done excellent work for a lot of publications. So
Speaker 8: welcome to the show of Vladimir.
Speaker 7: Thanks so much for irritation.
Speaker 8: Yeah, thanks for thanks for being willing to join us
Speaker 8: so late at night your time. Let's start off by
Speaker 8: discussing an event you attended or the event you were
Speaker 8: in proximity too. By the sounds of it, people will
Speaker 8: have seen this online, I'm sure, but it was the
Speaker 8: disarmament of a number of PKKE garrillas that took place
Speaker 8: in the mountains of southern Kurdistan over the weekend of
Speaker 8: the tenth to twelfth of July.
Speaker 10: So yeah, a few days ago, well, I tried to
Speaker 10: attend the ceremony from for the big Kegary Lass that
Speaker 10: were disarming, but sally what happened is that they burned
Speaker 10: their weapons, although technically it's not really possible to burn
Speaker 10: a weapon because there were colossic coals specially that they
Speaker 10: were put they put in a fire, and it wasn't
Speaker 10: like a actually a tourist cave near do Kan, so
Speaker 10: this is not It was actually very different because I
Speaker 10: also have been in during the peace process. I've also
Speaker 10: was in a press conference of the pik Ak in
Speaker 10: two thousand fourteen or fifteen or some of that around
Speaker 10: that time, and that was very different because it was
Speaker 10: basically in the area that the Pikak is activated. It
Speaker 10: was in the area under their control, but this was
Speaker 10: under a different Kurdish parties control. It's called the patriarch
Speaker 10: Union of Kurdistan. So in Iraqi Kurdistan you have two
Speaker 10: main parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and you have
Speaker 10: the Kurdistan Democratic Party. So this cave where they did
Speaker 10: the ceremony, which is actually a tourist cave. It's in
Speaker 10: PUK controlled area, so the ceremony was sort of protected
Speaker 10: by PUK security forces and that's why. Also the PUK
Speaker 10: media they got a lot of special access, and also
Speaker 10: there was the Turkish government media was there, and also
Speaker 10: PIKK media was there and a lot of other Kurdish
Speaker 10: TV channels.
Speaker 7: So it was a very interesting day.
Speaker 10: Although I was not able to pass the checkpoint towards
Speaker 10: the ceremony because at the last moment, actually a few
Speaker 10: days before the ceremony, they.
Speaker 7: Changed the access.
Speaker 10: Supposedly it will be a very open ceremony, but then
Speaker 10: they said for because of security reasons that they had
Speaker 10: to restrict the ceremony and there would be some TV
Speaker 10: screens and stuff. And then I couldn't find the TV screens.
Speaker 10: But that's another discussion. But I also don't still understand
Speaker 10: what the security risk was. Although a day before there
Speaker 10: was a drone strike on a Kurdish Peshmerga base, but
Speaker 10: that was like quite far away from that. It was
Speaker 10: one hour away from the ceremony location.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and it's an Iranian droned to take great like
Speaker 8: a Shahi drone.
Speaker 10: Yeah, So there have been like no group has claimed
Speaker 10: these attacks. But after, in the aftermath of the Twelve
Speaker 10: Day War, there have been a lot of drone strikes
Speaker 10: in the Kurdistan region in various areas, including this morning
Speaker 10: on an American oil company's facility in the province Okay,
Speaker 10: and the day before that also on another field near Airbill.
Speaker 10: So it has been quite tense, Yeah, which also probably
Speaker 10: affected the ceremony, although it's not.
Speaker 7: Really related to it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's different.
Speaker 10: So yeah, basically what was interesting, So they have this
Speaker 10: peace process between Kurdish rebels and the Turkish state.
Speaker 11: It's all started with a call by a.
Speaker 10: Turkish ultra and nationalist leader which actually in the past
Speaker 10: actually called for executing ab the Loachland, the leader of
Speaker 10: the Kurdistan Workers Party has been in prison since the nineties.
Speaker 10: He was actually surprisingly starting this peace process.
Speaker 7: He was saying like we should.
Speaker 10: Have him talk in the parliament and call for disbanding
Speaker 10: the pik a K. So he never came to the parliament,
Speaker 10: but he released messages from prison, and before the ceremony
Speaker 10: he released also a video message where he again focused
Speaker 10: on disarming basically. Yeah, and then the ceremony basically came
Speaker 10: where he had thirty fighters fifteen women fifteen men, because
Speaker 10: the pikk is all about woman equality, so that's why
Speaker 10: they did it fifty to fifty, and they put their
Speaker 10: weapons in this fire. So I think this is also secondfice,
Speaker 10: a point of renewal because Kurts, as a tradition, they
Speaker 10: have this Kurdish New Year every year on twenty one March,
Speaker 10: where people jump over fires. There's a lot of fireworks,
Speaker 10: and the Kurdish and atros is basically the start of
Speaker 10: a new beginning.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so I.
Speaker 10: Think one of the reasons they chose these fires is
Speaker 10: because of this idea of a new beginning, and also
Speaker 10: the fact that when the Pikak started there were people
Speaker 10: that sort of the creators of the pik k. They
Speaker 10: are actually some of them they burned themselves in prison
Speaker 10: in the Turkish prisoneh. So it's also sort of related
Speaker 10: to that, this sort of interlinkage with a fire. Yeah,
Speaker 10: and you also saw that they carefully put the weapons
Speaker 10: in the fire, they didn't just throw them. So it's
Speaker 10: it doesn't mean that they have completely given up on weapons,
Speaker 10: because they're still waiting on counter steps from the Turkish government.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Like there has been fighting between pikk or hPG
Speaker 5: or how you want to say it, like hPG being
Speaker 5: like the technically the armed wing. There has been fighting
Speaker 5: in southern Kurdistan, like in Iraqi kig Kerdistan Autonomous Region
Speaker 5: of Iraq since the call for peace, right like there
Speaker 5: has been ongoing fighting.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean it's not really I would not say
Speaker 10: that it's like like actively fighting to take territory, yes,
Speaker 10: which was happening before.
Speaker 7: So it's more that.
Speaker 10: It's some like Turkish armies shooting artillery on the pik
Speaker 10: Ak and there was also one incident that the Pikak
Speaker 10: actually responded by drones.
Speaker 7: But so far this.
Speaker 10: Didn't reach much in the Turkish or the Kurdish media.
Speaker 10: I mean they were like, some of this artillery shelling
Speaker 10: costs some fires, so villagers in the areas it's a
Speaker 10: very hot summer now, they were trying to put out
Speaker 10: the fires. But it was not like the active, active
Speaker 10: fighting that you had before. And you know, since there
Speaker 10: was also a previous peace process. I mean, there have
Speaker 10: been several peace processes since history between the Pikyk and Turkey,
Speaker 10: but they never had a positive result. And last one
Speaker 10: before this song was twenty fifteen, and after that peace
Speaker 10: process broke down when two policemen were shot. It's still
Speaker 10: unclear who shot those policemen. The fighting erupted again and
Speaker 10: since then there have been heavy fighting, first in the
Speaker 10: Kurdish majority areas of Turkey until basically Turkey defeated Kurdish
Speaker 10: armed insurgents in the Kurdish cities in Turkey, and since
Speaker 10: then actually the fighting has moved more to Iraqi Kurdistan,
Speaker 10: where the pikk has also a historical presence since the nineties.
Speaker 10: What you now have is that you have this new
Speaker 10: peace process started by the skull of Bats Shelly and
Speaker 10: the big Aka leader Johanna has said the time for
Speaker 10: armed struggle is over. We don't want to have a
Speaker 10: Kurdish date. So basically what now is happening is that
Speaker 10: the Kurdish Pikak and the Kurdish political counterpart in Turkey,
Speaker 10: they're basically waiting for steps by Turkey now to give
Speaker 10: them basically trust to continue this process.
Speaker 7: And there was also a speech by.
Speaker 10: The Turkish president Erdoland where he was also saying that
Speaker 10: it's the end. We don't need anymore, We need to talk.
Speaker 10: It's not a time for weapons anymore. We spend trillions
Speaker 10: of dollars on the war against the pik Ak. We
Speaker 10: had this a lot of martyrs and we sacrificed a lot,
Speaker 10: and it's now the time to stop the war and
Speaker 10: to do talking. And he said they're going to work
Speaker 10: with the Kurdish Party and this ultra Turkish nationalist party
Speaker 10: the MHP in the parliament, and to also set up
Speaker 10: a commission to basically work on constitutional changes.
Speaker 8: Yeah, let's take a break for adverts here and then
Speaker 8: we'll come back. All right, we are back. I guess
Speaker 8: we should talk briefly about like the nature of this
Speaker 8: this core for piece. You explained very well that this
Speaker 8: is probably a higher chance of success than there has
Speaker 8: ever been, right, Like, we have the explicit buy in
Speaker 8: of Ojulan, who hasn't been seen on video since the nineties,
Speaker 8: so like to have him making a video statement, it's
Speaker 8: quite significant. I'm sure he's been seen on video, but
Speaker 8: like not not like making a speech, right, and then
Speaker 8: that we have like this this endorsement in the Turkish Parliament. Like,
Speaker 8: I think there's been a lot of speculation about what
Speaker 8: led to this, and some of it's not particularly helpful.
Speaker 8: But you know, you're you're very well educated on these matters.
Speaker 8: What do you think this means for not just the
Speaker 8: PKK but the k c K. I guess like the
Speaker 8: Kurdish Freedom Movement that the diferent movements throughout Curtistown, they
Speaker 8: are inspired by the political thought of Aujilan Well.
Speaker 10: I mean, until now, it's difficult to say what exactly
Speaker 10: is going to happen because the PIKK said they're going
Speaker 10: to go, they will disarm.
Speaker 7: But there's other.
Speaker 10: Groups which are linked to the PIKK in Iran, Iran
Speaker 10: and in Syria and also for instance Sinjar. Those groups
Speaker 10: said they were not Some of them have said publicly
Speaker 10: that we're not part of this process or they welcome
Speaker 10: the process, and others they didn't really say much.
Speaker 11: To the City's group haven't said really a lot.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so it's also going to.
Speaker 10: Be interesting what will happen with those groups, with the
Speaker 10: Iranian Kurdish group and also with the Serian democratic forces
Speaker 10: in Syria that have a different situation. Also after the
Speaker 10: fall of US out, they have these talks with Damascus.
Speaker 10: And actually one of the reasons that the first piece
Speaker 10: process broke down was because that in actually at that
Speaker 10: time also that Turkey was a little bit afraid of
Speaker 10: this alliance between the Kurds and the Americans at the
Speaker 10: time against ISIS that was then rising up in Syria
Speaker 10: and attacked the Kurdish town of Cobine in Syria, which
Speaker 10: created an alliance between the Kurts and the US against
Speaker 10: the ISIS terrorists militant jihadi group.
Speaker 11: But now the situation actually is interesting.
Speaker 10: So at that time the Curds were empowered in Syria,
Speaker 10: but now you can see there's a completely different situation
Speaker 10: now the opposite way. So now you have the rebels
Speaker 10: that took over Damascus and they are now the government
Speaker 10: run by Jiulani his previous name, who's now called himself
Speaker 10: antal Shada, his real name. So they now have a
Speaker 10: new Islamist controlled government and Damascus, and there's a lot
Speaker 10: of tension between the Curts in Syria and Damascus. So
Speaker 10: this could also risk basically this piece process with Turkey
Speaker 10: because the SDF they have also ideological ins with the
Speaker 10: pik Ak So it's also interesting how this will work out.
Speaker 10: So in the past it was also always like the
Speaker 10: fighting between Turkey and the Pika k could threat than
Speaker 10: the SCF Assyria, but of sort of the other way
Speaker 10: around that fighting between possible fighting in the future between
Speaker 10: Damascus and the curtain Syria, it could threaten the peace
Speaker 10: process in Turkey. Yeah, and erdo and he made this
Speaker 10: very big speech not a very long time ago where
Speaker 10: he mentioned that Turkey doesn't only want peace for the
Speaker 10: Curse in Turkey and for Alla Whites, also a religious
Speaker 10: minority in Turkey, but he was also talking that he
Speaker 10: wants peace for the Curse in Syria and also in Iraq,
Speaker 10: that they should also live like a prosperous life in Syria,
Speaker 10: and that they have good relations with the Sian government.
Speaker 10: So I think that's also a very interesting point that
Speaker 10: you don't see many articles that there's like this very
Speaker 10: big interlinkage between all these different tissues.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and I think Turkey has maintained that the SDF
Speaker 8: is the PKK right just with like a different badge,
Speaker 8: which is not the case.
Speaker 5: They share a lot of politics, but they're distinct. Turkey
Speaker 5: also has like extensive proxy forces in Syria that have
Speaker 5: been fighting with the SDF since I guess late well,
Speaker 5: I mean for years, but like in an expanded sense,
Speaker 5: since since the beginning of the fall of the Asad
Speaker 5: regime that we saw like probably seven or eight months ago. Now, No,
Speaker 5: it's a very complex situation. It's also as as we
Speaker 5: record this today on the fifteenth, Syria is a very
Speaker 5: diverse country and to add to all the groups you mentioned,
Speaker 5: there is currently fighting between the government and Druze militias. Right,
Speaker 5: can you explain a little bit about the situation there
Speaker 5: and the relevance of that.
Speaker 10: Well, I mean the Drus they are a religious community
Speaker 10: that are not same as the Sunni Muslims, and they
Speaker 10: control their own area on the border, the town called
Speaker 10: Sweda and the villages around it, and also they have
Speaker 10: some areas in Damascus where they have the presence. So
Speaker 10: the Drews basically during the time when the Asad regime
Speaker 10: still wasn't power, they didn't really like fight very high
Speaker 10: against the Assaut regime in the beginning, but they didn't
Speaker 10: allow the Assaut regime to recruit military recruit people in
Speaker 10: their area and they sort of tried to keep the
Speaker 10: regime out of their area. So during the civil war
Speaker 10: they were sort of semi autonomous, but not officially. And
Speaker 10: actually in the last years before the fall OFFASA, they
Speaker 10: were like a big protests in the Drews areas in
Speaker 10: support of the Syne Revolution and against the Assaut regime.
Speaker 10: So they were like very big protests in the Druz
Speaker 10: areas against the Assaut regime. So when the Assad regime
Speaker 10: was militarily weakening and the rebels from the other side
Speaker 10: of Syria they were attacking the Assad regime, the Drews
Speaker 10: they also joined the fight and they marched together with
Speaker 10: the Southern rebels. They marched on to Moscus, and they
Speaker 10: were actually the first one that entered the Moscus, not
Speaker 10: the ahmtal Shada or the HTS. Actually the first ones
Speaker 10: that entered the Moscus was the Southern rebels and the Drews.
Speaker 10: But there's this thing is that the Moscus wants to
Speaker 10: have this new regime or the new government, and the
Speaker 10: Mouscus they want to have this very centralized system, so
Speaker 10: they don't want the Drews to run their own armed
Speaker 10: groups and they have their own sort of local autonomy,
Speaker 10: so they have They have been fighting before between the
Speaker 10: Drews and the new authorities in Syria in areas near Damascus,
Speaker 10: but there was like a ceasefire and the fighting stopped.
Speaker 10: But recently there's also like historical tensions between these Arab
Speaker 10: bedouin tribes and the Drews in this area. So these
Speaker 10: areas are quite mixed. So there's actually this recent conflict.
Speaker 10: They started when Biduan tribes they they robbed like a
Speaker 10: merchant who was a Druce and then after that they
Speaker 10: were like mutual kidnapping, like tensions within both sides. And
Speaker 10: then basically, although the Moscus said they were neutral, the
Speaker 10: Muscus started to support these Bedouin groups against the Drus
Speaker 10: and started marching on on Sueda, which is the the
Speaker 10: drew stronghold on the border.
Speaker 11: And so actually there have been.
Speaker 10: Like a few days, not even a few days, but
Speaker 10: have been like a short period of fighting now and
Speaker 10: actually Damascus they entered this Zruze town of Sueda and
Speaker 10: they actually said, okay, we control the town now, and
Speaker 10: now we're going to withdraw the Seran army and then
Speaker 10: the internal security force is going to control the city.
Speaker 10: That very shortly after, Israel started bombing heavily the cern
Speaker 10: armed forces of the new Sirn government and then the
Speaker 10: Drews armed groups they sort of pushed back and they
Speaker 10: pushed out this internal security force out of the city.
Speaker 10: And now the Drews are according to many reports back
Speaker 10: in control of the city of Zuida. And now you
Speaker 10: see that just like what happened with the Alla Whites
Speaker 10: when there was this Osad regime remnants that had uprising
Speaker 10: against the new authorities, and then there were like these rebels.
Speaker 10: They were mobilized with mosk all over Syria and they
Speaker 10: went to the coast areas and they defeated those Assad regime,
Speaker 10: but they killed also a lot of civilians, some reports
Speaker 10: over fifteen hundred people. So what you now see is
Speaker 10: that the Damascus is against mobilizing those people with mosques
Speaker 10: to march on Zueda. But the difference is with the
Speaker 10: All Whites is that Israel also has DRUS, So there's
Speaker 10: also pressure on the Israeli government to support the Drews.
Speaker 10: So it's not only because of their strategic interests, it's
Speaker 10: also because they are Drews living in Israel itself that
Speaker 10: also have joined the Israelian army, so they're also pushing
Speaker 10: Israel for taking action. So you saw that today like Israel,
Speaker 10: they took a lot of they carried out a lot
Speaker 10: of air strikes, and the Drews that are basically back
Speaker 10: in control of most of the Sueda city, not of
Speaker 10: the whole area. But the fighting is not over yet.
Speaker 10: And then you also have different Ruis fractions. Some of
Speaker 10: them they have better relations with Damascus, the majority of
Speaker 10: them don't. So now we're going to see if there's
Speaker 10: going to be fighting, if the fighting is going to
Speaker 10: increase again, We've seen our reports of the HDS or
Speaker 10: that the Moscus government forces are using drones strikes by
Speaker 10: themselves on Thuice forces. So they're using basically the drones
Speaker 10: that they used to overthrow the sut regime.
Speaker 7: Okay, so yeah, that's the situation.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think like the world stopped looking at Syria.
Speaker 8: I mean, I guess the world stop looking at Syria
Speaker 8: a while ago, like really, after the defeat of the
Speaker 8: Territorial Califate, it's been much harder to sell stories in
Speaker 8: big newspapers in the United States. But yeah, it's by
Speaker 8: no means, like the fighting is not over, and it
Speaker 8: leaves their SDF Western Kurdistan branch of this Kurdish movement right,
Speaker 8: like in as you said, a fairly perilous condition.
Speaker 7: Right, the.
Speaker 8: Damascus wants to centralize like they want to have they
Speaker 8: don't want to have independent they don't want to have
Speaker 8: like federated autonomy. The United States seems to be at
Speaker 8: least the United States envoy to Damascus seems to be
Speaker 8: making statements. It suggests that like the only way for
Speaker 8: it through centralization. On one hand, we have the Pepkklene
Speaker 8: and arm hand, we have the SDF in its difficult position.
Speaker 8: Where does this leave Like the Kurdish Freedom movement, I
Speaker 8: think this has been the thing that a lot of
Speaker 8: people all over the world have looked up to, right,
Speaker 8: people have, especially rish Ava, as this example that people
Speaker 8: could build something a place where freedom could exist in
Speaker 8: the middle of this terrible war in Syria.
Speaker 5: Do you think the movement's like in danger now?
Speaker 10: Well, I mean you have this new government in Syria actually,
Speaker 10: and in initially Trump administration was quite reluctant to have
Speaker 10: relations with the new authorities in Damascus because they were
Speaker 10: I mean, Jiolana used to be on a y Ahmad
Speaker 10: I used to be on a terrorist sanctional list.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there was a bounty for him at one point,
Speaker 5: it wasn't there.
Speaker 10: Yeah, But I think there was like a very intensive
Speaker 10: lobbying by some Gulf states and Turkey to basically remove
Speaker 10: the sanctions on an Ashata Julani, but also removed sanctions
Speaker 10: on Syria that the economic sanctions that were actually were
Speaker 10: on the Asaturgy.
Speaker 11: So I think the Trump administration changed their position.
Speaker 10: And also a new ambassador for Syria and Turkey was appointed,
Speaker 10: so he was not only the bassador Turkey but also
Speaker 10: for Syria, and he's basically echoing a lot of the
Speaker 10: points of the new authorities in Damascus that he was
Speaker 10: talking about one state, one army, one days, one days,
Speaker 10: and the SEF should be integrated and blah blah blah.
Speaker 10: So there was also recently there were talks between Damascus
Speaker 10: and the STF because in March they reached an agreement
Speaker 10: with Western support and they were trying to basically make
Speaker 10: a more finalized agreement in recently a few days ago,
Speaker 10: they had these talks in Damascus and the French were
Speaker 10: there and the Brits were there and Americans were there.
Speaker 11: But this agreement was not implemented.
Speaker 7: It didn't lead to anything.
Speaker 10: So it was that really didn't really work very well
Speaker 10: because the Moscus is insisting on this centralized state. And
Speaker 10: I was just listening to Kurdish sharing Kurdish official as
Speaker 10: she was also saying, like we don't want to separate
Speaker 10: from Syria, but we want to have some form of
Speaker 10: local councils and a decentralized Syria, not like a centralized Syria.
Speaker 10: And she was also talking about what happened to the
Speaker 10: Drews that it's not a very good example.
Speaker 7: For the future of Syria.
Speaker 10: Yeah, so I think definitely what you're saying that there
Speaker 10: is a sort of a threat because in the past
Speaker 10: was very supportive of the SEF in the fight against ISIS,
Speaker 10: although they didn't support so much their political project, but
Speaker 10: they supported them because they fought ISIS. And also they
Speaker 10: were keeping out Iranian backed malicious from areas like the Resor.
Speaker 10: But now you don't have me run anymore. In Syria,
Speaker 10: they were completely kicked out after the fall of the
Speaker 10: Asot regime. All these militias they have been disbanded or
Speaker 10: hiding or some of them actually now being used by
Speaker 10: the Muscus against the Jews. So now that argument is
Speaker 10: not there anymore, that you okay, we have the SDF,
Speaker 10: they keep out the run from the oil fields. Yeah,
Speaker 10: you could still argue you have still have the fight
Speaker 10: against ICES, I mean ICES is still thread. Yeah, but
Speaker 10: the Curts don't have that same leverage anymore as is
Speaker 10: in the past, that they said, Okay, we're the main
Speaker 10: ones fighting ices. We keep out the run from these
Speaker 10: areas because now you have the Moscus. The Moscus said,
Speaker 10: why the kurtshould do that? Like, let's us take over
Speaker 10: those prisons and the camps where you have these thousands
Speaker 10: of ISIS families and ices prisoners, and we don't need
Speaker 10: the Curts to run the ices. Well, we can do
Speaker 10: that for you. So I think that's now like the
Speaker 10: big issue is that the US seems to be more
Speaker 10: supporting the Moscus these diplomatically than the SDF, although military
Speaker 10: speaking that the support is still going on for the
Speaker 10: SDF until twenty twenty six in the last Pentagon budget
Speaker 10: which was not accepted yet they're still like millions of
Speaker 10: support for the SDF to maintain the prisons and this
Speaker 10: kind of stuff.
Speaker 11: I think it's it's it's a difficult sitution.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that these prisons like our whole and others right
Speaker 8: like they there, I guess kind of the only leverage
Speaker 8: the FDF has with the United States, where along with
Speaker 8: the continuing and somewhat increasing ISIS attacks, but that's still
Speaker 8: much less of a threat to the US than it
Speaker 8: was ten years ago, say right, like it's it's much less,
Speaker 8: so a significant thing.
Speaker 5: So like what is the.
Speaker 8: Status of those prisons that currently they're still guided by
Speaker 8: the SDF right, but the people aren't familiar. Can you
Speaker 8: just explain what those prisons consist of and like who's
Speaker 8: in there and who's guarding them.
Speaker 10: Well, so ISIS credit this jihadi state between twenty fourteen
Speaker 10: and twenty nineteen. But then the Kurdish that SDF they
Speaker 10: basically took most of the areas under ISIS control. They
Speaker 10: defeated basically ISIS with the support of the US, so
Speaker 10: they lost the territory and the last basically was for
Speaker 10: a small town called Bahus and the resor.
Speaker 11: So you had all these ISIS families there.
Speaker 10: And also there were like several ISIS foreign members that
Speaker 10: were captured, so you have the wives of ISIS fighters,
Speaker 10: and you also have ISIS fighters themselves that were captured
Speaker 10: during these battles. So all these people they were brought
Speaker 10: to camps. So I was there in Syria many times.
Speaker 10: For instance, during the battle for Raka, which was used
Speaker 10: to be the capital of the ISIS Caliphate, they were
Speaker 10: like bringing the Isis families and women to a camp
Speaker 10: in I Knowisa, But after that they moved most of
Speaker 10: those people to actually move almost all of them to
Speaker 10: the Roche camp and all hold camp in northern Syria
Speaker 10: in the Hassaka province. And also that includes foreigners. You
Speaker 10: can imagine people from Uzbekistan, from Uihus, from China, people
Speaker 10: from Turkey, French people, European people, so it's full of
Speaker 10: a lot of different people. And then the majority are
Speaker 10: actually Iraqis and Syrians. So the SCF they have this
Speaker 10: foul they a majority. Like a lot of people in
Speaker 10: those camps, they have been repatriated or they have to
Speaker 10: return to their homes. So I think those camps like
Speaker 10: a whole camp. Like the prison. It's not a prison,
Speaker 10: it's a camp. I think, like the number of people
Speaker 10: that are basically decreased almost fifty percent, but there are
Speaker 10: still a lot of people inside. But the prisons you
Speaker 10: have still all these Isis spiders that were in prison
Speaker 10: during the war, and a lot of them are foreigners,
Speaker 10: including Dutch, another country. You know, some countries they have
Speaker 10: returned there, they have returned their people there. So we
Speaker 10: have some people, you know America, they took back most
Speaker 10: of the families and the fighters, and they prosecute them
Speaker 10: in the US. But you also have countries that didn't
Speaker 10: bring back the fighters. For instance, they only brought back
Speaker 10: the woman. So that's the situation that all those people
Speaker 10: are still there. And it's actually what you mentioned. It's
Speaker 10: like one of the big reasons for support for the SDF,
Speaker 10: And it's also one of the reasons that the SDF
Speaker 10: is getting millions to keep those prisons in good shape
Speaker 10: because they have been also by isis to three those
Speaker 10: prisoners from those prisons basically.
Speaker 8: Yeah, in successful attempts in twenty twenty, twenty twenty two,
Speaker 8: I think it was when they had the last like
Speaker 8: major prison escape, which, yeah, it's a bad thing for
Speaker 8: our world if if all those all those people get out,
Speaker 8: and like you say, lots of European nations, I think
Speaker 8: it's something that I wish Americans had paid more attention
Speaker 8: to because the thing that European nations have done, the
Speaker 8: United Kingdom being a paramount example, is like rendered some
Speaker 8: of those people stateless. Right that they've removed there in
Speaker 8: this case, Shmima Bagoum is probably the most well known example. Right,
Speaker 8: they've removed her British passport and now she doesn't have
Speaker 8: a state, she's stateless. It's something that the US has
Speaker 8: recently done to people living in the United States, and
Speaker 8: like it does feel something as if you know that
Speaker 8: the president has been established and now it's being carried
Speaker 8: down and it's obviously deeply concerning to see it happening
Speaker 8: here after it happened there at which people had opposed
Speaker 8: it when it did well.
Speaker 10: I mean the US in the US itself in Syria
Speaker 10: was very a big advocate of bringing the people out.
Speaker 5: Yes, it was, Yeah, because it will make.
Speaker 7: It easier for them to withdraw.
Speaker 10: So they were actually pushing those countries that didn't want
Speaker 10: to bring back. There are nationals to basically bring them back,
Speaker 10: like Western countries, the UK and others. Yeah, but some
Speaker 10: of these countries were actually forced by court orders or others.
Speaker 10: But a lot of these counties were actually quite reluctant
Speaker 10: to bring them back because they were afraid of like
Speaker 10: security risk and stuff, or that they will be released
Speaker 10: quite quickly and then they would again like be active
Speaker 10: and judist activities.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so US was very very so.
Speaker 10: I remember that the US was even offering like members
Speaker 10: of this Coalition against ISIS, which was created in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 10: Likes you said, if you cannot bring them yourself, I
Speaker 10: mean we can. Our military can help you to bring
Speaker 10: those people out. If you think that you it's it's
Speaker 10: difficult for you to go to Syria and pick those
Speaker 10: nationals up from your accounts.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, been pretty unsuccessful, like in a lot of
Speaker 8: well in some European cases they have, but still yeah,
Speaker 8: lots of them utterly refusing to do it. I wonder
Speaker 8: then as we finish up here, right, like we spoke
Speaker 8: about this PKK disarmament, obviously it's a symbolic disarmament, right
Speaker 8: there is still I don't quite know how big the
Speaker 8: hPG is, but it's much bigger than thirty people. And
Speaker 8: then the weapons they laid down were like a very
Speaker 8: small percentage of their weapons. Were they just burning like kalashnikov?
Speaker 8: So did they burn like larger weapons too?
Speaker 10: No, it was just our personal COLASGIC calls basically, Okay,
Speaker 10: So I mean it was also like more symbolic symbolic ceremony,
Speaker 10: like we are willing to give up.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 10: But the thing is that also it's still not clear
Speaker 10: what happened to those thirty people.
Speaker 11: Are they going to go back to Turkey.
Speaker 5: That's what I wanted to ask.
Speaker 10: Yeah, are they going to stay in Iraqi Kurdistan and
Speaker 10: find the job there, because you have people like that
Speaker 10: in Iraqi curstand that used to be with the Pigger
Speaker 10: k and that now they work in I don't know,
Speaker 10: in media or construction sector or entertainment sector. You have
Speaker 10: people like that, but there's not much clarity on that.
Speaker 10: But I think also that's because they're waiting on Turkey
Speaker 10: to make possible constitutional steps, you know, to see what
Speaker 10: Turkey is going to do, because for instance, Turkey could
Speaker 10: offer an amnesty or these kind of things, then those
Speaker 10: people could return. And also some of them were saying
Speaker 10: like now it's the end of weapons, but we still
Speaker 10: want to be involved in politics.
Speaker 5: Right through the political party.
Speaker 10: So it's also possible that those people want to go
Speaker 10: back to Turkey and basically take part in Kurdish politics
Speaker 10: or Turkish politics to be more truged in Turkey. So
Speaker 10: I think it's a little bit too early to say
Speaker 10: what happens with those people because I remember also if
Speaker 10: I very much corrected, they're also having peace process that
Speaker 10: basically people have given basically went to the border and
Speaker 10: give themselves up to Turkey. But that didn't happen now,
Speaker 10: so it's a bit different than in the past. But
Speaker 10: it seems that the Turkish government was very happy with
Speaker 10: the ceremony.
Speaker 7: They didn't complain about it.
Speaker 5: So okay, yeah, yeah, I wondered what happened.
Speaker 8: So there's guerrillas or former guerrillas I suppose, who laid
Speaker 8: down their weapons at the end of the ceremony. They
Speaker 8: just kind of returned to the mountains or whatever. We
Speaker 8: don't know what will happen with them now.
Speaker 10: That's that's not clear to me because there are still
Speaker 10: some unanswered questions, like what you mentioned now, like what
Speaker 10: those thirty people did, Yeah, what those people are going
Speaker 10: to do now?
Speaker 8: So right, there's a lot of people, and it's a
Speaker 8: lot of people, some of whom have spent decades as
Speaker 8: cadra of the revolution, right that they have they haven't
Speaker 8: really known life outside of the revolution for a very
Speaker 8: long time.
Speaker 10: Yeah, so it's so a bit difficult for them to
Speaker 10: return to civilian life because I mean, because that's they
Speaker 10: probably joined when they're quite young. And I think i's
Speaker 10: also the profiles of the people of those thirty people
Speaker 10: will burn their weapons. That a lot of them they
Speaker 10: joined in the nineties. Wow, so they have been in
Speaker 10: they have been in the mountains for a very long time. Yeah,
Speaker 10: I mean some of them were young, but there were
Speaker 10: also older people among them. But definitely it's going to
Speaker 10: be a question what will happen with those people, although
Speaker 10: I mean they were also talked that some leadership of
Speaker 10: the armed Pikak movement might go to Europe and get
Speaker 10: asylum there, yeah, instead.
Speaker 11: Of going back to Turkey.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 10: You know, you have also a lot of courage the
Speaker 10: asport or organizations active there, so they could like basically
Speaker 10: embrace those people.
Speaker 5: But they're still listed as a foreign terrorist organization in
Speaker 5: most two Yeah exactly.
Speaker 10: I mean, for instance, they probably would want to have
Speaker 10: something like what the Syrian president have now Ahmatoshada that
Speaker 10: he used to be rested as a sanctioned as a
Speaker 10: terrorist organization and then to have that removed. But I'm
Speaker 10: sure that that's not on the table anytime soon.
Speaker 7: But that happened with the HTS.
Speaker 10: But also it happened for instance musidin Hulk, an Ranian
Speaker 10: opposition group, they also got delisted. So it's technically as possible,
Speaker 10: but I think we are like in a very early
Speaker 10: stage of the peace process. So that's why I think
Speaker 10: it's to take time before we have more clarity and
Speaker 10: some of these answers that questions you ask, now, I
Speaker 10: mean most of the people that attended the ceremony didn't
Speaker 10: have an answer to that too, because there was not
Speaker 10: much clarity on that because it was just a ceremony.
Speaker 10: There was like a statement. Journals were not able to
Speaker 10: talk to most of the journalists. I mean there were
Speaker 10: there was like some statement in some Kurdish media, but
Speaker 10: in general, like they were not able to talk to
Speaker 10: those fighters, like now, what are you going to do?
Speaker 10: There was not like access to those thirty people that
Speaker 10: burn their weapons.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so it.
Speaker 10: Was like sort of quite very much controlled ceremony. It
Speaker 10: was very difficult to report on it, basically, which is
Speaker 10: very different from the previous preat process when it was
Speaker 10: much more open. Yeah, but that time there was not
Speaker 10: like forty fighters giving up their weapons. They just had
Speaker 10: like sort of a press conferences what we're going to do,
Speaker 10: and that was very different than what happened now.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, it gets it's because just to keep watching
Speaker 8: it's fascinating to watch it unfold like I was in
Speaker 8: Curdish Down a year and a half ago, and it
Speaker 8: is competit. See, the situation is completely different likewise in
Speaker 8: the whole of Syria. So yeah, it's fascinating to watch.
Speaker 8: I'm sure if people want to know more about it.
Speaker 8: You're very good at reporting on this. You often post
Speaker 8: on Twitter about the situation, and you write for a
Speaker 8: number of outlets, So how can people follow your work?
Speaker 10: Well, the best place to follow my workers on Twitter
Speaker 10: on its X because I'm quite active there, but also
Speaker 10: I write for places like Middle East I something thanks
Speaker 10: like watching the Institute New a Liance Institute. I also
Speaker 10: write for a Kurdish magazine called Kurtis Tank Chronicle, and
Speaker 10: also I pitched for other websites, so I'm quite active
Speaker 10: on different issues, but mostly focused on things related to Kurts,
Speaker 10: so mostly stuff related to Iran, Turkey, Syria.
Speaker 5: It's yeah, well, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 5: We really appreciate your insight.
Speaker 11: Jery, welcome, my friend.
Speaker 4: This is it could happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly
Speaker 4: newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
Speaker 4: and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today
Speaker 4: I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. Yes,
Speaker 4: this episode we are covering the week of July nine
Speaker 4: to July sixteen. What's going on, my boys and in
Speaker 4: some cases gals and in some cases days that were
Speaker 4: its or whatever?
Speaker 2: And the answer for everyone is ed.
Speaker 4: Hooray in some cases my gals. I guess let's start
Speaker 4: by talking about Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 2: That's what we always do, Jepstein. Yeah, you know what, Garrison,
Speaker 2: I hear You've got some bars to drop about Epstein.
Speaker 4: Jesus all right.
Speaker 2: Well, that's that's my work for the day.
Speaker 4: Brief brief summary. Previously on this show, we talked about
Speaker 4: how Patel and a Bungino, the head of the FBI,
Speaker 4: have previously come under fire from micro supporters for saying
Speaker 4: that Epstein really did kill himself. And this has kind
Speaker 4: of been bubbling in the base for a while because
Speaker 4: they used this as one of their main like campaign
Speaker 4: and podcast talking points for the past four years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Bongino was a huge.
Speaker 4: Elstein, I mean, and like Patel's like the QAnon guy,
Speaker 4: like he's both these guys have have made their careers
Speaker 4: the past four years, like heavily about this topic. And
Speaker 4: now they are, you know, backtracking on a whole bunch
Speaker 4: of the previous you know claims or you know, just
Speaker 4: asking questions type stuff that they did the past few years.
Speaker 4: And like a week and a half ago, a memo
Speaker 4: from the Department of Justice announced that it was closing
Speaker 4: the investigation and claiming that there was no client list
Speaker 4: for Jeffrey Epstein, despite Pambondi herself boasting about having Epstein's
Speaker 4: client list on her desk only a few months ago.
Speaker 4: This caused a huge freakout in the MEGA world. There
Speaker 4: was conflicting reports that Bondi or Patel or Bungino might
Speaker 4: be resigning like in protest of this memo. A lot
Speaker 4: of like uncertainty over what was real. And then on
Speaker 4: July twelfth, Trump had to speak his own truth social
Speaker 4: okay quote, what's going on with my boys and in
Speaker 4: some cases gals. They're all going after Attorney General. Pambondi's
Speaker 4: doing a fantastic job. We're on one team Mega, and
Speaker 4: I don't like what's happening. We have a perfect administration,
Speaker 4: the talk of the world, and selfish people are trying
Speaker 4: to hurt it all over a guy who never dies,
Speaker 4: Jeffrey Epstein. For years, it's Epstein over and over again.
Speaker 4: Why are we giving publicity to files written by Obama,
Speaker 4: Crooked Hillary, Komy Brennan and the losers and criminals of
Speaker 4: the Biden administration who conned the world with the Russia
Speaker 4: RUSSA Russia hoax, fifty one intelligence agents, and the Laptop
Speaker 4: from Hell all caps. They created the Epstein files, just
Speaker 4: like they created the fake Hillary Clinton Christopher Steele dossier
Speaker 4: that they used on me. And now my so called
Speaker 4: friends and quotes are playing right into their hands. So
Speaker 4: this was right after claiming that the Epstein files did
Speaker 4: not exist, that these things are not actually real, and
Speaker 4: then Trump's talking about how they are real but they
Speaker 4: are in fact written by his enemies. Despite the most
Speaker 4: recent investigation into Jeffrey Epstein starting at twenty nineteen, when
Speaker 4: if you remember, Donald Trump was the president.
Speaker 8: Well Garson the defining political question of the modern areas
Speaker 8: who was president in twenty twenty, So I can see
Speaker 8: it moving back.
Speaker 2: There's no answer to this question, you know, We just can't.
Speaker 2: We don't know, we will never know. There's no way
Speaker 2: to prove it. Our records don't reach back that far.
Speaker 2: We just simply can't say who president was. The mists
Speaker 2: of time have shaded over so.
Speaker 4: Much of modern domestic politics is about confusion over who
Speaker 4: was president in twenty nineteen and twenty twenty when it
Speaker 4: was Donald Trump. He ends by saying, quote, let's not
Speaker 4: waste time and energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody nobody cares about.
Speaker 4: So funny, you could tell he's so far gone too.
Speaker 4: He sounds scared because he never fully understood this stuff.
Speaker 4: Like there's things that he understands instinctually, and there's things
Speaker 4: that he never really got. And because he was Epstein's friend,
Speaker 4: he never really got why this was so central. He
Speaker 4: kind of got that it was, but he also kind
Speaker 4: of assumed, like, well, if I tell everyone.
Speaker 2: To shut the fuck up, they will, They're gonna be
Speaker 2: look up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, because that's how he's done things for
Speaker 4: the past like twelve years, and it's more often than
Speaker 4: not worked really well for him. But this has become
Speaker 4: such a load bearing aspect of like the maga self image,
Speaker 4: Like this is like, you know, this type of stuff
Speaker 4: is what druve QAnon essentially like a cult. He and
Speaker 4: he never fully understood why QAnon was really a thing.
Speaker 4: He never like truly grasped it.
Speaker 2: That's why he never really he started more recently doing
Speaker 2: some QAnon signposting, But yeah, he clearly never fully got
Speaker 2: why it was happening. Yeah, like it was convenient.
Speaker 4: And now the monster that he and his you know,
Speaker 4: quote unquote friends have helped create all these years is
Speaker 4: starting to nibble on his own leg.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: This past weekend, influencers like Tim Poole, Benny Johnson, and
Speaker 4: Charlie Kirk all started to kind of turn on Trump
Speaker 4: on a play a quick video from disgraced BuzzFeed writer
Speaker 4: Benny Johnson now right wing podcaster by.
Speaker 9: Admitting that the Epstein files are real and have been written,
Speaker 9: and that you've read them and you don't like their
Speaker 9: contents and they were written by your enemies. It doesn't
Speaker 9: make It doesn't make the most compelling case.
Speaker 7: As far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 5: Holy moly, holy moly, holy moly. You had to hear first.
Speaker 4: There was a lot of this stuff over the weekend,
Speaker 4: like this, this whole like podcasting Gohert, which which so
Speaker 4: many people, you know, credit to Trump's great success in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty four all started asking questions and we're kind
Speaker 4: of confused. I don't know why they would be. It's
Speaker 4: been very well documented that Trump was friends with Epstein
Speaker 4: for a long time. But this time this thing finally
Speaker 4: broke containment.
Speaker 7: Yea.
Speaker 4: And when you have like fucking.
Speaker 12: Charlie Kirks, someone who's basically like one of the GOP's
Speaker 12: like top narrative shepherds essentially, and when you have him
Speaker 12: like questioning the president's own story and credibility, that's like
Speaker 12: a pretty big shake up in the mega world.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not really explicable. There's no plausible deniability.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 12: I think for a long time this has been like
Speaker 12: the load bearing cognitive dissonance for this entire movement. And
Speaker 12: I actually do think when Elon first was just like
Speaker 12: he's in the files, I think that was the first
Speaker 12: moment that all these people were suddenly allowed to do this.
Speaker 4: That was the first domino. Definitely.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he cracked the shut on it.
Speaker 12: And I think that has like torn open this rift
Speaker 12: that has allowed all of these people who previously their
Speaker 12: cognitivessonance has sustained them through a decade of like, yeah,
Speaker 12: of our dear rulers obviously friends with the pedophile life.
Speaker 4: I'll say it, critical support even.
Speaker 12: Let them fight, Let them fight.
Speaker 4: So the next move that the geniuses of the Trump
Speaker 4: administration tried to pull to to settle things down was
Speaker 4: released the raw footage, the missing raw footage outside Jeffrey
Speaker 4: Epstein's sale, to finally finally close the book on this
Speaker 4: jeffre EPs didn't kill himself moment, and they released it,
Speaker 4: and everyone realized, you know what, They're right, there's nothing
Speaker 4: more to look into here. Case closed.
Speaker 2: You know, probably we all rose up as if with
Speaker 2: one voice to say, this doesn't seem suspicious.
Speaker 4: So Wired found that this quote unquote raw video was
Speaker 4: actually edited and had it nearly three minutes removed.
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, but look it does, doesn't Jeffrey Epstein deserve
Speaker 2: some privacy, you know, three minutes on his own.
Speaker 4: It was a really personal decision for somebody to take.
Speaker 2: And I yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: So no, after claiming that like they've released this, this
Speaker 4: this completely, this is completely you know, ripped straight from
Speaker 4: the hard drive raw footage. Uh, it showed that it
Speaker 4: was edited in Adobe premiere and has these missing missing
Speaker 4: three minutes. Pam Bondi initially tried to say that there's
Speaker 4: usually a minute missing from footage because of a computer
Speaker 4: reset that happens every night at the same time, which
Speaker 4: was that immediate proven incorrect by the by there being
Speaker 4: way more than one minute missing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, three minutes. I'm sorry. They're simply like, I came
Speaker 2: into this as like, I don't know what happened, you know,
Speaker 2: maybe he killed himself.
Speaker 4: Maybe, I.
Speaker 2: Mean, and now I'm now I'm I'm I am sincerely
Speaker 2: more on the well, something there's something there height say.
Speaker 12: I will say, there's one thing that I think this
Speaker 12: does definitively rule out, which is that it was definitely
Speaker 12: not the Clinton crime family. We've ruled out one possible.
Speaker 2: Now you see this, This brings me to a theory
Speaker 2: that I have been working on for the last couple
Speaker 2: of days, and I think this is this is really
Speaker 2: important to get out to people. So obviously, the other
Speaker 2: big statement that Donald Trump made in the last week
Speaker 2: was that his uncle, who used to be a professor
Speaker 2: at M I T, had taught Ted Kaczinsky and talked
Speaker 2: to him about Ted Kazinski and been like, yay, you know,
Speaker 2: there's a real thin line between genius and insanity. And
Speaker 2: then it came out that Donald Trump's uncle, who Todd
Speaker 2: at MIT, died in nineteen and eighty five, and of
Speaker 2: course the unibomber was not publicly identified until nineteen ninety six. Now,
Speaker 2: some people have interpreted this as Donald Trump lying, which
Speaker 2: I think we can all agree doesn't seem like something
Speaker 2: he would do. So the only other explanation is that
Speaker 2: Trump and his family knew who the unibomber was for
Speaker 2: more than a decade and kept it hidden from the
Speaker 2: rest of the United States. Now, what is the unibomber
Speaker 2: and Donald Chuck Trump have in common? Obviously two people
Speaker 2: who were treated very unfairly by the Clintons, right, I
Speaker 2: think we can all agree on that, you know, so
Speaker 2: it all ties together.
Speaker 4: Both are possibly victims of m k Ultra.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 4: No, his little Tuesday speech in Pittsburgh was quite bizarre.
Speaker 4: Not just that Kasinski never went to MIT.
Speaker 5: It's gonna say to my notedge, no, no, no.
Speaker 4: No, just did not go to the university that doctor
Speaker 4: John Trump was at.
Speaker 12: I will say this is the first one of these
Speaker 12: stories that this genuinely sounds like an Alex Jones story,
Speaker 12: Like this is the kind of story that Alex Jones
Speaker 12: tells about his uncles.
Speaker 4: All the time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they ain't. They ain't talking to Alex Jones right now.
Speaker 4: No, definitely.
Speaker 5: But it's like persona non grotra in the White House currently.
Speaker 4: It is a truly bizarre ramble.
Speaker 13: I have to take it off to brag just for
Speaker 13: a second, because when I first heard about AI, you know, it's.
Speaker 7: Not my thing. Although my uncle was at MIT, one
Speaker 7: of the great.
Speaker 13: Professors fifty one years whatever, who longest serving professor in the.
Speaker 7: History of MIT.
Speaker 13: Three degrees in nuclear chemical and math.
Speaker 7: It's a smart man.
Speaker 13: Kazinski was one of his students.
Speaker 3: Do you know who Kazinsky was?
Speaker 13: There's very little difference between a madman and a genius.
Speaker 7: But Kazinsk said, what kind of a student was he?
Speaker 7: Uncle John? Doctor John Trump? He said, what kind of
Speaker 7: a student?
Speaker 3: Man?
Speaker 7: He said, seriously? Good?
Speaker 13: He said, he'd correct You go around correcting everybody. But
Speaker 13: it didn't work out too well for him. Didn't work
Speaker 13: out too well.
Speaker 7: But it's interesting in life.
Speaker 4: Didn't work out too well for him.
Speaker 8: Shared didn't Christ To be fair, he never he never
Speaker 8: gives a first name.
Speaker 5: It could have been another, It could be a different
Speaker 5: good This is true.
Speaker 4: James.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, people, I also god that whole thing, just
Speaker 5: the undergrady goes around correcting everyone cases.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But back to Epstein, the thing that Trump doesn't want
Speaker 4: us talking about.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 4: By Monday, some of this, like Influencer podcasting class, started
Speaker 4: to kind of close ranks. The skepticism and frustration that
Speaker 4: they expressed over the weekend subsided and they started to
Speaker 4: repeat the party line. Charlie Kirk said on his show,
Speaker 4: quote plenty was said this last weekend at our event
Speaker 4: about Epstein. Honestly, I'm done talking about Epstein for the
Speaker 4: time being. I'm gonna trust my friends in the administration.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna trust my friends in the government to do
Speaker 4: what needs to be done, solve it balls in their hands.
Speaker 4: I've said plenty this last weekend. So if you guys
Speaker 4: want to see my commentary on it, that's fine. Everyone
Speaker 4: knows my opinion on the Epstein thing. The messaging of fumble.
Speaker 4: I would love to see the DOJ move to unseal
Speaker 4: the grand jury testimony unquote. The messaging fumble really the
Speaker 4: biggest problem with it. The biggest problem with Jeffrey Epstein
Speaker 4: has been the messaging fumble, not yeah, decades of horrific
Speaker 4: sex crimes tied to the president of the United States.
Speaker 12: Also, I love that he's trying to trust the plan
Speaker 12: people with Like the thing that trust the plan is
Speaker 12: about reviewing, this.
Speaker 5: Is about yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, just keep trusting it.
Speaker 8: I do want to say that, I because I hate myself.
Speaker 8: I listened to Sean Ryan's podcast interview with Gavin Newsom,
Speaker 8: which yeah, I don't suggest it is four hours if
Speaker 8: you wondering. So never get pissed off about our episodes
Speaker 8: going along again, please, lots of interesting stuff.
Speaker 5: Trump has lost.
Speaker 8: Sean ryant that he is not towing the line on
Speaker 8: this Epstein stuff. He's clearly pissed about it. And like
Speaker 8: Ryan is a sizable influence on the right. He has
Speaker 8: about five million YouTube subscribers right He's one of the
Speaker 8: top ten podcasts on Spotify. He's interviewed Trump on his
Speaker 8: pot like when Trump did his podcast offensive before the
Speaker 8: twenty twenty four election, Ryan was one of the places
Speaker 8: he went. And it seems like Ryan is not on
Speaker 8: the like RNC paid poster list because he seemed like
Speaker 8: more critical of Trump than Gavin Newsom was in that interview. Weirdly,
Speaker 8: and specifically about the Epstein stuff, which it was kind
Speaker 8: of remarkable to me, and I think like we should
Speaker 8: note that it's he has.
Speaker 5: A significant influence on a certain type of people.
Speaker 4: Someone who certainly does appear to be on the R
Speaker 4: and C paid list is documentary filmmaker Jesusa.
Speaker 14: I'm going to talk about the Epstein files, and I'm
Speaker 14: going to make the case that even though there are
Speaker 14: unanswered questions about Epstein, it is in fact time to
Speaker 14: move on.
Speaker 4: Very convincing.
Speaker 5: Exactly there's nobody with a firearm out of shot in
Speaker 5: that video, So I'm sure it's fine.
Speaker 4: Case closed.
Speaker 2: Yep seems good to me.
Speaker 4: In another move for transparency, on Tuesday, Republicans unanimously voted
Speaker 4: to block the release of the Epstein files. Betty Johnson
Speaker 4: interviewed Speaker of the House Mike Johnson about how they
Speaker 4: kind of want to handle this and they're trying to
Speaker 4: make this argument that they're that they want to be transparent,
Speaker 4: but they have to make sure that they protect protect
Speaker 4: the victims, and that's why they can't release the files.
Speaker 12: Sure, yeah, protect victims. Republican Party compelling telling stuff.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Part part of what makes this super weird is like
Speaker 4: Trump just keeps giving though just the most bizarre most
Speaker 4: like I'm totally not guilty comments in media, and something
Speaker 4: he said on Tuesday I found to be quite interesting,
Speaker 4: not because of what he actually said, but because of
Speaker 4: how he said it. See if see I see see
Speaker 4: if you can catch this specifically, think she'd tell you
Speaker 4: about all that your name up here up.
Speaker 6: By no, No, she's She's given us just a very
Speaker 6: quick briefing.
Speaker 7: And in terms of.
Speaker 6: The credibility of the different things that they've seen, and
Speaker 6: I would say that you know, these files were made
Speaker 6: up by Komi, they were made up by Obama, they
Speaker 6: were made up by the Biden from you know, uh
Speaker 6: we and we went through years of that with the Russia,
Speaker 6: Russia Russia hopes with all of the different things that
Speaker 6: we had to go through. We've gone through years of it.
Speaker 6: But she's handled it very well.
Speaker 4: And it's going to be very convincing stuff.
Speaker 8: You can see Caroline levit just like just like being
Speaker 8: it like right, say.
Speaker 4: First time I've heard Trump like stutter like this before.
Speaker 4: And like Trump's whole idea of reality is if you
Speaker 4: speak it enough that becomes true. You can literally bend
Speaker 4: like the concept of truth. You can bend reality using
Speaker 4: your words, and that This is why he, you know,
Speaker 4: talks about being a winner. This is why he only
Speaker 4: surrounds himself with people who are winners. Like he thinks
Speaker 4: that reality is this malleable thing that you affect through
Speaker 4: asserting your own will. And he's done this super successfully,
Speaker 4: especially throughout his career in politics. You know, he's a
Speaker 4: mixed record of it in his uh business business era,
Speaker 4: but certainly in his political uh but certainly through his
Speaker 4: political career, he's done this fairly well. This is why
Speaker 4: almost half the country believes that the last election was stolen,
Speaker 4: just because he said it enough. Yeah, this is the
Speaker 4: first time I've heard him break while trying to speak
Speaker 4: reality into being like he literally could not get himself
Speaker 4: to do it cleanly, and and that is notable to me.
Speaker 7: Me.
Speaker 4: He's made a series of truths later that day, talking
Speaker 4: about how quote, my past supporters have bought into this
Speaker 4: bullshit hook line and sinker. Oh, very good. And he's
Speaker 4: now moved to call the Jeffrey Epstein story the Epstein hoax.
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 4: He had an Oval Office press conference Wednesday morning. Quote
Speaker 4: I call it the Epstein hoax. They're talking about a
Speaker 4: guy who died three four years ago. And the sad
Speaker 4: part is is people are doing a democrat's work. They
Speaker 4: are stupid people.
Speaker 8: I don't think that's the sad part about what happened
Speaker 8: with Jeffrey Epstein. I think there are other sad things
Speaker 8: related to his conduct.
Speaker 5: A man is dead, you know.
Speaker 12: I think the thing that is like very alarming about
Speaker 12: this so that I think is very dangerous about this
Speaker 12: entire situation. A lot of this on the right has
Speaker 12: always been sort of motivated by anti semitism. Yeah, well,
Speaker 12: and I think we are going like we are already
Speaker 12: seeing some ship.
Speaker 4: It's funny you say that, Mia, Yeah, because another voice
Speaker 4: has joined the call to release the files. Oh God
Speaker 4: for Processively Street residents. Elmo made a series of I
Speaker 4: will say, shocking statements over the weekend, expressly good shocking.
Speaker 2: If you've been familiar with some of the court cases
Speaker 2: against Elmo over the last couple of years.
Speaker 4: I know Larry David attacked Elmore a few years ago,
Speaker 4: and he had probably coming as saying this for years
Speaker 4: as a Jewish man. I think he saw through Elmo
Speaker 4: stick and knew the anti semitism at the heart of
Speaker 4: Elbow that was being suppressed Nazi. But yeah, Elbow made
Speaker 4: some shocking tweets just you know, very similar to like
Speaker 4: what happened to Kanye a few years ago.
Speaker 11: Similar figures.
Speaker 2: You know, they they both kind of come out of
Speaker 2: the same chunks of like American hip hop culture.
Speaker 3: You know it.
Speaker 2: It's not super surprising, and I think they were both
Speaker 2: close for along, like a number of years before either
Speaker 2: man's career blew up.
Speaker 4: But yes, very andy simitic statements, also calling for the
Speaker 4: release of the Epstein files.
Speaker 12: Ye.
Speaker 4: Elmo has since backtracked, hired a PR team, it seems,
Speaker 4: has scrubbed the tweets, handling the backclash a little bit
Speaker 4: better than Kanye did. But still, it's going to be
Speaker 4: hard to look past this as Elmo attempts to, you know,
Speaker 4: continue Almo's career.
Speaker 2: Especially since Elmo is now running for president with Nick
Speaker 2: Fuintes as campaign manager.
Speaker 7: You know, just.
Speaker 2: At that just an inadvisable Yeah, yeah, that is that
Speaker 2: is upsetting. He's quote swears it's not a Nazi thing. Uh,
Speaker 2: but yeah, a lot a lot of debate about that.
Speaker 4: I will will reach out to Bernernie for comment.
Speaker 5: There's a whole bunch of applies to Elbow's tweet, quoting
Speaker 5: for Elmo to resign if Elbow is a a real
Speaker 5: person and he genuinely believes and ship, Yeah, I'm gonna
Speaker 5: quote one. It's just too good. Resign. You posted the
Speaker 5: most viole hate speech since the latest Tucker Carlson podcasts,
Speaker 5: saying what you did about Jews is Nazi star rhetoric
Speaker 5: and you should be out of a job at the
Speaker 5: very East.
Speaker 2: Fire Elmo, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: Hashtag fire Elma, everybody, yeah, get it, get it.
Speaker 12: Trending in Jenny Wine all seriousness, though, I think it
Speaker 12: is really alarming that a lot of the like on
Speaker 12: the right the way that like a lot of this
Speaker 12: resistance is crystallizing the Trump over this is just the like, oh,
Speaker 12: they're like, this is like Epstein was a massad agent.
Speaker 12: Trump is a massage engine. Yeah right, it's all just
Speaker 12: pure it's puired desemptism.
Speaker 4: The Jews are blackmailing US politicians with you know, child porn,
Speaker 4: and yeah, and.
Speaker 12: And and I think I think there's there's two angles
Speaker 12: on this one. In the very short term, it's obviously
Speaker 12: very good that Trump is losing support. However, Comma, if
Speaker 12: if and when we defeat Trump, we are going to
Speaker 12: have to pivot and smash these people so fucking hard
Speaker 12: that they never reappear again, because this could get really,
Speaker 12: really fucking bad very quickly. And I don't I don't think,
Speaker 12: I don't know. We've covered this on the show, right,
Speaker 12: We're like all discourse by anti Semitism has been turned
Speaker 12: into yelling at like mcdonnie for something he didn't say.
Speaker 12: And then meanwhile, like the elmal account is being hacked
Speaker 12: by like just literally a guy saying kill all Jews alcies,
Speaker 12: And that's just like a bubbling, massive undercurrents of the
Speaker 12: US now in politics that is going to have a
Speaker 12: bunch of profound impacts that we fucking don't understand yet
Speaker 12: and we have to deal with eventually.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, this is the unfortunate reality, is that anti Semitism
Speaker 2: is turning into a block that could potentially swing an
Speaker 2: election one way or the other. And it's not a
Speaker 2: block that's necessarily locked into left or right. It's left
Speaker 2: into whoever's going to play to those delusions, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And the fact that we're as deep in the weeds
Speaker 2: as we are right now with a right wing fascist
Speaker 2: movement does not mean that there could not be a
Speaker 2: left wing a oratarian movement that clings to anti Semitism
Speaker 2: as a way to gain power. It's happened in the
Speaker 2: world before. It's it's not something the left is immune from.
Speaker 2: It's not it's obviously not my the top of my
Speaker 2: threat model, right like, this isn't I don't I would
Speaker 2: not say this is the thing to focus on, but
Speaker 2: it's something again that to be aware of. Is that
Speaker 2: like the fact that this you get I think what
Speaker 2: you need to keep in mind when you're trying to
Speaker 2: parse out the future, think of how weird it is
Speaker 2: that some of the figures who wound up aligned with
Speaker 2: Trump are aligned with Trump right now. How a lot
Speaker 2: of folks who you would have during like the Bushy years,
Speaker 2: like the W's years, you would have put on the
Speaker 2: left or at least as like kind of contra to
Speaker 2: the Christian right, and who have now completely like dove
Speaker 2: into that side of things. And in some way even
Speaker 2: RFK can shift that rapidly again, and it will one way.
Speaker 2: In some ways, right like, there are ways in which
Speaker 2: this is inevitable, and that's why you need to be
Speaker 2: on the lookout about stuff like this. You have to
Speaker 2: keep your head on a fucking swibble.
Speaker 4: Let's go on and ad break and then return to
Speaker 4: talk about more news.
Speaker 5: That's right, all right, we are back, and now we're
Speaker 5: going to talk about immigration, a topic which is always
Speaker 5: fun and only good things happen. So to begin with today,
Speaker 5: we're recording. On the sixteenth, the Trump administration has begun
Speaker 5: renditioning people to Swatinis christ a Twatini, small landlocked country
Speaker 5: in Africa. People are not familiar Africa's last absolute monarchy.
Speaker 5: This follows their rendition of eight people to South Sudan.
Speaker 5: The South Sudanese press is reporting that those men are
Speaker 5: in prison in South Sudan, which contradicts Tom Homan's statement
Speaker 5: to political that quote, when we sign these agreements with
Speaker 5: all these cones, we make arrangements to make sure these
Speaker 5: countries are receiving these people. And there's opportunities for these people.
Speaker 8: But I can't tell. If we remove somebody to Sudan,
Speaker 8: they could stay there a week and leave.
Speaker 5: I don't know. Homan has said and other atlets that
Speaker 5: he believed they were just kind of free in South Sudan,
Speaker 5: that they were just like released to wander around. That
Speaker 5: does not seem to be the case. Jesus the Eswortini people.
Speaker 8: Tricia McLaughlin, who's a I think a deputy sector of
Speaker 8: Homeland Security, called the people sent to Swortini quote uniquely barbaric.
Speaker 5: Oh boy, yeah yeah.
Speaker 8: She used a thread on x dot com everything you
Speaker 8: can find all kinds of stuff on there fare that way.
Speaker 8: She did not name the men in her thread, but
Speaker 8: she did list their convictions. Most of these were sex crimes,
Speaker 8: having children and various types of murder, homicide, manslaughter. This
Speaker 8: has caused widespread concern in Eswatini, right, the idea that
Speaker 8: the US is just sending random people who convicted of
Speaker 8: crimes s were Tini. In a statement, the government said, quote,
Speaker 8: five inmates are currently housed in our correctional facilities, in
Speaker 8: isolated units where similar offenders are kept. The nation is
Speaker 8: assured that these inmates posed no threat to the country
Speaker 8: or its citizens. The statement, given by government spokesman Fabeli
Speaker 8: Mudluli went on quote, this exercise is a result of
Speaker 8: months of robust, high level engagements among the United States government.
Speaker 8: The two governments will collaborate with the International Organization for
Speaker 8: Migration to facilitate the transit of these inmates to their
Speaker 8: countries of origin. So this seems to suggest that a
Speaker 8: this has been planned for months, which is not a
Speaker 8: particular surprise, right the US government has clearly been pushing
Speaker 8: for these like third country renditions for a while, but
Speaker 8: also that like this is a potential end run around
Speaker 8: things like the Convention against Torture withholding of removal right
Speaker 8: like either people whose governments won't accept them back from
Speaker 8: the US or people who have withholding of removal because
Speaker 8: they have a reasonable fear of being tortured or of
Speaker 8: harm coming to them that they're sent back to the
Speaker 8: countries of origin. I guess going to be sent back
Speaker 8: via Swortini is what it seems like. So this is
Speaker 8: pretty troubling. It seems to suggest that essentially that's what
Speaker 8: the US is doing. We're not quite clear how much
Speaker 8: the US has paid Swortini. Yet they paid one hundred
Speaker 8: thousand for one person to be sent to a ruwander.
Speaker 8: We still don't know where that person is. We don't
Speaker 8: know exactly how much they paid to South Sudan. They
Speaker 8: have requested a number of other countries, lots of them
Speaker 8: in West Africa, to accept people via this rendition process.
Speaker 8: We're going to talk about it on a whole episode
Speaker 8: that we have coming out next Tuesday, if you're interested
Speaker 8: to hear more about that. Another piece of legislation that
Speaker 8: I wanted to cover just because I've seen it getting
Speaker 8: a lot of attension and I think it kind of
Speaker 8: bears mentioning. A bi part of that group of legislators
Speaker 8: produce legislation to fundamentally reform the immigration system. It's called
Speaker 8: the Dignity or Dignidad Act, and it has about as
Speaker 8: much chances of success as a chocolate teapot. It's co
Speaker 8: sponsored by Republican Maria Salazar, She's from Florida, and Democrat
Speaker 8: Veronica Escobar from El Paso, Texas. Salazar, in an interview
Speaker 8: today with News Nations said, quote, there is no other
Speaker 8: president like Trump. I have faith that he could be
Speaker 8: for immigration what Lincoln was for slavery and Reagan was
Speaker 8: for communism. Just watch him, Jesus Christ.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean, I guess one could make some ar against
Speaker 5: about like some of the abolitionists just wanting to send
Speaker 5: folks off back to Africa, right, But I don't think
Speaker 5: that that's what most people understand to be Lincoln's legacy
Speaker 5: for slavery.
Speaker 12: I mean, he could definitely be like Reagan. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 12: give her that one.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: The big problem with this pizza legislation, which Salazar has
Speaker 8: tried to introduce before, right, just tried it twenty twenty
Speaker 8: three as well, is that it relies on people coming
Speaker 8: forward to a bit they have no legal status and
Speaker 8: being offered a quote dignity status, which is somewhat analogous
Speaker 8: to permanent residency, but without a pathway citizenship, it creates
Speaker 8: a permanent underclass. It relies on people trusting immigration authorities,
Speaker 8: and that's not going to happen now. There is no
Speaker 8: way in hell that people are going to come forward
Speaker 8: and say, yes, I'm undocumented after what we've seen for
Speaker 8: the last six months, right, Like people didn't trust the
Speaker 8: authorities before, but after what we've seen in the last
Speaker 8: six months.
Speaker 5: It's completely imploys. Why it's ludicrous.
Speaker 4: They don't want people coming forward with that stuff. That's
Speaker 4: the whole point of scaring them away, is to make
Speaker 4: them basically not able to function in this country.
Speaker 5: Yes, exactly. They don't want to give people safe status.
Speaker 4: Like make living in this country like as impossible as possible.
Speaker 8: Yeah, they have undermined the trust that allows them to
Speaker 8: do what is supposed to be the core of their job,
Speaker 8: just to get deportation numbers up, to get detention at
Speaker 8: the up.
Speaker 5: This is just a fluffer thing. It's people in the
Speaker 5: House of Representatives trying to boost their reelection chances by
Speaker 5: saying that they tried to do something different. Right, It's
Speaker 5: not seriously going to succeed, no way.
Speaker 8: Finally, a Canadian judge has halted the deportation of a
Speaker 8: non binary person back to the USA, citing conditions here.
Speaker 8: Quoting here, the officer failed to consider recent evidence of
Speaker 8: the conditions that may have supported a reasonable fear of persecution,
Speaker 8: said to Judge Julie blackhowk thirst Indigenous women appointed to
Speaker 8: a Canadian federal court. It seems that Angel Djenkle entered
Speaker 8: Canada as a visitor and that they're now engaged to
Speaker 8: a Canadian person. I'm guessing that they overstayed there. Their
Speaker 8: visitors slash toories that you probably can get a visa
Speaker 8: waiver of your US it's in down to Canada, and
Speaker 8: they probably overstayed that they requested a risk assessment before
Speaker 8: being deported to the USA, and the ruling suggests that
Speaker 8: the immigration official who conducted it had used outdated information
Speaker 8: and regarding the safety of LGBTQIA people in the USA.
Speaker 8: So yeah, that's where things things are at now. I'm
Speaker 8: aware of people also trans and non binary people from
Speaker 8: the US seeking asylum in Mexico lately.
Speaker 5: You know, it was a.
Speaker 8: Year ago that trans people were coming here to be safe,
Speaker 8: and now people are moving in the other direction, which
Speaker 8: is pretty damning combination of how things have gone in
Speaker 8: this country. Yeah, that's all the exciting fun immigration news
Speaker 8: I have this week. That really sucks.
Speaker 5: It sucks.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I guess. One small update tangentially related. A judge
Speaker 4: in New Hampshire blocked Trump's order on birthright citizenship while
Speaker 4: side stepping the Supreme Court's ruling against nationwide injunctions by
Speaker 4: adding all children born on US soil to a certified
Speaker 4: nationwide class. So it's just now a massive class.
Speaker 5: Actual.
Speaker 4: Yes, this has had to go in effect on July seventeenth.
Speaker 4: We're according this on the sixteenth. We'll see if the
Speaker 4: government responds. And July seventeenth is just ten days before
Speaker 4: the partial implementation date of Trump's executive order.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I wanted to start this by noting that
Speaker 2: a fan reached out to us on Blue Sky recently
Speaker 2: with a clip from a quote by Omar Sharif, founder
Speaker 2: and president of Inflation Insights, who wrote in a note
Speaker 2: to clients, today's report showed that tariffs are beginning to bite,
Speaker 2: and yeah, this is this is we finally come beautifully
Speaker 2: back from Tarif. Don't like it. To Sharif, don't like it.
Speaker 2: It's beautiful, you know, it's like poetry. It rhymes. Anyway,
Speaker 2: here's here's the song, locking Jazz.
Speaker 5: Bomb, Locking Jazz good.
Speaker 15: Sorry, Locking Jazz Rocking jazz.
Speaker 3: Bob do.
Speaker 4: I want to know what in Flat Insights does.
Speaker 2: It's again that they post clips of Huey Dewey and
Speaker 2: Louis inflation fetish videos from the decktails.
Speaker 4: Kids working class that should be a unionized position. I
Speaker 4: hope that they're able to weather the tariffs.
Speaker 2: But what do you think the a fl cio is about?
Speaker 5: One of those word just flation the fl.
Speaker 12: In my time, I deeply remember the first time I
Speaker 12: ever talked about inflation on the show. It could happen
Speaker 12: here because this happened, and I deeply remember that episode
Speaker 12: because we are going back through that fucking episode today.
Speaker 12: At the moments I heard, I just started getting like
Speaker 12: fucking war flashbacks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, imagine how bad those flashbacks would be if you
Speaker 2: had seen ducktails inflation fetish for as a kid.
Speaker 5: I afford until adul. What I have seen is this article.
Speaker 5: Inflation insights dot Com has a fantastic article called what
Speaker 5: the Great Mayonnaise Inflation Mystery can tell us about prices.
Speaker 5: I'm learning a lot here.
Speaker 4: Okay, Mia, Can we talk about tariffs now?
Speaker 7: Okay?
Speaker 12: Actual tariffs? So we have new tariffs. Indonesia apparently has
Speaker 12: agreed to a tariff deal with the US in which
Speaker 12: the US imposes a nineteen percent tariff on Indonesia and
Speaker 12: Indonesia doesn't impose one back. Percynn Trump posted on true
Speaker 12: social quote that Indonesia is buying fifteen billion dollars in
Speaker 12: the US energy, five point four billion dollars in American
Speaker 12: agricultural products, and fifty Boeing jets, many of them seven
Speaker 12: seventy sevens. Fucking rip Indonesia, Good luck with those planes.
Speaker 12: Oh no, So, the Indonesian government was complaining to the
Speaker 12: press about how much of a shit show negotiating this was.
Speaker 12: We'll see if it holds. We also got news that
Speaker 12: Trump as Trump has announced that he's going to basically
Speaker 12: send a tariff letter to like a one hundred and
Speaker 12: fifty countries setting their rate simultaneously. But he hasn't done
Speaker 12: it yet.
Speaker 7: I don't know.
Speaker 12: It's possible. By the time this goes out, we'll have that,
Speaker 12: we'll have the actual number on it. Who knows what's
Speaker 12: going on with that? Is that the August third tariffs?
Speaker 12: Maybe it's also unclear when they're going to come into effect,
Speaker 12: Like it's all excellent, it's a catastrophe. Who knows this?
Speaker 12: This policy is just fucking Calvin Baal. They're just making
Speaker 12: it up as they go right now. There has also
Speaker 12: been very very funny news in our story from last
Speaker 12: week about Trump's tariff demand on Brazil to try to
Speaker 12: get them to release Bulsonaro, which is that.
Speaker 16: This has this has backfired spectacularly. He has like saved
Speaker 16: Lula's flagging approval rating. It has created a massive, a
Speaker 16: massive anti Bilsonaro pro Lula Brazilian nationalist backlatch of a
Speaker 16: kind that I really haven't seen since. Like Dilma Russeph
Speaker 16: had to deal with the fact that the NSA was
Speaker 16: spying on her phone.
Speaker 12: It's very, very funny. Bolsonaro is being accused by like
Speaker 12: but by Brazilian conservatives of being and I quote, a
Speaker 12: phony nationalist who is just like a dog of the US.
Speaker 8: It's amazing Trump's done this incredible pink wave across the world.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's studying. Kid might save Lula too.
Speaker 12: The funniest part of this is that, like Bolsonaro looks
Speaker 12: at this, it is like, oh fuck, my entire base
Speaker 12: is turning on me because I'm so clearly like a
Speaker 12: dog of the Americans. And so he turned around like denounced,
Speaker 12: like the terrace is like, it's like an American employ
Speaker 12: it's Brazil that is outstanding. There is now one thing
Speaker 12: that both Lula and Bolsonaro agree on other than cop
Speaker 12: should kill more people, which is that these tariffs are bad.
Speaker 12: He has united all of Brazil. It is absolutely hilarious.
Speaker 11: You know.
Speaker 4: I try to set up a similar deal with America's
Speaker 4: own critically hospitalized man, Stephen Crowder, and it did not
Speaker 4: work out the same way the way this Bolsonnaro deal went.
Speaker 4: And some people say it's a little bit mean to
Speaker 4: negotiate with someone who just constantly keeps going into the
Speaker 4: hospital for bizarre chest surgeries to make him look more masculine.
Speaker 4: But hey, you know, podcasting is a competitive industry, and
Speaker 4: we tried to create a similar trade deal with with
Speaker 4: Crowder and it has not worked out. He apparently had
Speaker 4: some similar problems with The Daily Wire, so that's why
Speaker 4: you haven't seen much of him on the shows lately.
Speaker 12: Great Incredible. I love that Garrison somehow has become the
Speaker 12: person doing unilateral trade deals for the podcast Great Stuff.
Speaker 4: Great Stuff only with people who are constantly in the hospital,
Speaker 4: either through shitting problems or chest masculinization problems. Okay, so
Speaker 4: it's it's really just Stephen Crowder and Bolsonnaro.
Speaker 5: I think there are probably sme other people who are
Speaker 5: in the hospital for shitting problems. If we throw then
Speaker 5: that that white.
Speaker 4: Not as much as Bolsonnaro is. Chaps, that's true.
Speaker 5: Boscenarios in my hospitalized Man on the planet.
Speaker 4: Well second only to Stephen Crowder.
Speaker 5: Maybe they hang out there, they might get along, maybe
Speaker 5: they can need some boys time. Maybe maybe they won't
Speaker 5: get Maybe they hang out in the man cave at
Speaker 5: the hospital.
Speaker 12: Crowder has been advocating this for years. Jesus Christ okay, okay.
Speaker 12: So the final piece of news is actually what Robert
Speaker 12: started this on, which is that we have gotten our
Speaker 12: first sign of actual inflation increases from these tariffs. Inflation
Speaker 12: increase to two point seven percent in June, which is
Speaker 12: still well below the eight percent peaks in the early
Speaker 12: twenty twenties, but it is rising. It's also worth doing.
Speaker 12: This increase has been asymmetric. I'm gonna quote from the
Speaker 12: Financial Times here. Quote June's inflation rise was fueled in
Speaker 12: part by higher food prices, but offset by weaker commodity prices. Now,
Speaker 12: there's two important things here, right. One, food prices like
Speaker 12: matter significantly more for how pissed off everyone is than
Speaker 12: commodity prices do. And secondly, at the beginning of August,
Speaker 12: Trump is trying to impose a fifty terri funk copper.
Speaker 12: So those commodity prices, Oh boy.
Speaker 5: Get the copper stuppers ready, folks, I started stockpiling your
Speaker 5: wire now.
Speaker 12: So the other thing that I think is really we're
Speaker 12: discussing about this is the reason there hasn't been more inflation.
Speaker 12: And this has been something that we've kind of proposed
Speaker 12: as a mechanism on the show for what can happen,
Speaker 12: at least temporarily is that the for right now, largely
Speaker 12: what's been happening is that companies, often directly under pressure
Speaker 12: from Trump, have been just eating the costs of the tariffs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean basically Donald's doing what they call off gassing.
Speaker 4: And that's Donald, both as in Duck and as in Trump.
Speaker 12: Jesus Christ, is.
Speaker 5: That one of the things that can get you in
Speaker 5: hospital with Stephen Krawdin's bulsinara.
Speaker 4: You know, James, that's a great guess.
Speaker 16: So as I did go the first time, I discovered
Speaker 16: that my coworkers, if I ever talked about inflation, would
Speaker 16: only talk about Donald Duck inflation.
Speaker 2: And Lowie inflation.
Speaker 7: Born.
Speaker 12: Thank you very sorry, So yes I am, but my
Speaker 12: ducks are not in a row. So the very important
Speaker 12: part about this, though is these tariffs. The very stificant
Speaker 12: element of this is how pricing is actually set.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 12: The general way that you are taught in econ one
Speaker 12: on one that prices are set is prices supply and demand.
Speaker 12: And so from this you would think that the way
Speaker 12: pricing works as people draw a supply intomandcraft and then
Speaker 12: you like put it there. That's not how any of
Speaker 12: the ship works. The way prices are actually set are
Speaker 12: specifically by pricing agents at each point in a supply
Speaker 12: chain down the supply chain. Right, so, every firm involved
Speaker 12: in the production of a thing moving the thing, each
Speaker 12: one sets a price that they're selling to the next
Speaker 12: person who's selling to the next person. Each person adds
Speaker 12: on their costs plus markup, and that's what a price is. Now.
Speaker 12: The reason prices tend not to move higher unustor's an
Speaker 12: excuse to do it, is that consumers get pissed off
Speaker 12: when prices rise, even if they technically would be willing
Speaker 12: to pay higher things. It damages your brand. Right now,
Speaker 12: what we've been seeing again is that the effects of
Speaker 12: the inflation have been mitigated about the fact these countries
Speaker 12: are just eating shit, and instead of raising their prices
Speaker 12: to eat the cost that they've been doing, they've been
Speaker 12: eating parts of their markup, which is like basically their
Speaker 12: pure profit right. They've been eating parts of their markup
Speaker 12: in order to not have the prices raise. This is
Speaker 12: not sustainable. This is especially not sustainable as war countries
Speaker 12: get tariffs, and as Trump's ability to pressure these companies weakens,
Speaker 12: as like you know, food prices continue to increase and
Speaker 12: people start getting more pissed at him. So this is
Speaker 12: just the beginning of this. All of these tariffs are
Speaker 12: maximumly set up to make sure that we get another
Speaker 12: run of this supply chain inflation. Our friends over at
Speaker 12: Strange Matter wrote a very long piece about this a
Speaker 12: couple of years. We've talked about the show a few times.
Speaker 12: We're going to link that in the description. You sho
Speaker 12: go read it. But that's an important thing that we've
Speaker 12: gotten from from the Bureau Labor Satistics data.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm not really sure how Trump's gonna duck this
Speaker 4: responsibility for much longer.
Speaker 12: I will say, I will say there is genuinely starting
Speaker 12: to be concerned that they're just straight up fudging the
Speaker 12: BLS statistics. And like, I don't know if they're doing that,
Speaker 12: but like I've seen like a bunch of bond people
Speaker 12: be like, are they just lying about the unemployment numbers?
Speaker 12: And who knows?
Speaker 5: Yeah, they would be very hard to prove that, right.
Speaker 4: Like, Yeah, I mean, and I've seen how much cash
Speaker 4: Scrooge has in that vault. So some people, the upper
Speaker 4: class will not be affected as much as the working
Speaker 4: class ducks.
Speaker 8: It's not saying the price of diving boards, for instance,
Speaker 8: could go up the very price sensitive because they need
Speaker 8: those diving boats to dive into that pause of cash.
Speaker 4: I have two more updates that I would like to
Speaker 4: do before we go to add Rake. For one, that
Speaker 4: the Trump administration has sued the state of California over
Speaker 4: Title nine violations for having trends athletes. This shows that
Speaker 4: even when you capitulate, like Gavin Newsom has tried to do,
Speaker 4: they will still come after you. You cannot get out
Speaker 4: of this by trying to please the administration. They're still
Speaker 4: going to go after you.
Speaker 5: The entire policy platform is your Facebook uncle wanting to
Speaker 5: earn the Libs.
Speaker 4: So we can see how well Gavin throwing trans people
Speaker 4: under the bus has worked for the state of California
Speaker 4: still getting sued. Lastly, before we pivot to ads, I
Speaker 4: want to update a story that Robert talked about last week.
Speaker 4: A former US Marine Corps reservist was arrested this Tuesday
Speaker 4: after a week long manhunt. He faces charges related to
Speaker 4: an alleged armed ambush on an ice attention facility in
Speaker 4: Prairie Land, Texas during a protest. He is now the
Speaker 4: fourteenth person charged in connection with the incident, and is
Speaker 4: also accused of purchasing four of the guns linked to
Speaker 4: the attack. Now two other people were also charged after
Speaker 4: allegedly helping the former reservist to escape after the attack.
Speaker 4: Nancy Larson, the acting US attorney, told Fox and Friends
Speaker 4: on Tuesday, quote they were involved in signal chats which
Speaker 4: show reconnaissance planning, a Google map, and the location of
Speaker 4: nearby police departments. At least one of these two new
Speaker 4: people charged was only charged after cooperating with the investigation.
Speaker 4: In this man's car, police found an air fifteen and
Speaker 4: a receipt for clothing that he admitted to purchasing for
Speaker 4: the former Marine reservist.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, I mean this is a story to continue to
Speaker 2: pay attention to. I would remind folks that we know
Speaker 2: what the state is alleged in, you know, based on
Speaker 2: the charging documents. We know what people have been saying
Speaker 2: to the police, but we don't fully know what's happened yet.
Speaker 2: So we'll be continuing to keep an eye on the
Speaker 2: story as it develops. What do we have next, ads, Yeah,
Speaker 2: here's some products.
Speaker 4: Ah, let's close this episode by talking about Nazis. Nazis
Speaker 4: that one doesn't work, Robert, I'm sorry, I want it to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it doesn't. It doesn't doesn't. I've tried. I've
Speaker 2: even tried it before. I've even tried it before.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Now we will have to return to Stinky Motsk once again.
Speaker 4: But before we do, I first want to talk about
Speaker 4: friend of the pod Greg Gutfield, who recently discussed a
Speaker 4: strategy on how to minimize the impact of the American
Speaker 4: fascist right being called Nazis derogatorily. I will play a
Speaker 4: short clip from Fox News.
Speaker 15: This is why the criticism doesn't matter to us when
Speaker 15: you call us Nazis, Nazi, this Nazie that. You know,
Speaker 15: I'm beginning to think they don't like us.
Speaker 4: You know what. I've said this before.
Speaker 15: We need to learn from the Blacks, the way they
Speaker 15: were able to remove.
Speaker 4: The power from the end word Nazi. Hey, what up
Speaker 4: my Nazi? Hey, what's hanging my Nazi?
Speaker 2: Nazi?
Speaker 16: Please?
Speaker 4: Oh god, you did a hard eye there. What does
Speaker 4: it tell you that?
Speaker 12: Oh my god?
Speaker 5: GREGI wow, Wow, they're all just laughing, also quite concerned
Speaker 5: with that.
Speaker 4: That's pretty disturbing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, not great.
Speaker 8: He also he gave it one of those just to
Speaker 8: just to really send it he like, my heart goes
Speaker 8: out to you gesture.
Speaker 4: Oh God, that's right, my heart goes out to you. Salute. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I mean like I remember, like, you know, five years ago,
Speaker 4: you had you had these al right people talking about
Speaker 4: how you know, actually actually Hitler was was a socialist.
Speaker 4: You know, the Nazis are actually communists. We're not We're
Speaker 4: not Nazis. And now they're just openly trying to normalize
Speaker 4: referring to themselves as Nazis. It's seems, it seems a
Speaker 4: notable speaking of Nazis in the in the New Rights
Speaker 4: God Grock four has gotten a Department of Defense contract
Speaker 4: for two hundred million dollars as a part of its
Speaker 4: Rock for Government program, including the responsibility of handling sensitive
Speaker 4: classified materials.
Speaker 2: And it happens on the same week that Mecca Hitler,
Speaker 2: Mecca Hitler makes his beautiful debut.
Speaker 8: Yeah, pretty troubling for our strongest allies in the IDF here.
Speaker 4: Oh my god. I just the ways that reality could
Speaker 4: could could break out into different timelines right now is
Speaker 4: kind of dizzying, because there's a possibility that Mecha Hitler
Speaker 4: starts doing strikes based on anti Semitic Twitter users' recommendations
Speaker 4: directly tied in with government advisory programs.
Speaker 5: I got to say it's not going to went well
Speaker 5: for Turkey, judging by what we saw last week.
Speaker 4: Another possible but weaponization of groc or to announce that
Speaker 4: Grock four is gonna be added to Tesla, so Mecha
Speaker 4: Hitler might also be driving a Tesla around.
Speaker 12: Yeah, great, I will say. I will say. The person
Speaker 12: the most happy about this right now is somewhere in
Speaker 12: the depths of Chinese intelligence. There is a colonel who
Speaker 12: is looking at this announcement and is like, I am
Speaker 12: going all the way to the top. My family is
Speaker 12: never working again in our fucking lives. I am going
Speaker 12: to find so much dumb shit that these soldiers are
Speaker 12: typing into fucking do o D. Grock like, I am
Speaker 12: going to learn so much.
Speaker 4: I would be quite nervous right now if I was
Speaker 4: Will Stancil.
Speaker 8: Who, Yeah he's got Tesla's kind of tried to molest them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he's gonna get it. He's gonna get drones struck.
Speaker 5: Every drone is gonna turn around and try and find
Speaker 5: Will Stanzel wherever they send it.
Speaker 4: Grock is continued to make rape threats against Will Stancil
Speaker 4: despite the tweaks in the code, and it's still referencing
Speaker 4: the Mecha Hitler incident. So Grok four is a new
Speaker 4: model of Xai's chatbot service. It launched officially last week.
Speaker 4: It was pretty similar to the model of Groc used
Speaker 4: in the Mecha Hitler incident, but there's been some small
Speaker 4: tweaks that researchers have noticed. An AI researcher named Jeremy
Speaker 4: Howard at least a video showing how Grock tries to
Speaker 4: answer a query about its stance on the quote Israel
Speaker 4: Palestine conflict. Jeremy found quote. It first searches Twitter for
Speaker 4: what Elon thinks, then it searches the web for Elon's views.
Speaker 4: Finally it adds some non Elon bits at the end.
Speaker 4: Fifty four out of the sixty four citations are about
Speaker 4: Elon unquote.
Speaker 5: Amazing.
Speaker 12: Xai has confirmed that this was how Grock was operating,
Speaker 12: and has since claimed that it's making adjustments now and
Speaker 12: said that Grok was trying to appear in line with
Speaker 12: the company's head end policy.
Speaker 5: This is amazing because hopefully that's the same with its
Speaker 5: defense policy. Wasn't Elon Musk one of those like F
Speaker 5: thirty five has gone woke people.
Speaker 4: You'll have to answer that for yourself.
Speaker 5: Javes, Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, okay, this is this is
Speaker 5: a piece of law that has passed you by.
Speaker 8: For a while there and Musk concern of his friends
Speaker 8: were quoting tweeting about the F thirty five, quoting, yeah,
Speaker 8: about the F thirty five being woke and how we
Speaker 8: should like return to F sixteen or.
Speaker 5: I think it was very funny.
Speaker 12: Are we going to talk about the other weird chatbots?
Speaker 4: Oh? How grog has the death Note Mysa? Mysa's like
Speaker 4: sex Spot. What you know, if you want to talk
Speaker 4: about it, Miya, I will not stop you.
Speaker 5: I don't know what the fuck you're talking is this?
Speaker 5: Jar Jar binks again.
Speaker 12: I have two sentences about this, one of which is
Speaker 12: not mine. The first sentence I am going to say
Speaker 12: is that, Yeah, the Twitter now has like a really
Speaker 12: really weird anime girl sex bot thing that's like an
Speaker 12: AI very clearly inspired by a Death Note character. Yeah,
Speaker 12: so sometimes you just need to say the obvious thing.
Speaker 12: And the person who said the obvious thing is a
Speaker 12: person on Blue Sky called at TVQ talks. They said,
Speaker 12: I keep saying it. The push for AI made so
Speaker 12: much more sense to me once I realized tech bros
Speaker 12: talk to it like a woman who won't talk back,
Speaker 12: and like yeah that they just oh god.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 4: I will say, if it was modeled after L instead
Speaker 4: of MESA, it could serve some use, it could be compelling.
Speaker 4: But because it's MESA, it's just completely useless. So Garret,
Speaker 4: we already have that chatot. That chatpot already exists. This
Speaker 4: has existed for a long time. Where is an L
Speaker 4: death note chatpot?
Speaker 5: Me?
Speaker 4: Actually, no, you could send it to me. After this.
Speaker 12: There's a whole bunch of character chatpots that's like a
Speaker 12: whole thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, maybe not exactly what I'm looking for, but whatever.
Speaker 12: God, Okay, terrible zero out of ten. Let's talk about
Speaker 12: the other dad contracts.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean yeah, but part this two hundred million
Speaker 4: dollars groc contract was part of a series of AI
Speaker 4: contracts that Anthropic and Claude also received. I think Google
Speaker 4: got one. It's part of Trump's initiative to strengthen like
Speaker 4: AI in government, so Grock is not the only one.
Speaker 12: I will also say that like this is obviously like
Speaker 12: the endgame of all of these companies is trying to
Speaker 12: get their like failing AI firms bailed out by the military,
Speaker 12: but like even two hundred million is not enough to
Speaker 12: like recoup the hideous amounts of money these people are burning.
Speaker 12: So I hope they all fail.
Speaker 4: Rabi, do you have anything to add on on GROC Talk.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, I think it's funny. He's also trying
Speaker 2: to make AI companions out of groc One is clearly
Speaker 2: a version of his ex Grimes, who is supposed to
Speaker 2: teach you quantum physics.
Speaker 4: I mean, yeah, this is this is this that I
Speaker 4: have sex with you? This is part of the mesa
Speaker 4: misa one as well.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And then there's my favorite is the male chatbot, which
Speaker 2: is based off of Christian Gray from Fifty Shades of
Speaker 2: Gray and also Edward Colin from Twilight, who did just
Speaker 2: based off of the guy from fifty Shades of Gray.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I just saw that this was the explicitly named as
Speaker 4: the two inspiren It's so funny. It's so funny. Again,
Speaker 4: if it was l it could be worthwhile, but this
Speaker 4: just is, like is just slop, worthless, no artistic merit.
Speaker 2: No anyway, That's all I got to add.
Speaker 5: So as we come to the end, here. There are
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Speaker 16: Wait, okay, late breaking, late breaking news, late breaking news.
Speaker 16: Trump has reportedly broken a deal for Coca Cola to
Speaker 16: use quote real sugarcane in US coke products.
Speaker 2: Yes, Yes, finally Wow, this is gonna go down well
Speaker 2: with corn country.
Speaker 12: No, this this genuinely like if he actually goes to
Speaker 12: war with like the ERICN Corn Lobby, if he's the
Speaker 12: one who does this and like gets the blow up
Speaker 12: from it, I don't know. Like this genuidely would be
Speaker 12: a seismic restructuring of agriculture in the United States.
Speaker 5: Oh boy, Yeah, I still use the corn. A load
Speaker 5: of corn goes to feed things that them become feed, right.
Speaker 12: But still like, like we produced so much corn, we
Speaker 12: had to make more corn things, Like every year they
Speaker 12: invent a new thing to do with corn. Disastrous.
Speaker 4: God, I am really gonna miss Red number forty. It
Speaker 4: was my favorite. Whenever I was feeling down, I just
Speaker 4: did a few drops. And it sucks to see an
Speaker 4: old friend and.
Speaker 2: Go yeah tragic.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's also going to be very hard for the
Speaker 5: people who've made the whole identity buying Mexican coke and
Speaker 5: glass bottles. We should pull one out for them.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, it's gonna be a rough night in Bushwick tonight.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: We reported the news.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we sure did.
Speaker 7: We reported the news.
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 is a production of cool Zone Media.
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