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
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 1: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 3: It's James today and I'm joined by Jenny Keaston, who's
Speaker 3: a writer, activist and someone who's been in and out
Speaker 3: of Northeast Syria for a long time working with the
Speaker 3: women's movement, and today we're going to be talking about
Speaker 3: the situation in North and East Syria since the fall
Speaker 3: of the Asad regime, some of the conflict that has
Speaker 3: been happening in a resistance of the SDF. Welcome to
Speaker 3: the show, Jenny Eida.
Speaker 1: Yeah, First of all, it's not sure having him be
Speaker 1: happy to be here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're welcome, of course. So I think if we
Speaker 3: start off, people have been messaging me a lot of
Speaker 3: various platforms about the the letter that Abdullah or Juland wrote,
Speaker 3: and I don't want to dress that in its entirety
Speaker 3: today because we've got something coming up on that we're
Speaker 3: going to talk to some people from the Freedom for
Speaker 3: Abdullah your campaign, but I do want to use it
Speaker 3: as a jumping off point because I think it a
Speaker 3: has reminded people, as we spoke about before the show,
Speaker 3: that North and East Syria exists and the SDF exists,
Speaker 3: which has been largely missing and like the legacy media
Speaker 3: reporting on Syria, but b like there's been atrocious reporting
Speaker 3: on what it means for the SDF, even though there's
Speaker 3: a very clear answer to that. So for people who
Speaker 3: have you been reading papers which either just ignore the
Speaker 3: existence of the FDF entirely or speculate as to what
Speaker 3: they're going to do when they've given a very clear answer,
Speaker 3: could you explain to people like where this leaves the SDF.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, no, So thanks for that. And yeah, I've
Speaker 1: also been gay a lot of questions about chanslater, and
Speaker 1: I'm really glad to hear that you guys are going
Speaker 1: to program on it because Western media wants to reverce
Speaker 1: it in this way. It's very snazzy and there's like
Speaker 1: bolts with the blue and something crazy is happening. Really,
Speaker 1: it's unfortunately it has to actually be talking about in
Speaker 1: a kind of more long term and intelligent way that
Speaker 1: sets the context and like yeah, puts that and makes
Speaker 1: things a bit more clear, because it is something with
Speaker 1: a background and it's connected to a lot of things,
Speaker 1: and of course that whole political process that a Jan's
Speaker 1: recent statement is a part of. It's going to affect
Speaker 1: the situation here in northern East Siria because the situation
Speaker 1: here a lot of the time depends on the actions
Speaker 1: of the Turkish state and on expansion. It is on
Speaker 1: an aggression from there, and so as the political situation
Speaker 1: shouldn't changes, it will affect that. What it is not
Speaker 1: is like a call or a statement that means that
Speaker 1: the SDF has to lay down their arms and started
Speaker 1: this thing. This is for several reasons, absolutely not what
Speaker 1: it is. The main one of those being that the
Speaker 1: SDF is not and never has.
Speaker 3: Been the.
Speaker 1: And that's something that they've tried many times over the
Speaker 1: years to make it very clear, but unfortunately hasn't always
Speaker 1: been like heard and acknowledged. And so whatever this statement
Speaker 1: means that you guys will go into that in your
Speaker 1: program whatever it is for the PKKA. But the situation
Speaker 1: is not fair to stand. It's a different situation here,
Speaker 1: and so the SDF is in a moment of like
Speaker 1: a big question and a big change. But it's much
Speaker 1: more to do with what's been happening in Syria politically,
Speaker 1: and to do with the government and the interim government
Speaker 1: had said, yeah, government that installed themselves here, and the
Speaker 1: regime games, and of course the ongoing war and situation
Speaker 1: of invasions that they're facing. So there's a lot of
Speaker 1: big questions for the SDF. But I think it's important
Speaker 1: right now that we don't kind of confuse and misunderstand
Speaker 1: but this sort of parallel process that's going on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely, And I think if people are hearing this
Speaker 3: and you're new to the show, this is your first
Speaker 3: time hearing the sea of acronyms that is the Ish
Speaker 3: freedom movement. Academic you to The Women's War, which is
Speaker 3: a series that Robert made. I have a book but
Speaker 3: you can't read it yet, still editing it, or you
Speaker 3: could listen to one of our numerous other if you
Speaker 3: search for a Java or Northern East Syria or Syria
Speaker 3: in our feed. I'm sure you'll find a lot to
Speaker 3: explain those acronyms to you. But yeah, we've had this
Speaker 3: situation right where since December, the situation in Syria has
Speaker 3: drastically changed and we now have two state actors. Well,
Speaker 3: we have lots of stay active. We always had lots
Speaker 3: of state actors intervening in Syria, but we have this
Speaker 3: new state actor in the Syrian state, right and I
Speaker 3: think people if they're you know, if they're like reading
Speaker 3: the New York Times or god forbid, seeing Charles Lister,
Speaker 3: then that they'll have a certain vision of this that
Speaker 3: sort of exempts the SDF. It sort of just ignores
Speaker 3: this whole area of Syria and says like, oh, well,
Speaker 3: the Syrian Revolution has succeeded. I think we should address
Speaker 3: like what has happened to the SDF to northern East
Speaker 3: Syria since the collapse of the said regime in December.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so obviously what's happened toy Syria in northan As
Speaker 1: Syria and t SDF is very connected to the whole
Speaker 1: overall Syria process. And you're right when you hear the
Speaker 1: reporting on it, I think lots of parts of it
Speaker 1: can get erased in kind of depending who's talking and
Speaker 1: what their angle is or whatever. There are a lot
Speaker 1: of things left out, not just the Kurds in north
Speaker 1: of Eassyria, but other minority ethnic groups or like women
Speaker 1: organizing across Syria, like all of these things. It's a
Speaker 1: very complex situation, which I won't pretend I can completely
Speaker 1: lay out and summarize for everyone in five minutes. But yeah,
Speaker 1: what you did have was the culmination the end of
Speaker 1: a period and a massive change when as you say,
Speaker 1: there was a regime change, there was a change of government,
Speaker 1: and that happened with this like offensive sweeping down from
Speaker 1: Idland to Damascus, succeeding in taking over the government in
Speaker 1: Damascus from the Asad family, which was the end of
Speaker 1: a sixty one year brain which caused absolute jubilation, say
Speaker 1: to say, all across Syria, and that includes where I
Speaker 1: am and lone from Syria because anyway, just yeah, people
Speaker 1: were very happy and celebrating. But also there were cities here.
Speaker 1: When you look at the map and you see this
Speaker 1: like sending autonomous region, what you had to understand was
Speaker 1: that there were actually within the cities, there were neighborhoods
Speaker 1: and sections that were still under the ASAD government. It
Speaker 1: wasn't as simple as like the whole city is in
Speaker 1: the autonomous administration. So here as well, even there were
Speaker 1: still statutes of a Sad and people took the streets
Speaker 1: and tore them down, and really close to actually where
Speaker 1: I'm recording this today, there's a roundabout where they took
Speaker 1: down the statue of a Sad and it's been replaced
Speaker 1: by pictures of the martyrs of people who have fallen
Speaker 1: fighting for the autonomy of the region here and fighting
Speaker 1: for their political system. So you know, it's very very beautiful. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people celebrated and more happy with a qualifier, with a
Speaker 1: very big qualifier, you know. So that jails opened as
Speaker 1: well and the flags went up, and yeah, it was
Speaker 1: a real moment of jubilation, celebration. But unfortunately the force
Speaker 1: which eventually succeeded in toppling a Sad and installing itself
Speaker 1: as the now as they're saying that interim or transitional
Speaker 1: government Syria, you know, we can say it was not
Speaker 1: one of the many like progressive democratic alternative forces that
Speaker 1: originally in the uprisings weakepped the A SAD government. Yeah,
Speaker 1: back in twenty and eleven. Since then, things have changed,
Speaker 1: and isn't a podcast directly about that. I'm sure you
Speaker 1: guys speak about it as well at other times, but
Speaker 1: instead what you have is HTS, who are kind of
Speaker 1: conglomerate militia of these different militia groups. There's another acronym
Speaker 1: for you there names I.
Speaker 3: Think, yeah, three languages acronyms.
Speaker 1: Pointing people to resources is always very useful. And they
Speaker 1: are kind of mixed up amalgamation of different militias who
Speaker 1: are operating in Syria. And what's crucial to say about
Speaker 1: them is that they're you know, their political back and
Speaker 1: a perspective. A lot of people in these organizations are
Speaker 1: like really really similar unfortunately and all too familiar to
Speaker 1: the people here who fought against ISIS, the Islamic State,
Speaker 1: because they're coming from similar backgrounds, and also to al
Speaker 1: Qaeda and the organizations who were kind of the Syrian
Speaker 1: branches of al Qaeda. But like, I've played a really
Speaker 1: direct role in finding HTS and they want to now
Speaker 1: sort of put on a new face, put on a suit,
Speaker 1: go out and shake the world's had it and become
Speaker 1: world statesmen from the government, which unfortunately it looks like
Speaker 1: all of our governments are all too willing to very
Speaker 1: quickly accept. And we'll get in a minute we can
Speaker 1: talk a bit specifically about the roles that and almost
Speaker 1: your listeners are in the States, so that the American
Speaker 1: government has been playing here. But yeah, so there's a
Speaker 1: big qualifier on how much people are celebrating because of
Speaker 1: the very dodgy history and the real like threat the
Speaker 1: xts's politics holds unfortunately, particularly for ethnic minorities, on women,
Speaker 1: and they're established their power and it's by no means
Speaker 1: a kind of non violent or peaceful process, and there's
Speaker 1: a lot of tensions flaring up with a lot of problems. However, yes,
Speaker 1: it is the case that in a lot of Syria,
Speaker 1: the majority of Syria outright like warfare on the ground
Speaker 1: as for an asstop because there's one group have taken
Speaker 1: power and so we're in a different moment, we're in
Speaker 1: a different kind of process. So what's different up here,
Speaker 1: what's different up in the north and East, and what's
Speaker 1: not being discussed as much. And the point that I'm
Speaker 1: often trying to make, what I'm trying to write articles
Speaker 1: and doing interviews at the moment is that like actually
Speaker 1: the war in the whole Syria has not completely stopped.
Speaker 1: YEA mostly yes, you can say in most regions, but
Speaker 1: significantly here in northern Eastyria. It's not just that there
Speaker 1: is still classes or flare ups between different groups like
Speaker 1: there might be in other regions. There is like a
Speaker 1: full scale invasion, a ground invasion with air support that
Speaker 1: has also been going on. Yeah, and that was tied.
Speaker 1: Where has that come from? Like what is that? Ones
Speaker 1: that look like this is another group another history letter
Speaker 1: had drill in for you. But the important thing to
Speaker 1: understand is that this offensive was tying to coincide with
Speaker 1: the HCS takeovers. Also has a lot of links with
Speaker 1: the Perkish state, and I wouldn't I personally would bot
Speaker 1: those with bars to say that that government is a
Speaker 1: Turkish public government or that the relationship is that direct.
Speaker 1: But there is a relationship there and what you saw
Speaker 1: when they kind of successfully went on the offensive was
Speaker 1: at the same time, other armed groups which operate are
Speaker 1: kind of loosely affiliated and mostly operating on a mercenaries
Speaker 1: of a paid basis rather than being kind of ideologically
Speaker 1: driven or whatever, but are affiliated under the name the SNA,
Speaker 1: the Syrian National Army, which is even more confusing because
Speaker 1: they're not and were never the National Army of Syria
Speaker 1: what they are. And yet these paid militias, which yeah,
Speaker 1: we can describe if he might describe as hard as gangs, mercenaries,
Speaker 1: et cetera, et cetera, and it kind of depends that
Speaker 1: it's like a mix of different forces. What's very important
Speaker 1: there is the very close relationship that they have with
Speaker 1: the Turkey state that essentially the Turkish government has made
Speaker 1: the choice that it wants to continue its aggression and
Speaker 1: its expansionism onnotany Syria, and other than immediately sending their
Speaker 1: own army, they instead pay and fund and direct and
Speaker 1: support these militias who are also operating for their own benefit. Yes,
Speaker 1: but the relationship between them their actions right now in
Speaker 1: the Turkish state, it's much more direct. So at the
Speaker 1: same time as you have this this sweep to the
Speaker 1: south that caused the Regimi change in Syria, heading to
Speaker 1: the east, so to originally the reason Zeppa, followed by
Speaker 1: the city at Mindage in the region around there, you
Speaker 1: have this onslaught from the essay and that is what
Speaker 1: the SDF, if you originally mentioned, are currently up against.
Speaker 1: And that's the situation that we're in and it's it's
Speaker 1: still ongoing. It's very much not stopped. It's still much
Speaker 1: very much like hot engagement and hot fighting that is happening.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's like sometimes to introduce your other econom
Speaker 3: we use like TFSA to refer to some of those groups,
Speaker 3: like the Turkish Free Syrian Army, and that they're essentially
Speaker 3: an operation by the Turkey state to co oper to
Speaker 3: what was initially a democratic grassroots revolution more than a
Speaker 3: decade ago. And like, if you haven't been following, I
Speaker 3: suppose it would be easy to be confused by this,
Speaker 3: But the SNA have not been backwards in documenting their
Speaker 3: war crimes in the advance towards I guess their advanced
Speaker 3: westwards towards the Euphrates and even over the Euphrates, and
Speaker 3: there have been some really horrible things, some of them,
Speaker 3: like I've shared online if people want to. They're not
Speaker 3: hard to find if you want to find them, but
Speaker 3: are not going to put them right in front of you,
Speaker 3: because they're horrible. And as the SNA have advanced, they've
Speaker 3: reached a couple of locations that are very crucial, right,
Speaker 3: and that's where they've been kind of stopped by the SDF,
Speaker 3: because the SDF haven't been in like such a large
Speaker 3: sale conflict for the last couple of years. They've been
Speaker 3: fighting against like Islamic State splinter cells and to a degree,
Speaker 3: the SNA. But like the SDF has modernized a lot
Speaker 3: more than the SNA have, I guess in the past years,
Speaker 3: right that they've embraced the use of first person view drones.
Speaker 3: They've even shut down several Turkish Biractar drones, which they
Speaker 3: previously if they had the ability to do it then
Speaker 3: then they weren't able to use that ability until very recently.
Speaker 3: So like they in a sense, their resistance has been
Speaker 3: very impressive, right because we have, on the one hand,
Speaker 3: it's the second largest army in NATO giving its like
Speaker 3: full support to the SNA, and on the other hand
Speaker 3: we have the FDF, which is interior US partner force. Right,
Speaker 3: there are US bases still in Syior, there are US
Speaker 3: troops still in Syria, well yeah for now, But like
Speaker 3: I mean, I remember when I was in Java in
Speaker 3: October twenty twenty three, the US shot down a Biractar
Speaker 3: drone over a US base and then it did not
Speaker 3: shoot down the dozens of other Biractar drones that were
Speaker 3: bombing the cities the city that you're in right now,
Speaker 3: city that I was in, other cities. You know, I
Speaker 3: met a mother who had lost her fourteen year old
Speaker 3: son to one of these dwined bombings. Really like horrific
Speaker 3: and just cruel bombing of all of very clearly civilian targets.
Speaker 3: So like, the US is there, but they're not doing
Speaker 3: anything to help supposedly their friends, supposally their partners. And
Speaker 3: like every interview I conducted began with like five minutes
Speaker 3: of me being asked why the Americans weren't being friends
Speaker 3: when the SDF had been friends to them in a
Speaker 3: battle against ISIS, And like, that's not something I have
Speaker 3: a good explanation for, other than like I think most
Speaker 3: Courtish people can understand the difference between people and government
Speaker 3: and people and state, and like I might have a belief,
Speaker 3: but it's not the same as the government of the US.
Speaker 3: So can you explain the role of the US here
Speaker 3: because people will be very confused, right, And I think
Speaker 3: it's easy to sort of simplify this as like America
Speaker 3: is in Syria for oil, but there's a little bit
Speaker 3: more to it than that.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, absolutely, And again it's it's such a big question,
Speaker 1: and it's a question of how far back do you go?
Speaker 1: How far do you zoom out? Sense keep As you
Speaker 1: keep moving back from today, the plot kind of thickens
Speaker 1: and as you you know, if you imagine if you're
Speaker 1: looking at the Google maps of Steria and then you
Speaker 1: you click the button that takes you out and out,
Speaker 1: and the map gets wider and wider, the story kind
Speaker 1: of fills itself in as well. Like that seems to
Speaker 1: make more sense when they are put in that context.
Speaker 1: And I think a good place to start maybe is Yeah,
Speaker 1: this consistent for a long time, like American attitude to
Speaker 1: this whole region, not just Sylia, which is to play
Speaker 1: yet to play very carefully to your advantage and make
Speaker 1: alliances where it suits you and continue to where it
Speaker 1: suits you and not stick to them where it doesn't.
Speaker 1: And that is Yeah. One aspect of that is the resources,
Speaker 1: which goes further than just oil, is also gas and
Speaker 1: is also the resource of the space to create a
Speaker 1: trade route, right, Like, that's a really important question in
Speaker 1: the Middle East at the moment, and it's one of
Speaker 1: the reasons that Kurdistan is such an important place politically,
Speaker 1: a lot of these lines of potential trade routes and
Speaker 1: these kind of lines of power and money they intercept
Speaker 1: and they cross over here. So there are all these
Speaker 1: different resources at play. And I think another thing that's
Speaker 1: important to look at is that, yeah, the US as
Speaker 1: the US government as you put it, as distinct from
Speaker 1: the citizens in anyway, doesn't just go into this blind
Speaker 1: and kind of react day by day. It's not like
Speaker 1: a reactive force in the world. The US government is
Speaker 1: and would you know, proudly announced I think as well
Speaker 1: with Creey thing on this one point that they are,
Speaker 1: no matter who the administration is and where it's politically
Speaker 1: leaning at the time, a very proactive force. They have
Speaker 1: a plan where that they go and they try and
Speaker 1: put it into practice. And famously, historically and very intensely,
Speaker 1: a lot of that has played out in the Middle
Speaker 1: East because of the Middle East position in the world
Speaker 1: resources and the role that it's played in kind of
Speaker 1: who gets to be the big dog in the world
Speaker 1: over the years and throughout history, it's become for those
Speaker 1: various reasons that very important. And so yeah, again without
Speaker 1: it's many podcasts of its own, and I'm sure you
Speaker 1: are making them, So I won't try and like summarize it,
Speaker 1: but I think you can't talk about America's role in
Speaker 1: Syria and the Middle East in general without mentioning like
Speaker 1: Israel and the role Israeli state place for for and
Speaker 1: with America and things like. You know, we're all sort
Speaker 1: of following and for you guys following more closely because
Speaker 1: we're all following the current Americans administration and leadership and
Speaker 1: what's been coming out of there. And sometimes you think, like, God,
Speaker 1: is it just not when you look at something like
Speaker 1: you know, the video for like the new Gaza that
Speaker 1: they're going to make, for example, and Trump's Gaza whatever
Speaker 1: that was. Yeah, yeah, So I mean it makes it sick.
Speaker 1: And then you're also not sure if it's it's serious
Speaker 1: or if it's mad. But I think unfortunately it's actually, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's quite an intelligent play. And what it speaks to
Speaker 1: that is relevant to what I'm saying here is this
Speaker 1: kind of long term flat right that to annihilate a
Speaker 1: region to the best of your ability so that you
Speaker 1: can move in and develop it. Yeah, is a tried
Speaker 1: and tested method of many many governance, and America is
Speaker 1: not the only one. But at the moment we're at
Speaker 1: kind of crucial moment in the Middle East when one
Speaker 1: sort of wall of forces are trying to greatly reduce
Speaker 1: the role and power of some others so that they
Speaker 1: can put their plan into place and so that they
Speaker 1: can yeah, they can, so they can make money. You know,
Speaker 1: you always were following money and where development can be
Speaker 1: made and where trade routes can be made. And so
Speaker 1: what happened the tiny of the regime change that we've
Speaker 1: just discussed, the timing of HDS being able to move
Speaker 1: into the Masters and take it over. It's no coincidence
Speaker 1: that it came after like a shift in the Israeli
Speaker 1: like genocidal war on Gaza, and after what the then
Speaker 1: military action they were taking against Tesbola in Lebanon, which
Speaker 1: they felt then had up to a point achieved what
Speaker 1: they wanted to achieve, and then things kind of moved
Speaker 1: to Syria. Right, So I'm not saying that the new
Speaker 1: government has kind of come from has been sponsored by
Speaker 1: that at all. I think there's a huge amount of
Speaker 1: tension there. But the withdrawal of like the weakening and
Speaker 1: or withdrawal of forces to Iran and Hezbela here played
Speaker 1: a huge role with then being able to establish themselves
Speaker 1: as a government. So that is also something that you
Speaker 1: know that's not directly necessarily every step sort of kind
Speaker 1: of puppeteered by the US at all, but it is
Speaker 1: a part of the politics that the US has kind
Speaker 1: of long historical influence on and that it backs and
Speaker 1: that it's in conversation is in the whole of the
Speaker 1: Middle East. It's this kind of greater Middle East plan,
Speaker 1: it's vision for it, if you if you will. And
Speaker 1: the other aspect that I think is important to talk
Speaker 1: about is the US's relationship with North and Eastria specifically
Speaker 1: you mentioned they're like, you know, there's like supposed friendship
Speaker 1: with we can say that like friendship with the Kurds
Speaker 1: as people will refer to it. Or the alliance and
Speaker 1: coalition between the SDF and the US, which was sort
Speaker 1: of most most famous and most well known during the
Speaker 1: fight against isis when the international coalition, it's always the
Speaker 1: spearheaded by America, was bombing and providing air support for
Speaker 1: the SDF as the as they pulled it. The boots
Speaker 1: on the ground, the actual brand force that could go
Speaker 1: and take territory back from Isis, which yes, did look
Speaker 1: like a kind of did look like a friendship. But
Speaker 1: I think from both sides, everyone always that that was
Speaker 1: a practical alliance, perhaps perhaps a strategic alliance at best.
Speaker 1: We can say, but I think that the US has
Speaker 1: not got a history of operating on a basis of
Speaker 1: like friendship or of that kind of commitment to the
Speaker 1: forces it works with, and a lot a lot of
Speaker 1: history and modern recent history can attest to that. And
Speaker 1: from the side of people here, I think it's really
Speaker 1: important to say that, yeah, people were angry, and that
Speaker 1: you know what you heard you were talking about interviewing
Speaker 1: people and then kind of being like, well, what are
Speaker 1: they doing? Like we we fought all with them, partly
Speaker 1: on their behalf like and then they deserve Yes, people
Speaker 1: are angry, but the more kind of politically engaged someone
Speaker 1: is sort of moving up that scale, I think the
Speaker 1: less face they ever had in the US.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, and now you've got the US kind of muttering
Speaker 1: about withdrawing their troops from Syria, right yah, And as
Speaker 1: Daja who because they said this before, I was actually
Speaker 1: here when they said this reportant back in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: I also have be in northern East Syria, and it
Speaker 1: was I'm not wrong, it was Trump again. If I
Speaker 1: turned out and they said we were drawing our forces
Speaker 1: from Syria, did they actually withdraw Not exactly. No. You
Speaker 1: still saw them driving around in big cars, mostly right
Speaker 1: next to the oil fields. It was a bit it
Speaker 1: was almost tomical, sort of like when party and parts
Speaker 1: next to the oil fields. But that withdrawal was symbolic.
Speaker 1: That withdrawal was they withdrew from bases right on the
Speaker 1: border with Turkey, which lies just to the north of
Speaker 1: Syria and as such just next to north of Eassyria
Speaker 1: for anyone without the about the map immediately in their head,
Speaker 1: and they announced it very very clearly and very publicly,
Speaker 1: and so it was a kind of it was a
Speaker 1: green flag to say to Turkey, yeah, coming on, you come, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're not going to stop you. We're not gonna because
Speaker 1: what you don't want to do is hit an American
Speaker 1: by accident, as you gave the examples. They you know,
Speaker 1: they brought down a drum, but it was over an
Speaker 1: American base, not because it was bombing civilians nearby, which
Speaker 1: dozens of other were, And so that you had that
Speaker 1: kind of symbolic withdrawal led to in twenty nineteen. It's
Speaker 1: one of the times that Turkey has like annexed section
Speaker 1: es centrally annexty section of Syria North and East Syria
Speaker 1: under the remit of the Autonomous Administration, but nonetheless still
Speaker 1: technically Syrian territory. And in that time it was sarah
Speaker 1: Kanya and Gerrispi, which people may have heard of, and
Speaker 1: so that, yeah, that was the like green flag to
Speaker 1: Turkey to take that step. And at that time, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe share. It's a lot of a lot of political stuff,
Speaker 1: a lot of acropins, a lot of all this and
Speaker 1: maybe I'll just SHAREO be anecdote. Yeah, at that time
Speaker 1: when they made the announcement they were going to leave,
Speaker 1: people organized a march to an American base, and I
Speaker 1: was here at the time and I joined it with
Speaker 1: some of the women's organizations. It was the most amazing day.
Speaker 1: Like I sort of went home and wrote this massive
Speaker 1: journal antique. I've already been here for a very long time,
Speaker 1: but my mind was still a bit blown by it.
Speaker 1: For one thing, it was such an example of how
Speaker 1: the social movement here works and what society is like
Speaker 1: in all the complexity, because yeah, a lot of people
Speaker 1: here are very wedded to the liberatory, progressive, grassroots democratic
Speaker 1: women's freedom ecological movement that I'm sure you've spoken about
Speaker 1: in your programs on Rashava, and thousands and thousands of
Speaker 1: people completely take ownership of that and see themselves in
Speaker 1: that and are the driving force of that. Obviously, that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean every single person here is one hundred percent
Speaker 1: sold on movement at all. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Some of them are trying to get on with life.
Speaker 1: Some of them just trying to get on with life.
Speaker 1: Some of them are you know, I mean, if you
Speaker 1: talk about women's freedom, there's always going to be really
Speaker 1: few men or a bit like what does this mean
Speaker 1: for me? What do I have to give up? So
Speaker 1: it would be sick, it would be silly and new
Speaker 1: topics to say that everyone's talk we sold. However, nobody
Speaker 1: wants to get invented by one of the largest armies
Speaker 1: in NATO. Yeah, so you have this sort of actually
Speaker 1: even broader than usual kind of coming together, like groups
Speaker 1: from the sort of like tribal clan structures here that
Speaker 1: are still like a really political force, and that don't
Speaker 1: you know, have a kind of uneasy truth and sort
Speaker 1: of slowly learning each other. Relationship with the movement, you
Speaker 1: can say, but they really came out in force as
Speaker 1: well as well as like the Curdish movement as well
Speaker 1: as like lots of different ethnic groups. And we marched,
Speaker 1: and to be honest, I didn't know we were going
Speaker 1: through an American based A lot of people didn't. It
Speaker 1: was quite confusing days because I think they didn't want
Speaker 1: to announce things too widely until they got there and
Speaker 1: we went and did this kind of the Yeah, they
Speaker 1: like read out a letter symbolically. I think in some
Speaker 1: of the Arabic community leaders went up to the base
Speaker 1: and we the majority of people. There's got hundreds of
Speaker 1: hundred of people in this crowd, and they stayed back
Speaker 1: at a distance. And I found out later that that
Speaker 1: is because the American soldiers said, if two bigger groups
Speaker 1: of people come close, we will we will open fire.
Speaker 1: Like that that information was given. Yeah, I don't know
Speaker 1: what they were scared of.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: It's like like any march here, the people in the
Speaker 1: front row are always ranks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's old ladies.
Speaker 1: No different on that day. I mean they're a bit scary,
Speaker 1: to be said. I don't think that it's a bit
Speaker 1: embarrassing if the American soldiers would keep together them but
Speaker 1: that stuff of it's judge. But while we were there
Speaker 1: by like your chance, the fleet of not tacks but
Speaker 1: big armored cars rolled in and there was just this
Speaker 1: moment I really clearly remember, just pause, and they rolled
Speaker 1: through the crowd, and the crowd parted and turned and looked,
Speaker 1: and nobody teared or clapped. Obviously there was no sense
Speaker 1: of oh, it's the Americans, right, yeah, but nobody sort
Speaker 1: of through you know, for anything else, through insults or
Speaker 1: chanted anything negative either. There was just this stillness and
Speaker 1: this really helpable energy of this kind of sense of
Speaker 1: people looking at you know, obviously they're just these soldiers
Speaker 1: that happened to be driving these trucks, but they really
Speaker 1: symbolized something more than that. And people were kind of
Speaker 1: looking sort of insisting that you looked them in the eye,
Speaker 1: saying like, hey, if anyone owes anyone, you owe us.
Speaker 1: After everything we fought for and everything we've.
Speaker 3: Done, I have thirteen thousand marches. They were called exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so many people lost in the fight isis and
Speaker 1: so much like blood and sweat and fears given, and
Speaker 1: there was just yeah, this palpable sense of like, at
Speaker 1: least have the decency to kind of look at us
Speaker 1: and admit what you're doing, because you know what you're doing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it really yeah, it really felt it was very
Speaker 1: kind of moving at the time, and that I feel
Speaker 1: like it's very symbolic into politics here of how you know,
Speaker 1: someone asking the other day what was it like for
Speaker 1: people to rely on America knowing that they'd betrayed them,
Speaker 1: And I said, well, they didn't, they never relied on them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know I was relying on aera.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you know, there's that kind of the expectation
Speaker 1: of at least some sense of dignity. That is a
Speaker 1: very important concept for people here in dignity and yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, that that is I always remember that that
Speaker 1: would yeah say again, and it's confusing. That was five
Speaker 1: five and a half years ago. Now, yeah, and now
Speaker 1: you've got this sort of is history repeating itself talking
Speaker 1: about with the troops. But I think it's important to
Speaker 1: understand what that means. What that means is they're talking
Speaker 1: about potentially giving a greed of blag for more military aggression,
Speaker 1: and I think they kind of haven't decided yet. It's
Speaker 1: really going to do it, and there's a lot of
Speaker 1: things in the balance, and in terms of I'll just
Speaker 1: say one more, one more thing, and I think gets
Speaker 1: a bit longer in terms of like the plan for
Speaker 1: Syria and America's role, like this is my opinion. I
Speaker 1: can't say for sure that this is the definite reality,
Speaker 1: but my understanding in the situation is that once again
Speaker 1: people here in this in this movement are kind of
Speaker 1: caught between a rock and a hard place. And the
Speaker 1: rock and the hard place now looks like You've got
Speaker 1: the new government that set itself up in Damascus, Yes,
Speaker 1: and their goal, if they can wangle it and get
Speaker 1: the outside and international support, is to build your sort
Speaker 1: of socially at least, if not politically, the model is
Speaker 1: going to look a bit like Afghanistan and the Colabat, right,
Speaker 1: Like from the signs of changes they've made to the constitution,
Speaker 1: incidents of like violence, sectarianism and feminist side of been rising,
Speaker 1: attacks they've already made on women's rights like very rapidly,
Speaker 1: and things that have been put in like the president
Speaker 1: that legally has to be in Muslim all of this stuff, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's sort of their plan. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: I think if you kind of let the American government
Speaker 1: loose on Syria to build up its plan. At the moment,
Speaker 1: I think they are seeing an opportunity to use this
Speaker 1: kind of formula from Iraq into and I think they
Speaker 1: want to create this sort very open to capitalist market
Speaker 1: who trade kind of space in which the North and
Speaker 1: East area with majority though not entirely Curtis, can sort
Speaker 1: of play this role that the Kurdistan region of Iraq
Speaker 1: has played.
Speaker 3: I don't know what you call it, like a safe
Speaker 3: conduit to capital. Like it's a very stark difference. If
Speaker 3: people haven't traveled that part of the world to be
Speaker 3: in pol a Bill and then to us into Java,
Speaker 3: that you can see the impact that a decade of
Speaker 3: that being the safe place to have your oil company
Speaker 3: headquarters has had on the Ghatstan regional government. Yeah, I've
Speaker 3: better move on before we finish up. I want to
Speaker 3: talk about the current manifestation of resistance right and specifically
Speaker 3: at Tishrin Dam, because that's something that A has been
Speaker 3: reported on and B like it mirrors what you saw
Speaker 3: in twenty nineteen, and that like it's not just a
Speaker 3: military resistance, right, but also like a civil sized society resistance.
Speaker 3: Can you explain maybe if people have seen anything, they've
Speaker 3: seen that horrible video of people dancing and then SNA
Speaker 3: drone just dropping a mortar bomb right in the middle
Speaker 3: of them, But can you explain how we got there?
Speaker 1: Yeah, of course, now, yeah, great, I'm glad you asked that,
Speaker 1: because in some sense they know there is horrible stuff
Speaker 1: in there. But this is the this is the beautiful bit,
Speaker 1: this is the great bit, the bit that, yeah, we
Speaker 1: soon be talking about at the moment. So, yeah, the
Speaker 1: Tissuing Dam is a big tydro electric facility that is
Speaker 1: on the Euphrates River. And if you look at a
Speaker 1: map Asia, Euphrates is kind of in the middle of
Speaker 1: the top and that is the region roughly where there's
Speaker 1: offensive that we spoke out of the Turkish funded militias,
Speaker 1: which has come from from the west across to the east,
Speaker 1: at times closer and further away from the river, and
Speaker 1: currently like a few kilometers away, that's where that offensive
Speaker 1: has been stopped by the FDA and cannot progress any
Speaker 1: further despite intensive air support from Turkey, and they're sort
Speaker 1: of increasingly putting pressure on that, but it hasn't got anywhere.
Speaker 1: But it's close, right, you know, it's not too far away,
Speaker 1: and people are following the news. And what's right on
Speaker 1: the other side. If you get across the river there
Speaker 1: there's the dam, and then there's a bridge further to
Speaker 1: the north of Krakos at bridge that's similarly kind of crucial.
Speaker 1: And if you get across the river, you're not far
Speaker 1: away at all from the city of Kabani, which I'm
Speaker 1: sure most of your lessons will parad off. Is this
Speaker 1: massively important symbol of anti fashion resistance. It was one
Speaker 1: of the ignition points of the revolution for the social
Speaker 1: movement here and it was really important a plight against Isis.
Speaker 1: And I think it's safe to say that Turkey via
Speaker 1: the SNA had its eye on Cabani again and that
Speaker 1: this is in fact an attack on Kabani, which has
Speaker 1: been kind of held back. And so the Dan is
Speaker 1: important symbolically as this like strategic river crossing. It's this
Speaker 1: kind of no pass that are like they will not
Speaker 1: pass moment. It's also important logistically, like for the society
Speaker 1: here because it's a hydroelectric facility. It supplies electricity, helps
Speaker 1: with the supply of water for various reasons. For thousands
Speaker 1: and thousands of people. It's now out of action, might
Speaker 1: go without saying, but when you're in the middle of
Speaker 1: an active war zone, you can't keep running a place
Speaker 1: like that. So that is directly attacking and impacting the
Speaker 1: society and normal communities here, and so yeah, it's no
Speaker 1: wonder that those normal communities and that society but always
Speaker 1: feel very very implicated and are kind of ready to
Speaker 1: to stand up and defend themselves. It's not as Yeah,
Speaker 1: the military assault is not kept separate from the society
Speaker 1: in the society is also under attatch indirectly attacks on
Speaker 1: infrastructure such as that, and directly by like drone strikes
Speaker 1: on many many civilian targets. Unfortunately, Yeah, in recent times
Speaker 1: that has increased, particularly in villages surrounding Banni, and you
Speaker 1: seem like kids also hospitalized and killed as a part
Speaker 1: of that. So on the eighth of January, what began
Speaker 1: was that what they call a convoy, like a big
Speaker 1: big trek of different vehicles got together and arranged and
Speaker 1: organized from different towns across Anotomy Syria to go to
Speaker 1: Kishin dam As. This very like the day symbol is
Speaker 1: very clear like important physical location and also very symbolic
Speaker 1: thing where war has also been fought before. There's also
Speaker 1: in previous campaigns against for example, there was fighting in
Speaker 1: the regions, so people feel like, you know, their sons
Speaker 1: and daughters have fought for diffree river crossing before. It's
Speaker 1: still you know, it's there in the historical memory as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and people went and since then, which is almost exactly
Speaker 1: two months as we're recording this, we're right around the
Speaker 1: two months anniversary months and there's been a constant presence
Speaker 1: there protests on the dam and that's got several different
Speaker 1: kind of aspects to it. It is mostly to raise
Speaker 1: the voices and raise awareness and make visible what's happening.
Speaker 1: And yeah, if it's hard to understand why like hundreds
Speaker 1: of people would go from their homes to somewhere that
Speaker 1: is closer to the active fighting, to somewhere that's in
Speaker 1: a very unstable region, Like yeah, first of all, you
Speaker 1: have to understand that nowhere in notedly Syria is actually sick,
Speaker 1: right like in Commas, for the city where I am,
Speaker 1: there's been residential buildings bombs dropped on them from drones
Speaker 1: like within the last couple of months as well. It's
Speaker 1: not like and there's this sense of safety wherever you are.
Speaker 1: The difference is a sense of doing something about and
Speaker 1: of standing together and coming together in these like amazingly
Speaker 1: brave and amazingly creative ways that only the communities have
Speaker 1: not in Assoria can manage. So Yes, Unfortunately, during these
Speaker 1: two months there have consistently been air strikes on the dam,
Speaker 1: and I don't have the exact statistics, and you wouldn't
Speaker 1: necessarily get an honest answer about how many of them
Speaker 1: have come directly from Turkey and how many have come
Speaker 1: from SNA drones, right, but the Sena drunes are paid
Speaker 1: for by the Turkis state anyway, So at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, yea morally, how much difference does it make?
Speaker 1: And they have attacked the civil protests there and up
Speaker 1: until now, I believe twenty five civilians have been killed
Speaker 1: and many more than that hospitalized. But despite this, and
Speaker 1: in the shadow of this, with the most beautiful defiance
Speaker 1: like that, protest has continued. And what the videos that
Speaker 1: maybe don't get shared as much or shared enough that
Speaker 1: people might not have seen are also these images you know,
Speaker 1: which are very I can attest are very real because
Speaker 1: I went there myself a few weeks ago, which is
Speaker 1: everybody getting out and dancing at the slightest opportunity or
Speaker 1: the slightest excuse, lack of an excuse, and the most
Speaker 1: amazing art that's been made, like paintings of the people
Speaker 1: who've been killed, or they would say here fallen martyr.
Speaker 1: In these two months, Yes, there's been theater, like theater
Speaker 1: performed using the bits of the bombed out cars that
Speaker 1: were bombed just a few days before as props to
Speaker 1: kind of like, yeah, tell the story of what's been happening,
Speaker 1: like the most like creative things. Also statements for the press,
Speaker 1: and all your different organizations show ups, so like the
Speaker 1: organized youth show up as the youth, and obviously the
Speaker 1: women's organizations as women saying like, you know, this is
Speaker 1: our revolution, this is our community, and we know what
Speaker 1: it looks like when it gets occupied. We're not just
Speaker 1: going to stand by and see it happen again. It's
Speaker 1: our land, it's our water, and it's our kids. Is
Speaker 1: the refrain that kind of gets repeated over and over again.
Speaker 1: And of course they're they're in solidarity as well with
Speaker 1: the with the SDF themselves, with the military force. It
Speaker 1: would be it would be crazy if they weren't, because yeah,
Speaker 1: they are also embedded in their communities. No, they're not
Speaker 1: extracted from the society the way that most kind of
Speaker 1: state armies are. So yeah, the situation at Tiswine is
Speaker 1: still ongoing, and when I was there, it was it
Speaker 1: really was the most amazing experience. There were bombings while
Speaker 1: I was there, and tragically, one of the people I
Speaker 1: got to know there who was a journalist, his name
Speaker 1: was Eggy Brush. Just less than two weeks after I
Speaker 1: got back, I found out that he'd also been killed
Speaker 1: in another drawne strike.
Speaker 3: So it was, Yeah, it's.
Speaker 1: Very very just kind of doesn't it doesn't stop, the
Speaker 1: aggression doesn't stop, but nonetheless people kind of coming together
Speaker 1: to resist it doesn't stop either. And once I'd been there,
Speaker 1: it seemed a lot less crazy or hard to imagine
Speaker 1: that people would come together around it because you see
Speaker 1: like the immense power that it was, and you see
Speaker 1: that how everyone here has lost someone. Know, like the
Speaker 1: vast majority of people here lost members of their family.
Speaker 1: You said yourself, thirteen thousand fallen in the fight against
Speaker 1: Isis alone, and since then, like war one way or
Speaker 1: another has been going on. So people know what lost
Speaker 1: means already they've already lost, but they're not going to
Speaker 1: let that make them step back. They're gonna do their
Speaker 1: fall and loved ones justice and continue to stand up
Speaker 1: in their name. And yeah, it's a very sort of
Speaker 1: big thing, but it's really powerful when you see it
Speaker 1: in person and and all that kind of humanity and
Speaker 1: humor and joy despite the situation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, that is a very unique thing to courts
Speaker 3: down And like the Kurdish freedom movement, it's this sort
Speaker 3: of joy. I mean, I've think it's very similar in
Speaker 3: Burma rightly, where they also do they love to dance,
Speaker 3: oh well in a war, and like it is one
Speaker 3: of the things that I think, like the joy. It
Speaker 3: is hard to explain and I was sort of writing
Speaker 3: long on time here, but I just like when people
Speaker 3: hear Syria and to exemp when they hear me and
Speaker 3: mad or they'll think of wars. But like you should
Speaker 3: also think about all the people who exist outside of
Speaker 3: the conflict, or who don't think this outside of it.
Speaker 3: It's around word, but who who are not fighting at
Speaker 3: the front line. Like the experience of revolution is very
Speaker 3: joyful one even amidst very difficult times, and it's difficult
Speaker 3: to explain it if you haven't experienced it, because it
Speaker 3: sounds so juxtaposed, but it isn't necessarily. The guy have
Speaker 3: actually really fond memories of meeting Kurdish people coming into
Speaker 3: the United States in the mountains at a time when
Speaker 3: the United States was retaining people outdoors in very difficult conditions,
Speaker 3: and like dancing with them there at a time when
Speaker 3: like it was miserable. The ability to salvage joy. It
Speaker 3: gives you a sense of sovereignty, I suppose, and I
Speaker 3: can understand why that's such an important part of the
Speaker 3: Curdish freedom movement when every expression of Curtis's identity has
Speaker 3: been suppressed for so long, like the ability to seize
Speaker 3: your moments what James Scott would call like little small
Speaker 3: acts of resistance, Like it's important. It's it's more important,
Speaker 3: I think people understand. And if you're understanding it from
Speaker 3: a Western military doctrine, it doesn't fit. But that's because
Speaker 3: you're using the wrong framework. Yeah, exactly, Jenny. If people
Speaker 3: are interested in following your work about this, or perhaps
Speaker 3: they're interested in doing what they can to support the
Speaker 3: revolution and what is a challenging time, a very changing time,
Speaker 3: how can they do both those things?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so well, if they are interested in following the
Speaker 1: sort of updates and so on that I've been doing.
Speaker 1: I've got Instagram and TikTok channels, which are both at
Speaker 1: j Keston. I'm assuming you can stick that written form somewhere.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll put it in the show notes.
Speaker 1: And Telegram channel as well if people find it easier
Speaker 1: to sort of get Yeah, that's just the most condensed
Speaker 1: way to kind of download information, videos or whatever, which
Speaker 1: you can find under the same name, and there's also
Speaker 1: links to it on the on Instagram, TikTok and on there.
Speaker 1: We've got we linked tree that has some suggest for
Speaker 1: if people want to support, like ways to donate, say
Speaker 1: to the Kurdish Red Present and stuff like that. And
Speaker 1: then specifically, yeah, I mean there is a lot that
Speaker 1: people can do and whatever it is, it all starts
Speaker 1: with getting more I wouldn't say informed, I would say
Speaker 1: getting more connected. Right, So getting informed is a part
Speaker 1: of that, but not just in the sense of information learning,
Speaker 1: like it's also connecting with like the feeling of things
Speaker 1: here and why it's become so important to so many
Speaker 1: people across the world, not just people from here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the more we learn about that, I'm all, we'll
Speaker 1: start to see like how we can be a friend
Speaker 1: to the movement here and where how our role can fit.
Speaker 1: And I know that there are specifically in America a
Speaker 1: couple of organizations, is it that theybi book Chain has
Speaker 1: been really prominent in organizing one of them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Emergency Committee for Java.
Speaker 1: Emergency Committee for a Java, that's the one. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean had emergency in there somewhere. That's definitely worth looking
Speaker 1: up and following a lot of the work that they do.
Speaker 1: And you also got like think it's like the Kourdish
Speaker 1: Piece Institute, that kind of lobbying, and so yeah, there
Speaker 1: are some there is some stuff from coming from the
Speaker 1: United States as well, But I think, yeah, the more
Speaker 1: people get a chance to kind of learn about stuff
Speaker 1: here and see the connection and be able to see
Speaker 1: and find themselves in it, And I think that's got
Speaker 1: a lot to do with what you were just speaking about.
Speaker 1: Hearing you put so well, I wouldn't extend it much more,
Speaker 1: but yeah, like people here, it's really there's always war happening,
Speaker 1: and always war kind of filing on top of you,
Speaker 1: but that's never what it's about. The question is always
Speaker 1: what are you're fighting for and what you're fighting to defend?
Speaker 1: And what would you be doing if there was no war.
Speaker 1: Everyone here'll always say if there was no war, we'd
Speaker 1: still have enough work to do with all the really
Speaker 1: like I was that word ambitious, like social transformation that
Speaker 1: people here are really committed to. There's enough going on
Speaker 1: and it's very big and as you put it, it's
Speaker 1: very beautiful and very joyful, and so that's Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the bit that I encourage people to try and learn
Speaker 1: more about, because that's the bit that makes you stay.
Speaker 1: It makes peopleeople like me stick around for years, finding
Speaker 1: out more and more, making friends and getting closer and
Speaker 1: closer to there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's a very good way to put it.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I encourage people to do all that. Thank
Speaker 3: you so much for your time doing I note it's
Speaker 3: late there, but we really appreciate you joining us today.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much than cheers, hello, and welcome to
Speaker 5: it could happen here. It's time to finally continue our
Speaker 5: journey through Latin America and Anarchiston.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 5: So far we've covered almost every country in Latin America
Speaker 5: at this point, including Peru, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Central America.
Speaker 5: The country is the former Grand Colombia like Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia,
Speaker 5: and also Cuba and.
Speaker 6: A few other islands in the Caribbean.
Speaker 5: And now before we get to the really big history
Speaker 5: that I've kind of been saved as the finale, that
Speaker 5: is anarchism in Mexico, we're going to be talking about
Speaker 5: the anarchist movement in Uruguay.
Speaker 6: So my name is Andrew Sage.
Speaker 5: You can find on YouTube as Andrewism and you can
Speaker 5: also find the bulk of the research for today's episode
Speaker 5: in an Hill Capialities, aptly titled Anarchism in Latin America.
Speaker 5: I'm joined today by James me again and it's been
Speaker 5: a while.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it has been a while.
Speaker 6: Nice to be back, great to be back in conversation.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So, before we could really get into the history of
Speaker 5: anarchism in Uruguay, I probably should give some context as
Speaker 5: to how Uruguay became Uruguay. And well, my source for
Speaker 5: this history is primarily the Encyclopedia Britannica. So before the
Speaker 5: whole scoog of European clonalism, what is now known as
Speaker 5: Uruguay supported a population of about five thousand to ten
Speaker 5: thousand people, which were.
Speaker 6: Organized in semi nomadic groups.
Speaker 5: You had the Tarua, the China, and the Guarani Indians primarily.
Speaker 5: So the first European visits took place first in fifteen sixteen,
Speaker 5: and they weren't particularly successful or of interest. Spain was
Speaker 5: looking for gold and looking for silver. That was their
Speaker 5: incentive for colonization at the time, and they didn't see
Speaker 5: any of that, so they didn't have much motivation to
Speaker 5: stick around. It was until the sixteen twenties, over a
Speaker 5: century later, that Jesuit and Franciscan missionary set up religious settlements,
Speaker 5: but unfortunately, by then, Uruguay's native population had already begun
Speaker 5: to collapse. Thousands of people were succumbing to European diseases,
Speaker 5: so they had no immunity to a couple of centuries later,
Speaker 5: in eighteen hundred, Uruguay continued along with the very small population.
Speaker 5: At this point it was about thirty thousand people in total,
Speaker 5: and a third of their population lived in the capital
Speaker 5: city of Montevideo.
Speaker 6: Another thirty their population.
Speaker 5: Were African slaves who worked on ranchers and meat processing plants,
Speaker 5: and as domestic servants. Meanwhile, the elite, whether they be
Speaker 5: wealthy traders, bankers, or landowners, mostly traced their roots to Catalonia,
Speaker 5: the Basque Country, the Cleary Islands, and other parts of Spain.
Speaker 5: We get into eighteen ten, when a lot of the
Speaker 5: Latin American countries had been fighting for their independence Boros
Speaker 5: Aires Argentina was among them. But while Argentina was fighting
Speaker 5: for its independence, Montevideo was a Royalist stronghold backed by
Speaker 5: the Spanish military and naval forces. On the country side,
Speaker 5: it was a different story though Uruguay's greatest independence zero
Speaker 5: kind of came out of that space. His name was
Speaker 5: Jose Crevasio Artigas, and he originally led a Spanish cavalry unit,
Speaker 5: but eventually turned against the crown in eighteen eleven and
Speaker 5: rallied an army of rural fighters, freed African slaves and
Speaker 5: anti royalist leaders from Montevideo. So with the back in
Speaker 5: from Buenos Aires, his forces were able to score key
Speaker 5: victories and eventually oust the Spanish. But Artigas had much
Speaker 5: bigger ambitions. He wanted a confederation of provinces to resisted
Speaker 5: the dominance of Buenos Aires. In fact, he wanted Montevideo
Speaker 5: to become the center of a rival confederation, as prior
Speaker 5: to Argentina becoming Argentina, it was sort of a loose
Speaker 5: confederation centered in Buenos Aires. Artigas's ideas also included things
Speaker 5: like redistributing the land to freed slaves and Poiuguayans, which
Speaker 5: made him obviously very popular among the poor and very
Speaker 5: much a threat to the elite. Eventually, he was forced
Speaker 5: into exile because because he made some enemies that basically
Speaker 5: sat on their hands as the Portuguese Brazilian forces invaded
Speaker 5: and took over the region despite his exile, though the
Speaker 5: fight really wasn't over, you know. After the occupation, which
Speaker 5: was often called Brazilianization, it was resisted very heavily by
Speaker 5: locals and exiles, and of course Argentina, which had become
Speaker 5: some lot of a rival power to Brazil in the region.
Speaker 5: It saw Brazil's influence in Uruguay as a threat. So
Speaker 5: eventually one of Artigas's exile officers, a guy named Juan
Speaker 5: Antonio Lavaller, would lead a force that would cross the
Speaker 5: river and reclaim Uruguay. The fight would end in a
Speaker 5: steel meat and then British deplomat to step in, because
Speaker 5: of course the British had their own interests in the region.
Speaker 5: But eventually, in eighteen twenty eight, a treaty was signed
Speaker 5: officially created in Uruguay as an independent Natia buffer state
Speaker 5: between Argentina and Brazil. In eighteen thirty, Uruguay's first constitution
Speaker 5: was ratified, and at the time the country had a
Speaker 5: population of just seventy four thousand people.
Speaker 6: All that war kind of left the country in ruins.
Speaker 5: A lot of the once wealthy colonial families were devastated,
Speaker 5: the cattle numbers had plummeted, and the threat of both
Speaker 5: Argentina and Brazil still persisted despite the treaty at being signed.
Speaker 5: So then the nation ended up being split into two
Speaker 5: rival factions. You had the faction that was led by
Speaker 5: Uruguay's first president and then you had the faction that
Speaker 5: was led by Uruguay's second president, and they became face
Speaker 5: rivals that ignited a civil war known as the Gera
Speaker 5: Grande or Great War.
Speaker 6: I'd make a long story short.
Speaker 5: The first President's supporters became known as the Colorado Party
Speaker 5: and they controlled Onetevideo, and the second president supporters became
Speaker 5: known as the White Party or the Blanco Party, and
Speaker 5: they dominated the countryside, and so they were to fight
Speaker 5: from time to time, each side being backed by different parties.
Speaker 5: The Blancos were backed by Argentina, the Colorados were backed
Speaker 5: by France and England, and then eventually Brazil, and after
Speaker 5: about a decade of war, there was still no clear
Speaker 5: victory as to who came out of it as a
Speaker 5: success in state. The interior of the country was devastated,
Speaker 5: government was bankrupt, its very existence as an independent nation
Speaker 5: came into doubt, and the divisions between the people who
Speaker 5: backed either party became more stark than ever. Eventually, the
Speaker 5: Colorados were able to force Blancos out of power thanks
Speaker 5: to their back in by Brazil, and that move ended
Speaker 5: up alarming Paraguay, who was also a freedom Brazil's influence.
Speaker 5: So Paraguay ended up launching in what became known as
Speaker 5: the War of the Triple Alliance, which is something I
Speaker 5: covered in the episode of Paraguayan Anarchism. Eventually, after getting
Speaker 5: out of the civil wars and all these disputes and
Speaker 5: foreign powers medalist affairs, we have the situation Uruguay found
Speaker 5: itself in in the nineteenth century, a situation that waves
Speaker 5: of immigrants and also anarchism would find themselves in So
Speaker 5: Capelletti identifies a few of the early forces that shaped
Speaker 5: igu radicalism before anarchism and cynicalism. The first factor shape
Speaker 5: in the radical landscape in Uruguay's eighteenth century was utopian socialism.
Speaker 5: It came to Uruguay with Eugenio Tanddet in eighteen forty four,
Speaker 5: and he was a French utopian socialist and follower of
Speaker 5: Charles Freyer.
Speaker 6: Who was one of the founders of utopian socialism.
Speaker 5: That whole milieu advocated for reconstruction of society based on
Speaker 5: communal associations of producers known as falanges. And then with
Speaker 5: their influence afterwards came the next force of influence the
Speaker 5: Italian migrants who had fought in.
Speaker 6: The Civil War.
Speaker 5: These were Republicans who eventually became socialists. And in the
Speaker 5: next influence was the mutualist movement that was inspired by
Speaker 5: put On in the eighteen seventies, first arising in Uruguay
Speaker 5: among artisans and workers and establishing mutual aid societies to.
Speaker 6: Meet people's needs.
Speaker 5: A friend of Pedros of Prodona himself, a guy named
Speaker 5: Jose Ernesto Gilbert, had actually moved to Monte Video for
Speaker 5: a bit after being exiled from France, and I don't
Speaker 5: think he did anything too actively political. He did pursue
Speaker 5: botanic studies in Uruguay, and I believe there was some
Speaker 5: kind of creature.
Speaker 6: Named after so let's cool, you know, so fun fact.
Speaker 5: Finally, as we kind of exit the nineteenth century, you had,
Speaker 5: of course the rise of unions and internationalist organizations in
Speaker 5: the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. You had fights for workers' rights,
Speaker 5: you had the struggle for an international socialism, and you
Speaker 5: have what Capital identifies as a Euroguaian section of the
Speaker 5: Association International de Trabajadores, which was established in eighteen seventy
Speaker 5: two and engaged in a public action in eighteen seventy
Speaker 5: five that had some two thousand attendees. They established something
Speaker 5: of a manifesto where one line had asked, who better
Speaker 5: and of greater faith than ourselves can destroy the criminal
Speaker 5: exploitation to which we are condemned as a whole. The
Speaker 5: manifesto basically ask workers to unite, and this was in
Speaker 5: a time where anarchism was finally starting to pick up
Speaker 5: in the region.
Speaker 6: Another group formed in eighteen seventy six.
Speaker 5: This was the Ferracion Regional de la Republca Oriental del Uruguay,
Speaker 5: later called the ferracanal Uruguaya or f O r U.
Speaker 5: And they published papers like Social, La Lucha Obrera, la Fravadores, Liman,
Speaker 5: Spasion and Solidaridad. And it was a very small but
Speaker 5: virgin in movement, but they didn't take very long to
Speaker 5: start making some moves, as Capelletti noting they celebrate the
Speaker 5: anniverstry of the Paris Commune in March eighteenth and collected
Speaker 5: forty pesos on behalf of libertarian prisoners in Lyon. They
Speaker 5: also collected money to support their papers and to support
Speaker 5: peoples and efforts elsewhere, like in France. What's interesting about
Speaker 5: the Uruguayan anarchists is that they were among the most
Speaker 5: internationalists that I have found so far. You know, like
Speaker 5: other parts of Latin America, they did have a large
Speaker 5: immigrant population. Yeah, but because I suppose the size of
Speaker 5: Uruguay compared to other countries, the immigrant population was probably
Speaker 5: larger proportional to their neighbors. So they ended up having
Speaker 5: a much greater connection to movements and you know, things
Speaker 5: that happened in other parts of the world, including their
Speaker 5: home countries.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that makes sense. Was there. I'm trying to remember
Speaker 3: exactly when this began, but like there was a movement
Speaker 3: among anarchists, I guess in the early more in the
Speaker 3: early twentieth century to like learn Esperanto as part of
Speaker 3: their internationalism.
Speaker 5: Yes, that's actually a history that I would love to
Speaker 5: cover in an episode.
Speaker 3: I will connect you to somebody who wrote books about
Speaker 3: it with pleasure.
Speaker 6: Really yeah, yeah, that'll be fantastic.
Speaker 3: My first book was about the anti fascist Olympics and
Speaker 3: the last surviving Popular Olympian, the Guardo Vivankos, died in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty two in Canada and an old people's home.
Speaker 3: I've been trying to visit him, but because of the
Speaker 3: COVID restrictions for in the old people's home, I wasn't
Speaker 3: able to. But he he had served as a Esperanto
Speaker 3: translator at the Popular Olympics and like lived out his
Speaker 3: whole life with the stream of like if we can,
Speaker 3: if we can, if we can break down the linguistic
Speaker 3: barriers between workers, and we can we can get together
Speaker 3: and change things.
Speaker 5: Wow, that is fascinating. You know what's interesting about the
Speaker 5: whole Esperanto connection to anarchism is that long before I
Speaker 5: really got into anarchism or even learned about anarchism. I
Speaker 5: actually tried to learn esperanto.
Speaker 3: Let's here you go. It worked. Did they see that
Speaker 3: this is what they wanted? You saw the barriers fall
Speaker 3: down once you there, once you began speaking esperando.
Speaker 6: I didn't get very far.
Speaker 5: I think it was around the time when like dueling
Speaker 5: A first introduced it into their like courses, Okay, and
Speaker 5: I saw it, and I like did like a brief
Speaker 5: reading on it, and I was like, oh, this looks interesting,
Speaker 5: and so I tried to pick it up and I
Speaker 5: studied it for a little while, but I didn't get
Speaker 5: particularly far. Yeah, but now we're looking in the connection
Speaker 5: between Esperanto and atnarkis, I'm just like, wow, you know,
Speaker 5: the seeds were already there in a sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you were ready for it. That
Speaker 3: was a dream of the of the nineteen twenties and thirties.
Speaker 3: I'm glad that you're living.
Speaker 6: In for sure.
Speaker 5: And actually we're about to enter, well at least the
Speaker 5: twentieth century. In our little historical review here, anarchists almost
Speaker 5: really sunned to finally pick up steam by this point
Speaker 5: becoming very commonly known across Iuruguay. In fact, by nineteen eleven,
Speaker 5: according to Capitaletes research of the official stats, there were
Speaker 5: one hundred and seventeen thousand industrial workers in Uruguay, and
Speaker 5: of those, ninety thousand were affiliated with the FRU. So
Speaker 5: what's seventy six percent of those industrial workers were affiliated
Speaker 5: with an explicitly anarchist organization that included port workers, construction workers,
Speaker 5: metal workers, horse drivers, railway workers, and a lot more.
Speaker 5: And to be honest with you, I'm not entirely show
Speaker 5: what kept them from taking Boulder action compared to some
Speaker 5: of their neighbors, considering their proportion the numbers they had,
Speaker 5: But unfortunately didn't take very long for the movement to
Speaker 5: be divided, particularly after the Russian Revolution. There was, of
Speaker 5: course the influence of Bolshevik ideas that had split the
Speaker 5: movement somewhat, bringing workers onto the Bolshevik cause, and then
Speaker 5: of course you had Bolshevik sponsorship. It was within the
Speaker 5: USSR's interest to support USSR aligned movements worldwide, and so
Speaker 5: a lot of libertarian groups around the world went into
Speaker 5: decline in that time, including in Uruguay. Some of the
Speaker 5: unions and up faltering under the pressure of both the
Speaker 5: state and of course the new draw that was the
Speaker 5: Marxist Leninist groups. But of course the Libertarians never really
Speaker 5: gave up, they don't tend to historically speak it. So
Speaker 5: the unions and groups continued acting, continued producing papers. In fact,
Speaker 5: there was a major surge and unionization in the nineteen forties.
Speaker 5: According to Poor Sharkis the feracio and anarchista i Uruguaya,
Speaker 5: especially among the textile workers, royal women talkers, construction workers
Speaker 5: and meat packers. And then outside of the union and
Speaker 5: paper pushing scene you are set Uruguaian writers that continued
Speaker 5: to shape the cultural scene with anarchist ideas. Florencio Sanchez,
Speaker 5: for example, was a playwright in the Rio de la
Speaker 5: Plata region whose experience in nationalist militias led him to
Speaker 5: align himself with anarchist circles. He worked as a journalist
Speaker 5: while actively participating in anarchist organizations and publications, including La
Speaker 5: Partesta in Bunros Airis. His plays tackled social issues such
Speaker 5: as class struggle, intergenerational conflicts, and the hardships of the
Speaker 5: working class. Then you also had other Uruquian literary figures
Speaker 5: influenced by anchism and contributing to the libertarian literary movement,
Speaker 5: including poet Julio Herrera Ierseg, novelist Torresio Kiroga, and Bohemian
Speaker 5: writer Roberto de las Carreras. And interestingly, there was another
Speaker 5: notable figure in anarchism connected perhaps the most or one
Speaker 5: of the most notable figures in anarchism, and that was
Speaker 5: the friend and biographer of Erico man A Testa himself,
Speaker 5: Luigi Fabri. Fabri founded the journal Study Sociali, which was
Speaker 5: one of the strongest libertarian publications in Uruguay and Latin America,
Speaker 5: and after he died, his daughter, Lucy Fabri, continued his
Speaker 5: work and edited the journal until nineteen forty six. Lucy
Speaker 5: Fabri was also one of the founders of the FAU
Speaker 5: and she also published quite a few books in her time,
Speaker 5: many of which have yet to be translated into English.
Speaker 5: I wish I could you know, check them out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Paul Shaky, he just mentioned he's the guy He's
Speaker 3: translated like a library of anarchist text.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think translators they don't get as much praise
Speaker 5: as they should. You know, they're a really underrated contribution
Speaker 5: to the movement and to the propagation of the movement
Speaker 5: to new spaces.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely. I translated some text for a zine last year,
Speaker 3: and it is a lot of work.
Speaker 6: Yep.
Speaker 3: Yeah, massive respect to people who do that.
Speaker 5: Unfortunately, translation is not as simple as just going wood forward,
Speaker 5: you know. You really do have to get the spirit
Speaker 5: of the text out of it somehow, sometimes with different
Speaker 5: phrasing and that kind of thing.
Speaker 6: Yeah, exactly, it's difficult.
Speaker 3: Google can't do.
Speaker 6: That for you, yep.
Speaker 5: I mean, I appreciate having the ability to like go
Speaker 5: on a website and like have Google Translates translate the
Speaker 5: web page quickly for me, but that has very clear
Speaker 5: and obvious weaknesses, you know when you go through it
Speaker 5: in terms of actually translating the information. Yeah, it's good
Speaker 5: for like getting like a vague gist, right, but professional
Speaker 5: translators aren't going away anytime soon.
Speaker 3: No. No, it's a great thing to do if you
Speaker 3: if you have a couple of languages, like to make
Speaker 3: the world visible from someone else's perspective. It's such a
Speaker 3: wonderful thing to be able to try and share that.
Speaker 3: It's really special. Yeah, particularly for.
Speaker 5: The last less well known or less popular languages. Yeah,
Speaker 5: you know, although you'll be surprised, some of the most
Speaker 5: popular languages, most widely spoken languages in the world, are
Speaker 5: still lacking some key translations of some very key literature.
Speaker 5: You know, you'd be surprised, like the kinds of texts
Speaker 5: that we take for granted, the theory and stuff we
Speaker 5: take for granted that's just not available and VICEIVI sir,
Speaker 5: you know, there's probably a lot of gems out there
Speaker 5: that I've yet to hit.
Speaker 6: The English language definitely.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, like just because especially if it's a big language,
Speaker 3: like a language is something like Arabic of Spanish, Mandarin,
Speaker 3: where so many people speak it already, Like there's less
Speaker 3: need to translate it because like it's it's getting out there.
Speaker 3: I suppose that pizza that isn't quite the same like
Speaker 3: urgency to translate it, but the ideas get out through
Speaker 3: sort of paraphrase, I suppose, because enough people can readly
Speaker 3: in the ritual language and then paraphrase it in other languages.
Speaker 5: Yeah, as long as the idea gets there, you know,
Speaker 5: the exact words may not necessarily be important.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's some beauty and like the piece I translated
Speaker 3: was pretty sure, but it's the Belgian anarchists who fought
Speaker 3: in the Spanish Civil War and then went into exile
Speaker 3: in South America. But the way he writes about the
Speaker 3: revolutionary moment is one of the most perfect and beautiful
Speaker 3: enclculations I've ever read, so like it was nice to
Speaker 3: be able to share that.
Speaker 6: You should send that to me. What is it called.
Speaker 3: It's called rejecting or refuting the legend by a guy
Speaker 3: called Louis Mercy. A Vega was the name he went by.
Speaker 3: Sometimes he also called himself Charles Riddle. That neither of
Speaker 3: those were his real names, but there's the names he
Speaker 3: lived most of his life under. I've been reading a
Speaker 3: lot of translations if to Rooty column memoirs. Another wonderful
Speaker 3: one is called Sons of the Night, which is by
Speaker 3: an Italian anarchist who foll in Spain and they live
Speaker 3: the rest of his life in France. And then it's
Speaker 3: a beautiful book. Because he was a groundskeeper at the
Speaker 3: Libertarian Club in Marseille, the young people of the Libertarian
Speaker 3: Club were so influenced by his life and his experiences
Speaker 3: and the way he talked about the world that after
Speaker 3: his passing they translated his diary and then wrote this
Speaker 3: huge historical sort of The footnotes are four times long
Speaker 3: as a book because the footnotes explain that the things
Speaker 3: that he's talking about and who the characters are, and
Speaker 3: it's it's a really kind of beautiful text. And it
Speaker 3: has the authors called themselves the Shewmnologues like that, the
Speaker 3: followers of Antoine j Minez. So it's kind of anonymously
Speaker 3: authored and I thin it's a really special like literary project.
Speaker 6: Wow, that's something that always moves me.
Speaker 5: You know, when somebody is able to have such an
Speaker 5: impact on the lives of others that even in their.
Speaker 6: Absence, people you know, continue their lives.
Speaker 3: Were Yeah, yeah, it's a really special thing. I'll send
Speaker 3: you a link to it when with them, but I've
Speaker 3: diverted us a long way from Uraguai. I'm sorry.
Speaker 6: Oh, that's fine, that's fine.
Speaker 5: I think for this episode, there's just one other interesting
Speaker 5: moment in Uruguay's anarchist history that I want to cover,
Speaker 5: and I'll leave it at that before the next episode.
Speaker 6: But going down this rabbit hole was actually really interesting
Speaker 6: for me.
Speaker 5: So there was an experiment in the fifties in Uruguay
Speaker 5: called the Communidad del Sur, which was an anarchist intentional
Speaker 5: community experiment, and capolet He talks about it briefly as
Speaker 5: an effort by folks to live and work and eat
Speaker 5: and rare children together away from the injustices of capitalism
Speaker 5: on the state. Now, anarchism is not about establishing intentional communities,
Speaker 5: but many anarchists have found great reprieve and great joy
Speaker 5: in establishing those communities, in finding love and care and
Speaker 5: connection in those spaces. So these people spent about twenty
Speaker 5: years living together, making decisions together, sharing finances, and sharing education.
Speaker 5: But the Irguayan military dictatorship stepped in and put an
Speaker 5: end to the project in nineteen seventy six. They spent
Speaker 5: that time afterwards living in exile. First they settled in Peru,
Speaker 5: and then they ended up in Spain, and then after
Speaker 5: that they found themselves in Sweden, of all places, where
Speaker 5: they continued their communal life and engaged in international political education.
Speaker 5: So that's all I ended up learning about them at first.
Speaker 5: But I wanted to digg a little deeper and find
Speaker 5: out what happened to them after that, and I wasn't
Speaker 5: finding that information in English language sources, so I ended
Speaker 5: up unfortunately having to lean upon Google Translate for the
Speaker 5: Swedish and Spanish wikipedias, but those pages went into a
Speaker 5: little bit more depth, and so I was able to
Speaker 5: find out that this group ended up taking part in
Speaker 5: the occupation of the Mulvaden neighborhood in the late seventies,
Speaker 5: and they also translated Latin American anarchist texts into Swedish
Speaker 5: and vice versa. And then when the dictatorship in Uruguay ended,
Speaker 5: they returned to Uruguay with the money they raised with
Speaker 5: the hell of their Swedish comrades, and initially a few
Speaker 5: stay in Stockholm, so there was a split effort between
Speaker 5: Uruguay and Sweden for a bit, but the ones in
Speaker 5: Sweden were able to send money and equipment home and
Speaker 5: so eventually they were all able to focus in Uruguay
Speaker 5: and set up a printery and established a farm in
Speaker 5: the countryside outside Montevideo on land purchased with money collected
Speaker 5: in Sweden, where they focused on collective farm and organic agriculture,
Speaker 5: and apparently there's still active today. I found what seems
Speaker 5: to be their website, but it's no accessible.
Speaker 6: It's down.
Speaker 5: I tried to dig fit on web archive, but I
Speaker 5: wasn't getting much information out of that. But I also
Speaker 5: found of Swedish website that was talking about the activity,
Speaker 5: and I'll drop that in the show notes as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that'd be cool.
Speaker 5: So that particular website they said, and this is the
Speaker 5: rual translation of what they said, but it was quote.
Speaker 5: In parallel with the other activities, the organization runs a
Speaker 5: farm which produces sweets from figs, goofer, blackberries and such
Speaker 5: aus fruits. It also presuves vegetables such as peppers and
Speaker 5: eggplant and produces its own tomato sauce. This small scale
Speaker 5: industry that the organization has built up is mainly run
Speaker 5: by a women's group, Comunidad There's Sosuro also participates in
Speaker 5: the collective Lapi Tanga that works for equality between women
Speaker 5: and men and against violence against women end quote. So
Speaker 5: they're doing some really important work in Uruguay after all
Speaker 5: these years. I can't find their exact location, but it
Speaker 5: seems they're based somewhere in La Palce. If anybody wants
Speaker 5: to reach out for food, the details what they're up
Speaker 5: to these days, their story is really fascinating to me,
Speaker 5: So I'd love to find out just that whole idea
Speaker 5: of this group feacing this victoria repression, resettling somewhere else,
Speaker 5: catching their breath, engaging actions elsewhere, and then me are
Speaker 5: being able to return home and continue the work. I
Speaker 5: find that very inspiring.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's really cool. That's what we hope for, you know,
Speaker 3: when like people are forced into exile, to be able
Speaker 3: to return eventually and to be like accepted into the
Speaker 3: community where they find themselves and able to like, like
Speaker 3: you say, catch your breath and build their strength and return.
Speaker 3: That's really cool.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean shout out to the Swedish anarchists who would have,
Speaker 5: you know, moved in solid arity with them and help
Speaker 5: them set up and that kind of thing if they did.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Swedish has been really good at accepting migrants and refugees.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately a number of people who had received assignment in
Speaker 3: Sweden were killed this week, so that fucking sucks, IRB
Speaker 3: to them.
Speaker 6: Yes, I think it just the mood is shifting as
Speaker 6: a lead.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all around the world thanks to the wonder of
Speaker 3: social media, I think.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but you see the digression we had about translation
Speaker 5: and ended up connecting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, beautiful. Yeah, everyone listening, start learning Esperanto.
Speaker 5: I think that's a great hobby yellow I do question.
Speaker 5: I think it was like a really cool project and
Speaker 5: it's time. I don't know how well it can pick
Speaker 5: up today.
Speaker 3: Like Esperanto in the Age of Ai is an interesting
Speaker 3: I'd love to hear from Esperantis, honestly, like if we
Speaker 3: have Esperantis who listening. I still have a great deal
Speaker 3: of admiration for the project and like for the people
Speaker 3: who participate in it, and I've had a lot of
Speaker 3: communications with them because of their relations to Spanish anarchism,
Speaker 3: and they've always been the nicest, most interesting, welcoming people.
Speaker 3: So like, yeah, if you want to be I Esperanto guest,
Speaker 3: please hit me up.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, maybe eventually I will get back into Esperanto and
Speaker 5: pick it up again. I'm still still working on my Spanish,
Speaker 5: as listeners can probably tell, but.
Speaker 6: We'll get there.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So we'll leave it here for today, but next time
Speaker 5: we're going to venture into how anarchists stayed active throughout
Speaker 5: the twentieth century and also contributed to the development of
Speaker 5: anarchist strategy internationally. Until then, I've been Andrew Sage, I've
Speaker 5: been here with James Stout and you can find me
Speaker 5: on YouTube dot com, slash andrewism on picture dot com,
Speaker 5: slashly and true. This is it could happen here, Heast
Speaker 5: be with you.
Speaker 7: Welcome to kadap Here increasingly ruled by an absolutely unhinged
Speaker 7: and unrestrained band of Nazis, and apparently they're democratic collaborators.
Speaker 7: I am your host, Mia Wong with Vus James Stout.
Speaker 3: I'm nia's collaborator today. Yay, this is a collaborator. Good.
Speaker 3: We are talking today about collaborator bad.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 7: On Friday, Senator Chuck Schumer and his allies, in an
Speaker 7: act of democratic collaboration with the regime that looks even
Speaker 7: more hideous now than it did then, in the wake
Speaker 7: of a series of absolutely horrific deportations in the last
Speaker 7: few days, voted for basically a continuing funding resolution. So
Speaker 7: this is this is a little bit complicated, but I
Speaker 7: believe in US we can get through a little tiny
Speaker 7: bit of Senate bullshit. So basically what's happening is that
Speaker 7: they need a resolution to keep funding the government for
Speaker 7: a little bit until more negotiations.
Speaker 3: Can happen to fund a budget. There has been a budget.
Speaker 7: Basically, like we keep seeing this over and over again.
Speaker 7: They're keep being continuing funding resolutions, they keep almost being
Speaker 7: government shutdowns, because if there's not a continuing funding resolution
Speaker 7: and there's no budget, the government doesn't have any money.
Speaker 7: What happened here was that, So in the Senate you
Speaker 7: can filibuster this and a whole bunch of senators Schumer
Speaker 7: and others. We will be reading out later after we
Speaker 7: talk about what this resolution actually did, because it's unhinged.
Speaker 7: So you've probably been hearing. If you've been hearing about this,
Speaker 7: you've been hearing you called a culture vote. So what
Speaker 7: that is is basically the absolute shortest version of it is,
Speaker 7: it's a vote to kill a philibuster on the bill.
Speaker 7: You filibuster by continuing debate. Culture ends debate, c et cetera,
Speaker 7: et cetera. So this resolution is staggeringly unhinged. It is
Speaker 7: not a very long funding continuation. It includes thirteen billion
Speaker 7: dollars and cuts a non military spending and also six
Speaker 7: billion dollars in military spending cuts. There are a lot
Speaker 7: of things that have been sort of defunded by this,
Speaker 7: including like a lot of like housing and urban development stuff.
Speaker 7: It's research ship, you know, and that's obviously really bad.
Speaker 7: Because normally with these resolutions, you're just sort of like
Speaker 7: continuing the funding, right, But this is not a normal
Speaker 7: continuing resolution.
Speaker 3: This is.
Speaker 7: It is over It is very very over dramatic to
Speaker 7: do the thing that a lot of people have been doing,
Speaker 7: which is comparing it to the enabling.
Speaker 3: Acts that the Nazis passed. Yeah, it's not.
Speaker 7: But but Comma, this is a completely unhinged continuing resolution.
Speaker 7: There has never been a continuing resolution like this ever,
Speaker 7: and it is Jenny Wineley. It is another step down
Speaker 7: the path of effectively having Trump running the government as
Speaker 7: a dictator by sort of pure fiat. And Okay, you
Speaker 7: can sally say this and you think this is an exaggeration,
Speaker 7: but what this continuing Resolution actually does is normally in
Speaker 7: one of these resolutions, Congress tells the executive how parts
Speaker 7: of the budget are supposed to be sent, right, it
Speaker 7: does allocations. It'll be like, okay, so there's this money
Speaker 7: for this thing. It goes to this purpose and you
Speaker 7: have to spend it here. This continuing resolution just.
Speaker 3: Like doesn't do that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And the goal of it is just to let
Speaker 7: Trump do whatever the fuck he wants with the money
Speaker 7: by not actually giving out congressional things to specifically allocated.
Speaker 7: So this is more of a thing we've been seeing
Speaker 7: more and more, which is congress specifically like delegating and
Speaker 7: abandoning its constitutional power to be the people who set
Speaker 7: the budget and just heading it over to the executive
Speaker 7: so there can be a single unitary executive that runs
Speaker 7: the entire governments.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean when you combine it with the open
Speaker 3: defiance of the court. So you saw this weekend with deportation, right, like,
Speaker 3: it's not a good not a good outlook actually, like
Speaker 3: it is in terms of the old separation of powers,
Speaker 3: which is supposed to be a thing.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you know, you could you could argue about whether
Speaker 7: the American Revolution was about the king being able to
Speaker 7: set taxes because that was technically a thing controlled by
Speaker 7: the British Parliament. But like it is, for example, the
Speaker 7: issue that like the Revolution of seventeen eighty nine was
Speaker 7: fought over, right like like that that there shouldn't be
Speaker 7: a single unitary executive who gets to fucking set the budget.
Speaker 3: It's fundamentally I don't want to say unconstitutional, because I
Speaker 3: guess I don't get to decide what is unconstitutional. And
Speaker 3: to the extent that it matters.
Speaker 7: Fucking fuck if we get well, I mean it doesn't matter. Yeah,
Speaker 7: but it is like obviously hideously unconstitutional.
Speaker 3: It's entirely against the basic principles of the constitution, right,
Speaker 3: like the scene kwan, none of the US Constitution, to
Speaker 3: use a fancy word, is separation of powers. Is It's
Speaker 3: not like the kind of the point of a thing
Speaker 3: is to not just have one older dude in charge
Speaker 3: like like that that is the English way.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and this is this is the fundamental like principles
Speaker 7: upon which the liberal notion of democracy is based. And
Speaker 7: I use liberal in like the seventeen early eighteen hundred
Speaker 7: cents of the word liberal, right, which is that, like
Speaker 7: you believe in democracy. This bill effectively just allows Trump
Speaker 7: to do funded defund programs at will. I mean there's
Speaker 7: you know, there are there are specific things like boundaries
Speaker 7: in which she can't and can't do this. But I'm
Speaker 7: gonna read some stuff from Senator Patting Burray, who is
Speaker 7: the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which is
Speaker 7: the committee that handles like where money goes in the budget.
Speaker 3: Right, it's a budget appropriations et cetera.
Speaker 1: CA.
Speaker 7: So she, you know, is one of the Senatorsho sort
Speaker 7: of understands is intimately she wrote a fact sheet about this,
Speaker 7: which is fucking terrifying. I'm just going to quote from
Speaker 7: that because good God. Quote under this continuing resolution, that
Speaker 7: Trump administration could, for example, decide not to suspend funding
Speaker 7: previously allocated for Combating Fence and all the Support Act
Speaker 7: and other Substance abuse and mental health care programs or
Speaker 7: specific NIH priorities like Alzheimer's disease and vaccine research, and
Speaker 7: instead steer funding to other priorities if it's choosing. It
Speaker 7: could also pick and choose which military construction, Army Corps,
Speaker 7: or transit improvement and expansion projects to withdraw funding without
Speaker 7: direction from Congres, leaving democratic states and priorities in the lurch.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's that is like that's not great, Like even
Speaker 3: like I don't think people realize how much damage is
Speaker 3: could do and like, yeah, yeah, they have a year
Speaker 3: of just randomly slashing fit. Not only is it the
Speaker 3: programs who are affected, right, things that are cut, the
Speaker 3: certainty that contractors will get paid, The certainty that if
Speaker 3: you have a contract with the government it is a
Speaker 3: reliable thing like that will have devastating economic consequences. If
Speaker 3: they just start randomly yoinking contracts and not paying people.
Speaker 3: That's they did with the USAID suppliers, right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, So, like there is also a bunch of funding
Speaker 7: cuts for things like the Army Corps of Engineers, and like,
Speaker 7: there are a lot of valid criticisms you can have
Speaker 7: about the Army Corps of Engineers and for example, the
Speaker 7: way it has structurally fucked the entire city of New Orleans.
Speaker 7: But the thing is not giving them money to do
Speaker 7: hurricane prevention is not going to help that. And the
Speaker 7: thing about this, right, because this resolution has thirteen billion
Speaker 7: in direct budget cuts and then it also allows Trump
Speaker 7: to do more cuts on top of it by doing
Speaker 7: by doing these funding allocation things. Right, So it's it's
Speaker 7: like it's it's a fucking like double Yeah, it's sort
Speaker 7: of double set of cuts here. And this includes you know,
Speaker 7: he can he can reallgate money away from the FAA.
Speaker 7: One of the most absolutely terrifying ones is that this
Speaker 7: continuing resolution allows RFK Junior to eliminate funding for the
Speaker 7: universal flu vaccine.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was talking to someone in a medical profession about this,
Speaker 3: Like there's a serious chance that is won't be h
Speaker 3: one developed in the US for next year and we'll
Speaker 3: just use the European one. Great stuff.
Speaker 7: You know, this is really the substantive problem with this
Speaker 7: entire thing and why it is genuinely an act of
Speaker 7: like an act an act of collaboration worthy Avichy France
Speaker 7: to fucking pass this, to pass this fucking bill. Is
Speaker 7: that again you are handing control of like the budgets, right,
Speaker 7: you're handing direct control of just like how budget allocation
Speaker 7: stuff gets gets fucking out with to like Elon Musk,
Speaker 7: Trump and RFK Junior, and they can just fucking do
Speaker 7: this shit with it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we've already seen some of this, like manipulation of
Speaker 3: federal government funding, like with with Columbia University. Oh, we're
Speaker 3: gonna get to that. Yeah, okay, good exciting.
Speaker 7: Yeah, So other things. It defunds FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund,
Speaker 7: which is bad because a bunch of funding, the FEMA
Speaker 7: Disaster Relief Fund has been get this exhausted because there
Speaker 7: were a bunch of fucking disasters. Guess what, there's gonna
Speaker 7: be more of disasters. Guess what, There's not going to
Speaker 7: be money in ease the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's bad. Yeah. And here's the thing.
Speaker 7: We have not fucking hit the worst part of this
Speaker 7: continuing resolution yet, like all of that, right, like the
Speaker 7: monopolization of power in the hands of the executive, you know,
Speaker 7: like the potentially funding of the flu vaccine.
Speaker 3: We have not hit rock bottom yet.
Speaker 7: Rock bottom is this getting resolution quote slashes one hundred
Speaker 7: and eighty five million dollars seven percent of the total
Speaker 7: program from defense nuclear non proliferation programs, including the programs
Speaker 7: that prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear and radioactive material, remove
Speaker 7: radioactive materials at risk of being misused or causing a
Speaker 7: catastrophic accident, and to ur and monitor foreign nuclear fuel
Speaker 7: cycle in weapons developments, nuclear materials movement or diversions, and
Speaker 7: nuclear explosions.
Speaker 3: Cool. So we are defunding the nuke police again for
Speaker 3: a third time, and this one looks like.
Speaker 7: It's actually gonna fucking stick because I don't think any
Speaker 7: of these fucking people actually understand what the defense nuclear
Speaker 7: non proliferation programs do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, because they will on one about Iran
Speaker 3: and enriching uranium for years. Have they have they just give?
Speaker 3: Have they moved on?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 7: I like this as as we're going to see in
Speaker 7: a second, this budget is being written by just fucking clowns,
Speaker 7: like just absolute dipshits.
Speaker 3: I don't I don't know who the fuck is doing this.
Speaker 3: That's what I sometimes wonder is, like, who comes with
Speaker 3: these numbers? Like it's like staffers, it's literally an army
Speaker 3: of staffords.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the senators re voting for these bills most often
Speaker 7: have no idea what the fuck is in them. It's
Speaker 7: all run by an army of staffers. And the thing
Speaker 7: about it all being run by an army of staffers,
Speaker 7: and the fact that Republican staffers are increasingly drawn from
Speaker 7: a class of like genuinely the most unhinged people who
Speaker 7: have ever lived, this class of fucking internet gropers and
Speaker 7: fucking white nationalists bullshit, means that one of the parts
Speaker 7: of this I think people have heard about is the
Speaker 7: one billion dollars in spending that was cut just from
Speaker 7: like the city budget of Washington, DC. Now, looking at
Speaker 7: what's happened next, I genuinely think they did this by accidents.
Speaker 7: That's been the explanation that's been given is that they
Speaker 7: literally did it by accidents. And the reason I think
Speaker 7: it might actually be true, it's it's either it's either
Speaker 7: actually true or they saw the pushback. But immediately after
Speaker 7: this bill got passed, there was like a separate bill
Speaker 7: that was drafted to restore the funding, and that was
Speaker 7: approved unanimously by the second So it might legitimately have
Speaker 7: been a mistake. So it was either legitimately a mistake
Speaker 7: or all of these people realize that the entire population
Speaker 7: of DC was about to like fucking march on the
Speaker 7: capital of Pitchforks. So I don't know one of those
Speaker 7: two things. So we're not talking much about the DC
Speaker 7: stuff because it seems like the funding is going to
Speaker 7: come back, though if it doesn't well cover the catastrophic
Speaker 7: impacts of that. And there's one more thing, James, which
Speaker 7: I couldn't find details of, but one of the things
Speaker 7: that's supposed to do is eliminate protections for people an
Speaker 7: immigration course.
Speaker 3: Fantastic, Great, allow the Attorney General more power. Yeah, I
Speaker 3: was just looking this up. Actually, Like, let me there
Speaker 3: was an office founded under Biden that was the Office
Speaker 3: of the Obficely Immigration Detents from Ombudsman, which was like
Speaker 3: supposedly to exist to like examine people's conditions in immigration detention. Right,
Speaker 3: And I'm wondering to what extent it still exists. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Like I don't know. I was just trying to find
Speaker 3: that out. I would have to go through the resolution,
Speaker 3: and maybe I will at some point, but yeah, there
Speaker 3: is stuff that the federal government does right now that
Speaker 3: provides people with some protections in immigration courts, right, and yeah,
Speaker 3: I can see. I mean, look to the extent that
Speaker 3: that matters because they're just deporting people in open violation
Speaker 3: of court orders right now, we don't know. But it's
Speaker 3: still bad either way, right, taking away the very few
Speaker 3: protections that might have. Yeah, it's bad. Yeah, So speaking
Speaker 3: of bad things, we're going to go to ads and
Speaker 3: then we're going to come back.
Speaker 6: We are back.
Speaker 7: So, having said all of this about this bill, fully
Speaker 7: ten Democratic senators voted to avoid shutting down the government
Speaker 7: and fucking past this unbelievably hideous resolution, which again like
Speaker 7: defunds the nuke police. Again, they are risking like global
Speaker 7: annihilation by doing this. And I'm just going to read
Speaker 7: out the names of everyone who did this, because there's
Speaker 7: been a lot of focus on Chuck Schumer, and Chuck
Speaker 7: Schumer is to like probably the primary person responsible for this,
Speaker 7: but fuck every single one of these people.
Speaker 3: He's a quistling in this scenario, like the capital Q quisling.
Speaker 7: Yes, yes, okay, so Chuck Schumer, Katherine Cortes, mosto Dick Durbin,
Speaker 7: which is actually a surprising one because Durbin suburban's about
Speaker 7: to retire.
Speaker 3: He he was my old senator in Illinois.
Speaker 7: I actually know he wasn't wow a complicated I shtually
Speaker 7: fucking don't remember one of the which one of them
Speaker 7: I had?
Speaker 3: Uh?
Speaker 7: But Durbin is, you know, he's like senior party leadership guy.
Speaker 7: He's usually been in like the kind of left I
Speaker 7: guess of the like old Democratic leadership, which is not
Speaker 7: very far left.
Speaker 3: But he fucking voted for this.
Speaker 7: John Fetterman, to the surprise of absolutely no one, Kirsten Gillibrand,
Speaker 7: to the surprise of absolutely no one. Yeah, Maggie Hassan,
Speaker 7: Agnes King, Gary Peters, Brian Schatz, and Janine Shaheen now
Speaker 7: notably miss on that list. Tim fucking Kine voted against this.
Speaker 7: Do you know how bad a Republican budget thing has
Speaker 7: to be for Tim fucking kin to vote against it
Speaker 7: and be like, hey, guys, what the fuck are you doing?
Speaker 3: Yeah? And the thing is like, as a Democrat, the move,
Speaker 3: just if you want to get re elected is to
Speaker 3: vote against it and then blame them for everything bad
Speaker 3: that happens this year because of the budget thing, right
Speaker 3: if you have no moral backbone whatsoever. And I'm sure
Speaker 3: like there are things in this continuing Resolution which really
Speaker 3: screw over rural areas, right, like some of the funding
Speaker 3: that was allocated. Oh yeah, And like Cain is at least,
Speaker 3: I guess astute enough to see that when things get
Speaker 3: harder of his constituents, he can go, yes, they did this,
Speaker 3: and I voted against it, and you need to return
Speaker 3: me to office so I can continue opposing this shit,
Speaker 3: which is very cynical approach. Yeah, but then, yeah, we've
Speaker 3: just got Chuck Chuck Schumer who just kind of bowed
Speaker 3: down and kissed the ring.
Speaker 7: And you know, the response to this is staggering. I
Speaker 7: genuinely I have never seen anything like the kind of
Speaker 7: anger I'm seeing it. I I've seen that Schuber for
Speaker 7: the past few days. This has happened Friday.
Speaker 3: Like Indivisible, which is like a pretty so indivisible.
Speaker 7: Is like a sort of NGO thing that's like a
Speaker 7: like tries to get it's like a sort of vaguely
Speaker 7: progressive thing and tries to get people to vote for
Speaker 7: the Democrats.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and like register voters and stuff.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And they've been getting into fights with the Democratic
Speaker 7: leadership because they keep telling people to call their senators
Speaker 7: to tell them to oppose bills and nominations, and the
Speaker 7: Democrats are like, we don't want to impose bills.
Speaker 3: In twenty twenty. In mobilizing the vote in territory, for instance,
Speaker 3: like an indivisible to played a really important role, so
Speaker 3: like they're not negligible in their power.
Speaker 7: No, Yeah, and like they are calling for primary Chruck Schuber,
Speaker 7: R slash neoliberal is calling for AOC.
Speaker 3: The primary Chuck Schumer.
Speaker 7: Do you know how fucked things have to be for
Speaker 7: our slash neoliberal to be backing AOC against Chuck Schumer,
Speaker 7: like fucking nearer tandin is Agrey with Bertie Sanders criticizing
Speaker 7: Schumer for voting for this bill, like this is like,
Speaker 7: I I don't know, I think there maybe there are
Speaker 7: probably are people in the audience here who's like weren't
Speaker 7: paying attention enough or like don't remember, or like weren't
Speaker 7: old enough to be around for like like the Bernie wars.
Speaker 7: But this is like every faction on every side of
Speaker 7: like the whole series of fights from like twenty fifteen
Speaker 7: and like Bernie's first thing through twenty twenty, even like
Speaker 7: the mid late twenty twenties, Like all of these people
Speaker 7: were on exactly polar opposite side. They fucking hated each other,
Speaker 7: and they're all like coming together specifically to agree on
Speaker 7: a fuck Chuck Schumer campaign to the point where like
Speaker 7: again like Arslaus neoliberal and like Nearer, Tandent, who are
Speaker 7: like have been just absolute stalwarts at the party right
Speaker 7: for ages are like are.
Speaker 3: Backing AOC primarying Chuck Schumer. Yeah, it's a total cultural
Speaker 3: victory for the Bernie bros. Is what's happening. It's a
Speaker 3: Democratic party.
Speaker 7: Well, and again, the Chuck Chuber is the head of
Speaker 7: the Democratic Caucus in the Senate.
Speaker 3: Yeah, minority leader of the United States Senate.
Speaker 7: Yeah, he is, you know, he is unbeliefably powerful, and
Speaker 7: I mean, like the people criticizing him.
Speaker 3: He got criticized.
Speaker 7: There was a joint statement on funding bill in the
Speaker 7: Senate from the Democratic minority leader in the fucking House,
Speaker 7: Hakim Jeffries, and the Democratic Whipcathleen Clark, and the Caucus
Speaker 7: chair peri agular and like Hawkim Jeffries is as ferociously
Speaker 7: anti socialist of a politician as there exists in all
Speaker 7: of Congress. He is like implacably hostile to even like
Speaker 7: the most like barraest progressive things whatsoever. He is just
Speaker 7: staggeringly opposed to. And they released a joint statement against this, right,
Speaker 7: what is sort of happening here, And it's happening fucking
Speaker 7: too late to stop anything, But what's happening here is
Speaker 7: like we are genuinely starting to get a kind of
Speaker 7: and I'm seeing this sort of online. We've been I
Speaker 7: think we've been seeing the sort of echoes of it
Speaker 7: is like, but there's a kind of realignment happening among
Speaker 7: you know, obviously this has been being opposed by people
Speaker 7: outside the Democratic Party and by a lot of the
Speaker 7: Democratic Party's base for ages right and the Democratic Party's base,
Speaker 7: and also just like people who don't want to get
Speaker 7: be ruled by fascist forever have had, you know, incredibly
Speaker 7: staunch opposition to all of the collaborationists investment happening. But
Speaker 7: what's happening right now is that like the actual like
Speaker 7: inside of the Democratic Party, there was a fucking rupture happening,
Speaker 7: and inside of the people who are like, you know,
Speaker 7: like inside of the politic cost there was a rupture
Speaker 7: happening between people who are collaborationists and people who'd like
Speaker 7: want to be less collaborationist.
Speaker 3: And this is to the point where like Nancy Pelosi
Speaker 3: came out against this.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and the reason they're doing this is because a
Speaker 7: lot of these people are fucking terrified because they are
Speaker 7: looking at a couple of things. One they're looking at
Speaker 7: what the Trump administration is doing, and they're going, holy shit,
Speaker 7: Like near A Tandon is looking at them, fucking just
Speaker 7: black bagging. It's just like just fucking black bagging Mamu
Speaker 7: Khalil and is going like, holy shit, we are maybe
Speaker 7: about I mean, it's maybe eight steps away from that
Speaker 7: happening to be, but that's eight steps that you can
Speaker 7: fucking like, that's a path you can walk down. And
Speaker 7: this is also these people that are realizing just the
Speaker 7: unbelievable anger among just like regular what you would call
Speaker 7: sort of like regular liberals who aren't like, like, you
Speaker 7: vote for the Democrats, but if you aren't like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're not like on Twitter with a blue wave emotion.
Speaker 7: But the thing is, even the people on Twitter with
Speaker 7: a blue wave emoji, and again, like the arch last
Speaker 7: neoliberal people are like the most ideologically committed of all
Speaker 7: of these people, right, Like even the most unhinged nerds
Speaker 7: who are like obsessed with like individual house races and
Speaker 7: like very very specific, weird technical policy stuff that allows
Speaker 7: them to justify supporting all these unhinged policies, even those
Speaker 7: people are turning on them. And the reason this is
Speaker 7: all happening, and I think this is a very very
Speaker 7: important thing to understand about the entire political landscape going forward,
Speaker 7: is that one of the core, an extremely important basis
Speaker 7: of Donald Trump's support is in the leadership of the
Speaker 7: Democratic Party, particularly the Democratic Party in New York, Right Schumer,
Speaker 7: this is Eric Adams. This is also increasingly becoming true
Speaker 7: of people like Gavin Newsom and a lot of the
Speaker 7: sort of Democrats out of the Bay to some extent,
Speaker 7: And you know, and you can you can see this
Speaker 7: in sort of various border states too, where you know,
Speaker 7: these people fundamentally are doing this because they fucking agree
Speaker 7: with him. That's why why, that's why they're fucking collaborating.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or at the very least like and perhaps it's
Speaker 3: in a sense worse that they don't agree with him,
Speaker 3: but they don't care enough to not like they're doing
Speaker 3: it because they think they can personally benefit.
Speaker 7: No, I don't think that's true. And my evidence for
Speaker 7: why I don't think that's true is I'm going to
Speaker 7: read some stuff from from the New York Times interview
Speaker 7: that they would chuck Schumer right after he did this. Okay,
Speaker 7: So in this interview with the New York Times, he
Speaker 7: gets asked about Trump cutting four hundred million dollars of
Speaker 7: funding for Columbia University for I guess, not like publicly
Speaker 7: executing the Palestine protesters.
Speaker 3: And again, yeah, Columbia University.
Speaker 7: That is an institution that he represents in the Senate, right, Yeah,
Speaker 7: Like that's like his that's like his fucking thing. And
Speaker 7: his response was, well, obviously they didn't crush the campus
Speaker 7: protests hard enough, but cutting four hundred million dollars spending
Speaker 7: might hurt students who didn't protest, like maybe, And he's
Speaker 7: not even clear about that, right, So if you read
Speaker 7: between the lines of what he's saying, his arguments is
Speaker 7: that it's actually fine for Trump to do all of
Speaker 7: these fucking budget cuts of all of these people from
Speaker 7: these universities, as long as it's specifically targeting pro Palestinian protesters,
Speaker 7: such as anyone who's vaguely pro Palestine. And he also
Speaker 7: gets you know, he gets asked about the Trump administration
Speaker 7: just straight a black bagging Moo Khalil, and he says, quote,
Speaker 7: I don't know all the details yet. They're trying to
Speaker 7: come out and there'll be a court case which will
Speaker 7: determine it. If he broke the law, he should be deported.
Speaker 7: If he didn't break the law on which and just
Speaker 7: peacefully protested, he should not be deported. It's plain and simple.
Speaker 3: I mean, how is it hard to not make an
Speaker 3: equivocating statement on that. No, because he agrees with it.
Speaker 3: He thinks it's fine. He thinks it's fine.
Speaker 7: The Trump administration fucking black bagged this guy, like again,
Speaker 7: who is who it was? A permanent US resident. He
Speaker 7: thinks that it is okay. That here's the thing, he's
Speaker 7: not even disagreeing with the actual literal black bagging. And
Speaker 7: I want to point this out, like even if Amu
Speaker 7: Khalil like legally committed a crime, like that's not a
Speaker 7: fucking deportation thing.
Speaker 3: The section of the United States they're using to justify
Speaker 3: deporting him is not one that has been used before.
Speaker 3: This is not he did not do a felony, and
Speaker 3: they're not suggesting that he did do a felony. And
Speaker 3: like if Schumer can't find it in himself to condemn that,
Speaker 3: like yeah, like folks need to move on because because
Speaker 3: he agrees with it, Like that's the thing, Like, yeah,
Speaker 3: what he is saying here is that he agrees that
Speaker 3: if a permanent legal US resident commits any crime, well
Speaker 3: doesn't though he's not accused, he's not accused of a crime,
Speaker 3: like he's he no, no, that's not's no.
Speaker 7: But this is specifically what says Schumer said, quote, if
Speaker 7: he broke the law, he should be deported. What his
Speaker 7: stance is is that if someone who is a permanent
Speaker 7: US resident breaks the law while at a Palestine protest,
Speaker 7: even if it is a misdemeanor, even if it is
Speaker 7: fucking jaywalking, that they should be deported. That is the
Speaker 7: Trump administration line. Like that is it is slightly less
Speaker 7: than Trump administration line, but that is that is a
Speaker 7: genuinely fascist political line. She just straight up agrees with
Speaker 7: the administration. He is a slight matter of degree like
Speaker 7: off from them, but like he's he just like he's
Speaker 7: collaborating because he fucking agrees with them. He agrees with
Speaker 7: them both on on the fact that the state should
Speaker 7: be used to like destroy anyone who supports Palestine, and
Speaker 7: she agrees with them on the fucking deportation ship. Because
Speaker 7: you know, this was one of the other things that
Speaker 7: Democrats have fundamentally aligned with Trump on since twenty twenty
Speaker 7: is that fundamentally, like they agree that we need more
Speaker 7: immigration controls and we need to do more border violence.
Speaker 7: You can see the evidence of this from when they
Speaker 7: fucking passed that just unhinged fascist bill to do allow
Speaker 7: border state of emergencies.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's stuff that they proposed and didn't pass
Speaker 3: because they were republiants tenty to kill it and then
Speaker 3: Biden executive order banning asylum. Like I think what it
Speaker 3: comes down to is that for the Democrats, the existence
Speaker 3: of people who oppose the genocide in Palestine and the
Speaker 3: existence of migrants is seen as inconvenient, and they're prepared
Speaker 3: to do away with any rights so as people might have,
Speaker 3: and even do away with those people rather than engage
Speaker 3: with them in any way. Right, they I'm sure, people
Speaker 3: like Schuma continue to blame people from both of those
Speaker 3: movements for their ass whooping that they took at the
Speaker 3: polls in twenty twenty four because they decide, I did
Speaker 3: that it was more important to do genocide than it
Speaker 3: was to listen to Vose in this country rather than listening.
Speaker 3: Now they're blaming them, and the only logical way for
Speaker 3: them to go is right, and the only logical place
Speaker 3: for them to take it is more state violence.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, But there's another aspect of this too, which the
Speaker 7: thing I want to close on, which is okay, So,
Speaker 7: why why have the Democrats been shifting so far to
Speaker 7: the right since twenty twenty right, and particularly since after
Speaker 7: twenty twenty two when they needed to sort of win
Speaker 7: it contesta for election. And the answer is that after
Speaker 7: twenty twenty all of their politics became about opposing the
Speaker 7: uprising because they you know, that there was a period
Speaker 7: dream the uprising where they were scared enough that like
Speaker 7: you get like the Kent cloth shit, and they're like,
Speaker 7: you know, and they're talking about like and Biden like
Speaker 7: runs on a significantly more left wing platform than like
Speaker 7: Kamala Harris did, right, yeah, like because of the particularly
Speaker 7: because of the pressure of those protests. Now obviously, like
Speaker 7: presidential platforms just lies, right but right, yeah, it's just
Speaker 7: likes you need to tell to get the votes.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 7: But on the other hand, the fundamental politics of Democratic
Speaker 7: Party in the last half a decade has been opposing
Speaker 7: the uprising. It's the thing that's, you know, behind all
Speaker 7: of their turn to tough on crime politics. It's the
Speaker 7: thing behind their their's sort of anti immigrant politics, the
Speaker 7: thing behind the turns they've been taking on trans politics.
Speaker 7: And the problem with this particularly like the anti black,
Speaker 7: anti crime shit and the anti immigrant stuff, you know
Speaker 7: who else. His entire politics like came into the fucking
Speaker 7: political sphere as the right wing reaction to the uprising.
Speaker 7: Oh wait, Donald Trump. Donald Trump walked down the fucking
Speaker 7: escalator in twenty fifteen, immediately in the wake of the
Speaker 7: giant uprisings in Baltimore in twenty fifteen, which I think
Speaker 7: people have sort of memory holds, like Ferguson and Baltimore.
Speaker 7: He like, it's like right after Baltimore that Trump fucking
Speaker 7: comes down the escalator and that and people forget how fundamentally,
Speaker 7: the right wing reaction to those protests deranged people who
Speaker 7: even the Tea Party hadn't pushed like far enough to
Speaker 7: vote for Donald Trump.
Speaker 3: It was like it was reaction to this. Yeah, that's
Speaker 3: when we saw the oath Keepers for the first time
Speaker 3: as well, Like this kind of militant right really grew
Speaker 3: dramatically in response to that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And this is the sort of fundamental thing that's
Speaker 7: going on, is that there's now an entire class of
Speaker 7: people who are running the Democratic Party.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 7: This is a fucking Chuck Schumer. He is, like, I mean,
Speaker 7: quite possibly the most powerful Democrat in the country, and
Speaker 7: he is just straight up a collaborationist.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it might legit become that like AOC is more
Speaker 3: powerful than Chuck Schumer in the next few weeks, you know,
Speaker 3: he is that the reaction against Chuck Schumer from establishment
Speaker 3: Democrats is stronger than anything I've ever seen from them.
Speaker 7: He lost Seth Moulton, which I didn't even think was possible. Yeah,
Speaker 7: But I think there's there's one more important note to
Speaker 7: sort of say here, which is that, like, you know,
Speaker 7: the response to this that I've largely been seeing is
Speaker 7: everyone going, Okay, we need a primary these people. Okay,
Speaker 7: are you looking at the rate at which stuff is
Speaker 7: happening in this country? Like you do you think that
Speaker 7: we are going to be able to wait until the
Speaker 7: fucking primaries?
Speaker 3: Yeah, six years the seventh places, right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, until we can like a t to fucking do
Speaker 7: shit here, Like absolutely not. No, they were like there
Speaker 7: literally is regardless of what you think about electoralism as
Speaker 7: a strategy, there is literally not time to wait until
Speaker 7: the next election cycle. Like again, they have defunded the
Speaker 7: nuke police for the third time. So the opposition to
Speaker 7: this isn't going to come from inside of the electoral
Speaker 7: system because again that ever coats are being run by
Speaker 7: collaborators and there's not enough time to fucking oust them.
Speaker 7: So if you if you want this to not continue,
Speaker 7: you were going to You're going to have to find
Speaker 7: ways to do organizing outside of that system. We have
Speaker 7: approximately one million episodes about this. You can also go
Speaker 7: back to my you already know how to organize episode.
Speaker 3: But yeah, look, call your centator if you want too.
Speaker 3: But if that's the net total of your political activity,
Speaker 3: then like right now, it's probably not going to make
Speaker 3: a difference in time, and really consider it it's the
Speaker 3: most useful use of your time. Yeah, and maybe make
Speaker 3: some beans or sew something nice for someone instead. Well
Speaker 3: as well, you could listen to it while you sew
Speaker 3: something nice. You could call them while you're cooking, you'll beans.
Speaker 3: Hell yeah, well this has been It could happen here. Yeah,
Speaker 3: down with the collaborationists. Yeah, fuck them. Yeah, absolutely fucking fun.
Speaker 3: Chuck Schume in particular.
Speaker 8: This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. Tesla
Speaker 8: derangement syndrome is sweeping the nation the last week. On
Speaker 8: March eleventh, President Donald Trump starred in a thirty five
Speaker 8: minute Tesla commercial broadcast live from the White House driveway
Speaker 8: to news stations across the country. This presidential ad campaign
Speaker 8: started with Trump announcing that he himself would buy a
Speaker 8: Tesla in some of his unique advisor Elon Musk, whose
Speaker 8: business ventures have taken a sour turn as of late,
Speaker 8: to assist Trump with his purchase, The South Lawn was
Speaker 8: temporarily turned into a Tesla showroom with five different models
Speaker 8: parked in a row to choose which shiny new car
Speaker 8: to buy. A significant portion of this Tesla sales event
Speaker 8: was spent by Trump praising Elon Musk's work at DOGE,
Speaker 8: as well as Elon's business ventures, and complaining about people
Speaker 8: treating Elon Musk unfairly, saying that he quote shouldn't be
Speaker 8: penalized because he's a patriot.
Speaker 9: My guess, I'm just telling people, this man is a
Speaker 9: great patriot, and you should cherish him. You should cherish him.
Speaker 10: You know.
Speaker 6: I have a little statement.
Speaker 9: We have to take care of our high IQ people
Speaker 9: because we don't have too many of them.
Speaker 1: We got to take care of him.
Speaker 8: As for the cars, Trump mentioned that he actually already
Speaker 8: a cyber truck for his granddaughter Kai, which Trump called
Speaker 8: the coolest design, but this time he chose a red
Speaker 8: Tesla model. S Upon climbing in the car that secret
Speaker 8: service does not allow him to operate, Trump remarked, Wow,
Speaker 8: everything's computer. At the end of the live streamed Tesla commercial,
Speaker 8: Trump said that he would pay with a check, though
Speaker 8: for the duration of the event, Trump served as both
Speaker 8: buyer and salesman as he read off from a sheet
Speaker 8: of notes on pricing and features for various Tesla models,
Speaker 8: like how quote Tesla's can be purchased for as low
Speaker 8: as two ninety nine a month.
Speaker 9: So I'm out of information that's put into priv Yeah,
Speaker 9: I want to make a good deal here, you know,
Speaker 9: I do notice this they have won, which is thirty
Speaker 9: five thousand dollars, which is pretty low. What is that
Speaker 9: all about?
Speaker 8: This whole charade was an explicit attempt to rescue Tesla's
Speaker 8: plummeting stock price and help foster a new demographic of
Speaker 8: electric car buyers, anti wo conservatives looking to show support
Speaker 8: of Elon Musk, Doge, and the new Trump administration through
Speaker 8: consumer purchases. Trump himself said that he hoped doing ads
Speaker 8: for Tesla on the White House driveway would help Tesla's
Speaker 8: stock value and encouraged others to buy Elon's cars. The
Speaker 8: next day, Tesla shares did rise four percent, but are
Speaker 8: now trending back down amid a global wave of protests
Speaker 8: against Tesla four Musk's involvement with Doge and the Trump administration,
Speaker 8: as well as Elon's Nazi curious behavior. Trump has tried
Speaker 8: to face this wave of hate against his new best friend,
Speaker 8: head On truthing on his platform of choice Truth social
Speaker 8: last week quote, Elon Musk is putting it on the
Speaker 8: line in order to help our nation, and he is
Speaker 8: doing a fantastic job. But the radical left lunatics, as
Speaker 8: they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla,
Speaker 8: one of the world's greatest automakers and Elon's quote unquote baby,
Speaker 8: in order to attack and do harm to Elon and
Speaker 8: everything he stands for. They tried to do it to
Speaker 8: me at the twenty twenty four presidential ballot box. But
Speaker 8: how did that work out?
Speaker 3: Unquote.
Speaker 8: There's a lot to impact there, from Trump calling Tesla
Speaker 8: Elon's baby, despite Elon carrying around his baby at the
Speaker 8: White House near twenty four to seven, to bizarrely declaring
Speaker 8: protest boycotts as illegal. Not only has Trump called the
Speaker 8: Tesla boycott illegal, but during the White House car commercial,
Speaker 8: he announced that vandalism of Tesla's will be labeled as
Speaker 8: domestic terrorism, promising that perpetrators will quote unquote go through hell.
Speaker 8: White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said, quote ongoing and heinous
Speaker 8: acts of violence against Tesla by radical leftist activists are
Speaker 8: nothing short of domestic terror unquote. There's certainly has been
Speaker 8: a surge of violence targeted at Tesla vehicles and dealerships,
Speaker 8: which I will discuss in detail later this episode, but
Speaker 8: for the past months, there's also been a wave of
Speaker 8: nonviolent protests and mass mobilization against Musk and Tesla at
Speaker 8: dealerships all around the country and even overseas, which the
Speaker 8: aforementioned boycott is a part of the quote unquote Tesla
Speaker 8: takedown protests. Call to quote sell your Tesla's, dump your stock,
Speaker 8: join the picket lines. We're tanking Tesla's stock price to
Speaker 8: stop Musk unquote. Their website has a map of Tesla
Speaker 8: dealerships around the world and a list of upcoming protests
Speaker 8: at various locations, which can be searched through via zip code.
Speaker 8: There have been reoccurring weekly protests at dealerships every Saturday
Speaker 8: in cities across the country, with demonstrations at more than
Speaker 8: fifty Tesla showrooms attracting crowds of between dozens to a thousand,
Speaker 8: like in tucsona, Arizona. The boycotts and public demonstrations certainly
Speaker 8: aren't helping Tesla's stock price and international reputation, but they
Speaker 8: are not the only display of displeasure directed at Elon
Speaker 8: and Tesla, as others are employing more direct methods to
Speaker 8: damage the company. Beyond peaceful protests, picketings, short lived dealership occupations,
Speaker 8: and waiving anti Elon Musk signs outside Tesla stores. Tesla
Speaker 8: vehicles themselves have become the nation's hottest graffiti mural service. Actually,
Speaker 8: around the world, people have been using Tesla's to scribble
Speaker 8: epithets against Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Even some eco
Speaker 8: conscious owners of Tesla vehicles have defaced their own cars
Speaker 8: with stickers that read I bought this before he was
Speaker 8: a Nazi, which, hey, you can also put on your
Speaker 8: old Kanye West records. Speaking of Kanye West, some individuals
Speaker 8: have taken to marking Teslaus with a swastika, which at
Speaker 8: first raised eyebrows and confused some investigators as typically when
Speaker 8: there's swastika graffiti, it's supposed to be anti Semitic in nature,
Speaker 8: whereas in this case, based on external factors, this is
Speaker 8: most likely a public attempt to link Elon Musk and
Speaker 8: Tesla with Nazism, following Musk's own anti Semitic posts, fall
Speaker 8: right politics, and the whole salute thing. Stickers and flyers
Speaker 8: have spread from the UK to San Francisco, reading don't
Speaker 8: buy a swasti car, but it's not all stickers and
Speaker 8: graffiti we'll talk about the other Tesla attacks after this
Speaker 8: ad break.
Speaker 3: Okay, we're back.
Speaker 8: One of the most bizarre instances of Tesla vandalism was
Speaker 8: when forty four wheels were stolen off twelve sold Tesla's
Speaker 8: in a Texas parking lot on Valentine's Day. Investigators say
Speaker 8: they don't currently have any leads since the nearby security
Speaker 8: cameras weren't recording and the Tesla cameras were not active.
Speaker 8: These Teslas were actually being stored in an Amazon parking
Speaker 8: lot six miles away from their home dealership. Allegedly, Tesla
Speaker 8: is contracting with other businesses to store their cars. A
Speaker 8: midwave of vandalism at Tesla dealerships. On March eleventh, wheels
Speaker 8: were damaged on multiple vehicles at a Tesla dealership in Dedham, Massachusetts.
Speaker 8: In Meyers, California, Tesla superchargers keep being sabotaged, with epoxy
Speaker 8: found in the charging cable and anti elon musk graffiti
Speaker 8: with chargers marked with swastikas. Seven Tesla charging stations at
Speaker 8: a shopping center were arsened outside of Boston, Massachusetts, on
Speaker 8: March third, and on March seventh, Maltov cocktails were thrown
Speaker 8: at a Tesla charging station in South Carolina with long
Speaker 8: live Ukraine on the ground in red paint. A twenty
Speaker 8: four year old man was taken into custody on March thirteenth.
Speaker 8: But it's not just wheel thefts and supercharger sabotage. Tesla
Speaker 8: dealerships have been a target for anti musk graffiti, vandalism,
Speaker 8: and armed attacks. Some commentators have been conflating the picketing
Speaker 8: protests and graffiti with actual instances of arson and property destruction,
Speaker 8: people like libs of TikTok labeling simple spray paint as
Speaker 8: quote unquote trans violence or trans terrorism, which is not
Speaker 8: to say some people aren't taking a more destructive approach
Speaker 8: towards their elon musk grievances. Whether that qualifies as terrorism
Speaker 8: is another issue though. On January twentieth, a man wearing
Speaker 8: black pulling a wheelie cart approached a Tesla dealership in Salem, Oregon,
Speaker 8: and threw a Molotov cocktail at a cyber truck. Surveillance
Speaker 8: footage shows the man pull out ignite and throw three
Speaker 8: more Molotov cocktails from his rolling cart before realizing an
Speaker 8: eyewitness is charging their Tesla nearby. The man in black
Speaker 8: pulls out a suppressor mounted AR style rifle and points
Speaker 8: it at the witness as they drive away, before continuing
Speaker 8: to throw more Molotov cocktails at parked vehicles. A rock
Speaker 8: was used to break the glass of the dealership showroom,
Speaker 8: and another Molotov cocktail was thrown inside the building. A
Speaker 8: criminal complaint claims that this incident caused around five hundred
Speaker 8: thousand dollars in damage to the dealership, including damaging seven
Speaker 8: Tesla vehicles. A month later, on February nineteenth, the same
Speaker 8: dealership was hit again, this time with gunshots breaking through
Speaker 8: windows and hitting vehicles. In early March, a forty one
Speaker 8: year old man was arrested in connection to both incidents,
Speaker 8: with court documents claiming fingerprints were identified on recovered glass
Speaker 8: bottles used for explosive devices and the suspects car was
Speaker 8: identified in footage captured by a police car parked near
Speaker 8: the Tesla dealership a bit north of Salem. In Tigered, Oregon,
Speaker 8: there have been two incidents of gunshots being fired at
Speaker 8: a testa dealership just this month. A Tigered police press
Speaker 8: release reads quote for the second time in a week,
Speaker 8: Tigered police are investigating shots fired at a Tesla dealership
Speaker 8: Early this morning, March thirteen, twenty twenty five, around four
Speaker 8: fifteen am, more than a dozen shots were fired at
Speaker 8: the dealership, causing extensive damage to cars and showroom windows.
Speaker 3: Unquote.
Speaker 8: There's also been a series of incidents at a Tesla
Speaker 8: dealership in northern Colorado. A spree of anti musk graffiti
Speaker 8: and vandalism started in January, with Molotov cocktail style and
Speaker 8: scendiary devices found on the scene. On February seventh, police
Speaker 8: responded to a call about graffiti and possible arson at
Speaker 8: the dealership. A few days later, a security guard confronted
Speaker 8: an individual spray painting the front windows of the dealership,
Speaker 8: and on February twenty fourth, a suspect was arrested at
Speaker 8: the dealership, a li a, llegedly in possession of bottles
Speaker 8: and gasoline.
Speaker 3: She was charged.
Speaker 8: In late February, another person was arrested allegedly in connection
Speaker 8: to a similar, yet unrelated incident at the very same
Speaker 8: dealership in Loveland, Colorado, after molotov cocktail style device was
Speaker 8: found burning between two Tesla vehicles on March seventh. Rocks
Speaker 8: were also used to damage both the building and multiple
Speaker 8: cars at around eleven pm on Sunday, March ninth, four
Speaker 8: cyber trucks erupted into flames at a Tesla parking lot
Speaker 8: in Seattle, Washington. On Monday, March seventeenth, two cyber trucks
Speaker 8: were set on fire at a dealership in Kansas City.
Speaker 8: Here's how local TV news reported the incident.
Speaker 11: Around eleven pm, officers were called to a fire at
Speaker 11: a car.
Speaker 3: Lot car Hire Dealer shifts in the parking lot.
Speaker 11: AKCPD officer was close by when he noticed smoke coming
Speaker 11: from a Tesla cybertruck. The officer used his fire extinguisher
Speaker 11: to try to put out the flames, but the fire
Speaker 11: continued to spread. CASEFD was called into help.
Speaker 12: Our crews got on scene and the fire was in
Speaker 12: two cyber trucks. It had spread from one to the other.
Speaker 12: We were able to get water on them. Copey, this
Speaker 12: amounts for water. Get the fire out.
Speaker 7: Now.
Speaker 11: Federal agencies are getting involved. We saw an ATF officer
Speaker 11: with a bag of evidence. They say this incident follow
Speaker 11: similar reports from across the country of violence at Tesla dealerships.
Speaker 9: I mean you're eventually going to get caught right.
Speaker 11: Reaction to this incident has been mixed with some condemning
Speaker 11: the crime and others who see it as a former
Speaker 11: protest towards the automaker.
Speaker 8: And just a few days ago, on March eighteenth, an
Speaker 8: individual addressed in all black fired gunshots and through maltov cocktails,
Speaker 8: damaging five cars at a Tesla service center in Las Vegas.
Speaker 8: The Las Vegas Review Journal writes that the FBI Joint
Speaker 8: Terrorism Task Force is investigating the matter. Quote agents arrived
Speaker 8: at the scene early Tuesday, according to FBI by Agent
Speaker 8: in Charge Spencer Evans. Evans said that while it was
Speaker 8: too early to call the attack in active terrorism, it
Speaker 8: had quote unquote some of the hallmarks and a potential
Speaker 8: political agenda unquote. Now this particular instant in Las Vegas
Speaker 8: really got to Elon Musk, who spent the rest of
Speaker 8: the day complaining on Twitter that Tesla has quote done
Speaker 8: nothing to deserve these evil attacks unquote. Attacks on Tesla
Speaker 8: have not been contained to the United States. In early
Speaker 8: March twelve, Teslas parked outside of a dealership in southern
Speaker 8: France were set ablaze, and outside Berlin, unknown persons set
Speaker 8: fire to a high voltage transmission line on a power pylon,
Speaker 8: cutting power to a massive Tesla manufacturing plant in Germany
Speaker 8: for multiple days. This follows a series of direct actions
Speaker 8: and a forest encampment where the Tesla gigafactory seeks to
Speaker 8: expand by leveling two hundred and fifty acres of forest.
Speaker 8: The German forest encampment lasted nine months before being successfully
Speaker 8: raided by police this last November, with police destroying treehouses
Speaker 8: and trashing tents. After the whole My Heart goes out
Speaker 8: to You salute and subsequent endorsement of AfD, Musk's reputation
Speaker 8: in Germany specifically is suffering steep decline. To quote the
Speaker 8: Washington Post quote, Tesla stock has fallen by more than
Speaker 8: thirty five percent since Trump's inauguration, and last year the
Speaker 8: company suffered its first annual sales drop in more than
Speaker 8: a decade. In Germany, Tesla car sales plummeted by seventy
Speaker 8: six percent in February compared with a year earlier, according
Speaker 8: to figures released Wednesday, and some owners have expressed buyer's
Speaker 8: remorse over owning a car some now see as a
Speaker 8: symbol of far right politics, a stark departure from the
Speaker 8: environmental consciousness it once epitomized, and we'll talk more about
Speaker 8: how these protests are affecting Tesla's international resputation after this
Speaker 8: ad break. Okay, we're back right. After the November election,
Speaker 8: Tesla stock surged to a never before seen high of
Speaker 8: one point five four trillion dollars, but as Musk's direct
Speaker 8: involvement in the government was ramped up, Tesla has fallen
Speaker 8: to about seven hundred and seventy seven billion. The massively
Speaker 8: inflated value of Tesla stock is directly related to the
Speaker 8: public perception of Elon Musk and Tesla stock greatly determines
Speaker 8: Musk's own net worth, which is down more than one
Speaker 8: hundred and forty billion from this past to December peak.
Speaker 8: When Elon's reputation gets damaged, so does Tesla's and vice versa.
Speaker 8: Tesla stock has been declining for nine consecutive weeks. JP
Speaker 8: Morgan analysts recently said that Tesla has lost so much
Speaker 8: value so quick that there really isn't any comparison.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 8: We struggle to think of anything analogous in the history
Speaker 8: of the automotive industry in which a brand has lost
Speaker 8: so much value so quickly unquote, and Forbes writes quote
Speaker 8: last week, JP Morgan analysts described the recent melting of
Speaker 8: Tesla's perception, especially in pockets of the world in which
Speaker 8: Musk inserted himself into right wing politics, such as Germany.
Speaker 8: About fifty three percent of respondents to a CNN poll
Speaker 8: published last week said that they hold a negative opinion
Speaker 8: of Musk, compared to roughly thirty five percent with a
Speaker 8: positive view and eleven percent with no take unquote. Overseas,
Speaker 8: Tesla sales in general are way down, even as electric
Speaker 8: vehicle purchasing is going up. New data from the European
Speaker 8: Automotive Manufacturers Association show that Tesla registrations in the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland,
Speaker 8: and the UK have dropped by forty five percent when
Speaker 8: you compare January twenty twenty four to January twenty twenty five,
Speaker 8: and this decline from Tesla comes as overall electric vehicle
Speaker 8: sales have increased thirty seven percent in the same January
Speaker 8: twenty four to twenty five head to head comparison. China's
Speaker 8: own evs are surpassing Tesla in global production and sales
Speaker 8: in China, which is a huge EV market, and Chinese
Speaker 8: manufacturer BYD is on track to overtake Tesla in global
Speaker 8: sales this year, and so if you consider the Tesla
Speaker 8: protests as a sort of public display of unhappiness with
Speaker 8: Tesla and Elon Musk, combined with all these other economic
Speaker 8: factors impacting the automaker, if these trends continue, Musk and
Speaker 8: Tesla could be in real trouble. After the Las Vegas
Speaker 8: attack this Tuesday, Musk went onto Fox News to explain
Speaker 8: the situation as he sees it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it turns out when you take away people's you
Speaker 4: know what, the money they're receiving. Fortunately, they get very
Speaker 4: upset and they basically want to kill me because I'm
Speaker 4: stopping their fraud. And they want to hurt Tesla because
Speaker 4: they're stopping this terrible waste and corruption in the government.
Speaker 4: And well, I guess they're bad people. Bad people will
Speaker 4: do bad things.
Speaker 8: Essentially, Tesla is seen as an extension of Elon, and
Speaker 8: right now, Elon is seen as an extension of the
Speaker 8: Trump government, and even if people feel powerless to stop
Speaker 8: the government, hurting Tesla is seen as a much more
Speaker 8: achievable goal with ripple effects that reach Elon, Doje and
Speaker 8: the Trump administration. And compared to protesting the government. Tesla
Speaker 8: is a soft target, with cars and dealerships all across
Speaker 8: the country, not justin state capitals or in Washington, d C.
Speaker 8: Whereas government facilities are to hard targets by both being
Speaker 8: less accessible and more protected. GP Morgan analysts wrote, quote,
Speaker 8: mister Musk's work with the Department of Government Efficiency has
Speaker 8: proven controversial domestically, and while as many members of the
Speaker 8: political right may be pleased as those on the left
Speaker 8: are displeased, the effect on Tesla sales seems nevertheless negative.
Speaker 3: Unquote.
Speaker 8: Musk is certainly trying to make the best of it
Speaker 8: by tapping into the previously untapped ev market of mega conservatives,
Speaker 8: And though the Tesla brand is gaining popularity amongst conservatives,
Speaker 8: that demographic is just far less likely than liberals to
Speaker 8: actually switch from a gas to electric car. Still, the
Speaker 8: President and conservative media have been doing a lot of
Speaker 8: free Tesla commercials. Last week, Sean Hannity announced on air
Speaker 8: that he would be buying a Tesla.
Speaker 1: I don't believe in cancelation.
Speaker 13: I don't believe in cancel culture, you know, and I
Speaker 13: know maybe it's not going to make up a difference,
Speaker 13: but you know what, after I drove my friends Tesla,
Speaker 13: I went, and I already picked out the one I want.
Speaker 13: It's called the the what is it called the s plaid?
Speaker 13: And do you realize this thing? An electric vehicle has
Speaker 13: one thousand and six horsepower and goes from zero to
Speaker 13: sixty two in two point zero seconds. And this thing
Speaker 13: rips and you can go about four hundred miles without
Speaker 13: a charge. And I don't drive enough to go further
Speaker 13: than four hundred miles, So I'm good. And maybe it's
Speaker 13: just a gesture on my part, and I like it.
Speaker 13: I like new technology, but it's just a way of saying,
Speaker 13: you know, look what they're doing to this guy.
Speaker 8: On Friday, March fourteenth, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that
Speaker 8: she is opening an investigation into the attacks against Tesla. Quote,
Speaker 8: if you're going to touch a Tesla, go to a dealership,
Speaker 8: do anything, you better watch out because we're coming after you.
Speaker 3: Unquote.
Speaker 8: She released a statement on Tuesday after the Las Vegas arson, writing, quote,
Speaker 8: the swarm of violent attacks on Tesla property is nothing
Speaker 8: short of domestic terrorism unquote. Musk just can't seem to
Speaker 8: understand that tons of regular people really hate him now
Speaker 8: and instead has to invent some grand conspiracy against him.
Speaker 3: Here's how he explained it on Fox News.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean it's really come as quite a shock
Speaker 4: to me that there's this level of really hatred and
Speaker 4: violence from the left. I thought the left of the
Speaker 4: Democrats were supposed to be the party of empathy, the
Speaker 4: party of caring, and yet they're burning down cars, They're
Speaker 4: fire bombing dealerships, they're firing bullets into dealerships, They're just
Speaker 4: you know, smashing up Tesla's. Tesla is a peaceful company.
Speaker 4: We've never done anything hopeful. I've never done anything hawful.
Speaker 4: I've only done productive things.
Speaker 3: So I think we just have.
Speaker 6: A deranged it.
Speaker 4: There's some kind of mental illness thing going on here,
Speaker 4: because this doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there are larger forces at work as well.
Speaker 4: I mean, I don't know who's funding it and who's coordinating,
Speaker 4: because this is crazy. I've never seen anything like this.
Speaker 8: On X the Everything app. Musk is much more open
Speaker 8: about who he suspects are these larger forces. Musk has
Speaker 8: spread claims that quote unquote multiple Democrat NGOs are coordinating
Speaker 8: quote attacks on Tesla dealerships, staff, and vehicles. Last night,
Speaker 8: a number of cyber trucks were torched in Seattle. Democrats
Speaker 8: are becoming increasingly more desperate and violent.
Speaker 3: Unquote.
Speaker 8: People in Musk's replies posted about how protesters are being
Speaker 8: paid by quote Democrat fundraising platform Act Blue, which is
Speaker 8: funded by Soros.
Speaker 3: Unquote.
Speaker 8: Act Blue seems to be the rights new favorite conspiracy
Speaker 8: topic from claiming that you said was illegally laundering money
Speaker 8: to Democrats through Act Blue, and now that Act Blue
Speaker 8: itself has the ability to funnel money to activist groups.
Speaker 8: Act Blue doesn't give away money or directly fund anything.
Speaker 8: It's a donation based platform for registered organizations. This is
Speaker 8: like saying go fundme paid.
Speaker 3: For your top surgery.
Speaker 8: No people donated on a fundraising platform. But nevertheless, this
Speaker 8: claim is going gangbusters on X the Everything app and
Speaker 8: being boosted by Musk and his associates. A popular right
Speaker 8: wing politics account on X called insurrection Barbie posted that quote.
Speaker 8: Attacks on the Tesla dealerships, which have been linked to
Speaker 8: the Indivisible Project, a left of Stalin ngo that organizes
Speaker 8: street protests for the Democratic Party with shady prepaid debit
Speaker 8: cards that they run through Act Blue, are committing economic
Speaker 8: terrorism meant to Tank Tesla's stock and drive a wedge
Speaker 8: between Musk and Trump.
Speaker 3: Unquote.
Speaker 8: Elon himself has claimed that a mysterious investigation quote unquote
Speaker 8: has found quote five Act Blue funded groups responsible for
Speaker 8: the Tesla protests, Troublemakers, Disruption Project, Rise and Resist, Indivisible Project,
Speaker 8: and Democratic Socialists of America. Act Blue funders include George Soros,
Speaker 8: Reed Hoffman, Herbert Sandler, Patricia Bowman, and Leah Hunt Hendrix.
Speaker 8: If you know anything about this, please post in the replies.
Speaker 8: Thanks Elon unquote. Now, the main organizations behind the Tesla
Speaker 8: takedown protests, two activist groups called the Troublemakers and the
Speaker 8: Disruption Project, don't even fundraise on Act Blue, that they
Speaker 8: have no affiliation, but that hasn't stopped Elon from targeting
Speaker 8: specific activists and accusing them of committing crimes simply for
Speaker 8: organizing pickets outside stores, meanwhile invoking the old antisemitic George
Speaker 8: Soros conspiracy as Elon himself has funneled hundreds of millions
Speaker 8: of dollars to right wing politicians this past year, and
Speaker 8: has threatened to primary any Republican Congressman who doesn't cave
Speaker 8: on Trump's agenda. So anyway, that is what's happening with
Speaker 8: Tesla derangement syndrome all across the country and even the world.
Speaker 8: Every day it feels like we are getting closer and
Speaker 8: closer to the cool zone.
Speaker 3: See you on the other side, Oh Lord, that the
Speaker 3: coming has begun, The coming has begun. This is that
Speaker 3: could happen here.
Speaker 8: Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the
Speaker 8: White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.
Speaker 8: I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout,
Speaker 8: and Robert Evans.
Speaker 2: Yes, and as James Stout just noted, the coming has begun,
Speaker 2: so we're going to also begin.
Speaker 8: This episode we are covering the week of March twelve
Speaker 8: to March nineteen. Obviously, the most important piece of news
Speaker 8: right now is that Minnesota Republican state Senator Justin aich Lord,
Speaker 8: who just last week sponsored or co sponsored a bill
Speaker 8: that that legally recognizes Trump derangement syndrome as a mental
Speaker 8: illness which disqualifies you from possessing firearms, was literally that
Speaker 8: same day rested in a sting operation for trying to
Speaker 8: meet up with and have sex with a minor.
Speaker 3: Like literally he was like to have been texting this.
Speaker 2: He thought what he thought was a kid, but what
Speaker 2: was really a federal agent while he was finalizing the language.
Speaker 8: It's it's it's truly phenomenal. Pedal club theory never fails. Anyway,
Speaker 8: Let's move on to the actual important stress, which is
Speaker 8: mostly bad.
Speaker 3: This has been a pretty rough week. Yeah, it's been
Speaker 3: a pretty rough week.
Speaker 6: It sucked.
Speaker 3: Yes, So I guess I'll turn to James Stout me, Hi, everyone, hija,
Speaker 3: Well the day you're listening, it's it's neuro's neurosis bab yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: Burdish listeners.
Speaker 6: See.
Speaker 3: So I want to talk today about rendition, and this
Speaker 3: has been reported his deportation. Like, I guess it technically
Speaker 3: falls within deportation. But what's happening here is that the
Speaker 3: Trump administration has begun renditioning people who it accuses of
Speaker 3: being members of trender Ragua, which is a Venezuelan gang
Speaker 3: and the La Mara Sabbath the MS thirteen as they're
Speaker 3: known here.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 3: It has done this based on something called the Alien
Speaker 3: Enemy to Act. The way it's able to use the
Speaker 3: Alien Enemies Act is that it has designated these gangs
Speaker 3: as foreign terrorist organizations rather than as like international crime organizations,
Speaker 3: and it's usually Alien Enemies Act to expedite their removal.
Speaker 3: We spoke about the Alien Enemies Act in a podcast
Speaker 3: that I made last November with Robin Sophe about parts
Speaker 3: of the Lord that Trump administration might use for its
Speaker 3: mass deportation agenda. They're now using this one, and very briefly,
Speaker 3: it's a two hundred and twenty six year old piece
Speaker 3: of legislation that hasn't been used since World War Two,
Speaker 3: when it was used to justifying tournament camps, which were
Speaker 3: a bad thing. These people aren't being deported back to Venezuela, right.
Speaker 3: The US doesn't have relations with the Moduro regime, although
Speaker 3: it has deported people back to Venezuela on an airline
Speaker 3: that was previously sanctioned, which could now land in the
Speaker 3: US for the express purpose of deportations, which is great. Instead,
Speaker 3: they're being sent to Al Salvador. They're being sent there
Speaker 3: with no trial or hearing or seemingly right to appeal.
Speaker 3: When they get to El Salvador, they've been parade in
Speaker 3: front of video cameras. Very degrading treatment. Right. Their hair
Speaker 3: is being shaped, sort of being walked with their heads
Speaker 3: forced down, they're being filmed on their knees while all
Speaker 3: their hair and facial hair is removed, and then they're
Speaker 3: being sent to second If you're not familiar with this,
Speaker 3: it was the subject of State Department human rights reports
Speaker 3: very recently, and now we are sending people there. It's
Speaker 3: a mega prison in El Salvador. It roughly translates terrorism
Speaker 3: confinement or terrorism detention center. I guess it's been very
Speaker 3: recently built by Bokel who's the president of El Salvador,
Speaker 3: and it's part of his Supermanodoro like Iron Fist. Super
Speaker 3: Iron Fist would be the way you were translated. I guess.
Speaker 3: It is routinely criticized by human rights organizations for the
Speaker 3: disgusting conditions of people are kept in right, the United
Speaker 3: States government intended to send three hundred people there, and
Speaker 3: in return it paid six million dollars to El Salvador
Speaker 3: for the cost of their detention. At the time that
Speaker 3: I wrote this, two hundred and thirty eight people who
Speaker 3: were accused of being part of trendell our work was
Speaker 3: sent there, and then twenty three who accused of being
Speaker 3: part of MS thirty. They were removed on flights the trumpdministrations,
Speaker 3: claiming they were removed before a district court judge in
Speaker 3: DC blocked their removals. But there are a series of
Speaker 3: timelines that you can see online, some of which will
Speaker 3: be linked in the source of this episode, would suggest
Speaker 3: that they were in the air when he blocked their removals. Nonetheless,
Speaker 3: the judge very explicitly said, I'm quoting here. Any plane
Speaker 3: containing these folks that is going to take off or
Speaker 3: is in the air needs to be returned to the
Speaker 3: United States. This is something that you need to make
Speaker 3: sure is complied with immediately. This did not happen. The
Speaker 3: planes continued traveling to Ossabadoid, stopped in Honduras, and then
Speaker 3: these people were paraded before the cameras, right, and they're
Speaker 3: now presumably being detained in this prison, which doesn't let
Speaker 3: basic s ender the human rights. The government has given
Speaker 3: various reasons for ignoring this ruling from the judge. Press
Speaker 3: Sextuary Caroline leave It claimed that there was quote no
Speaker 3: lawful basis for it. Obviously that the process here is,
Speaker 3: if you don't believe then judicial ruling is correct, you
Speaker 3: stop doing the thing and appeal it. You don't just
Speaker 3: keep doing the thing and say like, oh, well, I
Speaker 3: don't believe you. It's not true. Obviously, this only matters
Speaker 3: in so far as the judge can enforce his decision.
Speaker 3: They also claimed in court that the verbal order that
Speaker 3: the judge gave is not the same as a written one,
Speaker 3: and they claim that because the flights where every international waters,
Speaker 3: this was a foreign policy matter, and that the judge
Speaker 3: couldn't intervene in a foreign policy matter. That's a power
Speaker 3: of this reserve to the executive.
Speaker 8: I mean, like all of these justifications are really like
Speaker 8: freaky in terms of constitutional power and stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is there are fringes on the flag, so
Speaker 3: Admiralty Court apply is kind of done.
Speaker 8: Yeah, But specifically that last one, being like it doesn't
Speaker 8: count because we're over international waters is like, yeah, super
Speaker 8: frightening in terms of like human rights abuse.
Speaker 2: This that's not the way anything works, especially since it
Speaker 2: was like a US airline.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, and in terms of yeah, you basically don't
Speaker 3: have human rights because like it's they're forcing a loophole
Speaker 3: that doesn't exist in the same way that George W.
Speaker 3: Bush did in the in the early two thousands with
Speaker 3: Guantanamo Bay. He was never stopped from doing it.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, I I honestly I think I think the
Speaker 7: thing that this is closer to is the other things.
Speaker 7: So I think Guantanamo Bay is the one that gets remembered.
Speaker 7: But the other part of the CIA torture program was
Speaker 7: the US would just ship people off to places like Syria. Yeah, yeah, Syria.
Speaker 7: Egypt is Syria and the egypt biggest Yeah maybe yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: we did need you to.
Speaker 2: Syria's torture program had largely been cobbled together by a
Speaker 2: former SS guy.
Speaker 3: It's all, It's very good.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 7: I also want to read a line from the legal
Speaker 7: argument that Trump's lawyers made before this judge, because it
Speaker 7: is fucking horrifying. Quote, enemy aliens are not entitled to
Speaker 7: seek any relief or protection in the country that doesign
Speaker 7: get the enemy is absent dispensation by the president c
Speaker 7: Citizens Protection League. And then in parentheses noting common law
Speaker 7: ruling that alien enemies have no rights, no privileges unless
Speaker 7: by the king's special favor. So every single part that
Speaker 7: is horrifying. Also horrifying is the fact that if you
Speaker 7: actually look up the common lawal citation, the next words
Speaker 7: after king special favor is in a time of war.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so yeah, that's the idea here, right, that we're
Speaker 3: a war with these foreign terrorist organizations and these are
Speaker 3: essentially like spies or yeah, and this is this is
Speaker 3: this thing.
Speaker 7: We're like, well, no, obviously we're not like that. We
Speaker 7: don't have there's no state of war, Like, no state
Speaker 7: of wars have ever been declared. But because of the
Speaker 7: way the War on Terror sort of functioned, they're they're
Speaker 7: they're trying to claim these things. And then again like
Speaker 7: the fact that they're saying that anyone they declare an
Speaker 7: alien has literally no protections at all in the country,
Speaker 7: no rights at all can be anything can be done
Speaker 7: to them. It's unless specifically the president decides that they
Speaker 7: have rights. Is unbelievably hideous. It is pure, pure state
Speaker 7: of exception, the total fac shit. It's fucking horrifying.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's entirely unconstitutional, right, Like, you don't have
Speaker 3: to be a radically left person to believe that humans
Speaker 3: have rights. Yeah, I want to really briefly, like one
Speaker 3: of the criteria that was used here so so ice criteria,
Speaker 3: so they have to have two identifying signs to be
Speaker 3: classified as a gang member. One of them that has
Speaker 3: been used very heavily. Here is tattoos. We know from
Speaker 3: court filings that one man, Barrios, he has a football tattoo, right,
Speaker 3: like a tattoo of a football with a crown on
Speaker 3: it is this diocelic god underneath it was supposed to
Speaker 3: be I guess similar like a play on the logo
Speaker 3: of Al Madrid. But they've used this to claim that
Speaker 3: it's evidence he's a member of a gang. Gangs like
Speaker 3: tender Agua don't have like gang signed tattoos, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: but they're smarter than that, Like they've seen what's happened
Speaker 3: to gangs like MS thirteen because who do. Like Madras,
Speaker 3: Central American gangs have have had these things like as
Speaker 3: part of their tradition for a while, and they've been
Speaker 3: used heavily by law enforcement. I remember Christmas Eve twenty
Speaker 3: twenty three. I was in the desert with my friends
Speaker 3: and a large number of my joints across that day.
Speaker 3: I remember meeting a Venezuela man who was like covered
Speaker 3: in tattoos. They had to toe very heavy tattooed. That
Speaker 3: dude spent the entire day building a shelter for someone
Speaker 3: else's sick kid and then slept by himself in the
Speaker 3: freezing cold outside, and like, I know, I've been thinking
Speaker 3: about that guy a lot because under this ruling, right,
Speaker 3: like just his appearance of having tattoos would have him
Speaker 3: classified as a terrorist. And like when thousands of Americans
Speaker 3: living within an hour of that place did nothing, and
Speaker 3: that little girl who was sick had nowhere to sleep,
Speaker 3: like this guy took it upon himself to help, even
Speaker 3: when he himself was in a difficult place, And it
Speaker 3: just really makes me kind of sick. I think that
Speaker 3: this is where we're at now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I mean it's it's it's a damning indictment
Speaker 2: of the character of people who are the voter base
Speaker 2: in this coatttery, And it's a damning indictment of like
Speaker 2: what particularly liberals in the left failed to stop because
Speaker 2: this was a this was a train that we could
Speaker 2: see coming for a while, like the propaganda campaign against
Speaker 2: these folks, yeah, and a necessary ingredient, and the Republicans
Speaker 2: getting their way on this was democratic politicians, and you know,
Speaker 2: to be entirely fair, quite a few prominent thought leaders
Speaker 2: on the left absolutely folding and not just not just
Speaker 2: failing to like counterpoint this stuff, but like diving in
Speaker 2: on it because they either had prejudice of their own
Speaker 2: or they saw it as like an opportunity. But like,
Speaker 2: you know, the whole nativist deal is just disgusting. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't know what else to say. I can't just
Speaker 2: keep yelling about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not all a slippery slope. And I'm not
Speaker 3: saying that they're both as bad as each other, because
Speaker 3: what's happening now is much worse than anything that happened previously.
Speaker 3: But like, yes, when we could detain people, including little
Speaker 3: children outside and we could leave them there in the snow,
Speaker 3: and like little babies could be shift ring, and I
Speaker 3: could be giving away my own coat almost every day
Speaker 3: I was out there because I was worried someone's baby
Speaker 3: was going to die of hypothermia, we kind of conceded
Speaker 3: that these people didn't have rights, right and the Democratic
Speaker 3: Party let that happen, and people on the left let
Speaker 3: that happen. And that is a stepping stone on the
Speaker 3: pathway to where we're at now.
Speaker 2: Yep, just as like with all the shit that's that's
Speaker 2: happening right now, like in terms of like the disappearing
Speaker 2: of political opponents and whatnot, Like you can draw a
Speaker 2: line from that from like the Patriot Act, you know,
Speaker 2: from Obama targeting a US citizen in I think Afghanistan. Like,
Speaker 2: there's all of these are like obviously things were not
Speaker 2: nearly as bad as they are right now in those administrations,
Speaker 2: but like they're not unrelated. You know, this kind of
Speaker 2: unitary executive theory is a through line through the last
Speaker 2: several administrations, and if anyone had pushed back prior to
Speaker 2: this point, Trump wouldn't be able to do a.
Speaker 6: Lot of what he's doing. Yep.
Speaker 3: What we are doing is pivoting to ads. Yeah, right now.
Speaker 2: We're back and we're talking Ukraine Ukraine. I'm sorry that
Speaker 2: I shouldn't Ukraine if you want to, Yeah, I don't
Speaker 2: know why I did anyway. So, if you've been kind
Speaker 2: of paying attention over the last month or so, we've
Speaker 2: had a little odyssey in terms of US Russia Ukraine relations,
Speaker 2: and the gist of it is that everybody claims to
Speaker 2: want an end to the fighting.
Speaker 3: You know, at least off and on.
Speaker 2: Putin has kind of like made some motions to that
Speaker 2: has absolutely not acted as if this is something he
Speaker 2: particularly cares about. Trump clearly does want a ceasefire because
Speaker 2: he wants to be able to take credit for it.
Speaker 2: And Zelenski also clearly wants to cease fire. But there's
Speaker 2: been some kind of some pretty significant like hold ups.
Speaker 2: One of them has been around Ukrainian minerals. And you know,
Speaker 2: in February you had the administration talking a lot about
Speaker 2: how the US was going to gain control of Ukraine's
Speaker 2: minerals in order to pay us back for our support
Speaker 2: of their war effort. And Zelensky drew a very firm line,
Speaker 2: as he often does, like no, I'm not gonna You're
Speaker 2: not just going to get all of this, all of
Speaker 2: our country's minerals. And I should note here that like
Speaker 2: this is a fairly significant issue in global terms. It's
Speaker 2: estimated that Ukraine has about five percent of the planet's
Speaker 2: critical raw materials, including massive reserves of graphite. They're somewhere
Speaker 2: in like the top five countries in terms of proven
Speaker 2: graphite reserves, which among other things, is a critical ingredient
Speaker 2: for batteries in electric vehicles. They supply about seven percent
Speaker 2: of Europe's titanium. They're home to a third of European
Speaker 2: lithium deposits. This is not an exhaustive list that's just
Speaker 2: kind of you know, to start things off. And initially,
Speaker 2: when there was this kind of pushback from Zelenski saying like, no,
Speaker 2: you're not just going to get all that putin, came
Speaker 2: in and was like, well, hey, you know, we've occupied
Speaker 2: a bunch of Ukrainian land that has raw minerals on it.
Speaker 2: Will give those to you, right, And so this went
Speaker 2: back and forth, and eventually Zelensky and Trump's people put
Speaker 2: together like a deal that they were supposed to sign
Speaker 2: earlier this month that was like at actual like bilateral
Speaker 2: agreement on the use of Ukrainian minerals. And essentially what
Speaker 2: it would have done is the deal did call for
Speaker 2: Ukraine to use its mineral resources to repay the United
Speaker 2: States to the tune of about half a trillion dollars,
Speaker 2: but not in a manner like where they were just
Speaker 2: handing us their minerals. Essentially, Ukraine would contribute fifty percent
Speaker 2: of revenues earned from the future monetization of government owned
Speaker 2: mineral resources and other natural resources. But these were critically
Speaker 2: revenues earned from those resources like future modernization, right, so
Speaker 2: new mines, new oil and gas plants not included in
Speaker 2: this were like current reserves, like actively being exploited for profit.
Speaker 2: So kind of the key to this is that, like
Speaker 2: mining is not something that you can turn around on
Speaker 2: a dime. Generally, once you have actually proven you know
Speaker 2: that you have sort of the reserves in an area,
Speaker 2: it takes about twenty years to actually get like mines
Speaker 2: up and running, and you know, this is an extremely
Speaker 2: expensive process. So one of the reasons why Ukraine considered
Speaker 2: this a good deal for them is that we're essentially
Speaker 2: putting a lot of those revenues in the hands of
Speaker 2: the US. But it was revenues from minerals that Ukraine
Speaker 2: was not currently exploiting and that the US would help
Speaker 2: and provide funding to exploit. So it was not just
Speaker 2: paying back the US. It was something that would allow
Speaker 2: the rebuilding of the Ukrainian economy post war. There were
Speaker 2: some issues with this, including the fact that mining is
Speaker 2: an extremely energy intensive task in Ukraine is in the
Speaker 2: middle of an energy crisis at the minute, But among
Speaker 2: other things, it would have brought the US in and
Speaker 2: given them a financial stake and continued peace in the region,
Speaker 2: which was seen as positive. That all blew up at
Speaker 2: a White House meeting a couple of weeks ago, where
Speaker 2: if you remember JD Vance and Trump basically had a
Speaker 2: little like wwees SmackDown with Zelensky. It was a pretty
Speaker 2: ugly meeting, and after that kind of talk of the
Speaker 2: bilateral mineral deal faded significantly. Now what's interesting is that
Speaker 2: just today it's come out that Zelensky and Trump have
Speaker 2: had further conversations and there's a new deal apparently on
Speaker 2: the table, or at least the White House claimed that
Speaker 2: there was a new deal on the table. Both the
Speaker 2: White House and Zelensky's office said that it was a
Speaker 2: very post productive meeting. There's some evidence that Zelenski, after
Speaker 2: that big blow up, has been kind of doing the
Speaker 2: thing you've got to do with Trump, which is like
Speaker 2: massage him and say nice things to him so that
Speaker 2: he'll like you more, and that Trump has gotten kind
Speaker 2: of frustrated with the fact that Russia clearly has not
Speaker 2: been overly motivated to move towards the ceasefire. But then,
Speaker 2: in the middle of this meeting that everyone seems to
Speaker 2: agree went really well, the White House comes out and says,
Speaker 2: and we're working on an agreement where the US will
Speaker 2: control all of Ukraine's nuclear reactors, and Ukraine came out
Speaker 2: and said, no, we're not absolutely we did not say
Speaker 2: that that was a deal. So I don't know what's
Speaker 2: actually going to happen here. Ukraine is a massive, like
Speaker 2: nuclear energy state. In fact, the only European country that
Speaker 2: competes with them or that is like on the same
Speaker 2: level as they are in Europe in terms of nuclear
Speaker 2: industry is France. They've got four nuclear power plants with
Speaker 2: fifteen reactors in total. Now, obviously, like the Zapharizia plant
Speaker 2: is still under Russian control, which is a significant chunk.
Speaker 2: It's like six of the fifteen reactors in the country,
Speaker 2: and Ukraine is in the process of building more. They've
Speaker 2: actively added capacity since the end of the Soviet Union,
Speaker 2: and so one of the promises for sort of future
Speaker 2: Ukrainian economic stability is that they will be able to
Speaker 2: export nuclear energy to the rest of Europe, which is
Speaker 2: also going through an energy crisis. So it's unclear what's
Speaker 2: going to happen. There's definitely evidence again that Zelensky has
Speaker 2: kind of figured out how to massage Trump a little bit.
Speaker 2: There's a quote from an article in The Conversation that
Speaker 2: I found very interesting here While Trump still leans towards
Speaker 2: putin his relationship with Zelensky seems to have improved. The
Speaker 2: Ukrainian president appears to have learned that Trump doesn't have
Speaker 2: a long memory and that flattery goes a long way
Speaker 2: with the US president. Trump meanwhile, is no longer calling
Speaker 2: Zelenski a dictator, and yet there is no mention of
Speaker 2: halting US military aid or intelligence to Ukraine. There's the opposite,
Speaker 2: in fact, is the US has said it will assist
Speaker 2: in finding more patriot missile defense systems after Zelenski mentioned
Speaker 2: they were sorely needed. By giving Trump credit for the
Speaker 2: ceasefire initiative, Zelensky is putting the ball in Russia's court,
Speaker 2: and his apparent receptiveness to Trump's idea about the US
Speaker 2: taking over Ukraine's nuclear power plants will appeal to Trump's
Speaker 2: transactional instincts in addition to offering Trump business deals. And
Speaker 2: I don't fully know what the conversation is saying here
Speaker 2: because Ukraine or Zelenski's office has stated like we're not
Speaker 2: considering handing the US control. I think this may be
Speaker 2: something like what happened with the energy deal, where essentially
Speaker 2: what they talked about was the US having a financial
Speaker 2: interest in the rebuilding an expansion of the Ukrainian nuclear
Speaker 2: power grid, which would be an extension of existing programs
Speaker 2: because Ukraine's nuclear power grid is already very reliant on
Speaker 2: a US nuclear energy company, Westinghouse, that provides both the
Speaker 2: raw fuel for nuclear reactors to Ukraine and also provides
Speaker 2: a lot of actual technology for different kind of system
Speaker 2: in the reactors. So I kind of think that what's
Speaker 2: happening here is that basically it was floated like, well,
Speaker 2: we can extend and expand this deal, so the US
Speaker 2: will have a financial interest in this potentially very large
Speaker 2: Ukrainian industry, and then Trump and his people kind of
Speaker 2: took that and said to everyone else, Yeah, the US
Speaker 2: is going to be in charge of Ukraine's nuclear power.
Speaker 2: That's my best guess for what happened here.
Speaker 7: It really seems like we're relearning one of the last
Speaker 7: lessons from the administration, which is, if you can be
Speaker 7: the last person in the room with Trump.
Speaker 3: You can put what he does.
Speaker 7: Hey, yeah, I.
Speaker 3: Mia, do you want to do a tariff talk? Wait?
Speaker 2: Wait, did you say tariffs, Garrison or did you say.
Speaker 6: Jazz rock jazz bot?
Speaker 3: Sorry, locking jazz lock jaz.
Speaker 2: Ah, God feels good every time. Okay, miya, sorry, you
Speaker 2: can talk about the actual news now.
Speaker 1: Let's do this.
Speaker 7: So the news we have today is that effectively every
Speaker 7: single thing I have talked about on tariff talk before
Speaker 7: this is just the fucking prelude, you know. And though
Speaker 7: those have been very very extreme tariffs, but these are
Speaker 7: effectively going to be looked back on as the opening
Speaker 7: series of skirmishes and sort of probing defenses. On April seconds,
Speaker 7: Trump is going to crash the entire world economy. He
Speaker 7: is calling this Liberation Day. On April second, he is
Speaker 7: planning to impose reciprocal tariffs on every single country on Earth.
Speaker 2: Finally, you know what, I'm completely on board. As long
Speaker 2: as we're finally sticking it to those snotty fucks in Oman,
Speaker 2: you know, then everything's good. It's about goddamn time.
Speaker 7: Now I'm gonna take a fucking victory lap here because
Speaker 7: I have been talking about this for a very very
Speaker 7: long time.
Speaker 3: I talked about this last year. I talked about this
Speaker 3: the beginning of last year, talked about this the end
Speaker 3: of last year.
Speaker 7: The entire media seems to have short of forgotten about
Speaker 7: this until they all suddenly remembered this week that Trump
Speaker 7: had promised to do reciprocal tariffs. So what reciprocal tariffs
Speaker 7: are in theory is if there's a tariff on something
Speaker 7: and I from another country, the US matches it. So
Speaker 7: the way the Trump administration thinks about tariffs is deeply weird.
Speaker 7: So they're including things like value added taxes on goods
Speaker 7: in countries.
Speaker 3: Wow, which is like a sales yeah, packs in the US.
Speaker 7: Yeah yeah, But also like subsidies and also and this
Speaker 7: is the part that has gotten less things, but quote
Speaker 7: unquote currency manipulation. Now, how the fuck do you do
Speaker 7: you calculate that for literally every single country on Earth?
Speaker 7: Who knows business insider has some reporting on this where
Speaker 7: where they talk to some insiders and okay, so literally
Speaker 7: there are not enough people working on tariffs to like
Speaker 7: calculate out individual tariff races for every single country on Earth.
Speaker 7: It looks like the plan right now, when this is
Speaker 7: also just to change, because again, this is the Trump administration,
Speaker 7: and who the fuck knows what they're gonna be saying
Speaker 7: or doing in two weeks. But what we know right
Speaker 7: now is it looks like they're going to separate every
Speaker 7: country on Earth into three tiers of tariffs. So it's
Speaker 7: going to be like a low tier, a mid tier,
Speaker 7: and a high tier. And it's it's unclear exactly what
Speaker 7: levels they're going to be. These are going to be
Speaker 7: on top of all of the additional tariffs that they've
Speaker 7: already imposed. So say, for example, trying to gets put
Speaker 7: into high tier one, they put like a fifty percent
Speaker 7: tariff on it. That means a terrifra. It's going to
Speaker 7: be seventy percent because there's already twenty percent tariffs on
Speaker 7: their business. Insider seem to think twenty percent is like
Speaker 7: the low one. I don't know about that. I think
Speaker 7: they're going to be pretty high.
Speaker 3: We have no idea.
Speaker 7: And again, so what's happening here is Trump is declaring
Speaker 7: this Liberation Day because he has convinced himself. I think
Speaker 7: I finally understand what's going on in his brain, which
Speaker 7: is that he has convinced himself that like, if you
Speaker 7: have a trade deficit with a country, that means the
Speaker 7: country's robbing you.
Speaker 3: Right, yes, yes, again.
Speaker 2: Trump's firm, lifelong belief is that if you are selling something,
Speaker 2: you've won, and if you're buying something, you have lost.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Now, this is not how international trade works at
Speaker 7: all for the US. Like the entire US empire absolutely
Speaker 7: fuier is based on outsourcing a bunch of political violence
Speaker 7: to other countries so you can buy goods at cheap rates, right,
Speaker 7: Like that's that's that's, that's what the empire is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we love buying things. It's the entire basis of
Speaker 2: our civilization.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, The reason Jeffrey Bezos was that the inaugration is
Speaker 3: because we like to be buying.
Speaker 7: Yes, yeah, and so is something I mentioned, you know,
Speaker 7: back back when I was talking about this in the
Speaker 7: tariff episode right after the election, is that the thing
Speaker 7: about reciprocal tariffs, right, is that it means that if
Speaker 7: if anyone attempts to to fight a trade war with
Speaker 7: the US, so another country imposes twenty percent tariffs, the
Speaker 7: US will also impost twenty percent terriffs. And this just
Speaker 7: spials out of control into a version of a trade
Speaker 7: war so unhinged, like none of us have ever seen
Speaker 7: anything like it in our lifetimes.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, brother, yeah, that's coming.
Speaker 7: We have We now have April second as the day
Speaker 7: everything explodes. I also want to want up put Like
Speaker 7: another note here, the hope has always been from a
Speaker 7: lot of countries and a lot of the financial markets
Speaker 7: and a bunch of companies that these terrorifts are going
Speaker 7: to have more exemptions, because there were some exemptions on
Speaker 7: stuff in the initial tariffs on Mexico and Canada.
Speaker 2: Well, and he kept going back and forth.
Speaker 7: Right, yeah, but now we're getting into terroifts with which
Speaker 7: you have no exceptions. The steel and aluminum tariffs have
Speaker 7: had no exemptions at all.
Speaker 3: What we've been hearing.
Speaker 7: So one of the things I've been noting is that
Speaker 7: Canada and EU have been basically mobilizing in the trade
Speaker 7: war and imposing reciprocal terroists in the US. China has two,
Speaker 7: Mexico has not. Apparently Mexico still thinks that they can
Speaker 7: negotiate to be in like the lowest tier of tariffs,
Speaker 7: which won't completely destroy their economy. Fuck if I know
Speaker 7: why they think that, but who knows. Yeah, but that's
Speaker 7: the fact. That's effectively the tariff news we have right now.
Speaker 7: We have again April second, quote unquote Liberation Day, the
Speaker 7: day that this all goes into a fact. I bet
Speaker 7: they wanted to do April first and realize that they couldn't.
Speaker 3: No, Yeah, I didn't think that. No Trump.
Speaker 8: Trump announced this during his Joint Congressional address, and he
Speaker 8: openly said that he originally wanted to do it on
Speaker 8: April first, at the start of the month, but decided
Speaker 8: not to because he is too superstitious as a person. So, yes,
Speaker 8: originally they were going to be on April first, and
Speaker 8: then they pushed him back to April second because they
Speaker 8: didn't want it to be on April Foul's day.
Speaker 3: That's good. That's a good.
Speaker 8: So that's a great, great extra insight into the mind
Speaker 8: of the US God King.
Speaker 1: Cool.
Speaker 8: Anyway, let's go on ad break and then come back
Speaker 8: to discuss all of the other bad things that are
Speaker 8: happening in the country.
Speaker 3: Okay, we're back.
Speaker 8: The first thing I want to kind of open to
Speaker 8: a group discussion on is that On Tuesday, March eighteenth,
Speaker 8: the federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking Trump's ban
Speaker 8: on trans people serving in the military, ruling that the
Speaker 8: blanket ban likely violates constitutional rights of Steven Miller responded
Speaker 8: to the ruling by writing, District court judges have now
Speaker 8: decided that they are in command of the armed forces?
Speaker 3: Is there no end to this madness?
Speaker 6: God?
Speaker 3: Fuck.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 8: I know this is a topic that like we've discussed
Speaker 8: a lot, as you know, we're not all big US
Speaker 8: military defenders, no.
Speaker 2: But it's mostly done bad stuff in my lifetime.
Speaker 8: But we still take like, almost like an ontological issue
Speaker 8: with this band because it essentially creates just a secondary
Speaker 8: class of citizen with fundamentally different rights from the rest
Speaker 8: of everyone else, and that is never a good thing.
Speaker 2: It's like, so right now, one of the semi positive
Speaker 2: news stories is that Trump's ATF is going to be
Speaker 2: for the first time restoring people's Second Amendment rights who
Speaker 2: had them taken away because they were involuntarily institutionalized. And
Speaker 2: I've seen a lot of liberals being like, oh, they're
Speaker 2: just gonna let more crazy people have guns. This is bad,
Speaker 2: And like, I have to disagree whether or not you
Speaker 2: like it. The Second Amendment is a fundamental right under
Speaker 2: the Constitution, and it's bad to say that this class
Speaker 2: of people forever lose a fundamental right because they're involuntarily institutionalized.
Speaker 3: That's bad.
Speaker 2: And likewise, even if you hate the US military's role
Speaker 2: in US imperialism, which fine enough, the right to serve
Speaker 2: in an integrated military has been a major underpinning of
Speaker 2: most of the civil rights movements, like a foundational depending
Speaker 2: of most civil rights movements in this country's history, going
Speaker 2: back to the Civil War, you know, black civil rights,
Speaker 2: including LGBTQ rights and including women's rights. Right, It's like
Speaker 2: it is significant. And so the fact that the GOP
Speaker 2: is attempting to peel this back and essentially reverse integration
Speaker 2: of the military is bad for two reasons. One, it represents,
Speaker 2: as you've said, creating separate classes of people and peeling
Speaker 2: fundamental what are considered under the law in this country,
Speaker 2: fundamental rights away from groups of people. And it's also
Speaker 2: just dangerous for them to remake the military into an
Speaker 2: all white organization, right, like all white male organization. There's
Speaker 2: a reason why that's also.
Speaker 3: Dangerous to you.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, I think people should care about this, even
Speaker 2: if they're you know, leftists.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And like, especially in this country, the military represents
Speaker 3: one of the few social mobility tools that exist.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: People don't just join the military because they country, to
Speaker 3: what you might have seen on Twitter dot com, they
Speaker 3: want to go to Middle East and kill people. Sometimes
Speaker 3: they do it because they want to get a chance
Speaker 3: to go to education. Sometimes they want to do it
Speaker 3: so they get a chance to have healthcare.
Speaker 6: Yep.
Speaker 3: And like trans people serve at a higher rate, then
Speaker 3: it says people may not be the case for very
Speaker 3: much longer. By it like that has been the case.
Speaker 3: And they have rights to use however they want. They
Speaker 3: don't just have rights to use how you or I
Speaker 3: or anyone else would like them to use well, And.
Speaker 2: That's also a broad truth. For the US military, members
Speaker 2: of marginalized groups have always served at a higher rate
Speaker 2: than basically anyone else. This includes like Native Americans serve
Speaker 2: at a higher proportion of like their population within the
Speaker 2: country than most other groups, in part because traditionally, serving
Speaker 2: in the military was a way in which to gain
Speaker 2: acceptance and entrance into American society.
Speaker 8: It's also just like another world, like you can field
Speaker 8: in some ways, like insulated from like yes, the hoarders
Speaker 8: you might experience in like regular suburban life oddly enough, Yeah,
Speaker 8: to weigh.
Speaker 3: Out of the isolation that so many people experience in
Speaker 3: the world.
Speaker 7: And like, is it extremely bad that the way that
Speaker 7: you enter your into American society is by being a
Speaker 7: part of the imperial war machine?
Speaker 3: Yes? Yes, but also the war machine is going to
Speaker 3: be there whether you are in it or not. Yeah.
Speaker 7: And the actual fundamental important thing here is again what
Speaker 7: we've been saying is that like the fundamental basis of
Speaker 7: liberal democracy, going back to the American Revolution, going back
Speaker 7: to the French Revolution, going back to like the original
Speaker 7: liberal revolutions, the fundamental principle of is that everyone is
Speaker 7: equal before the law, and the moment that ceases to
Speaker 7: be true, and it has not been true in this
Speaker 7: country ever, but you know, we're seeing increasing numbers of
Speaker 7: people who are not considered equal before the law. We
Speaker 7: just spent this entire fucking like first part of this
Speaker 7: episode talking about what happens when people are considered to
Speaker 7: have no protections under the law, which at the state
Speaker 7: can just fucking black bag you and send you to
Speaker 7: a goolag. Yeah, Like that is bad. That's what's that
Speaker 7: fundamentally at stake here, not like whether you think the
Speaker 7: army is good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And imagine for those people, like when they people
Speaker 3: could have served nineteen years, right, they could have been
Speaker 3: just about to get their twenty years and get their
Speaker 3: retirement and will now not get that, Like they they
Speaker 3: signed up expecting a thing, right, Like there was a
Speaker 3: quid pro quote there that they would give twenty years
Speaker 3: of their life and possibly a lot of their health
Speaker 3: to the United States government in in return, they will
Speaker 3: get health care and a pentrum for the rest of
Speaker 3: their lives. And people are now going to lose that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 8: In some related news, the VA just announced that quote
Speaker 8: effective immediately, the VA will not to offer cross sex
Speaker 8: hormone therapy to veterans who have a current diagnosis or
Speaker 8: history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with gender dysphoria unless
Speaker 8: such veterans are already receiving such care from the VA,
Speaker 8: or such veterans we're receiving such care from the military
Speaker 8: as a part of and upon their separation from from
Speaker 8: the military service, and are eligible for VA healthcare. So
Speaker 8: basically they will not be emitting like new patients to
Speaker 8: receive gender affirming health care.
Speaker 3: Well, unless they're sist gender it seems like oh yes, correct, yes,
Speaker 3: if it's just basically assists men can still receive gender
Speaker 3: affirming hormones.
Speaker 8: Sure, be Like I kind of get annoyed when people
Speaker 8: do that, like comparison and is like that's never like
Speaker 8: we're falling into like this art for trap of like
Speaker 8: we're actually using words to mean what they mean, and
Speaker 8: like they're not using words like that, you know, like
Speaker 8: whenever people like laugh about haha, they banned pronouns at school.
Speaker 8: Now now you can't say the word I and you're
Speaker 8: like no, like come out like what like that's not
Speaker 8: what they mean, Like you have to understand like the
Speaker 8: dog whistles that they're using.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I found it interesting though that they seemingly like
Speaker 3: you tried to even get around like that like linguistic
Speaker 3: thing in the statement sure.
Speaker 8: I mean like it depends what you mean by gender dysphoria, right,
Speaker 8: Like you could theoretically you could have gender ysphoria because
Speaker 8: your assists male and you want to become more masculine, right,
Speaker 8: Like all of these diagnoses have like a very fuzzy
Speaker 8: ontological underpinning. Right, these are just categories that we're projecting. Yes,
Speaker 8: but this is you know, probably not great. It's probably
Speaker 8: isn't a good thing. Like, for instance, if you already
Speaker 8: have VIA healthcare, you're not in the military anymore, and
Speaker 8: now you decide that you would like to receive gender
Speaker 8: affirming healthcare, now you can't at least through the VA.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 3: So as a as a related thing, let's see I.
Speaker 8: Think we should kind of close with or like bookend
Speaker 8: our discussion on like like the immigration stuff and the
Speaker 8: black baggings and deportations which have been happening. A German
Speaker 8: immigrant named Fabian Schmidt who's lived in the States.
Speaker 2: With the green courge German named Beautifl.
Speaker 8: Since two thousand and eight, so like he's lived here
Speaker 8: quite a while. He immigrated with his mom. He was
Speaker 8: detained and tortured at the Boston Logan Airport upon returning
Speaker 8: from a visit to Europe. The man's mother says that
Speaker 8: he was quote unquote violently interrogated at the Logan airport
Speaker 8: for hours and was stripped naked, put in a cold
Speaker 8: shower by two officials, and pushed back into an interrogation chair.
Speaker 10: I'm going to.
Speaker 3: Quote from w GBH quote.
Speaker 1: She said.
Speaker 8: Schmid told her immigration agents pressured him to give up
Speaker 8: his green card. She said he was placed on a
Speaker 8: mat in a bright room with other people at the
Speaker 8: airport with little food or water, suffered sleep deprivation, and
Speaker 8: was denied access to his medication for anxiety and depression.
Speaker 8: He hardly got anything to drink, and then he wasn't
Speaker 8: feeling very well and he collapsed said a senior, which
Speaker 8: is his mom. He was transported by ambulance to mass
Speaker 8: General Hospital. He didn't know it at the time, but
Speaker 8: he also had the flu unquote. Now Schmid has since
Speaker 8: been transferred to multiple ice facilities. He had a misdemeanor
Speaker 8: charge for marijuana possession in California back in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 8: but that charge was dismissed the following year due to
Speaker 8: changes in state law. But I think that this incident
Speaker 8: may have flagged Schmidt on the customs and border protections
Speaker 8: like database and Hillary Beckham, CBP's Assistant Commissioner for Public Affairs,
Speaker 8: give a short statement reading quote, when an individual is
Speaker 8: found with drug related charges and tries to re enter
Speaker 8: the country, officers will take proper action unquote. But essentially
Speaker 8: they like tortured, black bagged this person who's had a
Speaker 8: green card for like almost two decades for a dismissed
Speaker 8: marijuana charge like ten years ago. This is like, you know,
Speaker 8: like a very white man like Fabian Schmidt, like this
Speaker 8: is this is super freaky stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we should say that a lot of that stuff
Speaker 3: is not particularly unusual and nice attention lights being totally
Speaker 3: time not being given bettying, but like being shoved into
Speaker 3: a cold.
Speaker 8: Chowerities that was at the airport, they say, like like
Speaker 8: being being interrogated at the airport.
Speaker 3: This is a new one, and like being forced to.
Speaker 8: Like forcibly, like give up your green card during this
Speaker 8: like interrogation session at that very same airport. Like I
Speaker 8: think just maybe like a day or so later. A
Speaker 8: Lebanese doctor and professor at Brown University, Russia, Alweya, was
Speaker 8: deported this weekend after traveling to Beirut to visit family
Speaker 8: and attend the public funeral of Hassan Nashraala. Upon a
Speaker 8: return to the United States, she was detained at the
Speaker 8: Boston Airport, had her H one B visa revoked, and
Speaker 8: was deported on a plane to France on Friday, March fourteenth,
Speaker 8: before she could attend her in person hearing that following Monday.
Speaker 8: According to court documents, her deportation was prompted by deleted
Speaker 8: pictures on her phone of like Shia Muslim figures like
Speaker 8: Neshraala and the Ayatola, another very very frightening incident. In
Speaker 8: those documents, it's unclear how Customs and Border Protection was
Speaker 8: viewing deleted photos on her phone or like like like
Speaker 8: like open of her phone, right, because like, if you
Speaker 8: recently deleted a photo, it is still contained in your
Speaker 8: recently deleted folder, assuming you have like an iPhone or equivalent.
Speaker 8: But it's unknown how they like got into her phone,
Speaker 8: if she like let them look through it, or if
Speaker 8: they used one of like a many.
Speaker 3: Like phone breakaway see or whatever.
Speaker 8: Yeah, but I think it is interesting that this is
Speaker 8: at the same airport to you know, slightly related incidents.
Speaker 3: But yeah, we've seen that a lot with like in
Speaker 3: the similar cases people crossing the land border's Sandy Sidro
Speaker 3: both I think a Canadian and German citizen were both detained,
Speaker 3: which is said San Diego County. If it's not familiar,
Speaker 3: it seems like there's some kind of policy at certain
Speaker 3: border crossings or maybe like the person in chides, Yeah,
Speaker 3: I was saying, do this, you know, detain people at
Speaker 3: there's anything on their record at all.
Speaker 7: Well so so, and there's another case of this that's
Speaker 7: similar where a French researcher who to best of my
Speaker 7: knowledge is unnamed so far, I was randomly pulled aside
Speaker 7: for a stop at George Bush International Airport in Houston,
Speaker 7: which is sort of fitting for all of this George
Speaker 7: Bush has got to be fucking creaming his pants thinking
Speaker 7: about all this.
Speaker 3: Black bag and shit.
Speaker 7: But yeah, I was randomly pulled over and they found
Speaker 7: anti Trump texts on his phone and immediately deported him.
Speaker 7: This is a guy who was visiting the US, like
Speaker 7: I think, to go to a conference, and the border
Speaker 7: patrol is arguing that anti Trump texts are considered terrorism,
Speaker 7: which is great, or the text that they found are
Speaker 7: like could be like the anti Trump ness of it
Speaker 7: can be considered terroristic, so that's bad. There was yet
Speaker 7: another case, which is a slightly different one, which is
Speaker 7: Buttercon Surrey, who is a postoc at Georgetown who was
Speaker 7: detained and sent to an immigration facility, who's here teaching.
Speaker 7: He's a postdoc at Georgetown on a student visa who
Speaker 7: has been sent to an immigration facility based on basically
Speaker 7: a right wing panic about his wife, his wife's father
Speaker 7: being Hamas and because of this, he's been black bagged
Speaker 7: in a way very similar to Mak mckhalil. Yeah, now
Speaker 7: Georgetown is backing him on this, but this is you
Speaker 7: know this, this this is another one of these fucking
Speaker 7: blackpackings that they're just doing now with someone who is
Speaker 7: here on a student visa who has committed no crime,
Speaker 7: who Georgetown was like, has committed no crime. And again
Speaker 7: also if even if you've committed a crime, this is
Speaker 7: fucking horseship. But yeah, all of these things are just
Speaker 7: continuing to ramp up, and they're getting boulder and boulder.
Speaker 3: Thanks, Robert.
Speaker 8: Do you want to do you want to read a
Speaker 8: select paragraph or two from a from Khalil's first like
Speaker 8: public statement.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so he put out a letter a couple of
Speaker 2: days before we recorded this, and you should really read
Speaker 2: the whole thing if you just google Mahmood Khalil letter.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think the exact title is my name
Speaker 2: is Mahmood Khalil and I am a political prisoner, which
Speaker 2: is the first sentence of the letter. But I want
Speaker 2: to read this little bit of him talking about his
Speaker 2: arrest on March eighth, I was taken by DHS agents
Speaker 2: who refused to provide a warrant and accosted my wife
Speaker 2: and me as we returned from dinner. By now, the
Speaker 2: footage of that night has been made public. Before I
Speaker 2: knew it was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into
Speaker 2: an unmarked car. At that moment, My only concern was
Speaker 2: for Newer's safety. I had no idea if she would
Speaker 2: be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest
Speaker 2: her for not leaving my side. DHS would not tell
Speaker 2: me anything for hours. I did not know the cause
Speaker 2: of my arrest or if I was facing immediate deportation.
Speaker 2: At twenty six Federal Plaza, I slept on the cold
Speaker 2: floor in the early morning hours. Agents transported me to
Speaker 2: another facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, I slept on
Speaker 2: the ground and was refused a blanket despite my request.
Speaker 2: My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right
Speaker 2: to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine
Speaker 2: and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed
Speaker 2: in full force Monday night with January ceasefire. Now broken,
Speaker 2: parents in Gaza are once again cradling two small shrouds,
Speaker 2: and families are forced to waste starvation and displacement against bombs.
Speaker 2: It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle
Speaker 2: for their complete freedom. And again I really recommend reading
Speaker 2: the whole thing. It's it's very good, but yeah.
Speaker 8: I get so particularly upset that Trump's admin uses like this,
Speaker 8: like vague anti semitism justification for for for some of
Speaker 8: these actions, at least because the head of Trump's anti
Speaker 8: Semitism task force just last week retweeted Patrick Casey, who
Speaker 8: is from the American Identity Movement, a leading alt right
Speaker 8: figure who was at Charlottesville, to quote Shane Burley. This
Speaker 8: tweet that was reposted by the head of this anti
Speaker 8: semitism task force claimed that quote, Trump has the ability
Speaker 8: to revoke someone's Jew card.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's absolutely horrible.
Speaker 8: Are a serious here, It's unbelievable, unbelievable amounts of anti
Speaker 8: semitism spread by the person who leads the federal task
Speaker 8: force to combat anti Semitism.
Speaker 3: Great.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And going going back to Columbia for a second.
Speaker 7: One of the other things that has been happening is
Speaker 7: that Trump threatened Columbia with the loss of four hundred
Speaker 7: million dollars in government contracts unless they give in to
Speaker 7: a bunch of Trump's demands. So Trump wants them to
Speaker 7: ban masks on campuses, allow campus cops to do more
Speaker 7: violence against student protesters, and expel like protesters who occupy buildings.
Speaker 7: The president is supposed to get control of all discipline
Speaker 7: and can expel and suspend students, and they want to
Speaker 7: crack down student groups. They want and this is also
Speaker 7: a tie into the other thing. They want the IHR
Speaker 7: definition of antisemitism and like specifically, the Trump's like letter
Speaker 7: to them specifically says like classifying anti Zionism as antisemitism.
Speaker 7: And they want to put the Middle East, South Asian
Speaker 7: and African studies departments in academic receivership, which means stripping
Speaker 7: away power from the faculty and giving it to someone
Speaker 7: outside the Yeah, Columbia is about to give into these demands.
Speaker 7: It seems like they want to try to find another
Speaker 7: word other than academic receivership, but they're going to fucking
Speaker 7: do it. So and Trump have the legal authority to
Speaker 7: do this, No, obviously not. But you know, does he
Speaker 7: have the moral authority to do this? No obviously not,
Speaker 7: like this guy is, but.
Speaker 2: None of those are important. He as guys with guns.
Speaker 2: That's what it always comes down to. And the any
Speaker 2: one who forgets that is only hurting themselves.
Speaker 7: Like yeah, and so he's also doing this thing of
Speaker 7: like attempting basically to dismantle a bunch of the higher
Speaker 7: education institutions in this country unless they become just pure
Speaker 7: right wing sort of laboratories. And another example of this
Speaker 7: is as the news stories about Columbia, we're coming out
Speaker 7: like Columbia trying to take the deal.
Speaker 3: We're coming out.
Speaker 7: The University of Pennsylvania is good about to lose one
Speaker 7: hundred and seventy five million dollars of funding for allowing
Speaker 7: Leah Thomas, a trans swimmer, to swim for their college.
Speaker 7: So this is just going to be a giant sort
Speaker 7: of battering ram that Trump is going to use to
Speaker 7: just basically obliterate the education system and impose whatever unhinged
Speaker 7: right wing thing that he wants to impose.
Speaker 8: And we will talk more about his efforts to destroy
Speaker 8: the education system next week on our next episode of ED,
Speaker 8: as says he is continuing to prep an executive order
Speaker 8: to abolish the Department of Education. And there's plenty of
Speaker 8: other news, including the federal judge confrontations, that we will
Speaker 8: also report on next week. But before we leave today,
Speaker 8: Mia has a brief note on the bird flu.
Speaker 6: With Flitch.
Speaker 8: I'm sure will be fine. Frankly, I'm still eating eggs,
Speaker 8: but uh Mia.
Speaker 7: Yes, so as people there with the boyd flu. So
Speaker 7: the thing the thing about chickens is that they're dying
Speaker 7: from bird flu right now. This has killed an enormous
Speaker 7: number of chickens. This is part of why egg prices
Speaker 7: are so high. Now, this is a problem that a
Speaker 7: lot of countries have dealt with. China has dealt with
Speaker 7: this by just fucking vaccinating their chickens. The Biden administration
Speaker 7: refused to vaccinate chickens because it would cost money and
Speaker 7: because it might make it harder for us to export
Speaker 7: their chickens.
Speaker 3: So that was bad.
Speaker 7: RFK Junior literally just wants to let the bird flu
Speaker 7: rip and kill all the birds and thinks that the
Speaker 7: healthy birds will survive. And those healthy birds, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: He thinks immunity.
Speaker 7: He has a heard immediity guy for COVID because he's
Speaker 7: a human eugenesis he's also a chicken eu genesist. Now,
Speaker 7: I'm specifically doing this because I read multiple viral just
Speaker 7: reading about this or writing about this. I talked to virologists,
Speaker 7: and the virologists all basically said, if you were trying
Speaker 7: to design a way to make the bird flu like
Speaker 7: move like a mutate in such a way that it
Speaker 7: moves from birds to humans, this is what you would do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, great, so and again cool, the death rate of
Speaker 2: this thing is in a completely different category from fucking COVID.
Speaker 2: It makes COVID look like having a mild case of allergies,
Speaker 2: like staggeringly lethal and like it cannot overstate how disastrous
Speaker 2: this would be.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and COVID code more than a million Americans, like
Speaker 3: fifteen case people have memory?
Speaker 2: Hold that yeah, right now, current rates when it has
Speaker 2: reached humans as about a fifty percent fatality rate. They
Speaker 2: thought initially that they were missing a lot of cases
Speaker 2: and that it was much lower, but like the current
Speaker 2: research points to the suggests that that is not the case,
Speaker 2: that it is actually somewhere in that range of lethality.
Speaker 8: Yes, I'm still eating my chicken tartar. I don't know
Speaker 8: why everyone's so worried about it.
Speaker 3: And again, we.
Speaker 2: Don't know that like the version that actually is able
Speaker 2: to jump from human to human after jumping from bird
Speaker 2: to human would be that lethal because that doesn't exist
Speaker 2: quite yet.
Speaker 3: Probably, Yeah, but this is how we find out, but
Speaker 3: we really don't want to find out.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I look, if you don't want to find out,
Speaker 7: we have to find a way to get our k
Speaker 7: junior out of that fucking office.
Speaker 2: Like again, I think if we we really need to
Speaker 2: have a lot of different farmers set up photo ops
Speaker 2: with him where he is just covered in birds. We
Speaker 2: need to have that man in constant physical contact with chicken.
Speaker 2: It would do it and the problem will eventually solve it.
Speaker 2: We could convince him to eat raw chicken. We could
Speaker 2: definitely do it. Sure, yes, absolutely, raw would eat them,
Speaker 2: cuddle them, sleep with them at night, just kind of
Speaker 2: stand on a pile of their corpses.
Speaker 3: All right, all right, I'm if you are a chicken,
Speaker 3: or you know a chicken, or you have anything else
Speaker 3: you would like to share with us, you can do
Speaker 3: so well, not anything else. You should be related to
Speaker 3: the news and things that we can report on. You
Speaker 3: can send it to cool Zone tips at proton dot
Speaker 3: me and that's only encrypted if you also use encryption
Speaker 3: to send the message then to end. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 3: proton manaddress. That means, yeah, you have to send from
Speaker 3: encrypted to encrypted. It still doesn't mean it's it's perfectly safe.
Speaker 3: It just means it's encrypted. So send what do you
Speaker 3: think you can send over an email? That is that way?
Speaker 6: We reported the news. 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.
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