Speaker 1: 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. Welcome back to It
Speaker 2: Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here, which
Speaker 2: is normally focused on the United States because that's where
Speaker 2: we all live. However, we do like to cover the
Speaker 2: rest of the world and the ongoing struggle against the
Speaker 2: global far right movement. And today we're going to talk
Speaker 2: about a place that we don't cover often on this show, Ireland.
Speaker 2: And it's not because Ireland doesn't have a problem with
Speaker 2: the far right, because as our guest today is going
Speaker 2: to talk to us about it, most certainly does. And
Speaker 2: so I would like to welcome to the program a
Speaker 2: great guy, Padre O'Rourke, author of Burned Them Out, A
Speaker 2: History of Fascism and the far Right in Ireland. Thank
Speaker 2: you so much for being on the show.
Speaker 3: No problem, delice to be here, Thanks very much, Robert.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, there's this attitude, and I think, as
Speaker 2: you noted in some note use of the long, there's
Speaker 2: a degree to which it's true that Ireland has some
Speaker 2: resistance to the far right that has led to maybe
Speaker 2: it growing slower or taking a little longer to get
Speaker 2: off the ground to the same extent that it has
Speaker 2: in the UK or the US as a result of
Speaker 2: kind of the history of Irish republicanism. That that's not
Speaker 2: comprehensively true across the island, and that that's you know,
Speaker 2: certainly has not stopped it from having some pretty significant problems,
Speaker 2: which we're going to talk about today.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Sadly, as long as fascism has existed since Mussolini's
Speaker 3: March on Rome and his political rise, we have had
Speaker 3: fascist groups here of one sort or another. Yeah, We've
Speaker 3: had fascist groups in Ireland that were pro British and politics,
Speaker 3: fascist groups in Ireland that were pro Irish or Irish independence.
Speaker 3: You know, obviously we were neutral during World War Two.
Speaker 3: We weren't occupied by Nazi Germany or anything like that.
Speaker 3: We did have one very big fascist group here in
Speaker 3: the nineteen thirties, the Blue Shirts, who were extremely violent
Speaker 3: and got sixty eight members of Parliament elected. They were
Speaker 3: the main political opposition. They were kind of the largest
Speaker 3: non governing fascist organization in the world per capita. But
Speaker 3: as you said, Irish republicanism has kind of inoculated us
Speaker 3: against a lot of the far right stuff we'd have
Speaker 3: seen in Britain and Germany and France in the nineties because,
Speaker 3: you know, while the conflict was going on in the
Speaker 3: North of Ireland. Basically, if you were an angry young
Speaker 3: man with very strong patriotic feelings who was given towards
Speaker 3: political violence, he would probably end up in the provisional IRA.
Speaker 3: And their politics were very left wing and internationalist. I
Speaker 3: mean I remember going into their political wing Shinfein's bookshop
Speaker 3: in Dublin in the nineteen nineties and it was all
Speaker 3: pictures of you know, yes Er Arafat, and it was
Speaker 3: pictures of Nelson Mandela and like the Zapatis stays, and
Speaker 3: you know, it was very much about Irish independence being
Speaker 3: an anti colonial struggle. You do, of course get like
Speaker 3: on the opposite side of that, on kind of the
Speaker 3: loyalist pro British side in the North. You did get
Speaker 3: as kind of reaction to that, pro British paramilitaries, the
Speaker 3: Ulster Volunteer Force, the UDA, Ulster Defense Association, the Ulster
Speaker 3: Volunteer Force, the UVF. They would have linked up with
Speaker 3: neo Nazi groups like Combat eighteen in England to get guns,
Speaker 3: to get finances, to get their hands on explosives and
Speaker 3: things which were easier to get in England than in
Speaker 3: the North of Ireland. But really we never had a
Speaker 3: party here, either in the North or in the South
Speaker 3: that was as successful as groups like the Front National
Speaker 3: in France or the British National Party in England. But
Speaker 3: sadly in recent years, certainly in the last ten years,
Speaker 3: the far right are kind of back. They're alive and kicking,
Speaker 3: and they're taken to the streets.
Speaker 2: And so what do you credit that? I mean, it
Speaker 2: seems like there's a mix of things. First off, you
Speaker 2: suddenly do have people immigrating into Ireland from elsewhere in
Speaker 2: the world in significant numbers for you know, the first
Speaker 2: time in quite a while. And then on the other head,
Speaker 2: it sounds like there's also the kind of as we
Speaker 2: see everywhere in the world, the conscious exporting of far
Speaker 2: right figures and ideas into the country.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, Ireland's greatest export was always people, and you know,
Speaker 3: a fewge Irish American communities in you know, Chicago, New York,
Speaker 3: you know, all over Irish people in Australia and Canada
Speaker 3: and England, all over the continent. So in the early
Speaker 3: you know, twenty tens, we started, like there had always
Speaker 3: been a trickle of migration and people coming back and forward,
Speaker 3: like we had some you know, Vietnamese refugees here, we
Speaker 3: had you know, historically we had Russian Jews coming here
Speaker 3: and so on escaping programs in Zaras, Russia. But really
Speaker 3: the first time that we had very large numbers of
Speaker 3: people coming was in the tw anti teens, and it
Speaker 3: was things like the Mediterranean migrant crisis, it was people
Speaker 3: fleeing climate change in Africa, the Syrian civil War, Teleiban
Speaker 3: in Afghanistan, and more recently, of course Putant's invasion of Ukraine.
Speaker 3: And the far right have always been these tiny little
Speaker 3: fringe parties and figures. It was a very active anti
Speaker 3: fascist group here called Anti Fascist Action Ireland. And anytime
Speaker 3: these groups tried to organize or take to the streets,
Speaker 3: they were challenged and they were run off but really
Speaker 3: what brought them all together Ireland's kind of attempt to
Speaker 3: unite the right was the COVID nineteen pandemic because we
Speaker 3: had one of the strictest COVID lockdowns in Europe. You're
Speaker 3: talking about. Originally you weren't allowed to travel more than
Speaker 3: two kilometers from your home. That's one of the quarter
Speaker 3: miles for you Americans. And basically you could go to
Speaker 3: the store, but other than that, you couldn't, you know,
Speaker 3: you couldn't travel very far. And of course everyone was
Speaker 3: locked at home with their with their internet and started
Speaker 3: going down the rabbit hole. And what we saw was
Speaker 3: the anti vaxer COVID conspiracy movement took to the streets
Speaker 3: in Ireland very quickly, and that brought together all of
Speaker 3: the disparate tiny far right and neo fascist factions. The
Speaker 3: closet neo Nazis, the anti vaxers, the fundamentalist Catholics like
Speaker 3: the Society of Saint Pias, the tenth, the sovereign citizen types,
Speaker 3: you know, the people who were on about five G
Speaker 3: conspiracies and chemtrails, all got onto the streets, all got
Speaker 3: active on the Irish left and the anti fascist side.
Speaker 3: We kind of dropped the ball because we were following
Speaker 3: the healthcare advice and the cops were quite happy to
Speaker 3: ignore the far right mobilizing on the street. But there
Speaker 3: were striking workers like Debenhams and Clearis who'd been striking
Speaker 3: before COVID struck, and the cops were going up and
Speaker 3: moving these trade union assan saying, you know, you're breaking
Speaker 3: the pandemic. So it wasn't released evenly, and you know, suddenly,
Speaker 3: for the first time during the pandemic, we were starting
Speaker 3: to see groups of three four hundred far right in Dublin,
Speaker 3: which doesn't sound like much, but I mean last week
Speaker 3: there was a march in Dublin City and they had
Speaker 3: probably around five thousand, maybe up to ten thousand people marching,
Speaker 3: and that's something we haven't seen here since the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's such I think an important point. The
Speaker 2: degree to which, because this is a global issue, the
Speaker 2: degree to which everyone else attempting to abide by public
Speaker 2: safety measures during COVID nineteen strengthened the far right because
Speaker 2: they were out in the streets. It's kind of organizing
Speaker 2: equivalent of getting to steal a march on the enemy.
Speaker 2: It makes sense to me that it was because in
Speaker 2: the US that was interrupted at least by the George
Speaker 2: Floyd uprisings. But in Ireland, you know, it seems like
Speaker 2: there was a much more significant period of time where
Speaker 2: these folks were essentially acting and organizing unopposed, and the
Speaker 2: police were, when they chose to act at all, acting
Speaker 2: against folks on the opposite side of things who were
Speaker 2: organizing during COVID.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was like kind of run belong to the police.
Speaker 3: The cops didn't really start taking action on any of
Speaker 3: this stuff until I would say it was nearly November
Speaker 3: twenty twenty three when they had this rally called I
Speaker 3: think it was called to the Doll or maybe slightly
Speaker 3: earlier than that, in September twenty twenty three. The Doll
Speaker 3: is the Gaeacord for our Parliament, and basically the dregs
Speaker 3: of the COVID movement kind of came together again. You
Speaker 3: had all these tiny far rice and fascist parties popping up,
Speaker 3: and the best thing about them is they all get
Speaker 3: into furier fights. They all start arguing with each other
Speaker 3: about who's going to be the leader, and they haven't united.
Speaker 3: But they took to the streets in the autumn in
Speaker 3: the fall of twenty twenty three, and there was one
Speaker 3: really violent and disgusting riot outside the outside the Parliament
Speaker 3: where the far right were throwing bottles of your line
Speaker 3: at politicians trying to get in, were shouting racial abuse
Speaker 3: at anybody who wasn't white, who was working in the
Speaker 3: building as a cleaner or a parliamentary assistant or anything.
Speaker 3: Any opposition politicians they could see, they were screaming at
Speaker 3: them in imitation of you guys. And January the sixth,
Speaker 3: they had built a mock noose and they were using
Speaker 3: it to hang effigies of politicians. And you also had
Speaker 3: police cops being attacked for the first time by the
Speaker 3: fire right. Really there's been one or two other incidents,
Speaker 3: but it's only when cops started getting attacked by them
Speaker 3: and politicians were being directly their safety was being threatened,
Speaker 3: then the cops started to act, maybe in the last
Speaker 3: eighteen months or so, but it was really closing the
Speaker 3: stable door about five years after the violent fire right
Speaker 3: horse had already bolted.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, so I'm kind of thinking here,
Speaker 2: this is part of why you've started to see, you know, guys,
Speaker 2: like we started this conversation before being recording talk about
Speaker 2: Tucker Carlson coming over to talk to Connor McGregor, who's
Speaker 2: becoming an increasingly large part of this. And I wonder
Speaker 2: if it's if it's maybe these these different kind of
Speaker 2: international folks in the international movement sort of sniffing that,
Speaker 2: you know, they're hoping that the cancer his metastasize, so
Speaker 2: to speak. I mean, is that kind of what you
Speaker 2: how you see it?
Speaker 3: Well, they definitely have an influence here. I mean, the politics,
Speaker 3: the talking points, the buzzwords that the far right use
Speaker 3: in Ireland have all been learned from the likes of
Speaker 3: Alec Jones, have all been learned from watching you know,
Speaker 3: crazy stuff on Twitter. And it's all American and British
Speaker 3: far right talking points that are being replayed here. Stuff
Speaker 3: about the Clergy Plan, stuff about the Great Replacement and
Speaker 3: so on. I mean, one hundred years ago was the
Speaker 3: Protocols of the Elders of Zion and now they're just
Speaker 3: spinning the same conspiracy, same talking points again. Like for example,
Speaker 3: one of the things we had here was we had
Speaker 3: a party called the Irish People's Party and some of
Speaker 3: our campaigners were really fundamentalist Latin mass set of acantas Catholics,
Speaker 3: and they were going down and protesting about drag queen
Speaker 3: story time at Irish libraries. We don't even have drag
Speaker 3: queen story time. Yeah, I have been so inspired by
Speaker 3: what was happening in America and I just went in
Speaker 3: and started taking books off the shelves, you know, and
Speaker 3: anything to do with Annie LGBT Plus team, even basic
Speaker 3: sex education guides for kid's stuff. That's pretty mild. I'm
Speaker 3: perfectly happy to give my own my own kids, and
Speaker 3: I'm not the most woke guy. But they'd start ripping
Speaker 3: them up, they'd start taking them out of the library,
Speaker 3: filming themselves burning books at home. It was really crazy stuff.
Speaker 3: And at that stage again you did get anti anti
Speaker 3: fascist organizing. But what you kind of get is figures
Speaker 3: like Connor McGregor being amplified by the likes of Elon
Speaker 3: Musk being amplified by you know, Tucker Carlson coming over
Speaker 3: interviewing him, or Donald Trump of course inviting him to
Speaker 3: the to the White House, I mean the Prime Minister
Speaker 3: of Ireland, as we'd say, gay like the teacher Mehall Martin.
Speaker 3: He was invited to the White House on the twelfth
Speaker 3: of March. But the guy that Trump chose to actually
Speaker 3: have there on Patrick's dage itself was, of course, Connor McGregor.
Speaker 3: And McGregor has links to I wouldn't say far right figures,
Speaker 3: but certainly very populous figures. And McGregor has kind of
Speaker 3: started he's become God killed, and he started rambling on
Speaker 3: about you know, rosary beads and the power of Christ
Speaker 3: and all this kind of stuff. And he doesn't strike
Speaker 3: me as a particularly religious man. And now with the
Speaker 3: help of Tcer Carlson, you know, and and Elon Muskin others,
Speaker 3: he says he's going to run for president, and we
Speaker 3: have a presidential election coming up here in six months.
Speaker 3: Did you watch the interview, Robert.
Speaker 2: No, No, I haven't yet. I caught some clips of
Speaker 2: it all on social media. Yeah, but I haven't gotten
Speaker 2: to sit through the whole thing.
Speaker 3: It's wild. Bears absolutely no resemblance like what Connor puts
Speaker 3: across bears no resemblance to what's actually happening in Ireland.
Speaker 3: Like he started ranting about how the police are so corrupt.
Speaker 3: Element that's true, but he starts talking about how the
Speaker 3: traffic core, the road cops who give you like speeding
Speaker 3: tickets and stuff. They're the most violent and repressive and
Speaker 3: all all this kind of stuff, and it just so
Speaker 3: happens that Connor McGregor has a string of speeding violations
Speaker 3: in his sports cars. And then Tucker Carlson chips in
Speaker 3: and says, Oh, my god, you've got these armed cops
Speaker 3: and they're they're repressing the Irish people, but they're letting
Speaker 3: these immigrants do whatever. My dad was a copier for
Speaker 3: thirty years. My dad was on the border in the
Speaker 3: nineteen seventies with the IRA shooting at him and he
Speaker 3: didn't even get a gun. Our cops aren't armed. But
Speaker 3: Carlson is just throwing this stuff out being educated about it,
Speaker 3: and he says at the very end of the interview,
Speaker 3: McGregor says, Oh, there's been a government kind of hit
Speaker 3: job on me. They're planning to bring me down. What
Speaker 3: he's referring to is a civil trial now, not a
Speaker 3: criminal trial. A civil trial that Connor McGregor lost when
Speaker 3: he was brought to court for alleged rape and sexual
Speaker 3: assault and the jury believed he's accuser. A woman called
Speaker 3: a hairdresser called Nikita Hand, and Connor McGregor was forced
Speaker 3: to pay damages of a quarter of a million euro
Speaker 3: to her, plus costs in the Irish High Court, which
Speaker 3: are about one and a half million euro. Now to
Speaker 3: you or me, that would be you sum of money.
Speaker 3: To Connor McGregor, that's nothing. And I have to say,
Speaker 3: for legal reasons he is appealing it. But the reality
Speaker 3: is that standing in the way of any political ambitions
Speaker 3: Connor McGregor has, And we just had here in the
Speaker 3: last six hours last year. We had a local election
Speaker 3: for like local councils, a general election, a European parliamentary election,
Speaker 3: any one of those. All he needed to do was
Speaker 3: put up one hundred and fifty quid and he could
Speaker 3: have stood. He would be on the ballot. In fact,
Speaker 3: under Irish electoral law, he could have stood in every
Speaker 3: single constituency in the country. And he didn't stand for election.
Speaker 3: And now he's complaining that he's being debarred from the
Speaker 3: Irish presidential race and he's not. It's just it's an
Speaker 3: exceptionally difficult ballot to get on.
Speaker 4: You can't just.
Speaker 3: Stump up the money in America and become her party
Speaker 3: candidate or a writing candidate or whatever. That doesn't work here.
Speaker 3: You need this sport of a large number of democratically
Speaker 3: elected politicians to get there. So I think McGregor's relaying
Speaker 3: is not to get into the presidency, because really he can't.
Speaker 3: He's not even going to be on the ballot. But
Speaker 3: I think he wants to be Arland's Arland's answer to
Speaker 3: Tommy Robinson. And I suppose if Tommy Robinson is the answer,
Speaker 3: what the hell was the question?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, we'll get into that more in a second.
Speaker 2: I do want to throw to ads here really quickly,
Speaker 2: and then we'll continue to talk about Connor for a
Speaker 2: moment we're back. So you say he wants to be
Speaker 2: the Irish answer to Tommy Robinson, which is such a
Speaker 2: like I'm a higher man like that. It's odd to me,
Speaker 2: Like I had kind of I had kind of been
Speaker 2: worried because we've had so many cases of guys in
Speaker 2: the United States who start out as these absolute jokes
Speaker 2: on the far right and then you just see them
Speaker 2: pick up more and more attention over time, and that
Speaker 2: was kind of my worry with Connor. But but you're
Speaker 2: saying you're kind of concerned more that he's going to
Speaker 2: continue to be like an organizing presence on the far
Speaker 2: right rather than someone who has much of a chance
Speaker 2: of picking up actual like political office.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think with Connor it's it's all about his ego,
Speaker 3: which is probably what you'd expect from an MMA star.
Speaker 3: You know, there's going to be an element of you know,
Speaker 3: ego and show voting and kfab and so on. I
Speaker 3: mean it's interesting and he's interview with Tucker Carlson. He
Speaker 3: was giving out that the Minister of Education, you know,
Speaker 3: isn't a teacher, they're unqualified for the job. And the
Speaker 3: Irish government's Minister for Health isn't a doctor. And it's like, well,
Speaker 3: what qualifies you to be president Connor? You're a former
Speaker 3: plumber turned for MMA fighter, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, getting hit in the face. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And we've had ministers of Education who were teachers and
Speaker 3: ministers of health who were doctors who happened to be
Speaker 3: totally awful. The reality is like, we have a pr system.
Speaker 3: We've you know, very democratic and fair process, and we
Speaker 3: have more than the two parts system here. But I think,
Speaker 3: like as emerged during the during that Civil Right trial
Speaker 3: which McGregor lost. You know, he had to admit to
Speaker 3: his cocaine use during it. He has been sending out
Speaker 3: kind of fevered I would imagine cocaine fever trip tweets
Speaker 3: saying as President of Ireland, I have the power too.
Speaker 3: And it's like, man, the election hasn't even happened yet
Speaker 3: he's way ahead of himself. He's not going to get
Speaker 3: in the ballot. He knows that he wants to present it.
Speaker 3: And I mean the fact that he's even talking about
Speaker 3: getting in the ballot shows he doesn't understand the constitutional
Speaker 3: system here, which it's not like Britain. We have a
Speaker 3: written constitution. It's not that complex if you know the
Speaker 3: basics of the law. He's never going to get in
Speaker 3: the ballot, but he wants to present it that he's
Speaker 3: been denied the opportunity to stand. And unfortunately, what we
Speaker 3: have around the country is an increasingly violent anti immigrant
Speaker 3: street movement that whenever these what we call him here
Speaker 3: ipass in International Protection Applicant services, these IPA or refugee centers. Basically,
Speaker 3: when these are picked as places of accommodation by the
Speaker 3: government while these people's applications for refugee status or they
Speaker 3: have to stay somewhere while these are being examined, you
Speaker 3: tend to get large protests in towns, villages, cities all
Speaker 3: over Ireland. Sometimes he's turned quite violent. Sometimes there's been
Speaker 3: more than thirty arson attacks on these centers. And I
Speaker 3: think what Connor McGregor ultimately wants is he wants to
Speaker 3: be able to tour the country attending these protests and
Speaker 3: having everyone queuing up to take selfies with him and
Speaker 3: telling him what a great hero he is. And I
Speaker 3: think that's he's ultimately.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 3: And he's obviously he's going to grift off the back
Speaker 3: of it. The guy has money already. But it was
Speaker 3: so funny this multime multi millionaire being interviewed by Tucker
Speaker 3: Carlson saying we're going to start fundraising from my campaign.
Speaker 3: It's like, man, you have more money than you could
Speaker 3: ever spend on political posters and buyers and adverts. You know.
Speaker 2: So it almost sounds like this is like a retire
Speaker 2: plan for him, right, Like he's he's he's clearly past
Speaker 2: his prime in terms of the getting hit in the
Speaker 2: face thing for money, and now he's sort of moving
Speaker 2: on to like drifting off of these far right events
Speaker 2: and probably traveling just ahead of a series of riots,
Speaker 2: you know, Like that's that's seems like what's in his future.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I mean we've had some you know, at
Speaker 3: the time of an outbreak of rioting in Dublin antimorgan
Speaker 3: violence which caused twenty million euros worth of damage and
Speaker 3: you know, trash the city center in November of twenty
Speaker 3: twenty three Connor and I'm not saying he directly caused it,
Speaker 3: but he was tweeting at the same time Ireland as
Speaker 3: a war, yeah, and around the same time he was
Speaker 3: tweeting like any property that's been taken over by foreigners evaporated.
Speaker 3: I think really his plan is to kind of if
Speaker 3: he can represent himself as a political martyr figure. He's
Speaker 3: hoping that it will overshadow the you know, his loss
Speaker 3: in the rape case, and he is a course appealing
Speaker 3: that and claiming he has new evidence and everything. But
Speaker 3: I think really that's what it's both.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the way
Speaker 2: far right violence has looked in Ireland like these when
Speaker 2: these protests have really kicked off, because it seems like
Speaker 2: there's been this kind of fairly significant acceleration in the
Speaker 2: last three or four years in terms of it, particularly
Speaker 2: arsen attacks, and one thing that I was kind of
Speaker 2: struck by in your notes was the degree to which, like,
Speaker 2: no one's been arrested for any of these yet.
Speaker 3: No, what happens. These started around twenty eighteen, so maybe
Speaker 3: just before COVID you had one or two of them.
Speaker 3: And my book went to print in December twenty twenty four,
Speaker 3: so I stopped counting in December, and by then I
Speaker 3: had over thirty arson attacks and there hasn't been a
Speaker 3: single conviction for any of them. So it's when usually
Speaker 3: former hotels that have been closed down with years are
Speaker 3: that the government moves in or some local person moves
Speaker 3: in to renovate them and use them as one of
Speaker 3: these centers. They'll just go up and smoke in the
Speaker 3: middle of the night. And I mean, we have all
Speaker 3: ready a very significant homeless problem here. I mean there's
Speaker 3: more than ten thousand people homeless in Dublin, both Irish
Speaker 3: and refugee, and I mean that probably sounds small to
Speaker 3: someone listening in a big American city. We thought we
Speaker 3: had a housing crisis when we had two thousand people homeless,
Speaker 3: and we got more than ten almost fifteen thousand people
Speaker 3: homeless now. And some of these anti immigrant protesters have
Speaker 3: actually burnt down homeless accommodation designed for Irish homeless people
Speaker 3: in the mistake and belief that it was going to
Speaker 3: be used for refugees. Yeah, so that's their contribution to
Speaker 3: the housing crisis. You've also seen stuff like attacks on politicians' homes.
Speaker 3: Sometimes it's just pickets, sometimes it's graffiti. In the case
Speaker 3: of Martin Kenny, who's an opposition TD, he'd be from
Speaker 3: shin fein Alrety. Most of your listeners would probably have
Speaker 3: heard of an Irish Republican, kind of left wing Irish
Speaker 3: Republican party. There was a refugee center plan for where
Speaker 3: he lived in Leitrim, and in fairness to he spoke
Speaker 3: out against it and he condemned what he called, quote
Speaker 3: the far right ideology that has been peddled in this
Speaker 3: country about asylum seekers. A week later, he was sleeping
Speaker 3: in his house with his wife and kids, and his
Speaker 3: car in the driveway was petrol band was firebombed and
Speaker 3: they came back a few months later and did it
Speaker 3: again and he was forced to move house. So arson
Speaker 3: attacks and politicians homes is something we haven't seen here
Speaker 3: since the original fascists were around in the thirties as well.
Speaker 3: And this violence. Again, like as I said, there hasn't
Speaker 3: been a single arrest. And I give you a perfect example.
Speaker 3: The title for the book Burned Them Out, is from
Speaker 3: an event that happened in February twenty twenty three. A
Speaker 3: guy stood up in front of a Garda police station
Speaker 3: here in Fingles, which would be a big suburb of Dublin,
Speaker 3: and there was a huge crowd of anti immigrant protesters around.
Speaker 3: One of them was waving a swastika flag and this
Speaker 3: guy stood up in front of them with a megaphone
Speaker 3: in front of the police station said there is no
Speaker 3: point standing here outside of Garda station. The only way
Speaker 3: to deal with refugees is to burn them out. Go
Speaker 3: where they're fucking staying and burn them fucking cunts out.
Speaker 3: That's a direct quote. And of course, had he been
Speaker 3: threatening that violence against the guardy, had he been threatening
Speaker 3: that violence against a private business or a politician, I
Speaker 3: have no doubt he would have been arrested straight away.
Speaker 3: But this you know, masked guy threatening violence in Arson
Speaker 3: was just allowed.
Speaker 2: To walk off.
Speaker 3: So there you go. They're certainly not on the ball.
Speaker 3: And we've even had during the COVID pandemic when there
Speaker 3: was a cop nearly killed that had a fireworks shot
Speaker 3: at him during one of these riots. The police commissioner
Speaker 3: in the South of Ireland, who's formerly a member of
Speaker 3: the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a very controversial pro British police
Speaker 3: force that used to be in the North. This guy's
Speaker 3: our new police commissioner down south, and he tried to
Speaker 3: blame Republicans and the IRA for the violence and left
Speaker 3: wing extremists for the violence that was happening. And it
Speaker 3: was so clear that you know, Republicans, Irish Republicans have
Speaker 3: been on the streets opposing these people and their marches
Speaker 3: for years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit. Like the
Speaker 2: actual organizing of the anti fascist movement in Ireland, how
Speaker 2: is it kind of responded to the mean explosion in
Speaker 2: some cases a literal explosion in far right violence on
Speaker 2: the street, Like are you seeing it kind of reach
Speaker 2: like new Heights or does it kind of seem like
Speaker 2: it's unprepared for the moment that we're hitting, because, like
Speaker 2: I mean, in the United States, it's kind of hard
Speaker 2: to tell because things have changed so much since twenty twenty, right,
Speaker 2: Like a lot of the fascist violence that we're seeing
Speaker 2: is now explicitly from the state, and so there's just
Speaker 2: not a lot of on the ground. There's not the
Speaker 2: same kind of on the ground response to it that
Speaker 2: you were seeing when it was groups like the Proud Boys.
Speaker 2: And I'm wondering kind of how things have changed since
Speaker 2: twenty eighteen in that regard in Ireland.
Speaker 3: I suppose, like if you think back as far as
Speaker 3: twenty fifteen, Tommy Robinson, friend of the Pod, attempted to
Speaker 3: organize He's Anti Islamic, He's Islamophobic Pigida movement right to
Speaker 3: launch a branch of it in Dublin, and they couldn't
Speaker 3: even get to their rallying point because there were five
Speaker 3: thousand anti fascists on the street there against them, Irish Republicans,
Speaker 3: Irish language activists, Muslim community from Dublin were their LGBT activists,
Speaker 3: and they couldn't even get to have their events. So
Speaker 3: up until COVID, certainly the anti fascists and groups like
Speaker 3: Anti Fascist Action Ireland were excellent at closing down small groups.
Speaker 3: You have a lot of people who are doing online
Speaker 3: research and exposing these people sorted histories and their international connections.
Speaker 3: So that's one thing we're pretty good at. And what
Speaker 3: it turns out is that a lot of these guys,
Speaker 3: like one of the main proponents of the QAnon conspiracy
Speaker 3: theory here was a guy called Rowan Croft who just
Speaker 3: happened to be a former British Army soldier. So that
Speaker 3: doesn't fly too well in Ireland from somebody standing up
Speaker 3: saying I'm a gait Irish patriot and I'm going to
Speaker 3: stop the foreigners, Like, well, hang out a minute. When
Speaker 3: you chose to fight in the military, you chose to
Speaker 3: serve the Queen of So you have big national groups
Speaker 3: like Anti Fascist Action, you have groups like Anti Imperialist
Speaker 3: Action Ireland. Thankfully, as these protests have sprung up around
Speaker 3: the country, these fair right, anti imigrant protests, they have
Speaker 3: always been countered. And I'm thinking of in Cork City
Speaker 3: when the library was being attacked and it actually had
Speaker 3: to be closed down for a period, and it was
Speaker 3: the first time that the Cork Library had closed since
Speaker 3: the British burnt it down during our revolution in the
Speaker 3: nineteen twenties. And you know, you had a crowd of
Speaker 3: maybe one hundred far right and people on the opposite side.
Speaker 3: The anti fascist scene kept building and building until by
Speaker 3: the end, and I was there for some of these protests,
Speaker 3: we had four or five hundred against them, and eventually
Speaker 3: we decided, right, we're going to stand and protect the library.
Speaker 3: And that happened in another places like Limerick, and it
Speaker 3: happened in Dublin, and eventually the far rights said, well,
Speaker 3: we can't even get near the library to have our
Speaker 3: protest anymore, and they dissipated. One thing that's very interesting
Speaker 3: here is the optics and sometimes on the lefts and
Speaker 3: on the anti fascist side, we're not as good at
Speaker 3: the imagery and the using new technology and stuff. And
Speaker 3: one thing you'll always see is, you know, when anti
Speaker 3: fascists are mobilizing in Ireland, you know they'll have often
Speaker 3: red flags, they'll have the Palestinian flag, they'll have Irish
Speaker 3: left wing Republican flags like the plow and the stars.
Speaker 3: But often we don't carry our national flag the Try
Speaker 3: color as much. And of course the far right love
Speaker 3: fetishizing flags and they have the green, white and orange
Speaker 3: Irish Try color everywhere. Often. Of course these people are
Speaker 3: so ignorant they fly it the wrong way around and
Speaker 3: it's the orange, white and green, so it's like vive
Speaker 3: lookout Divoir. It's the Ivory Coast flag if you have
Speaker 3: it the wrong way. But it's interesting in some of
Speaker 3: the clashes you'll have anti fascists with the Irish flag
Speaker 3: and fascists with the Irish flag. But I think just
Speaker 3: in terms of optics, it sometimes looks very bad when
Speaker 3: the far right are able to clip out a section
Speaker 3: of the opposing crowd and say, look, they have Palestinian flags,
Speaker 3: they have all other LGBT Pride flags, but they're not
Speaker 3: proud to be Irish. They don't have Irish fla and
Speaker 3: there could be some Irish flags kipped off at the stide.
Speaker 3: So these people in the far right are very good
Speaker 3: at using the history of Irish politics and resistance to Britain,
Speaker 3: and using the imagery of that struggle and co opting it.
Speaker 3: And I think it's very important that we on the
Speaker 3: on the anti fascist side don't surrender any of that
Speaker 3: to them. And I mean the Irish flag what it
Speaker 3: stands for. The green bit is for Catholics who wanted independence,
Speaker 3: the orange bit is for Protestants who wanted to be
Speaker 3: linked with Britain, and the white ones for peace and unity.
Speaker 3: So it's a flag that and it's for the essence,
Speaker 3: you know, talks about respecting a religious minority of people
Speaker 3: from a colonial or immigrant background who arrived here a strangers.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, well I want to I want to continue
Speaker 2: this discussion and then close things out. But first we've
Speaker 2: got one more ad break to do and we're back.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I kind of wanted to end this by
Speaker 2: looking into a like what are you kind of looking
Speaker 2: for in the future, like in the in the kind
Speaker 2: of the next year or two in Ireland, like you,
Speaker 2: what are you expecting? What are you worried to see? Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: what do you kind of see? Cut moving forward here.
Speaker 3: I think what's tending to happen now is genius out
Speaker 3: of the bottle and far right messages spreading. And you
Speaker 3: had this big far right rally of you know, ten
Speaker 3: thousand and five to ten thousand people at its maximum
Speaker 3: that came down O'Connell Street in Dublin, the main street
Speaker 3: in the capital city. It's not huge by political standards,
Speaker 3: but it is worrying. I think we're going to see
Speaker 3: that grow. And I think on the left sometimes and
Speaker 3: particularly in the trade union movement, we have this idea
Speaker 3: that all this is a flash in the pan and
Speaker 3: will organize a few big rallies and they'll go away.
Speaker 3: They won't. This is like the National Front in Britain.
Speaker 3: You know, these people are going to be around haunting
Speaker 3: Irish politics for least a decade, and then they're never
Speaker 3: going to fully go away, that they'll pop back up again.
Speaker 3: I think we're going to continue to see the regional protests,
Speaker 3: and I think as well we have started seeing the
Speaker 3: Irish government, which is a coalition of two center right parties,
Speaker 3: kind of tighten up their own language on immigration. We're
Speaker 3: starting seeing an increasing number of deportations as well. The
Speaker 3: police really still aren't fully on the ball. They are,
Speaker 3: of course being given new policing powers by the government
Speaker 3: to deal with violent protests. They are being issued with
Speaker 3: things like, you know, new non legal technologies, you know,
Speaker 3: peppers play and extra equipment and body cameras that they
Speaker 3: wouldn't have had before. But of course the classic thing
Speaker 3: is that these will always be used as much, if
Speaker 3: not more so against the left and the anti fascist
Speaker 3: side than they will be against the racists. Thankfully, these groups,
Speaker 3: you know, they're all in fighting with each other. They
Speaker 3: have tried to do like electoral paths and to plan
Speaker 3: out political strategies. But thankfully they're all so fixated on
Speaker 3: wanting to be the furire that never really works. But
Speaker 3: going to say a minute ago, is that that ten
Speaker 3: thousand people, if there were that many on the street.
Speaker 3: Not everyone in that is far right. You know, some
Speaker 3: of the people are from working class communities that have
Speaker 3: been betrayed by the government and have been abandoned, and
Speaker 3: they are starting they've just fallen down the rabbit hole.
Speaker 3: And I can think of an incident. I was in
Speaker 3: the gym a couple of months back and just sitting there,
Speaker 3: and there were a few guys. Didn't know they were
Speaker 3: around chatting. Obviously we were in the gym. None of
Speaker 3: us are in the sauna. None of us had many
Speaker 3: clothes on, and none of these guys had like questionable
Speaker 3: far right tattoos or anything like that. But the conversation
Speaker 3: suddenly started about immigrants and how they were bringing crime
Speaker 3: and how they were bringing disease and all this kind
Speaker 3: of stuff. And I listened to it for a minute
Speaker 3: or two and I just stood up and said, lads,
Speaker 3: everything you are saying about immigrants in Ireland now is
Speaker 3: what was said about Irish people in America in the
Speaker 3: nineteenth century and in England in like the seventies and
Speaker 3: the eighties. So I think it's important that even in
Speaker 3: our workplace is on public transport, when we hear it
Speaker 3: this the talk we call it out if it's a
Speaker 3: friend of ours who's fallen down the rabbit hole into
Speaker 3: these conspiracies, because that's how their message is spreading.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 3: Often when you see people involved in some of this
Speaker 3: anti immigrant rioting, they have no history of involvement in
Speaker 3: far right groups, but it's that message has spread beyond
Speaker 3: those groups thanks to our friends in the nerd Reich.
Speaker 3: And I think if we have a work colleague or
Speaker 3: a brother or somebody who falls into that that we
Speaker 3: don't abandon them. We don't immediately start calling them a
Speaker 3: Nazi and whatever that We try to talk talk them
Speaker 3: round to it. But look, I suppose the thing is
Speaker 3: there is hope, and everywhere these people have organized, there
Speaker 3: have been anti fascists there to meet them. I think
Speaker 3: we need to get better at planning that in a
Speaker 3: national scale. Of course, on the left you always get
Speaker 3: this fascialism and in fighting. I'm not standing beside him,
Speaker 3: he's tratskis well, I don't like his views in the north.
Speaker 3: Whatever we need to kind of say, as long as
Speaker 3: we're fighting with each other, the fascists are winning, thankfully.
Speaker 3: None of these people have ever gotten more than two
Speaker 3: percent in an election. They have nobody elected in our
Speaker 3: national Parliament. They only have four or five, maybe six
Speaker 3: councilors elected in the entire of the southern part of
Speaker 3: the country. And that's out of nine hundred and forty
Speaker 3: nine councilors. But we can't just laugh at them. We
Speaker 3: can't worry the sisatle threat because when the Nazis stood
Speaker 3: for election the first time, I think they only got
Speaker 3: two percent of the vote as well, and look how
Speaker 3: that turned out.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, and as we've seen in the US, like
Speaker 2: what starts as this tiny, tiny number of freaks and
Speaker 2: weirdos can wind up being a mass movement if it's
Speaker 2: not you know, cauterized, right Like that's and that's that's
Speaker 2: kind of the challenge in front of Irish anti fascists
Speaker 2: right now is ensuring that that cauterization happens absolutely.
Speaker 3: And I mean, look, if you think of this, you know,
Speaker 3: Elon Musk has Tip McGregor for president, and we're all
Speaker 3: laughing at it now, but you know it wouldn't be
Speaker 3: the first time that Elon Musk has tipped a reality
Speaker 3: TV star with a questionable sexual and criminal history for
Speaker 3: high office and they got.
Speaker 2: There, right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Do you want to have anything you want to plug
Speaker 2: here at the end of the episode, I mean your
Speaker 2: book obviously.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well obviously I'm not I'm not on ex Twitter
Speaker 3: anything like that. I don't have a substack or anything.
Speaker 3: So just the main thing I want to plug is
Speaker 3: my book Burned Them Out, a history of fascism and
Speaker 3: the far right in Ireland. It is published by Bloomsbury,
Speaker 3: head of Zeus, so it should be available in any
Speaker 3: to order via any bookshop obviously. If you are going
Speaker 3: to support a bookshop, support a small independent one Roger
Speaker 3: than Barnes and Noble. And if you are buying it online,
Speaker 3: obviously buy it from direct from the publishers Bloomsbury. Don't
Speaker 3: buy it off Amazon if you can, because god knows
Speaker 3: Jeff Besis has enough money.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's certainly bloody well, thank you so much, and
Speaker 2: yeah that's our episode. Everybody come back tomorrow when we'll
Speaker 2: have another one.
Speaker 7: Welcome to that and here a podcast, and I forgot
Speaker 7: to write an introduction for I'm your host, Miya Wong,
Speaker 7: and we are well, okay, we're not taking a break
Speaker 7: from the horrors, because this is also still a podcast
Speaker 7: about the horrors and what you can do about it.
Speaker 7: But you know, I am a transgender. One of the
Speaker 7: ways that we have been like depersonified via transgender is
Speaker 7: through a you know, a massive attack on trans like
Speaker 7: trans women in sports. And this has led to, you know,
Speaker 7: like the acceleration of like the broad scale attack on
Speaker 7: all of us being able to exist as people. And
Speaker 7: with me to talk about this is someone who has
Speaker 7: written a book that is about this and also kind
Speaker 7: of not about this in a lot of ways, and
Speaker 7: that is Victoria Ziller, who is a writer author writes
Speaker 7: about the Buffalo bills for our friends over at Defector
Speaker 7: sometimes and is the author of a new book What
Speaker 7: are the Boys Out Today? When you're listening to this, wow,
Speaker 7: crazy wild, Yeah it is it has syncd upe like
Speaker 7: this completely on purpose. We were one hundred percent planning
Speaker 7: this from the beginning. Hello, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm excited to have you on.
Speaker 7: So you would think that the question that your book,
Speaker 7: one of the boys asks is what if a transchool
Speaker 7: played football? But the actual and more important question to
Speaker 7: ask is what if a poster could write fiction? And
Speaker 7: the answer is that it fucking rips?
Speaker 4: Thank you?
Speaker 7: Is this this book rules? I Jenuily. I think this
Speaker 7: is the best written group chats I've ever read in
Speaker 7: a book. It rips it so good.
Speaker 4: I am very passionate about group chats, you know. I
Speaker 4: mean like posting is writing. Hello audience. If you don't
Speaker 4: know me, my name is Victoria. I'm online. You may
Speaker 4: know my Twitter or blue Sky accounts at dirtbag Queer.
Speaker 4: I'm like largely posting about football when football is in season.
Speaker 4: I kind of just post about random shit these days.
Speaker 4: But yeah, I've allegedly written a book. The weird thing
Speaker 4: about writing a book is that I feel like I've
Speaker 4: just totally blacked out actually writing it. And I'm like,
Speaker 4: that's crazy. Who did that? Couldn't be me? But yeah,
Speaker 4: in terms of like how I would like very quickly pitch.
Speaker 4: One of the boys, high school senior named Grace comes
Speaker 4: back to her high school football team. She quit over
Speaker 4: the summer because she came out as trans because her
Speaker 4: teammates want to make a push for a state title,
Speaker 4: and it's like trans coming of age, Friday Night Lights
Speaker 4: handshake meme. But also when I was like big picture
Speaker 4: thinking about what I wanted to do with this, I
Speaker 4: wanted to tell kind of a like traditional high school
Speaker 4: sports story, but through an outsider lens. Like if you
Speaker 4: think about the average like high school football story, you
Speaker 4: think like, well, what we're gonna do is we're gonna
Speaker 4: win state, we're gonna get the scholarship, and we're gonna
Speaker 4: get the girl. And I wanted to sort of like
Speaker 4: deconstruct those three things by making the protagonist trans and
Speaker 4: making the protagonist a instead of like linebacker or a
Speaker 4: quarterback or whatever, and that is who I am.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and this this book rips that sounds like a
Speaker 7: fun thing going on where it basically has like the
Speaker 7: football iceberg, where like you can come into us knowing
Speaker 7: zero ball and you will get stuff out of it.
Speaker 7: And you can come into this where I am knowing
Speaker 7: like a some ball and you will get some out
Speaker 7: of this. And then like the unhinged people who have
Speaker 7: like sixteen different PFF tabs like pinned their bookmarks will
Speaker 7: be like holy shit, the world building.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that was h it is. It is hard
Speaker 4: writing fiction about sports if you're writing young adult fiction,
Speaker 4: you know, which is what one of the boys is.
Speaker 4: Don't be weird about that. If you're an adult, teenage
Speaker 4: girls are like, oh, you don't have to hate the
Speaker 4: things they like. You can like call down a little bit. Uh,
Speaker 4: But yeah, writing about football for an audience of like
Speaker 4: teenagers is like fascinating because you have to assume that
Speaker 4: the audience knows very little and you have to figure
Speaker 4: out how much you want to give them so that
Speaker 4: they get it without like overwhelming them, which is like
Speaker 4: really just not at all what I wanted to do.
Speaker 4: But also, yeah, if you're a sicko like me, you
Speaker 4: can be like, ooh, I'm really into what this offense
Speaker 4: is doing, or I am really into this like onside
Speaker 4: kick play design. So I tried to, like do I
Speaker 4: tried to do a little bit of both. And also, again,
Speaker 4: this is a transcoming of age story, so yeah, it's
Speaker 4: also dealing with you know, the horrors. So yep, ball
Speaker 4: plus horrors is what we're working with here.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so I think, okay, we're going to get more
Speaker 7: into the politics of this in a second But first
Speaker 7: I want to ask one ball question since I have NOWBT,
Speaker 7: I have now introduced my audience to the fact that
Speaker 7: I talked about football by managing to get a rant
Speaker 7: about de Sean Watson on here for like ten minutes,
Speaker 7: the Sewn Watson trade. But okay, my one ball question
Speaker 7: for this was how happy did it make you when
Speaker 7: you figure out a way to write a football team
Speaker 7: that does not use the forward pass?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 6: Man?
Speaker 4: Uh, it's without without spoiling what happens at the end
Speaker 4: of the act one turn, circumstances occur so that this
Speaker 4: high school football team has to move a player who
Speaker 4: is who is not a quarterback two quarterback, at which
Speaker 4: point passing just goes away and we are just running
Speaker 4: the ball, baby, we are we we are pounding the rock.
Speaker 4: It's so sick. It is kind of sort of like loosely,
Speaker 4: what I based this on was the year that the
Speaker 4: University of Kentucky football team, like all like every single
Speaker 4: quarterback got hurt and they were like, Okay, Lynn Bowden,
Speaker 4: you are our best wide receiver. We're just gonna put
Speaker 4: you a quarterback and you know, we're just gonna see
Speaker 4: what happens. And that's like that was the fun of
Speaker 4: writing fictional football is that I can make my fictional
Speaker 4: football team do whatever I want, and I don't want
Speaker 4: to ever see conservative trickery that is the forward pass,
Speaker 4: get it out of here.
Speaker 7: Yeah. This is one of the things I love about
Speaker 7: you're writing is that you are very much just like
Speaker 7: an old school like traditionalist football pound of the rock,
Speaker 7: like none of this, like none of none of this
Speaker 7: fuck an RPO bullshit person which is which is also
Speaker 7: I don't know, it's just very funny that you have
Speaker 7: like you have like the football personality of like an
Speaker 7: extremely cranky, like seventy five year old like coach from
Speaker 7: like the seventies.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I'm a trans woman yeah in rules, which
Speaker 4: like again I tried not to do too much of
Speaker 4: it in this book. Like part of the reason that
Speaker 4: I made my main character a kicker, which we will
Speaker 4: also talk about other reasons later, but part of the
Speaker 4: reason is that kicking is this sort of like own
Speaker 4: separate salad off thing. So I really only have to
Speaker 4: like get the audience to understand kicking and what happens
Speaker 4: when Grace is on the field. I don't have to
Speaker 4: get into like what a football team that like never
Speaker 4: passes the ball, like is doing a technical level. We
Speaker 4: don't have to do all that. I give you just
Speaker 4: enough that if you are a sickoh, you're like, yeah, baby,
Speaker 4: like this rules.
Speaker 2: This is the sickest offense of all time.
Speaker 4: But also yeah, but also like you know, trying to
Speaker 4: trying to help the queer kiddos understand that, like running
Speaker 4: the ball is the official football position of the working class,
Speaker 4: of the poltariat.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 7: Okay, we're going to get more into the class dynamics
Speaker 7: of football the second. But the place I kind of
Speaker 7: want to start in terms of, like you know, talking
Speaker 7: about the parts of us at art just ball is
Speaker 7: so in a lot of ways, this is a book
Speaker 7: about scriptlessness, which is something that I think, I don't know,
Speaker 7: like we've been seeing a sort of resurgence of trends
Speaker 7: or not resurchens, but I kind of like surgeants, emergence, emergence,
Speaker 7: there we go, there we go, there we go. Yeah,
Speaker 7: of transliterature, and I think this is a very interesting
Speaker 7: angle to take on it. And it's you know, when
Speaker 7: I say scriplessness, it's about the ways in which trans
Speaker 7: women in particular don't have you know, sort of examples
Speaker 7: and paths to like follow. Right, there's not like a
Speaker 7: you're supposed to go from A to B two C.
Speaker 7: This is like what you're doing with your life and
Speaker 7: you have to just figure it out because suddenly you're
Speaker 7: you and you just you just have to you know,
Speaker 7: there's no rails, there's no guide, You just have to
Speaker 7: do it. I think the Sapatista line about it is
Speaker 7: that the road is made by walking. Can you talk
Speaker 7: about how like having to just figure the shit out
Speaker 7: influence the way that you write Grace and the way
Speaker 7: that you sort of write this book.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So this is something that Grace struggles with a lot.
Speaker 4: I mean, like specific to her, it's because she's a
Speaker 4: trans woman who's playing football, something that if an openly
Speaker 4: trans woman has ever openly played, like American football, there
Speaker 4: is not a lot of documentation of that online. So
Speaker 4: like Grace, she is like walking a path that has
Speaker 4: like never existed before. But I think, like more broadly
Speaker 4: and more like thematically, there is that like Grace is
Speaker 4: also frequently I call her stupid, and I don't think
Speaker 4: that she's stupid, but calm up. But Grace struggles a
Speaker 4: lot to like express herself I would say, and like,
Speaker 4: I wanted her to like challenge what a reader might
Speaker 4: expect from a trans girl in young adult fiction. Specifically,
Speaker 4: we're like I think she's like frequently kind of like grading,
Speaker 4: or at least I find her grading. She is not
Speaker 4: traditionally feminine. I don't think she's unfeminine, but she like
Speaker 4: struggles a lot with like feeling okay enough to like
Speaker 4: express that about herself. Yeah, and like, I feel like
Speaker 4: a lot of stories about trans kids have this view
Speaker 4: of being a like younger transperson of like, well, it
Speaker 4: was always easy for me, and I took to finity
Speaker 4: like a fish in water, and like this was like
Speaker 4: natural to me. I wanted to write a character for
Speaker 4: whom it is not necessarily natural for Grace to be
Speaker 4: this person, and I wanted her past and the way
Speaker 4: she is now to sort of like challenge a like
Speaker 4: cist reader specifically, but also in terms of scriptulousness in
Speaker 4: a more like macro way.
Speaker 2: There's not a lot of ya.
Speaker 4: Contemporary fiction about transgirl characters like at all. There is now,
Speaker 4: thankfully a good amount of trans male representation in the genre,
Speaker 4: but there are a few authors who are out here
Speaker 4: writing transferm contemporary but like not a lot so like
Speaker 4: figuring out like where I wanted to like slot in
Speaker 4: to this like genre that is kind of like struggling
Speaker 4: to be born, you know, not a lot of transfem
Speaker 4: like seventeen year old protagonists who are like going to
Speaker 4: like parties and drinking beer and worrying about whether or
Speaker 4: not they want.
Speaker 2: To go to college, which is all is all.
Speaker 4: Stuff I wanted to like touch here.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And I think there's a bunch of levels of
Speaker 7: this stuff sort of operates on and I think it's
Speaker 7: very like I don't know, like a lot of being trends.
Speaker 7: And I say this at least for me, I don't know,
Speaker 7: like maybe maybe this didn't for other people. Was just
Speaker 7: like having no idea what the fuck you're doing and
Speaker 7: just you know, waking up one day and realizing like shit, wait,
Speaker 7: what the fuck do you mean I'm doing this? And
Speaker 7: it's like, you know, I got think about this, like
Speaker 7: doing this job. It's like wait, what the fuck I'm
Speaker 7: a trans podcaster? Like what like I can't even.
Speaker 2: Do my makeup? Well, like what the fuck are we
Speaker 2: doing here?
Speaker 4: Yep?
Speaker 7: I think that like an never think that I've talked
Speaker 7: about I talked about this a lot in the show
Speaker 7: is but it's also just like how kind of like
Speaker 7: normal the trans girls who just like suddenly something blows
Speaker 7: up and they're like Internet famers or whatever the fuck
Speaker 7: are that. They're just like some kid until like, yeah,
Speaker 7: you know, there's just like an explosion and everyone is
Speaker 7: suddenly interested in every intimate detail of your life and
Speaker 7: is trying to deconstruct it in order to destroy you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Grace is Again I don't really want to like
Speaker 4: spoil act act three stuff here, but later on the story,
Speaker 4: Grace achieves some amount of like Internet notoriety for what
Speaker 4: she's doing. And yeah, Grace is like an extremely typical kid.
Speaker 4: She has like typical kid problems. But then this like
Speaker 4: microscope gets put on her and she's she is sort
Speaker 4: of like forced to like become this like different thing
Speaker 4: that like if she wants to be that thing someday,
Speaker 4: it's not now.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think in a lot of ways, my book
Speaker 4: is about how we ask teenagers to like do too
Speaker 4: much and be too much. But like, especially trans kids,
Speaker 4: when you transition at any age, you are building the
Speaker 4: plane of your personality while you are flying it, baby yep,
Speaker 4: And like that's so much pressure to put on anyone,
Speaker 4: but like especially anyone who is a kid is just
Speaker 4: like there's a lot of pressure. And I wanted to
Speaker 4: I wanted to like juxtapose the parts of Grace's experience
Speaker 4: that like a like sis boy or girl could read
Speaker 4: and be like, yep, I also don't know where I
Speaker 4: want to go to college.
Speaker 2: But also like sort.
Speaker 4: Of like show like well because she is like this,
Speaker 4: she is facing this like unreal level of scrutiny that
Speaker 4: is like not normal, deeply unnatural and like fucked up
Speaker 4: and like unfair.
Speaker 7: Yeah, speaking of unfair, we have to go to ads.
Speaker 7: We come back. That's one of my better pivots. I'm
Speaker 7: proud of that one. When we come back, We're going
Speaker 7: to talk about masculinity.
Speaker 2: We are back.
Speaker 7: So one of the boys is weirdly the second football
Speaker 7: involved book about a trans woman that I've read in
Speaker 7: the last year, and I think it's fascinating because in
Speaker 7: the like pure archetypal sense from structuralless anthropology, it is
Speaker 7: like a pure structural inversion of Alison Greeves is How
Speaker 7: to Fly, because how to Fly is this is also
Speaker 7: a good book, but How to Fly is about a
Speaker 7: girl getting forced fem to escape masculine violence. Why they
Speaker 7: come and a cheerleader and one of the boys is
Speaker 7: about a trans woman going back into into a hypermasculine
Speaker 7: space to become a football player. It's like they're just
Speaker 7: literally perfect structural versions of each other. And so I
Speaker 7: wanted to ask you about how are you thinking about
Speaker 7: doing this thing right, which is which is going back
Speaker 7: into these these hyper masculine spaces that a lot of
Speaker 7: people come out of pre transition, you know, when when
Speaker 7: you were sort of writing this, because this is not
Speaker 7: a thing that people tend to write when they're writing
Speaker 7: about transfems.
Speaker 4: Totally and sort of the like irregularity of Grace's path
Speaker 4: this way is like one of the reasons why I
Speaker 4: was like drawn to like writing a sports story about
Speaker 4: like a trans girl playing football specifically, is because like
Speaker 4: I probably have a like more I don't know if
Speaker 4: complicated is the word, but I have like a very
Speaker 4: like interesting relationship with masculinity. And as much as I'm
Speaker 4: like fascinated by it, like I think it is like
Speaker 4: endlessly interesting to see the ways that like men construct
Speaker 4: the like various kinds of masculinity that they live in
Speaker 4: and the like various outcomes that men can end up
Speaker 4: finding via their weird distinct masculinities. For instance, for me personally,
Speaker 4: I'm still in my like old high school like boys
Speaker 4: group chat like that we like started like a decade ago,
Speaker 4: and like I have never once had a problem fitting
Speaker 4: in there. When they all found out I was trans,
Speaker 4: was like, oh shit, cool, whatever we're gonna keep talking
Speaker 4: about like the NIX, you know. And like again, Grace's
Speaker 4: journey with masculinity is different from mine, but kind of
Speaker 4: like her, I have like some amount of like difficulty
Speaker 4: and like very masculine sports spaces when I was a kid,
Speaker 4: but then like once you adapt and once you like
Speaker 4: learn how to like perform this thing, Like I never
Speaker 4: had a problem existing in these worlds. And like something
Speaker 4: that Grace is really annoyed by is that people are
Speaker 4: always like I just can't believe that, like you would
Speaker 4: be trans, And what is hidden in there is like
Speaker 4: you were kind of a dick. You were like kind
Speaker 4: of a douchebag. Yeah, So, like I very much wanted
Speaker 4: to write a trans protagonist who has a relationship with
Speaker 4: like her past self and with her male friends. That
Speaker 4: was like a little more complicated. Were like she has
Speaker 4: a like very good, solid group of like male friends
Speaker 4: who are not like perfect, but are still like that's
Speaker 4: my friend. So like I think for my friends and
Speaker 4: for a lot of trans women's male friends, they're like, well,
Speaker 4: I was friends with you before, so like you're still
Speaker 4: like you know, you're still you.
Speaker 3: I'm still gonna be cool with you.
Speaker 4: So I guess that means that I have to think
Speaker 4: about like that I have to like, okay, now I
Speaker 4: have to like think about how like trans people are
Speaker 4: like treated by society more broadly. And it's like interesting
Speaker 4: seeing men in my life like suddenly become like cognizant
Speaker 4: of like transitions, and it's all like personal. It's all like, well,
Speaker 4: I know this person, and therefore I'm going to show
Speaker 4: compassion to this person that I like. And then you know,
Speaker 4: politics starting at the personal and sort of like growing
Speaker 4: out from there.
Speaker 7: So I want to ask a bit more, just digging
Speaker 7: into sort of the masculinity aspect specifically, because one of
Speaker 7: the things I think is I don't know that there's
Speaker 7: a part of being a transfem that isn't super well
Speaker 7: understood outside of it, which is sort of a lot
Speaker 7: of trans women have a phase where you really try
Speaker 7: to be a man, right, where you get like really
Speaker 7: into like hypermasculinity in order to try to like yeah,
Speaker 7: try to make yourself do it. Like I had gamer
Speaker 7: me a phase, which was a fiasco, not even gearing
Speaker 7: me if I'm still sort of game and be but
Speaker 7: I had, like you know, I had I had like
Speaker 7: like top point two five percent Heartstone player, like the
Speaker 7: a wreck a disasters substantively a worst person. Yeah, and
Speaker 7: you know so, and like that's the thing that has
Speaker 7: a lot of complicated social ripples. Were like this this
Speaker 7: process of like like doing this, you know, sometimes it's
Speaker 7: like your final them. It's just it's just what you're
Speaker 7: doing to try to get by. It's like trying to
Speaker 7: force yourself to be a man and like do this
Speaker 7: masculinity in a way that's like really shit because you're
Speaker 7: trying to like reconcile it with yourself. Yes, So this
Speaker 7: is like a thing that a lot of like transforms experience.
Speaker 2: I think it's.
Speaker 7: Written interestingly in this book. And I was always wondering,
Speaker 7: I don't know, like like the way you talk about
Speaker 7: being in this in like fitting into these spaces as
Speaker 7: like okay, well, I figured out how to like do
Speaker 7: the performance okay, and then it was sort of fine.
Speaker 7: So I'm wondering, like this is almost universally seen as
Speaker 7: like this is like a formal structural violence that's been
Speaker 7: enacted on you that you sort of have to like
Speaker 7: do this. But there's also a kind of I don't know,
Speaker 7: a kind of complicated dynamic of like these people are
Speaker 7: still like your friends and you like them, and I
Speaker 7: guess I want to know sort of how you've been
Speaker 7: thinking about like that specific angle and like this sort
Speaker 7: of process of fitting in and becoming and also just
Speaker 7: this is sort of unbecoming you have to do to
Speaker 7: like become yourself.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So my book has flashback sequences that are written
Speaker 4: in second person. This is mostly a book that's written
Speaker 4: in first person. But I tried to like really lean
Speaker 4: into this like phenomenon of like closeted trans women like
Speaker 4: butching up at like certain moments in their lives in
Speaker 4: order to like pass and cram down this like feeling
Speaker 4: that is like really fucking scary at first.
Speaker 3: So like.
Speaker 4: I want the second person grace flashbacks to her like
Speaker 4: starting fights and being a like asshole to her girlfriend.
Speaker 4: I want them to feel like jarring, and I want
Speaker 4: them to feel like Grace is being a bastard in
Speaker 4: a lot of these flashbacks, but like I also wanted
Speaker 4: to show like how she gets there in terms of
Speaker 4: like various moments earlier in her life where she was
Speaker 4: sort of like shunted into this more like masculine path
Speaker 4: in order to like pass and like not be bullied
Speaker 4: or like other eyes, and like it definitely is. It's tough,
Speaker 4: and I think that I think that I personally have
Speaker 4: a like complicated relationship with Like, Yeah, like I hated
Speaker 4: football when I played it. And I did it because
Speaker 4: like I like the sport obviously because I'm a fan,
Speaker 4: and because I wrote this book about it, and because
Speaker 4: I write about football some times and I boast about
Speaker 4: it a lot, but like playing it made me miserable,
Speaker 4: but like I also made friends with that team who
Speaker 4: I still talk to. So it's like I definitely wanted
Speaker 4: to feel like violent and imposed, but also like it
Speaker 4: isn't something that can be like erased. It's something that
Speaker 4: you have to deal with. It's something that like as
Speaker 4: you grow up and as you continue to self actualize,
Speaker 4: you have to like decide what parts of that version
Speaker 4: of yourself are worth keeping and what parts aren't. And
Speaker 4: that's like something that I wanted to show, like Grace
Speaker 4: struggle through kind of in real time, is she's like
Speaker 4: very early in her transition, and she doesn't know how
Speaker 4: she wants to present, and she doesn't know how much
Speaker 4: of like her old life and the people in her
Speaker 4: old life that want to associate with her, or does
Speaker 4: existing on this football team dragger back towards something that
Speaker 4: she doesn't want to be anymore. It's all stuff that
Speaker 4: I wanted to play with. And it's not like overtly political,
Speaker 4: but is like subtextually political, you.
Speaker 7: Know, yeah, well it's it's it's political in the sense that,
Speaker 7: like you know that we were talking about sort of
Speaker 7: scriptleussness earlier, right, And I think one of the one
Speaker 7: of the sort of alienating factors about being trends is that, like,
Speaker 7: especially if you're like kind of alone and you're like,
Speaker 7: you know, like you're like the only transferm that you're
Speaker 7: spending time with.
Speaker 2: Right, This is just.
Speaker 7: True for like a lot of things, like a lot
Speaker 7: of how sort of oppression functions and a lot of
Speaker 7: how violence functions. Is by convincing you that this is
Speaker 7: the only You're the only person's ever gone through this,
Speaker 7: m h. And there are always going to be unique
Speaker 7: aspects of it. But like, you know, one of the
Speaker 7: ways that alienation has maintained is by convincing you that
Speaker 7: no one else can understand the thing that's happening to you,
Speaker 7: and that because no one else has ever done it.
Speaker 7: And it turns out like, no, actually, this is something
Speaker 7: that like all of us have gone through. And when
Speaker 7: when you sort of start to realize just the kind
Speaker 7: of solidarity that could be built based on this collective
Speaker 7: well of experience we've all gone through, and how it
Speaker 7: can be you know, changed by actual actions of a
Speaker 7: bunch of people working together, it changes things. So I
Speaker 7: think I think it is in a lot of ways
Speaker 7: political in the sense that like, in order to have politics,
Speaker 7: you have to have sort of like collective assemblages of
Speaker 7: people who fucking understand each other and to understand that
Speaker 7: they're not alone, that they can do things totally. And
Speaker 7: this is part of how you get to that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we can talk a little bit more about the
Speaker 4: like very start of something that could be seen as
Speaker 4: a political awakening that Grace has in this book, but like, yeah,
Speaker 4: part of the reason that she isn't perfect is because
Speaker 4: she doesn't know any other Like there are no other
Speaker 4: transmitment characters in this book, And that was very deliberate. Yeah,
Speaker 4: Grace is like on our own. She is like figuring
Speaker 4: this out as she goes yep. And I wanted it
Speaker 4: to feel rough and like ad hoc because like that's
Speaker 4: how it is for a lot of people.
Speaker 2: That's how it was, like go through it by walking.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, I guess, I guess I want to kind
Speaker 7: of move into the more directly political realm. One I
Speaker 7: think is interesting about this book is that, like Grace
Speaker 7: and this is something that like I my brain has
Speaker 7: been so melted by having been like the politics kids
Speaker 7: since I was like fifteen, because I was like my
Speaker 7: high school was like interrupted in the middle of it
Speaker 7: by be trying to overseell the Turkish government, and so like,
Speaker 7: my brain is so melted. We'll get air to one
Speaker 7: one day. We already can't go there for our coverage
Speaker 7: of Kurdish gorilla movements. Very good stuff. You'll find many,
Speaker 7: many such things, I think. But like one of the
Speaker 7: interesting persons about this is that Grace is like not political, right,
Speaker 7: and most of the people in this aren't. And there's
Speaker 7: kind of a divide between the politics knowers who are
Speaker 7: like the more uh you know, who are like okay, yeah,
Speaker 7: like we we are like the queer kids. We are
Speaker 7: like the activist kids, and then like the you know,
Speaker 7: like the ballplayers, and then Grace sort of fits more
Speaker 7: into the like not even more. Grace isn't like a
Speaker 7: politics person. Grace is a like, hey, like transphobia is bad,
Speaker 7: we shouldn't do that, but also like just wants to
Speaker 7: fucking go kick a go kick a rock between two posts.
Speaker 7: So yeah, can you talk about like how you sort
Speaker 7: of decided to make her just be like kid who
Speaker 7: doesn't follow politics.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So like that was like not any kind of
Speaker 4: like statement about how like politics is bad.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 4: That was like Grace's seventeen, and most seventeen year olds,
Speaker 4: if they have politics at all, have like completely incoherent politics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because I was like, holy shit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So, like Grace has the like barest outlines of
Speaker 4: like ideology, and those were like put on her by
Speaker 4: people in her life. We know that her dad is
Speaker 4: a union man, and from a small age she has
Speaker 4: internalized that unions are good. Does she know why probably not,
Speaker 4: but or all so we know that her friend tab
Speaker 4: who is Bori, has been like educating her on like
Speaker 4: Puerto Rican Independence, which was like which was a like
Speaker 4: that was a very funny lie, right, because because Grace
Speaker 4: is as like dumb as shit white kid from the suburbs,
Speaker 4: but so like inasmuch as she's like piecing together the
Speaker 4: person she is bit by bit, she's also kind of
Speaker 4: like piecing what she thinks about the world together along
Speaker 4: with that in terms of like most of the straight
Speaker 4: white players on the football team like do not have
Speaker 4: like basically don't have politics. There's a scene where one
Speaker 4: of my minor characters is like, yo, I just figured
Speaker 4: out that, like trans phobia is bad, and I loved
Speaker 4: I fucking loved writing that. But like, I imagine that
Speaker 4: up until recently, Grace was exactly like this and just
Speaker 4: like just like yep, I'm a middle lower middle class
Speaker 4: white straight boy air quotes on all of that, she
Speaker 4: never had any kind of like thought about that.
Speaker 2: That does not.
Speaker 4: Reflect what was going on in my life when I
Speaker 4: was a teenager, because I was a very annoying oh
Speaker 4: like me and a friend of mine, Chavon, got in
Speaker 4: trouble for putting a Bernie Sanders twenty sixteen sticker on
Speaker 4: her locker, because that's the kind of shit.
Speaker 7: We were doing in.
Speaker 4: High school in twenty fifteen. So like, I was like
Speaker 4: very much had sort of like vacant liberal middle class
Speaker 4: kid politics, but like Grace, Grace is. I imagine that like
Speaker 4: later in her life, she kind of has more political
Speaker 4: thoughts in her head. But I also kind of imagine
Speaker 4: that her brain works like I don't know if you've
Speaker 4: played Disco Elysium, but I kind of imagine. I kind
Speaker 4: of imagine Grace has a like thought cabinet, and it's
Speaker 4: like she has like she has like two slots in it. Oh,
Speaker 4: she just like cannot hold that many ideas in her
Speaker 4: brain at once. So she's she is in all aspects
Speaker 4: of her life trying her vest and trying to get better.
Speaker 4: And yeah, I want to like I feel like a
Speaker 4: lot of contemporary YA that comes out these days, a
Speaker 4: lot of the kids have like overly coherent politics. I
Speaker 4: was like, nah, nah, I wanted to write a kid
Speaker 4: who has like good intentions but has no idea what
Speaker 4: she's doing.
Speaker 7: Yep, God, my brain's doing the Trump flying. In many cases,
Speaker 7: have no idea what they're doing. Yeah, oh Jesus, crash,
Speaker 7: braids and broken. Okay, speaking of things being broken, the
Speaker 7: products and services to support this podcast unrelated statements.
Speaker 2: We are back, Okay.
Speaker 7: So, having now gotten like many far into this interview
Speaker 7: without directly being like, here's the football politics, let's talk
Speaker 7: about the politics of football. Because one of the things
Speaker 7: that I think is fascinating about, you know, the way
Speaker 7: you're sort of talking about this, and the way that
Speaker 7: Grace like runs into this, and the way that this
Speaker 7: is just like a thing that happens in the US,
Speaker 7: which is that like giant portions of the entire US
Speaker 7: economy and like like structural elements of the US like
Speaker 7: education system from like the ground up, and like all
Speaker 7: of these sort of contracting services, like massive portions of
Speaker 7: like how every single part of the education system from
Speaker 7: like fucking like middle school through college are all bent
Speaker 7: around this game, yep. And I think one of the
Speaker 7: things that happens there is that like the they're kind
Speaker 7: of like default ambient politics. It is very conservative, and
Speaker 7: I think in ways that you know, are very easy
Speaker 7: to understand, and that when people tend to talk about this,
Speaker 7: they immediately go like, well, yeah. So like you know,
Speaker 7: like the left is talking about football, it's like you're
Speaker 7: talking about the militarism, which is like yeah, I mean
Speaker 7: they're fucking flying jets over games like there, we're not
Speaker 7: even in wars anymore. In terms of like US ground
Speaker 7: troops deployed, Like why the fuck are their troops showing
Speaker 7: up on the field. There's like the cult of masculinity stuff.
Speaker 7: There's you know, I mean, like there's been some engagement
Speaker 7: now with the racial politics of it with Kaepernick. People
Speaker 7: realize like holy shit, wait, there's been like stuff happening
Speaker 7: here for ages, and you know when you get sort
Speaker 7: of the masculinity politics. But there's I think a lot
Speaker 7: of stuff here that we don't talk about on the
Speaker 7: left in terms of like the class dynamics of this
Speaker 7: and the way that football I'm just like functions in
Speaker 7: a lot of very very weird ways in terms of
Speaker 7: like sucking together this weird pool of a bunch of
Speaker 7: like non working class kids and like, I don't know,
Speaker 7: fucking see if I knew ball, I could I could
Speaker 7: pull an example off top of my head of like
Speaker 7: some some quarterback prospect you'd spent his family had spent
Speaker 7: like two million dollars on like personal trainers for him.
Speaker 4: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I grew up sort of like middle lower middle class
Speaker 4: and like playing football specifically, and I grew up playing
Speaker 4: mostly like soccer and baseball, a little bit of basketball,
Speaker 4: but I sort of like I sort of ended up
Speaker 4: playing football when I was like a teenager because I
Speaker 4: was large, and that's how that works. And like in
Speaker 4: terms of like connecting with people who weren't white and
Speaker 4: of my exact class status or higher like football sow
Speaker 4: it happened. Man, like most of my earliest friendships with
Speaker 4: black kids with Hispanic kids was like all through football,
Speaker 4: and like it is a like very interesting of like
Speaker 4: class and racial melting pot at least at like I
Speaker 4: went to a like pretty big suburban middle and high school,
Speaker 4: but like lots of lots of very different kinds of
Speaker 4: people ended up at my school, and lots of very
Speaker 4: different kinds of people ended up playing football, And like
Speaker 4: you're gonna get a more diverse slice of that student
Speaker 4: population on a football team than you will on the
Speaker 4: fucking yearbook committee or in like school band, class government, whatever.
Speaker 4: All of that came very naturally to me in terms
Speaker 4: of writing this book, where like I've ended up with
Speaker 4: a book that's like quite diverse. But I didn't really
Speaker 4: do that on purpose. I just kind of like, who
Speaker 4: are the kinds of kids who end up playing football?
Speaker 4: And it's like everyone you have like Poorish kids like Grace,
Speaker 4: and then you have like Ritish kids like Ahmed or
Speaker 4: Dre in my book, who like I very much wanted
Speaker 4: to like show that, like maybe one of the reasons
Speaker 4: that Grace is going to end up having a more
Speaker 4: coherent politics is because, like she has friends of different
Speaker 4: backgrounds that she might not if she had not ended
Speaker 4: up playing this this like fucked up, evil, violent game.
Speaker 4: To be clear, Yeah, I mean, I think any football
Speaker 4: fan who is honest with themselves and has his politics
Speaker 4: that are not evil has a very complicated relationship to
Speaker 4: the game for a like variety of reasons. Because it
Speaker 4: will like choose up people's brains and there's that, but
Speaker 4: there's also like implied conservative politics. There's also a big
Speaker 4: factor here is that high school football, even at a
Speaker 4: public school like mine, the religion is all over it, baby.
Speaker 2: Like all over it. Yeah, that's a huge part of it.
Speaker 4: Jason Kirk of The Shutdown Full Cast is working on
Speaker 4: a book about the like history of Christianity and college
Speaker 4: football called Church and State. I'm very fucking excited for
Speaker 4: that book.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, yeah, that sounds awesome.
Speaker 4: But it's just like really interesting political space because of
Speaker 4: how diverse it is and because of how like homogeneous
Speaker 4: a lot of the like religion and.
Speaker 2: Politics of it are, I guess if that makes sense.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And it's soundso weird because like, you know, so
Speaker 7: like I don't know, I refuse to watch college football,
Speaker 7: Like I draw the line there, like I'm not doing this.
Speaker 2: I'm not doing this.
Speaker 7: They can't make me watch like fucking Colorado's State or
Speaker 7: whatever the fuck.
Speaker 2: But like one of the.
Speaker 7: Things that you get in the NFL too, is it's like,
Speaker 7: on the one hand, like you have all of this
Speaker 7: really really conservative shit right, like every fucking everything is God.
Speaker 7: Like every single time someone holds a thing in front
Speaker 7: of a player there there's like at least three lines
Speaker 7: of like all of this is possible because of God.
Speaker 7: And like someone's like it's like that the only place
Speaker 7: you see people regularly saying Christ is King where they're
Speaker 7: not also like holding an ar to like a non
Speaker 7: white person's head, you know. So so that there's all
Speaker 7: of this like really really conservative religious shit. But then
Speaker 7: also there's like a union. Yes, then everyone's in and
Speaker 7: it's like a large like I mean, it's not that powerful,
Speaker 7: and there's there's weirdness there too, because you get to
Speaker 7: see all of the really interesting dynamics of unions that
Speaker 7: you don't really get outside of kind of like I mean,
Speaker 7: like I guess like SAG kind of has this, but
Speaker 7: it's this union in this place where one the owners
Speaker 7: have like an unbelievable amount of control. It's a hideous
Speaker 7: amount of power, and they can turn through people really quickly.
Speaker 7: They have you know, these are some of the richest
Speaker 7: people in the world. And then also secondly there's there's
Speaker 7: this like marketization force that's happening where you know, you
Speaker 7: get to see in miniature the way that capitalism has
Speaker 7: like moved to to sort of deal with unions, deal
Speaker 7: with sort of the class movements of the twentieth century,
Speaker 7: which is that like they're also trying to turn all
Speaker 7: of these kids like into entrepreneurs.
Speaker 3: HM.
Speaker 4: I think in the NFL, I think it's more coherent
Speaker 4: because there is a players association, not a union.
Speaker 7: A players association, although also also shout out shout outs
Speaker 7: to the PA for backing are for backing a unionization
Speaker 7: attempt here.
Speaker 2: Thanks for that.
Speaker 7: I don't know if it mattered, but that's a lot
Speaker 7: to me.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Also, like sports players, unions are fascinating because these
Speaker 4: are people who are part of a union who are
Speaker 4: like at least some of them millionaires. So it's yep,
Speaker 4: a very interesting sort of like class dynamic happening there.
Speaker 4: But like call it like the college game right now
Speaker 4: is just charn Oldhouse. I mean, like it is better
Speaker 4: now that players are being paid like unambiguous good that
Speaker 4: players can profit off of their name, image and likeness.
Speaker 4: But again it makes like I remember, like I'm not
Speaker 4: on Twitter much anymore, but like in the like early
Speaker 4: Elon days, you started getting Twitter ads and these were
Speaker 4: sixteen seventeen year old high school football players.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The post is like huddle highlights and like a like
Speaker 4: quick recruiting profile of like hey, class of twenty twenty
Speaker 4: seven defensive back wide receiver out of Palo Alto, and
Speaker 4: just like blasting that onto like Twitter timelines everywhere, just
Speaker 4: like please God, somebody see my Like, somebody see these
Speaker 4: fucking huddle highlights. The feudalism stage of high school and
Speaker 4: college ball has like ended, and now we are in
Speaker 4: the no regulations baby, just like completely unfettered capitalism stage.
Speaker 7: Can we explain like just how like very briefly, people
Speaker 7: who do not know any football like what name, image
Speaker 7: likeness is and how this is different from like a
Speaker 7: system that would be normal, which is you pay the players.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so for like seventy years, the precedent with college
Speaker 4: football in the United States of America is that all
Speaker 4: these players are amateurs and they cannot be compensated in
Speaker 4: any way. They cannot profit off of their name, image likeness,
Speaker 4: so that means that they can't like sell autographs. The
Speaker 4: school isn't going to sell jerseys that have their name
Speaker 4: on them. You are meant to make exactly zero dollars
Speaker 4: from your time as a amateur college athlete. And this
Speaker 4: was the ironclad system for like seventy years, and then
Speaker 4: it kind of got like destroyed overnight. Yeah, when the
Speaker 4: NCAA finally legalizes players profiting off of their name, image,
Speaker 4: and likeness, so that means that they could sign like
Speaker 4: endorsement deals. And when this was first made a thing
Speaker 4: in twenty twenty one, it mostly manifested in like the
Speaker 4: Coldest Crawford for the Nebraska football team is filming a
Speaker 4: ad for a local air conditioning company because his name
Speaker 4: is the Coldest. And it was sort of like very
Speaker 4: like quaint and cute at first, but then nil collectives
Speaker 4: got going, which are these I don't even know how
Speaker 4: to how to like god described collective is these are
Speaker 4: like investment groups that operate independently of universities that pool
Speaker 4: resources and then pay players for like extremely scant public appearances,
Speaker 4: so that they can say that they're just profiting off
Speaker 4: of name, image and likeness, but in reality they exist
Speaker 4: as a way to pay college football players without paying
Speaker 4: them via schools. Now, there is the house settlement happening
Speaker 4: right now, which colleges will soon be able to probably
Speaker 4: maybe God who knows, will soon be able to directly
Speaker 4: pay college athletes a certain amount of money. Lord knows
Speaker 4: where that's going. Like this is all changing at like
Speaker 4: lightnings at like yeah, yeah, so like we have just
Speaker 4: straight up gone from like nobody gets paid for anything
Speaker 4: to like we are in fucking like gilded age robber
Speaker 4: bear and shit where like yeah, because none of this
Speaker 4: shit is regulated schools or an aisle. Collectives will go
Speaker 4: back on agreements and everything's negotiated every year. They're like
Speaker 4: like it's it's a fucking mess. Yeah in the college
Speaker 4: game right now. So I mean all of that makes
Speaker 4: the like NFL having a kind of shitty union look
Speaker 4: a lot better.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, IM just thinking about the kind of like
Speaker 7: this is my way of kind of bringing it back
Speaker 7: to transgender but like one of the things that I've
Speaker 7: been thinking about a lot in terms of I mean
Speaker 7: just like what I do, right, and but also just
Speaker 7: like the way that capitalism has been moving in the
Speaker 7: last like few decades is it's increasingly about you know
Speaker 7: because like okay, so, like capitalism's fundamental base has always
Speaker 7: been like you sell your labor, m right, but now
Speaker 7: it's it's it's been increasing your shows for me into
Speaker 7: like you're selling like the image of yourself. You're selling
Speaker 7: your identity, You're selling like yeah, you know, you're selling
Speaker 7: your personality. You're selling as much of like and this
Speaker 7: is this is what name image likeness is.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 7: It's like, we're not gonna pay you for like your labor,
Speaker 7: which is like you playing football. We're gonna pay you
Speaker 7: for like this nebulous image of yourself. So you get
Speaker 7: all these people who like are are you know, you're
Speaker 7: forced to turn all of yourself into an object for consumption,
Speaker 7: and like I think that's the thing with like fucking
Speaker 7: I don't know, That's what I'm doing on this show
Speaker 7: right to a large extent, like I am like the
Speaker 7: Asian transgender and like, yeah, obviously, like all of this
Speaker 7: is like research, but it's also you know, this is
Speaker 7: what like brand and identity is, and this has had
Speaker 7: these like seismic impacts on the entire global economy. Like
Speaker 7: I've talked about this an episode on when I talked
Speaker 7: about Temu, but like Tamu is literally the product of
Speaker 7: this happening with Chinese farmers. We're like Chinese farmers, We're
Speaker 7: doing this like farm social media thing and so almost
Speaker 7: like holy shit, what if we liked become these things
Speaker 7: where they were selling food but they were also just
Speaker 7: selling that like the identity brand of like themselves as farmers,
Speaker 7: And Timu was like, well a PDD, which is the
Speaker 7: Chinese company, was like what if we just brought all
Speaker 7: of these things together in one spot so you could
Speaker 7: just do directed like consumer sales through it. And now
Speaker 7: that's like the entire fucking economy is just this morass
Speaker 7: of like selling every single part of yourself and I
Speaker 7: don't know, like I'm wondering how much of yourself did
Speaker 7: you have to do you have to like leave in
Speaker 7: a book like this, and how much of it can
Speaker 7: you like kind of like keep away from the market.
Speaker 4: Oh boy, So like you're good. Yeah, Oh gosh, everything
Speaker 4: is uh, everything is personal brands.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 4: You know, there's a lot of pressure as an author
Speaker 4: to use all your social media is in a very
Speaker 4: particular way. You're supposed to. You're you're supposed to make
Speaker 4: your cute little canva graphics and like talking about your
Speaker 4: characters and engage with like prompt posts on Instagram and
Speaker 4: you know whatever social media du jore And like, my
Speaker 4: personal experience is a little irregular because I do have
Speaker 4: some amount of like sports, Twitter, niche micro celebrity. I'm posting,
Speaker 4: so like I'm not out here making promotional.
Speaker 2: Tiktoks for one of the boys.
Speaker 4: That was like something that was very important to me.
Speaker 4: Was like, oh I'm not going to be doing that,
Speaker 4: Thank god.
Speaker 1: That shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The way that authors have to promote themselves and turn
Speaker 4: themselves into brands is like a whole other can of
Speaker 4: worms that like sucks so like, Thankfully, I think I've
Speaker 4: managed to avoid the most alienation uh like forms of that.
Speaker 4: But I did have a few not too long ago,
Speaker 4: very confidently state that this book was loosely based on
Speaker 4: my life story, which was news to me. I was like, word,
Speaker 4: I didn't know that. So, like, I think, especially if
Speaker 4: you write fiction as a person of any marginalized identity
Speaker 4: if you're if you're black, if you're gay, if you're trans, whatever,
Speaker 4: people are going to assume that you're writing like auto fiction.
Speaker 4: Because I think a lot of people react to women's
Speaker 4: fiction this way, because I think a lot of people
Speaker 4: subconsciously have a hard time believing that like, women have
Speaker 4: interior lives and can like imagine things, you know, Like,
Speaker 4: I think a lot of people assume that authors are
Speaker 4: always writing about themselves and writing about the people in
Speaker 4: their lives, and uh, I mean, I'm writing about experiences
Speaker 4: that I have had similar ones too, but like, nah, dog,
Speaker 4: that is not how this works.
Speaker 7: Yeah, there's a really great essay about this by a
Speaker 7: friend of min named Rosemary Hoe, who's absolutely brilliant writer,
Speaker 7: who wrote about the she she's writing about Zady Smith,
Speaker 7: and one of the things that she talks about is
Speaker 7: like the way that people just assume that Zadi that
Speaker 7: like Zadie Smith's politics are just like didactically coming out
Speaker 7: of the mouth of a character, and like, well, no,
Speaker 7: that's not how this shit works, Like yeah.
Speaker 4: It is. Uh, it's frustrating, and I think like a
Speaker 4: lot of authors have their own experiences with this, so
Speaker 4: uh yeah, yeah, I mean I like, you have to
Speaker 4: turn yourself into some kind of brand. That's why I'm
Speaker 4: going on podcasts, you know, So that's all, uh you know,
Speaker 4: that's fun, but uh, I'm trying not to like, you know,
Speaker 4: completely give myself over to the fucking torment nexus.
Speaker 7: Yeah, ye, you know, And there's like, I don't know,
Speaker 7: this is also just like this is a way you
Speaker 7: can just completely lose your mind. I don't know if
Speaker 7: I've ever actually talked about this on this show. Weirdly,
Speaker 7: one of the people whose career trajectory is the most
Speaker 7: similar to Minus is Asian American writer named Lesley Yang,
Speaker 7: who was like this guy who got brought in to
Speaker 7: write about like I think it was Columbine. It's like
Speaker 7: some mass shooting that was like a Korean kid did
Speaker 7: his friends were like, hey, you're Asian, right about this?
Speaker 6: Oh god?
Speaker 7: And he you know, for a bit he was like
Speaker 7: he was like duh, Like he was like he was
Speaker 7: like the guy who was like the big like Asian American,
Speaker 7: like this is like the literary thinker. He was like
Speaker 7: interviewing Aaron Schwortz. He was doing like profiles of a
Speaker 7: bunch of like interesting people, and then he just became
Speaker 7: this like incredibly boring, bog standard reactionary and he became
Speaker 7: one of these A very common kind of person who
Speaker 7: you experience on the right is like someone who's experienced
Speaker 7: who's like understanding of race comes from like watching sports
Speaker 7: where they're like there are black players in basketball and
Speaker 7: there's a bunch of them, and because of that, this
Speaker 7: means that like actually black people are like overrepresented and
Speaker 7: like as a class, they're like privilege or whatever the
Speaker 7: fuck because there's just like a bunch of black basketball
Speaker 7: players and I don't know, I think it's like there's
Speaker 7: like a really interesting intersection here of like the way
Speaker 7: that people understand politics as just like politics are just
Speaker 7: like the thing that I see on my screen when
Speaker 7: I'm watching football, and how we have to sort of
Speaker 7: like just deal with that shit and deal with the
Speaker 7: sort of micro identity formation that is real but also
Speaker 7: isn't like a defiction of what the world is.
Speaker 8: M yeah.
Speaker 7: So one of the interesting things in this book is
Speaker 7: that like the right wing media, like right wing football
Speaker 7: media kinda isn't in it that much really, which I
Speaker 7: think is fascinating And I wonder part of how much
Speaker 7: of this is just like this was kind of a
Speaker 7: book that was originally being written before like Aaron Rodgers
Speaker 7: was going up Pat McAfee show in front of like
Speaker 7: half a million people every single day and like screaming
Speaker 7: about trans people.
Speaker 4: M So, this book has excerpts of like articles and
Speaker 4: outside media and like social media, et cetera. Originally it
Speaker 4: had like a lot more. I had to cut a
Speaker 4: lot in order to make this book like legible as
Speaker 4: a book. This book is already like pushing the edges
Speaker 4: of what you could really communicate in ya in terms
Speaker 4: of like I have a lot of characters, I have
Speaker 4: a lot of shit going on, So like part of
Speaker 4: it is just that, like I had to like you know,
Speaker 4: trim et cetera. But like, yeah, originally it had a
Speaker 4: lot more of that stuff, and there were like interstitial
Speaker 4: snippets from a fictional sort of like football podcaster guy
Speaker 4: who is like Pat McAfee and all of the like
Speaker 4: bar stool former athlete podcasters, Yeah, in a blender, and
Speaker 4: he like he was this like really pathetic former like
Speaker 4: special team or linebacker who just like keeps reliving the
Speaker 4: fucking glory days.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Eventually I just had to like refocus and like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: bring that conflict closer to home with like school administration's
Speaker 4: kind of shitty, and like there are plenty of dudes
Speaker 4: on the football team who also suck. So I kind
Speaker 4: of like left it in via some like shitty tweets
Speaker 4: that you see, or you get a lot of it,
Speaker 4: like indirectly you can imagine what is happening on the
Speaker 4: fucking Pat McAfee show.
Speaker 2: Oh my fucking god.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But like also part of it is what you
Speaker 4: said that the weird timeline of publishing means that I
Speaker 4: started writing this book in February twenty twenty one, wrote
Speaker 4: the majority in twenty twenty two, and edit it in
Speaker 4: twenty three and twenty four, and like kind of this
Speaker 4: like very organized anti trans reaction was not as prevalent
Speaker 4: in twenty twenty one at all like I kind of
Speaker 4: had to like track it as it started to like
Speaker 4: really like form up a drill time. This is not
Speaker 4: the world that I thought I was gonna write my
Speaker 4: stupid little football book. Yeah, and and like have it
Speaker 4: emerge into a lot of people are say that this
Speaker 4: book is very timely, and I'm like, dog, this is
Speaker 4: a Biden administration for him through.
Speaker 7: So one final ball question on behalf of my beloved
Speaker 7: and a curse Seattle Seahawks. Okay, so think about Sam Darnold,
Speaker 7: who's now our quarterback after they traded my beloved Gito
Speaker 7: Smith for a fucking third round pick.
Speaker 2: Brother.
Speaker 7: Okay, so, like, is the thing that's going to happen
Speaker 7: this season not just by week five? Abe Lucas goes
Speaker 7: down for the twelve million time whatever child they dragged
Speaker 7: out of a kindergarten to try to block the deal,
Speaker 7: one hundred gets liquifight in ten milli seconds to Sam
Speaker 7: Darnold just like start seeing the ghosts of men who
Speaker 7: haven't been born yet, Like, isn't this exactly? Is this
Speaker 7: just what's gonna happen? Why why did they build this
Speaker 7: team like this?
Speaker 4: Can I attempt to give you a small amount of
Speaker 4: Seattle Seahawks optimism.
Speaker 7: I thought they were gonna would have lived in games
Speaker 7: last season.
Speaker 4: They should have. So we lost to the Flame Giants.
Speaker 4: So I I really like some of what the Seahawks did.
Speaker 4: They drafted a lot of players that I really like.
Speaker 4: It's true they they finally took a interior offensive line
Speaker 4: player in the first round. Congratulations, Uh yay. Gray's Abel
Speaker 4: is a good player. He's also a maga aed shit,
Speaker 4: which is what you want on your offensive line. No,
Speaker 4: that's what you want on your offense. It's true, it's true.
Speaker 4: But also like, god fucking damn it. So you got
Speaker 4: Gray's Abel. You got Jalen Milroe, who Jalen isn't good
Speaker 4: at football right now, but a sports media friend named
Speaker 4: Derek Klassen put it that he's He's the kind of
Speaker 4: player you want to bet on and then be wrong about,
Speaker 4: just just because he's fun, because he's a like legit,
Speaker 4: actual like special athlete special with the ball in his hand.
Speaker 2: He's cool.
Speaker 4: I really like Jaylen mil Roe. But you also drafted
Speaker 4: later on. You took Tory Horden and Ricky White, who
Speaker 4: are two of my favorite sort of like small school
Speaker 4: wide receivers in the draft. Hell, you took Damien Martinez,
Speaker 4: who is a running back who I think could end
Speaker 4: up being a lot better than someone who's drafted in
Speaker 4: the seventh round would indicate. And also you took a
Speaker 4: full back. You took Robbie Oates. That's great. His name
Speaker 4: is a Robbie Oates.
Speaker 7: A great name, great name, old name, old name team.
Speaker 4: He is a He's like the squarest football player I've
Speaker 4: ever seen. Love love Robbie Oates. However, the Sam Donald
Speaker 4: situation is tough.
Speaker 3: It's tough.
Speaker 4: I uh, I have a hard time seeing it happen.
Speaker 7: He would literally if you had put it behind last
Speaker 7: year Seahawks offensive line, he literally would have died by
Speaker 7: about week eight, like you just like straight up would
Speaker 7: have died on the field.
Speaker 2: Oh god.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And like it's a bit better this year because
Speaker 4: you have friends able, but you still have Abe Lucas.
Speaker 7: You know, you still have a We'll have a Lucas
Speaker 7: for three weeks and then we won't have Abe Lucas
Speaker 7: and then.
Speaker 4: And also like Sam Donald was in like the perfect
Speaker 4: spot for him, and now he's going to be throwing
Speaker 4: the ball too. I mean, you know you got Cooper Cup.
Speaker 4: You got, you know, for four weeks, got JSN, but
Speaker 4: you also have Marcus valdezk is he gonna is he
Speaker 4: gonna get load bearing snaps?
Speaker 7: Like?
Speaker 4: Is that really? Is that really what you want?
Speaker 7: My cope last year was that was that JSN, that
Speaker 7: Cas and Lockett was the most underrated receiver trio in
Speaker 7: the league.
Speaker 6: Yep.
Speaker 7: And this year it's like, all right, we get six
Speaker 7: games a Cooper Cup and then we get fifth rounders.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: God, it's it's tough out here.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I don't expect Sam Darnold to work here, just like
Speaker 4: straight up, Like I have been a Sam Donald truther
Speaker 4: for years, but it is the classic thing of like
Speaker 4: I think Sam Donald's better than most people think, and
Speaker 4: then a lot of people are like one hundred and
Speaker 4: thirty million dollars Sam Donald, and it's like what, hold on,
Speaker 4: hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. I didn't
Speaker 4: think he was that good. I didn't think he was
Speaker 4: traded Gino Smith good.
Speaker 7: No, oh god, So that's unfortunate. Yeah, so this this that,
Speaker 7: this has been the football section of this of this podcast. Yeah, Sotoria,
Speaker 7: do you have anything else that you want to say
Speaker 7: before we head out? And where should people buy your
Speaker 7: book from?
Speaker 4: Not Amazon on that's like really all I have to
Speaker 4: say about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one of.
Speaker 4: The boys, my name is Victoria Zeller, and you just
Speaker 4: buy that from bookshop, buy it from your local indie.
Speaker 4: You can buy it from Barnes and Noble because we
Speaker 4: don't hate them as much as we hate Amazon. But
Speaker 4: like I would say, buy it from your local indie
Speaker 4: bookstore is like ideal for me. I make the same
Speaker 4: amount of money wherever you buy it, so it doesn't matter.
Speaker 4: But if you want to sign copy, you can also
Speaker 4: order it from my home bookstore, So there's that.
Speaker 3: Hell.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but yeah, my website is a Victoria dot monster
Speaker 4: and all my links are there.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Okay, I realized I had an actual final question that
Speaker 7: I wanted to ask it I forgot to do before
Speaker 7: this the fucking we started the intro, so I apologize.
Speaker 7: So the odds here are much much higher than they
Speaker 7: are in most places that there's going to be some
Speaker 7: queer kids who fucking play ball to some extent listening
Speaker 7: to it, And I wanted to I'm throwing something from
Speaker 7: your book at you, which is I know, to the
Speaker 7: what did you say it to the kiddos who are
Speaker 7: going through it.
Speaker 4: This is so mean. Okay, Okay, I'm going to be
Speaker 4: real with you right now. Guys, do what's best for you. Yeah,
Speaker 4: fight if you have it in you to fight, But like,
Speaker 4: you got to be a kid first and foremost, and
Speaker 4: like trans kids, queer kids deserve the chance to be
Speaker 4: fucking kids. They deserve the chance to make mistakes and
Speaker 4: listen to music too loudly in their friends shitty car,
Speaker 4: and they deserve to play sports if that's what they
Speaker 4: want to do. I think in a lot of ways,
Speaker 4: my book is about how we ask teenagers to be
Speaker 4: braver than they should be, and I think that's bullshit.
Speaker 4: So I'm not going to put it on You have
Speaker 4: as much fun as you can, like ball if you can,
Speaker 4: but do but makes you happy and when and what
Speaker 4: feels safe to you is like really all I've got, Like,
Speaker 4: you know, just have fun while you're able to as
Speaker 4: a child is like yeah.
Speaker 7: No, And it's like, yeah, it's not if you are
Speaker 7: like a little ass kid A I have so sorry
Speaker 7: for how much U s We're on the show. Be like,
Speaker 7: it is not up to you right now to save
Speaker 7: the world. That is the job of fucking everyone else
Speaker 7: who listens to the show. Like, if you want there
Speaker 7: to be more queer athletes, if you want trans kids
Speaker 7: to be able to be kids, that shit's on you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all of the rest of you who listen to
Speaker 2: the show, if you are.
Speaker 7: Also like the fucking one bazillion trans people listen to
Speaker 7: the show, this is like a bit less on you
Speaker 7: than it is on fucking everyone else. But yeah, but
Speaker 7: the best time do I started organizing was like five
Speaker 7: years ago. The second best time is right now, and
Speaker 7: the best time after that is tomorrow. So go fucking
Speaker 7: build a world where trans kids can be kids and
Speaker 7: fall out.
Speaker 4: Let kids like me hoop, let them hoop, let them
Speaker 4: hit dingers, let them ball.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, my people need rings.
Speaker 4: My people need titles, they need trophies, they need championships.
Speaker 9: Hello, and welcome to It could happen here today. We
Speaker 9: are talking about white genocide. And when I think of genocide,
Speaker 9: there is only one name that comes to mind, and
Speaker 9: it's Molly Congo.
Speaker 2: Molly, Welcome.
Speaker 9: I just I wanted you to be here as we
Speaker 9: talked about the genocide of the white race.
Speaker 10: I mean, who better to talk about it than two
Speaker 10: pasty fellas like us.
Speaker 9: M hmm, yeah, yeah, I'm sure we're like soon for
Speaker 9: the chopping block here, Molly, what's happening?
Speaker 2: Why are we Why?
Speaker 9: Well, I will explain a little bit of what's happening,
Speaker 9: and then you can tell me how on earth we
Speaker 9: got here. The United States terminated its refugee admissions program
Speaker 9: in January of this year, right when Donald Trump became
Speaker 9: the president and signed a time of executive orders. So
Speaker 9: since then, the United States has not admitted any refugees.
Speaker 9: In February, it also stopped. The United States terminated its
Speaker 9: cooperative agreement with refugee resettlement agencies, which meant that even
Speaker 9: refugees who had arrived weren't getting the assistance that they
Speaker 9: previously got. However, on the twelfth of May, the United
Speaker 9: States have admitted fifty nine Africana refugees from South Africa,
Speaker 9: and concurrently, Donald Trump told the press that what's happening
Speaker 9: was a genocide of the white people. He said it
Speaker 9: wasn't because they were white. He said there was black people.
Speaker 9: He would do the same thing. I mean, there are
Speaker 9: several genocides impacting black people right now, and they are
Speaker 9: not getting refugee admissions to the United States. Apparently these
Speaker 9: people are being genocided. So Molly, can you explain what's
Speaker 9: going on here? How the white genocide happened?
Speaker 10: Sure, I mean, the short answer to that question is,
Speaker 10: it is not happening. It is not real. It is
Speaker 10: not a thing that is happening or in my opinion,
Speaker 10: really could meaningfully happen under the conditions that they're talking about.
Speaker 10: So again, like you said, they have terminated all refugee
Speaker 10: resettlement programs. So people coming from active war zones, active
Speaker 10: ongoing genocides, people fleeing political persecution all over the world.
Speaker 10: They don't deserve our help. They don't need our help anymore. Right,
Speaker 10: But these people, these people from South Africa are uniquely
Speaker 10: experiencing the worst thing that could happen to a person,
Speaker 10: I guess, which is white genocide. So white genocide, I
Speaker 10: think is often sort of used interchangeably with great replacement theory.
Speaker 10: So the white genocide conspiracy theory and the great replacement theory,
Speaker 10: I think they're hand in hand. They're very similar, there's
Speaker 10: a lot of overlap, and they're used interchange but white
Speaker 10: genocide is much more specific and it's more recent iteration
Speaker 10: on the theme. It comes from a mid nineties book
Speaker 10: written in prison by a neo Nazi terrorist named David Lane.
Speaker 10: David Lane notably coined the fourteen words we know, you know,
Speaker 10: the fourteen we don't need to say. He had a
Speaker 10: lot of anxiety that if we don't do something, white
Speaker 10: people will become extinct, will be pushed out of existence
Speaker 10: by immigrants who are out breeding us. You know, there's
Speaker 10: this sort of concurrent belief that pornography, which is, you know,
Speaker 10: in their minds, something that is a Jewish tool of
Speaker 10: oppression of the white race. That is, you know, it's
Speaker 10: causing us to do interbreeding, it's deluding our bloodlines. So
Speaker 10: you know, all of these things together are going to
Speaker 10: push white people out of existence, which again not happening,
Speaker 10: not true, not a real thing that can happen, but
Speaker 10: it's something they're very anxious about. But when you spend
Speaker 10: a lot of time talking about how white people are
Speaker 10: being pushed out of existence, you've got to be able
Speaker 10: to point to something. You have to point to a
Speaker 10: place where a white person has been meaningfully harmed, and
Speaker 10: they can't really do that to the talking point that
Speaker 10: they fall back on most often when you're talking about
Speaker 10: white genocide, you know, you're really wringing your hands about this,
Speaker 10: and you have to be able to point to something.
Speaker 10: They point to the South African farm murders. Is this
Speaker 10: idea that white farmers in South Africa are being targeted
Speaker 10: for murder and mass that is this massive ongoing campaign
Speaker 10: of violence, which again is not happening and is not true.
Speaker 10: There is a more violent crime in the country of
Speaker 10: South Africa than in other similarly positioned nations. They do
Speaker 10: have a little bit more violent crime than we do here,
Speaker 10: for instance, But if you break down the numbers and
Speaker 10: they have they have conducted a multi year study of this,
Speaker 10: you know, hypothetical phenomenon. White farmers are not being targeted
Speaker 10: for murder. They're not being murdered in larger numbers than
Speaker 10: any other demographic. It's just not a thing that's happened.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I know, it's almost like a laughable claim or like,
Speaker 9: except that it's also terribly sad when like Israel, it's
Speaker 9: just kind of Babe ruthing a genocide in Garza. Now
Speaker 9: they're not even trying to pretend anymore. They're like, no,
Speaker 9: we're going to kill everyone by starving them. That's what
Speaker 9: we would like to do. And obviously those people cannot
Speaker 9: enter the United States. It's refugees, but these folks from
Speaker 9: South Africa can. How did it go from any Nazi
Speaker 9: in prison to the brain of the President of the
Speaker 9: United States.
Speaker 10: I mean that idea sort of filtered into American right
Speaker 10: wing think space over the last I guess thirty years
Speaker 10: since Lane wrote that manifesto from prison, slowly and through
Speaker 10: multiple origin points. But I have argued repeatedly over the
Speaker 10: last several months that we can point to you exactly
Speaker 10: the moment that Donald Trump heard about this. There is
Speaker 10: a specific moment in time in August of twenty eighteen
Speaker 10: when Donald Trump first found out the plight of the
Speaker 10: white South African and I have the date somewhere in
Speaker 10: my notes, but it was it was one evening in
Speaker 10: August of twenty eighteen when he was watching Tucker Carlson Shocking.
Speaker 10: He was watching an episode of Tucker's show back when
Speaker 10: it was still on TV, and he had some policy
Speaker 10: analysts from the Heritage Foundation on to talk about this,
Speaker 10: this terrible thing that's happening. And about forty five minutes
Speaker 10: after that segment aired, Donald Trump tweeted the word Africa
Speaker 10: for the first time. He has tweeted thousands and thousands
Speaker 10: and thousands of times about a lot about Robert Pattinson's
Speaker 10: relationship with Kristen Stewart, you know, things about diet coke,
Speaker 10: things about vaccines.
Speaker 7: He's tweeted a lot of things.
Speaker 10: But he tweeted about Africa for the first time forty
Speaker 10: five minutes after the segment on Tucker Carlson, and he
Speaker 10: had bought into this idea that these people are being
Speaker 10: uniquely persecuted.
Speaker 6: God.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Carlson has mainstreamed a lot of these like white
Speaker 9: nationalists talking points, but yeah, this one. And you have
Speaker 9: a really good series on this on your show, right,
Speaker 9: Like if people want to people want to learn more
Speaker 9: about the plight of the Africana, you can explain that
Speaker 9: over several hours.
Speaker 10: Yes, I spent three months sort of tracing this story
Speaker 10: in hainstaking detail. If you're interested in checking that out
Speaker 10: over on We'd Little Guys.
Speaker 2: And you should. It's great.
Speaker 9: It's great, good podcast. I highly recommend. So, like we've
Speaker 9: seen this thing gradually gained momentum, I guess. And then
Speaker 9: at some point obviously someone got into Trump's here in
Speaker 9: the last month and he made an executive order right.
Speaker 2: He shared the secret Order.
Speaker 9: I'm just going to read from it now, quote refugee
Speaker 9: resettlement and other humanitarian considerations. The Secretary of State and
Speaker 9: the Secretary of Homeland Security shall take appropriate steps consistent
Speaker 9: with law to prioritize yeah, law, yea, we're gonna get
Speaker 9: to that, to prioritize humanitarian relief, including a mission and
Speaker 9: resettlement through the United States refuge Admissions Program for Africanas
Speaker 9: in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.
Speaker 9: Such plan should be submitted to the President through the
Speaker 9: Assistant to the President and Homeland Security Advisor.
Speaker 2: So like he's.
Speaker 9: Asking them to develop a plan basically for resettling these
Speaker 9: white South Africans in the United States, right.
Speaker 10: Right, So when he says that it's not about race, now,
Speaker 10: when he's pushed on that now and he says, oh,
Speaker 10: it's not about race, it's not because they're white. They
Speaker 10: word Afrikaaners appears in the executive order, and that doesn't
Speaker 10: just mean South. That's not a demographic term for people
Speaker 10: from South Africa. It is a racial term for the
Speaker 10: descendants of Dutch settlers. Those people are white.
Speaker 9: Yeah, No, Like by definition, right, they are white South Africans.
Speaker 9: They are like therefore definitionly the group that benefited from
Speaker 9: the apartheid era very much.
Speaker 7: So.
Speaker 9: As if this wasn't clear enough, Christopher Landau appeared at
Speaker 9: a press conference meeting these refugees wearing an orange white
Speaker 9: and blue tie. It's quite a unique tie. I actually
Speaker 9: googled orange white and blue. I couldn't find one for
Speaker 9: people who are not familiar. That is the part idea
Speaker 9: of flag of the Republic of South Africa.
Speaker 10: That is a deep cut. The decision to use that
Speaker 10: particular color scheme when you're greeting these bore refugees is
Speaker 10: very intentional and very odd.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's got to be a choice, right, Like, no
Speaker 9: one has a striped orange white and navy blue tie
Speaker 9: like lying around.
Speaker 10: And the sort of dedication to reviving that as a
Speaker 10: symbol is not without precedent. So with Dylan Rufe, the
Speaker 10: Charleston church murderer, had on patches, he had the flag
Speaker 10: of Rhodesia. Obviously they love Rhodesia. Yeah, but he had
Speaker 10: the apartheid era orange white and blue South African flag
Speaker 10: and that was strange and unique enough as a symbol
Speaker 10: that an American would dig up and identify with yes.
Speaker 10: So the South African press noted it at the time
Speaker 10: of the Charleston church shooting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was not in the mainstream.
Speaker 10: That is a troubling sartorial trie.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, it's it is worrying, like there's yes, like
Speaker 9: you says, there's a line from the from the africaas
Speaker 9: through Dylan Roof to this horrific ideology. Right, do you
Speaker 9: know what what probably doesn't have a direct line to
Speaker 9: a part We can't be sure of that, I guess,
Speaker 9: but hopefully hopefully that these products and services do not
Speaker 9: have a direct through line from apartheid.
Speaker 10: Well, probably it's not the Washington State patrol again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, we're back. Hopefully that was something nice.
Speaker 9: I want to talk a little bit about the US
Speaker 9: Refugee of Missions program. So I think people sometimes misunderstand
Speaker 9: the program, what it means, where it comes from, who
Speaker 9: it's for. So to begin with, like, I want to
Speaker 9: distinguish between asylum seekers and refugees because I think in
Speaker 9: like the popular lexicon, these two words are used interchangeably.
Speaker 9: A refugee is outside of the United States and makes
Speaker 9: an application through the US Refugee Admissions Program, and that
Speaker 9: application is processed and approved or rejected or delayed or
Speaker 9: left for years and years and years while they are
Speaker 9: outside the United States. An asylum seeker is someone who
Speaker 9: is either inside the United States or presenting at the
Speaker 9: border of the United States and requesting asylum. So they're
Speaker 9: different categories.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 9: Generally, to be a refugee, one has to register with
Speaker 9: the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, and thus one
Speaker 9: has to have fled one's home country. It's somewhat notable
Speaker 9: that this flight came from Johannesburg, right, Like these people
Speaker 9: were in South Africa.
Speaker 10: Well, apparently DHS set up office space in Pretoria and
Speaker 10: they were conducted these interviews in Pretoria.
Speaker 9: Right, which again is unusual. Right, So you have to
Speaker 9: normally go to a resettlement support center.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 9: And I want to talk about the process of background
Speaker 9: checks in a minute, because surprise surprises didn't happen here,
Speaker 9: at least not as far as I'm aware. If it did,
Speaker 9: it to the most expedited version of this process that
Speaker 9: we've ever seen. So these refugees have been admitted as
Speaker 9: P one refugees, and people talk about P one like
Speaker 9: it's a visa category. It's not actually it's a priority category.
Speaker 9: There are four priority categories for people getting refugee visas.
Speaker 9: P one cases, the highest priority, are normally referred by embassies,
Speaker 9: the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, or non governmental organizations.
Speaker 9: If people have heard of this at all, it's probably
Speaker 9: with reference to Afghan folks who worked with the United
Speaker 9: States who are not being omitted in the United States
Speaker 9: refuge emission program right now. Some of them are stuck
Speaker 9: in third countries, even at airports if they don't have
Speaker 9: a visa for that third country, right, waiting to work out,
Speaker 9: like what the US is going to do this time
Speaker 9: after lying to them for decades and letting them down again.
Speaker 10: And unlike these realists state agents from Johannesburg, they can't
Speaker 10: just go back home.
Speaker 9: Yeah, right, like that they actually have fear of persecution
Speaker 9: if they do, which is not the case for the
Speaker 9: South African folks. P two are people like there are
Speaker 9: special groups designated for humanitarian concern like some congal these
Speaker 9: people living in Rwanda in the past, and Bermese groups
Speaker 9: living in Thailand have been P two. P three are
Speaker 9: family reunification cases, so you can you know if one
Speaker 9: person has refugee status come to the United States so
Speaker 9: they can bring the rest of their family. And then
Speaker 9: P four are people who have sponsors to something called
Speaker 9: the Welcome Core. Familiar with a Welcome Core, Molly, I
Speaker 9: am not.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 9: It sounds like the coolest brand to the military, you know,
Speaker 9: like like you've got the Marines and then the Welcome
Speaker 9: Core next door. The Welcome Core was set up in
Speaker 9: twenty twenty three by the Biden administration to allow five
Speaker 9: US citizens I think a minimum of five to get
Speaker 9: together to sponsor someone for refuge admission for the United
Speaker 9: States and basically take responsibility for their house seeing and
Speaker 9: for like reorienting them in the US community, right, getting
Speaker 9: their kids enrolled in school, helping them find a job,
Speaker 9: all that kind of stuff. It was a cool program.
Speaker 9: It lasted less than two years. That Donald Trump rolled
Speaker 9: that up in January of twenty twenty five, so we
Speaker 9: don't really have P four cases anymore. So all admissions
Speaker 9: were holding in January and February, the government, as I said,
Speaker 9: cut all cooperative agreements with resettlement agencies. So let's talk
Speaker 9: about what the normal process looks like for refugees. Generally,
Speaker 9: they require several years of background checks and interviews. For many,
Speaker 9: it's not possible in their countries. For most right, for instance,
Speaker 9: there is not a resettlement support center in Afghanistan, so
Speaker 9: people have to leave. That's how you see them in
Speaker 9: Pakistan right. What you're seeing now actually is Afghan people
Speaker 9: who are in Pakistan have timed out on their visas
Speaker 9: in Pakistan, so they're now facing like immigration enforcement there
Speaker 9: because they haven't been able to get resettled in the
Speaker 9: US before their Pakistan visa expires. They go through medical
Speaker 9: and biometric checks. There are at least two interviews. There
Speaker 9: are security checks. When they do their first interview, they
Speaker 9: have to give in things like their identifying documents, work history,
Speaker 9: declare of their family relationships, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 9: Then they have an interview with US Citizenship and Immigration
Speaker 9: Service after that. Then if they are admitted, they take
Speaker 9: cultural orientation classes before traveling. If that's when you learn
Speaker 9: how to be an American. I don't know what involves,
Speaker 9: but they have to take those before they come, and
Speaker 9: then the US government works with the iom for travel right,
Speaker 9: and that travel is funded through a zero interest loan
Speaker 9: to the refugee. So like in every other case, you
Speaker 9: pay for your flight. You have to pay it back
Speaker 9: starting six months when you get to the United States.
Speaker 9: That has not been the case for our Africana refugee friends,
Speaker 9: right that it appears that the United States government chartered
Speaker 9: a flight on their behalf. Once the refugees arrive, they
Speaker 9: are referred to a resettlement agency. Some of the names
Speaker 9: people might be familiar with, like Highest their Hebrew Immigrant
Speaker 9: Aid Society, who have literally been resettling refugees since the
Speaker 9: refugee in asylum see GA category was created right as
Speaker 9: a response to the Holocaust. Maybe IRC is another one
Speaker 9: people are familiar with.
Speaker 10: Which, interestingly, Hyas was the target of ire of a
Speaker 10: great replacement theory motivated mass shooter here in America. Yesbert
Speaker 10: Robert Bauers posted a lot about Hyas in the days
Speaker 10: and weeks before he carried out that mass shooting.
Speaker 9: Yeah, the Tree of Life Synagogue. People aren't familiar. Yeah,
Speaker 9: and that was at the time of the quote unquote
Speaker 9: migrant caravan fall of twenty eighteen, would.
Speaker 10: It, Yes, that would be that time period.
Speaker 9: Yeah, that was a pretty big time. I was in
Speaker 9: Tijuana a lot at that time with seeing a migrant caravan.
Speaker 9: Folks were interviewing folks trying to help. Yeah, coming back
Speaker 9: to that was remember thinking, like what a fucked up world.
Speaker 9: So those people didn't get refugee emissions, right, those people
Speaker 9: were here seeking asylum. The system right now is suspended. Right,
Speaker 9: and as many as twelve thousand people who have been
Speaker 9: approved are waiting for travel authorization should come to the
Speaker 9: United States.
Speaker 2: So they're completely in limber.
Speaker 10: Right, You're in limbo and at great personal risk.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, they're in I mean people spent twenty years
Speaker 9: in refugee camps waiting to be admitted to the United States.
Speaker 9: And like, it's hard for me to describe I tried
Speaker 9: to my Darien Gap series, Right, how desperately sad refugee
Speaker 9: camps are as places, right, And I think people think
Speaker 9: of refugee camps a's like, oh, you go there for
Speaker 9: a few weeks and you sleep under a big white ten.
Speaker 10: No children are born and raised there.
Speaker 9: Yeah, people live their whole lives in refugee camps. You know,
Speaker 9: they're the ones that they tibermesport have been there since
Speaker 9: the nineteen forties. But they live their whole lives, often
Speaker 9: without even basic essential services.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 9: I did see for since highest had a little school
Speaker 9: in Lajas Blancas, which is one of these UN refugee
Speaker 9: camps in Panama. The recent they have a little school
Speaker 9: is because children spend so long there that they miss
Speaker 9: out on their education if they don't have a little
Speaker 9: school for them.
Speaker 10: And so that's just an insult to injury in this
Speaker 10: whole process, right. It's not only is he shutting off
Speaker 10: this avenue for refugee status for everyone else and giving
Speaker 10: it to these people who, you know, I think it's
Speaker 10: fair to say don't deserve it. Yeah, but he's made
Speaker 10: this process so simple and so easy and so painless,
Speaker 10: and that not only are they not fleeing persecution, but
Speaker 10: they're getting this fast tracked, this easy pass.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and like we're paying for it. I mean I
Speaker 9: remember recently some friends and I were helping someone who'd
Speaker 9: admitted to the US not as a refuge actually on
Speaker 9: a different visa category. But like they were really having
Speaker 9: a hard time navigating the basics and funding that, so
Speaker 9: like we were able to help them out.
Speaker 10: I mean, obviously international immigration is a difficult process. It
Speaker 10: wouldn't be. I mean, you and you've immigrated internationally, right,
Speaker 10: It's not a simple process. No, But looking at the
Speaker 10: people who have taken Trump up on this offer of
Speaker 10: refugee resettlement. These appear to be people who could have
Speaker 10: simply immigrated had they chosen to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it seems that way. They could have just moved.
Speaker 9: Yeah, they could have I mean come here on like
Speaker 9: a B one visa or like, I mean, pathways to
Speaker 9: citizenship are relatively rare if you just like, say, you
Speaker 9: want to move to the US, right, like you just
Speaker 9: want to become an American unless you have a bunch
Speaker 9: of money. So like, these guys will have a pathway citizenship.
Speaker 9: It's not quite clear how Trump said that they will
Speaker 9: have one. What does that mean. I know, normally, if
Speaker 9: you're omitted as a refugee, you can file for permanent
Speaker 9: residency in a year, and then after a number of years,
Speaker 9: you could file to be a citizen.
Speaker 10: I just noticed as we're talking, so you know, I'm
Speaker 10: not familiar with how the process normally works. Like that's
Speaker 10: that's your wheelhouse. That's something you're very familiar with. So
Speaker 10: maybe this is normal. It just looks strange to me.
Speaker 10: So I've been on vacation the last week, so I'm
Speaker 10: just back today. So I just opened up the embassy's
Speaker 10: website because you know, as I was writing this story
Speaker 10: and sort of tracking this as it developed, there wasn't
Speaker 10: good guidance from the Consulate on what this process would
Speaker 10: look like. So I'm just looking at it again today
Speaker 10: and they have updated it as of yesterday. This is
Speaker 10: the US Embassy and Consulate in South Africa. New update yesterday.
Speaker 10: There is a form you can fill out, James.
Speaker 2: It's a Google doc.
Speaker 10: It is a Google form. The US Embassy website has
Speaker 10: a link to a Google form that you can fill
Speaker 10: out if you want to become great.
Speaker 2: I'm sure that's highly secure.
Speaker 9: Yeah, well, well it's funny. I was on that website
Speaker 9: early today as well. That is oh dear, that is sad.
Speaker 9: I mean, yeah, I don't think a Google doc can
Speaker 9: possibly be as secure as it would need to be
Speaker 9: to have the amount of information the government gets on
Speaker 9: you when you become a refuge is all the information?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 9: Just to outline the criteria to be eligible for US
Speaker 9: resettlement consideration, individuals must meet the following criteria. They must
Speaker 9: be of South African nationality and must be of African
Speaker 9: ethnicity or be a member of a racial minority in
Speaker 9: South Africa.
Speaker 10: I thought it wasn't about race.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I thought it was.
Speaker 10: I thought it wasn't about race.
Speaker 2: James, Yeah, right, it seems.
Speaker 9: And then they must be able to articulate a past
Speaker 9: experience of persecution or fear of future persecution. What they
Speaker 9: don't mention here is that, like normally, there are protected
Speaker 9: categories into which refugees and asylum seekers have to fit. Right,
Speaker 9: there's a race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group,
Speaker 9: or political opinion. I mean, I guess, I guess you
Speaker 9: could argue that, like the Africanas are not per se
Speaker 9: a race, right like that, like there are there could be.
Speaker 9: It's conceivable that one could be white out of South
Speaker 9: African nationality but not be Africana.
Speaker 10: Oh very much, so, very much so. I mean there's
Speaker 10: a African is a very specific sort of genealogical lineage.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and like which is W's.
Speaker 10: Which is why I think they have been careful here
Speaker 10: to say or a member of a racial minority, because
Speaker 10: they're saying, like, look, we're not going to do the genealogy.
Speaker 10: We don't care if your great grandfather was Dutch. We
Speaker 10: just need you to be white. We just need you
Speaker 10: to be white.
Speaker 9: Yeah, when you arrive, you can do a twenty three
Speaker 9: and meter test and then they do your percentage and
Speaker 9: you know, then they put you back on the plane.
Speaker 10: No, they just got the pantone color scale. They're just
Speaker 10: going to hold up the page colored paint chip.
Speaker 9: Yeah, they get you at what they called fucking the
Speaker 9: paint shop there where you go in and they mix
Speaker 9: it for you. So yeah, they didn't mention these protected
Speaker 9: categories here. The US State Department of Set has received
Speaker 9: eight thousand inquiries from people seeking information about the refue program.
Speaker 9: And that's a lot of people. That is a large
Speaker 9: number of people. The Episcopal Church here in the United
Speaker 9: States right like a notably woke organization, I would say Episcopal.
Speaker 9: I mean they do good Episcopal migration ministries do good work.
Speaker 9: You won't find me shaped talking. They do good things
Speaker 9: for people who need help. It has ended its partnership
Speaker 9: with the United States government. So I'm going to read
Speaker 9: a little bit here from Presiding Bishop Sean wrote the
Speaker 9: first time for me quoting a bishop on the podcast.
Speaker 9: Since January, the previously biparts in US refuge admissions program
Speaker 9: in which we participate has essentially shut down. Virtually no
Speaker 9: new refugees have arrived, Hundreds of staff and resettlement agencies
Speaker 9: around the country have been laid off, and funding for
Speaker 9: resettling refugees who have already arrived has been uncertain. Then,
Speaker 9: just over two weeks ago, the federal government informed episcocal
Speaker 9: migration ministries, under the terms of our federal grant, we're
Speaker 9: expected to resettle white Africanas from South Africa, whom the
Speaker 9: US government has classified as refugees. In light of our
Speaker 9: churches steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our
Speaker 9: historic ties was the Anglican Church of South Africa, we're
Speaker 9: not able to take this step. Accordingly, we have determined
Speaker 9: that by the end of the federal fiscal year we
Speaker 9: will conclude our refugee resettlement grand agreements with the US
Speaker 9: federal government, skipping a bit. Then, it has been painful
Speaker 9: to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly
Speaker 9: unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have
Speaker 9: been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years.
Speaker 9: I am saddened and ashamed that many other refugees who
Speaker 9: are being denied entry to the United States have brave
Speaker 9: people who worked alongside our military in Iraq and Afghanistan
Speaker 9: and now faced danger at home because it has service
Speaker 9: to our country. They also grieve that victims of religious persecution,
Speaker 9: including Christians, have not been granted refuge in recent months.
Speaker 10: Good for them, honestly.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Like because I think, I mean think maybe people.
Speaker 10: Don't think about this or don't realize that a lot
Speaker 10: of these programs like this is a federally grant funded
Speaker 10: federal program through a partnership with the Episcopal Church. Like
Speaker 10: you know, in the early days of DOGE, you know,
Speaker 10: they were saying like, oh, we found all this wasteful spending,
Speaker 10: all this you know, suspicious payments to these religious organizations.
Speaker 10: Those are social programs we have outsourced. We have outsourced
Speaker 10: all of these government functions to these church based social programs.
Speaker 10: You know, for better or worse. Say about that what
Speaker 10: you will, but that is in fact how many of
Speaker 10: these things function.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Like when I think about, like, you know, I've spent
Speaker 9: a decent amount of time in refuge camps.
Speaker 2: The majority of the services that.
Speaker 9: Are provided by faith paped programs. Highest there's Bethtal World Ministries.
Speaker 9: I think it's called Catholic charities. It'sian migration ministries, there's
Speaker 9: caulca Aid, the Sikh Group, right, I don't think they
Speaker 9: receive any federal Maybe I don't think they receive federal funding.
Speaker 10: But I think for the Episcopal Church as a massive
Speaker 10: organization to come out and say, yeah, we won't dirty
Speaker 10: our hands with this, that's incredible.
Speaker 9: No, it's great, and like more organizations should. I think
Speaker 9: they're being resettled in Virginia for the most part.
Speaker 10: Good, that's where I live.
Speaker 9: James, Oh good, yeah, great, Well you know you could
Speaker 9: take one in, Molly. You could have a little African
Speaker 9: to come live with you, like a god.
Speaker 10: So Charlottesville where I live, Oh, you'll get some. It's
Speaker 10: home to a large number of Afghan refugee family. It's like,
Speaker 10: I know people who work with our new Afghan neighbors
Speaker 10: and like helping them get settled in our community and
Speaker 10: helping women get driver's license and get them sewing machines
Speaker 10: so they can sew their traditional garments at home, and
Speaker 10: like it's a beautiful community effort to welcome these people
Speaker 10: into our town. But I just can't I just can't
Speaker 10: imagine the worst people on Earth coming here.
Speaker 9: Yeah, well you can help with sewing machine rent you
Speaker 9: could help us sew up a little pre pre Rainbow
Speaker 9: Nation South Africa flag for them. But yeah, it is
Speaker 9: like I've helped people arriving here on refuge visas and
Speaker 9: like it's actually a really really affirming and wonderful thing
Speaker 9: to do in your community, and like now it's a
Speaker 9: time when you can still do that. All the people
Speaker 9: who were resettled here before January, the funding that was
Speaker 9: supposed to help their kids enroll in school, that were
Speaker 9: supposed to help especially women learn to drive right, that
Speaker 9: were supposed to help people orient themselves in the US,
Speaker 9: find education, find work right. As a person who moved
Speaker 9: to America, it is a very confusing place. You have
Speaker 9: like seventy five different layers of government, none of them
Speaker 9: really want to help you.
Speaker 2: That says a lot of forms to fill in.
Speaker 9: The rent is insane, right, and then you add people
Speaker 9: drive like fucking maniacs, so.
Speaker 10: Like and we don't have healthcarerier James, I'm sure that
Speaker 10: was a culture shock for you. But like so when
Speaker 10: I was poking around in some of these Facebook groups
Speaker 10: for these for the South Africans who are sort of
Speaker 10: interested in maybe seeking this opportunity, and they were talking
Speaker 10: about sort of the pros and cons and whether they
Speaker 10: would go and how is the PROW process was going
Speaker 10: to work. And the one fear that I saw come
Speaker 10: up over and over again is like, well I heard
Speaker 10: the healthcare is pretty bad. There is, Yeah, dude, it is.
Speaker 2: Damn yeah, damn don't come.
Speaker 9: Yeah yeah in some states, right, there are state funded
Speaker 9: like safety net programs. I don't know about Virginia.
Speaker 10: And I'm sure I'm sure as as America's special and
Speaker 10: only refugees, they will be afforded access to to all
Speaker 10: available programs.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Put them on try care after we've kicked the transfolks off.
Speaker 9: That's how they're making up for the gap.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty bleak.
Speaker 9: Honestly, I would really encourage folks like give you are
Speaker 9: listening to this and thinking, oh, it fucking sucks. So
Speaker 9: those people have not been granted refugee status. I'm thinking
Speaker 9: of Like I met a woman from Zimbabwe when I
Speaker 9: was in Darian Gap who had come with her daughter. Right,
Speaker 9: she had faced persecution at home in Zimbabwe, a country
Speaker 9: that is not Rhodesia anymore.
Speaker 2: We're keeping score in.
Speaker 10: A country that was never Rhodesia. Rhodesia never existed.
Speaker 9: Yeah, right, Yeah, she went to South Africa right to
Speaker 9: attempt to be safe, and persecution followed her that. So
Speaker 9: then she took this journey all across the America's carrying
Speaker 9: her kid through through the jungles and over the mountains
Speaker 9: and through the rivers. And that's where I met them,
Speaker 9: and we've stayed in touch.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 9: She's in the United States now, she's working on her
Speaker 9: asylum process, and it is expensive and it is by
Speaker 9: no means secure. And this is like a woman who
Speaker 9: has faced who fits multiple categories right in the protected
Speaker 9: they've protected categories here, right, It's going to be very
Speaker 9: hard and very expensive for her. And it really genuinely
Speaker 9: fucking breaks my heart to see someone who like would
Speaker 9: be such an asset to any community, who was such
Speaker 9: a ray of light even in some of the hardest
Speaker 9: places I've ever been. She might not get to stay
Speaker 9: here and these folks will and that really makes me sad.
Speaker 9: But yeah, if you have a chance in your community,
Speaker 9: Like almost the way I sometimes find out about refugees
Speaker 9: arriving or being settled is like on next door and
Speaker 9: realists next door is mostly a site for aging racist
Speaker 9: but like, sometimes people will be like, hey, there's an
Speaker 9: Afghan family here and they don't. Like one of the
Speaker 9: things in California is that you can rent a house
Speaker 9: and they don't have to give you a fridge. Yeah,
Speaker 9: a fridge is like a luxury, it's not it's not
Speaker 9: for the pause. So like trying to help people find
Speaker 9: a fridge before Ramadan, right, Like I have a truck,
Speaker 9: a bigger I can lift a fridge into the back
Speaker 9: of my truck. If someone has a fridge they don't want,
Speaker 9: so like, that's the thing I can do to help,
Speaker 9: and it makes me happy to do that. Then I
Speaker 9: can carry a fridge upstairs. Like that's not something you
Speaker 9: can do. There are a million other things you can do, right,
Speaker 9: including just like having people over for dinner, cooking food
Speaker 9: for them, offering to take them out on a walk
Speaker 9: and show them your neighborhood. Like there are so many
Speaker 9: ways that you can welcome people. And like, while people
Speaker 9: aren't newly arriving, there are people who are still recently
Speaker 9: arrived who really could do with some help. The government
Speaker 9: isn't paying for any more. We can't stop the government
Speaker 9: paying for flights for Africanas. But like you can do something,
Speaker 9: you can do something positive and will maybe make you
Speaker 9: feel better about the fact that you know, your taxpayer
Speaker 9: dollars are bringing the poor, downtrodden Africanas from South Africa
Speaker 9: to neighborhoods near Molly.
Speaker 10: And it's just such an ugly intersection, right, this is
Speaker 10: not just like our adult brained president falling victim to
Speaker 10: a racist conspiracy that he saw on Tucker Carlson, right,
Speaker 10: like that that's how the idea got into his mind.
Speaker 10: But I think this resurgence of his alleged interest in
Speaker 10: the plight of the white South African is this terrible
Speaker 10: intersection of personal grievance and financial interest, right that. You know,
Speaker 10: it's no coincidence that the text of the executive Order
Speaker 10: is not just about like you know, whites are being persecuted.
Speaker 7: But there is a.
Speaker 10: Hot shot on the side in the first section of
Speaker 10: the executive Order that, like well, and South Africa has
Speaker 10: been very unfair to Israel. Right that South Africa being
Speaker 10: a leading voice in the international community on the genocide
Speaker 10: in Gaza is part of this. That the inded they
Speaker 10: need to be punished for their advocacy against the genocide.
Speaker 10: When their ambassador was expelled. It was not a coincidence
Speaker 10: that he is a Muslim South African who has been
Speaker 10: very vocal about the genocide in Gaza, and that he
Speaker 10: appears in public in a kufia that he's when he
Speaker 10: was when he returned to South Africa after being expelled
Speaker 10: from the United States. He was talking about Palestine when
Speaker 10: he got home, and that's not a coincidence. And it's
Speaker 10: also not a coincidence that Elon Musk is currently fighting
Speaker 10: to launch Starlink in South Africa. Yeah, so this is
Speaker 10: sort of a longer explanation which is just sort of
Speaker 10: in brief. Since apartheid ended in nineteen ninety four, they
Speaker 10: have racial equality laws that if you have a national
Speaker 10: level company, something like starlink something you're going to provide
Speaker 10: a national telecommunications contract that serves the whole country, there
Speaker 10: has to be some black ownership of the country. They're
Speaker 10: not saying that there can be no white executives. They're
Speaker 10: not saying, you know, white people aren't allowed to do business,
Speaker 10: but there has to be some black ownership stake in
Speaker 10: the company. And large corporations around the world manage this
Speaker 10: by establishing a local subsidiary that is owned locally by
Speaker 10: a majority of black shareholders. Microsoft does it, like every
Speaker 10: big company does it. Companies operate in South Africa. International
Speaker 10: corporations operate in South Africa, and they do it every
Speaker 10: day and they do it easily. But Elon Musk refuses
Speaker 10: to do that. He refuses to have any black ownership
Speaker 10: stake in his company or a local subsidiary. So he's
Speaker 10: not allowed to have starlink there. Yeah, and so over
Speaker 10: the last couple of months, he's been, you know, walking
Speaker 10: out of meetings, he's been, you know, yelling at the
Speaker 10: President of South Africa about how he's racist against white
Speaker 10: people and so like this is personal, it's financial, and
Speaker 10: it is a racist conspiracy theory and now we're all
Speaker 10: having to live it.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's also not a coincidence. So like Musk has
Speaker 9: started interacting with some of these like white farmer accounts
Speaker 9: on his racism ap right.
Speaker 2: I think that one.
Speaker 9: I think it's an maybe its screen name is just
Speaker 9: bore or it's oh yes, a.
Speaker 10: South African news site recently unmasked that particular individual.
Speaker 2: Oh cool.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I haven't read the article yet, Like I said,
Speaker 10: I've been on vacation, but they're they're on the case.
Speaker 7: Yeah, great, good, And I think about these.
Speaker 10: You know, white identity South African nationalist kinds of guys.
Speaker 10: Is apartheid wasn't that long ago? Yeah, thirty years ago? Right,
Speaker 10: So anybody god fifty year older who's talking a lot
Speaker 10: about white identity in South Africa, I would just like
Speaker 10: to ask you, what were you doing in nineteen ninety Yeah,
Speaker 10: just tell me who you were hanging out with the
Speaker 10: nineteen ninety because I have questions.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Like I remember the end of apartheid very like,
Speaker 9: that's one of my earlier political memories. I remember, like
Speaker 9: Nelson Mandela coming out at the Rugby World Cup in
Speaker 9: nineteen ninety five, like that being a big people like
Speaker 9: I guess maybe our listeners a lot of our listeners
Speaker 9: are younger than me. But like, South Africa was something
Speaker 9: of a pariah state under apartheid, right, Like they couldn't
Speaker 9: people wouldn't even play sports with them. They didn't even
Speaker 9: go to the IOC Olympic Games. And the IOC not
Speaker 9: an anti racist organization, an organization which famously sent the
Speaker 9: Olympic Games to add off Hitler's Germany. But yeah, they
Speaker 9: were a complete global pariah. And to have gone from
Speaker 9: that to like the US has to intervene in the
Speaker 9: plight that persecuted Africana within my lifetime.
Speaker 2: It's a pretty fucking bleak.
Speaker 10: It is a quick turnaround and an ugly one. But
Speaker 10: like I said, the average white South African who is
Speaker 10: very vocal about white rights may have a very close
Speaker 10: connection to a very recent act of terrorism, if you
Speaker 10: know what I'm saying.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, they're not just talk.
Speaker 10: It was very violent in the early nineties.
Speaker 9: Yes, yeah, Molly's done some good stuff on the yeah,
Speaker 9: and on the violence of white South Africans. And I guess, yeah,
Speaker 9: what folks in the US who are inspired by them? Molly,
Speaker 9: do you have anything you want to plug? Otherwords, kuntu
Speaker 9: Wei's way, I guess is what you want to plug?
Speaker 10: Right, Yeah, I mean I'm keeping an eye on their
Speaker 10: treeson Case against Affro Forum. I think that's I mean,
Speaker 10: it's just political talk, but it's fun.
Speaker 7: We'll see.
Speaker 10: Apparently the investigation is ongoing. But no, if you are
Speaker 10: interested in more about how this happened, I did an
Speaker 10: eight part series about political violence at the end of
Speaker 10: apartheid and its connections to American neo Nazis. You can
Speaker 10: check that out on Weirdle guys, it's a good time.
Speaker 10: I think there's a really fun episode about Adulf Lunngren
Speaker 10: movie from the late eighties. It was secretly fun to
Speaker 10: my South African military intelligence. Yeah, it's a good time.
Speaker 10: And uh we live in hell.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, it's it's it could happen here. It is,
Speaker 2: and it's talking about it happening here. You know about
Speaker 2: what we're you know, what's happening in a galaxy far
Speaker 2: far away. These are the and Or episodes we're talking
Speaker 2: about episodes Jesus, what is it?
Speaker 7: Seven through nine?
Speaker 2: Seven through nine of and Or Season two, when this
Speaker 2: is done, will be three quarters of the way over with.
Speaker 2: I mean, one of the best seasons of television ever made.
Speaker 2: So you know, savor it, folks, enjoy it, and enjoy
Speaker 2: these podcasts. Yeah, eloquent Garrison, thank you, thank you, arg
Speaker 2: Me Harties raised the Hondo Anaka flag.
Speaker 11: And let's watch some and Or. This is episode three
Speaker 11: of our Star Wars and Or Politics review podcast. The
Speaker 11: person grumbling in the intro is Robert Evans. I'm Garrison Davis.
Speaker 11: We are also joined by Mia Wong. Let's start with
Speaker 11: episode seven. I think this ark on General might be
Speaker 11: my favorite arc of the whole show. Frankly, they did
Speaker 11: some really fun stuff. Oh yeah, and seven's mostly set up.
Speaker 11: This is episode seven titled Messenger. I'll do a quick
Speaker 11: overview and then we can discuss some of the setup
Speaker 11: to the Gorman massacre. So rebel militias are forming an
Speaker 11: army on the fourth moon of Yavin. Willman returns from
Speaker 11: the planet Gorman with a special mission for Cassion Loosen
Speaker 11: Once isb agent Detra Miro assassinated to protect the Axis network.
Speaker 11: The Empires failed to secure an alternative live to the
Speaker 11: Gorman mineral calkite, and ISP command tells Dedra that an
Speaker 11: Imperial fleet will be sent to Gorman in two days
Speaker 11: and to prepare for a declaration of Marshall domain.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I want to note at the start of this
Speaker 2: kind of what we see because we're watching one year
Speaker 2: jumps between these, this is the first time where it's
Speaker 2: been made really clear the rebellion has moved on from
Speaker 2: scattered insurgent groups to a functional army. Like when we're
Speaker 2: introduced to Yavin, there's a transport landing, a group of
Speaker 2: soldiers are getting off and they're being told like, okay,
Speaker 2: your ration cards are here. And like you need to
Speaker 2: report in here and here, this is where you're billeted.
Speaker 2: It's very like standard professional military stuff. So we are
Speaker 2: now at the point where the rebellion that Andor has
Speaker 2: been portraying previously is not around anymore. The rebellion has
Speaker 2: moved on largely, and those old networks still exist to
Speaker 2: some extent, but that is not the heart of it anymore.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and that's a big part of what this episode
Speaker 11: is starting to set up now on Gorman. Imperial presence
Speaker 11: on the planet has already increased dramatically in the past year.
Speaker 11: A new imperial headquarters the towers above the capital city
Speaker 11: of Palmo. Security forces are stationed throughout the city with
Speaker 11: checkpoints and a mandatory curfew. The past few weeks, there's
Speaker 11: been stories of insurgent attacks against the Empire, most recently
Speaker 11: the bombing of a naval depot. Imperial News reports that
Speaker 11: quote unquote inexplicable Gorman.
Speaker 2: Terrorists their hate for imperial norms.
Speaker 11: Are getting help from quote unquote outside agitators.
Speaker 2: Which is not untrue actually for once, but also not
Speaker 2: like the core of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, and
Speaker 2: I think that that's part of the part of the
Speaker 2: point right like that. That's part of what Luthen's going
Speaker 2: for is he wants to keep them sort of obsessed
Speaker 2: with this side of things, in part because Luthan knows
Speaker 2: that it's moved on, right, Like, Luthen knows that the
Speaker 2: rebellion is in Yavin. Now you know he is. He's
Speaker 2: not entirely a side show, but he's no longer the
Speaker 2: heart of it. And yeah, every resource they waste looking
Speaker 2: at his network is a time they're not spent looking
Speaker 2: at Yavin.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and Luthan's still trying.
Speaker 11: I mean, like the outside agitators here is probably mostly
Speaker 11: like Luthen's guys who've been trying to build up the
Speaker 11: insurgency on Gorman simply to make some sort of political
Speaker 11: crisis and then you know, also help the people who
Speaker 11: have already committed to resisting the empire, help them actually
Speaker 11: like do that beyond what the Gorman Front's been like
Speaker 11: parading around and doing you know, little little protests in
Speaker 11: front of the memorial for the past few years. Luthen
Speaker 11: was like, if these guys want to do this seriously,
Speaker 11: let's let's see what happens when we do it seriously.
Speaker 11: And that's kind of what we've resulted to here. The
Speaker 11: Empire has sent a quote unquote crisis specialist and a
Speaker 11: riot team to assist de Dra in managing any civil unrest.
Speaker 11: Cyril Karn starts questioning what the Empire wants with Gorman
Speaker 11: and what he's really been doing Wing these past two years. Yeah,
Speaker 11: Dedra tells him to pack his things, as they'll soon
Speaker 11: be leaving together for Corroussant. Back on Yavin four, Bicks
Speaker 11: takes a skeptical Cassian to a Force healer to help
Speaker 11: with a stubborn blaster burn. Though Cassian resists, the healer
Speaker 11: can sense that Cassian is somehow important. He has main
Speaker 11: character energy. Cassian is split between Luthen and the growing
Speaker 11: organized rebellion Yeah, but decides to take a rebel U
Speaker 11: Wing Starfighter to Gorman and undercover as a journalist. Cassian
Speaker 11: checks into the hotel at Palmo Square and sets his
Speaker 11: sights on ISB Agent Dedra.
Speaker 2: M H.
Speaker 11: So, Yeah, a lot of this episode is like showing
Speaker 11: how the rebels are actually like growing an army before
Speaker 11: they've really put together the formal rebel alliance, like they're
Speaker 11: they're they're getting so much closer to that. But at
Speaker 11: this point it's it's like a whole bunch of little
Speaker 11: like militias that are operating over the same base and
Speaker 11: are starting to set up like rules and guidelines, and
Speaker 11: like Cassie and butts up against some of those rules
Speaker 11: a little bit here.
Speaker 2: Because he can't go and come as he pleases anymore, right,
Speaker 2: Like it gets him in trouble with General Draven.
Speaker 11: Yeah, it's not just rebel cells that are operating independently.
Speaker 11: Now they are trying out working together and that has
Speaker 11: some growing pains.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Well, and it's not just working together too, like, it's
Speaker 7: it's the command structure totally. Structure is becoming increasingly centralized
Speaker 7: in a way that it hasn't been. Well, it's the
Speaker 7: previous to this has been like the centralizing thing has
Speaker 7: been like Luthen kind of being an asshole to everyone
Speaker 7: but like moving stuff between them.
Speaker 2: And now it's like.
Speaker 11: Or Sagarera, right where where he operates as like a
Speaker 11: cult of personality type thing with his own militia.
Speaker 7: Yeah yeah, right, well, but i mean like between all
Speaker 7: of the different networks. Yeah, and now it's like, no,
Speaker 7: we have this place where we're developing a chain of
Speaker 7: command and we're developing these sort of like totally we're
Speaker 7: going to become increasingly rigid like hierarchies in this In
Speaker 7: this whole thing.
Speaker 11: Luthen's becoming a somewhat controversial figure and is kind of
Speaker 11: getting pushed out of the actual organized rebellion because he's
Speaker 11: a little bit difficult to work with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because he's an asshole. Like that's like, yeah, and well,
Speaker 2: he's he's doing what he has to do. I mean,
Speaker 2: I'm Luthen's last defender. If he's only got one fan,
Speaker 2: it's me. And Luthen is doing is handling this exactly
Speaker 2: how he has to. There's no room to be nice
Speaker 2: and there's no room for anybody's feelings in this. But that,
Speaker 2: you know, what we do see is people choosing now,
Speaker 2: I want to be involved in this kind of bigger
Speaker 2: and more structured thing where the way I am treated
Speaker 2: is less dependent upon the whims of this guy at
Speaker 2: the spoke, where I don't get to know anything, where
Speaker 2: there is a command structure, where there is there is
Speaker 2: a degree to which it's more like predictable how things
Speaker 2: will be day to day. Right, A lot of people
Speaker 2: do prefer that. Yeah, And also this at this stage
Speaker 2: of the rebellion. If you're going to take on a
Speaker 2: military like this, you need a formalized force. You need
Speaker 2: more of a command structure, You need a chain of command,
Speaker 2: and people need to know who is calling shots in
Speaker 2: what situations because you you simply can't function effectively in
Speaker 2: a large scale in combat without it.
Speaker 11: Yeah, well, well we'll talk more about kind of Luthen's
Speaker 11: situation in episode nine, you know, the Luthen of it all, Yeah,
Speaker 11: because that kind of gets more into like what his
Speaker 11: current place is in the rebellion. But like really like
Speaker 11: the role that he occupied is is frankly no longer needed,
Speaker 11: like like and he's even acknowledging this, Like they're they're
Speaker 11: they're going beyond the sort of like you know, like
Speaker 11: small scale like intel network, arms deals, like all this
Speaker 11: type of like like covert you know, the El Dawni raid.
Speaker 11: They're growing beyond what Luthen really specialized in. And and
Speaker 11: now they're doing a full on military and and Luthen's
Speaker 11: always been operating kind of like a DIY like spy agency,
Speaker 11: and and now they're they're they're they're doing a whole
Speaker 11: military and and that kind of butts up against how
Speaker 11: Luthen like to operate and like what he's like frankly
Speaker 11: just capable of doing. Like he he understands the importance
Speaker 11: of YABN, but he's also okay with not being there
Speaker 11: in person.
Speaker 2: Well I don't think he thinks he fits there, right, Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Like his whole thing is such a an idiosyncratic organization
Speaker 2: that's that's just based around him and Claya, you know,
Speaker 2: this this young woman that he works with. Like there's
Speaker 2: no place for him in a military command structure. That's
Speaker 2: not his thing.
Speaker 11: The other thing this episode really focuses on is like
Speaker 11: you know, news propaganda and like the idea of like
Speaker 11: like terrorism outside agitators and using those things as justifications
Speaker 11: for state crackdowns. The senator from Gorman talks with mon
Speaker 11: Mathma about about how he believes that like the Empire
Speaker 11: is lying about what's happening on Gorman and these bombings
Speaker 11: must be like a false flag attack. So you got
Speaker 11: to see a whole bunch of different people's perspectives and
Speaker 11: like validity of the actions that are happening on Gorman.
Speaker 11: Like there's there's questions over like who's doing this. Is
Speaker 11: the state just making these things up so that they
Speaker 11: have a justification to crack down on us.
Speaker 7: Are these things.
Speaker 11: Genuine or are they Are they being done by by
Speaker 11: people on Gorman who are like aligned with the resistance
Speaker 11: but maybe are getting like outside help. You have all
Speaker 11: those sorts of questions, and then the news media is
Speaker 11: like manufacturing consent for an imperial crackdown, like what was
Speaker 11: discussed in like the very first episode.
Speaker 7: It's very it's very seventies Italy, like because there's these
Speaker 7: bombings happening, because there's all this weird shit, and because
Speaker 7: nobody knows exactly who's doing what, everyone is like kind
Speaker 7: of become conspiracy brained and like half the conspiracies are true,
Speaker 7: but not only the ones people think are the ones
Speaker 7: that are true. And it's it's just like the information
Speaker 7: space has become so messy when you're dealing with such
Speaker 7: a combination of like of like of these attacks and
Speaker 7: of these like different kinds of above and below ground
Speaker 7: organizations where nobody knows exactly, no one's exactly talking to
Speaker 7: each other, and yeah, it just gets so messy so quickly.
Speaker 11: Even the Gorman front itself is like debating this, like
Speaker 11: they had this whole meeting where they discussed like tactics,
Speaker 11: like the role of the role of violence, and like
Speaker 11: as these big arguments erupt, they start to reflect on
Speaker 11: how the empire is actually set them up for infighting,
Speaker 11: and the most time they spend doing this, the less
Speaker 11: time they're actually doing anything helpful on Gorman or like
Speaker 11: doing anything that actually can secure their own like liberation
Speaker 11: or their own like you know, combat against the suppressive force.
Speaker 2: There's a good part in that scene where they're debating
Speaker 2: it where the guy who gets who kind of stumbles
Speaker 2: upon them doing the robbery. Yeah in the last like yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: It has a speech where he's basically like, look, man,
Speaker 2: everyone's like whatever they're doing, whatever their attitude about the
Speaker 2: right way to resist, they're all Gormans to me, and
Speaker 2: so they're all on my side. Yeah, right, And I
Speaker 2: like the way that he that he expressed that because
Speaker 2: it very much as we're going to talk about next episode.
Speaker 2: It comports with who that guy is as a as
Speaker 2: a resistor. Right.
Speaker 11: There's like national identity is a big concept in these episodes,
Speaker 11: but not in like a fascistic nationalist sense.
Speaker 2: No, is in we're all in this, We're all going
Speaker 2: to hang together, is what I think he's saying.
Speaker 7: But like like national solidarity. Yeah yeah, it's like eighteen
Speaker 7: twenties kind of like or even like Ireland, right, like
Speaker 7: yeah yeah, And like you know, I can give a
Speaker 7: speech here about where this is going in about how
Speaker 7: shin Fame's like Turny gets imbigers and trans people, but
Speaker 7: it's also like that's just like that what's happening right now.
Speaker 7: This is like eighteen twenty, not like nineteen twenty.
Speaker 11: The last thing I want to talk about in this
Speaker 11: arc before we go on break is this Force healer
Speaker 11: that Cassiean reluctantly visits in the Yavin for mess Hall.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: This was a super interesting scene to me, and this
Speaker 7: is the first.
Speaker 2: Time we have seen any mention of the Force really. Yeah.
Speaker 11: This is like the big like spiritual moment in this series,
Speaker 11: and or has kind of veered away from like the
Speaker 11: mystical side of Star Wars in favor of the more
Speaker 11: like materialist politics the Star Wars that they concluded this here,
Speaker 11: I thought was really interesting and really well done. And
Speaker 11: the reason why I like it so much is that,
Speaker 11: like throughout the Rebel Alliance, they always like agreet each
Speaker 11: other and like say, goodbye by saying may the Force
Speaker 11: be with you, which is a little bit odd because
Speaker 11: the Rebel Alliance isn't like a Jedi revivalist cult. They're
Speaker 11: not like a Force cult in the way that so
Speaker 11: many other groups and you know, Star Wars TM are,
Speaker 11: And the fact that you have people who engage with
Speaker 11: the Force in it's more like regular manner, more similar
Speaker 11: to like kind of like hippie woo spiritualist stuff that
Speaker 11: that props up in like radical spaces I find really interesting.
Speaker 11: And obviously in Star Wars that has more of like
Speaker 11: a legitimate backing because we all recognize the forces real.
Speaker 11: In Star Wars, the Force.
Speaker 2: Is fake, it's a psio.
Speaker 7: It's just the alien god thing in the black Holes.
Speaker 2: For in part what I love that and er is
Speaker 2: how big it makes the universe seem because Cassi Cassian
Speaker 2: isn't like he doesn't have like the you know, the
Speaker 2: There's that line in the in a New Hope where
Speaker 2: basically Han's like, I don't know, like Han's clearly heard
Speaker 2: of the Jedi, but he's like, I don't need like
Speaker 2: I don't give a shit about this.
Speaker 7: I don't need hokey religions or special efforts.
Speaker 2: It's like somebody talking about yeah, like like Wicca, right,
Speaker 2: Like if you're just like a dude who's a fucking
Speaker 2: drug dealer, You're like, I don't need to hear about that, man,
Speaker 2: I got I got fucking heroin to move, Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's very it's very much like it's it's very much
Speaker 2: like faith Healer coded.
Speaker 7: It's like, oh god, no, I'm not gonna see the
Speaker 7: faith healer come on, Like.
Speaker 11: No, yeah, And and he talks about how him and
Speaker 11: his like his mom had like a bad experience with
Speaker 11: a horse a force healer like ten years ago, and
Speaker 11: you're like, this is this is a whole like scam
Speaker 11: operation as well.
Speaker 7: Yeah, like fake force healers.
Speaker 2: And beyond that, the thing that's unset is what we
Speaker 2: know about Cassie and is he was raised on the
Speaker 2: planet completely cut off from the rest of the galaxy.
Speaker 2: His childhood was as a hunter gatherer in the deep jungle,
Speaker 2: and he was, presumably as all people's in that situation
Speaker 2: always have, raised with a set of beliefs about the
Speaker 2: universe and spirituality that were completely shattered when his entire
Speaker 2: planet was annihilated by the Empire. Right was it by
Speaker 2: the Republic. Well it was, it was in that transition, the.
Speaker 7: Fuzzy period between the Republic and the Empire.
Speaker 2: Yet yes, but of course he doesn't believe in anything, right,
Speaker 2: Like he had some sort of set of beliefs and
Speaker 2: the entire cosmology of his planet was annihilated, Like why
Speaker 2: would he believe in anything?
Speaker 11: I just like what this does for like the Alliance itself,
Speaker 11: and it shows that the Force is like a regular
Speaker 11: part of these people's lives. And like specifically the way
Speaker 11: the Force Healer talks is more about like the Force
Speaker 11: as this as this like operator of.
Speaker 7: Like fate and destiny.
Speaker 11: And it can sense that Cassian Andor is the main
Speaker 11: character in Rogue Wan a Star Wars story, and is
Speaker 11: important for the story of Star Wars, and she can
Speaker 11: feel that this is important, and so condicts and and
Speaker 11: Or is also freaked out by that like feeling. And
Speaker 11: I do like that version of the Force a lot.
Speaker 11: I think that's a much more interesting way to do it.
Speaker 11: And just like you know, force cults in like a
Speaker 11: forever religious war with each other for thousands of years.
Speaker 7: Yeah, if you if, if you pay us an unbelievably
Speaker 7: large amount of money, Garrison and I will have our
Speaker 7: six hour argument we have every time about the Force
Speaker 7: Star Wars.
Speaker 4: Well, I do also.
Speaker 7: Like that it's not one hundred percent clear that this
Speaker 7: person is even force sensitive.
Speaker 11: She can like feel through the force, but like everyone
Speaker 11: can with some degree of training.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but but it's well, but it's it's it's also
Speaker 2: like not.
Speaker 7: Clear that it's like like she's just a girl.
Speaker 2: She's yeah, yeah, but it's like it's it's not a
Speaker 2: his back seems to feel better.
Speaker 7: Yeah, no, yeah, totally yeah. But but but but also
Speaker 7: like that's the thing, like it's it's not it's not
Speaker 7: like a thing like Okay, this is like a Jedi, right,
Speaker 7: they're using the Force, and you could tell using the Force.
Speaker 7: This is a lot more kind of like nebulous, and
Speaker 7: it's not one hundred percent clear if it's happening or
Speaker 7: if it's everyone is like I think just thinks that
Speaker 7: it's happening or like what's you know, it's it's very no.
Speaker 11: Yeah, that's why I like it, Like, yeah, it's not
Speaker 11: a Jedi, it's just it's just someone and everyone in
Speaker 11: this universe can have a connection with the Force, because
Speaker 11: that's how this universe works, and some people don't want
Speaker 11: to or think it's fake, and other people get really
Speaker 11: into it. So people get way too into it, and
Speaker 11: then they do genocides in the name of the of
Speaker 11: their religious order. But for a lot of people like this,
Speaker 11: who aren't like a Jedi or aren't like a Sith
Speaker 11: or you know, a whatever, a guardian of the wills, God,
Speaker 11: it's just a thing you can like connect with and
Speaker 11: you can like feel your way through like fate and destiny.
Speaker 2: Well, and I really like that. They must have there
Speaker 2: must have been a discussion, should we have her say
Speaker 2: she used to be like a Paddawan, right who somehow
Speaker 2: escaped Order sixty six.
Speaker 7: That must have been God, she's not.
Speaker 2: Thank God, they just didn't.
Speaker 12: We don't know what she don't care, need to does
Speaker 12: matter because no one in the situation would give a shit. Yeah,
Speaker 12: Cassian's not gonna be like, so, yeah, tell me about
Speaker 12: like your fucking bad He doesn't give He doesn't give
Speaker 12: a fuck.
Speaker 2: There's so much else going on in his head at
Speaker 2: that moment.
Speaker 7: So much better that she's just a random person and
Speaker 7: we never know.
Speaker 2: We never know.
Speaker 11: All right, Let's go and break and come back to
Speaker 11: talk about the Gorman massacre. Yay, okay, we are back
Speaker 11: and or season two episode eight, Who are you?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Oh I just I will talk a lot about
Speaker 2: the name of this episode. Oh yeah, baby, because I
Speaker 2: love it, because it's it's just some of the best
Speaker 2: writing that this show or any show has ever had.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, please go ahead and give us the over there.
Speaker 7: Let's do a quick run down.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 11: As mining equipment lands across Gorman, troops barricade the Imperial
Speaker 11: headquarters in Palmo Square as they prepare for a mass protest.
Speaker 11: The Gorman Front prepares to retake the town square, distributing
Speaker 11: weapons and rallying just regular Gorman citizens to march on
Speaker 11: the town center. The old leader of the Front realizes
Speaker 11: too late that this protest is probably an Imperial trap
Speaker 11: and is powerless to stop this unfolding spectacle. He encounters
Speaker 11: a Cyril Kern on his way to the Imperial HQ
Speaker 11: and confronts Cyril about misleading the Gorman resistance and why
Speaker 11: the Empire is mining on Gorman.
Speaker 2: Oh, and this scene is the guy who plays Ryot.
Speaker 2: There's so many great monologues in this The dude who
Speaker 2: plays Rylands, who is the old rich guy who's kind
Speaker 2: of the organizing center of the Gorman Front.
Speaker 7: The original one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, has a beautiful speech here where he's just how
Speaker 2: can you say these things?
Speaker 7: What kind of being are you?
Speaker 2: What kind of being are you? Yeah, it's excellent, it's perfect,
Speaker 2: it's devastating. Yeah.
Speaker 11: Cyril breaks free and makes his way through the chanting
Speaker 11: crowd that's filled in a square.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 11: After arriving at the barricaded Imperial Tower, Cyril sneaks into
Speaker 11: Dedra's office to demand to know what the Empire wants
Speaker 11: on Gorman. He chokes Dedra as she confesses that this
Speaker 11: has all been for the Emperor's new energy program, and
Speaker 11: she promises that they will soon return to Corussant as heroes.
Speaker 2: We'll get everything we want. The Empire will reward us
Speaker 2: for our loyalty. This is this is it. This is
Speaker 2: the last fucked up thing we have to do, and
Speaker 2: then we can live happily ever after. Yeah, didn't you
Speaker 2: want this promotion?
Speaker 7: Yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 11: She says that this might be the previous episode or
Speaker 11: this one, but like when Zero like kind of like
Speaker 11: protests that just like, yeah, but you weren't complaining when
Speaker 11: you got promoted into this into this job. But Zero
Speaker 11: wishes Dedra good luck and he leaves to join the
Speaker 11: crowd outside Cassie and is stationed on the outskirts of
Speaker 11: the crowd, trying to line up a shot to take
Speaker 11: out Dedra. But stormtroopers soon kettle the crowd and Imperial
Speaker 11: riot cops are sent into the square to jumpstart a
Speaker 11: flash point. Protesters throw rocks and bottles, but it's an
Speaker 11: Imperial sniper who is ordered to shoot their own riot
Speaker 11: cops that starts the Gorman massacre.
Speaker 2: And they make a beautiful point. The kettling is done
Speaker 2: by stormtroopers who are the elite, right, These are their
Speaker 2: very best infantry, the riot cops. From the moment they're introduced,
Speaker 2: because we see these guys land with their kit bags,
Speaker 2: their sergeant clearly has a lot more experience and is like,
Speaker 2: these guys don't know what the fuck they're doing. We
Speaker 2: cannot put them in any kind of dangerous they have
Speaker 2: and that's the point. That's why they're there. These men
Speaker 2: were hand picked to be the worst of the Empire.
Speaker 2: Here's they're expendable, right, and because you can count on
Speaker 2: them to panic and that's what's needed.
Speaker 11: They're cannon fodders. Yeah, they're sacrificial lambs. Yeah, now, Sir
Speaker 11: Cyril watches the chaos unfold as the Gorman Front tries
Speaker 11: to defend against the Imperial Slaughter and Chax security droids
Speaker 11: are sent into the town square, but when Cyril sees Cassian,
Speaker 11: he suddenly lunges at him and the two get into
Speaker 11: a brutal brawl.
Speaker 7: Cyril gets the.
Speaker 11: Upper hand, but is shocked when Cassian does not remember
Speaker 11: who he is. While frozen, pointing his blaster at Cassian,
Speaker 11: Cyril gets shot dead by the old leader of the
Speaker 11: Gorman Front.
Speaker 2: There's Rylan's It's an incredible moment. Yeah.
Speaker 11: While trying to exfiltrate Cassian meets up with Willem, who
Speaker 11: decides to stay and help the resistance. In the aftermath
Speaker 11: of the massacre, the Gorman Front broadcasts the final message
Speaker 11: about the Imperial siege, claiming there are thousands dead in
Speaker 11: the streets. Cyril's mother is in tears watching news reports
Speaker 11: coming out of Gorman that frame the Imperial troopers killed
Speaker 11: as fallen heroes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh boy, what.
Speaker 11: An episode, maybe the best episode in the series. Just phenomenal.
Speaker 2: It's phenomenal. I'll give you that. I don't know whish
Speaker 2: I'd pick us the best, but it's tough. It's tough.
Speaker 7: It's the prison break one still, because a break one's
Speaker 7: very good.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna go on a little rant about the name
Speaker 2: of this episode, who Are You, because that moment between
Speaker 2: Cassian and Cyril, is one that Tony Gilroy ha said
Speaker 2: interviews he had to fight for everyone was like just
Speaker 2: crazy and Diego Luna said it was one of the
Speaker 2: hardest lines for me to deliver because Luna likes the
Speaker 2: show and is a fan of the character Cyril and
Speaker 2: his acting, and he knows every and it has the
Speaker 2: degree of sympathy that you almost have to have for
Speaker 2: Cyril at this point totally, and so it was such
Speaker 2: a difficult challenge for him to be like to really
Speaker 2: sell who wait, who the fuck are you?
Speaker 7: Who shatters cyril self perception?
Speaker 2: Well, and it's not even I'll even push against a
Speaker 2: little bit that because I don't think it's entirely that.
Speaker 2: I think what I like about Cyril's journey is that,
Speaker 2: and what I like about this episode is that who
Speaker 2: Are You is not just about that line. It is
Speaker 2: about every character that we see in this We are
Speaker 2: learning who they all are, and they are learning who
Speaker 2: they all are. Rylands in the beginning, right, this guy
Speaker 2: who had been so gung ho about the Gorman resistance,
Speaker 2: who had been when he realizes what's happening, that they're
Speaker 2: all going to be massacred, his family and his culture
Speaker 2: are going to be wiped out as a result of
Speaker 2: this act of resistance that he's helped organize. He tries
Speaker 2: to stop it. He says, we have to pull back.
Speaker 2: We and he learns he's not a rebel, right, he's
Speaker 2: a reel And there's always been hints of that. He's
Speaker 2: not a rebel. He's always you know, the Emperor can't
Speaker 2: know about this, right, We've seen hints of this from
Speaker 2: Mark Rylance. He learns that about himself. And then a
Speaker 2: little later in the episode when it's become because we
Speaker 2: watch his kids get massacred. He doesn't see them, but
Speaker 2: he knows they're dead. He hears the gunfire. He understands
Speaker 2: no one's making it out of there. He's not a
Speaker 2: dumb man. And when he comes in and shoots Cyril
Speaker 2: in the head, he learns again who he is. And
Speaker 2: now he wasn't before, but now he is because they've
Speaker 2: taken everything from him, right, Yeah.
Speaker 11: The quote from earlier when he's like arguing with people
Speaker 11: in the streets, He's like, the only path forward is
Speaker 11: silent resistance. Yeah, And by the end of the episode
Speaker 11: he is a little beyond that.
Speaker 2: And I love for him that he gets a chance
Speaker 2: to learn who he is and be wrong and then
Speaker 2: learn again and be right right, which is not a
Speaker 2: chance Cyril is going to get. Cyril does and all
Speaker 2: Cyril is. We see, we see a lot of characters
Speaker 2: in this who could only have been themselves in a
Speaker 2: fascist state. Dedra's one of them, right, Dedra could not
Speaker 2: have been the person she is outside of the Empire.
Speaker 2: I think part of Goaz probably is too, could never
Speaker 2: have been himself fully outside. Certainly, well, I think if you.
Speaker 7: Put Partigas into CIA, he is mostly the same guy.
Speaker 2: I think he must have been in the Republic CIA. Yeah.
Speaker 11: He feels very like Republic transitioned into the empire, like God.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think Krenick obviously is one of our best.
Speaker 2: Crenic is only an empire is under fascism, Ye, Cyril
Speaker 2: is not an ideological fascist. Cyril never really embraces fascism
Speaker 2: as a belief system. He never understands the Empire that way,
Speaker 2: he just understands the Empire's law and order, or he
Speaker 2: gets if you look at it from Cyril's standpoint, he
Speaker 2: gets brought into this not because he wants to cramp
Speaker 2: down on clamp down on the evil rebels and he
Speaker 2: loves Palpatine and wants to kill Freedom. It's because two
Speaker 2: guys are murdered that he considers colleagues, and he thinks
Speaker 2: it's wrong.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 7: He has a sense of like justice.
Speaker 2: And he believes he's following that, and he believes that
Speaker 2: his girlfriend is invested in that, and he truly believes.
Speaker 2: He doesn't want to hurt the people of Gorman. He
Speaker 2: wants to find the outside agitators who are driving them
Speaker 2: to disaster, right, And the moment when he learns that
Speaker 2: that's all a lie, he beats the shit out of
Speaker 2: his girlfriend in a very violent I had an argument
Speaker 2: with someone online about like, is this domestic violence? And
Speaker 2: I'm like, in a literal sense, these people are in
Speaker 2: a domestic partnership and he is doing violence to her.
Speaker 2: In a moral sense, if you find out that your
Speaker 2: significant other has been hiding a genocide from you, I
Speaker 2: think it's okay. Like and you've been made complicit in it.
Speaker 11: It's such a fucked up, it's such a it's such
Speaker 11: like every everyone is everyone's fucked and everyone's evil and
Speaker 11: everyone's complicit. Yes, and they're all like calling their own
Speaker 11: commitment to like the state and what they view as
Speaker 11: justice and law and order into question. And like for Cyril,
Speaker 11: like he's he has just committed to this idea like
Speaker 11: justice and what he sees as law and order, and
Speaker 11: the Empire is the physical manifestation of law and order,
Speaker 11: so therefore the Empire must be good, right, and and
Speaker 11: that's his view. And when he realizes maybe the Empire
Speaker 11: actually doesn't really care about law and order, No, they
Speaker 11: just like it, she gets so confused. Like he he
Speaker 11: doesn't know how to orient himself in the world. He
Speaker 11: doesn't know where a sense of morals can be derived from. No,
Speaker 11: if the state is not the represent is not like
Speaker 11: the lawful good representation of like justice.
Speaker 2: And we've seen from Cyril previously that he has physical courage, right,
Speaker 2: he's not afraid of violence, he's not afraid of putting
Speaker 2: himself in physical danger, right, Like he's not a Cassian
Speaker 2: and or level comfortable with it, right because he just
Speaker 2: doesn't have that kind of experience. But he's he's not
Speaker 2: he's not physically a coward, but he's a moral coward
Speaker 2: the whole series and that changes and again going back
Speaker 2: to who are You? He understand he learns one thing
Speaker 2: about himself, which is that he is not a genocide committer, right,
Speaker 2: he is not someone who will consciously participate in the
Speaker 2: annihilation of a race.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 2: When he learns that those are the stakes he hits,
Speaker 2: he chokes Dedra and he fucking runs. He doesn't know
Speaker 2: anything else about himself at that point. And my interpretation
Speaker 2: of his reaction to that line from Cassian isn't just
Speaker 2: because I think what I love about the scene when
Speaker 2: he chooses to attack him, It's not him making a
Speaker 2: decision to go back to the Empire. He's not trying
Speaker 2: to rest to fight Cassian because he wants to get
Speaker 2: back and good. It's just the only thing that makes sense.
Speaker 2: He's nothing ring to his child self. Yes, yes, it's
Speaker 2: crazy because it's animal. The way that he goes after
Speaker 2: him is like a rabbit dog charging, you know.
Speaker 11: Like this whole situation on Gorman calls into question how
Speaker 11: he sees the Empire and therefore how he sees himself
Speaker 11: as he realizes that he's just been a pawn in
Speaker 11: the empire's larger game. And like, in a way, Gorman's
Speaker 11: the first time that Cyril has been part of like
Speaker 11: a real community, maybe since he was like a Corpo cop,
Speaker 11: Like there's no like solidarity in community like on Coorissant,
Speaker 11: there's not in the Bureau of Standards. Like Gorman's the
Speaker 11: first time he's actually kind of been a part of
Speaker 11: a community. And like this happens with like with like
Speaker 11: FBI double agents infiltrating radical organizations. Sometimes it's it's yeah,
Speaker 11: it's it's very odd. So like when he decides to
Speaker 11: join the crowd, it's just like he's aligning with them.
Speaker 11: But then when he sees Cassie and all of this
Speaker 11: psychological like progress, and the question that he's done just
Speaker 11: gets immediately rolled back because then he sees the guy
Speaker 11: who he thinks like kind of like ruined his life,
Speaker 11: who like who who altered the trajectory of what Zero's
Speaker 11: life was supposed to be, And therefore he just he yeah,
Speaker 11: he turns into an animal. He undoes all of all
Speaker 11: of this psychological progress and attacks the guy that he
Speaker 11: views ruined his life, and then in his final moments
Speaker 11: is in part like confronted with the idea that like
Speaker 11: the guy that he's been obsessing over for years doesn't
Speaker 11: even remember who he is, and like Cassian has been
Speaker 11: living rent free in his head this whole time, and
Speaker 11: and like he didn't need to, like Yarol could have
Speaker 11: moved on. Seril didn't need to do this, And he's
Speaker 11: been obsessing over someone who doesn't even remember him.
Speaker 7: So I think the other thing that's really important about
Speaker 7: Cyril's character is like if if you remember him in
Speaker 7: like the very beginning of season one, right, he has
Speaker 7: like like like what he like goes home, like he
Speaker 7: has like a storm he has like storm tuber like
Speaker 7: figure out yea clone trooper like action figure. Yes, And
Speaker 7: and he has and you know, and he's he's like
Speaker 7: tailoring his own uniform because he has this conception of
Speaker 7: himself as this like you know, as like this like
Speaker 7: this brave cop, as this like sort of like like
Speaker 7: this like that this is very specific kind of like
Speaker 7: fascist bureaucrat with a gun like platonic figure.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: And the thing is Denser Miro is that actual person.
Speaker 7: And this is and this is a tension that that
Speaker 7: they that it's kind of worked out, or of course
Speaker 7: season one if like Dendri Muro is a character who
Speaker 7: in a conventional show is a hero right like she
Speaker 7: is she is she is like the cop that's willing
Speaker 7: to work outside of the restrictions of the thing in
Speaker 7: order to get the job done. Yeah, and then and
Speaker 7: you get to see what that actually is in real life,
Speaker 7: which is she's just fucking torturing people, and you know,
Speaker 7: and she's torturing people and she's gone and she and
Speaker 7: when she gets offered a chance to do the genocide
Speaker 7: in order to investment, she gets that.
Speaker 2: And I think part of what's.
Speaker 7: Going on with Cerial is like Cyril's whole thing is
Speaker 7: that he has been trying to be this cop and
Speaker 7: then he has this moment where he's like, oh shit,
Speaker 7: none of that's like real. The actual thing that it
Speaker 7: means to be this cop isn't just this isn't this
Speaker 7: like I dress up in my in my client was closed.
Speaker 7: And he gets this season one too where he like
Speaker 7: actually goes into the field and it's just like everyone's
Speaker 7: fucking dying around him and he's shell shocked and things
Speaker 7: are exploding, and it's like he's getting that here again
Speaker 7: where it's like his' like thing where he's been cultivating
Speaker 7: this like intelligence.
Speaker 2: Person and he sees it and it just like it
Speaker 2: just sort of it rips away.
Speaker 7: The facade that's like that is the facade of how
Speaker 7: like on a kind of macro level, like how we
Speaker 7: how film and television and how American media thinks about
Speaker 7: like spies and thinks about cops. Sure, and you see
Speaker 7: that the actual brutal reality of it, which is like
Speaker 7: through through the eyes of this person who who like
Speaker 7: through through this sort of like media stuff, has always
Speaker 7: wanted to become this person and is like, oh, you're
Speaker 7: just doing a genocide. The one part of being a
Speaker 7: cop that I can do is like choking is like
Speaker 7: choking my partner.
Speaker 2: M So my interpretation of kind of his ending moments
Speaker 2: is that Number one, I don't really feel it is
Speaker 2: necessarily that he undoes all the progress. I think that
Speaker 2: there's this this animal moment when he sees Cassian that
Speaker 2: just overrides that because nothing else about his life has
Speaker 2: makes sense anymore. He's completely lost any sense of sanity. Sure,
Speaker 2: and Cassian makes sense. Fighting him makes sense, and so
Speaker 2: he does it, and we do see he has a
Speaker 2: chance to shoot him, and he hesitates and he lowers
Speaker 2: the gun just a bit and then he's immediately shot
Speaker 2: and in that moment. Number One, one of the themes
Speaker 2: of this is that, like everyone has their own rebellion,
Speaker 2: there's an argument you can make that him not doing
Speaker 2: that was his last little act of that. There's an
Speaker 2: argument that like maybe he would have, you know, tried
Speaker 2: to engage you in conversation or like you know, monologued
Speaker 2: or whateverbody didn't get the chance. We just don't know.
Speaker 2: We'll never know. And he's kind of contrasted with Rylands
Speaker 2: and that Rylans does get the chance to see who
Speaker 2: he is and have it be not enough and then
Speaker 2: become enough. Cyril gets the chance to see who he
Speaker 2: is and he does do one. He gets one win,
Speaker 2: and it is a win to realize there's a genocide
Speaker 2: going on and I refuse to be a part of it.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 2: That's not nothing that he makes that choice. We don't
Speaker 2: know where he would have gone from here. There's a
Speaker 2: version of Cyril that could have been a part of
Speaker 2: the rebel, that could have if he had just left
Speaker 2: Cassie and helped some Gorman's escape on a ship, used
Speaker 2: his imperial credentials gotten them out of there. It becomes
Speaker 2: something else We'll never know because he doesn't get the chance.
Speaker 2: And I see in that last moment, not just him
Speaker 2: being like, you don't know who I am? Oh, that
Speaker 2: shatters me, but him being asked who are you and
Speaker 2: realizing I have no answer to that question? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 2: And he just doesn't get the chance ever to do that.
Speaker 11: It is a very like Greek tragedy, ugh like moment tyr. Yeah, phenomenal,
Speaker 11: phenomenal screenwriting.
Speaker 2: I will larw you. It's going to get paid off
Speaker 2: a lot in the next three episodes. But there's this
Speaker 2: idea that has run through the series that even if
Speaker 2: you are someone working within this machinery of death, within
Speaker 2: this evil empire, you're not unredeemable or unsavable. But you
Speaker 2: don't have unlimited time. Right, Yeah, you can be something else.
Speaker 2: You have that chance, but you don't have infinite days
Speaker 2: to make that choice.
Speaker 11: This is like the entire message of Star Wars. This
Speaker 11: is like, this is this is like Luke in Vader
Speaker 11: in the Throne Room. This is like what this whole
Speaker 11: series is about.
Speaker 7: Like is this moment.
Speaker 11: Yeah, yep, I do have a few other things I
Speaker 11: want to talk about in terms of like the massacre.
Speaker 11: I really like that we see a return of like
Speaker 11: imperial military police, not just stormtroopers. I think putting a
Speaker 11: face on the riot cops is really good for the
Speaker 11: audience because stormtroopers are backpacks and t shirts and little
Speaker 11: fun toys and riot cops or riot cops. I'd really
Speaker 11: like that Willman is sleeping with a French militant.
Speaker 7: Many such cases.
Speaker 2: Among us.
Speaker 11: Hartagras in a like a phone call with Dedras talking
Speaker 11: about how like yeah, like you know, propaganda, news media
Speaker 11: has been useful and like spreading like rumors and like
Speaker 11: you know, like co intel pro that's for stuff. It's
Speaker 11: been useful. But now the only the quote is like
Speaker 11: now the only story is Gorman aggression. Like this is
Speaker 11: all that we can focus on. There's there's no no
Speaker 11: more of this like outside agitators thing, no more of
Speaker 11: this like long term slow planning. We have to we
Speaker 11: just have to focus on how like savage these Gormans are.
Speaker 11: And meanwhile, like Fox like space, Fox News is outside
Speaker 11: stoking divisions on Gorman, talking about how there's rumors of
Speaker 11: a quote unquote general strike. How How how the empire
Speaker 11: is negotiating for like a peaceful demonstration, even though even
Speaker 11: though even though the leaders are obviously you know, making
Speaker 11: making people agitated in this in this growing insurrection, The
Speaker 11: Chance got me. I have heard way too many the
Speaker 11: whole world is watching Chance.
Speaker 7: So as soon as they.
Speaker 4: Started to go the galaxy, I started like, I started
Speaker 4: like get like sweat egg I started having no No that.
Speaker 2: That gave me a little breakdown too. It's my least favorite. No,
Speaker 2: it's happening again.
Speaker 4: The galaxy isn't watching.
Speaker 2: No, it's not it's not. Oh I hate that chant.
Speaker 2: I hate that fucking Chance. It's very real. It's very real,
Speaker 2: right like this these guys right, yes, we get.
Speaker 11: We get like a real proper riot set up, right,
Speaker 11: like the last riot in and Or was on fer
Speaker 11: Ex Like that was like a funeral riot.
Speaker 2: Right, It's almost like some of the writers have seen kettles.
Speaker 7: It's great, it's crazy.
Speaker 11: And like this time like this is not like a
Speaker 11: morning ritual like like it was unfair, like this is
Speaker 11: this is this is a protest riot. There's there's signs,
Speaker 11: there's banners, there's fireworks, there's smoke, there's space molotovs, there's
Speaker 11: state affiliated news crews. There's tie fighters flying overhead like
Speaker 11: police copters and police drums.
Speaker 7: It's excellent.
Speaker 2: I got a little flashback of being buzzed by a
Speaker 2: police helicopter. It's standing rocks so close that it knocked
Speaker 2: my car off the road. That's what happened with the
Speaker 2: tie fighter. So good.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah. And it's like like like right down to like
Speaker 7: just just like the micro dynamics of like how the
Speaker 7: crowd is interacting with the riot shields. It's like, oh shit.
Speaker 11: And I got the same not in my stomach when
Speaker 11: I can tell that it's about to go down. I
Speaker 11: get this the same not watching this like they really
Speaker 11: nailed It's.
Speaker 2: Great too, is it? With in the just in the
Speaker 2: face acting, but with Cassie and and with Wilman, you
Speaker 2: can see that they know they've been in this. They
Speaker 2: know Willman a spatlieh Okay, okay, okay, I know what's happening.
Speaker 7: I also really like that, okay, so okay. So the
Speaker 7: challenge that Gilroy has here is we have to introduce
Speaker 7: the concept of kettling to the average Star Wars watcher,
Speaker 7: and with the average Star Wars watcher. You can't be like, Okay,
Speaker 7: the police are going to form a wall. You have
Speaker 7: to physically make walls come in around the thing.
Speaker 2: Like some people have said that the Gorman mascer is
Speaker 2: very clearly inspired by what's happened in Palestine. These episodes
Speaker 2: I'm sure were informed by other massacres in Palestine, but
Speaker 2: these were written prior to the most current outbreak of
Speaker 2: really intense genocidal violence.
Speaker 7: In like twenty two.
Speaker 2: Probably again there were other similar massacres that occurred in Palestine.
Speaker 2: But also like this is very clearly patterned off of
Speaker 2: Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland. This is very clearly patterned
Speaker 2: off of I would argue my suspicion the Ombuitz massacre
Speaker 2: in India by the British government as well. Like I
Speaker 2: think that there are pieces of all of that in here.
Speaker 7: There's also elements that I heard friend of the show
Speaker 7: Emmy Who's Great, talking about, like the Tlata Laco massacre,
Speaker 7: which is like the massacre in nineteen sixty eight in
Speaker 7: a square in the middle of Mexico City, which is
Speaker 7: massacre where there's like these giant students sixty eight student
Speaker 7: protests are happening and they just like put snipers on
Speaker 7: the rears and shoot everyone.
Speaker 2: Mm hm.
Speaker 7: And I think so when I saw this, like I
Speaker 7: thought it was going to be a lot more of
Speaker 7: just like a straight massacre. Everyone dies and it kind
Speaker 7: of turns into a shootout, and I wasn't sure how
Speaker 7: that was going to play. Also, I think it is
Speaker 7: also worth remembering that, like also a lot of the
Speaker 7: sort of famous historical massacres aren't like some people do
Speaker 7: shoot back. Yes, because the thing at Tieneman, like some
Speaker 7: of the some of some of the students like take
Speaker 7: workers from soldiers that they fought and like shoot, Well, yeah,
Speaker 7: this is more of the workers. And by the time
Speaker 7: they get into the square with the students, like those
Speaker 7: people don't have gone. Some of the workers like try
Speaker 7: to fight back and just get massacred. But it seems
Speaker 7: to have been really effective. Yeah, And just like conveying that, like, yeah,
Speaker 7: this shit happens constantly.
Speaker 2: It happened in my dawn too. Write where you have
Speaker 2: you know, both you have Berkut snipers shooting and killing
Speaker 2: protesters and you have protesters firing back from behind the barricades. Yeah.
Speaker 11: I really liked the singing the gorba national anthem as
Speaker 11: a way to like, yeah, stop the chanting, which is
Speaker 11: like calling towards you know, like we're safe because the
Speaker 11: galaxy's watching us. And like the guy who starts to
Speaker 11: the song realizes, like that maybe that's not true, and
Speaker 11: instead the song like unites people in like national solidarity
Speaker 11: to prepare them for what's about to happen, instead of
Speaker 11: like gesturing outwards at like this at like you know
Speaker 11: those those off planet watching this, and that ensures our safety,
Speaker 11: Like no, our safety is from like each other. And
Speaker 11: the fact that yeah, so many of them do fire
Speaker 11: back and like it is it. They do not like
Speaker 11: lose their agency, and it doesn't like make this less
Speaker 11: of a massacre.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's another example.
Speaker 7: This is like the Red Summer, which is like a
Speaker 7: whole bunch of like anti anti black race riots and
Speaker 7: you and it's it's not what he thinks. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 7: it's remembered as like a bunch of white supremacists just
Speaker 7: murdered a bunch of black people.
Speaker 2: And that's true.
Speaker 7: But also people fought back, like people had guns, people
Speaker 7: fought back, people resisted them, and you know a lot
Speaker 7: of people fucking died. And also people in these situations
Speaker 7: fight back and it's good. The last thing I want
Speaker 7: to discuss in this last section is the based hotel
Speaker 7: porter who throws that.
Speaker 2: Bob my god. Oh yeah, and again, yeah, we are
Speaker 2: learning he already knows clearly he knows who he is.
Speaker 2: He never has any question about that. But we don't
Speaker 2: know who he is. Cassian doesn't fully until he's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I wiped you from the system, bro, get out of here, right.
Speaker 7: So that's what we're talking about, yeah, is this is
Speaker 7: this base hotel porter.
Speaker 11: And also that the way the way Cassian works as
Speaker 11: a spy is different from the way that other like
Speaker 11: Luther and operatives do. Like Cassian gets to know this
Speaker 11: guy in the previous arc of episodes when he's when
Speaker 11: he's like going to like survey the Gorman Front like
Speaker 11: a year ago, and he gets into a conversation with
Speaker 11: hotel porter who was at like the Tarkan massacre and
Speaker 11: was like was there when there was like five hunch
Speaker 11: people died and like and and his dad died protecting
Speaker 11: him like like andor like converses with him in his
Speaker 11: in his hotel room to like learn about like the
Speaker 11: local people and to like learn about the actual history
Speaker 11: from like a regular guy who experienced it. And this
Speaker 11: isn't something that like vell and sint to really do.
Speaker 11: This isn't something that that Luthen really does like like
Speaker 11: and Or has a connection or like and Or values
Speaker 11: making connections with just like the regular people and wherever
Speaker 11: he's operating, and this this always like trans outs to
Speaker 11: help and Or in the long run, even if he
Speaker 11: doesn't really know it in like the immediate because when
Speaker 11: Andor comes back a year later under a different name
Speaker 11: with a different job, the hotel porter recognizes him and
Speaker 11: is like, I got you, buddy.
Speaker 7: I I.
Speaker 11: Know that you're up to something and I will protect you,
Speaker 11: like where we are in this together, Like I recognize you,
Speaker 11: and I like value you, and that is what like
Speaker 11: helps helps and Or like in this episode.
Speaker 7: And then also the grenades that he throws is you
Speaker 7: know cool, uh.
Speaker 2: And there's there's a beautiful and Or's last line to
Speaker 2: this kid is I hope things work out for you.
Speaker 2: And the last thing we see that kid do is
Speaker 2: detonate a bomb to kill himself and a bunch of
Speaker 2: other people.
Speaker 7: Rebellions are built on hope.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And he tells him rebellions are built on hope,
Speaker 2: which is where we get that line from Rogue one.
Speaker 11: I like that Sam, the guy with two m's who
Speaker 11: killed Sinta last Dark is still in the fight and
Speaker 11: is killing imperials. He is, yes, he is killing them
Speaker 11: in the name of Sinta. He is, he is showing up.
Speaker 2: He is real and he he he again. He learns
Speaker 2: who he is in this episode, right, like he's not
Speaker 2: just a fuck up. He rams a truck into that
Speaker 2: K two unit and save save Cassio, save, saves the
Speaker 2: whole day. And yes, he learns Rellion too. Yeah, he
Speaker 2: learns who.
Speaker 11: I feel like that everything good that happens to Cassiod
Speaker 11: all the people who do it are like in part
Speaker 11: like a responsible for the destruction out of the Death Star,
Speaker 11: which shows how like the butterfly effect works.
Speaker 7: In a really fun way.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and like like a good luth and operative casting
Speaker 11: and takes K two to get reprogrammed. But like this,
Speaker 11: this episode like ends on this on this Gorman cry
Speaker 11: for help, this like final broadcast done by Wilman's French
Speaker 11: GF and I I was legitimately tearing up at this.
Speaker 11: Uh it got to me and or starts tearing up,
Speaker 11: but like it's it, It really got to me. And
Speaker 11: then like we zoom out of Gorman and you can
Speaker 11: see like how unnatural the imperial like tower is above
Speaker 11: like the regular Palomo skyline with lit's like you know,
Speaker 11: historical architecture that you have this like just just like
Speaker 11: hideous like imperial it like citadel, like casting a dark
Speaker 11: shadow over the town. And then we we cut to
Speaker 11: Cyril's mom crying watching Fox News where they're talking about
Speaker 11: how outside rebel assistance helped the Gorman front and they question,
Speaker 11: what's the price will pay for our own safety? And
Speaker 11: that's how the episode ends.
Speaker 7: What aisode?
Speaker 2: What aisode?
Speaker 11: All right, we'll go on a break and then come
Speaker 11: back to briefly discuss this last episode, which is also
Speaker 11: quite good.
Speaker 7: Okay, we're back. Episode nine.
Speaker 11: Welcome to the Rebellion Clone wars heads are feasting so
Speaker 11: much Senate very fun. So on Corussant, fake news spreads
Speaker 11: about what has happened on Gorman and the Gorman senator
Speaker 11: is arrested with no warrant and no charges. Mad Mathma
Speaker 11: plans to make a final speech in the Senate and
Speaker 11: then leave Coroissant with bail. Organa to lead the rebel
Speaker 11: alliance on Yavin, but Senator Organa doesn't want to leave yet.
Speaker 11: He wants to stay and buy time for Yavin to
Speaker 11: get fully up and running, but he advises Mon to
Speaker 11: go through with the speech and offers an extraction team
Speaker 11: to help her get off Corussant. While writing her speech,
Speaker 11: Man Mathma is the Senate aid Erskine finds an ISD
Speaker 11: listening device in her office. She goes outside to practice
Speaker 11: the speech while Erskine continues to search for more bugs.
Speaker 11: Waiting outside for Man is Luthan, who tells her that
Speaker 11: Erskine's been secretly working for him for two years and
Speaker 11: that Bail's extraction team is somehow corrupted. Man grows upset
Speaker 11: at Luthan's deceptions and secrets and is unsure of who
Speaker 11: to trust, but Luthan says that he is sending a
Speaker 11: highly trusted operative as an alternative extraction plan. Cassian, still
Speaker 11: undercover as a conflict journalist, agrees to escort Manmathma as
Speaker 11: his last job for the rebellion. Other senators mourned the
Speaker 11: Imperial martyrs slain by the Savage Gormans before Bail. Organa
Speaker 11: invokes a Senate article to hand the Florida Monmothma, where
Speaker 11: she gives her speech calling what's happened on Gorman a
Speaker 11: genocide and labels Emperor Palpatine a monster that, empowered by
Speaker 11: the Senate, has hijacked the truth and reality. The ICB
Speaker 11: orders to shut down the Senate feed and detain Senator Mathma,
Speaker 11: but as Mon exits the Senate chamber, Cassian is waiting
Speaker 11: outside as Lucan suspected one of Bail's extraction team members
Speaker 11: is an ISB double agent, and kills another one of
Speaker 11: Baile's operatives once they're found out. The undercover ICB agent
Speaker 11: tries to arrest Mon but is killed by Erskine and Cassian.
Speaker 11: Man helps navigate through the Senate building as it's put
Speaker 11: into lockdown, eventually reaching her vehicle outside, where Cassian kills
Speaker 11: her driver, Chlorus, who's also an ISOB plant.
Speaker 2: Well was maybe we'll talk about that, yeah.
Speaker 11: Cassian takes Wilman to Yavin for medical attention while Gold
Speaker 11: Squadron finishes Man's escort to the rebel base back on Base,
Speaker 11: Bix breaks up with Cassian via snapchat message and leaves
Speaker 11: Yavin to fight for the rebellion elsewhere and to keep
Speaker 11: Cassian on Yavin, and later that day rebel and engineers
Speaker 11: reprogram these salvaged k extroid. Okay, this episode has a
Speaker 11: lot of a lot of politics, A lot of politicking, Yeah,
Speaker 11: a lot a lot of capital Senate stuff.
Speaker 2: I want to read a little bit from monmothmaus speech here. Sure,
Speaker 2: what I think is kind of the nut of it here,
Speaker 2: I believe we are in a crisis. The distance between
Speaker 2: what is said and what is known to be true
Speaker 2: has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk,
Speaker 2: the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous.
Speaker 2: The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil.
Speaker 2: When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away,
Speaker 2: when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable
Speaker 2: to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.
Speaker 11: Uh boy, it's a little orange man bad. But hey,
Speaker 11: the Orange Man is bad.
Speaker 2: It's not just orange. It's making a broader, more historical
Speaker 2: point that totally yes. The reason all of this works.
Speaker 2: By destroying any kind of shared concept of reality, you
Speaker 2: can get people to If you can get people to
Speaker 2: believe absurdities, you can get them to commit atrocities.
Speaker 7: Right, I mean, this is this is what like the
Speaker 7: Nazis understood as well.
Speaker 2: Yes, and I love that speech. I think it's really
Speaker 2: one of one of my favorite bits of this is
Speaker 2: that it continues to show the degree to which, as
Speaker 2: in Nimic's Manifesto, tiny spontaneous individual acts of rebellion are
Speaker 2: constantly occurring and are a key part of the movement
Speaker 2: even when they're not organized. Mathma only gets through her
Speaker 2: speech and maybe only lives because a team of door
Speaker 2: repair guys who do not appear to be anyone's secret
Speaker 2: agents just fuck up purposefully at their job, like we
Speaker 2: can't get in I don't know, man, we can't get
Speaker 2: into the fucking thing, Like you're gonna have to wait.
Speaker 2: We're still working on this. Yeah, and it's kind of
Speaker 2: inferred that, like it's it's weaponized incompetence, right, And I
Speaker 2: really appreciate that bit. We have a showdown with her
Speaker 2: and her driver because she becomes aware before her speech
Speaker 2: that her driver, who she's been taking in as a
Speaker 2: confidant in the last couple episodes.
Speaker 11: Well no, no, no, no, like her driver, she's known
Speaker 11: her driver, Chlorus has been like isb for like two seasons.
Speaker 2: This is a different driver. I think than first this
Speaker 2: is the same driver, because she's been talking. She's been
Speaker 2: talking to Chloris a couple of times. She makes a
Speaker 2: comment about that this one hurts.
Speaker 11: She's been talking to like Erskine, like, oh shit, yeah,
Speaker 11: she's she's been getting closer to like her state aid.
Speaker 11: Chlorus has always been like a dipshit who they've kept
Speaker 11: around because he's like kind of bad at his job.
Speaker 11: He is bad at being an ISB, like like paid informant,
Speaker 11: so they like keep him around even though they know
Speaker 11: he's reporting to ISB.
Speaker 2: There's a little bit of an insinuation with him looking
Speaker 2: at his gun and listening to her that maybe he's
Speaker 2: rethinking things. But again, we never get the chance to
Speaker 2: see that because Cassie and.
Speaker 7: I think he's like thinking about if he's gonna have
Speaker 7: like a rest or shoot her. Yeah, that was my
Speaker 7: bread on it.
Speaker 2: I think he's making up his mind about what he's
Speaker 2: gonna do. And I don't think we actually see that,
Speaker 2: but I mean I think it's open to interpretation.
Speaker 7: Yeah, because Cassian domes his little because little.
Speaker 2: Thus has and does not take chances like that, he
Speaker 2: does not take chances.
Speaker 11: And also Cassian employs great tactics in asking Man what
Speaker 11: his name is first to engage him in conversation, to
Speaker 11: distract him enough to like totally surprise him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very good. I also I like the one of
Speaker 2: the kind of it's not stated directly, but like Lannie,
Speaker 2: the Imperial deep cover agent within the ISB, is the
Speaker 2: guy who put these people there, particularly the incompetent ISB
Speaker 2: agent who Cassian first shoots the lady, the.
Speaker 11: Person who's infiltrated Man's team a Baile's team. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 11: the reason why Luthan knows that there's something wrong with
Speaker 11: Bail's team is because the agent that has that has
Speaker 11: infiltrated like Baile's network is one of Lonnie's agents. So
Speaker 11: Lonnie was able to get word to Luthan that there
Speaker 11: could be a problem with with Baile's extraction team and
Speaker 11: that's what that's what helps helps get mont Yavin safely.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And it's just kind of more confirmation of the value
Speaker 2: of Lannie of yeah, having him there and how he
Speaker 2: how much he was worth the sacrifice of Ando Krieger
Speaker 2: and his rebels and season.
Speaker 11: One Nonnie Lonnie is mvp uh. Like a lot of
Speaker 11: this episode is kind of showing how much Luthen's accelerationist
Speaker 11: project has kind of succeeded, like like how much he's
Speaker 11: he's in somewhat set up Gorman or at least like
Speaker 11: fed the fire of Gorman slightly to create this political
Speaker 11: crisis to further his like accelerationist goal of creating this
Speaker 11: like big conflict, and like we see some of that
Speaker 11: start to work out, even though Luthen himself is like
Speaker 11: having a much harder time and the kind of the
Speaker 11: house of cards he's built is starting to crumble and
Speaker 11: he's probably not gonna be able to work with many
Speaker 11: people for for very much longer.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And that's like that That's the other thing I
Speaker 7: want to mention about this episode about the way Luthen
Speaker 7: operates is that because the way Luthen operates is by
Speaker 7: fucking not telling anyone anything and by manipulating people and
Speaker 7: by spying on them, and by like having this whole
Speaker 7: network of double agents and like people who doesn't like
Speaker 7: the problem with operating like that, And this is the
Speaker 7: problem that he's running into here is like mon Mathma
Speaker 7: does not fucking trust him because the thing that she
Speaker 7: learned when Luthen comes to tell her like, hey, the
Speaker 7: the you can't go with Bail's team. Yeah, Baile's team
Speaker 7: is going to kill you. She's like, you fucking this.
Speaker 7: You've had my own aids spying on me for two
Speaker 7: what the fuck? Yeah, Like it's like like this this
Speaker 7: is like a persistent problem with the like and you
Speaker 7: start to see this, have have we surround have we
Speaker 7: seen Vell like not working with him anymore?
Speaker 2: I think we have in these episodes, uh Vell does
Speaker 2: not seem to be working with him anymore. She's more
Speaker 2: or less completely gone in on the actual like military
Speaker 2: part of the alliance.
Speaker 7: Yeah then yeah, well and this and this is the
Speaker 7: this is the thing about this is like you get
Speaker 7: to watch every walking away from You get to watch
Speaker 7: everyone who Luthen had worked everyone walks away with him
Speaker 7: because they're like this guy keeps being an asshole and
Speaker 7: he keeps hiding things with people, and he keeps manipulating everyone,
Speaker 7: and it's like it's like he's doing and this is
Speaker 7: this is like also this is a kind of person
Speaker 7: also that you run into where it's like they're doing
Speaker 7: really important work and also interpersonally they're impossible to fucking
Speaker 7: work with and like like and you can you can
Speaker 7: watch it even emulate with this having like real political gratifications. Yeah,
Speaker 7: where it's just like, no, this guy has been just
Speaker 7: like jerking her chain around and like lying to us
Speaker 7: and manipulating us for so long that all of the
Speaker 7: relationships that he needs are breaking down and it's no
Speaker 7: longer a position where because he's the guy with the
Speaker 7: money in the arms and the coordination, everyone has to
Speaker 7: work with him. They now have a choice to like
Speaker 7: go do literally anything else, and everyone keeps walking away,
Speaker 7: and it like almost gets mon Mathama killed because she's
Speaker 7: so pissed at him that he's been like spy having
Speaker 7: her spye.
Speaker 11: On, but it it also saves her, Like it's it's
Speaker 11: it's it's a double right.
Speaker 7: It does seem distrust with Mon, but it also.
Speaker 2: Is what God because it is it is him who
Speaker 2: gets Mom out. Yeah, and it's it's like it's just
Speaker 2: this like really messy.
Speaker 7: That's what makes them a good character is that he
Speaker 7: is both like he understands who he is.
Speaker 11: He's like fucked up and morally compromised and is obviously
Speaker 11: hashtag problematic, but it's also completely necessary within the plot
Speaker 11: that they've created. Yeah, and like somewhat defensible and like
Speaker 11: he knows that he's like fucked, Like he he says,
Speaker 11: like there's.
Speaker 7: No Yavin for me.
Speaker 11: I'm not going to have and I'm never going to
Speaker 11: see the sunrise, Like that's not what my role is.
Speaker 11: I have to be the asshole here, and yeah, it sucks.
Speaker 11: And we start to see like his fake Luthen like
Speaker 11: gallery persona is starting to collapse here too, Like yeah,
Speaker 11: this whole episode, he's not in his like wag, He's
Speaker 11: not in his like fancy clothes. He is like insurgent
Speaker 11: Luthen Like this, this this role that he's he's cultivated
Speaker 11: these past few years is no longer needed and it
Speaker 11: does have negative consequences. Yeah, Mon is not trusting him
Speaker 11: in this moment where she kind of really has to.
Speaker 11: Like Mon thinks that Luthan might just be trying to
Speaker 11: like protect himself, that Luthen might not actually care about
Speaker 11: Mont's own safety Cassie and is tired of always being
Speaker 11: a tool for someone else and is dealing with trauma
Speaker 11: and burnout and Erskine's just caught in the middle of
Speaker 11: this hole, this this whole ship storm and yeah, this
Speaker 11: is this is what makes it compelling.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Yeah, it's just good character writing. We've
Speaker 7: all been bent by secrecy, is what he says.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and and by God he has. And there's there's
Speaker 2: a couple of really good moments in this that I
Speaker 2: don't want to skip over. There's the next Year in
Speaker 2: Next Year in Yavin moment between mon Mathma and Bail Arghana,
Speaker 2: which I saw someone on Twitter decree to be Zionist propaganda.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, like that that is definitely based on next
Speaker 2: Year in Jerusalem, a term that has been in use
Speaker 2: for like way more than half of a millennia. That is,
Speaker 2: has nothing to do with Zionism. You're just being racist,
Speaker 2: I'm sorry. And it's a nice like it's a I think,
Speaker 2: a nice nod to the travails of like what we
Speaker 2: are seeing is like a diaspora, right, as people have
Speaker 2: to flee their homes to participate in the rebellion.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 2: I think it's an appropriate kind of callback to real
Speaker 2: world history there and the line where I think that
Speaker 2: moment between her and Bail works really effectively and the
Speaker 2: thing that he's doing works really effectively.
Speaker 11: This interaction between her and Bail also shows like the
Speaker 11: difference between how Bail operates, Luthen operates because like Man
Speaker 11: asks Bail if he trust his people, like like if
Speaker 11: he trusts his extraction team, and he says like of course, yeah,
Speaker 11: but he but but he has to admit that he
Speaker 11: doesn't actually know them personally for for quote unquote safety,
Speaker 11: and like this is this is where it shows like
Speaker 11: the difference between someone like Bail, who's maybe less manipulative
Speaker 11: than Luthan, maybe a little bit less morally compromised than Luthen,
Speaker 11: but also in in moments like this, like in the
Speaker 11: in specific moments like this comes up a little bit
Speaker 11: short compared to Luthen's uh, like you know, semi semi
Speaker 11: like destructive and like bridge burning tactics, which which he
Speaker 11: which he openly describes as bridge burning. I think I
Speaker 11: think this episode like, are are there any bridges you
Speaker 11: haven't burned yet? Well, we're gonna deal with that soon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we will be dealing with that soon. I would
Speaker 2: like to call out mon Mathma's face acting and both
Speaker 2: the scenes were casting and just immediately domes some motherfuckers.
Speaker 7: WHI jack my god, incredible stuff.
Speaker 2: She's like, she's she's known intellectually and it's even hit
Speaker 2: her because she had a friend of hers killed, right,
Speaker 2: a former lover. She didn't order it, but it was
Speaker 2: done and she knew it was happening, So she's not
Speaker 2: she had to cope with it, totally naive. But the rebellions,
Speaker 2: I would argue, not fully real to her until she
Speaker 2: sees a man shot through the brains.
Speaker 11: It's funny because she, like like minutes earlier, has a
Speaker 11: line where she's like, like, hiding in this set it
Speaker 11: this whole time, will have been the hardest thing we've
Speaker 11: ever done, and then it's immediately faced with the lethal
Speaker 11: consequences for her actions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like I don't know, I don't know. It's
Speaker 2: much worse.
Speaker 7: Well, and it's also like interesting too because it's like
Speaker 7: the second person she's seen shot in this episode, right,
Speaker 7: because like there's also like the first I s P
Speaker 7: Agent who they have shot.
Speaker 11: But it's like she doesn't know the person someone she knows, right, No,
Speaker 11: it's just like some cop and the known Chlorus for years.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and she's just watched her just like ye nope
Speaker 7: and the way and it just instantly he's like yea media. Yeah,
Speaker 7: She's like, oh shit, would have I gotten myself.
Speaker 11: Into Nton's strongest soldiers, killed two undercover I s B.
Speaker 11: This episode give them my hand, folks, Yeah, no, this
Speaker 11: is this is a really a really, a really sleek episode.
Speaker 11: I do like that that like bails, like Infiltrator, has
Speaker 11: like a real is b look to her face. As
Speaker 11: soon as I saw that actress, I'm like that one
Speaker 11: has got to be the undercover I s B right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she just got that.
Speaker 7: Fabulou has said, ib jaw very good.
Speaker 2: There's one thing I'd like to bring up at the
Speaker 2: end of these episodes. It's kind of a callback to
Speaker 2: the very first episode of the show. Is the first
Speaker 2: time we see our boy Cyril. He's just convinced that
Speaker 2: something is and people I've seen people point out Seria
Speaker 2: was actually really good at his job. He points this
Speaker 2: out that like I salved a murder in two days, right,
Speaker 2: he figured out who had who had killed these officers
Speaker 2: very quickly. And one of my favorite little undercutting of
Speaker 2: series points is that his boss solves it even faster,
Speaker 2: like in that first conversation, because his boss is an
Speaker 2: older guy, he's a corporate cop. He clearly has been
Speaker 2: doing whatever he's been doing since probably before the Clone Wars. Right,
Speaker 2: he's been nearer the end of his career than the beginning,
Speaker 2: and he doesn't like the Empire.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 2: He's not even that much of a law and order guy.
Speaker 2: He's more of a get through the day and do
Speaker 2: my fucking job guy. When Cyril brings up Cassie and
Speaker 2: killing these cops, he's like, yeah, man, they're at a brothel.
Speaker 2: I know their salaries. They can't afford that. They were
Speaker 2: shaking people down. They shake the wrong guy down and
Speaker 2: they got killed. Best to ignore it. You don't want
Speaker 2: the Empire over here. And every aspect of Cyril's life
Speaker 2: would have been better if he'd listened to this guy
Speaker 2: who I'm sure spins the rest of the empire, sitting
Speaker 2: on like barely notices the end of things. You know,
Speaker 2: he's probably retired by then. Just a shout out to
Speaker 2: the smartest, the smartest guy in security services we meet
Speaker 2: over the course of these entire series, that old dude
Speaker 2: at the desk. She was like, not worth it, not
Speaker 2: getting into it. Yeah, I wouldn't ask anybody anything. A
Speaker 2: poor poor Cyle, what a little weasel Leah. And he
Speaker 2: fucked up. He fucked up bad.
Speaker 11: I love I always love being in the Senate. She
Speaker 11: does call the Gordon massacre a genocide, performs a whole speech,
Speaker 11: very very solid acting as usual, genevievel Riley fantastic work
Speaker 11: as Asma on this entire season.
Speaker 2: Everyone's great. God damn. Oh well, just talk a little
Speaker 2: bit about Deadri's breakdown after the Gorman.
Speaker 7: Master Yeah in episode eighth, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which also does fit into the whole who are
Speaker 2: you thing where we see that she's not like a
Speaker 2: complete sociopath, right, She's not absolutely devoid of horror over
Speaker 2: what she's doing. She's just willing to accept the horror
Speaker 2: in order to get what she wants out of life,
Speaker 2: which I think is just like a much more realistic
Speaker 2: portrayal of human evil than we tend to get.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: She she finds ways to cope and justify.
Speaker 11: Yeah, And like you know, Lonnie is having to find
Speaker 11: ways to cope and justify, but he's doing that through
Speaker 11: being a double agent and feeding and feeding Luthen, like
Speaker 11: very very important intel as we see in this episode
Speaker 11: and the next let's see. I think this is this
Speaker 11: is most of what I what I had on on
Speaker 11: on thisisode. Oh yeah, I mean, BIXI Bix bricks up
Speaker 11: with Cassian to force Cassian to stay in the U
Speaker 11: in the Alliance, even though he's probably not gonna be
Speaker 11: working with Luthen again. I'll have more to say about
Speaker 11: Bis next week, I guess.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I I have a lot to
Speaker 2: say about this, but I think we'll wait until last
Speaker 2: episode to fully discuss BIX. I think that's probably best.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Ye, But but this, this batch specifically, I think is
Speaker 11: some is some real solid, real solid so is Wow
Speaker 11: Star Wars.
Speaker 2: The stars have never been more wars, Garrison, the stars
Speaker 2: have never been more wars? Can all agree on that?
Speaker 11: I will get way too mad if I talk about
Speaker 11: the DNC anymore in this preamble. This is It could
Speaker 11: happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening
Speaker 11: in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it
Speaker 11: means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today. I'm joined by
Speaker 11: James Stout, Mia Wong, and Robert Evans. Right, everybody, this episode,
Speaker 11: we are covering the week of May eighth through May fifteenth.
Speaker 11: Trump gets bribed by cutter, Stephen Miller wants to suspend
Speaker 11: Habeas Corpus and a Twitch streamer gets interrogated at the border.
Speaker 7: How are we doing, fellas?
Speaker 2: Uh, I don't know bad Like every time I'm.
Speaker 7: Not talking to a border patrol willingly and yeah, that's
Speaker 7: what I'm doing that I'm not doing. I'm staying the
Speaker 7: fuck away from the border.
Speaker 2: Although it's also impossible to say the fuck away from
Speaker 2: the border because like ninety percent of the country lives
Speaker 2: technically within the patrols from met Yeah.
Speaker 11: Yeah, but if you are happening to go to the
Speaker 11: border and you do get stopped by law enforcement, you
Speaker 11: should not talk to them. You should You should say
Speaker 11: that you're staying silent and will only speak with a lawyer.
Speaker 2: You have certain things that you have to say, right
Speaker 2: if they decide to talk to you about something other
Speaker 2: than you know, here's my passport, et cetera. Do I
Speaker 2: have anything to declare? Which you do have to answer
Speaker 2: if they attempt to engage you in other conversation about, say,
Speaker 2: your political beliefs. All you have to say is am
Speaker 2: I being detained? And if they say yes, you say,
Speaker 2: I plead the fifth and I demand to speak to
Speaker 2: a lawyer, and then nothing else. There's nothing else you say.
Speaker 2: That's how you should handle this situation.
Speaker 11: Yeah, you definitely do not need to debate your politics.
Speaker 11: Not required with the border patrol.
Speaker 9: Tell them how you feel about Potestine. That's yeah, not
Speaker 9: gonna end.
Speaker 2: Well, no, not necessary, And yeah, like it's one of
Speaker 2: those things I have no desire to like get into
Speaker 2: an online beef with the fellow who got stopped. He
Speaker 2: is a big boy and able to make his own choices.
Speaker 2: But I do not recommend you make those same choices,
Speaker 2: because there's no actual benefit to you in doing that, right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: don't coalk the cops. It's very easy to not talk
Speaker 2: to the cops. I'm doing it right now. Uh huh,
Speaker 2: that's what you think, trivially easy. Yeah, it's it's it's
Speaker 2: simple and unnecessary, and it's just like largely the problem
Speaker 2: is that and this is even something that he talked
Speaker 2: about where like, well, the guy seemed really nice and
Speaker 2: he apologetic and like he didn't want to have to
Speaker 2: do this. And if you're having a conversation like that
Speaker 2: with them, then they're getting what they want out of it,
Speaker 2: which is for you to feel like that right, for
Speaker 2: you to feel like, oh okay, this guy's this guy's nice,
Speaker 2: I can chat with him for a little while you
Speaker 2: feel safe enough to talk. Yeah, yes, that's their entire job,
Speaker 2: that's what they're trying to get you to do.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and again like this is this is specifically if
Speaker 11: you are, like a US citizen coming to re enter
Speaker 11: the country. There's there's different different rules and different different
Speaker 11: suggestions which you should talk with an immigration lawyer about
Speaker 11: if you were not a US citizen.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, not advice for people who are coming here
Speaker 2: and not citizens. Yeah, yeah, none of this is.
Speaker 11: But yeah, you really really do not need to get
Speaker 11: into a debate with the border guard about your politics
Speaker 11: when you're trying to enter the country.
Speaker 2: Or any other time. Really just just don't really any time. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's no point in time in which that's useful to
Speaker 2: you or anyone else. You ain't changing doing it.
Speaker 3: Maybe do it.
Speaker 11: Maybe there's more to politics than debate. No, speaking of
Speaker 11: more to politics, the PKK, what's going on with the PKK, fellas.
Speaker 2: We should, we should give a brief overview of who
Speaker 2: the PKK is is. The PKK is the Kurdish Workers Party,
Speaker 2: and it is originally a maoist and now not that
Speaker 2: terrorist group. That's legally how it's defined by the United
Speaker 2: States and by most Western countries. That was started in
Speaker 2: southern Turkey like in the late seventies, close to fifty
Speaker 2: years ago, and it started out as a rather different
Speaker 2: kind of organization than it is. It's one of its
Speaker 2: founders and generally the guy referred to as its founder
Speaker 2: as a dude named of the la Aujalon or Oppo
Speaker 2: who got captioned Kenya a few decades back and has
Speaker 2: been in a Turkish prison ever since, but does continue
Speaker 2: to like write stuff that informs because there's kind of
Speaker 2: this strong Maoist core at the heart of the foundation
Speaker 2: of the party continues to have a lot of influence
Speaker 2: over it. And this is the root of kind of
Speaker 2: the different organizations that sprung out and became what we
Speaker 2: call Rajava. Is this group that kind of came in
Speaker 2: during Isis's invasion and you know, had changed significantly from
Speaker 2: its MAOIs roots at that point, and kind of from
Speaker 2: the PKK, we get the YPG and the YPJ and
Speaker 2: you know, these different social and militant movements in Northeast Syria. Anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 2: they would dispute the from the PKK, they sure would. Yes,
Speaker 2: the robots for a good legal reason. Yes, yes, but
Speaker 2: they're all.
Speaker 9: Inspired by the political thought of oyser Land, right, Like
Speaker 9: we can say that safely. Yeah, and Ouserland, I guess
Speaker 9: addressed by video the twelfth Congress of the PKK which
Speaker 9: occurred earlier this month, at which they voted to disband
Speaker 9: themselves and lay down their arms. So that's the d
Speaker 9: A meeting, right, they get together. Obviously it seems that
Speaker 9: Turkey decided not to ask strike that meeting. Turkey has
Speaker 9: been carrying out strikes against the PKK in three different
Speaker 9: countries for decades, and sort of small arms engagements as well,
Speaker 9: and artillery in the whole nine yards. So yeah, at
Speaker 9: that conference they decided to lay down their arms and
Speaker 9: begin disbanding themselves and return to They're still pursuing their
Speaker 9: struggle I guess, for freedom for Kedistan.
Speaker 2: But this time through the democratic process. Yeah. We're going
Speaker 2: to cover this subject in more detail on Tuesday next Tuesday.
Speaker 2: But suffice it to say, like this does not mean
Speaker 2: that like the PKK is like that all of the
Speaker 2: kind of different movements that came out of and were
Speaker 2: inspired by the PKK are like folding up and setting
Speaker 2: up shop. This is more of a pragmatic decision made
Speaker 2: as the result of the changes of situations on the
Speaker 2: ground and the progress that a number of these other
Speaker 2: movements have made. And yeah, this is worthy of deeper discussion.
Speaker 2: We'll give a deeper discussion. But this is something that's
Speaker 2: going to hopefully at least mean that Turkey spends less
Speaker 2: time northern Iraq, although that it may be foolish to
Speaker 2: hope too much for that.
Speaker 9: Do you love to bumble an Iraq? I guess they're
Speaker 9: calling it there like good Friday moments. So people who
Speaker 9: are familiar with the Irish situation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when the ira was like, maybe we've done enough.
Speaker 9: And significantly when there were releases of people who were incarcerated.
Speaker 2: Right, right, and the British government did make some significant
Speaker 2: concessions too.
Speaker 9: Yes, so we will learn more of there were concessions
Speaker 9: involved in this process or if it was a kind
Speaker 9: of unilateral thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot of rumors again, just to go briefly,
Speaker 2: that the Turkish government essentially needs that aired one essentially
Speaker 2: needs some of the support of the Kurdish parties in
Speaker 2: order to maintain keep doing Erdawan shit. So again we'll
Speaker 2: see on all that.
Speaker 7: Yep, speaking of not blowing each other up. India and Pakistan, well, yeah,
Speaker 7: slightly blowing lightly blowing each other up. Can we say
Speaker 7: that without minimizing it, because yeah, there's some fens and
Speaker 7: blowing up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so let's let's talk about this.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 7: We are thankfully no longer on nuclear war watch, which
Speaker 7: is great.
Speaker 2: Put on pause. It's all cool, everything's fine.
Speaker 11: I was I was talking with a read last night
Speaker 11: about whenever this sort of confrontation happens. One of the
Speaker 11: nice things about a globalist world order is that if
Speaker 11: the rest of the world goes.
Speaker 7: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa Hello, who come on now, it
Speaker 7: kind of works.
Speaker 2: Pull him back, hold me back, bro China got a
Speaker 2: hand on pakistans es. It's not worth it. They're not
Speaker 2: worth it. That's the role of the United Nations. Jade
Speaker 2: E Vance like massaging India's shoulders.
Speaker 7: I know, man, I know, but it's.
Speaker 2: Whatever.
Speaker 6: Whatever.
Speaker 11: Things get really spicy between two equal powers. If one
Speaker 11: of their buddies just can go hey, hey, dude, whoa whoa, Oh,
Speaker 11: it kind of works, which is a little bit silly,
Speaker 11: but yeah, yeah, just.
Speaker 2: Remind everyone in charge, do you know how rich you are?
Speaker 2: Come on, you don't want this like you've got hot
Speaker 2: tubs in your manshin, it ain't worth it.
Speaker 7: Yeah, foreign politics, so much of it is just so
Speaker 7: unbelievably stupid, Like it is just like weird nationalist masculinity bullshit,
Speaker 7: where it's like, okay, so we killed some of your
Speaker 7: your people, and then you're gonna kill some of our people,
Speaker 7: and then we can both agree that we like retaliated,
Speaker 7: neither of us back down, and then we'll do a ceasefire.
Speaker 7: So the good news here is that we did actually
Speaker 7: get a ceasefire. The ceasefire was holding, and it's continued
Speaker 7: to hold. This is not like a kind of like
Speaker 7: Israel Palace and cease fire where the Israelis immediately just
Speaker 7: start like shooting everyone an instant later. This is actually holding.
Speaker 7: It's good, it will probably continue to hold. We got
Speaker 7: some more details from Reuters who talked to a bunch
Speaker 7: of officials from different camps. But we know now we're
Speaker 7: gonna do a longer episode about this next week.
Speaker 2: Tuesday. Yeah, all the walls on Tuesday.
Speaker 7: Probably Tuesday, unless, like I don't know, like some other
Speaker 7: shit happens. Who knows, I don't I don't want to
Speaker 7: ever promise an episode's.
Speaker 2: Going out of a day because.
Speaker 5: Tuesday or Wednesday, because it's like like we could we
Speaker 5: could wake up to Trump is likely Trump has like
Speaker 5: declared that like his meme coin is now the official
Speaker 5: currency of the United States or something like who.
Speaker 7: Knows, you say, or Wednesday, we'll say, yeah. Yeah. So
Speaker 7: what's used to have happened that really escalated everything is
Speaker 7: that India fired on a critical Pakistani air base and
Speaker 7: Pakistan was like, all right, gotta go fucking sick on
Speaker 7: mode now, and so they do their retaliation. India appears
Speaker 7: to not have understood exactly how pissed off Pakistan was
Speaker 7: going to be about them hitting this airbase, which also,
Speaker 7: like you would, I don't know what their military planning is,
Speaker 7: like you would assume.
Speaker 2: Trees normally love it when you hit their air bases.
Speaker 6: Whatever.
Speaker 2: Ran at Area fifty one, Yeah, like what are we
Speaker 2: doing here? What are we doing here?
Speaker 7: But the thing that does seem to have worked is
Speaker 7: that Mark or Rubio seems to have actually been like
Speaker 7: able to kind of pass information along between the advance
Speaker 7: was also sort of involved. It seemed mostly like Rubio
Speaker 7: was able to pass a thing to the Pakistani government,
Speaker 7: being like, hey, the Indians are gonna stop. And the
Speaker 7: Pakistani government was like, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, right, but this is getting done.
Speaker 7: We did our retaliatory attacks, like we fucked up.
Speaker 2: A bunch of expensive jets. Like that is key is
Speaker 2: that everybody can sort of this didn't go on so
Speaker 2: far that that like everyone has a lot to avenge,
Speaker 2: and it went on enough that everybody can claim some wins.
Speaker 2: Pakistan could be like, we really did some damage to
Speaker 2: India's best chunk of their air force, and India can
Speaker 2: be like, we blew up some stuff you know, everybody's got.
Speaker 2: If you if you don't have enough information to know
Speaker 2: that like nobody really won, you can pretend you did, right,
Speaker 2: And that's what both of them are doing.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And I think this was this one were talking
Speaker 7: about this last week, like that the best case scenario
Speaker 7: for this is actually I kind of better than the
Speaker 7: best case scenario I was thinking of. I mean, not
Speaker 7: this is like none of this is a good outcome,
Speaker 7: but the outcome here of like it's like a very
Speaker 7: abbreviated version of like an Israel iron thing where they
Speaker 7: shoot each other a few times and then stop. Hopefully
Speaker 7: this will continue to hold and hopefully both sides will
Speaker 7: not take this, and this is something that they were
Speaker 7: talking about. One of the experts that we're just talking
Speaker 7: to were talking about was like, hopefully both sides don't
Speaker 7: see this as a like, oh, we can have conflict
Speaker 7: between two nuclear empowers and it'll be okay. Hopefully both
Speaker 7: sides are going to be like this was very dumb,
Speaker 7: but right now it seems to be over. The ceasefires holding.
Speaker 7: Hopefully more people don't die.
Speaker 8: Yep.
Speaker 9: Yeah, the Dessault stug price though, that that took a
Speaker 9: foul after all shut down.
Speaker 2: That's kind of funny. You know what else is funny?
Speaker 2: Hopefully the russ Ads. Yeah, this podcast nice one.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's why they pay me the baud ocre books.
Speaker 7: Uh yeah, welcome back to something ed. If you have ed,
Speaker 7: please consider him sent Cutter, I hardly okay, sorry now, Garrison,
Speaker 7: I'm so proud of you, buddy.
Speaker 2: That was the right thing to say. That was the
Speaker 2: right thing to say.
Speaker 7: Ahead of Trump's planned trip to the Middle East, Cutter
Speaker 7: has offered a gift to President Trump, a four hundred
Speaker 7: million dollar Boeing seven forty seven eight luxury jet known
Speaker 7: as a Palace in the Sky, which Trump does plan
Speaker 7: to accept.
Speaker 2: Which a stupid fucking plan.
Speaker 7: You gotta flick up a picture of this thing. It
Speaker 7: is absurd, and I gotta say, honestly, my primary thoughts,
Speaker 7: I know they should be like offense and anger, but
Speaker 7: most they're mostly ah cutter.
Speaker 2: You know the assignment. You knew exactly this man can't
Speaker 2: turn down a luxury palace plane. Of course, it's not.
Speaker 2: Someone should off from the fucking snow piercer. You know
Speaker 2: it's all gold up in there. It is.
Speaker 7: It is all gold up in there. Actually, you can
Speaker 7: look it up. It absolutely is. I don't need to
Speaker 7: garrison in my in my mind palace, I've already seen
Speaker 7: the Okay, hit me with the leak.
Speaker 2: Why did we allow this to be constructed? Because it's
Speaker 2: it's one of those things. This is not this like again,
Speaker 2: should it not be legal for Trump to do this?
Speaker 2: Is it not legal for Trump to do this? Of course?
Speaker 2: Is it physically possible for the man Donald Trump to
Speaker 2: say no to this plane?
Speaker 7: Now?
Speaker 2: No, no, that never was in the carts.
Speaker 7: This this is a temple to the defeat of the
Speaker 7: International Workers Movement.
Speaker 2: Jesus, I want to see pitches of this plane. Someone
Speaker 2: to send me pitches the p oh oh good lord,
Speaker 2: oh good lord. Okay, I'm putting it. I mean it's
Speaker 2: exactly the plane you'd think.
Speaker 11: Yes, it's the most Trump thing you could ever imagine. Yeah,
Speaker 11: it's so funny.
Speaker 2: I'm so angry.
Speaker 7: It's just Trump tower in the sky, like you know,
Speaker 7: it's it's actually what I will say about that, Gere,
Speaker 7: is a Trump tower in the sky is like a
Speaker 7: ship built to look fancy to like tasteless Americans. The
Speaker 7: Katari versions actually is actually extremely nice. Yes, the Immirant
Speaker 7: of Qatar knows what they're fucking doing when it comes
Speaker 7: to interior design for fucking evil rich people.
Speaker 2: This you could have had this if you replace the
Speaker 2: walls that are clearly a plane. This could have been
Speaker 2: like a set on and or from like a high
Speaker 2: level coruscant, like the person's house, like that's that's what
Speaker 2: we're talking. Especially that like room with the elevator in
Speaker 2: the middle, like that's a set where mon Mathma yells
Speaker 2: at her like it's beautiful.
Speaker 11: So this plane would be used as a new Air
Speaker 11: Force one and after his term, Trump would retain ownership
Speaker 11: through his Presidential Library Foundation.
Speaker 2: Of course, that's so many.
Speaker 11: Issues with this, from like national security to like a
Speaker 11: very clear bribe. On Monday, Trump told reporters quote, I
Speaker 11: could be a stupid person and say no, we don't
Speaker 11: want to free very expensive airplane.
Speaker 7: I thought it was a great gesture. Unquote.
Speaker 2: Of course, of course what owned So what made a
Speaker 2: comment that like we received the Statue of Liberty as
Speaker 2: a gift. It's the same thing.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's not really the same thing.
Speaker 9: Guys, If like it was Jeff, I don't know who
Speaker 9: is president went arrive, but if the president was living
Speaker 9: inside the Statue of Liberty, Chester, I think it was
Speaker 9: Chester aar there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, yeah, I don't remember exactly.
Speaker 7: I you also love that Trump isn't making the same
Speaker 7: argument that like the old that Clinton supporters used to,
Speaker 7: which is like, well you can take money from a
Speaker 7: thing without being influenced by it, And like the New
Speaker 7: York Times is making this argument. They're like, well, just
Speaker 7: because people are are spending one million dollars to have
Speaker 7: dinner at a crypto thing with Trump doesn't mean that
Speaker 7: he's actually been influenced by the money, so you can't
Speaker 7: call it bribery.
Speaker 2: And I was like, this is great society.
Speaker 7: We love this, we love this. Just give him give
Speaker 7: give the president the fancy.
Speaker 2: Quinn pro what.
Speaker 9: Yeah, to be fair, Trump does have something of a
Speaker 9: history of entering into a financial contract with people and
Speaker 9: then totally abandoning his end of it, So you could
Speaker 9: you could make that up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's so bad Trump.
Speaker 11: They get into an argument with with ABC anchors when
Speaker 11: they asked him if he thought this could be seen
Speaker 11: as a bribe.
Speaker 7: I'll play a short clip here.
Speaker 10: Why you're saying people who view that luxury jet as
Speaker 10: a personal would get to you?
Speaker 6: Why not leave it your ABC? Fake news only ABC?
Speaker 13: Well a few of you would, let me tell you,
Speaker 13: you should be bad asking the question they're giving us
Speaker 13: a free jet, I could say, no, no, no, don't
Speaker 13: give us.
Speaker 6: I want to pay you a billion or four hundred
Speaker 6: million or whatever it is. Well, I could say thank
Speaker 6: you very much. You know those an all golfer named
Speaker 6: Sam Snay Did you ever hear me? One? ADQ terms
Speaker 6: was a great golfer.
Speaker 11: After that, he goes on to talk about golf for
Speaker 11: a whole minute, building an analogy based on making an
Speaker 11: easy putt on a golf course. I'm going to quote
Speaker 11: from BBC quote Attorney General Pambondi reportedly investigated the legality
Speaker 11: of the deal and determined that because there are no
Speaker 11: explicit conditions attached, it would not amount to a bribe.
Speaker 11: Conservatives and others were quick to point out that Bondi
Speaker 11: was registered as a lobbyist for Cutter prior to joining
Speaker 11: Trump's cabinet, at some point, earning up to one hundred
Speaker 11: and fifteen thousand dollars a month for her work for
Speaker 11: the Qatari government.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, one's going to be like influenced by a
Speaker 2: mere one hundred and fourteen thousand dollars a month. You couldn't,
Speaker 2: for example, easily immediately so much money and get me
Speaker 2: to say everyone should buy a Chevy truck, the new Ram,
Speaker 2: that's the vehicle of the proletariat Ram.
Speaker 7: We know that this is fake because Robert would never
Speaker 7: knowingly endorse a Chevy product for.
Speaker 2: One hundred and fourteen thousand dollars. You think I wouldn't
Speaker 2: sell chevyes.
Speaker 11: But this is the most like corrupt administration we've ever
Speaker 11: seen before. It's absurd, like just completely like flying it
Speaker 11: in your face. Even ten Cruz said that this gift
Speaker 11: could could impose quote significant espionage and surveillance problems unquote
Speaker 11: because yeah, that plane.
Speaker 2: Is going to be so fun for thee Oh my god,
Speaker 2: how they're just the whole plane. It's a flying bug.
Speaker 2: It's so funny.
Speaker 11: Our government they're gonna listened to every Air Force one meeting.
Speaker 2: Not only are they going to listen into it, the
Speaker 2: guy whose job that is, Like, they've already been paying
Speaker 2: almost as much as the plane costs for him to
Speaker 2: get pre empt of therapy to listen to that many
Speaker 2: Trump inner circle conversations. The fucking Emir himself is putting
Speaker 2: a hand. I know, man, I know it's gonna be hard.
Speaker 2: Like we're all back, We're all behind you.
Speaker 11: Everyone from like Ben Shapiro to Laura Lumer have have
Speaker 11: opposed this de facto bribe as quote unquote sleazy, while
Speaker 11: also pointing to Cutter as a terrorist aligned state.
Speaker 2: Did you think your guy was? Come on, you watched
Speaker 2: Donald Trump. You believe me he's gonna take a golden
Speaker 2: palace in the sky.
Speaker 9: Come on, man, didn't they also wheel out a mobile
Speaker 9: McDonald's faming costa so he could do.
Speaker 2: That was in Saudi Arabia to Saudi Arabia, that was Arabia.
Speaker 7: They're also planning to possibly construct a new Trump Tower
Speaker 7: in Dubai.
Speaker 2: Su Honestly, both Dubai and Trump deserve that kind of
Speaker 2: like shade. Yeah, sure they belong together.
Speaker 11: Yeah, the people that Trump is negotiating with here just
Speaker 11: really know how to like get wins out of him,
Speaker 11: Like yeah, Trump Tower, here's a mobile McDonald.
Speaker 7: Here's a four million dollar free jet. They really have
Speaker 7: him on law.
Speaker 2: It's tragic because the mobile McDonald's and burger Kings used
Speaker 2: to be a sign of American like logistical dominance that
Speaker 2: like I was wondering if it had invaded it rock,
Speaker 2: like fuck our ability to like airstrike anyone anywhere. We
Speaker 2: can put a fully operational McDonald's anywhere on the planet
Speaker 2: in about sixteen hours, like no one else can do that.
Speaker 9: Yeah, we invaded a rock with burger King trailers, yes, yes.
Speaker 2: And to see it turned against our values so much.
Speaker 2: Is it's just deeply if no, I mean, I'm joking here,
Speaker 2: but it is funny. Speaking of foreign trade, what is
Speaker 2: that I hear? Is that is that the lucid melody
Speaker 2: of tariff reef Garrison.
Speaker 4: Locking jazz b locking jazz bot sorry, locking.
Speaker 8: Locking jazz rocking jazz Bob.
Speaker 2: We're all thinking about the best way we ever spent
Speaker 2: our company money. Every penny of that one hundred and
Speaker 2: fourteen thousand dollars a month Chevy gives us for telling
Speaker 2: people to buy the new Rams. It went to a
Speaker 2: good place.
Speaker 9: Yeah, just if we can just get one more automotive
Speaker 9: industry sponsor, then I can finally rewrite White Riot to
Speaker 9: be about white genocide in South Africa.
Speaker 2: That's right. We're courting Shell right now. So don't worry, James,
Speaker 2: We're gonna get that cover. But I'm glad to hear it.
Speaker 11: So I heard all the tariffs are gone, basically. I
Speaker 11: heard we're back to normal. Nothing ever happens. I can
Speaker 11: go back to buying Timu all day long. I can't
Speaker 11: stop playing those those TV gambling ads. And everything's normal, right, Mia.
Speaker 7: Okay, So let's let's let's where are we at with
Speaker 7: the turf tariffs? So there were actual negotiations between the
Speaker 7: US and Sharp and so they agreed to a ninety
Speaker 7: day pause on the one hundred and forty five percent
Speaker 7: tariff and the one hundred and twenty percent tariff that
Speaker 7: China had imposed retaliation. However, there's still thirty percent, like
Speaker 7: a tariffs on all Chinese goods, which is in and
Speaker 7: of itself alone enough to cause a recession. I just
Speaker 7: want everyone's Easter forgotten. This China's is back down to
Speaker 7: ten percent across the board on all us goods. Now again,
Speaker 7: this is a ninety day pause, which has been like
Speaker 7: this is just the way that all this functions now
Speaker 7: is nothing ever ends. It just gets kicked off like
Speaker 7: down the road for ninety days. So we'll be back
Speaker 7: here in ninety No, well, okay, we'll be back in
Speaker 7: the crisis zone a bit before that, because we're still
Speaker 7: on the other ninety day countdown, which the Liberation Day
Speaker 7: turf tariff one for every single country on Earth.
Speaker 11: Honestly, I don't think these countdowns are real, and I
Speaker 11: know this is like this is like different from the
Speaker 11: way like other commentators will talk about how these tariffs
Speaker 11: aren't really Like I'm not saying these tariffs aren't real.
Speaker 11: I don't know if there's someone in the White House
Speaker 11: who is literally counting down each day here like this.
Speaker 2: No, I think there is.
Speaker 7: I think I think it's Navarro, because Navarro actually wants
Speaker 7: all of these terriffs, and that's that's that's the driving
Speaker 7: thing behind this is Trump kind of wants these tariffs,
Speaker 7: but there's not enough of him there psychologically to like
Speaker 7: push it unless Navarro is doing it. But the reason
Speaker 7: these are taking the form of pauses is because Trump
Speaker 7: like actually wants them until he can like negotiate his
Speaker 7: big shiny deal or whatever the fuck that like can't
Speaker 7: happen structurally for reasons we'll get into.
Speaker 11: But like, I'm just remembering the Canada Mexico tariffs that
Speaker 11: Trump put on a ninety day pause and then can
Speaker 11: we completely forgot about and instead it did the Liberation
Speaker 11: Day tariffs, which then got another ninety day pause.
Speaker 7: No, but there was also the but also like the
Speaker 7: auto tariffs got paused and then those came off and
Speaker 7: like went into effect. Yeah, so some of these like
Speaker 7: have happened, and like and I think, I really think it.
Speaker 7: The actual thing it comes down to is like will
Speaker 7: Navarro be the last person in the room with Trump
Speaker 7: or will it be one of his other cabinet people
Speaker 7: who don't support this stuff? And I think it's just
Speaker 7: a coin flip basically, as like who wrap fucks the
Speaker 7: other one successfully as to whether like all this stuff
Speaker 7: happens and there's still like more tariffs that are like
Speaker 7: floating in the air that we haven't heard anything about
Speaker 7: from last week. Wild wild tariffs frolicking in the woods.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like sour dough. They can just flick it.
Speaker 7: I want to actually explain what the fuck is going
Speaker 7: on with the Chinese tariffs though, because the reporting on
Speaker 7: it has been really bad and no one's in the
Speaker 7: idea what the fuck is going on? So Okay, on
Speaker 7: the one hand, there is still the thirty percent across
Speaker 7: the board on all Chinese coots. However, the fee for
Speaker 7: small packages right, which is the stuff that was in
Speaker 7: the Deminimus exemption that we talked about getting reduced, so
Speaker 7: that tariff is at fifty four percent or a one
Speaker 7: hundred dollars flat fee for the package. What qualifies as
Speaker 7: a small package value. I think it's like sub eight
Speaker 7: hundred dollars, okay roughly, so yeah, And they also still
Speaker 7: have to go through like actual full custs which which
Speaker 7: the package is from Deminimus, like weren't going through right, Okay.
Speaker 7: So this is still lethal to like Tamu and Chian
Speaker 7: and like all of the all the companies that have
Speaker 7: been relying on this stuff. It's still lethal to like
Speaker 7: vast quantities of like parts of the supply chain that
Speaker 7: we haven't even seen yet that we're getting, like the
Speaker 7: one kind of screw that they need in cheap Chinese packages,
Speaker 7: because you could just do that and so and so
Speaker 7: that's what's still in effect right now. And as best
Speaker 7: I can tell, there hasn't actually been a negotiation.
Speaker 2: It's it's also.
Speaker 7: Unclear whether the Chinese government like knew that those were
Speaker 7: going to go back into effect because there because Trump
Speaker 7: did this whole thing like, ah, the tarifs are over,
Speaker 7: blah blah blahlah blah, no are the thirty percent tariff
Speaker 7: on all goods, And then the next day he was like, oh, yeah, no,
Speaker 7: but that the small package one's still there, and that
Speaker 7: rates also changed, So it's also possible by tomorrow the
Speaker 7: rates are different. Because this is the dominant feature of
Speaker 7: all of this structurally is just complete chaos, Like it's
Speaker 7: it's just chaos. Nobody has any idea what the fuck
Speaker 7: is happening, And this is just a complete fiasco for
Speaker 7: literally everyone, because the shifts and teriff rates that are
Speaker 7: happening on a day by day basis are shifts large
Speaker 7: enough to shift the entire structure of the global economy,
Speaker 7: and they're just happening every days. And that's the thing
Speaker 7: that's like fucking the economy almost as much as like
Speaker 7: the actual tariffs, is just the chaos of the uncertainty
Speaker 7: and the inability to do any kind of like even
Speaker 7: the short term planning that businesses usually do. It's also
Speaker 7: worth noting that like there's no actual trade deal right,
Speaker 7: Like there isn't actually a US China trade deal. There's
Speaker 7: just they both agreed to like back off for a
Speaker 7: while while they do negotiations. There's also no structural way
Speaker 7: to actually like resolve the problem that Trump sees here,
Speaker 7: which is that like Trump and Navarro and the hardliners
Speaker 7: don't want there to be a US trade deficit with China,
Speaker 7: and that's not a thing that could be solved, never
Speaker 7: gonna happen.
Speaker 2: That's crazy.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, And so you know, and this has been
Speaker 7: playing out in other negotiations too. The US has been
Speaker 7: in negotiations with India. Trump just like came out and
Speaker 7: straight up lied and said that India had agreed to
Speaker 7: get rid of all their tariffs, and India was like, no,
Speaker 7: we didn't. What the fuck you talk talking about.
Speaker 2: Art of the deal.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so you know, this is all turned into just
Speaker 7: an utter fiasco. Meanwhile, we're starting to see signs that, yeah,
Speaker 7: the price increase, so we all knew we're coming up coming.
Speaker 7: Walmart is doing massive price increases, a bunch of other
Speaker 7: companies are considering them. They're probably going to start very soon.
Speaker 7: I want to read this quote from an economist named
Speaker 7: Marcus Nolan that NBC talk to, who is a senior
Speaker 7: institute for the Pierson Institute for International Economics. He said, quote,
Speaker 7: I think we're in for a lot more turbulence and
Speaker 7: a lot more back and forth, and the market seems
Speaker 7: to grasp, which I'm glad someone else is finally fucking
Speaker 7: saying this, because like, yeah, no shit. And part of
Speaker 7: what was going on here too is the market is
Speaker 7: just incredibly easy to manipulate because people running the markets
Speaker 7: are very stupid, and the moment they realize like you
Speaker 7: can just very very easily make an unhinged amount of
Speaker 7: money by being like the TERRORISTI are going to go
Speaker 7: into a fact and then betting against the market. There's
Speaker 7: been so much like insider stories of like insider trading
Speaker 7: from this stuff, and I don't think that's like the
Speaker 7: major thing going on. But it's also like it's just
Speaker 7: such an easy grift to pull if you know what's
Speaker 7: gonna happen. Like I could have made a bunch of
Speaker 7: money if I'd been willing to be like, hey, friends,
Speaker 7: give me a bunch of money to put to the
Speaker 7: stock market and let me short a bunch of shit
Speaker 7: the day before the Liberation Day terrrish or whatever.
Speaker 11: And that's a plug for our new weekend show where
Speaker 11: Mia does Jim Kramer. We're gonna we're gonna start doing
Speaker 11: stock portfolio suggestions. It's called Markets with Mia, Markets with
Speaker 11: MEA thank you James, Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well I will.
Speaker 7: I will fucking I will throw darts at a dartboard
Speaker 7: and then throw the dartboard at a larger dartboard, and
Speaker 7: I will outperform Jim Kramer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're calling this to do whatever the opposite of
Speaker 2: Jim Kramer says power hour. We've literally just reversed his audio.
Speaker 7: It's such a powerful investment strategy, never been defeated. Okay,
Speaker 7: So so the one last thing I want to talk about,
Speaker 7: which is not quite terriff but is ECON related, is
Speaker 7: that there are for the financial times, there is a
Speaker 7: plan in s trow administration to roll back a bunch
Speaker 7: of the rules about leverage ratios we're imposed on banks
Speaker 7: for two thousand and eight. And so, okay, Mia, what
Speaker 7: the fuck is a leverage ratio?
Speaker 9: Think the very short leave underneath the bank, and if
Speaker 9: you want to tip it over, you have to be
Speaker 9: quite a long way like away from it actually, and
Speaker 9: then you pivot on the other end.
Speaker 7: I think this is a very funny joke, but no
Speaker 7: one else is laughing on the call. No. I would
Speaker 7: try to figure out how to write part two of it,
Speaker 7: but then you just brought up Archimedies. I try to
Speaker 7: over Archimedes's name, but I couldn't do it, So okay.
Speaker 7: So basically, basically what this is is that so banks
Speaker 7: have just like a bunch of unbelievably risky assets, and
Speaker 7: this is a requirement that they actually have assets that
Speaker 7: are safe. Yeah, so they have the assets that are
Speaker 7: risky go under. They don't get fucking nukes like everyone
Speaker 7: did in two thousand and eight. Now, this is worth
Speaker 7: noting because one of the other kind of stories that's
Speaker 7: kind of flown under the radar is that in the
Speaker 7: past couple of years, a bunch of banks and a
Speaker 7: bunch of investment firms have been getting back to the
Speaker 7: literally the exact types of extremely risky mortgage backed securities
Speaker 7: at the cause the two thousand and eight financial collapse.
Speaker 7: It's literally the same people to bring them back do
Speaker 7: the same thing again. They've also I'm doing it with
Speaker 7: auto loans, which is great. And in the middle of this,
Speaker 7: the Trump administration wants to roll back a bunch of
Speaker 7: the protections that have been maintaining this very very precarious
Speaker 7: balance so that the banking system has been in to
Speaker 7: like not really collapse for the past decade and a half.
Speaker 7: So that's gonna be fun. The rumor is is gonna
Speaker 7: happen over the summer. If he does this over the summer,
Speaker 7: right as everything kicks off, it's gonna be a trip.
Speaker 7: Do you know what else is a trip?
Speaker 11: These products and services that support this podcast. Woo all right,
Speaker 11: we are back. We're gonna close this episode with me
Speaker 11: and James talking about a whole bunch of really bad
Speaker 11: immigration stuff that has happened again, which I feel like
Speaker 11: is kind of an evergreen for us. Same thing with
Speaker 11: Tariff top. We always have some bad immigration news and
Speaker 11: this week is no different. On Friday ninth, Stephen Miller
Speaker 11: announced that the administration is quote actively looking at suspending
Speaker 11: Habeas corpus. James don't to give a very brief definition
Speaker 11: of what Habeas corpus is.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's it's just a foundation of like most legal
Speaker 9: systems in the world, which draw I guess on English
Speaker 9: common law means bring me the body, right, Like the
Speaker 9: idea is you have to present some evidence before just incarcerating.
Speaker 7: If you're going to say this guy killed somebody, there
Speaker 7: better be a corpse. Right, needs to be like reason
Speaker 7: and due process for detention.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, you can't just lock someone up because you wanted to. Yeah,
Speaker 9: actually you.
Speaker 7: Can, but you sometimes can.
Speaker 11: And this does predate the United States, and the United
Speaker 11: States itself has suspended Habeas corpus a few times, usually
Speaker 11: in specific states. For instance, following the Pearl Harbor attack,
Speaker 11: Habeas Corpus was suspended in Hawaii to detain Japanese civilians.
Speaker 11: A President Grant and Congress works together to suspend haby
Speaker 11: Corpus in South Carolina during reconstruction. Admits to terrorist attacks
Speaker 11: from the KKK, which is kind of crazy to think
Speaker 11: about in retrospect, and the very first time Habeas Corpus
Speaker 11: was suspended was in the lead up to the Civil
Speaker 11: War when President Lincoln called for its suspension in the
Speaker 11: state of Maryland. Now that unilateral action was later deemed
Speaker 11: unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and now it's widely recognized
Speaker 11: that only Congress has the right to suspend Habeas corpus.
Speaker 11: This is in the case of rebellion or invasion. Now,
Speaker 11: this is something that Stephen Miller is talking about. It
Speaker 11: should be incredibly worrying. Obviously, they've kind of tried to
Speaker 11: make this happen just already without like explicitly saying so,
Speaker 11: which is also what like FDR tried to do during
Speaker 11: World War Two, where they don't formally call for the
Speaker 11: suspension like nationwide, but they start instituting policies that definitely
Speaker 11: like do yeah exactly, which is why we're seeing so
Speaker 11: many habeas petitions being filed across the state when people
Speaker 11: have been detained unlawfully. Homeland Security Secretary Christinomes said on
Speaker 11: Wednesday in congressional hearing that the level of border crossings
Speaker 11: under Joe Biden provides a sufficient legal justification to suspend
Speaker 11: Habeas corpus. Following Trump's declaration of invasion. So this is
Speaker 11: something to watch out for as they start trying to
Speaker 11: basically codify all of the actions that they're currently doing
Speaker 11: which can be construed as illegal or certainly legally questionable,
Speaker 11: they're going to try to find ways to make them
Speaker 11: more explicitly legal.
Speaker 9: So probably the most notable immigration happening this week is
Speaker 9: one that we already covered on the show, and it
Speaker 9: is the reopening of the United States refugee emissions program.
Speaker 7: We're taking refugees again.
Speaker 2: We didn't, we didn't, yeh.
Speaker 9: Unfortunately, we're only taking the persecuted Africanas of South Africa.
Speaker 9: Wait what Yeah, the survivors of the white genocide, those
Speaker 9: those who made it through.
Speaker 7: Quote unquote white genocide, the white zero side that even
Speaker 7: Groc doesn't agree existly.
Speaker 9: Yeah, can't make his digital child believe in.
Speaker 11: Let me actually quote from a from a grok doing
Speaker 11: a Charger Banks impression. We don't have to do this,
Speaker 11: Lisa Grock Oopsie used to ask about the replies. But
Speaker 11: Lisa takes you meaning the big talk about South Africa. Yeah,
Speaker 11: do white genocide Takabucho controversial. I'm sorry, I can't turn
Speaker 11: the rest.
Speaker 2: It's not even good Jar Jar, I'm sorry, and he
Speaker 2: speaks Spanish. I think it's chucking all the racial stereotype.
Speaker 6: What are we.
Speaker 7: They make it more racist, see white farmers getting attacked
Speaker 7: too much, like two hundred and fourteen attacks a year,
Speaker 7: and political words like killed four making it worse.
Speaker 2: It's too bad. I'm not getting cancer and pay for
Speaker 2: exposure to this. It does go on for.
Speaker 9: Sentences so much more like I love how you should like.
Speaker 9: It's fucking dubstep recorders.
Speaker 2: Cut in the song. I've never met a nice South
Speaker 2: African right here.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I think we can. We'll just do the first first.
Speaker 9: We just discussed it. We're fine for copyright.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I'll throw that in here. Yep.
Speaker 9: It's even got a reference to me and Mars, so
Speaker 9: we're fine. We've covered it before. It's the central worldly song.
Speaker 7: Lisa says, no, thank.
Speaker 2: You, stop gone.
Speaker 9: So if he's giving a double thumbs down, everyone is
Speaker 9: very upset right now, apart from Garrison, who's laughing like
Speaker 9: a little imp. Having introduced jud Jar Binks to the goal.
Speaker 9: Right back to the Afrikaners. The fifty nine Afrikaners who
Speaker 9: are brought to the United States came after the United
Speaker 9: States halted or refugee admissions. In January, thousands of people,
Speaker 9: including Afghans who and Iraqis who work for the United States,
Speaker 9: remained stranded.
Speaker 2: Some of them are stuck at airports.
Speaker 9: Most of them are in third country where they only
Speaker 9: have limited visas, and they're looking at timing out their
Speaker 9: visas in those third countries. As a direct result of
Speaker 9: the Trump administration's fackory with the white genocide stuff, the
Speaker 9: Episcopalian Church, not the most work of organizations, has suspended
Speaker 9: its contracts its resettlement contracts with the government.
Speaker 7: Criticals support, Yeah.
Speaker 9: I mean, I read the letter from one of their
Speaker 9: bishops on our show about this, and like he was
Speaker 9: very forthright, and like, I generally genuinely do have critical
Speaker 9: support for the faith based organizations who help refugees. It's
Speaker 9: a good thing to do, and I'm glad that they
Speaker 9: are doing it, especially I they're not trying to like
Speaker 9: turn into a weird missionary operation like evangelicals do.
Speaker 2: For sure.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, I mean, what's it called the fucking Glenn Beck.
Speaker 9: One doesn't it's not a resettlement agency. Luckily so in Worcester, Massachusetts,
Speaker 9: a place that I didn't know there was a Worcester
Speaker 9: in America. Actually this is oh yeah, So how is
Speaker 9: it then that as a nation, Americans are incapable of
Speaker 9: saying Worcestershire.
Speaker 7: Oh boy, yeah, because that's just one state and it's
Speaker 7: not a good one. Also, that's the sauce, right.
Speaker 2: It's also the place I was born Garrison. Oh well, yeah, Worcestershire.
Speaker 2: For those who are you wondering there it is people,
Speaker 2: Yeah again I do.
Speaker 7: We do have to call it Worster because that's what
Speaker 7: it's called in this country.
Speaker 4: Hmm.
Speaker 11: I care a lot about accurate pronunciations of places and names.
Speaker 7: So it is Worcester.
Speaker 9: Worcester's the city in Worcestershire is the county in England too,
Speaker 9: so you don't have the county and where you have Massachusetts,
Speaker 9: so wester Massachusetts. I threatened to arrest a twenty one
Speaker 9: year old woman named Augusta Clara, and they told her
Speaker 9: that they'd have to take her three months old baby
Speaker 9: as well, because they couldn't leave it with her seventeen
Speaker 9: year old sister on account of the younger woman being
Speaker 9: a minor. As it turned out, this was a ploy
Speaker 9: to lure out her mother. Clara called her mother who
Speaker 9: came out to take the baby, and they arrested her mother,
Speaker 9: which was who they'd been wanting to arrest the whole time.
Speaker 9: This arrest came the day after they had arrested the
Speaker 9: baby's father in what Clara says was a response to
Speaker 9: him honking his horn at an undercover ICE agent. Neighbors
Speaker 9: tried to intervene in the scene, which resulted in the Worcester,
Speaker 9: Massachusetts Police Department responding. The cops proceeded to body slam
Speaker 9: seventeen year old girl, arrest her, and arrest a local
Speaker 9: woman for what they claimed was pushing them. Locals have
Speaker 9: been protesting since the city council has moved its meetings
Speaker 9: online citing public safety concerns, and in another bungled raid
Speaker 9: in the same state, ICE agents left a twelve year
Speaker 9: old child alone on the sidewalk and drove their vehicle
Speaker 9: aggressively towards a city councilor who was trying to document
Speaker 9: a situation. Meanwhile, in Florida, DeSantis has sworn in one
Speaker 9: hundred Florida Highway Patrol deputies as special US Marshals, and
Speaker 9: their claiming this allows them to conduct immigration enforcement operations
Speaker 9: of their own outside of cooperation with ICE or CVP
Speaker 9: that adds to the two thousand ATF and DA agents.
Speaker 9: A tramp administration has requested to join ICE teams. So
Speaker 9: when you're watching videos, sometimes you'll see when there are
Speaker 9: these like ICE snatch squads right there are ATF agents
Speaker 9: with them, and what they're generally there to do is
Speaker 9: like to secure, to provide like additional security on the
Speaker 9: team while the ICE agents do the actual apprehensions. DeSantis
Speaker 9: has also offered quote new detention facilities. I haven't seen
Speaker 9: much reporting on this, but in the same statement on
Speaker 9: his website where he talked about cross swearing the highway
Speaker 9: patrol guys, he also talked about these quote new detention facilities,
Speaker 9: and I want to take this opportunity to reflect on
Speaker 9: the existing detention facilities in Florida because they are the
Speaker 9: worst in a system of horrific detention facilities. The ACLU
Speaker 9: has documented quote persistent emotional, physical, and sexual abuse at
Speaker 9: the hands of staff for these facilities. Detainees reportedly being
Speaker 9: punished simply seeking medical care, be denied medical attention just
Speaker 9: by having preexistinct conditions. The report also found ample evidence
Speaker 9: of gendered and racialized mistreatment the Chrome Detention Center that's
Speaker 9: krom Is in particular horrific migrants there, in one instance
Speaker 9: were held in chains on buses for sixteen hours and
Speaker 9: told to use the bathroom where they were sitting on
Speaker 9: the buses. A migrant named a sudi as A hell
Speaker 9: Vasquez Martinez somehow kept his phone inside the Chrome Detention
Speaker 9: Center and was able to live stream or at least
Speaker 9: post videos showed horrific overcrowding. Some sources claim there were
Speaker 9: as many as four thousand people in the detention center,
Speaker 9: which has a capacity of five hundred and two people
Speaker 9: that we know of have died there since January.
Speaker 2: Florida looking to add more detention centers. Not great, It's
Speaker 2: about all I got.
Speaker 9: Garrison talk to us about Project Homecoming. Who's coming home?
Speaker 11: Yeah, And again we will actually close on some good news.
Speaker 11: So it's not all horrible stuff this entire time. But
Speaker 11: we do need to mention Project Homecoming. So this was
Speaker 11: a proclamation issued by Trump on May ninth, entitled establishing
Speaker 11: Project Homecoming, which aims to curb a quote unquote full
Speaker 11: scale invasion. It claims to devote more federal resources to
Speaker 11: assist self deportation via the CBP Home app including paying
Speaker 11: for flights for those who are quote voluntarily and permanently
Speaker 11: departing the United States unquote, which says, quote the Secretary
Speaker 11: of State and Secretary of Homeland Security shall create a
Speaker 11: concierge service whereby any alien illegally present in the United States,
Speaker 11: it may arrive at an airport with or without appropriate
Speaker 11: travel documents book air travel to permanently relocate to a
Speaker 11: different country. So they are really strengthening these self deportation mechanisms.
Speaker 11: Section two promises to provide financial incers in the form
Speaker 11: of a quote unquote exit bonus for each illegal alien
Speaker 11: who voluntarily and permanently departs the United States.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so a couple of really weird things. They're just
Speaker 2: off the bat. Yes, age like permanently departs.
Speaker 9: It seems to suggest that you would be permanently barred
Speaker 9: from ever entering the United States acquiring a visa.
Speaker 2: Again.
Speaker 9: Secondly, if you don't have travel documents, the country that
Speaker 9: you're traveling to or through has no reason to admit you.
Speaker 9: Right that, the US government cannot force other countries to
Speaker 9: admit people without travel documents. There are things called refugee
Speaker 9: travel documents which allow people who have had their passports,
Speaker 9: et cetera stolen to travel.
Speaker 2: I don't think that's what's gonna happen here.
Speaker 11: Yeah, it does mention something about trying to negotiate with
Speaker 11: other countries to allow people without documentation to arrive there,
Speaker 11: but like, well they actually do that probably not like
Speaker 11: they've claimed to not have to need to do that before,
Speaker 11: So like, yeah, that's not like a solid promise. Now
Speaker 11: those who choose to remain will face quote sweeping consequences
Speaker 11: including removal, prosecution, incarceration, and finds as consistent with applicable
Speaker 11: law for immigration related crimes, the garnishment of wages, and
Speaker 11: the confiscations of savings and personal property, including homes and
Speaker 11: vehicles unquote, So they're threatening to steal all of your things.
Speaker 11: This proclamation follows this like propaganda video shared by Christino
Speaker 11: and the Department of Homeland Security. This video was released
Speaker 11: a few weeks ago, and it contains some similar rhetoric
Speaker 11: regarding self deportation and fines being imposed for those who
Speaker 11: stay in the country.
Speaker 14: An illegal alien from Guatemala charged with raping a child
Speaker 14: in Massachusetts. An MS thirteen gang member from Al Salvador
Speaker 14: accused of murdering a Texas man of Venezuelan charged with
Speaker 14: filming and selling child pornography in Michigan. These are just
Speaker 14: some of the heinous migrant criminals caught because of President
Speaker 14: Donald J. Trump's leadership. I'm Christinom, the United States Secretary
Speaker 14: of Homeland Security. Under President Trump, attempted illegal border crossings
Speaker 14: are at the lowest levels ever recorded, and over one
Speaker 14: hundred thousand illegal aliens have been arrested. If you are
Speaker 14: here illegally, your next you will be fine nearly one
Speaker 14: thousand dollars a day. Imprisoned and deported, you will never return.
Speaker 14: But if you register using our CBP home app and
Speaker 14: leave now, you could be allowed to return legally. Do
Speaker 14: what's right. Leave now under President Trump America's laws order
Speaker 14: and families will be protected.
Speaker 2: The whole style of this video is very bizarre. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's like a Marvel trailer.
Speaker 11: It's like a Marvel trailer with like the setex of
Speaker 11: like mid two thousands, like dystopian sci fi.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Again, the end of that video, she talks about being
Speaker 11: able to return legally, which is in contrast to the
Speaker 11: language in a Project Homecoming, which says that people would
Speaker 11: be leaving the United States permanently. Finally, the proclamation directs
Speaker 11: the Secretary of Home and Security to within sixty days,
Speaker 11: supplement existing law enforcement and removal operations by deputizing and
Speaker 11: contracting state and local police, former Feds, and quote other individuals,
Speaker 11: to increase the enforcement and removal operations force of the
Speaker 11: Department of Homeland Security by no less than twenty thousand
Speaker 11: officers in order to conduct an intensive campaign to remove
Speaker 11: illegal aliens unquote. And now, as of this morning, May fifteenth,
Speaker 11: the DHS has requested to mobilize over twenty thousand National
Speaker 11: Guard troops from the Department of Defense to comply with
Speaker 11: Trump's order to expand its immigration crackdown. And on Wednesday,
Speaker 11: the FBI ordered agents to deprioritize white collar crime investigations
Speaker 11: for the remainder of twenty twenty five to instead focus
Speaker 11: on immigration enforcement. Field offices notified their agents that now
Speaker 11: one third of their time must go towards assisting Trump's
Speaker 11: immigration policies.
Speaker 7: I'm going to quote from Reuter's quote. The orders came
Speaker 7: on the same day that Matthew Gaiiatti, the head of
Speaker 7: the Justice Department's Criminal Division, issued new guidance to prosecutors
Speaker 7: that scales back this the scope of white collar cases
Speaker 7: historically pursued by the Department, and orders prosecutors to quote
Speaker 7: minimize the length and collateral impact of such investigations.
Speaker 2: Jeez.
Speaker 11: Again, the most corrupt administration ever ever before seen. Yeah,
Speaker 11: and now for the good news to close the episode.
Speaker 11: The Tuft's university student was may Oz Turk, who was
Speaker 11: black bagged on the streets of Massachusetts for co authoring
Speaker 11: a pro Palestine op ed, has been released on bail
Speaker 11: as of May ninth, after spending six weeks in ICED attention.
Speaker 11: The judge said that missus Ostrich's claims of her First
Speaker 11: Amendment and Due process rights being violated are quote unquote
Speaker 11: very substantial. And then on Wednesday, May fourteenth, the Georgetown
Speaker 11: University researcher from India named Batar Khan Suri was released
Speaker 11: from immigration detention as he continues to fight two deportation
Speaker 11: cases brought against him by the Trump administration for his
Speaker 11: support of Palestine. So this is now the third or
Speaker 11: fourth person that has been released from ICE custody following
Speaker 11: like political prosecutions based.
Speaker 2: On their activism. Yeah, that's a good thing.
Speaker 11: Now, these cases are still going to be continuing in courts.
Speaker 11: But the fact that these people have been released from
Speaker 11: ICE attention is good news.
Speaker 9: And in most cases they were released on their own recognizance,
Speaker 9: right without GPS tagging or any like.
Speaker 11: Yeah, they're freedom move throughout the country because most of
Speaker 11: them have cases in like multiple states. ICE is trying
Speaker 11: to move them around to many different locations. And I
Speaker 11: know that Surrey and ost Turk are able to go
Speaker 11: back to their homes.
Speaker 9: Yeah, So like it's good. It shows that the courts
Speaker 9: are still able to stop some of this stuff at
Speaker 9: this time.
Speaker 2: Yes, and that the actual ability of a lawyer to
Speaker 2: intervene when you were treated illegally by the state is
Speaker 2: not nil yeah yet.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Yeah, good point, positive developments here.
Speaker 11: But like, yeah, as we'll see with with Miller's goal
Speaker 11: of getting rid of habeas corpus and accelerating law enforcement
Speaker 11: operations with these twenty thousand new National Guard troops. This
Speaker 11: is this is something that's still going to be a
Speaker 11: very a very hot issue for quite a while, and
Speaker 11: we will continue to report on it as it develops.
Speaker 2: Well everybody, until next time. Remember something WESA reported to news.
Speaker 2: We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with
Speaker 2: more episodes every week from now until the heat death
Speaker 2: of the universe.
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Speaker 1: You can now find sources for It could Happen Here
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