Speaker 1: Also media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted
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Speaker 2: Hi.
Speaker 3: Everyone, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 4: It's me James today and I am very lucky to
Speaker 4: be joined by Azad, who is fighting in Mianma Chinland
Speaker 4: specifically with the AIF. Welcome to the show, Zad, thanks
Speaker 4: for being here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks for having me on of course. Yeah.
Speaker 4: This has been a project that I've been following from
Speaker 4: Afar for some time, maybe several months now I think.
Speaker 4: But for listeners who have not been following, can you
Speaker 4: explain very briefly the role of the AIF in the
Speaker 4: struggle in Miammah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sure, getting right into it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, first, I like give a little bit of a
Speaker 5: spiel about like the context of the AIF maybe for
Speaker 5: people who aren't so familiar. Yeah, in Burma already for decades,
Speaker 5: there have been some kind of established president of we
Speaker 5: can say foreign volunteers of some kind or you know,
Speaker 5: ex military personnel or you know, somebody who is somehow
Speaker 5: drawn to the conflict. There has already been the president
Speaker 5: for some decades of people coming in a very limited
Speaker 5: capacity and helping with this group or that group. But
Speaker 5: it mostly has been participation of two big characteristics. The
Speaker 5: first characteristic is that, of course it's been an individual basis,
Speaker 5: like whoever individual had this idea, they organized it themselves,
Speaker 5: they handled it themselves, with the exception of like the
Speaker 5: Freemam arrangers, but I wouldn't classify them as like, you know,
Speaker 5: foreign fighters or anything.
Speaker 6: They do very very.
Speaker 3: Good work, but yeah, slightly different role. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 5: The people who did this kind of stuff were mostly
Speaker 5: coming as individuals, you know, kind of on their own progative.
Speaker 5: And secondly, they were overwhelmingly we can say non political
Speaker 5: or you know, ex. Military guys from Western nations or
Speaker 5: you know, from neighboring countries who were somehow drawn to
Speaker 5: the conflict and wanted to use their skills in that
Speaker 5: kind of light. The AIF, on the other hand, is
Speaker 5: absolutely by no means like the foreign fighter organization in
Speaker 5: me and more or it's not like the foreign battalion,
Speaker 5: or that's also not what the goal in the mission is.
Speaker 5: It specifically came about after twenty twenty three twenty twenty four,
Speaker 5: there were slowly more internationals in the country, internationalists we
Speaker 5: can say.
Speaker 3: Yeah, who were here on a much more yeah.
Speaker 5: Albeit at the beginning individual it was the same where
Speaker 5: people were organizing their own ways, organizing their own routes
Speaker 5: and connections, but with a much more different perspective of
Speaker 5: this kind of more intentional anti fascist internationalist perspective yeah,
Speaker 5: which led over into the name. So kind of as
Speaker 5: a result of discussions between me and some other people
Speaker 5: who were here and also some other people outside the country,
Speaker 5: the idea to set up a formation or an organization
Speaker 5: like this was floated, and of course after talking with
Speaker 5: like local partners and local comrades who anyway were involved
Speaker 5: with on the ground, there was a lot of enthusiasm
Speaker 5: on both sides, both from people outside the country, both
Speaker 5: from people inside the country.
Speaker 3: So kind of.
Speaker 5: Within that context, the idea to take a step forward
Speaker 5: in a more organized, explicitly consistent yeah, to use a
Speaker 5: polite word, consistent perspective for internationalism and Meanmoir, that was kind.
Speaker 7: Of the goal.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And if people aren't familiar to see Anti Fascist Internationalists front, right,
Speaker 4: the AIF has a really cool logo with the peacock
Speaker 4: tail and the three rows and the like the white
Speaker 4: star in a red background. I thought that was I
Speaker 4: really appreciate your logo.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So yeah, I think people will like when they talk
Speaker 4: about the conflict in me Ima, they will be like, oh,
Speaker 4: why are they why I say, not more internationalists and
Speaker 4: why is they not more international volunteers? Something that you
Speaker 4: and I have spoken about before, it is that like,
Speaker 4: this has always been an international conflict, right, and it's
Speaker 4: always been an anti fascist conflict as well. Do you
Speaker 4: want to explain that to people who because I think
Speaker 4: sometimes it's easy for people to fall into these orientalists
Speaker 4: of somewhat colonialist constructions of the conflict there, and I
Speaker 4: think you and I both agree that those are not
Speaker 4: the lens through which we should view it.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean, of course, the history of let's just use
Speaker 5: a big term, the history of conflict in Burma is
Speaker 5: of course very deep and very complex and has a
Speaker 5: thousand different ethnic and political you know branches that you
Speaker 5: can go down. But if we're really focusing in on
Speaker 5: this post coup situation, which even though it has its
Speaker 5: roots and its context and of course the pre coup
Speaker 5: with you know, the existing ethink resistance organizations and the
Speaker 5: democracy movement, if we're really looking at the conflict post
Speaker 5: twenty twenty one coup, fundamentally it is not any one
Speaker 5: nations struggle. It is not anyone's people struggle. It is
Speaker 5: not even like a national struggle of Berno, we can
Speaker 5: say it is fundamentally a fight against fascism. It is
Speaker 5: an anti fascist people's revolution. Where after, of course the
Speaker 5: coup and after these initial stages of protest and uprising,
Speaker 5: the people were faced by a choice of do we
Speaker 5: accept dictatorship, do we go back and do we live
Speaker 5: like normal? Do we accept fascism, do we live under fascism?
Speaker 5: Or do we prepare to sacrifice everything to fight against fascism?
Speaker 5: And that was the fundamental calculation in that So insofar
Speaker 5: as it's to fight against fascism, that makes it an
Speaker 5: international struggle in itself. I mean, without even you know,
Speaker 5: going on too much about how anyways, the so called
Speaker 5: nation of Burma is dozens and dozens and dozens of
Speaker 5: different ethnicities and religions and cultures, which I mean, if
Speaker 5: you aren't thinking in the traditional nation state sense of
Speaker 5: internationalism and more thinking in the kind of brotherhood of
Speaker 5: cultures and traditions. Then yeah, of course, without the flashy
Speaker 5: you know, foreigners coming, it's already an international struggle against fascism.
Speaker 5: But I think, you know, on a more intentional level,
Speaker 5: the dictatorship represents fundamentally the same fascism that exists all
Speaker 5: over the world, fundamentally state oppression. So yeah, in that regard,
Speaker 5: it's very much an international struggle.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And something we've spoken about before is like the
Speaker 4: links of the inspiration I guess that comes from the
Speaker 4: internationalist struggle in North and East Syria and Rajava, and
Speaker 4: how that's very much been like a source of inspiration
Speaker 4: for young people in the MR. I've spoken to tons
Speaker 4: of them even two years ago, especially young women there
Speaker 4: right looking at the women's revolution in Rajava and seeing
Speaker 4: like that this was a possibility, that this was something
Speaker 4: like on the horizon that they could strive for. Do
Speaker 4: you want to explain like your own perceptions of that
Speaker 4: inexperience of it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, sure, Well, first, you know, not to overstate things,
Speaker 5: while of course the Rojava is a big inspiration I
Speaker 5: think not just for the people here in me and
Speaker 5: mar but truly like a beacon of hope in general. Yeah,
Speaker 5: you know, you know, a little biased, having spent time
Speaker 5: in Rozebah as you also have, I think, how can
Speaker 5: we say, I'll give a bit of context. In twenty
Speaker 5: twenty three, I think this message went out from the
Speaker 5: can DF to the forces in Rajaba, and I was
Speaker 5: there at the time.
Speaker 3: So was I really what?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was stared to say we were there.
Speaker 4: We were both there at the same time. Everyone started
Speaker 4: hitting me up for book recommendations. It's like October, I
Speaker 4: didn't know that. Yeah, okay, right off Joctoba seventh, I think.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 5: Anyways, so yeah, when this came out, like some friends
Speaker 5: sent this to me and was like, hey, can you
Speaker 5: translate this? And I like, not only me when I
Speaker 5: saw it, but also all the friends in the leadership
Speaker 5: and you know, all of the comrades there were like
Speaker 5: very one surprised, but also very excited and very happy
Speaker 5: to kind of see a message like this. And I
Speaker 5: think also when the message was returned, you know, some
Speaker 5: of the friends from the leadership you know, recorded this
Speaker 5: video message and sent it back. It was very much
Speaker 5: like a very pleasant, happy surprise for everyone involved, and
Speaker 5: it really showed the degree to which fundamentally we are
Speaker 5: fighting the same struggles, even though you know, maybe you know,
Speaker 5: materially we're not talking about like guns going from one
Speaker 5: place to the other. Fundamentally we're comrades on the same
Speaker 5: very very long frontline. Now, I think what that looks
Speaker 5: like locally, especially, I'm happy that you mentioned, like specifically
Speaker 5: the women's situation. You know, I myself sometimes when I'm
Speaker 5: giving training here, I like to show videos from certain
Speaker 5: parts of Kurdistan where they're very effective, we can say,
Speaker 5: and of course that naturally includes like the very very
Speaker 5: heavy participation of the women's guerrilla units as well as
Speaker 5: the men's guerrilla units, and specifically here and me andmar
Speaker 5: we see a very difficult situation in the revolution in
Speaker 5: regards to like the position of women, where because of
Speaker 5: I mean, it's a very new revolution. Lots of these
Speaker 5: people are you know, a couple years ago, they were
Speaker 5: just in we can say, liberal society. They weren't in
Speaker 5: any kind of you know, maybe at best activist context.
Speaker 5: But it's not like these people had a strong revolutionary platform,
Speaker 5: and then they said, okay, let's launch a revolution against
Speaker 5: the dictatorship. It was a natural evolution from protests to
Speaker 5: resistance to revolution.
Speaker 6: No.
Speaker 5: So because of that, the same social structures that existed
Speaker 5: in liberal society were in a large part transplanted into
Speaker 5: resistance organizations, which means that, Yeah, of course, thousands and
Speaker 5: thousands of women from all over the country have traveled
Speaker 5: to these camps, you know, have prepared and have ready
Speaker 5: themselves to fight against the dictatorship. But in a lot
Speaker 5: of ways they're still facing off against you know, the
Speaker 5: patriarchy that is inherent in all of our modern society. Yeah,
Speaker 5: so I think Rajaba into much as like I think
Speaker 5: anybody can take Rojaba as an inspiration. If there is
Speaker 5: anybody who, more so than anybody else, can take as
Speaker 5: an inspiration, it is women and youth. As that is,
Speaker 5: of course, like the revolutionary focus of the entire paradigm
Speaker 5: of the Reva revolution. So I won't say that it's like,
Speaker 5: you know, like the leading inspiration for the people of
Speaker 5: me and more or something, but definitely the people who
Speaker 5: have interacted with it or interfaced with it in some
Speaker 5: capacity be it official or unofficial. Of course, have gotten
Speaker 5: a lot of inspiration from that, and us as internationalists,
Speaker 5: both me as well as some other people here, you know,
Speaker 5: having had that in person experience with the Java revolution,
Speaker 5: of course for us is eternal inspiration.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's a really beautiful thing to see, like
Speaker 4: you said, just to see people like when we think
Speaker 4: about alliances in conflict, right, if we look at the
Speaker 4: extremely interactional way that the United States enters inso those alliances, right,
Speaker 4: it's willing to allow the people who approach Java to
Speaker 4: die for it in the battle against I say so
Speaker 4: Dash that it's not willing to stand by them when
Speaker 4: they're being bombed by Turkey, right, something right, and you
Speaker 4: and I have both seen. But to see something that
Speaker 4: is said begins with genuine solidarity and admiration. And one
Speaker 4: thing I really liked was when the k and DF
Speaker 4: replied to the video that came from Rajava, they said
Speaker 4: that they still had a lot to learn, especially with
Speaker 4: regards to gender. And it's so rare to see revolutionary
Speaker 4: movements submitting their faults, especially during the struggle, right during
Speaker 4: the moment of revolution. And that's something that I've been
Speaker 4: so impressed with in Myanmar for a long time, is
Speaker 4: their willingness to look out at the world and see
Speaker 4: things that they think are better and adopt them or
Speaker 4: to at least consider them. It's the thing in Java too.
Speaker 4: Some of the one of the friends in Rajaba said
Speaker 4: that they were excited to learn more about Meamma because
Speaker 4: they hadn't worked everything out, and that they thought that
Speaker 4: there might be some solutions that they could learn from there.
Speaker 4: And so it's really special to see that that solidarity
Speaker 4: that comes from a very genuine place and not just
Speaker 4: it's not just rhetorical. There are people such as yourself
Speaker 4: who have made the journey to fight on behalf of
Speaker 4: the revolution in me Mma. But it's really a special thing.
Speaker 4: It's really a wonderful thing to see, especially like with
Speaker 4: the world seemingly getting more and more isolated and more
Speaker 4: and more nationalists as supposed to internationalists, like, it's a
Speaker 4: really beautiful time for it to happen too.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, And I think I mean not to make the podcast,
Speaker 5: you know, a democratic and federalism ideology lesson or something,
Speaker 5: but yeah, I think insofar as the revolution in Rajaba
Speaker 5: considers itself a force on the side of democratic modernity.
Speaker 5: I think it's important to understand that they really mean it,
Speaker 5: like they really do see the conflicts that we're facing
Speaker 5: today against the capitalist system, against capitalist modernity.
Speaker 3: They really do see it.
Speaker 5: In this all encompassing light, that even though something is
Speaker 5: happening all the way over here in me and more
Speaker 5: and that maybe you could only tangentially connect to what's
Speaker 5: happening over there, they really do believe it when they
Speaker 5: say we are comrades in this same struggle. And that's
Speaker 5: why the solidarity is so beautiful to see, because it's
Speaker 5: that real solidarity. It's not just like, you know, pendering
Speaker 5: to some internationalist kind of sentiment.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: No, it's very real and it has a very genuine
Speaker 4: basis in sharing more than common interests. I will say, so,
Speaker 4: for people who are not as familiar with the struggle
Speaker 4: where you are, which is in chin Land, would you
Speaker 4: explain a little bit of I mean, obviously we can,
Speaker 4: and we will at some point explain a little bit
Speaker 4: more of the history of chin Lan, because I think
Speaker 4: it's very important and it sometimes gets marginalized from even
Speaker 4: narrative of the revolution. But can you explain like the
Speaker 4: groups and the struggle as it has been since twenty
Speaker 4: twenty one. In many ways, Chinland is where the revolution,
Speaker 4: the arm revolution began, right, So can you explain how
Speaker 4: we get to a place today where in recent weeks
Speaker 4: we've seen massive victories in Chinland.
Speaker 5: Yes, So, as you know, the political situation at least
Speaker 5: between the groups is somewhat complicated. So I'll try my
Speaker 5: best to like most fairly but also somehow accurately described. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I'll start from the history. We can say, as you
Speaker 5: described in and around Mindot at the time of these protests,
Speaker 5: this was kind of like the catalyst and one of
Speaker 5: the first places that actual armed resistance to this dictatorship started.
Speaker 5: And that wasn't armed resistance like with guns or something
Speaker 5: that was armed resistance like with the shotguns like double
Speaker 5: barrel shotguns from India, muzzle loading, traditional hunting rifles and
Speaker 5: air guns and things like this, and with that kind
Speaker 5: of weaponry, they were going and attacking police stations and checkpoints.
Speaker 5: So it really was a sign for everyone like not
Speaker 5: only the bravery of the people that are willing to
Speaker 5: do something like that, but the willingness and the risk
Speaker 5: that these people are able to take, and the seriousness
Speaker 5: of their opposition to the dictatorship that look, this isn't
Speaker 5: just a protest anymore. Even we have only sticks and stones,
Speaker 5: we will.
Speaker 8: Dis may this dictatorship.
Speaker 5: So yeah, that was a very inspiring early period. And
Speaker 5: I think even before the involvement of some of the
Speaker 5: bigger ethnic armed organizations, there were already local CDFs, which
Speaker 5: stands for Chinland Defense Force, which is kind of just
Speaker 5: like PDF. It's a moniker that a lot of groups share.
Speaker 3: There were a lot of.
Speaker 5: Different PDFs and cdf popping up just in the days
Speaker 5: following the coup in Chinland. So yeah, like from the
Speaker 5: very beginning there was the precedent in the history of
Speaker 5: revolution there. Now these towns that were the beginning of
Speaker 5: the revolution have now been seized. So min Dot as
Speaker 5: of last month was taken by the Chin Brotherhood Alliance
Speaker 5: as well as you know CDF, min DOT and alliance partners.
Speaker 5: So the progress has definitely been made. The current landscape
Speaker 5: looks a little bit like this. In Chin State, there's
Speaker 5: two big blocks. We can say, one block is the
Speaker 5: Chin Brotherhood and one block is the Chin Land Council.
Speaker 5: At first there was only one block called the ICF NCC,
Speaker 5: which sends for interim Chin National Coordinating Council or committee.
Speaker 5: I always forget the last ceime and that was like
Speaker 5: the political big umbrella organization. And there was the CJDC,
Speaker 5: which is the military big umbrella organization that sends for
Speaker 5: Chinlin Joint Defense Council or Committee.
Speaker 3: Again Lessie always in big use. So yeah, for a.
Speaker 5: Long time it was everyone, including one of the you know,
Speaker 5: very old ethnic resistance organizations, the CNA CNF, the Chin
Speaker 5: National Army, Chin National Front was kind of involved in
Speaker 5: this one big umbrella organization and everywhere there was resistance
Speaker 5: against the dictatorship and on some level cooperation both with
Speaker 5: Chin groups as well as with the nug In twenty
Speaker 5: twenty three, political events occurred and as we can say politely,
Speaker 5: a disagreement in the political future of Chinland separated into
Speaker 5: two groups, with CNACNF withdrawing from the CJA and forming
Speaker 5: their Chinlen Council, and the groups that kind of subscribed
Speaker 5: to that vision and subscribed to that path they joined
Speaker 5: the new Chinlen Council and all of the groups that
Speaker 5: remained in the CGDC in the ICNCC continued to hold
Speaker 5: on to the ICNCC as a kind of platform and
Speaker 5: umbrella organization for the people in Chin State that didn't
Speaker 5: want to subscribe to this new path, and then Chin
Speaker 5: Brotherhood was formed as the new practical military alliance of
Speaker 5: those people who remained, we can say, and since then,
Speaker 5: in only one year, I mean, both sides have have
Speaker 5: had very incredible victories. No, Chinlein Council has been able
Speaker 5: to in the north of Chin State liberate Chika and
Speaker 5: Tunzong Town, and then of course in the south of
Speaker 5: Chin State, Chindler has been able to take Matupe and
Speaker 5: Contellette and Mindot. So definitely victories all around.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I'll.
Speaker 4: Stop myself before I comment too much more on that. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but victories, it would have been unimaginable.
Speaker 3: Three years.
Speaker 4: I mean we're almost exactly three years from the beginning
Speaker 4: of the revolution. Four years guy, yeah, twenty twenty five, god, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: four years from the beginning of the revolution when, as
Speaker 4: you say, like those videos, that was when I first
Speaker 4: became aware of the post coup resistance, was seeing videos
Speaker 4: online of people with those traditional muzzle loading hunting rifles
Speaker 4: but taking on police checkpoints or attempted to organizer arm resistance,
Speaker 4: and those little air guns with the made of the
Speaker 4: blue plumbing pipe, like they it was incredible, like the
Speaker 4: bravery of the people and their commitment and their willingness
Speaker 4: to risk their lives and sometimes lose their lives because
Speaker 4: like as one revolutionary doctor told me a few years ago,
Speaker 4: he said, like, my grandparents died for democracy, and my parents'
Speaker 4: generation died for it, and we don't think another generation
Speaker 4: should have to die for it, So like we're all
Speaker 4: prepared to go down fighting for this, which I thought,
Speaker 4: you know, was really impactful. And then he was right
Speaker 4: that their willingness to risk their lives and to be
Speaker 4: so brave is unparalleled, and the revolution wouldn't have got
Speaker 4: to where it's got to. But it's such a beautiful
Speaker 4: thing that it has. I wonder like it's a crucial
Speaker 4: time for the revolution now right, like the revolution is
Speaker 4: as successful it's ever been. We're reaching the fifth year.
Speaker 4: Can you explain like the role of the AIF within
Speaker 4: the broader revolution, because I think people get really confused
Speaker 4: by all the acronyms, and it can be easy to
Speaker 4: think that these groups and it's an alphabet stup right,
Speaker 4: I'm writing a book about this and Spain, and like
Speaker 4: I've spent most of the last week just trying to
Speaker 4: write the dictionary of acronyms that goes in the back
Speaker 4: of the book. But like, can you explain that these
Speaker 4: aren't groups that are necessarily sometimes they are opposed to
Speaker 4: each other, they have different visions for the future. But
Speaker 4: can you explain the role of the AF within the
Speaker 4: broad anti hunter movement.
Speaker 7: Sure?
Speaker 5: First, I'll say, I'm reading a book right now about
Speaker 5: like the history of the communist part of the in Burma,
Speaker 5: and that history goes from like of the thirties all
Speaker 5: the way to the nineties, and every single page has
Speaker 5: at least ten different acronyms, and it's absolutely insane.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 5: About the AIF, the Anti Fascist Internationalist Front, which I'm
Speaker 5: hoping everyone just recognizes as AIF because it's kind of
Speaker 5: a mouthful. Our perspective so far has been that especially
Speaker 5: as foreigners, especially as like foreign foreigners, you know, like
Speaker 5: Western foreigners.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we really want.
Speaker 5: To avoid as much as possible the perception of we're
Speaker 5: coming here, you know, we've got military experience, or we've
Speaker 5: got this knowledge, or we've got that knowledge, and now
Speaker 5: it's time. Now it's time for us to tell you
Speaker 5: what to do. Or now it's time for us to
Speaker 5: train or something like that. Yeah, I would say our
Speaker 5: perspective is much more closer to the perspective of the
Speaker 5: you know, the international structures in Rajava. Our goal is
Speaker 5: recognizing that this enemy, the SASC dictatorship, the SAC junta,
Speaker 5: is fundamentally a fascist, anti human enemy. That makes it
Speaker 5: also our struggle, and so not in some kind of
Speaker 5: like prison way, or not in some kind of like
Speaker 5: imposing way, but in a very genuine and organic manner.
Speaker 5: We want to come here and implement ourselves into the revolution. Now,
Speaker 5: we have some friends who are coming who maybe have
Speaker 5: previous experience with this or with that, and in their capacity,
Speaker 5: of course they give training. Because the people here have
Speaker 5: the comrades, have been overwhelmingly receptive to training like this.
Speaker 5: You know that there's been no pride or no like, oh,
Speaker 5: we don't need the help.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Quite contrarily, everyone at all stages, even the nug is
Speaker 5: saying I'm not talking about us, I'm just talking about publicly,
Speaker 5: you know, to everyone is saying, whatever help we can get,
Speaker 5: we appreciate it.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: But you know, we're not just bringing people who are
Speaker 5: you know Rajava veterans or veterans of some conflict where
Speaker 5: they can come and give training. Fundamentally, it's an anti
Speaker 5: fascist conflict, which means even people without experience are able
Speaker 5: to come and not only participate in the revolution, but
Speaker 5: in a less transactory way, not to say like, oh,
Speaker 5: I have something and I will give it to the revolution.
Speaker 5: In the most important way is to come and to
Speaker 5: learn from the revolution.
Speaker 3: Exactly as you said.
Speaker 5: Even a revolution like Rojava, which has decades and decades
Speaker 5: of history and tradition and culture and ideology and is
Speaker 5: steeped in this yeah, I would say, you know, one
Speaker 5: of the most powerful, prominent revolutions of our time, Yeah,
Speaker 5: is still able to say a revolution like this, of
Speaker 5: course we can learn from it. We need to learn
Speaker 5: from the struggles of our comrades there, We need to
Speaker 5: learn from the developments happening in this revolution. Our perspective
Speaker 5: in AIF is very much the same where yeah, okay,
Speaker 5: maybe we have some limited material things we can contribute,
Speaker 5: but ultimately it's about organically participating in this revolution which
Speaker 5: is against fascism, and in our own ways to take
Speaker 5: the lessons of this revolution, to take the fundamental meaning
Speaker 5: of this revolution and be able to translate it for
Speaker 5: ourselves and for of course the future works.
Speaker 3: Which are ahead of us.
Speaker 4: Shall we say, Yeah, I remember as much much younger
Speaker 4: talking to veteran of the International Group, an anarchist veteran. No,
Speaker 4: it's from the International Brigade to correct myself, and I
Speaker 4: have him to explain anti fascism to me, and he
Speaker 4: said that for him, like when someone devalues humanity like
Speaker 4: the hunter does in Burma, Francoist did in Spain, right,
Speaker 4: like I did in Syria, it debases his own humanity,
Speaker 4: and like anyone who attacks humanity in that way is
Speaker 4: attacking him and all humanity, And therefore it's the responsibility
Speaker 4: of all humanity to defend humanity, to defend compassion in kindness. Absolutely. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I think what you're doing in Myanmar is part of
Speaker 4: that desire to defend humanity against inhumanity, against whatever we
Speaker 4: want to call it. What are the struggles that the
Speaker 4: revolution faces, Like I know you guys have recently been
Speaker 4: doing a fundraising campaign, for example, and the revolution is
Speaker 4: almost unique and its complete lack of solidarity from the
Speaker 4: states of the world. Right, there is not a state
Speaker 4: that is backing this revolution. It is entirely the force
Speaker 4: of the people of Meamba. So can you explain some
Speaker 4: of the struggles within the revolution perhaps because of that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean as much as some people you know,
Speaker 5: like to say CIA or something like this, of course,
Speaker 5: the reality is that, you know, I've heard the term
Speaker 5: crowdfunded revolution.
Speaker 3: I think it's incredibly accurate.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because no, in the af we recently did a
Speaker 5: fundraiser for vehicles and equipment and things like this, but
Speaker 5: that's on our scale. On the scale of these organizations,
Speaker 5: I mean, they are fundraising from the diaspora millions and
Speaker 5: millions of dollars to be able to wage this resistance.
Speaker 5: And of course even like local people who themselves maybe
Speaker 5: don't have a lot, are giving everything they can or
Speaker 5: or any way acting any way they can, or doing
Speaker 5: anything they can to.
Speaker 3: Help the revolution.
Speaker 5: So we can say overwhelmingly it is a popular resistance,
Speaker 5: even I would go so far as to say it
Speaker 5: is fundamentally a people's resistance against the dictatorship. That of
Speaker 5: course represents itself in a lot of different organizations. But
Speaker 5: these organizations enjoy the like ninety five percent support of
Speaker 5: the people against the junta, you know. Yeah, So yeah,
Speaker 5: in that regard, the challenge, of course, is always resources
Speaker 5: and always the strength of the enemy. No, we're still
Speaker 5: going up against jet fighters, helicopters, mortars, artillery. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 5: they have a lot of AMMO.
Speaker 3: Us not so much. So there's like lots of these
Speaker 3: practical problems.
Speaker 5: I think the how can we say cynical kind of
Speaker 5: as you mentioned earlier, Western outlook has been to paint
Speaker 5: this struggle kind of in Oh, it's a tribal struggle.
Speaker 5: There's all these different groups, they're all fighting for their
Speaker 5: own area. What's going to happen after they win? Now
Speaker 5: I disagree with that assessment obviously. I think you know
Speaker 5: yourself as you're familiar with the conflict. I think it's
Speaker 5: much deeper than that, And even across these many different
Speaker 5: identities and cultures, there's very deep, very real coordination in
Speaker 5: cooperation where I don't think it's just like chaotic. But
Speaker 5: on the other hand, that is a you know, not
Speaker 5: to give the the cynic's credit. That is a question
Speaker 5: which going forward will politically very much be on the
Speaker 5: AGENTA because I mean, now, as you're seeing, most of
Speaker 5: the country is no longer in the junta's control, and
Speaker 5: the parts that are in the junta's control are contested,
Speaker 5: and then you have the tiny sliver of land which
Speaker 5: they can say they somehow without any kind of you know,
Speaker 5: contestion control. So very soon the onus will be on
Speaker 5: revolutionary forces to answer that question. Okay, how are we
Speaker 5: going to consolidate? How are we going to transfer these
Speaker 5: winds on the battlefield into something that is more permanent
Speaker 5: and more lasting. And I think you know already as
Speaker 5: you're seeing in Chinn State that I can speak of
Speaker 5: and that people are seeing and elsewhere that I can't
Speaker 5: speak of because I don't know. There are definitely frictions.
Speaker 5: You know, I'm not going to say it's perfect. Everyone
Speaker 5: is smiling, everyone is working together, and there's frictions that
Speaker 5: will have to be worked through. But fundamentally, I think
Speaker 5: the trajectory as it currently is is positive for the resistance.
Speaker 5: We can say, yeah, definitely.
Speaker 4: I was talking to someone yeah, yes, today in another
Speaker 4: part of me Emma, and I was saying, you know,
Speaker 4: I'm going to come visit you hopefully soon, and he
Speaker 4: was saying, like, oh, you'll have it. Like just to
Speaker 4: be in the liberated zone is so special. Talk to
Speaker 4: us about like liberated chin Land, right min Dat's just
Speaker 4: been liberated. Large areas have been under the control of
Speaker 4: semi control of a dictatorial regime that has been extremely
Speaker 4: oppressive to the Chin people for decades. Like how are
Speaker 4: people receiving their liberty? How are they governing themselves or
Speaker 4: attempting to take care of one another in these liberated spaces?
Speaker 5: Sure well, I think the first thing I'll say is
Speaker 5: maybe to contrast to other parts of meanwhile, we've been
Speaker 5: relatively lucky in Chin State, and that even you know,
Speaker 5: for some years already the junta, due to the mountainous
Speaker 5: nature of Chin State, has anyway, been reduced to the
Speaker 5: cities for years, like all of their checkpoints, all of
Speaker 5: their like external places. The last of those were cleared
Speaker 5: in twenty twenty three, and most of them anyway in
Speaker 5: twenty twenty two were gone. So by land mass, even
Speaker 5: before these towns were seized, the junta controlled if you
Speaker 5: were to add up all of the area that they
Speaker 5: actually physically control in Chin State, maybe a couple square kilometers,
Speaker 5: you know, just the area of like their bases and
Speaker 5: something like that. So because of the nature of Chinn State,
Speaker 5: they never had the of course they did these atrocities
Speaker 5: and massacres and things like this, but on the kind
Speaker 5: of like you know, fascist dictatorship level of oppression. Since
Speaker 5: after the revolution they had not really had the opportunity
Speaker 5: to impose themselves too much. They were the ones kind
Speaker 5: of cowering in their corner. Yeah, but I think especially
Speaker 5: after these towns are being seized now, you know, take Ricodar,
Speaker 5: which is the border town on India, or take Mindatom
Speaker 5: or Tupi. These towns that have just been recently seized.
Speaker 5: These are towns which people are wanting to live their lives.
Speaker 5: I mean, Chin State has always been autonomous even in
Speaker 5: British rule, in colonial rule, it was just labeled as unadministered,
Speaker 5: you know, and there was a very rich democrat tradition
Speaker 5: or how can we say, maybe not democratic in the
Speaker 5: traditional sense, but tradition of self rule and autonomy in
Speaker 5: Chin State, and the removal of the junta from these
Speaker 5: areas is allowing those relationships to much more naturally flourish.
Speaker 5: And I think the aspiration of a lot of people
Speaker 5: both abroad as well as internally displaced from Chin State
Speaker 5: is to return to those places where there's been fighting
Speaker 5: and to continue their lives as normal, which I think
Speaker 5: finally now that not just in Chin State, but all
Speaker 5: over the country, we're slowly seeing these alternative systems of
Speaker 5: you know, let's not call them like communist or revolutionary
Speaker 5: or anything, but fundamentally they are alternative to the state
Speaker 5: administration system.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think that narrativit you pushed back on
Speaker 4: already that like, and we've seen it from so many
Speaker 4: every think tank, every analyst, ever, every so called expert
Speaker 4: has said the eros will only fight for their territory.
Speaker 4: When they've reached the limits to what they consider to
Speaker 4: be their like ethnic homeland, they will stop. And that
Speaker 4: hasn't happened, right, It's not happened anywa where. But the
Speaker 4: fact that even if it did, right, or even if
Speaker 4: some of these e ros have visions for the future
Speaker 4: which is not as liberatory as maybe you and I
Speaker 4: would like the fact that there are parts of Bamma
Speaker 4: that are free now and that where people can live
Speaker 4: their lives as they wish will never change, and that
Speaker 4: will mean that those places are always there for people
Speaker 4: to go to. And like, I'm sure lots of people
Speaker 4: you're fighting with and alongside have come to Chinland, right like, like,
Speaker 4: not all of them will be would have spent their
Speaker 4: whole lives. Yet they'll have come there from but my
Speaker 4: majority cities maybe is that correct?
Speaker 5: Look like not to give any specifics, so I'll just
Speaker 5: make a very broad term to exaggerate the fact. You
Speaker 5: can say that I have met somebody from almost every
Speaker 5: single group in me more Inchinsta.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Now that's just to say. That's not to like, you know,
Speaker 5: be shocking or something. That's just to highlight the level
Speaker 5: of interconnectedness logistically, materially, militarily, you know, even if it's
Speaker 5: just someone sending someone to say.
Speaker 3: Hi from somewhere.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's not like, oh, everyone's in their corners fighting.
Speaker 5: I mean, I promise you there are soldiers here which
Speaker 5: are giving their lives for the towns and Chin State,
Speaker 5: which maybe they never even thought about Chinn State before
Speaker 5: this revolution.
Speaker 3: You know, they're coming from opposite sides of the country.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, it's fundamentally a fight against the dictatorship. It's not
Speaker 5: the fight to liberate Chinland or to liberate Kadenny or
Speaker 5: something like this.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I remember speaking to Mandoalate pdf a while ago,
Speaker 4: and they were saying to me like they were really
Speaker 4: scared when they first left the cities because they've been
Speaker 4: told that like wild people lived in the mountains. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 4: at that now we're wild people. We like the wild
Speaker 4: people like. But yeah, this narrative, I mean, James C.
Speaker 4: Scott talks about this right in the art of not
Speaker 4: being governed, this idea that these mountains were never really
Speaker 4: places that are amenable to state control and that now
Speaker 4: there are places where people can go to avoid it.
Speaker 3: But it's also important that this revolution.
Speaker 4: Extends to beyond the mountains and into the cities and
Speaker 4: that people living there don't have to live under the
Speaker 4: boot heel of dictatorial state, which is what's happening right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 4: People will be listening to this, I'm sure and like
Speaker 4: thinking this is laudable, this is incredible, and a they'll
Speaker 4: be shocked that they haven't heard about this, maybe especially
Speaker 4: the newer listeners. And I do want to say that,
Speaker 4: like you can go back and listen to our other
Speaker 4: coverage on MEMA.
Speaker 3: There is a lot.
Speaker 4: But like in terms of conflicts, right, conflict is always
Speaker 4: messy and war is never inherently a beautiful thing. Beautiful
Speaker 4: things can happen, it was, but we rarely see wars
Speaker 4: where there is so much good on one side and
Speaker 4: so much evil on the other. And why do you
Speaker 4: think that the especially the Western media has largely overlooked
Speaker 4: the conflict in Mema.
Speaker 3: It's a good question.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I will say, just on a very base level,
Speaker 5: without getting into any kind of like you know, pondering
Speaker 5: or something like that. I've spoken with a few journalists
Speaker 5: and you know, before anything, before we even talk about
Speaker 5: politics or something, there is just the material calculation that
Speaker 5: these outlets are making. From what I understand from what
Speaker 5: I have heard, people don't care. Now that's really unfortunate.
Speaker 5: But like these like big networks, you know, CNN, whatever, Yeah,
Speaker 5: I have to make the calculation of the people they
Speaker 5: send and the risks to send them, and the actual
Speaker 5: exposure that these news articles will get.
Speaker 3: From what I.
Speaker 5: Understand conversations that I've had with some people that are
Speaker 5: you know, involved in these networks. Right now, there is
Speaker 5: not on like the executive board level. There's just not
Speaker 5: a lot of push to cover me in market and
Speaker 5: that's you know, that's really unfortunate. And I think one
Speaker 5: really bad side effect of that is whenever there's a tragedy,
Speaker 5: the media is there. Yeah, you know, like whenever there's
Speaker 5: some massacre, or whenever there's some you know, intertribal conflict,
Speaker 5: or whenever there's something bad to report about, or maybe
Speaker 5: you know, on a good day, they're really big, like
Speaker 5: a win like in last year that we saw, you know, yeah, okay, yeah,
Speaker 5: for these big things that Western media will be there.
Speaker 5: But I think even from recording these very like click
Speaker 5: baity eye catching things, it seems like they're not getting
Speaker 5: the exposure that they want to get out of this content,
Speaker 5: which is putting them off of covering the you know,
Speaker 5: in our opinion, much more meaningful wall to wall content.
Speaker 3: That exists, I mean every day in me and Mark.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it seems like this Western eye is only interested
Speaker 5: in the suffering, we can say, which is really unfortunate.
Speaker 5: But you know, even if the media is not paying attention,
Speaker 5: we can say, for better or worse, the governments are
Speaker 5: paying attention absolutely, I mean almost like hawks.
Speaker 3: You can say.
Speaker 5: There are every single regional government as well as foreign
Speaker 5: governments of course, keeping a very close eye on the situation,
Speaker 5: circling looking at developments, I mean China especially no being
Speaker 5: being very.
Speaker 3: Involved in the process.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So yeah, Well, unfortunately, the kind of liberal media eye
Speaker 5: is not so much you know, giving me and more
Speaker 5: the coverage that it deserves as a popular revolution. The
Speaker 5: powers at b are definitely watching its progression, we can.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Speaker 4: I mean it offers an alternative for the world that
Speaker 4: like it's distinct even from Java, like the building of
Speaker 4: a revolutionary movement, like you said, the crowdfunded revolution, the
Speaker 4: revolution that like entirely I mean at points armed itself
Speaker 4: using guns, it downloaded off the internet. You know, it
Speaker 4: offers sometimes I think when I'm thinking about, you know,
Speaker 4: my background in studying anarchists in Spain, and like obviously
Speaker 4: I've looked a lot at the past, but it gives
Speaker 4: me a vision of the future, like and it's only
Speaker 4: in covering the small parts of the revolution that make
Speaker 4: it truly a revolution that we can see that. Like
Speaker 4: you have an Instagram and on there you're posting about
Speaker 4: training sometimes when you're doing the trainings and there are
Speaker 4: women who are coming to train, you know, with rifles
Speaker 4: to be I was gonna say, Marx, Marx people, I
Speaker 4: guess like people.
Speaker 5: Yeah, on the US military, guys are weird about calling
Speaker 5: things snipers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there're snipers.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Okay, Yeah, let's do that, Okay, in the moment
Speaker 4: that they receive that training and become like efficient with
Speaker 4: their weapons, like a revolution happens for that woman. And
Speaker 4: it's only through like following those those little revolutions that
Speaker 4: happen every day that make up a big revolution that
Speaker 4: we truly understand it. And I'm sure that's something that
Speaker 4: like you're seeing on a daily or weekly basis, right,
Speaker 4: like people's world's opening up and their horizons changing because
Speaker 4: of the revolution.
Speaker 5: Well, listen absolutely now, of course, you know, as as
Speaker 5: leftists involved or interested in this revolution studying it, whether
Speaker 5: you're a socialist, whether you're anarchists, whether you're a communist,
Speaker 5: whether you're upper wist. You know, however you like to
Speaker 5: describe yourself whatever flavor you are, you know, without pontificating
Speaker 5: too much. I think fundamentally this revolution is a symbol
Speaker 5: of hope that it can be done. No, Like, I'll
Speaker 5: give an example from the conversations that I've had with
Speaker 5: the comrades that have been involved in this revolution since
Speaker 5: it was just a protest movement in the street. One
Speaker 5: thing that I've heard a lot is that at the
Speaker 5: beginning of the revolution, when it switched, you know, when
Speaker 5: the police were fining blows into the crowds, and when
Speaker 5: people made this decision that Okay, now we have no
Speaker 5: choice but armed resistance. We have no choice but to
Speaker 5: fight the dictatorship. When that calculus was made, when that
Speaker 5: decision was made, it was not made based on the
Speaker 5: kind of analysis of the situation that they could even win. Yeah,
Speaker 5: it was not even that like, Okay, we're going to
Speaker 5: do this and we have this strategy of guerrilla war,
Speaker 5: and then we'll do this, this and this, and then
Speaker 5: we'll achieve the victory. The calculation that was made was
Speaker 5: a moral calculation. It was saying, we have the choice.
Speaker 5: We can go back to our life. We can accept
Speaker 5: this oppression, we can give up this struggle for democracy
Speaker 5: that we've been waging in one form or another, or
Speaker 5: we can make the decision to fight even if we
Speaker 5: won't win. It's the moral imperative to resist dictatorship. And
Speaker 5: I think what this revolution is showing not just for
Speaker 5: the people who themselves were surprised at their capability and
Speaker 5: we're themselves surprised at what they could accomplish when they
Speaker 5: actually stepped up and fought and sacrificed for revolution. Fundamentally,
Speaker 5: it's a message to everyone. It says, look, these people
Speaker 5: at the beginning were going at checkpoints with like double
Speaker 5: barrels and air rifles, and at the end, now they
Speaker 5: are like threatening to overthrow what was previously assumed to
Speaker 5: be one of the most powerful militaries in Southeastern Asia.
Speaker 3: I mean, now, like everyone.
Speaker 5: Jokes on the top of dow because they're obviously garbage now,
Speaker 5: But like at the time, that wasn't That wasn't the analysis.
Speaker 5: You know, it would be the same as saying like, oh,
Speaker 5: you know, we're going to overthrow the USA or something
Speaker 5: like that. It was fundamentally people didn't even envision the victory,
Speaker 5: but on the moral principle to resist, they've resisted and
Speaker 5: from that moral position they were able to materialize the
Speaker 5: victory that they had.
Speaker 3: Previously not even imagined. So, you know, for me, that's
Speaker 3: what I take away.
Speaker 5: There's no books, there's no ideological books here that you
Speaker 5: can study and understand the underpinnings of the revolution. You know,
Speaker 5: there's no classes that you can go to that the
Speaker 5: PDF teaches you about what their revolutionary paradigm is. Fundamentally,
Speaker 5: it's a fight of the people against oppression and against
Speaker 5: the dictatorship, and while of course there's some strengths and
Speaker 5: some weaknesses that we face in the revolution, ultimately in
Speaker 5: the same way as Rajaba, in the same place as
Speaker 5: other places in the world, it's a beacon of hope
Speaker 5: for democratic people who envision themselves fighting on the side
Speaker 5: of freedom and the symbol that actually, yeah, you can win.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's given me so much hope, Like at a
Speaker 4: time the last few years when we've all desperately needed
Speaker 4: something good to happen, Like something good is happening and
Speaker 4: incredibly good through them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like it's breathtaking.
Speaker 4: Like I went in twenty twenty two during the first
Speaker 4: year of the revolution, and I was shopping around this
Speaker 4: story for months, right, I knew these guys who were
Speaker 4: doing the three D printing, and I went to every
Speaker 4: major outlet. I was like, this is the story that's
Speaker 4: going to make people care, and no one bought it
Speaker 4: until eventually Cool Zone did and here I am. But
Speaker 4: like even twenty twenty one twenty two, talking to those guys,
Speaker 4: I was like, they might all die. It's still been
Speaker 4: worth it for them, but they might all be gone
Speaker 4: in a year. Unfortunately, familiar with that from my line
Speaker 4: of work, but like to see it succeed, it's so
Speaker 4: like incredible. It's obviously war is terrible, and terrible things
Speaker 4: have happened in the war, but like it's such a
Speaker 4: beautiful thing to see people refuse to accept tyranny and
Speaker 4: just through the tenacity of their refusal to create liberated
Speaker 4: spaces and to now threwn to topple like you say,
Speaker 4: one of what had previously been a feared army in
Speaker 4: the region. Like it continues to amaze me every day,
Speaker 4: every every time I see people dancing in front of
Speaker 4: a captured military headquarters or I don't know, it's just
Speaker 4: such a such a remarkable revolution. Is that if people
Speaker 4: wish to be in solidarity, if they wish to follow
Speaker 4: the aif if they want to learn more about the
Speaker 4: af where can they do that? Are their places online
Speaker 4: or are there ways that they can support you aside
Speaker 4: from obviously like being part of the struggle, Like how
Speaker 4: can they help you?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Me personally, my information platform is mostly on Instagram, where
Speaker 5: I post updates about you know, either insights about what's
Speaker 5: going on or news updates or something like that.
Speaker 3: And that's a zod underscore AFA on instagraram spat out
Speaker 3: aside to fit the known courage speakers.
Speaker 5: Yeah, azad a z a d IF you will, Yeah,
Speaker 5: Thanky underscore AFA on Instagram. The AIF also has an
Speaker 5: Instagram for like official posts.
Speaker 3: It's AIF me and more in.
Speaker 5: General about the AIF, especially at this early stages. Right now,
Speaker 5: we're involved in some frontlines in Western meanmore and so
Speaker 5: because of that, we don't really have a lot of
Speaker 5: information presence out right now, but in the coming weeks,
Speaker 5: in the coming months, definitely when things get published, when
Speaker 5: more things like that come out, they will come out
Speaker 5: from kind of the existing distribution circles that have been
Speaker 5: going around, like libcom. There has been like statements going
Speaker 5: out as well as Instagram perr things like that. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and recently we just completed a fundraiser. Our goal was
Speaker 5: ten thousand dollars for the vehicles and the equipment that
Speaker 5: we will needed to get started.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 5: For listeners who don't know, maybe yeah, maybe they're not aware.
Speaker 5: This only started in October of last year, so we're
Speaker 5: still in the stages of consolidating and getting our equipment.
Speaker 5: We set the goal for ten thousand dollars and we
Speaker 5: exceeded it. We raised over thirteen thousand dollars for that nice,
Speaker 5: so yeah, we're very happy to say that. But in
Speaker 5: the future, of course, there will always be more opportunities.
Speaker 5: As you know, revolution is very expensive. So yeah, on
Speaker 5: all fundraising platforms we have PayPal, cash app and venmo
Speaker 5: and all of those are aif me and more. And yeah,
Speaker 5: in the future, hopefully we will have more news both
Speaker 5: about what's happening in me and more are both how
Speaker 5: we specifically are involved, as well as just very exciting
Speaker 5: footage we can say we hope to share soon.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that'll be great to see and I hope you'll
Speaker 4: come back and join us again, and maybe we can
Speaker 4: delve into a little bit more of the history of
Speaker 4: the revolution and the revolution in chin Land specifically, because
Speaker 4: I think these are things that that we need to
Speaker 4: cover more and I'd love to give people a place.
Speaker 8: To learn about them.
Speaker 10: Yeah, absolutely great, Thank you.
Speaker 11: So much, Hello, and welcome back to it could happen here.
Speaker 11: I am once again your occasional host, Molly Conker, and
Speaker 11: I am joined today by Spencer Sunshine, the author of
Speaker 11: Neo Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism, The Origins and Afterlife
Speaker 11: of James Mason's Siege. It's available now in paperback. I
Speaker 11: have my paperback copy from Routledge Press. So Spencer, I
Speaker 11: guess let's get right into it. What is Siege and
Speaker 11: why should we still be talking about it?
Speaker 12: Well, unfortunately, we should still be talking about it because
Speaker 12: it's still influential. It was a book originally published in
Speaker 12: nineteen ninety three, but that is an edited version of
Speaker 12: newsletters published in the eighties by a fellow named James Mason,
Speaker 12: who is a lifelong neo Nazi. He joined the American
Speaker 12: Nazi Party at age fourteen in nineteen sixty six. He
Speaker 12: is still an active ideological believer in national socialism. It's
Speaker 12: a book that in it he makes the argument that
Speaker 12: any kind of normal legal political activity was pointless for
Speaker 12: Neo Nazis to engage in and like forming organizations, holding marches,
Speaker 12: making the traditional propaganda, trying to build up parties, even
Speaker 12: guerrilla warfare. At the end of it, he becomes very
Speaker 12: cynical about and he says through what are essentially dramatic
Speaker 12: random acts of violence, of terrorism or murder. He even
Speaker 12: goes into praising serial killers like Joseph Paul Franklin, we
Speaker 12: can destabilize the government and society and after this neo
Speaker 12: Nazis can come to power. This has become a very
Speaker 12: influential idea. More recent he was rediscovered. It was a
Speaker 12: pretty obscure The newsletters were very unpopular that he never
Speaker 12: made more than one hundred copies. The original book had
Speaker 12: a print run of one thousand, so it was a
Speaker 12: sort of obscure text. It was known amongst neo Nazi
Speaker 12: circles for some unusual reasons. It became mixed up with
Speaker 12: some countercultural figures and that was actually what made it
Speaker 12: more well known. But it was revived in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 12: It was found by these younger aspiring terrorists, let's say
Speaker 12: at the time, around a message board called Iron March.
Speaker 12: It became the bible of the Atom Offen Division, this
Speaker 12: neo Nazi group that its members and associates killed five people,
Speaker 12: and out of that everyone in the Adam off And
Speaker 12: division had to read Siege, which became the hashtag, and
Speaker 12: out of that grew this whole sort of network, first
Speaker 12: of groups and now really totally decentralized, like propaganda channels
Speaker 12: on telegram to terogram promoting these same ideas, and so
Speaker 12: it's become very influential today. It gets named in like
Speaker 12: terrorist manifestos. The school shooter, I think it was in Nashville,
Speaker 12: Tennessee that just happened. He makes a reference to people
Speaker 12: who are into siege in his writings, and more and
Speaker 12: more I've documented before him at least twelve murders or
Speaker 12: either by the amount Adam Waffin Division, by people inspired
Speaker 12: by siege culture, or by people directly linked to terogram.
Speaker 12: So if we want to look at the main text
Speaker 12: animating neo Nazi terrorism today, which has now spread around
Speaker 12: the glow of those groups in Latin America, there's groups
Speaker 12: in eastern Western Europe. It's even influencing groups in the
Speaker 12: Middle East or people in the Middle East. They're called accelerationists.
Speaker 12: They want to accelerate the collapse of things. And if
Speaker 12: there's a single ideological text today that's influential on this scene,
Speaker 12: it is by easily James Mason Siege.
Speaker 11: And what I particularly am enjoying about the book I
Speaker 11: just told you before we started recording, I haven't finished
Speaker 11: it yet. What I'm enjoying about this book is so
Speaker 11: you know, you were saying that James Mason started writing
Speaker 11: this in the eighties, right, but nobody was reading it.
Speaker 11: It was very sort of niche. It wasn't popular, even
Speaker 11: with it its own niche. He was not a popular man.
Speaker 11: He had a lot of beefs with other leaders in
Speaker 11: the movement. It's rediscovered in the twenty tens. It's big
Speaker 11: on Iron March. It's the animating force behind Adam Waffin,
Speaker 11: And so all of a sudden in the last ten years,
Speaker 11: people like us researchers of the far right, mainstream journalists,
Speaker 11: people are talking about Siege, they're talking about Mason. But this,
Speaker 11: I think, correct me if I'm wrong, is the only
Speaker 11: book sort of tracing it.
Speaker 9: Back to its root.
Speaker 11: James Mason did not come into existence in twenty fifteen
Speaker 11: on the pages of Iron March. Right, they sort of
Speaker 11: dug back up this writing that was at that point
Speaker 11: thirty years old. But this book, I mean, it's an
Speaker 11: incredible work of research, but it's also sort of a picuresque, right.
Speaker 11: It follows James Mason through decades of Nazi history. Right,
Speaker 11: he wasn't just a guy who wrote a newsletter. He
Speaker 11: was a guy who was in a lot of rooms.
Speaker 11: He knew a lot of people. So through the lens
Speaker 11: of James Mason's life, you can follow the orange of
Speaker 11: the modern neo Nazi movement back to the sort of
Speaker 11: splinters and sects and rival personalities of the seventies. Right
Speaker 11: that you can't understand modern neo Nazi organizing if you
Speaker 11: don't know the history that goes back to the sixties
Speaker 11: and seventies.
Speaker 12: Well, thank you forgetting that. I had someone write a
Speaker 12: review and it was an interesting view from the viewpoint
Speaker 12: of literary criticism. And he's like, well, this is one
Speaker 12: of these books about a book it's not And I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 12: it kind of is, but it's really and I started
Speaker 12: after I started writing this which has an unusual origin,
Speaker 12: or just maybe it is a usual origin, Like the
Speaker 12: first half is about neo Nazism in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 12: which is incredibly undocumented. There's a huge problem with a
Speaker 12: documentation about the far right in general before twenty fifteen.
Speaker 12: Probably more books have come out in the last ten
Speaker 12: years about the far right in the US before twenty
Speaker 12: fifteen than came out before, and certainly about neo Nazis,
Speaker 12: who are almost always when they are written about American
Speaker 12: neo Nazis. It's usually in a history of the white
Speaker 12: supremacist movement, and there's no differentiation made between them, and
Speaker 12: I would say the National Socialists are quite different from
Speaker 12: other white supremacists for a variety of different reasons. So
Speaker 12: there is no book about Neo Nazism in the nineteen
Speaker 12: seventies in the US at all. There are only two
Speaker 12: documents I can really name, and they're both written by
Speaker 12: National Socialists actually, one in Australia and one the head
Speaker 12: of the New Order, which used to be the American
Speaker 12: Nazi Party. It's actually not bad. It's an eight part
Speaker 12: series by Martin Kirk. So the first half is really
Speaker 12: reconstructing what happened in the nineteen seventies, because this is
Speaker 12: what Siege is coming out of. This Siege is an
Speaker 12: answer to the questions that faced neo Nazis in the
Speaker 12: nineteen seventies. And then the second half of the book
Speaker 12: is even I would say, less about Mason. It's about
Speaker 12: these four countercultural figures who discover Mason, help publish him,
Speaker 12: and eventually published and disseminated Siege itself.
Speaker 10: And part of that is I.
Speaker 12: Was just around the scene these people were part of
Speaker 12: in the nineteen nineties. Like I saw one of them,
Speaker 12: boyd Rice Play. I had many mutual friends with another,
Speaker 12: the published Adam Parfrey of Farreal House. So like, I
Speaker 12: was like right around what these people were doing as
Speaker 12: part of the nineties counterculture. So I became very interested
Speaker 12: in that because these people always denied their background, you know,
Speaker 12: or s left it off or something. And I found
Speaker 12: just so many smoking guns in this. And so I
Speaker 12: will say how this started is right after Charlottesville, they
Speaker 12: Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Always you say these
Speaker 12: things and then just you give the name of the thing,
Speaker 12: and people are like, wait a minute, that's like where
Speaker 12: I live. You know, we're more than that, you know,
Speaker 12: I was in Seattle. I was like, oh, I was
Speaker 12: at Seattle, referring to this nineteen ninety nine demonstration, and
Speaker 12: I'm like, people are here, weren't even necessarily born then,
Speaker 12: and just saying at Seattle doesn't mean anything. So after
Speaker 12: Younite the Right, there was a spike in popularity in
Speaker 12: Siege and the hashtag read siege because it looked like
Speaker 12: the rally followed what he said, and he said, no
Speaker 12: one in an American society will allow neo Nazis to succeed,
Speaker 12: and a lot of people don't know this, but what
Speaker 12: happened at the initial rally is that it wasn't the
Speaker 12: street fighting people might be familiar with, even that's dating
Speaker 12: from memory. Was before it was supposed to start, and
Speaker 12: when it was supposed to start at noon, the police,
Speaker 12: who had been standing a block away and letting everything unfold,
Speaker 12: marched in and forced everyone out, meaning the rally never happened.
Speaker 9: Nobody ever gave a speech.
Speaker 12: Nobody gave a speech. As we know, the car attack
Speaker 12: happened like an hour or two later. I got to
Speaker 12: look at a timeline, it's all like garbled now right, Yeah,
Speaker 12: that sounds right. And the book is co dedicated to
Speaker 12: Heather Hair I just want to point out. So it
Speaker 12: seemed to coincide with what Mason said. He's like, you
Speaker 12: can't do legal work, you have to do a terrorism right,
Speaker 12: And so there was a spike and interest in it,
Speaker 12: and Adam often had been doing more and more. Adam
Speaker 12: often people are committing murders, strange murders. They're all very
Speaker 12: strange murders, which I think speaks to a lot of
Speaker 12: the personalities who are involved in this and other forms
Speaker 12: of violence, even in more structured political movements. I think
Speaker 12: it does attract tends to attract fringe people, except at
Speaker 12: certain times where people are intentionally using it a strategy
Speaker 12: as part of a bigger mass move And anyway, these
Speaker 12: are questions for terrorism studies, and so there was a
Speaker 12: spike of interest in it. So I was going to
Speaker 12: write a short article for a think tank I used
Speaker 12: to be associated with, which I will not name because
Speaker 12: I had such a bad experience with them, and it
Speaker 12: was going to be an article. I couldn't get the
Speaker 12: facts to line up. As I said, there's terrible scholarship
Speaker 12: about this period, and so I used this very sophisticated
Speaker 12: research tool called Google, and through that I found that
Speaker 12: Mason's papers There was a huge collection of Mason's papers
Speaker 12: at the University of Kansas and Lawrence, Kansas. So I
Speaker 12: decided I'd go there. I thought I'd just straighten these
Speaker 12: things out. There were some documents I needed, some very
Speaker 12: obscure fanzines and stuff.
Speaker 10: That'd be the end of the day.
Speaker 12: I got through. Well, first I discovered it's not easy
Speaker 12: to get to Lawrence, Kansas. You have to fly into
Speaker 12: an airport. And then I think I took an uber
Speaker 12: for like an hour.
Speaker 10: There was like one.
Speaker 12: Bus a day or something. Anyway, I got there and
Speaker 12: started poking at the papers. It was sixty boxes of
Speaker 12: his correspondence. He had letters incoming and outgoing since the
Speaker 12: early nineteenth sixties. As you mentioned, he was an insider
Speaker 12: to the neo Nazi movement, so it was with all
Speaker 12: these people he had kept carving copies of his outgoing letters.
Speaker 12: It was a unique slice of national socialist life.
Speaker 10: In the United States. Never seen an archive like it.
Speaker 12: People didn't keep their papers because they were doing illegal activities.
Speaker 12: The government sees them and has them in a warehouse
Speaker 12: somewhere or whatever. This is even in the pre Internet.
Speaker 12: I can only do this because it was pre Internet
Speaker 12: and there were paper copies of stuff, and of the
Speaker 12: age where I grew up doing all research on paper
Speaker 12: and in archives. And I quickly found out what I had.
Speaker 12: And there were two things. One, as I said, was
Speaker 12: that there was this whole story of American Neo Nazism,
Speaker 12: of when the American Nazi Party splinters then called the
Speaker 12: National Socialistory People's Party in the nineteen seventies, and all
Speaker 12: these groups come out of it, many of which we
Speaker 12: know parts of like William Peters who wrote to Turner diaries,
Speaker 12: and the Skoky incident which is parodied in The Blues Brothers.
Speaker 10: Some people don't know this just.
Speaker 12: So Paul Franklin shooting and paralyzing US publisher Larry Flint,
Speaker 12: and some other things. And I was like, Oh, these
Speaker 12: are all people who came out of one thing, a
Speaker 12: splintering of the party. And I realized that there basically
Speaker 12: was a terrorist wing that came out of the splintering.
Speaker 12: And people knew Mason and people knew Pierce, but there
Speaker 12: was like a couple other groups or people, but people
Speaker 12: didn't put it together that they were all like the
Speaker 12: most radical wing of these splinter groups. So there was
Speaker 12: that story, and then, as I mentioned, there was a
Speaker 12: second story about these countercultural people who had always denied
Speaker 12: that they were involved in national socialism or the level
Speaker 12: of it. It was just a joke, all these things
Speaker 12: that we hear today almost word for word. AND's how
Speaker 12: I found all their letters to James Mason, and they're
Speaker 12: adorned with swastikas and eight aids, and they're helping him.
Speaker 12: Had they reveal the extent that they helped him, and
Speaker 12: the funny thing is a lot of this stuff was
Speaker 12: actually available.
Speaker 10: And out in the open.
Speaker 12: It was in published books, but it was like little
Speaker 12: pieces of flakes of gold scattered around everything. I started
Speaker 12: picking them up because I realized you could put them together.
Speaker 12: And so one article turnout was supposed to be one article,
Speaker 12: and then it turns two articles. And I sat down
Speaker 12: to write it and turned into a book. And then
Speaker 12: five year years later I finally had the manuscript done.
Speaker 12: Then took another year at the publishers, and then it
Speaker 12: came out last year. So it's been seven years of work,
Speaker 12: and I've been going around doing talks. I did seventeen
Speaker 12: talks and support of the book, and as many podcasts
Speaker 12: and stuff. So I'm still the book is still part
Speaker 12: of my life, as much as I would like to
Speaker 12: sort of put it down.
Speaker 10: But thank you for having me on the podcast. This
Speaker 10: is not great that you have me on the podcast.
Speaker 10: Not against no diss against you, no shade, no shade no.
Speaker 11: And I'm so I'm so jealous of your trip to
Speaker 11: Kansas to see the archives.
Speaker 9: I only recently.
Speaker 11: A year or two, discovered that his papers existed in
Speaker 11: those archives, and so I wrote to the archivist and
Speaker 11: I said, like, you know, are any of these digitized?
Speaker 11: I would love to see them. And they're like, you know,
Speaker 11: we've only digitized like one box. And they sent me
Speaker 11: a couple of a couple of scans, but most of
Speaker 11: it has not been digitized. So you have to go
Speaker 11: to Kansas if you want to read this old pedophile
Speaker 11: Nazis letters to Charles Manson.
Speaker 12: Well, I do have thousands of pictures I took of
Speaker 12: this correspondence. So yeah, if you were quest to digital copies,
Speaker 12: they won't tell you what they've digitized. And so it's
Speaker 12: like you know, trying to like randomly throw darts or something.
Speaker 12: If you get the right file they have them.
Speaker 9: And I was like, I was begging and pleading.
Speaker 11: I was like, please, just like any letters you have
Speaker 11: with Bob Heyite, I just I just want the Bob
Speaker 11: Hike letters.
Speaker 10: But I can give you the Bob Hyke letters.
Speaker 9: I would love those.
Speaker 10: I think they'll they'll digitize stuff for a price.
Speaker 11: Though, I'm sure I'm sure if I pay for it,
Speaker 11: they would do me the favor. But that's the thing
Speaker 11: is that there's so much interconnection here because these stories
Speaker 11: always get told episodically, right like the story of James
Speaker 11: Mason and Adam woffin the story of William Luther Peers,
Speaker 11: the story of the founding of the National Socialist movement.
Speaker 11: But nobody takes those pieces and slots them together because
Speaker 11: they interlock. They all interlock, right, And so this idea
Speaker 11: of the lone wolf, I mean, I guess James Mason's
Speaker 11: life's work is to perpetuate and motivate the lone wolf.
Speaker 11: But is it really a lone wolf if he's training them.
Speaker 12: Well, the lone wolf question is is a long question.
Speaker 12: A lot of people know Metzker moved to the lone
Speaker 12: wolf strategy after a war was sued by the SPLC
Speaker 12: and collapse, but Mason was advocating this beforehand and was
Speaker 12: very tight with Metzker. So there is actually a book
Speaker 12: describing what you've said, putting the pieces together, and it's
Speaker 12: called Neo Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fast exactly. It's the
Speaker 12: I think, which you can buy today.
Speaker 11: I mean, like I said, it's the only book that
Speaker 11: I know of that fits these pieces together.
Speaker 12: No, it is the only book. Actually, I've been in
Speaker 12: contact with James Mason, and he said when radio interview,
Speaker 12: it's not the first of its kind, but it's the
Speaker 12: best of its kind.
Speaker 11: High praise from the book's Nazi pedophile subject. Why did
Speaker 11: he donate his papers to the library, because, like you said,
Speaker 11: most people are not not only not preserving these items
Speaker 11: where they're not preserving them at all because they know
Speaker 11: what they've done is illegal or harassing to everyone involved,
Speaker 11: and they're intentionally destroying the evidence of these kinds of communications.
Speaker 11: But he not only saved them, but he wanted to
Speaker 11: make sure we could read them.
Speaker 9: Did you talk to him at all about why he
Speaker 9: did that?
Speaker 12: Well, he sold them. He was a wheeler dealer in
Speaker 12: especially American Nazi party memorabilia. You know, he sold furniture
Speaker 12: on the side, like antiques. He'd go antiquing and he
Speaker 12: if you've seen pictures of his apartment, it's filled with
Speaker 12: Nazi nickknacks, right, he's got a knife collection.
Speaker 11: I mean, it looks like it looks like the Area
Speaker 11: Nation's booth at the Tulsa Gun Show.
Speaker 12: It looks like my apartment, but like the in the
Speaker 12: inverse and fewer plants. So he was a collector. So
Speaker 12: he was already on My understanding is he was already
Speaker 12: selling George Lincoln Rockwell memoryabilia or whatever, papers and such.
Speaker 12: Two Kansas. They have this collection there called the Wilcox
Speaker 12: Collection of anti extremist stuff. This guy, Laird Wilcox, had
Speaker 12: been in early students for Democratic Society before they took
Speaker 12: like Marxist turn and then decided that the left and
Speaker 12: the right were the same, like in the seventies or something,
Speaker 12: and started collecting all this material. So they were one
Speaker 12: of the they're probably the biggest collection of far right material.
Speaker 12: And as I said, at the time, libraries weren't collecting
Speaker 12: it and people weren't writing about it. They were like, oh,
Speaker 12: these are just a bunch of kooks and wing nuts.
Speaker 12: They're not important. And some of this is because, like
Speaker 12: as I say in the book, the first neo Nazi
Speaker 12: mass murder wasn't until the late seventies, like it was
Speaker 12: what we know as neo Nazism today really only emerged
Speaker 12: in the seventies, is one of my arguments in the book.
Speaker 12: So the papers were there because he sold them. The
Speaker 12: second thing is he is unique, I think, not unique,
Speaker 12: but very uncommon because he is an unabashed neo Nazi.
Speaker 12: He does not try to hide it. He is not
Speaker 12: like the NSM, which is actually a party he co founded, shockingly,
Speaker 12: but left over it as they turned because originally it
Speaker 12: was to promote violence, and then as it turned to
Speaker 12: a more traditional Hollywood Nazi party, he left. But it's
Speaker 12: the same one that was at Charlottesville, and Jeff's Scoop
Speaker 12: was the head of I actually taught Jeff Scoop about
Speaker 12: how the.
Speaker 10: Party was founded. That was very interesting. I interviewed him
Speaker 10: for the book.
Speaker 9: Another one of those dishonest actors.
Speaker 12: Well, the guy who had made him the head of
Speaker 12: the party, who was actually the second head, Harrington, cliff Harrington.
Speaker 12: Clifford Harrington did not give him the truthful account of
Speaker 12: the parties founding. Harrington claimed he was a co founder,
Speaker 12: and he wasn't. He claimed a different date. This is
Speaker 12: one reason I spent so much time on stuff. Also
Speaker 12: that I found all these things that had been printed
Speaker 12: that were wrong. The bi scholars and others that were
Speaker 12: and it wasn't their fault, they were taken. It was
Speaker 12: hard to get these harder to get these documents, especially
Speaker 12: when a group is moving. And so Harrington claimed he
Speaker 12: had been a co founder in nineteen seventy four or whatever,
Speaker 12: but he was lying. Mason was one of the co
Speaker 12: founders and not him. He only became the head in
Speaker 12: the eighties. So this is some of the stuff I found. Anyway,
Speaker 12: I was going to say the NSM at one point,
Speaker 12: god where not neo Nazis.
Speaker 10: Were National Socialists.
Speaker 12: I was like, get the fuck out of here, like really, like,
Speaker 12: come all, your flag is a swastikonic ah, I mean,
Speaker 12: this is absurd, but people will do that, right, It's
Speaker 12: like the dead parents git in Monty Python. If people
Speaker 12: know this and so. But Mason stands out because he's
Speaker 12: always been very upfront about his views. He's very proud
Speaker 12: of them. He's not ashamed. And if this it's embarrassed
Speaker 12: other people, they didn't belong He's as he told to me,
Speaker 12: they didn't believe in the One True religion.
Speaker 10: So I asked him.
Speaker 12: About these counterculture figures who have denied they were ever
Speaker 12: involved in this stuff. At the time, he was convinced
Speaker 12: they were National Socialists and he was like, well, they
Speaker 12: believed in something else other than the One True Faith.
Speaker 10: I think that's the word he used.
Speaker 12: So, yeah, he is nothing to hide. He's very open
Speaker 12: about it, very open about promoting terrorism. As you know,
Speaker 12: and maybe some of the listeners do young neo Nazis
Speaker 12: go to his apartment and he tutors them. They take
Speaker 12: pictures with him. This included Sam Woodward, who murdered a
Speaker 12: young gay Jewish man Blaze Bernstein, recently sentence to life
Speaker 12: in prison. There's pictures a Woodward in Mason's apartment. So yeah,
Speaker 12: I mean he wants he's proud of his lineage and
Speaker 12: he wants it documented. And I know I did him
Speaker 12: a favor by writing a book about his movement. I mean,
Speaker 12: they don't have the intellectuals and the resources to in
Speaker 12: the trained people to write historical books, and I did
Speaker 12: it a pretty straight up book. Even Mason was like,
Speaker 12: I kept waiting to read the smear. I kept waiting
Speaker 12: for the smear. There was no smear. I was like, yeah,
Speaker 12: I just wrote it as a history book. And so
Speaker 12: in a way I've given them an insight into their
Speaker 12: history which wouldn't exist otherwise. So this stuff is always
Speaker 12: a double edged sword when you cover as you know,
Speaker 12: when you cover fascist groups, they want the publicity.
Speaker 10: By and large.
Speaker 12: I was told sometimes at the SPLC, like groups contact
Speaker 12: them and they're like cover us, give us coverage.
Speaker 9: Sending them their press releases. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 11: But I mean I think someone like Mason, I guess
Speaker 11: he doesn't see the smear because, like you said, he's
Speaker 11: proud of himself. So this is I think is an
Speaker 11: honest appraisal of his legacy, and most people would see
Speaker 11: that as a smear, but he's proud of it.
Speaker 12: Well, it's not a smear. I don't need to say
Speaker 12: anything bad about him. He's there promoting Nazi terrorism. What's
Speaker 12: the point of, like, you know, denouncing this or something.
Speaker 11: I mean, Whereas I think someone like Pierce, I think
Speaker 11: sometimes when people write honestly about Piers, obviously he's been
Speaker 11: dead for twenty five years, but he resisted the characterization
Speaker 11: that he was inciting terrorism, even though he, like Mason
Speaker 11: very much was Oh.
Speaker 10: Well, Pierce is just a liar. I mean, all these
Speaker 10: guys exactly.
Speaker 9: That's what I mean.
Speaker 11: But I think a book like this about Pierce, I
Speaker 11: think he would not have enjoyed, whereas Mason is at
Speaker 11: least honest about his legacy.
Speaker 12: You know, there is a terrible book about Pierce by
Speaker 12: one of the sickaphants who is a professor actually Griffin.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and that again, that is one of those dishonest histories.
Speaker 11: I think we were talking before we started recording that
Speaker 11: the problem with archival research trying to write a history
Speaker 11: of these movements is they are dishonest actors. And so
Speaker 11: Robert S. Griffin he wrote what is it the Fame
Speaker 11: of a dead Man's Deeds?
Speaker 6: Yes?
Speaker 9: Is that what it's called. He went into it saying like,
Speaker 9: I'm going.
Speaker 11: To write this neutral appraisal of this figure of the movement,
Speaker 11: about William Luther Pierce, and over the weeks that he
Speaker 11: spent on the compound to write it, and he spent
Speaker 11: time with Peers on the compound in Hillsboro, became radicalized
Speaker 11: and is a Nazi. Now are he still alive? I mean,
Speaker 11: he could take issue with that characterization if he wants.
Speaker 11: But yes, I'm sure you've read the book. It's not neutral.
Speaker 11: It's a has giography of Peers.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 12: There's actually a book by Pierce's son too, which is interesting.
Speaker 9: I've read that. It's quite good.
Speaker 10: Well, unfortunately a lot of it's copy pasta.
Speaker 11: But I think his insight into his relationship with his
Speaker 11: father is very unique. It's called The Sins of My
Speaker 11: Father by Kelvin Pierce. I mean, that's a window you
Speaker 11: don't often get, although I guess now we do also
Speaker 11: have the Klansman's son by Don Black's.
Speaker 9: Daughter Black's daughter or son she has transitions.
Speaker 10: Oh, I did not know that well, Mazeltov.
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah, I remember reading their work before Trump, and
Speaker 12: they actually wrote one of the most moving resignations from
Speaker 12: the movement that I've read, very much, taking you know,
Speaker 12: being accountable even though they were raised in it. I
Speaker 12: feel like children raised in this are not like as
Speaker 12: accountable as adults are, right, especially like they were in
Speaker 12: college at the time.
Speaker 10: But it was like a true interesting.
Speaker 12: Working through it, and I felt like heartfelt apology for it.
Speaker 12: And yeah, actually this is a fun fact. You may
Speaker 12: know a member of the Aryan Nationalist Action A and A.
Speaker 12: This terrorist there's a bank robbing group from the eighties.
Speaker 12: I think became the first person to transition gender.
Speaker 9: From Donald Langyen.
Speaker 11: Donal Langen was known as pretty Boy Pedro when she
Speaker 11: was the head of the Aryan Republican Army. It's a
Speaker 11: bank robbery gang out of Allaheim City. Yeah, she was
Speaker 11: the first person to win a battle with the federal
Speaker 11: government to transition in federal prison.
Speaker 10: To get surgery.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and just recently. Actually, there was a filing in
Speaker 11: her case. She's trying to get the way the case
Speaker 11: is titled in the court records it's still Peter Lean
Speaker 11: in her dead name, and the judge denied her petition
Speaker 11: to retitle the case. But she has transitioned and is
Speaker 11: in a women's prison.
Speaker 10: Is she in Texas?
Speaker 9: Oh gosh, I could look up in the BOP where
Speaker 9: she is.
Speaker 10: Texas bans prisoners from changing their names.
Speaker 9: She is in FMC cars. Well that isn't in Dallas.
Speaker 10: Yeah, that's why. That's why.
Speaker 11: So she's still in the BOP system under her dead name,
Speaker 11: but she was allowed to physically transition. So that's again
Speaker 11: just a strange twist of history, right that the person
Speaker 11: who won that legal padel for us was a Nazi
Speaker 11: bank robber.
Speaker 12: Well, she has also long repudiated those politics. So I
Speaker 12: think she's been the only person to have surgery transperson
Speaker 12: has surgery who was in prisoned at the time, because
Speaker 12: I think that was recently and then everything, you know,
Speaker 12: everything they changed. They I know that they slowed down
Speaker 12: their trans policies waiting to see the results of the election.
Speaker 12: So for strange reason, I you know, actually a bunch
Speaker 12: of the stuff about trans people in prison.
Speaker 11: So anyway, no, I mean it's a remarkable, remarkable history.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Yeah, So you started writing this book after Unite the
Speaker 11: Right because there's this renewed interest in Siege. I mean,
Speaker 11: I guess what has the experience been, like, you know,
Speaker 11: over the course of spending the last six years of
Speaker 11: your life working on this, realizing that it is only
Speaker 11: becoming more relevant and not less.
Speaker 12: Well, the problem is is like for people like us
Speaker 12: who watch the far right, like our work is only
Speaker 12: important or people are only interested in it when there
Speaker 12: is a big upswing, and then like that's when people
Speaker 12: are interested and that's when it is more important. So
Speaker 12: on one hand, it's good that I didn't spend five
Speaker 12: years and then no one remembered what siege was and
Speaker 12: it was just a blip. I mean, that's good for me,
Speaker 12: But I'll have to say what's good for me is
Speaker 12: bad for society.
Speaker 9: And so I mean, I think.
Speaker 11: It would have been an important work of history regardless.
Speaker 11: But I guess as you're working on it, realizing that
Speaker 11: the body count is only growing.
Speaker 12: Yeah, it's it's I don't know, I don't really you know,
Speaker 12: what do you say about that. I call these people
Speaker 12: empty people spreading emptiness. Like it's hard for me even
Speaker 12: to get mad at the more aggressive neo Nazis and
Speaker 12: white supremacists. Like often they're young, and I just see
Speaker 12: like sad young people who can't deal with their problems,
Speaker 12: engaged in like hurting other people who are often not
Speaker 12: so different than them, you know, I mean there's a
Speaker 12: trans man who was in Adam. Often you know, like
Speaker 12: they're yeah, numerous stories of people being you know, of
Speaker 12: not white descent, either they're hiding that they're not, or
Speaker 12: they're a mixed race descent and they're sort of passing
Speaker 12: as wide of being Jewish and being queer, all this stuff.
Speaker 10: The movement's filled with these people.
Speaker 12: Sometimes it's the people are even like how many straight
Speaker 12: white men are there in the movement, Like and it's
Speaker 12: just sad. You're like, I see you're being attracted to
Speaker 12: this because you're so alienated or you're so your identity
Speaker 12: is so shaky that you are attracted to this idea
Speaker 12: of a firm, strong identity. And I mean sometimes people
Speaker 12: forget Fascism in Italy and Germany arose and basically the
Speaker 12: last two countries that arose and solidified in Europe, Like
Speaker 12: those were countries that wasn't clear what Italy was going
Speaker 12: to be. There's such differences between the north and the south.
Speaker 12: There's no reason, Like it was unclear originally whether Germany
Speaker 12: was going to be Austria too, you know, and so
Speaker 12: they were. It's a way part of fascism is shoring
Speaker 12: up that national identity which was very fragmented, and it
Speaker 12: works the same I think with people's identities. And one
Speaker 12: of the one of the things that attracts people to
Speaker 12: neo Nazism, I think, is this strong affirmation of an identity,
Speaker 12: and people with mixed identities or conflicted about it or
Speaker 12: filled with self loathing are drawn to this for that reason.
Speaker 12: One of the many reasons people get drawn into these things.
Speaker 9: And they recruit so young.
Speaker 11: I mean, I think in the book you're talking about this,
Speaker 11: you know all the way back to James Mason's origins
Speaker 11: that he became interested in the Nazi Party as a
Speaker 11: fourteen year.
Speaker 10: Old, joined it, joined it at fourteen.
Speaker 11: So he's a child, right getting into this movement, and
Speaker 11: now that he is an old man, he is in
Speaker 11: turn in doctrinating children, right that Adam Woffen members are
Speaker 11: very young, I guess were Adam Woffin technically doesn't exist anymore,
Speaker 11: but most of the young men who spilled blood for
Speaker 11: Adam Waffen.
Speaker 9: Were twenty years old, nineteen years old.
Speaker 12: And you know, someone pointed out the founder of the
Speaker 12: feuer Krieg Division when he founded it was twelve. He
Speaker 12: was arrested when he was thirteen or fourteen, but he
Speaker 12: founded it at.
Speaker 11: Twelve, and which tragic, obviously tragic, heartbreaking, disgusting. But imagine
Speaker 11: being one of the adults who is in that group
Speaker 11: and finding out that your fear was twelve.
Speaker 12: I grew up in the South in an extremely Protestant
Speaker 12: area at the height of that like eighties fundamentals Christian
Speaker 12: Christian right thing, and there were I knew about. These
Speaker 12: are kind of an older thing. Child preachers. Have you
Speaker 12: ever heard of child preachers? This was a big thing during.
Speaker 11: The Yeah, they speak in tongues and they sort of
Speaker 11: parrot the cadence of the way adults speak.
Speaker 9: But if you listen carefully, they're not saying anything.
Speaker 12: If they've memorized the way that adults give these barn
Speaker 12: burning you know, adul Protestants, Evangelicals give these barn burning sermons,
Speaker 12: but they don't necessarily understand what they're saying. And so,
Speaker 12: I mean, I think it's pretty common people adults will
Speaker 12: do this. They honestly believe in what they're saying. Maybe
Speaker 12: they understand it a little better. I think there's a
Speaker 12: bunch of post structuralist academics who don't even understand what
Speaker 12: they're saying.
Speaker 10: But that could happen too.
Speaker 12: And so I think people like, well, I don't know,
Speaker 12: I was a pretty smart twelve year old. Maybe I
Speaker 12: would understand it better. But you just need somebody repeating it.
Speaker 12: It's the slogans and the narratives have already been formed
Speaker 12: by others. You're not necessarily innovating on it. As long
Speaker 12: as you can repeat the dogma, it doesn't really matter
Speaker 12: who's saying. It doesn't matter if you're if the person
Speaker 12: is gay or Jewish.
Speaker 9: And I mean, the Estonian twelve year old was not
Speaker 9: a one, you know.
Speaker 11: In the Ethan Melzer case a year or two ago,
Speaker 11: Ethan Melzer was a US Army private who was trying
Speaker 11: to set up his unit in Turkey to be attacked
Speaker 11: by Middle Eastern terrorist groups, and the person he was
Speaker 11: communicating with online sort of goading him into these acts.
Speaker 9: Was a child. It was a child. He was the
Speaker 9: Order of Nine Angles though right he was Ona.
Speaker 12: He wasn't a near Nazi, right, I always try to
Speaker 12: distinguish there's some nine A's who are not.
Speaker 11: He was at the bleed point of Adam Waffin's splinter
Speaker 11: group and Ona he was involved with rape Waffen, was he. Yeah,
Speaker 11: the lineage of these groups is so messy. I think
Speaker 11: some of them don't even understand the ideological lineage of
Speaker 11: the sect they've ended up in. But but Melzer was
Speaker 11: at that sort of bleed point where Adam Woffin was
Speaker 11: becoming ONA.
Speaker 12: But I think what we're seeing now and definitely in
Speaker 12: these last two school shootings in the last month, is
Speaker 12: a syncretic murder. Cull the guy who just said the
Speaker 12: naspau one was black. But if you start looking at
Speaker 12: both of their manifestos, there were French to all different
Speaker 12: kinds of things, some of whom are white supremacists and
Speaker 12: neo Nazis, many of whom aren't just other school shooters,
Speaker 12: and they don't seem to have a real ideological, necessarily
Speaker 12: connection to some of this the political stuff. It's not
Speaker 12: become an O nine A. They are founded by neo
Speaker 12: Nazi and many of them are neo Nazis, And so
Speaker 12: I was going to say they're not. They don't have
Speaker 12: to be, and all the people aren't even if you
Speaker 12: were supposed to be there, they aren't all And so
Speaker 12: we're just getting through these various online forums on Telegram
Speaker 12: and elsewhere. Sometimes they just spread over all kinds of
Speaker 12: the different platforms. We're getting just this syncretic mix of
Speaker 12: these things. And this is one of the things that
Speaker 12: made Nina and Siege culture are parallel Mason's ideas because
Speaker 12: Mason's not a Satanist, and in fact, he's recently denounced
Speaker 12: Ordered nine Angles. And when he was around Satanists, they
Speaker 12: were atheist Satanists around the Church of Satan. That when
Speaker 12: you start saying, hey, we need to commit random murders
Speaker 12: in this goal of destroying the like suppose a Jewish
Speaker 12: controlled society so there could be a White Arean revolution, Like,
Speaker 12: it doesn't matter if you have a really political reason
Speaker 12: or if you're thinking that these heretical acts will destroy
Speaker 12: somehow the consensus reality, you're just trying to go people
Speaker 12: into these violent, random acts of terrorism and more random murders.
Speaker 9: Right, and the end result is the same.
Speaker 12: They're thinking is the same, and the end results is
Speaker 12: the same. So they start cross pollinating. And then what's
Speaker 12: the difference between the school shooter cults?
Speaker 6: You know?
Speaker 12: And now we have groups like the Maniac Murder cult
Speaker 12: who are ostensibly political, ostensibly neo Nazi and Order of
Speaker 12: nine angles been a reality or just like go attack
Speaker 12: old people from behind. I mean, it's just pathetic stuff. Go,
Speaker 12: you know, beat up homeless people and stab them. It's like,
Speaker 12: at some point I often say this and my speeches
Speaker 12: as it's become more and more real, is like everything
Speaker 12: blends together in our society.
Speaker 10: I think.
Speaker 12: You know, you start with like school shooters, and it's
Speaker 12: hard to distinguish them from like a political mass shooters
Speaker 12: and from political mass shooters. Right, at one point, it
Speaker 12: just becomes this one thing that's like all mixed together
Speaker 12: because we're having in the United States, we're having these
Speaker 12: constant attacks and constant that often the body account is
Speaker 12: very high. Like what becomes the difference anymore? Does it
Speaker 12: really matter? Like the Allen, Texas guy who was a
Speaker 12: Latino neo Nazi who killed a bunch of people in
Speaker 12: an outlet mall, this is really a neo Nazi action,
Speaker 12: like he was, like clearly if you look at his
Speaker 12: stuff or an article called Nazis of color about this dynamic.
Speaker 12: But was his action? How is his action necessarily any
Speaker 12: different than like a school shooting or whatever, or just
Speaker 12: like you know, it's just like he's going somewhere and
Speaker 12: killing random people, Like what is this about? So I
Speaker 12: think we're seeing this syncretic murdercal is really I know
Speaker 12: other people have different ways of posing this that is
Speaker 12: sprawling out on different online platforms and appealing to very young,
Speaker 12: alienated people, probably whose whole lives are you know, online.
Speaker 12: I think especially younger people who went through COVID zoomers
Speaker 12: and I guess people younger than that would be Generation
Speaker 12: Alpha spend more time online than any other generation. Obviously
Speaker 12: they must, and this becomes especially when they're much younger,
Speaker 12: the horizon of other world right, and if they're in
Speaker 12: cells and they're not really connected to other people and
Speaker 12: they're not connected to their family, like it just it
Speaker 12: just drives these impulses more and more, and they don't
Speaker 12: have the maturity to look outside of it or to
Speaker 12: think about the repercussions of it, or think of have
Speaker 12: the empathy to think about how it's going to affect
Speaker 12: other people in their families.
Speaker 11: And so when it comes to Siege, what would you
Speaker 11: say its current role in this sort of evolving syncretic
Speaker 11: murder culture that we have, is it is Siege's legacy
Speaker 11: now just that it's ideological lineage lives on in sort
Speaker 11: of the terragram milieu.
Speaker 13: Or is it still itself influential? Oh, some of this
Speaker 13: is a question of ideas. I think sometimes Siege acts
Speaker 13: as a symbol. People can gesture that their neo Nazis
Speaker 13: is a serious neo Nazi four hundred and fifty page tone.
Speaker 9: They didn't read it. They didn't all read it.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I know read Siege, just like how many of
Speaker 12: you have read Siege? And I found out doing the
Speaker 12: work that there's like an edited one hundred page version,
Speaker 12: and then there's like a little pocket version. And then
Speaker 12: someone even made the ten tenuts of Siege.
Speaker 9: There's the spark notes murder called.
Speaker 12: Well adam Off the division apparently had a test on
Speaker 12: Siege to get in And I'm like, I know these
Speaker 12: people didn't write. They're like a lot of very disturbed
Speaker 12: or you know, people who aren't going to like it's
Speaker 12: a boring text. I mean I read it twice in like.
Speaker 11: I've read portions, but I'm not going to sit here
Speaker 11: and say I read the whole book.
Speaker 9: It's four hundred and fifty page.
Speaker 12: Man, I read every newsletter and the book and it's yes, no.
Speaker 6: Oh.
Speaker 12: So it acts as a symbol to be like, look,
Speaker 12: we have a serious intellectual thing.
Speaker 10: How many Christians have read the Bible? Let's be really sort.
Speaker 11: I think, yeah, I think that's the right analogy, right,
Speaker 11: that it is a foundational text, but they're not all
Speaker 11: sitting down and digesting or even understanding it.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I mean, how many Communists have read Dos capital No,
Speaker 12: even just volume one, which I have, I would like
Speaker 12: to say I have. Actually, is it more or less
Speaker 12: boring than Siege? It's more intellectual? And so there's that,
Speaker 12: and there's also like the conclusions are there, right, the
Speaker 12: whole argument is developed in Siege, But you really just
Speaker 12: need to take the conclusions, which is you can't do
Speaker 12: any political work, it's hopeless. You need to go out
Speaker 12: and commit dramatic acts of violence to help inspire people,
Speaker 12: and then you know, maybe afterwards there'll be some aran
Speaker 12: blah blah blah. Frankly, that's all you need to know
Speaker 12: about it, because that's what it advocates. You just need
Speaker 12: the praxis that it concludes. And most activists aren't intellectuals.
Speaker 12: Like I always say, like a movement can have three
Speaker 12: slogans and what you need to do on the left,
Speaker 12: you need to make sure those are the right slogans
Speaker 12: pointing in the right direction, because somebody who flows into activism,
Speaker 12: who's young, who it doesn't matter if they're young, doesn't
Speaker 12: have a background of politics, is going to take the
Speaker 12: thing seriously that you say. And you can only say
Speaker 12: so many things to people. Political movements are stupid. I mean,
Speaker 12: this is why we are The ninety nine percent was great.
Speaker 10: It was great. It wasn't true.
Speaker 12: I mean half of Americans are like it, you know,
Speaker 12: support the Republicans, but like it's like one thing and
Speaker 12: then the person can think about those things. They're not
Speaker 12: going to have complicated ideas. So what is what are
Speaker 12: the slogans that come out of something? What are the
Speaker 12: basic what does it boil down to the things you're
Speaker 12: saying And people have inherited that from siege or inherited
Speaker 12: it secondhand, you know, because Terogram is very well versed
Speaker 12: in what Siege is about. I mean, Adam often had
Speaker 12: to read it, so they were more I think, into
Speaker 12: it as a text. And then as it's gone out,
Speaker 12: you know, Tarogram people, the Tarogram collective certainly knew what
Speaker 12: was in it and stuff, and so people are being
Speaker 12: affected by it even if they don't know, even if
Speaker 12: they haven't read, or even if they don't know. That's
Speaker 12: the origin of those ideas, right.
Speaker 9: So Teragram is directly downstream of Siege.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 9: So Siege was a newsletter that became a book.
Speaker 11: People read the book, and the people who read that book
Speaker 11: turned it back into a zine.
Speaker 9: Right, So it's it's sort of oh to someone, Right,
Speaker 9: it's moving.
Speaker 11: Through its phases and now it's regressing back into sort
Speaker 11: of mimetic zine form.
Speaker 12: But people who join these movements who want something more intellectual,
Speaker 12: because everyone who joins a religious or political movement, some
Speaker 12: people want a more rigorous They're like, well, what's the
Speaker 12: reason for this? Well, I have these questions. How do
Speaker 12: you answer them? What is why are we doing this?
Speaker 12: Want more rigorous? Some people want a more rigorous background.
Speaker 12: Can turn to siege, and as they get older will
Speaker 12: turn to siege or move out of it. And they're like,
Speaker 12: what were the ideas behind this? Why did we have
Speaker 12: these ideas? And I think that's it's normal. I mean,
Speaker 12: there are all kinds of weird intellectual groundings for white supremacists.
Speaker 12: A lot of it is theology, which is sort of curious,
Speaker 12: and I kind of conclude it at some point that
Speaker 12: you just needed something complicated because they couldn't use race
Speaker 12: science anymore, and they weren't people who developed social science
Speaker 12: other than someone like a londabenoist who's saying something much
Speaker 12: more complicated than most white supremacis are. And so like
Speaker 12: theology just allowed something intellectual for people to chew on,
Speaker 12: you know what I mean, Like, people are real smart
Speaker 12: who are very analytical want something to chew on with
Speaker 12: the ideas, whether it really changes their practice or not.
Speaker 12: And I think there has to be something that serves
Speaker 12: that need.
Speaker 11: And so I guess, wrapping up, because we're supposed to
Speaker 11: keep these daily shows short, what is the takeaway that
Speaker 11: you want people to to come away from this book with?
Speaker 11: I guess, especially in this political moment.
Speaker 10: I think there's two things The book has two things.
Speaker 12: One, I just want to have people have a better
Speaker 12: understanding of neo Nazism in the US and.
Speaker 10: How it developed.
Speaker 12: It's just one big blur. It's part of other things,
Speaker 12: and I see it as a distinct strain. And I
Speaker 12: want people to have a just a better understanding of
Speaker 12: that political movements origins, which is maybe a more scholarly thing.
Speaker 12: And I am My next book, I hope if I
Speaker 12: can get a contract, is to write a history of
Speaker 12: national socialism in America, because again, there's not a single
Speaker 12: book that describes that, which is very strange. Certainly not
Speaker 12: a history post war, and there may be a pre
Speaker 12: war one, but not one that puts it all together.
Speaker 12: So there's a lot of ignorance about this movement. And
Speaker 12: the second part about the cultural actors, is about the
Speaker 12: danger of taking a radical cultural movement and to use
Speaker 12: impulses like transgression and turn them into the very toxic politics,
Speaker 12: into terrorist politics. At the end of the day, I
Speaker 12: had a discussion on Blue Sky. It was amazing. You
Speaker 12: could see, it wasn't twitter. I had a useful discussion
Speaker 12: on Blue Sky and where I learned something. It was
Speaker 12: just fabulous, and it was this woman posted that, which
Speaker 12: is like essentially in Matzau I read it. In the
Speaker 12: twentieth century, there was always this assumption that transgressive art,
Speaker 12: avant garde art was implicitly progressive. Sometimes it was ideological,
Speaker 12: but even when it wasn't, even when I had some
Speaker 12: dodgy elements, the impulse of it led to progressive, left
Speaker 12: leaning politics, and it's very transgression was progressive. And I
Speaker 12: mean these guys I'm looking at are and working in
Speaker 12: the eighties, and you see it now, we've all seen
Speaker 12: it with four Chan like that was never that isn't true,
Speaker 12: and that was never true true, right, I mean those
Speaker 12: of us in the punk scene in the eighties and nineties,
Speaker 12: it could see this, even if we certainly didn't put
Speaker 12: it that way. With like skinheads in particular, it was
Speaker 12: contested terrain where people were trying to take the subculture
Speaker 12: and pull it to the left and right right. There
Speaker 12: were so many Nazis, but there were anti fascist skinheads too, Sharps.
Speaker 12: Sharps to some extent, Sharps were a lot of them
Speaker 12: are rgling nationalists. They just weren't a Nazis. This is
Speaker 12: a common There was grips like rash Red and anarchist
Speaker 12: skinheads who still exist, but there was a contested train
Speaker 12: where people trying to pull it in different directions. This
Speaker 12: is still the case in neo folk and heathen religious circles.
Speaker 10: And that's sort of you.
Speaker 12: There's an implication which I don't think I can only
Speaker 12: like put it into words now, that like the transgressive
Speaker 12: elements of these subcultures didn't necessarily go one way or
Speaker 12: the other, and it was something you'd have to fight over,
Speaker 12: like they could go and have any direction. And I
Speaker 12: think it was clear on four Chan early on. I
Speaker 12: once was mentioned very early on in four Chan and
Speaker 12: someone chimed.
Speaker 10: In and they're like, leave them alone.
Speaker 12: He's my friend, and I'm like, no, which of my
Speaker 12: friends are on four Chan and defending me? But like
Speaker 12: four Chan didn't have to end up the way it did.
Speaker 12: You know, the earlier Internet culture wasn't like this. It
Speaker 12: was progressive or libertarian, or a more decent libertarian for
Speaker 12: reading of libertarianism than we have now. So that's the
Speaker 12: second part. I mean, other than these guys, if you
Speaker 12: ever were in the industrial or neo folk scene and
Speaker 12: you heard the beout, there's Nazis, I have all of
Speaker 12: the receipt in detail in the book. If that's of
Speaker 12: interest to you.
Speaker 11: Yeah, Boyd Rice will tell you he never meant it,
Speaker 11: but I've read some of the primary documents that lead
Speaker 11: me to believe otherwise.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 12: And I even made a video of him creatively entitled
Speaker 12: Boyd Rice New Nazi Collaborator.
Speaker 10: And I know you're like, Spencer, what are you really
Speaker 10: getting at here?
Speaker 12: And I show the letters and stuff, and just if
Speaker 12: you're not familiar with these figures, I know a lot
Speaker 12: of people there were very obscure movements at the time,
Speaker 12: and you know, people are not familiar with them. But
Speaker 12: I think are familiar enough with this idea of like
Speaker 12: a super radical cultural movement about step by step by
Speaker 12: show how it can move into fully politicized a transgressive
Speaker 12: movement can move into a fully politicized, super toxic neo
Speaker 12: Nazism that is espousing terrorism, and that that this is
Speaker 12: something that we always have to watch out for in
Speaker 12: our own religious movements and our own cultural movements and
Speaker 12: occult circles. I just did a podcast with some you know,
Speaker 12: ac cult style esoteric podcast, and I was talking about
Speaker 12: Satanists to become Nazis. Satanists are sort of I would
Speaker 12: say split these days, but there's definitely a Nazi, you
Speaker 12: know peace in there are a very visible one.
Speaker 10: And so some of it's just about these things.
Speaker 11: That's an important takeaway too, that you know, in any subculture,
Speaker 11: especially the sort of transgressive subcultures like you know, counterculture
Speaker 11: music and art and you know, occult spaces, you know
Speaker 11: have a magical practice.
Speaker 9: That you engage in. People who engage in, you know, practice.
Speaker 11: Pagan faiths in all these subcultures, you need to call
Speaker 11: out these bad actors early and often push back. Don't
Speaker 11: let them bullow you and push them out of your spaces.
Speaker 12: Absolutely, and Nazis ruin everything. They intentionally go into all
Speaker 12: these spaces and sometimes don't intentionally. Actually, this was a
Speaker 12: comment on Stormfront I learned from talking about Nazis and
Speaker 12: the animal rights movement, and they're like, Spencer doesn't understand.
Speaker 12: We're not infiltrating these movements. We're just vegans. We're just
Speaker 12: also Nazis. Like, but we're not vegans because we're Nazis.
Speaker 12: We're not coming here from some other reason.
Speaker 9: Well, you can't let them sit with you either way.
Speaker 10: Well, this is a funny story. I don't know if
Speaker 10: you have tied.
Speaker 12: But I heard this story from a friend of mine
Speaker 12: that they were in a vegan group in southern California,
Speaker 12: I think, and they had a unofficial party, like a barbecue.
Speaker 12: It's people from the group, you know, from the group
Speaker 12: doing it. People brought their partners. It wasn't an official
Speaker 12: group function. But this white member of the group brought
Speaker 12: her husband, who was Kevin McDonald. Oh, and they were
Speaker 12: vegetarians or vegans, and people were like, holy fuck. And
Speaker 12: he was like, I mean, I feel a little sympathetic
Speaker 12: to me. He's like, hey, man, I don't know. I'm
Speaker 12: just I'm a I'm a vegetarian or whatever. I'm here
Speaker 12: with my wife.
Speaker 10: She's going to a party.
Speaker 9: Like, no, you're not allowed to have friends. You're not
Speaker 9: allowed to have friends, You're not allowed to have hobbies.
Speaker 9: You can't be here.
Speaker 12: Yeah, But he's like, I'm not here to recruit anyone.
Speaker 12: I'm here, you know what I mean.
Speaker 9: It's the barbecue is over with the race scientist shows up.
Speaker 12: Well. This became a big discussion in the group about
Speaker 12: whether to push him out or not. But you have
Speaker 12: to do these things, and if you even if you
Speaker 12: don't want to they're my friend, or everyone's welcome or whatever.
Speaker 12: What is gonna end up happening if you don't push
Speaker 12: the Nazi out, is that more Nazis show up. Well,
Speaker 12: if it's a single person, people are gonna start leaving,
Speaker 12: people of color are gonna leave, Jews are gonna leave,
Speaker 12: LGBTQ plus people are gonna leave, and you're gonna end
Speaker 12: up defending this one person losing many more So, even
Speaker 12: just on your own, you know, in life and self interest,
Speaker 12: if you want to keep your group together, and I've
Speaker 12: seen this again and again and again, and then they're like,
Speaker 12: you're defending a Nazis, so you're one too, So yeah,
Speaker 12: you've got to kick these people out, even just for
Speaker 12: practical reasons. I have a very low bar for people
Speaker 12: these days, and I try to appeal. I try to
Speaker 12: appeal to the Baser reasons sometimes with people you know.
Speaker 11: Well, if you would like to learn more about how
Speaker 11: a couple of guys in the counterculture movement in the
Speaker 11: eighties are responsible for the publication of the book that
Speaker 11: serves as the bible for modern Nazi terrorism, you can
Speaker 11: pick up a copy of Neo Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism.
Speaker 11: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege by Spencer
Speaker 11: Sunshine from Routlige Press, and it's available I think wherever
Speaker 11: books are sold. I bought my copy directly from the
Speaker 11: publisher Routledge Press. I think it was only twenty seven dollars.
Speaker 11: You know, a bargain and a steal, So pick up
Speaker 11: a copy of that and where else can people find
Speaker 11: your work?
Speaker 14: Spencer?
Speaker 10: Thank you for now that you mentioned that.
Speaker 12: I am on all of the social usually at Transform
Speaker 12: sixt seven eight nine.
Speaker 10: Have a web page if you want, if you have
Speaker 10: an RSS feed.
Speaker 12: If someone has said this recently, they're like, it's actually
Speaker 12: one of the better ways to keep track of people.
Speaker 12: I was like, your followers billion people anyway, Spencer Sunshine
Speaker 12: dot com awesome. If you'd like to support anti fascist
Speaker 12: research and get a warm, fuzzy feeling, you should sign
Speaker 12: up for my Patreon for as little as two dollars
Speaker 12: a month. You can help me out with the rent
Speaker 12: and get some exclusive content.
Speaker 10: So yep, hell.
Speaker 9: Yeah, thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 10: Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. It's been great.
Speaker 10: Welcome to dick it apt here, a podcast where the
Speaker 10: singular it is seemingly irrelevant now because everything is happening
Speaker 10: all of the time. Host me along and one of
Speaker 10: the many, many, many chaotic things that has been going
Speaker 10: on over the last two weeks since Trump's power has
Speaker 10: been a bunch of funding freezes to the US federal
Speaker 10: government grant system. And I think to a lot of
Speaker 10: people that doesn't sound like an enormously big deal, but
Speaker 10: that is unbelievably catastrophic for like I would go so
Speaker 10: far to say, is like the survival of the human
Speaker 10: species for reasons they will get to in a second,
Speaker 10: but unbelievably bad for the quality of life of everyone
Speaker 10: on Earth. And to get to kind of a sense
Speaker 10: of exactly what this kind of stuff does, what these
Speaker 10: funding freezes do, and what the sort of threat, particularly
Speaker 10: to the future of American science is, I have brought
Speaker 10: in two people who are intimately familiar with this Arguvon Salis,
Speaker 10: who's a surgeon and professor of medicine, and friend of
Speaker 10: the show. Yeah, come on, yeah, definitely. I don't know
Speaker 10: why I had such a hessidant friend of the show,
Speaker 10: because it wasn't in my notes that was that was
Speaker 10: that ad living it, But yeah, front of the show
Speaker 10: kave Hoda, who is a Gas show entrologist and the
Speaker 10: host of the podcast House of Pods, and both of
Speaker 10: you two, welcome to the show. Thank you so much
Speaker 10: for having us.
Speaker 14: Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 7: I'm excited to be here for your most Persian episode ever.
Speaker 6: For sure.
Speaker 10: We may have done episodes of like that were like
Speaker 10: about a row.
Speaker 7: Yeah, this is a Persians a bit too Persian doctors
Speaker 7: talking about Trump is about as Persian as a good
Speaker 7: and you're not You're not overselling it. This is a
Speaker 7: large scale attack on the healthcare infrastructure of the United
Speaker 7: States on a massive level, So you're not lying. It
Speaker 7: is a serious, serious issue, not just for us, but
Speaker 7: for the whole world.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 10: And one of the mean the places I want to start,
Speaker 10: I think is with because it was happening I think
Speaker 10: in n s FNIH a bit before this happened. But
Speaker 10: the OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, sent out this
Speaker 10: memo last week that was a it was nominally a
Speaker 10: response to this very weird Trump executive voter. That's him
Speaker 10: being like every single program that has to do with
Speaker 10: civil rights, which is like, so my my description was
Speaker 10: anything it has to do with civil rights at all,
Speaker 10: like gone His description of it is like DEI woke,
Speaker 10: So like anything it has to do with queer people,
Speaker 10: anything that has to do with like racial inequality, And
Speaker 10: they were supposed to like go through and review every
Speaker 10: single government grant program for anything, but.
Speaker 14: Don't forget he also included the gender ideology, which is
Speaker 14: a meaningless praise and the Green New Deal is.
Speaker 10: All part of it, yep, yep, yep, you know, and
Speaker 10: this is part of the raft of executive voters, particularly
Speaker 10: the anti trans executive voters. But OPM's response to this,
Speaker 10: again Awfulist Personnel Management's response was to just freeze literally
Speaker 10: every single grant program in the country. And this was
Speaker 10: everything from pell grants and like work study for college students,
Speaker 10: to like food aid for single mothers to my personal favorite.
Speaker 10: And I don't know why this never made it into
Speaker 10: the press because I'm apparently the only one who went
Speaker 10: through and read the list, but one of the things
Speaker 10: that he froze funding for was security patrols for nuclear
Speaker 10: weapons manufacturing sites. So like we almost like, why, yeah,
Speaker 10: why is that included? It was because literally what happened
Speaker 10: was they found a list of every single grant that
Speaker 10: like anyone does like and any like program that gives
Speaker 10: out grants and they froze all of them, and so
Speaker 10: like another one of them that when I said this
Speaker 10: is like, this is a threat to all life on Earth,
Speaker 10: I was not I was not joking here. One of
Speaker 10: the other ones was defunding one of the very important
Speaker 10: like international nuclear non proliferation organizations, like specifically the one
Speaker 10: that's there to make sure that like random people don't
Speaker 10: get like enriched uranium or like obtain nuclear weapons. So
Speaker 10: like we we dodged a like giant nuke sized bullet.
Speaker 10: When when like most of these programs got their money
Speaker 10: back after a judge was like, well, you obviously can't
Speaker 10: do this. This is so unbelievably illegal that it's astounding,
Speaker 10: like the Constitute should like very blatantly says that the
Speaker 10: power of the purse is Congress, not the President.
Speaker 14: Eight like stop, yeah, but I would just want to
Speaker 14: clarify for the people listening here that it wasn't just
Speaker 14: grant specifically, it was like all federal assistance. So one
Speaker 14: of the things that was very confusing and chaotic was
Speaker 14: this question of does this mean Snap is gone, Does
Speaker 14: this mean Wig is gone? What about Headstart? What about
Speaker 14: meals on wheels. I mean, there are tons of federal
Speaker 14: assistance programs out there, and they had only made an
Speaker 14: exception for Social Security and medic care in the memo,
Speaker 14: but not Medicaid. And what happened the next day, but
Speaker 14: the Medicaid portal went down right.
Speaker 10: Yeah, And it's it's chaotic too, because like all of
Speaker 10: the programs you just named were on the list of
Speaker 10: like programs that they were putting a freeze on, but
Speaker 10: then it wasn't clear what was going to happen with
Speaker 10: them end And it's still not right right.
Speaker 8: Yeah, we just have a judge.
Speaker 14: We have We found one judge with a backbone in
Speaker 14: the entire country so far, and he said, no, you cannot.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I am surprised actually that Trump hasn't gone out
Speaker 7: on the attack. Maybe I just missed it, like attacking
Speaker 7: that judge, you know, but it is, I mean, what's
Speaker 7: so confusing to me is, you know, I get it,
Speaker 7: at least in some part of their weird internal terrible logic,
Speaker 7: transphobic logic. I get why they're doing some of the
Speaker 7: things they're doing, but then some of them don't even
Speaker 7: make sense within their own whack internal logic. Like when
Speaker 7: they scrub, for example, the CDC for all the terms
Speaker 7: that they didn't like, gender terms, transgender terms, things like that.
Speaker 7: They also scrub things like following maternal morbidity or opioid use,
Speaker 7: things that don't, at least on the surface, even fit
Speaker 7: with their attacks on woke ideology. So it seems like
Speaker 7: it's a complete mess to me what's happening. And it's
Speaker 7: what's terrifying about it is not just that it's a mess,
Speaker 7: but it is happening. I mean, they are doing it,
Speaker 7: they are pushing it, even though they clearly don't even
Speaker 7: seem to really know what they're doing or even have
Speaker 7: a great sense internally of what they're doing.
Speaker 10: I think that's the danger of this right now, is
Speaker 10: that this is revenge.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 10: They're lashing out in sort of in pure anger and
Speaker 10: pure hatred, and they have been given control of an
Speaker 10: apparatus that they don't understand at all, Right, Like that,
Speaker 10: that's how you get defunding a nuclear police. That's how
Speaker 10: you get them defunding like the very Goldwater Memorial grant
Speaker 10: thing that gives money to kids who're writing essays about
Speaker 10: bury Goldwater. They don't understand what the state is and
Speaker 10: what it does, and they're just trying to take the
Speaker 10: whole thing apart, and they're just trying to sort of
Speaker 10: rampage their way through it. And it means that we're
Speaker 10: in this situation now where like for a long time,
Speaker 10: the line on like trans Rice was like, well, you
Speaker 10: should defend trans Rice because they're going to come for
Speaker 10: you next, And that's no longer true. What is actually
Speaker 10: happening here is in order to kill us, they are
Speaker 10: willing to kill everything. They're willing to let all of
Speaker 10: you die in nuclear fire. It's like specifically in order
Speaker 10: to hurt us, Right, That's the sort of line we're
Speaker 10: at where you know, all of these all of these
Speaker 10: sort of complicated systems and all of these sort of
Speaker 10: complicated funding mechanisms are just getting lit on fire by
Speaker 10: people who don't understand what they're doing and don't care. Right,
Speaker 10: just out of Spider or something.
Speaker 14: For sure, out of fight and hate. But I want
Speaker 14: to just take a step back and think about the
Speaker 14: fact that all of this is happening because of two
Speaker 14: versus three executive orders, depending how you think about it.
Speaker 14: But they're literally executive orders. They are not laws in
Speaker 14: the books in Congress does not pass anything. It's like
Speaker 14: this elderly man woke up and said, hey, let's get
Speaker 14: rid of DEI and DIA for example. Those are the
Speaker 14: terms they use exactly without saying what DEI is or
Speaker 14: what DEI A is. And then just I feel that
Speaker 14: we need to pause for a moment on the ADI
Speaker 14: A and they spell out, you know, as for accessible,
Speaker 14: wiping out everything related to accessibility is directly in violation
Speaker 14: of the ADA and makes no sense. And it is
Speaker 14: cool and all of that, but also just like legally
Speaker 14: it makes no kind of sense, and they're going to
Speaker 14: go after the ADA, which I'm guessing is part of
Speaker 14: their plan to the extent that there is a plan.
Speaker 14: But the two key executive orders here are the sex
Speaker 14: and gender. One that's not defending quote unquote defending women,
Speaker 14: that basically dictates that sex must be only male and female,
Speaker 14: thereby erasing intersex people completely, and that there's really they're
Speaker 14: essentially saying there's no such thing as gender and that
Speaker 14: the only genders that they see are willing to recognize
Speaker 14: are male and female. They're by erasing trans folks, intersect people,
Speaker 14: non binary folks, cutter a gender, queer, gender whood all
Speaker 14: of those people. So for them to go into like
Speaker 14: the CDC data sets, take them offline so that they
Speaker 14: can binarize whatever is there eliminate I'm assuming I don't
Speaker 14: I mean, I don't know that this was something that
Speaker 14: I'm assuming that that's what they're doing, taking any sex
Speaker 14: that thought male or female out of there, and then
Speaker 14: removing gender as a varia le because they've said that
Speaker 14: no grant funding should go to any assessment of gender period.
Speaker 14: So that's when you're talking to me about like how
Speaker 14: they're willing to throw everyone under the bus just to
Speaker 14: pursue this transphobic agenda about what you're talking about. They're
Speaker 14: willing to take huge lots of information off of the
Speaker 14: Internet so people can no longer research, or physician anyone
Speaker 14: else can no longer access this information, just to make
Speaker 14: sure that there's no hint or reference to anyone who
Speaker 14: is transgender. That seems to be like the key thing
Speaker 14: that they're trying to do with all of this. So
Speaker 14: they have thrown the entire government and take chaos and
Speaker 14: the lives of millions of people into chaos, all to
Speaker 14: remove the t in LGBT.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and the stuff that they're doing like the destruction
Speaker 10: of this research data, the way that it's been just
Speaker 10: like taken down and destroyed. Little parts of it have
Speaker 10: come back up after the sort of backlash, but you
Speaker 10: know what they're what they're doing is staging a digital
Speaker 10: version of the nazis burning all of the books at
Speaker 10: the sexual research. Like that's that's exposedly what they're doing.
Speaker 10: It's literally the same stuff, like it is research on
Speaker 10: queerness and trans people that they are lighting on fire.
Speaker 14: Yep.
Speaker 10: And you know you know who else lights research on
Speaker 10: queer and trans people on fire? It's it's the sponsors
Speaker 10: of this show. It's the products of services.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's the way you get those big bucks.
Speaker 10: That's how you do it. That's professional broadcasting. And we
Speaker 10: are back. So I want to move from that to
Speaker 10: kind of the next phase after we got out of
Speaker 10: the sort of OPM like suspending everything phase, which has
Speaker 10: been this kind of this uncertainty around a whole bunch
Speaker 10: of the other funding agencies for science, the National Science Foundation,
Speaker 10: National Institute of Health. Can you talk a bit about
Speaker 10: what's been going on with grants there before we move
Speaker 10: into like how this whole process works.
Speaker 14: Yeah, So the first line that something was materially going
Speaker 14: to change after these executive orders. As I recall, I'm
Speaker 14: living this along with everyone else, and what is time.
Speaker 14: But the first thing that I recall is the study
Speaker 14: section being canceled. The study sections are meeting where scientists
Speaker 14: come together. They each will have read various grant proposals
Speaker 14: and scored them on a number of different dimensions, and
Speaker 14: then they come together and discussed. They don't discuss all
Speaker 14: of them, by the way, They only discuss the ones
Speaker 14: that have that seem to have the most merit, and
Speaker 14: then out of those they make recommendations for which ones
Speaker 14: they believe should get funded. So these are a critical
Speaker 14: part of the process by which the government gives out
Speaker 14: funds for research. If these meetings do not happen, people
Speaker 14: grants are not getting evaluated, assessed, and recommended for funding.
Speaker 14: That means they're not getting the funding. That means they're
Speaker 14: not hiring people, or they're having to fire people they
Speaker 14: already had in their layoff, people they already had in
Speaker 14: their lab. They're not able to continue the important work
Speaker 14: that they're doing. They may lose their job. Like really
Speaker 14: truly people can lose their job because they were not
Speaker 14: able to secure enough funding to support themselves and their labs.
Speaker 14: So these are really really important meetings, and those have
Speaker 14: been canceled for both the NSF and the nih for
Speaker 14: at least the last couple of weeks, And as of yesterday,
Speaker 14: I saw doctor Megan Ray said that her or not
Speaker 14: maybe not her, but that study sections were canceled yesterday
Speaker 14: that were due to happen today. So there had been
Speaker 14: some communication around perhaps the free of those activities ending
Speaker 14: on February first today that we're recording as February third,
Speaker 14: and those study sections for today were canceled. On the
Speaker 14: other hand, NSS, which is obviously a separate organization, has
Speaker 14: informally i've heard, decided that they were going to resume
Speaker 14: from study sections, although they haven't rexamned just yet.
Speaker 7: And if I did add, just to be totally clear
Speaker 7: with your listeners, these are incredibly important organizations for discovery
Speaker 7: of new medical breakthroughs and for pushing science forward. For
Speaker 7: the NAIH, for example, the nih IS is a big
Speaker 7: part of the reason we have mRNA vaccines now. They
Speaker 7: were the ones helping to promote that research for decades
Speaker 7: before we were able to turn them into vaccines, and
Speaker 7: because a lot of what they did that we're able
Speaker 7: to do that when we're looking for a new breakthroughs
Speaker 7: and we're looking for something where patient comes to us
Speaker 7: and they're like, isn't there anything We've tried everything, isn't
Speaker 7: there anything that we could at least try or some
Speaker 7: trial that we could be involved in. That's where we
Speaker 7: find these things. These are the things that we're talking about,
Speaker 7: these really important healthcare infrastructure that we're discussing.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and you know between NAH and National Science Foundation
Speaker 10: and you know, Department of Energy is having a similar
Speaker 10: thing to this because Department of Energy funds all like
Speaker 10: hy energy physics research, so all of your sort of
Speaker 10: like particle accelerator or stuff like that. It's not just
Speaker 10: sort of like the National Labs for example, that they
Speaker 10: get funding from these places, although you know National Labs
Speaker 10: are like, you know, you get your funding from grants
Speaker 10: like everyone else. But you know, I mean this is
Speaker 10: this is all the way down to the level of
Speaker 10: like undergrads and college chemistry labs, like they're they are
Speaker 10: getting paid out of these grants from National Science Foundation,
Speaker 10: from the National Institute's for Health, like all of these
Speaker 10: all of these institutions pay out everything, and it's like
Speaker 10: this is the basis of how all science almost all science.
Speaker 10: Like there's some private sector stuff, but the thing is
Speaker 10: like the giant private like Bell Labs right, like you're
Speaker 10: your old school giant private sector. Here's our giant R
Speaker 10: and D thing. Like that's all kind of gone, so
Speaker 10: you know, like the only people who are getting funded
Speaker 10: by this are like weird startup guys. And it's like, Okay,
Speaker 10: look look look what they've invented in the last like
Speaker 10: fifteen years. It's like cryptocurrency NFTs, which is cryptocurrency again, Arranos,
Speaker 10: don't forget Yeah, sarrados, the metaverse, juice row, like they're
Speaker 10: doing great. It's really great. And people will be like, oh,
Speaker 10: they invented a ey. It's like no, so National Labs
Speaker 10: were using those AA algorithms like a decade and a
Speaker 10: half ago. It's like, yeah, the generative blah blah. Okay,
Speaker 10: we're not We're not here to get into me complaining
Speaker 10: about generative AI. Go go go go listen to edgit
Speaker 10: runs entire Like yeah.
Speaker 14: Yeah, I mean, I think the bottom line of what
Speaker 14: you're trying to communicate here is that a lot of
Speaker 14: scientific and medical breakthroughs have come from labs and from
Speaker 14: researchers who have been funded by the NSF and the
Speaker 14: NIH and I will just say as an academic, these
Speaker 14: are certainly the kind of premiere funding opportunities.
Speaker 6: That we have.
Speaker 14: Like it also is really critical in the careers of
Speaker 14: researchers to be able to show that their work is
Speaker 14: worthy of this kind of funding. And that's part of
Speaker 14: why I would think people's jobs, yes, the people we
Speaker 14: pay off of our grants, but also people like me,
Speaker 14: our jobs can be really dependent on whether we get
Speaker 14: this funding or not.
Speaker 10: And it's a generational thing too, because the students also
Speaker 10: need this funding. And so people people who undergrads, particularly
Speaker 10: people who are like doctoral students, like their research, right,
Speaker 10: like the stuff that they're doing while they're in graduate school,
Speaker 10: like getting PhD so they can become scientists. That's all
Speaker 10: also like funded by these grants. And if that stuff
Speaker 10: goes away, like, it's not just that you're obliterating this
Speaker 10: generation of science, like you're decapping the next like three
Speaker 10: generations of scientists, right because each one of them down
Speaker 10: the line suddenly doesn't have for the research experience that
Speaker 10: they're supposed to have. Exactly, yeah, right.
Speaker 14: And also, who would want to go into science if
Speaker 14: it's going to be invited, right, if they's just going
Speaker 14: to be like some random person who goes into the
Speaker 14: White House and never mind, we're not doing that anymore.
Speaker 14: Who wants to be exposed to those kinds of winds.
Speaker 7: A lot of the smartest doctors and scientists I know
Speaker 7: that tend to be risk averse people. I mean, there's
Speaker 7: a lot of people the CDC that could try to
Speaker 7: maybe sue for you know, for not being able to
Speaker 7: use the terms that they want to use and study
Speaker 7: the things they want to study, and they might even
Speaker 7: I don't know, maybe they could win. You talk to
Speaker 7: Laurier about that. Seems unlikely because they're not private sector.
Speaker 7: But to them, they're not going to because they're living
Speaker 7: paycheck to paycheck. To some of these people that are
Speaker 7: at the lower levels, people that aren't making a ton
Speaker 7: of money and they have livelihoods that they're trying to maintain,
Speaker 7: they're not going to try and rock the boat when
Speaker 7: it comes to these things. It's putting them in a
Speaker 7: really tenuous position already. They're already worried about their next grant,
Speaker 7: their next however, they're going to fund their labs.
Speaker 14: Yeah, And I just want to highlight that postdocs I
Speaker 14: think are particularly vulnerable because they are often like the
Speaker 14: NFF where You's actually demonstrated a girl, they aren't as
Speaker 14: said like, they're definitely often living paycheck paycheck. And what
Speaker 14: the NFF breeze did was that it made it so
Speaker 14: floks could not get their next paycheck because we were
Speaker 14: this was happening at the end of the month, right,
Speaker 14: so it was delaying people getting their next paycheck. And
Speaker 14: in particular, and talking about postdocs, yes, it can affect
Speaker 14: graduate students as well, but a lot of postdoc funding,
Speaker 14: like one of the grand that I have actually we
Speaker 14: worked directly with postdoctoral and some predoctoral, but many postdoctoral
Speaker 14: training programs that fund postoc And to the extent that
Speaker 14: any of those grants are put on hold, that is
Speaker 14: threatening the income of people who really don't have buffer,
Speaker 14: who cannot afford to not get paid.
Speaker 10: And also, you know, and this is another aspect of
Speaker 10: this too, and I really doubt they understand this, but
Speaker 10: you know, there's also a lot of postocs who are
Speaker 10: not from the US right there, who are either international
Speaker 10: student or international students who are just who are you know,
Speaker 10: coming in from other countries and those people, if you
Speaker 10: suddenly don't have a grant, you don't have a job,
Speaker 10: and that is really really bad for your immigration status.
Speaker 10: Like that, that is enough to get you kicked out
Speaker 10: of the US. And this is the thing that's constantly
Speaker 10: leveraged in sort of labor organizing, right or like one
Speaker 10: of the threats that universities will make. Usually they do
Speaker 10: it implicitly. Sometimes they'll just go out and say it
Speaker 10: very legally, will be like, Okay, if if you this
Speaker 10: postoc like you, this grad student like tries to like
Speaker 10: join this union, like your your legal status in the
Speaker 10: US is going to be compromised. But that's that's another
Speaker 10: sort of risk from this is like those people's ability
Speaker 10: to stay in the US and not get imported basically exactly, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 7: And then then we talk about bringing in you know,
Speaker 7: I know there's a lot of internal debate right now
Speaker 7: between the publican party on you know, bringing in people
Speaker 7: to work these jobs and bringing in these minds. But
Speaker 7: this is a clear example of where the United States
Speaker 7: has excelled in the past. We've been able to bring
Speaker 7: in great minds from all over the world to help
Speaker 7: us work on research and to help us come to
Speaker 7: work in these labs. I mean you go to like
Speaker 7: USA Staff and Stanford and you see these people working
Speaker 7: these labs on important stuff. And that's another like, that's
Speaker 7: that's that's something we're going to lose. And I hope
Speaker 7: we don't lose it permanently. I hope it's not, you
Speaker 7: know something like you say, well, last generations are worth
Speaker 7: of damage, but it's hard to see how it won't
Speaker 7: at this point.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I was just.
Speaker 14: Looking up one hundred percent agree and to your point
Speaker 14: about how much of the science and even other amazing
Speaker 14: things that are done in the country are done by immigrants.
Speaker 14: I think it's over just over a third of Nobel
Speaker 14: laureates from the United States have been immigrants to.
Speaker 10: The United States, you know, And it's sort of a
Speaker 10: nationalist thing, right, but like for ninety nine percent of
Speaker 10: the time for better like, the US has been very
Speaker 10: very good at absorbing other country scientists when you know
Speaker 10: this like we got up you know, okay, so like
Speaker 10: it's hard to take too much credit for it because
Speaker 10: we also took a bunch of scientists from the NAZS,
Speaker 10: like from the actual Nazis, but we also like a
Speaker 10: bunch of very famous US scientists, Like we're in the
Speaker 10: US because they were fleeing the rise of the Nazis,
Speaker 10: And you know, like we are looking at a situation
Speaker 10: where we are going to be the opposite of this,
Speaker 10: where like our scientists are going to be fleeing everywhere
Speaker 10: else because our government is being run by these people.
Speaker 14: Yeah, and I wanted to highlight I think that's liter
Speaker 14: all really great points about the effect of not getting
Speaker 14: the funding and who it trickles down to. But I
Speaker 14: also wanted to highlight that there's two different kind of
Speaker 14: ways that the funding can be withheld. The one is
Speaker 14: just that review process and not actually reviewing grants. Right, So,
Speaker 14: like I personally submitted a proposal in the fall, who
Speaker 14: knows if when that will get discussed. There are people
Speaker 14: in that kind of position where they maybe were dependent
Speaker 14: on or really hoping to get funding this round, and
Speaker 14: now they don't know if or when that proposal will
Speaker 14: get reviewed. Of course, you never know if you're going
Speaker 14: to get funded, but to not even have a chance
Speaker 14: at review is an unanticipated barrier. Then on the other side,
Speaker 14: there's people who have been funded and are in the
Speaker 14: position that I'm in, which is not knowing whether I'm
Speaker 14: going to receive the next payment. Because the NIH so
Speaker 14: I have a five year grant and we are currently
Speaker 14: in year three. Every year you have to submit a
Speaker 14: status update on your project, and then they determine based
Speaker 14: online of different things, including what budget they are given
Speaker 14: from Congress, how much of the funds that they had
Speaker 14: originally projected they'll be able to give to you. And
Speaker 14: there are as you can imagine, a lot of people
Speaker 14: who are doing work that's related to health disparities, help equity,
Speaker 14: women's health, LGBTQ health, et cetera, who now do not
Speaker 14: know if our work falls under quote unquote DEI or
Speaker 14: deia or gender ideology or all these vague terms that
Speaker 14: the administration is using, and so we actually don't know whether,
Speaker 14: Like for me, I don't know if I'm going to
Speaker 14: get my next set of funds. In July, so I
Speaker 14: was in the process of interviewing to hire someone to
Speaker 14: join my lab, and I genuinely don't know whether I
Speaker 14: should hire someone at knowing that I may lose funds
Speaker 14: in you know, five months, or do I just try
Speaker 14: to make do without and then that's a job that
Speaker 14: no one gets. And if you play that out over
Speaker 14: the three hundred thousand people were funded in various ways
Speaker 14: by the NIH, you start to understand the scope of
Speaker 14: damage was being done.
Speaker 6: Here.
Speaker 7: Can you tell people what your current grant is? And
Speaker 7: because I think that is pertin into this conversation, yes, yes.
Speaker 14: Yes, you're right. Okay, So my grant is called ending
Speaker 14: sexual Harassment Teaching of Principal Investigators at a Q acronym
Speaker 14: E stops. So our goal is to try to help
Speaker 14: people intervene when there is sexual harassment, with the ultimate
Speaker 14: goal decreasing the amount of sexual harassment that's happening in
Speaker 14: biomedical research.
Speaker 10: Oh they don't, they don't what you do with that?
Speaker 12: Like?
Speaker 7: Oh, no, right, because one of the great terrible ironies
Speaker 7: of this whole thing is that their argument is that
Speaker 7: they're doing a lot of this to protect women, the
Speaker 7: sanctity of women or whatever this is. You know, I
Speaker 7: am hopeful that I'm wrong for you. I hope that
Speaker 7: this is not the case. But I could see them
Speaker 7: very easily saying that this somehow fits underwoke ideology, and
Speaker 7: even though it's something clearly that is designed to help
Speaker 7: not just women, but a lot of women could benefit
Speaker 7: from this, you know.
Speaker 14: Yeah, and to your point, like everyone is at risk
Speaker 14: for hearing things sexual harassment, it's just that the majority
Speaker 14: of folks who experience that are women or sexual and
Speaker 14: gender minorities. And so yeah, I've really, obviously, as you
Speaker 14: can imagine've been thinking a lot about how they are
Speaker 14: interpreting these words that they're using and whether sexual harassment,
Speaker 14: which by the way, is a form of discrimination, Like
Speaker 14: is that DEI is stopping discrimination?
Speaker 10: DEI?
Speaker 6: I believe?
Speaker 7: Who?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 7: Well, you know, quickly, if I may, I can go
Speaker 7: over this. There was this email that was dispersed from
Speaker 7: the CDC about terms that were no longer going to
Speaker 7: be used, that were going to be scrubbed from the
Speaker 7: CDC's databases, and they included words like gender, transgender, pregnant person,
Speaker 7: pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non by binary, non binary.
Speaker 10: They use both to one with the hyphene hyphen.
Speaker 7: Signed male at birth, assign female at birth, biologically male,
Speaker 7: or biologically female. So anything that terms like that they're
Speaker 7: gonna scrub Wait, let me, can.
Speaker 14: I just clarify that, because actually it's even worse, I
Speaker 14: think than what you just described because what they actually
Speaker 14: said in that email, as I understand it, is that
Speaker 14: there's all these researchers who work at the CDC. So
Speaker 14: they said, if you have submitted a manuscript for publication
Speaker 14: to any scientific or medical journal that has any of
Speaker 14: these words in it, you must retract that manuscript. So
Speaker 14: it's even much much broader than just what's on the
Speaker 14: CDC's website. It's any work that anyone employed by the
Speaker 14: CDC has done, any research I could say that they've
Speaker 14: done that they are in the process of publishing. They
Speaker 14: have been asked to rescind that work so that they
Speaker 14: can remove these god awful words, right. That are actually
Speaker 14: words that are used routinely in science, but they can
Speaker 14: no longer have them in their manuscripts. And how nonsensical
Speaker 14: would their manuscript be without the word? I mean it, Yeah,
Speaker 14: it's terrible.
Speaker 7: The other thing that blows my mind about this is
Speaker 7: how incredibly inefficient. Maybe that's the point, is how ridiculous
Speaker 7: it's going to be. Who's going to be doing this,
Speaker 7: who's going to be looking over this. To my knowledge,
Speaker 7: there's only been one political point e in regards to this,
Speaker 7: and that's that the CDC it's Susan Moneraz is the
Speaker 7: acting director there at the CDC, and it's all going
Speaker 7: to go through that one person. All every study is
Speaker 7: going to go through that one person. It makes no sense.
Speaker 7: I don't even understand how it's going to be enforced.
Speaker 7: It's a ridiculous thing. I'm sure they're going to try
Speaker 7: to make some examples out of people, but how are
Speaker 7: they even enforced this. We're gonna find out what your grant.
Speaker 10: I guess.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 10: I think the bleak thing about specifically the fact that
Speaker 10: you study retractions and it's just you know, this attempt
Speaker 10: to ban anyone from doing any research, right, is that
Speaker 10: like the problem for them with medical research about trans
Speaker 10: people is that everyone who's doing this who isn't a
Speaker 10: like unbelievably rabid anti trans person from the beginning, you know,
Speaker 10: looks at everything that they want to you to trans
Speaker 10: people and goes, this is going to kill unbelievable numbers
Speaker 10: of us. And I think like part of what they're
Speaker 10: doing here is they're trying to before any of this
Speaker 10: stuff come out, they're trying to stop the scientific apparatus
Speaker 10: from revealing the fact that they are trying to wipe
Speaker 10: us out and that's yeah, an unbelievably bleak thing to
Speaker 10: live through.
Speaker 7: I guess, like, yeah, so sorry. I mean, honestly, I
Speaker 7: wish I could say something more. It's really terrible.
Speaker 10: I won't say this like Jenny Wineley because it never happens. Obviously,
Speaker 10: the best the best thing you can do for trans
Speaker 10: people is like something that involves the follow the regime.
Speaker 10: Like the second best thing is like hire us, because
Speaker 10: no one does it and we can't. No one can
Speaker 10: get jobs, right, and but like like the third minimum
Speaker 10: thing after like money or like housing, is like like
Speaker 10: check in on the trans people in your life because
Speaker 10: nobody actually ever does it, and it means a lot,
Speaker 10: and it's not going to like stop the wrath of
Speaker 10: the state. But like, I don't know a lot of
Speaker 10: people feel us alone. This has been to be a
Speaker 10: trans public service announcement. It's now over. I think that's
Speaker 10: great advice.
Speaker 7: In other friend of the show, Margaret Kiljoy, she also said,
Speaker 7: you know when you hire people, you hire trans people,
Speaker 7: put them front of house, make it visible, and then
Speaker 7: when you go and you frequent these places, let them know.
Speaker 7: That's part of why you do it. I like that
Speaker 7: you guys are doing this. I'm here to support that.
Speaker 7: I mean, because we're talking about money, you're talking at
Speaker 7: people's livelihoods or at stake, and we have to show
Speaker 7: that these are people that are not only employable but
Speaker 7: could benefit your business.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 14: Honestly, I don't know what to say about it either,
Speaker 14: aside from everything that they're doing is atrocious. It is
Speaker 14: a scientific it is in humane, It will it will
Speaker 14: harm people.
Speaker 10: Yeah, people are gonna die. People probably have already died.
Speaker 10: If you're transit, you're listening to this, fucking don't die.
Speaker 10: Think about how good it's going to be to get
Speaker 10: a piss on these people's graves in like eight years.
Speaker 10: It's gonna but.
Speaker 7: It is.
Speaker 6: It is.
Speaker 7: I agree, it is in dad to Argawan's point, it
Speaker 7: is dumb on every metric. I can't think of a
Speaker 7: single metric, and that these actions are not hurtful and
Speaker 7: going to harm us in the long run.
Speaker 10: To close this out that this is something that I
Speaker 10: think is very important because no one in the US
Speaker 10: apparently seems to understand this at all. How does the
Speaker 10: grant process actually work and what is it? Because you
Speaker 10: know this process, the difference between you like having clean
Speaker 10: water to drink and like that study that was going
Speaker 10: to determine if your water is clean or not not happening.
Speaker 14: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you know, first thing I will
Speaker 14: say is that the word grant applies to lots and
Speaker 14: lots of different opportunities. And there are grants as small
Speaker 14: as like one thousand or five thousand dollars in grants
Speaker 14: as large as multimillion dollars. And the processes actually are
Speaker 14: I mean, they're analogous, but they can be pretty different
Speaker 14: because that you can imagine for a smaller grant, the
Speaker 14: amount of work that you have to do to earn
Speaker 14: that grant generally is a little bit less. But I
Speaker 14: can speak in the most detail to the NIH review
Speaker 14: process and specifically to these grants that they call ro
Speaker 14: one because are like kind of their fanciest grants that
Speaker 14: go to individual researchers with their team, but it's led
Speaker 14: by an individual researcher often. And the way this works is,
Speaker 14: first of all, I want folks to understand, it takes
Speaker 14: a year from the time that you apply until the
Speaker 14: time that you get money, can take up to a
Speaker 14: full calendar year, and so you put in in an
Speaker 14: immense amount of effort so I'll use myself as an example.
Speaker 14: I apply for a grant in October, huge amount of
Speaker 14: effort I don't know how many hours leading up to
Speaker 14: that brand submission, and then I just sit and wait
Speaker 14: for months, months and months before there's even a study section,
Speaker 14: if study section happens, and then after that, it's still
Speaker 14: a couple more months before I might get information.
Speaker 3: It depends.
Speaker 14: Of course, there's some variability there. But it's a long,
Speaker 14: long process, is what I'm trying to say. And the
Speaker 14: way the process starts is often you will send what
Speaker 14: called the letter of interest to the agency that you're
Speaker 14: applying to. So I've you said earlier it's the National
Speaker 14: Institutes of Health. So every institute has its own notice
Speaker 14: of funding opportunities or no foes that are like, here's
Speaker 14: what we're actually asking people to submit for at this
Speaker 14: point in time. And then people will send a letter
Speaker 14: of interest to the program officer. Each grant mechanism will
Speaker 14: have its own program officer, and you will send a
Speaker 14: letter of interest, maybe you get some feedback, and then
Speaker 14: you move forward to the actual grant itself. And I
Speaker 14: just want to say that it is more work than
Speaker 14: probably anything else I've ever done except maybe my dissertation,
Speaker 14: and so it's it's a huge amount of work. The
Speaker 14: ro one includes, for example, a one page specific aim page,
Speaker 14: which is you have the entirety of the study somehow
Speaker 14: magically summarized in one page with your three aims. And
Speaker 14: if that doesn't get the reviewer's attention, and if they
Speaker 14: don't think it's compelling and interesting and important, that may
Speaker 14: be the end. You may have done all the of
Speaker 14: the work and they may only read that, and then
Speaker 14: you have a twelve page These are single space pages.
Speaker 14: Single space pages happen toward twelve page research strategy. I
Speaker 14: don't know how many thousand words, thousands of words that
Speaker 14: it's I'm just telling you twelve single space pages. There's
Speaker 14: a lot of effects about your research, and it's like
Speaker 14: one of these puzzles where it like has to be
Speaker 14: exactly right, and you have like these figures and you
Speaker 14: have to get them exactly the right size and the
Speaker 14: exact right place on the page with the legend and everything.
Speaker 14: So that all matters in these tall pages because if
Speaker 14: you don't do it right, they will literally reject your
Speaker 14: grant for formatting problems. And so you may have spent
Speaker 14: months writing this grant, and because you had the wrong
Speaker 14: size or the wrong margin that they can literally choose
Speaker 14: not to even read it, and then you're you're then
Speaker 14: having to wait till either six months later if there's
Speaker 14: another opportunity, or sometimes a full year later before you
Speaker 14: can try again.
Speaker 10: Also, it's worth noting you also have to like do
Speaker 10: a bunch of science. Like if it was just you
Speaker 10: must do twelve you must write twelve pages of stuff
Speaker 10: in formatta, it would probably be okay, But like you
Speaker 10: also have to do science, like both for it and
Speaker 10: also while you're doing it.
Speaker 7: It's incredibly hard to get these. When someone gets a grant,
Speaker 7: we all celebrate it for them because they're all so
Speaker 7: excited because we know it's not easy. What's funny about
Speaker 7: that is the Republicans make it seem like all you
Speaker 7: have to do is put in a couple of terms,
Speaker 7: like you know, non binary, and you automatically get a grant.
Speaker 7: They're like, no, idea, how like challenging it is?
Speaker 10: No, It's like the only thing that could even potentially
Speaker 10: work like that is to say say, whatever you're doing
Speaker 10: is cancer research, Like that's the actual thing, right, Like
Speaker 10: sometimes you could like defraud the DoD by telling them, like,
Speaker 10: whatever research you're doing is camouflaged, like it's not it's
Speaker 10: even that is like it makes it like one percent
Speaker 10: more likely that you're endless hours of work.
Speaker 14: Yeah, I wish I could just by woke ideology. Yeah,
Speaker 14: future bulk pages and they're like ghetagrass music. But yeah,
Speaker 14: to your point, you have to part of what's in
Speaker 14: those twelve pages is what is the work that you've
Speaker 14: done that builds up to the work that you're proposing
Speaker 14: to do. And that's the stuff whole section called preliminary studies,
Speaker 14: And what's in there very is depending on what kind
Speaker 14: of research you're doing. If you're doing animal research, it
Speaker 14: might be various animal models that you've tested different things
Speaker 14: on that demonstrate, for example, that you are able to
Speaker 14: work with the specific animal model that you're proposing to
Speaker 14: use in this study, and that you have the specific
Speaker 14: methodological skills for whichever type of sace cellular analysis or
Speaker 14: whatever it is that you're doing, that you have those skills,
Speaker 14: that you have the equipment that you're able to actually
Speaker 14: carry out that research. Because part of what they're evaluating
Speaker 14: is can the person who's proposing to do this work,
Speaker 14: actually do the work. Last thing they want to do
Speaker 14: is give you millions of dollars and have you fall
Speaker 14: out on your face because you don't have the skills
Speaker 14: that are needed. So you have these pages. Part of
Speaker 14: those cult pages like often a page two three pages
Speaker 14: about what you have done to prepare for the work
Speaker 14: that you're proposing, and a lot of times to your
Speaker 14: point that work may or may not be funded. You
Speaker 14: may have to if you're like an academic institution, you
Speaker 14: might be using your startup funds, you might be trying
Speaker 14: to get smaller foundation grants or something to be able
Speaker 14: to do that work so that you can prove to
Speaker 14: the funding agency that you're able to do it. And
Speaker 14: then in addition to this culltation thing, there are a
Speaker 14: bunch of additional documents that are required, Like there's currently
Speaker 14: this will probably change, but currently there's like a diversity plan,
Speaker 14: there is a how are you going to treat participants
Speaker 14: to our women and minorities. There's like an age document,
Speaker 14: There's a page about resources and facility these there's all
Speaker 14: these additional documents which again all have their own specific
Speaker 14: formatting requirements. There's a project narrative which is shorter, and
Speaker 14: then a project summary which is longer. I think I
Speaker 14: could have those backward way ways the way it's all
Speaker 14: these additional pages. It's not just the specific games and
Speaker 14: just the reach of strategy.
Speaker 15: It's all of this plus the budget and the budget justification,
Speaker 15: and like you could just go on, but I think
Speaker 15: you start to understand that there are many many files
Speaker 15: that go into a single grant application, and it represents
Speaker 15: often months of work for an individual and their collaborators.
Speaker 14: And if you have, for example, another institution you're collaborating with,
Speaker 14: they all have to do a bunch of this paperwork
Speaker 14: as well, and there's a contract between the two and
Speaker 14: all this is done just to have a chance of
Speaker 14: getting counted.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and you know, the disruptions to the funding system,
Speaker 10: the disruptions to the studies, the disruption to just the
Speaker 10: payout means that like all of this work that you're doing,
Speaker 10: you know, you have no idea whether whether like again,
Speaker 10: all of this in some cases unpaid labor that you
Speaker 10: have been doing for months and months and months like
Speaker 10: could just not happen. Yes, And also like it's worth
Speaker 10: noting too, like you also have to like when you're
Speaker 10: figuring out what you're going to be doing next, like
Speaker 10: working out whether or not you're grant even as a
Speaker 10: chance of getting approved like that, like is something that
Speaker 10: is that is that is a long term decision that
Speaker 10: determines like what like you know, what colleges you go to,
Speaker 10: like what institutions you end up at, like all of
Speaker 10: that kind of stuff, and like that thing being all
Speaker 10: the stuffing up in the air.
Speaker 14: And for people who run labs, yeah, trying to figure
Speaker 14: out like can you so I don't personally work with
Speaker 14: graduate students, but a lot of people do. So can
Speaker 14: you afford to bring in and sponsor another support another
Speaker 14: graduate student? Can you afford the support of another postdoc?
Speaker 14: These are all long term decisions. These aren't just like oh, Okay,
Speaker 14: I'm going to hire some for two months until I
Speaker 14: find out the next thing. It's like you want to
Speaker 14: commit to people, especially trainees. So it makes it very
Speaker 14: difficult for people who run labs to make those decisions
Speaker 14: to bring people in because we don't want to let
Speaker 14: people down. And so I think the kind of intuitive
Speaker 14: and natural concept is that people will bring in fewer
Speaker 14: people because that's less risky than bringing in more people
Speaker 14: and then having to either cut their funding or let
Speaker 14: them go or whatever later on when you don't get
Speaker 14: the resources that you need. And I want to just
Speaker 14: point out that institutions here have a major role to play.
Speaker 14: And not all institutions, and by that I mean higher
Speaker 14: education institutions, and not all of them are equally resourced, obviously,
Speaker 14: but we all know that there are quite a few
Speaker 14: in this country that have massive endowments, and so are
Speaker 14: what is the plan there and what is the support
Speaker 14: for the folks at their institutions. And I'm not trying
Speaker 14: to be I'm not trying to oversimplify what is in
Speaker 14: fact a very challenging issue. But it would be nice,
Speaker 14: it would be fantastic if some of these institutions came
Speaker 14: out and said, we understand that this is a very
Speaker 14: challenging time where you being committed to supporting the work
Speaker 14: of our faculty, our graduate students are postoc et cetera,
Speaker 14: and we will and we will fund anyone who's funding
Speaker 14: is withdrawn or withheld.
Speaker 7: Let's just say it'd be nice if some of these
Speaker 7: very important, prestigious academic institutions showed maybe at least the
Speaker 7: same backbone as COSTCO.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's all I ask.
Speaker 14: Okay too, I want to highlight too. It's very early
Speaker 14: yet in this game. But Brown did come out, I
Speaker 14: think it was yesterday or sometime over the weekend, stating
Speaker 14: clearly that they remained committed to their values of academic freedom.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 14: So that's the way to say it, right, like, we
Speaker 14: support our staff and employees and students. Fact, we're doing
Speaker 14: whatever work they think is important. I think that that
Speaker 14: was their roundabout way of saying, we're not abandoning the
Speaker 14: principles of DEI. But who knows, but that's what they said.
Speaker 14: But but to Princeton, Princeton actually put out their annual
Speaker 14: report on DEI at Princeton and I forget the exact
Speaker 14: worrying and I don't have it in front of me,
Speaker 14: but their president talked about how important it is to
Speaker 14: support people from different backgrounds, et cetera. So that that's
Speaker 14: two that are trying to do something.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I remain hopeful. I remain helpful. Yeah. Also, I
Speaker 10: got I got to put in my word at Costco
Speaker 10: hate here, which is they're currently screwing over their unions.
Speaker 3: So I thought they resolved it.
Speaker 7: I thought they actually gave them.
Speaker 3: No, they didn't. They did in the page increase.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's not resolved yet.
Speaker 7: I thought the hot Dog was still win fifty though,
Speaker 7: so that's important for me. Read Jamie Loftus's book Raw DOGG.
Speaker 10: I'm a doctor. I can't do that by law.
Speaker 14: Yeah, but even the NFL came out today and said
Speaker 14: that they're not going to end their d programs any typetube.
Speaker 10: NFL known for being all right, I mean that is
Speaker 10: a thing though, right if if, if you want to
Speaker 10: understand why the NFL is doing that, like look at
Speaker 10: who the current heads of the NFL Players Association are
Speaker 10: and like who their past heads for the last like
Speaker 10: decade have been, and that will give you an indication
Speaker 10: of like why it's like that. So yeah, MIO follows
Speaker 10: football pretty closely. I can tell it for unfortunately, if
Speaker 10: we're coming from feed all. Also, I kind of owe
Speaker 10: the NFL Players Association because they did they they did
Speaker 10: put out a statement in support of our unionization drive.
Speaker 10: So yeah, it was very sweet.
Speaker 3: That's nice.
Speaker 14: Well, I do want to say one more thing about
Speaker 14: the grant process, which is that often people are submitting
Speaker 14: the same grant over and over and over because the
Speaker 14: funding rates are so low and so often they will
Speaker 14: submit it the first time, get feedback, make changes, resubmit
Speaker 14: later and again. As I pointed out, it's not like
Speaker 14: this is a rolling submission process where any day of
Speaker 14: the week you can submit I think for most mechanism. Again,
Speaker 14: there's going to be some variability from institute to institute,
Speaker 14: but it's at most twice a year, so like if
Speaker 14: they're if they reject it, hopefully they give you feedback.
Speaker 14: By the way, sometimes you don't even get feed because
Speaker 14: if you weren't one of the top grant applications, you
Speaker 14: don't even get discussed, so you may not get feedback.
Speaker 14: But let's say you get feedback, then you try again,
Speaker 14: and then maybe you try again, and then maybe you
Speaker 14: try again. So sometimes they can take many cycles of
Speaker 14: this entire terrible process before you get funded one. And
Speaker 14: to Covey's point about efficiency, clier like, I mean, if
Speaker 14: you think about it that way, that it's extremely inefficient system.
Speaker 14: But the point I just wanted to make is that
Speaker 14: people work really, really hard to get these grants, and
Speaker 14: for some of the folks right now who are kind
Speaker 14: of in limbo waiting for study section to resume, this
Speaker 14: might be their third or fourth submission of something, and
Speaker 14: they were really hoping this was going to be the chance,
Speaker 14: because at some point you can't keep pursuing unless you
Speaker 14: have some other independent income, like often, at some point
Speaker 14: you cannot keep pursuing a specific line of research. So
Speaker 14: you have to think about what breakthrough is being put
Speaker 14: on hold or will never be identified because of all
Speaker 14: of this, because someone might have been waiting and maybe
Speaker 14: they can't wait for however long it takes to resolve
Speaker 14: this freeze, and maybe they end up switching their career
Speaker 14: path into something completely different. And I'll just say, like,
Speaker 14: even on a smaller scale, I had a grant that
Speaker 14: a colleague and I admitted several years back that got funded.
Speaker 14: That was a very competitive grant. It was not a
Speaker 14: federal grant, it was a foundation, very competitive and we
Speaker 14: were delighted. We were i mean just thrilled to get funded.
Speaker 14: And then we could not in the end take the grant.
Speaker 14: We did not do the work of the grant because
Speaker 14: he ended up not being able to find an appointment
Speaker 14: that was going to work for him in academia and
Speaker 14: so he went to industry, so that work never got done.
Speaker 14: To this day, that work has not been done yeah,
Speaker 14: I would love for it to be done. But those
Speaker 14: are the types of consequences that we're talking about when
Speaker 14: we're looking at like what's happening with these funds and
Speaker 14: the delay of distributing the funds and the chances that
Speaker 14: funds will be revoked from people. They really changed the
Speaker 14: course of not just individual lives, but of science.
Speaker 10: Yeah, And I mean, like the most visual example I
Speaker 10: could think about this was I knew some people who
Speaker 10: wanted to work in a coronavirus lab in twenty nineteen
Speaker 10: and couldn't do it because they didn't their PI didn't
Speaker 10: have funding for We're got a coronavirus thing. It's like, oh,
Speaker 10: what have been useful if they got that grant? Uh
Speaker 10: So I think this is a decent enough place to
Speaker 10: wrap up. I do have one thing that I want
Speaker 10: to plug, which is something you were talking about earlier,
Speaker 10: which is putting, which is these institutions like coming out
Speaker 10: and backing their scientists right, And that's that's a thing
Speaker 10: that you can do. You can put pressure on these
Speaker 10: institutions to do the right thing. And so it might
Speaker 10: be over by by by now, but like literally as
Speaker 10: we were recording this, there was a protest going on
Speaker 10: at NYU's Hospital. Yeah, because they've cut off care to
Speaker 10: transuse they cut off Yeah, and so you know you
Speaker 10: can do this the people who actually run these systems,
Speaker 10: and you know, and the entire federal government, right people
Speaker 10: running the federal government are relying on everyone just sort
Speaker 10: of sitting there being shocked, not knowing what to do,
Speaker 10: and doing nothing. And you know, you can go show
Speaker 10: up to the administrators, the offices of the administrators of
Speaker 10: these places, and you can confront them and you could
Speaker 10: be like, Okay, you're you're either right here right now.
Speaker 10: You're going to be a coward and you're going to
Speaker 10: go along with this, or you're going to go back
Speaker 10: own people.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah, And that's something that you could do right now.
Speaker 14: And I just want to add we didn't talk about
Speaker 14: this earlier, but when we talked about the CDC and
Speaker 14: everything that's been removed, one thing that's relevant to that
Speaker 14: is that there's an Office for Research on Women's Health.
Speaker 14: It's the only resource dedicated to women's health in the
Speaker 14: entire national Institutes of Health. We do have a National
Speaker 14: Institute of Children's Health. We do not have a National
Speaker 14: Institute of Women's Health. We have an awful for research
Speaker 14: on women's health.
Speaker 10: Right if we love the US government, Jesus.
Speaker 14: Yeah, it gets worse. So the National Academy the Science
Speaker 14: is Engineering in Medicine, which is like, I would say,
Speaker 14: one of the most prestigious kind of academic organizations that existed.
Speaker 14: A review of funding for women's health research at the NIH,
Speaker 14: and they put out a report in December. It's pretty
Speaker 14: scathing if you read it, and they shared that from
Speaker 14: twenty thirteen to twenty twenty three, research for women's health
Speaker 14: was like eight point eight percent of the entire NIH
Speaker 14: budget as a reminder, women are the population, and they
Speaker 14: called for almost sixteen billion dollars of additional funding to
Speaker 14: go to women's health research in the coming five years
Speaker 14: and the creation of an Institute for Women's Health. So
Speaker 14: what happened last week with almost everything on the website
Speaker 14: for the Office of Research for Women's Health was deleted.
Speaker 6: Jes Christ it's gone.
Speaker 14: So they're funding. An opportunities page is gone, Their bios
Speaker 14: about their staff are gone, their updates on advances in
Speaker 14: medicine for women over the last twenty five years gone,
Speaker 14: their pages on maternal morbidity immortality gone, The importance of
Speaker 14: including women in minorities and clinical trial gone, their page
Speaker 14: on health equity gone. You get the picture. So all
Speaker 14: of that except for just a very bare minimum landing
Speaker 14: page and kind a link to the office of I
Speaker 14: forget the official in the office that's an office that
Speaker 14: works on autoimmune diseases. Like everything else is gone. And
Speaker 14: so I did create a script. If anybody wants to
Speaker 14: call their member of Congress, I have a script for that,
Speaker 14: and the CDC pages that people can use in terms
Speaker 14: of actions. That's something I think that is about as
Speaker 14: real as it gets for us at this point. And
Speaker 14: I think that the more we are emphatic in our
Speaker 14: messaging that none of this is okay, that we demand
Speaker 14: to have these resources back online, that we demand to
Speaker 14: continue funding research on health disparities for all the different
Speaker 14: groups affected, I think the better the chance is that
Speaker 14: that actually happens. So that's out there if anybody.
Speaker 10: Wants that, Yeah, well we'll put links to that in
Speaker 10: the description. Also, I'm going to put it a personal
Speaker 10: plug to call your congress person to yell at them
Speaker 10: about all of the anti trans stuff, because they are
Speaker 10: legitimately in a flux point right now where the party
Speaker 10: is slipping back and forth between just being like, yeah, whatever,
Speaker 10: we'll pass a defense bill that like banchanz people from
Speaker 10: the military, and we're going to stop things from happening.
Speaker 10: And so this is the thing that can go either way,
Speaker 10: and getting yelled at by their constituents legitimately does help
Speaker 10: with us. So yep, absolutely, yeah, do that too. When
Speaker 10: you're called. While you're calling, what the CDC, multiple things,
Speaker 10: different calls even, Yeah, you.
Speaker 14: Might just want to put them on feed though and
Speaker 14: make it, you know, on your drive if you go
Speaker 14: into work, maybe every day on the drive you're just calling, Hi,
Speaker 14: here's the issue of the day, because there's no shortage
Speaker 14: of issues that we need to be communicating now.
Speaker 10: So, speaking of things in bios, where can people find
Speaker 10: you two for stuff that you want to promote the
Speaker 10: way you do, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 14: I mean, I'm on all the things, even the terrible thing,
Speaker 14: which is most of them are terrible, But I'm on TikTok.
Speaker 14: If you just put my first name, usually all come
Speaker 14: up TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, I know, I know, and blue
Speaker 14: Sky and I'm not the only one I don't really
Speaker 14: do is Facebook.
Speaker 7: You're too cool.
Speaker 6: For that.
Speaker 14: Oh, I have a subset. That's where the script is
Speaker 14: by my subset. Now, not too cool for Facebook. I'm
Speaker 14: just too lazy for Facebook.
Speaker 7: I mean, I mean listen, if you're on these things,
Speaker 7: you're not too cool for anything. That's the really cool
Speaker 7: kids are not on any of these things. You can
Speaker 7: find me at on Blue Sky, at cave Ka V
Speaker 7: E H M D. And more importantly, you can listen
Speaker 7: to my podcast, The House of Pod. It's a relatively fun,
Speaker 7: informal look at medicine. We tried to make healthcare more relatable,
Speaker 7: you know. Sometimes we'll take an aim at medical quackery
Speaker 7: or griffs and that sort of thing. I think your
Speaker 7: listeners will like it.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Our guests range from doctors like Peter Hotez or Argavon
Speaker 7: here to musicians like Portugal the Man or a lot
Speaker 7: of the Cool Zone family that you all know and love,
Speaker 7: Prop and Robert and hopefully me as soon. So find
Speaker 7: it anywhere you get your podcasts, The House of Pod. Yeah,
Speaker 7: and you can find all of that.
Speaker 10: We've talked about like a staggering number of the other
Speaker 10: shows that we do in this one, but yeah, you can.
Speaker 10: You can find our other shows where there are podcasts
Speaker 10: and yeah, think god, I'm so bad at plugging these things.
Speaker 10: You think it's my living but now can't do it,
Speaker 10: so you're out of ted. Absolute failure. But yeah, thank
Speaker 10: you to both for coming on. And I hope you
Speaker 10: get your grand arka pod because fuck that, like Jesus Christ.
Speaker 14: Thank you.
Speaker 6: Well.
Speaker 14: If I if I don't get my funding renewed this summer,
Speaker 14: I will, I will.
Speaker 3: Let you know.
Speaker 14: I mean we can talk about it.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, I'm down for a podcast. Yeah, this is
Speaker 10: this is big. Could happen here. I go harass your legislatures,
Speaker 10: your local administrators for universities, your local police departments. I
Speaker 10: make sure they do not bad stuff and do good things.
Speaker 4: Hi, everyone, I'm welcome to it could happen here today.
Speaker 4: It's me James and I'm joined by Nevdon jam Gochian.
Speaker 4: We're here to talk about Azerbaijan, Armenia and the increasingly
Speaker 4: genocidal rhetoric from Azerbaijan.
Speaker 3: But I want to start off.
Speaker 4: Nevdene, we're talking about COP twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3: I guess can you explain.
Speaker 4: I think people will be sort of somewhat familiar with
Speaker 4: these series of climate conferences but this one was held
Speaker 4: in Azerbijan, right, and can you explain a little bit
Speaker 4: about you've specialized in like these greenwashing, sports washing, various
Speaker 4: other sort of forms of laundering legitimacy.
Speaker 3: Rate, I'd love for you to start off there and.
Speaker 4: Explain how this particular conference was used as a means
Speaker 4: of laundering legitimacy for what is it like a genocidal project.
Speaker 6: COP twenty nine, which was just concluded in Azerbaijan, is
Speaker 6: the deadly serious and vital conversation about climate in the
Speaker 6: United Nations, which we absolutely need to have. But from
Speaker 6: the beginning it was a clown show. And the way Azerbaijan,
Speaker 6: a Petro dictatorship, was able to proture this for themselves
Speaker 6: was at COP twenty eight, which was held in Dubai,
Speaker 6: another questionable location for the climate conference, where they had
Speaker 6: a pavilion as reported by Political EU, where they had
Speaker 6: a giant advertisement that said Carabach is the first place
Speaker 6: to achieve net zero emissions in Azerbaijan, and that was
Speaker 6: one part of them getting the bid for COP twenty nine.
Speaker 6: And the way Zerbaijan was able to achieve net zero
Speaker 6: emissions in this particular location was they committed a genocide
Speaker 6: against all the people. If there's no people, there's no
Speaker 6: climate emissions. And that's probably not even true that it's
Speaker 6: a net zero emissions because they've engaged in so much
Speaker 6: of the eradication of any trace of Armenians in this
Speaker 6: place that Armenians been living in for at least two thousand,
Speaker 6: five hundred years. Destruction of buildings, of course is one
Speaker 6: of the huge source of pollution, and they've they've raised
Speaker 6: something like four cemeteries, thousands of the monuments, four churches
Speaker 6: have demolished, entire neighborhoods have been raised historical neighborhood so
Speaker 6: it's probably not even that zero, but that was their
Speaker 6: advertising claim to get the bid. The top twenty nine
Speaker 6: was originally supposed to be in Europe, but Russia was
Speaker 6: vetoing every European bid, and Armenia, who Azerbaijan is currently
Speaker 6: occupying two hundred and fifteen kilometers of Armenian territory, was
Speaker 6: blocking Azerbaijan. Tell Azerbaijan offered to give up thirty two
Speaker 6: Armenian hostages, so we've got to there, we've got the
Speaker 6: gangster hobstage situation, which they did. They gave up thirty
Speaker 6: two members of the Armenian military, and they made Armenia
Speaker 6: give up two other basignons that were reheld by Armenia
Speaker 6: because they had gone into Armenia and killed a local
Speaker 6: security guard trying to steal his car. They probably were
Speaker 6: lost and they killed this guy and they were trying
Speaker 6: to escape. But then just one of them had been
Speaker 6: sent to life imprisonment. But that's what Armenia gave up
Speaker 6: in exchange.
Speaker 8: To allow this climate conference to happen.
Speaker 6: That's correct, So let's stoom.
Speaker 4: Back from this climate conference, right like in this I
Speaker 4: think it's a really interesting place to start. The site
Speaker 4: of our genocide is a net zero area, and it's
Speaker 4: a very bleak vision of the sort of greenwashing future.
Speaker 4: Let's expand a little bit of the history of the
Speaker 4: conflict between these two countries, and also, perhaps more broadly,
Speaker 4: I think people will probably be familiar with the Armenian
Speaker 4: genocide if they've listened to this show, But of Armenian
Speaker 4: people as a subject discrimination and hatred for centuries.
Speaker 6: Right, well, you know, I mean, Armenians are one of
Speaker 6: the ancient people of that area, Greeks, Jews, Persians, they're
Speaker 6: one of the people that have kind of stuck it
Speaker 6: out for a long time in that neighborhood. The Turkic
Speaker 6: people are more recent visitors to the neighborhood, and there's
Speaker 6: nothing wrong with migration of people, but there's something about
Speaker 6: populations that have been there for a long time that
Speaker 6: really strikes a nerve if we want to be very
Speaker 6: mild about it, with the Turkic people, Turkey and Azerbaijan
Speaker 6: in the sense that they've been engaged in a policy
Speaker 6: of destroying any remnants of Armenians, including physical people, for
Speaker 6: least in the eighteen eighties. They've been making them second
Speaker 6: class citizens since they came in in the Ottoman Empire.
Speaker 6: There's this myth of the a multicultural society, which is
Speaker 6: interesting Azerbaijan is also trying to promote. But it really
Speaker 6: was a second class situation where the minorities in the
Speaker 6: Ottoman Empire had a lot of extra taxes and duties
Speaker 6: and persecution than other people in the area.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so let's talk about this this area then, specifically
Speaker 4: this area which would be called depending on who you asked,
Speaker 4: art Zach or Gona Krabak, Right, I think probably it is.
Speaker 4: I don't know, if I haven't looked on Wikipedia, but
Speaker 4: like what would the more commonly used terms for people
Speaker 4: wanting to look it up right in American English. But
Speaker 4: let's explain why there is a conflict in this area
Speaker 4: and then what has happened since. I guess we can
Speaker 4: go from like the fall of the Soviet Union would
Speaker 4: be a place to.
Speaker 6: Start, or I mean we talked about earlier. That's the
Speaker 6: tough thing about talking to rannions, like where I would
Speaker 6: start with the sixth century and the fall of the
Speaker 6: kingdom Ratu. Okay, but I guess we don't have that
Speaker 6: much time. So basically, and I do have to put
Speaker 6: this in there because there's a big Azerbaijani narrative that
Speaker 6: Armenians are effective people, they're effective presence. And I'll deal
Speaker 6: with that in a little bit. Ye, But you know,
Speaker 6: it's just been recorded by Greek. I mean, I don't
Speaker 6: know why I should have to prove our existence, but
Speaker 6: we do. Yeah, So anyway, I record to history that
Speaker 6: it's where the ourar media and alphabet was invented. These
Speaker 6: people have been indigenous to the region for thousands of years.
Speaker 6: They've got a deep connection with the land fall the
Speaker 6: Soviet Union. Fast forward, there had been under the territory
Speaker 6: of the Azerbaijani SSR as in a autonomous oblast, as
Speaker 6: they called it. It had been given to the Azerbaijani
Speaker 6: SSR because of Stalin, who was the Commissioner of Minorities.
Speaker 6: Calin has this big project to divide the people, the
Speaker 6: minorities in the Soviet Union to fight each other, which
Speaker 6: is ramped up in the nineteen sixties when the Soviets
Speaker 6: start inventing fake history to pit people against each other,
Speaker 6: which is wild, but Sloviet Union is crumbling. The people
Speaker 6: of Artsak, which is the armeniandigenous name Nagaro Karaba, is
Speaker 6: generally acceptable as well. That's that would be the colonial
Speaker 6: name or the name that the as Ais call the region.
Speaker 6: They are fed up with not being able to learn
Speaker 6: their language because of Azerbaijan. They're fed up with not
Speaker 6: being able to have any of the rights as Soviet
Speaker 6: citizens because the father of the current dictator of Azerbaijan
Speaker 6: was ruining Azerbaijan since nineteen sixty nine and his policy
Speaker 6: was to try to get as many armedients to move
Speaker 6: out of the region as possible. So they're fed up
Speaker 6: with this and they're like okay enough, they legally seceed
Speaker 6: from the Soviet Union. It's allowed in the Constitution, which
Speaker 6: of course infuriates that Azerbaijani SSR. You know. So there's
Speaker 6: a bunch of conflicts. There's the pogroms that happen against
Speaker 6: Armenians and cities of Baku and Sungate and at which
Speaker 6: point they seceed fully from the Soviet Union, one of
Speaker 6: the first areas to do so in nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 6: They actually left the Soviet Union before Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan with
Speaker 6: the Soviet Union's troops in bay there's this bloody mess
Speaker 6: it's called Operation Ring where they're killing Armenians in the area.
Speaker 6: There's a war that erupts when everybody seceedes. Armenians in
Speaker 6: Artsak get the upper hand due to they really cared
Speaker 6: about it and also probably because of racism within the
Speaker 6: Soviet Union, where they trained Armenians a little bit better
Speaker 6: than they did Azeris. It's a humiliating defeat for Azerbaijan.
Speaker 6: Azerbaijan is pushed back. Armenian sees about nine percent of
Speaker 6: Azerbaijani territory beyond art Soak, and that was a stasis
Speaker 6: until twenty twenty.
Speaker 4: Yeah, really yeah, sort of thirty years of right, but
Speaker 4: it was always disputed right this area was there as
Speaker 4: we don't continued to lay claim to the Attak region.
Speaker 8: Is that correct?
Speaker 6: For some reason, it was never recognized by the UN
Speaker 6: US being a real country similar to some other places.
Speaker 6: Why that is is confusing to me because they did
Speaker 6: leave earlier than anybody else. It is an ethnic minority
Speaker 6: that chose to leave the area, but it was they
Speaker 6: weren't considered legitimate by the UN by Azerbaijan, And secondarily,
Speaker 6: we have this brutal dictatorship that's held together by ethnic hatred. Really,
Speaker 6: I cannot overstate how terrible the Alif regime is in Azerbaijan.
Speaker 6: But you know, Urmeni forces committed at least one war
Speaker 6: crime that I'm aware of during that time in the
Speaker 6: place that called Joli, where they killed one hundred and
Speaker 6: eighty to six hundred Azari civilians. And they've used this
Speaker 6: event and I think one other, to really hold their
Speaker 6: country together in this pit of brothing, broth of it
Speaker 6: than hatred. So not till twenty twenty does that really coalesce,
Speaker 6: Do they become strong as a petro state? To take
Speaker 6: back large portions of the country.
Speaker 4: Yeah, talking of taking back, I'm going to have to
Speaker 4: take back thirty seconds to everyone's time for an advertising
Speaker 4: break here, So let's do that and we'll.
Speaker 8: Come right back. How it we're back.
Speaker 4: One thing I think that it might be illustrative to
Speaker 4: hear is that, like in the first Adzak War, Turkish
Speaker 4: I guess it, regulars or mercenaries or what you want
Speaker 4: to call them, people associated with the Gray Wolves fought
Speaker 4: on the side of Azubijan right and keen history understanders
Speaker 4: will know that there is some history of anti Armenian
Speaker 4: sentiment among the gray Wolves and then indeed in Turkey
Speaker 4: as a country. So preps, this is a good point
Speaker 4: to talk about the international involvement here, because I think
Speaker 4: it's very misleading to do this. As we're seeing in
Speaker 4: Syria right now, people want to do the world into blocks,
Speaker 4: right with like this sort of Cold War narrative that
Speaker 4: we have of Russian interests in US interests, And I
Speaker 4: think this is an excellent example of why that is
Speaker 4: not necessarily a great way to perceive the world. So
Speaker 4: can you explain the international involvement in Artsak and in
Speaker 4: this ongoing conflict, which we'll get to it beginning again
Speaker 4: in twenty twenty, I think in a second.
Speaker 6: In addition to Turkish forces being used in that twenty
Speaker 6: twenty war, which I guess we'll have to get into
Speaker 6: a little bit. Yeah, there, Syrian mercenaries were used as well.
Speaker 6: They were acuted, they were put on the front lines.
Speaker 6: It's kind of candid fodder. They're given something like one
Speaker 6: hundred dollars bonus that they beheaded a civilian, a two
Speaker 6: hundred dollars bonus that they beheaded in Armenian soldier there.
Speaker 6: But of course, Israel is the primary supplier of Azeri
Speaker 6: weapons in weaponry, going so far to test some of
Speaker 6: their drones on manned Armenian outposts early on before the
Speaker 6: war started. It's fair to say that Azerbaijan could not
Speaker 6: have been so successful without the aid of their ally, Israel.
Speaker 6: Israel has been deeply involved in Azerbaijan for a long time.
Speaker 6: They use Azerbaijan as a listening post against Iran. Israel
Speaker 6: stages raids from Azerbaijan on Iran and has to do
Speaker 6: with the ethnic minority in Iran. There's a lot of
Speaker 6: Azaris down there. Israel get something like forty percent of
Speaker 6: its oil from Azerbaijan. Right after the Palestinian genocide started,
Speaker 6: Israel awarded two contracts to the state oil company SOCAR
Speaker 6: in Azerbaijan that's right adjacent to the Palestinian gas field
Speaker 6: and the Lebanon oil field to SOCAR to explore. It
Speaker 6: cannot be overstated how complicit these two groups are with
Speaker 6: each other. They really really need each other in the region.
Speaker 6: In the United States also liked Azerbaijan as well. They
Speaker 6: see it as a friendly Muslim country bulark against Iran
Speaker 6: as well.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think they also have some Turkish drones. Is
Speaker 4: that right the bay Car Yes, absolutely. So let's talk
Speaker 4: about that twenty twenty war, because that was a war
Speaker 4: that relied heavily on these drones, right, some major means
Speaker 4: of destroying Armenian armor and pushing that offensive. So what
Speaker 4: happened in twenty twenty along this disputed border, Well.
Speaker 6: You know, it's called mountainous Karaba. It's an area that's
Speaker 6: great defensively if you're fighting in a pre drone world. Yeah,
Speaker 6: but you know, as you've discovered your Kurdish friends, the
Speaker 6: drones are amazingly destructive against people hiding in caves, which
Speaker 6: is what the Armenian response had been. Armenians had been
Speaker 6: a bit lazy. They've been relying on Russian tanks and weaponry,
Speaker 6: whereas Arbaijan's is buying from Israel. They're buying from all,
Speaker 6: you know, many many, just different sources, which reflects the
Speaker 6: wealth of Azerbaijan, of course. So in twenty twenty, there's
Speaker 6: some indication that Alif, the dictator of as Evaijhan, had
Speaker 6: been planning us for a while. He had this playbook
Speaker 6: called Operation Azeri Smile twenty twenty. The troops move in,
Speaker 6: they encounter more resistance than they thought, and they get
Speaker 6: most of the Armenian held territory of Nicardo Karaba back.
Speaker 6: They're stopped at the last minute, probably by Russian intervention.
Speaker 6: At this time. The Armenia was a member of the
Speaker 6: Russian Alliance at that time, which they're leaving just because
Speaker 6: it's the Russia has failed to live up to its
Speaker 6: treaty obligations anyway, and it left a kind of a
Speaker 6: skeletal state of Artak left, which was only supplied by
Speaker 6: this one road called the Latchin Corridor, that was only
Speaker 6: one road from Armenia to supply the one hundred and
Speaker 6: twenty some thousand Armenians who lived in Artzak left, which
Speaker 6: brings us to twenty twenty four, twenty three, twenty.
Speaker 10: Two orl Yeah.
Speaker 4: So yeah, you have this situation where we now have
Speaker 4: this massive area that I guess occupied a lot of people.
Speaker 4: People began leaving at that time right through that Latching Corridor,
Speaker 4: like people didn't feel like they could safely remain there.
Speaker 6: I mean, the indigenous people of art Sock have this
Speaker 6: profound relationship with the land and the people. I am
Speaker 6: an icon painter, and I was talking to my priest
Speaker 6: and he was comparing the people there to the elves
Speaker 6: and the lord of the ring. You know, they whistled
Speaker 6: to the birds. You know, they've just been living with
Speaker 6: the land for a long time. So there was a drade,
Speaker 6: but it's not as big as you would have fought,
Speaker 6: just because there's this intense millennia old connection with the
Speaker 6: places of art Sock. So what Ezerbay John did, and
Speaker 6: this is I think unprecedented, is they had a fake
Speaker 6: equalize protest. Oh wow, that stopped the Lachin Corridor from
Speaker 6: supplying food in medicine to the people of Artsac, so
Speaker 6: they starved those people. They denied the medicine, people had
Speaker 6: miscarriages as areas, were firing at farmers in the field
Speaker 6: that were trying to collect food, and that went on
Speaker 6: for nine months. And what stopped what fether By John
Speaker 6: claimed it was a group of ecological protesters who were
Speaker 6: stopping trucks of food coming into Artsock for any any reason,
Speaker 6: which you know is enough of the smoke screen for
Speaker 6: the Western world to really throw up its hands.
Speaker 4: Yeah, fascinating. So they literally have a blockade of these protesters.
Speaker 6: These protesters blocked it. There'sn't The Russian troops that were
Speaker 6: the peace coopers refused to disperse these protesters. They were
Speaker 6: these old appraching kind of looking people wearing fur coats.
Speaker 6: They were identified on social media as actually being members
Speaker 6: of the Zari military and they had these printed signs
Speaker 6: that said things like protect nature, stop pollutions, very generic,
Speaker 6: wildly generic things. Ostensibly, they are against the gold mining
Speaker 6: operations in artsk which is nuts because a protest is
Speaker 6: not allowed. And Azerbaijan and THEI there had been an
Speaker 6: actual protest against a real gold mine that was owned
Speaker 6: by the daughters of the dictator and they were brutally
Speaker 6: shut down, you know before, So anybody who was paying
Speaker 6: any kind of attention to this knew that it was fictive.
Speaker 6: But I think the EU in particular needing enough of
Speaker 6: the smoke screen not to support these people. EU. Of
Speaker 6: course it's getting its gas through Azerbaijan. Yeah, because they've
Speaker 6: said they don't want it from Russia. But Russia's just
Speaker 6: feeding its gas to Azerbaijan, and then Azerbaijan is selling
Speaker 6: it's Azerbaijani gas to the EU. So they were just
Speaker 6: trying to do that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we've just created a pass through and like someone
Speaker 4: who could live off that rentier income. So let's go
Speaker 4: to twenty twenty three. Okay, well we see happening in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty three.
Speaker 6: So the eco protesters they kind of run their course
Speaker 6: and then there's a lightning operation art sucks attacked positions overrun.
Speaker 6: There's this massive exodus of people, people who have to
Speaker 6: leave their houses immediately. The road is blocked. People are
Speaker 6: dying on this road on the way out, fighting each other,
Speaker 6: you know, just to leave their houses. In twenty twenty,
Speaker 6: Azebaijan has said, sure, you know, our Meetians can come back.
Speaker 6: We're just taking back a territory. You live here, you
Speaker 6: can do that. But when Armenians did, there's this one
Speaker 6: case of a sixty nine year old farmer who went
Speaker 6: back to get his possessions. Very troops cut off his
Speaker 6: head Jesus. They put it on a dead pig, and
Speaker 6: they put all those images on social media. They raped
Speaker 6: and tortured anybody that they could find left behind, and
Speaker 6: they turned it into means on stickers that were you know,
Speaker 6: something like down like twenty thousand times in the five
Speaker 6: days that were being monitored for this. So there was
Speaker 6: absolutely no question that people could stay behind.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Zero. Yeah, So there's no Armenians left. And so there's
Speaker 6: literally been daily ritual that's been going on for a thousand,
Speaker 6: seven hundred years that it doesn't go on anymore, and
Speaker 6: there's a tragedy in that.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, it's been lost.
Speaker 4: Like yeah, it's hard to quantify that, like you know
Speaker 4: the meaning of that loss. I think, especially for folks
Speaker 4: who aren't familiar with people and their culture and the
Speaker 4: like that connection to these things. Talking of quantifying things,
Speaker 4: I need to look at the amount of time we
Speaker 4: got here and pivot again to advertisements.
Speaker 3: And we're back so what we see.
Speaker 4: In odds, especially in twenty twenty three, is a project
Speaker 4: of ethnic cleansing, right, genocidal violence, whatever however you wish
Speaker 4: to phrase it. I mean ethnic cleansing is not a
Speaker 4: term that has really like a definition in natural law.
Speaker 4: Genocide does often very much like in this incidentce I'm
Speaker 4: using them to mean one and the same things, the
Speaker 4: removal of people, either through killing them or forcing them
Speaker 4: to leave or starving them.
Speaker 6: The International Association gene Side Scholars, the Lumpkin Institute, Luis
Speaker 6: Moreno Campo is a founding prosecutor the ICC. You on
Speaker 6: your RESTR. Mendez a special advisor to the Pacer General
Speaker 6: on genocide prevention. They all call it genocide, so we
Speaker 6: can call it that, Yeah, we can call it really safe.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there have been many genocide of products in history.
Speaker 4: Like what is Azerbaijan's goal with this? Is it the
Speaker 4: removal of Armenian people with the areas such as as
Speaker 4: the repeople can occupy it? Is it access to the
Speaker 4: resources that are there? Is it settling a historical school?
Speaker 6: If you look at a map, there's this idea of
Speaker 6: pan Turanism. Is that something that's you're familiar.
Speaker 4: With yeah, can you explain that to listen to a
Speaker 4: not Pan Turanism.
Speaker 6: Is this Turkish idea of an ancient Turkish state that
Speaker 6: stretches from the Bosphorus all the way over to Mongolia,
Speaker 6: and there's one little country in the way that is
Speaker 6: blocking this, this empire that should exist according to the
Speaker 6: Pan Tyrannism. And this is an old idea, it's a
Speaker 6: nineteenth century idea. It's blumping in with every Nazi and
Speaker 6: race junk scientist idea that you have. But that's the idea.
Speaker 6: And the secondary thing is, you know again Alief is
Speaker 6: raping his people. He's in presenting every journalist, he's any scientists.
Speaker 6: It's it's really on a level with truth Mngistan or
Speaker 6: what was happening in Syria or North Korea. And he
Speaker 6: needs ethnic hate to keep his country together. He's made
Speaker 6: an ethnic hate theme park. It's not called that, but
Speaker 6: that's what it is against Armenians. So yeah, so really
Speaker 6: I see it as a consolidation of power. He needs
Speaker 6: an enemy, he needs to move forward, which is why
Speaker 6: he's threatening to invade Armenia proper. Next.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and like I think one of the things that
Speaker 4: happened with the with the conflict in art Zac. I'm
Speaker 4: just I'm thinking about this, this Panturkic stuff because I
Speaker 4: see it every single day and their applies to my
Speaker 4: post on social media. Right. In my case it's with
Speaker 4: reference to my time in Kurdistan and in Rishaba. This
Speaker 4: information played a massive role in the in the twenty
Speaker 4: twenty three contract, in the twenty twenty conflict too, right,
Speaker 4: And I think people who are hearing about this sort
Speaker 4: of first time are at massive risk for finding that
Speaker 4: some of that differ information. Right. They hear about this
Speaker 4: driving to work today on our podcast and they go
Speaker 4: to google it. There's a lot of crap out there, right,
Speaker 4: So can we address that the role that it's played
Speaker 4: and continues to play.
Speaker 6: The load of crap or the pan Turanism or both?
Speaker 4: Well, the pan Turanism generates a lot of crap, right,
Speaker 4: Like I'm convinced that some of the accounts in my
Speaker 4: replies are not real human beings.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, that's been a well established phenomenon, the number
Speaker 6: of bots that as of by genre to a lesser
Speaker 6: except Turkey, because I think Turkey is more secure and
Speaker 6: it's genocidal aspect, whereas and it's really really going for
Speaker 6: it you know, so not only the bots in the
Speaker 6: replies which has come up. No matter what you put
Speaker 6: in a keyword, there's going to be lots of mentions
Speaker 6: on your social media. Not to mention there's a pretty
Speaker 6: vicious campaign out there to dos anybody who talks about
Speaker 6: this is that's happened to me before and it's not pretty.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 6: But also there's this thing called mirror propaganda. I don't
Speaker 6: know if you've heard of that, but there's areas will
Speaker 6: take something that Armenians say like, oh, our Armenians should
Speaker 6: go be able to have a right to return, say
Speaker 6: they drub this huge cloud of they'll take actual documents
Speaker 6: that have been produced by I don't know, Freedom House, right, yeah,
Speaker 6: and then they'll copy the entire doc document in format.
Speaker 6: Things the right of Azarias to return to Western Azerbaijan,
Speaker 6: which is their new concept, and western iver Dejan is
Speaker 6: the country of Armenia. So they have these maps where
Speaker 6: they renamed all the towns of Armenia with azari names.
Speaker 6: They claim Armenians only came to the region in eighteen
Speaker 6: twenty eight with the Russians, that they're fake people. Another
Speaker 6: tragedy of Artsak is they're taking these monasteries and places,
Speaker 6: not only destroying them but chiseling off ancient inscriptions to
Speaker 6: prove that Armenians didn't exist there. They've already done this
Speaker 6: in this other place called Natchivan, which is they call
Speaker 6: it the largest cultural genocide of the twenty first century,
Speaker 6: where they destroyed thousands of medieval monuments in stones with
Speaker 6: buljos and sledgehammers. So they're just wiping them out, any
Speaker 6: record of our medium, anything in they're claiming Armenia. It
Speaker 6: is really should be called Western Hazeraijan. And anytime Armenians
Speaker 6: talk about arts that going back, they're like, well, we.
Speaker 16: They made cookbooks, they've got a television show Western Basan,
Speaker 16: and it's just it's what you're laughing and I laugh too,
Speaker 16: but it's it's so ugly, so scary, but it's funny too.
Speaker 8: Yeah, And if these things are intil it's your grandma
Speaker 8: or have you been beheaded?
Speaker 4: Like yes, it does seem it does seem obscene, and
Speaker 4: it's so obscene that it's funny. Right, But like this
Speaker 4: is a concerted state project, right that, Like it's easy
Speaker 4: to get caught up in, and it's easy to get
Speaker 4: caught in this disinformation machine, not just from like like
Speaker 4: like a botty in your replies, but from news like
Speaker 4: you say, news outlets, or like doctored reports or things
Speaker 4: that look very convincing.
Speaker 6: Search results that go to the top. I mean, you know,
Speaker 6: on this course started with the writing andocide which ors
Speaker 6: Turkey and Azebay. John in Pakistan for some reason say
Speaker 6: it was fake. If you search for that, the top
Speaker 6: results are going to be our means are lying, they
Speaker 6: committed to genocide with us, And then they'll throw these
Speaker 6: numbers like, oh yeah, ARMANI it's killed three million turns,
Speaker 6: Like what are you talking about? These It's just like
Speaker 6: like words have meaning.
Speaker 8: You know, but increasingly less and less.
Speaker 6: Less and less. You know. There's that great Hannah Art
Speaker 6: line about constant lying is not aimed at making people
Speaker 6: believe a lie, but ensuring that no one believes anything anymore,
Speaker 6: and that's what they want. We're an obscure part of
Speaker 6: the world. This will say a bunch of shit, and
Speaker 6: people throw up their hands and walk away.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh it's too complicated, and so.
Speaker 6: They too complicated, right yeah, Or you know, they'll say, oh,
Speaker 6: it's ancient hatreds and like that's bullshit. It's not ancient hatreds.
Speaker 6: It's a very modern thing. These are real people who
Speaker 6: have real understandable issues, you know, like in Gaza, it's
Speaker 6: like it's very clear, Yeah what's going on? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I have the different sterias that have received a
Speaker 4: lot more coverage and longbow attention. So where does this
Speaker 4: leave us now?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 4: As ab Giant has just hosted this conference, and like
Speaker 4: it's important to recognize that this conference is it's a
Speaker 4: project of kind of global liberalism right to the cop conference,
Speaker 4: and like it conveys legitimacy, and in this case, it's
Speaker 4: a means of kind of laundering legitimacy right for this
Speaker 4: Carabuck project in their case, right through the lens of
Speaker 4: protecting the planet. Where do they go from there?
Speaker 6: Well, So what makes the dictatorship as Down a little
Speaker 6: bit different from these other dictatorships I mentioned is I
Speaker 6: think they care about what people think a little bit.
Speaker 6: They bring in F one racing, the Eurovision. They really
Speaker 6: do these projects because they want to be seen as
Speaker 6: a legitimate state, where I think those others like North Korea,
Speaker 6: they don't do that. Like, no, it's going to like
Speaker 6: us no matter what we do. Yeah, giving up they
Speaker 6: want to play on the international stage. So that's one aspect.
Speaker 6: Another aspect, it legitimizes themselves to their internal critics. People
Speaker 6: as their Bajana smart they know what's going on, but
Speaker 6: they say, oh, the world is coming to us. The
Speaker 6: world accepts us. They must, you know, accept the brutal
Speaker 6: dictatorship that's cracking down anybody's gay, lesbian, anything you know,
Speaker 6: orchure is a feature of this regime. So it legitimizes
Speaker 6: themselves internally. Yeah, and what they fear, I guess is
Speaker 6: people were getting angry that they invade Armenia. So it's
Speaker 6: just I think it's that chene. Now we could argue
Speaker 6: whether that was effective because COP twenty nine was an
Speaker 6: absolute train wreck for them, but I'm not sure that
Speaker 6: matters to them right. Matters to the environment, Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think probably these COP conferences are not going to
Speaker 4: be the way we solve our our issues with climate change.
Speaker 4: But that's an another conversation. And going forward, like what
Speaker 4: is the status of odds? What can those people, those
Speaker 4: people who were able to leave, Like what does the
Speaker 4: future hold for them? Are they sort of refugees in media?
Speaker 6: Now there are refugees are Armenia Amenia is a poor state,
Speaker 6: doesn't have the oil reserves. The Azerbaijan just announced that
Speaker 6: they're increased their military budget by twenty percent. It was
Speaker 6: already incredibly high last time I got statistics. The flights
Speaker 6: from of Dah, which is the Israeli military insulation for
Speaker 6: flying equipment to Azerbaijan, has ramped up. It's higher than
Speaker 6: it was in twenty twenty before their invasions, on par
Speaker 6: for twenty twenty three. So that's a pretty clear sign
Speaker 6: that they're getting all their equipment from Israel. They stopped
Speaker 6: before copp and so I haven't been able to get
Speaker 6: data on that since then. Azerbaijan just issued a declaration
Speaker 6: that parents cannot visit their children in the military, and
Speaker 6: that's a bad, bad sign. So the question is not
Speaker 6: if it's win, it is winter or I mean, he has
Speaker 6: a lot of mountains. Those are pretty good defend people
Speaker 6: are figured out. Sure, you've talked to your friends of
Speaker 6: our Java. They figured out drones a little bit, how
Speaker 6: to deal with them better. I mean, he has reached
Speaker 6: out to France, who's been helping them a little bit.
Speaker 6: Azby John says there's some conditions for peace that are insane,
Speaker 6: you know, like change your constitution is one, get rid
Speaker 6: of all EU observers is another. Don't get any new weapons,
Speaker 6: and then give us the what's called this Zuger corridor,
Speaker 6: which is like this road that goes to their exclave
Speaker 6: Naccheban to the to the west there, and it's just
Speaker 6: like you can't stay. No country is going to do that.
Speaker 6: Oh and they've got another claim, which is they say,
Speaker 6: allow the UNESCO to visit Armenia to bick out erased
Speaker 6: Azerbaijani sites, which is just a mirror propacanda insanity because
Speaker 6: Unesca's already in our media and Armenia asked that of
Speaker 6: UNESCO for Azerbaijan.
Speaker 4: But yeah, of course they just copy that right and
Speaker 4: say well why do you do it?
Speaker 6: Yeah, right, which you know is not a real thing.
Speaker 6: But anyway, so those are a conditions piece. So it
Speaker 6: seems probable that Azerbaijan will invade, possibly in spring because
Speaker 6: the snow will melt it away. Possibly now, because Alia
Speaker 6: seems like he's very angry that the world kind of
Speaker 6: paid attention to Cop twenty nine is figuring out that
Speaker 6: he's a dick, and he's ramped up in arrest in
Speaker 6: his own country. He does arrest an entire television station
Speaker 6: of people that were you can it's it's one of
Speaker 6: the least press free countries on Earth. But I guess
Speaker 6: people were doing something before that. And they'll either take
Speaker 6: the southern half of Armenia or they'll take all of it,
Speaker 6: because they say Yerevan, the capital of Armenians, is historically
Speaker 6: part of Azerbaijan. So that's a state where we're at there,
Speaker 6: And I really think any other perspectives are wishful thinking,
Speaker 6: and I'm Sartaly so grim about that, but it's I
Speaker 6: think it's a very real possibility that there's Armenian genocide,
Speaker 6: that it's killed literally, you know, accountable millions of Armenians
Speaker 6: since the eighteen nineties and ramped up through nineteen fifteen
Speaker 6: through nineteen twenty three, and then socide a little bit
Speaker 6: is ongoing and their project will be completed in the
Speaker 6: next year.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that's pretty bleak.
Speaker 4: How can people they want to be in solid director
Speaker 4: if they want to support I think this is something
Speaker 4: that doesn't get reported on right in the US, even
Speaker 4: though they just want to learn more.
Speaker 3: How can they do that? Where can they go?
Speaker 6: There's a good site. This has learned for art SoC
Speaker 6: that's a good site. There's a bunch of Armenian web
Speaker 6: sites that people can go to. May I post some
Speaker 6: some links on the show notes? Would that be that'd
Speaker 6: be good? Yeah?
Speaker 8: Well absolutely, Betters in the show notes.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I would be very happy to do that
Speaker 6: if people want to donate things. But it's similar to
Speaker 6: Gaza or other places, like what what does awareness to do?
Speaker 6: I guess it could slow things down, Yeah, but really
Speaker 6: we just need state actors to respond to this. Our
Speaker 6: meetings get very cynically used in France and in the
Speaker 6: United States by right wing politicians who claim that they're
Speaker 6: protecting Christians. But I don't think that's something that will
Speaker 6: actually happen.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean people think the same thing for a
Speaker 4: sad right that he protected Christians in Syria while he
Speaker 4: Yea murdered to gas his own people.
Speaker 6: Exactly.
Speaker 8: That's a best a cynical thing and a worse justification.
Speaker 6: I mean, what have you seen that's effective in terms
Speaker 6: of world action for these things with the Kurds or
Speaker 6: other people?
Speaker 4: I mean, look, and we talk about how the Kurds
Speaker 4: have defended themselves from get a state project to eliminate them. Right,
Speaker 4: in some areas they haven't been able to, right, and
Speaker 4: when they have it's through their own armed initiative for
Speaker 4: the most part. Right that they were very fortunate to
Speaker 4: have the support of the United States. But that was
Speaker 4: only ever in the battle against Isis. It wasn't when
Speaker 4: genocidal violence, right, this genocidal project in a free and
Speaker 4: where we're seeing it right now in powerfact, the US
Speaker 4: didn't stand beside them there. And it's not in its
Speaker 4: nature too. And I think this is a really difficult
Speaker 4: situation that we find ourselves in all around the world
Speaker 4: right now, right, we see we've seen this in Africa too, Right,
Speaker 4: it's not really in the nature of the United States,
Speaker 4: not in this century, to intervene simply for human rights reasons,
Speaker 4: simply because it because genocide is wrong.
Speaker 6: We had a person that Sam had the power, who
Speaker 6: wrote a book on how genocide is wrong and we
Speaker 6: should intervene. And then what happens when she's the tower
Speaker 6: with Obama and Biden.
Speaker 4: We draw red lines and then less sad walk over them,
Speaker 4: like it happens all over the world. And I think, yeah,
Speaker 4: we're probably in a post hedge and monic era, But
Speaker 4: that doesn't mean that people deserve to die because we're
Speaker 4: in a post Hedge and Monic era.
Speaker 6: I know.
Speaker 4: Look, if I look at the other genocide, which I've
Speaker 4: spent more time with than most genocides, the weird thing
Speaker 4: to say, it's the genocide in Meammar. Of the range
Speaker 4: of people, they are still facing genocidal violence now, even
Speaker 4: from anti hunter groups. But I also see Muslim people
Speaker 4: in the current National Liberation Army. I see them fighting
Speaker 4: with the k and DF, and the way that those
Speaker 4: people liberated themselves was like from the bottom up, and
Speaker 4: I think that, like I find some hope in what's
Speaker 4: happening in Kurdistan and what's happening in me Ammar. And
Speaker 4: I don't see very much from the Community of States,
Speaker 4: so much of the thing that even fucking exists. I
Speaker 4: don't really believe that state to have a conscience. And yes,
Speaker 4: I don't think it's in their nature to care about people,
Speaker 4: because people are inherently valuable. But I do think people do,
Speaker 4: and I do think it is in the nature of
Speaker 4: people to care.
Speaker 8: So I guess we have to continue to hope.
Speaker 6: And there has been some positive statements by your Java
Speaker 6: regarding our Medians and there's a lot of solidarity there,
Speaker 6: which it was great. You know, Kurt's helped commit the
Speaker 6: first Armenian genocide and they've apologized, and so I'm seeing
Speaker 6: a little glimmers of hope in terms of the solidarity
Speaker 6: of people who see what's right and wrong who aren't
Speaker 6: state actors. That's absolutely right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, one of the things people, there's another thing that
Speaker 4: will be deployed very often. The Kurds are responsible for
Speaker 4: the Armenian genocide. Court if people were part of the
Speaker 4: Armenian genocide, and they will acknowledge that, and they've tried
Speaker 4: to make amends for it.
Speaker 6: Yes, exactly right, and that's all.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like we're here now, we're not prisoners of our history,
Speaker 4: but we have to acknowledge it so that we can
Speaker 4: move from it.
Speaker 3: Thank you for sharing all that, Yes, thank you.
Speaker 4: Is there anything else that we've failed to address, so
Speaker 4: you want to get in quickly before we I mean, yes,
Speaker 4: estousands of you as of stuff.
Speaker 6: But you know, visit Armenia. It's still called one of
Speaker 6: the safest places on earth. Is it's been rated safer
Speaker 6: than Japan. It's a beautiful place, it's a struggling democracy,
Speaker 6: but it's the only democracy in the area. Try to
Speaker 6: pay attention to the news, you know, is Hackeys. It
Speaker 6: seems right, your senator, you know, like I just feel
Speaker 6: wrong saying that, but what else can we do? Right?
Speaker 6: If you're in Britain, the UK is an incredibly agregious
Speaker 6: supporter of Azerbaijan through British petroleum. Really, you people probably
Speaker 6: can have the biggest effect because the UK is the
Speaker 6: biggest enabler of those dirt bags. And thank you for
Speaker 6: the time. I really appreciate it. And I don't feel
Speaker 6: like I've done justice to two thousand, five hundred years
Speaker 6: of history, but thank you so much.
Speaker 4: No, I think it's great. Is there any way people
Speaker 4: can follow you online if they'd like to?
Speaker 6: Oh, absolutely not. I'm tired of getting docs.
Speaker 8: Excellent, Yes, pretty fit event.
Speaker 6: You know, And that's why I pin icons. This is
Speaker 6: because it's it's anonymous, you know.
Speaker 8: Very offline.
Speaker 6: But yeah, but thank you so much, great.
Speaker 8: Thank you.
Speaker 10: This is it could happen here.
Speaker 2: Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the
Speaker 2: White House, the crumbling of our world and what it
Speaker 2: means for you. I'm Garrison David today, I'm joined by
Speaker 2: Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. This week we
Speaker 2: are covering the week of January twenty ninth to February fifth,
Speaker 2: and oh boy, has this week felt like a month.
Speaker 2: I am absolutely exhausted. And let's start, I guess by
Speaker 2: talking about what Trump did.
Speaker 10: Tuesday night.
Speaker 2: He had a press conference with both himself and Israeli
Speaker 2: Prime Minister Benjamin and Yahoo to announce that the United
Speaker 2: States would quote unquote take over the Gaza Strip, resulting
Speaker 2: in quote unquote long term ownership Previously. On that day,
Speaker 2: Trump also signed an order pulling out of the United
Speaker 2: Nations Human Rights Council and cutting off aid to UNRA.
Speaker 2: Let's start with this topic. Hopefully we will have a
Speaker 2: later episode maybe next week, covering what's happening in Palestine.
Speaker 2: But you know, this is, as of right now, the
Speaker 2: current most development.
Speaker 4: This is one of the more like crazy things that
Speaker 4: he's like, like you could see Netanyahoo even like in
Speaker 4: the room clearly finding out about this for the first time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was a real, oh shit, really vibe.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure how long Trump and Nan Yaho actually
Speaker 2: had this like entire thing planned that that is a
Speaker 2: distinct possibility that like this has been Netanyahu's goal for
Speaker 2: a while, and this was like impacted his negotiations with Biden,
Speaker 2: like knowing that he wanted this to be like the
Speaker 2: outcome where the US basically just takes and holds the
Speaker 2: territory of Gaza as a US territory, like indefinitely.
Speaker 4: I think Babe knew that Trump would give him a
Speaker 4: positive outcome in any number of ways, right, like to
Speaker 4: include just saying like bomb it off the map, Like
Speaker 4: I think it's reasonable to assume that.
Speaker 1: Well, and I mean something like this was I think
Speaker 1: the obvious outcome as soon as Trump, I mean from
Speaker 1: before Trump won, right, Yeah, net Yahoo never had any
Speaker 1: intention of letting things go back to the way they
Speaker 1: were before October seventh, and Trump has a vested interest
Speaker 1: in giving Netanyahu whatever he wants the most, Like it's
Speaker 1: a I don't know, I'm not surprised by it. I
Speaker 1: guess I'm a little bit like, Okay, at least now
Speaker 1: we know what they're going to do next.
Speaker 2: It's in line with the manifest destiny territorial expansion and
Speaker 2: Trump has been talking about the past few weeks. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean Joe Biden laid the groundwork for this by
Speaker 2: giving like Israel the actual like bombs and materials to
Speaker 2: to like do the demolition side of this project. And
Speaker 2: now Trump continues to discuss relocating Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan,
Speaker 2: while promising to turn Gaza into quote unquote the riviera
Speaker 2: of the Middle East. Level it out create an economic
Speaker 2: development unquote.
Speaker 4: He has also said that he's gonna again said he's
Speaker 4: going to withdraw US troops from Syria, which would leave
Speaker 4: two thousand people in saintcom to deploy to Gaza.
Speaker 3: I guess if that's what they want to do.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean I feel like there's no possible way
Speaker 10: this can go quote unquote, well this is going to
Speaker 10: be a fucking catastrophe. The basic plan here is to
Speaker 10: do genocide. And then well mean this is this is
Speaker 10: part of a genocidal operation. Yeah, it's like this is
Speaker 10: like what we're doing a second law or your genui side.
Speaker 10: This is like the finishing touch.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 10: But you know, like on a sort of practical level,
Speaker 10: it's like, Okay, the US couldn't hold Afghanistan, right, like
Speaker 10: and like obviously like this is this isn't like a
Speaker 10: quote unquote easier occupation. But it's like, this is gonna
Speaker 10: be a fucking shit, like a nightmare, like and I
Speaker 10: don't know. I mean, my assumption is that this is
Speaker 10: going to be just like if if he actually, like
Speaker 10: you know, does a deployment of US troops, this is
Speaker 10: going to be hideously unpopular. People are going to be
Speaker 10: coming back in body bags and it's gonna fucking I
Speaker 10: don't know, it's going to be a nightmare for everyone involved.
Speaker 10: And yeah, it's a absolutely terrible idea.
Speaker 2: I'm more scared that they're going to get away with it.
Speaker 2: I think it's I'm more scared that things will go
Speaker 2: find for them and this just becomes like an actually
Speaker 2: stable US territory in the Middle East.
Speaker 4: There will be significant pushbacks not the word right like
Speaker 4: that there will be gerrilla warfare, right Like. It's very
Speaker 4: hard to take and hold significantly large urban areas, as
Speaker 4: the US has found out for twenty years. Whether or
Speaker 4: not people would accept that, I think I think they might,
Speaker 4: Like I think Trump kind of needs an enemy, you know,
Speaker 4: and a war and and like a quote unquote, you know,
Speaker 4: he can he can paint almost anything as a win.
Speaker 4: And I think people might be more willing than we'd
Speaker 4: like to think to accept people coming home in body bags.
Speaker 1: From that, I'm not really sure. I think we're actually
Speaker 1: going to see the kind of troop deployment that people
Speaker 1: think based on what Trump has said as opposed to
Speaker 1: expanded support for what the Israelis have already been doing,
Speaker 1: which has like done a significant job to depopulate the
Speaker 1: area as it stands. Like, Yeah, I think we have
Speaker 1: to be hesitant to draw too strong a line between
Speaker 1: the rhetoric and what Trump is actually going to do.
Speaker 1: Which doesn't mean I don't think that it's not very
Speaker 1: likely that you're going to continue to see massy population
Speaker 1: in Gaza. I think it's just that, like, I don't
Speaker 1: know that. I think the only way that happens is
Speaker 1: something that looks like most of the occupations of the
Speaker 1: last century have looked like from a US point of view.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and the new model is this Syria model, right,
Speaker 4: make a relatively small footprint, and then in the local
Speaker 4: partner force at the IDF pulling security for US contracts
Speaker 4: and in US money like.
Speaker 1: That, right, the IDF and a lot of third party
Speaker 1: corporate PMCs. Yeah, PMCs, you know, like that's what that
Speaker 1: we've we've got guys champing at the bit to do that.
Speaker 1: And yeah, like I that looks a lot likelier to
Speaker 1: me than the tenth Mountain Division, you know, occupying large
Speaker 1: chunks of Gaza.
Speaker 3: Agreed. Yeah, Eric Prince is ready to ready to get
Speaker 3: sadly all.
Speaker 2: Right, let's uh, let's transition to our new segment titled
Speaker 2: Stinky Musk, which I came up with last night. Delirious
Speaker 2: and yes it's bad. No, I'm not going to fix it.
Speaker 2: South African Gang does a hostile takeover of the United States.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're hitting.
Speaker 8: You're hitting today, Garrison.
Speaker 2: Elon Musk at a gig of overly online gen z
Speaker 2: interns are doing an oligarchic cyber coup of the federal
Speaker 2: government meant starting with the Office of Management and Budget
Speaker 2: and moving on to USAID, A General Services Administration, the Treasury,
Speaker 2: and as of Recording Noah, as well as many other agencies,
Speaker 2: smaller agencies, bigger agencies that they are infiltrating both physically
Speaker 2: and digitally. Yeah, employees of these agencies have been locked
Speaker 2: out both physically and digitally as the DOGE team ransacks
Speaker 2: various departments and accesses sensitive data with no oversight, and
Speaker 2: that's like government data about you possibly in the hands
Speaker 2: of a literal Nick Fuentes, pilled Groyper. Intern security officials
Speaker 2: who tried to resist Musk's seizure of classified materials have
Speaker 2: been fired, and DOGE personnel threatened to call the US
Speaker 2: Marshals to be let into buildings. I have some more
Speaker 2: info on this, as we will as we will go on,
Speaker 2: but I guess this is this is an okay time
Speaker 2: just to discuss.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the response to this is one of
Speaker 1: the more hopeful things going on right now. And kind
Speaker 1: of what led me to think that is looking at
Speaker 1: twenty looking at the fallout from twenty twenty and what
Speaker 1: worked and what didn't, largely what didn't work, and thinking like, okay, well,
Speaker 1: if we're going to actually get any kind of functional
Speaker 1: resistance to what's happening, what does that look like. And
Speaker 1: it doesn't look like the same cruise of people doing
Speaker 1: the same thing that they did four or five years ago,
Speaker 1: Which is why I've got some hope in the fact
Speaker 1: that you've got a different crowd of people who are
Speaker 1: radicalizing and taking to the streets, and you know, we
Speaker 1: have central employees, federal employees, right, and you've got a
Speaker 1: lot of like, yeah, most of them are still current,
Speaker 1: but you know, it's a mix of former and current
Speaker 1: federal employees. And these are these are the people who
Speaker 1: do a lot of the nuts and bolts stuff at
Speaker 1: the Office of Personnel Management, Office of Management Budget like.
Speaker 1: These are the people who like make keep things functioning
Speaker 1: at like a ground level, and a lot of them
Speaker 1: are are pissed off in a way that I don't
Speaker 1: think we have really seen before. And I think there's
Speaker 1: a potential And who's to say, Like, right now, we
Speaker 1: just had a big protest in front of Treasury about
Speaker 1: a full city block or so of people, many if
Speaker 1: not the vast majority of whom we're federal employees, rallying
Speaker 1: alongside a lot of Democratic members of Congress. And you know,
Speaker 1: that's that doesn't accomplish anything on its own, but it's
Speaker 1: a potential start to accomplishing something. You know, if you
Speaker 1: get those people out in the street, it provides, among
Speaker 1: other things, a lot of cover for everyone else. And
Speaker 1: it also is the start of you know, what you
Speaker 1: might call a reverse January sixth. You know, if January
Speaker 1: six was a bunch of random people taking and occupying
Speaker 1: government buildings without any knowledge of like what they are
Speaker 1: or how things actually function inside of them. The kind
Speaker 1: of thing that we might be looking at in the
Speaker 1: near future is the opposite of that, where a bunch
Speaker 1: of people who absolutely do know how those organizations and
Speaker 1: buildings function trying to take.
Speaker 3: And occupy them.
Speaker 1: And that's the feeling I got because I talked to
Speaker 1: some folks who are at the Treasury protest. One person
Speaker 1: that I talked to most extensively as a federal contractor
Speaker 1: who was present in twenty seventeen at the travel ban
Speaker 1: protests if you remember those, which is back when Trump
Speaker 1: announced his first Muslim bound and a bunch of people
Speaker 1: started occupying like airports and stuff like I was at
Speaker 1: the LAX for that. This person was at some of
Speaker 1: those protests and it was out in front of Treasury,
Speaker 1: and the quote that I've got from them there was
Speaker 1: I was expecting it it being this protest, the Treasury protest,
Speaker 1: to feel like the travel ban protests.
Speaker 10: It didn't.
Speaker 1: It was a lot angrier than the travel ban protests.
Speaker 1: The travel ban protests were kind of an in defense
Speaker 1: of another person sort of anger, and this was narrowly
Speaker 1: focused anger at a very specific group of people. There
Speaker 1: were a lot of people yelling and screaming outside of
Speaker 1: their congressman's offices and the like, and like, there hasn't
Speaker 1: been that much disruption compared to what we're going to see, right,
Speaker 1: Social Security payments haven't stopped going out in moss. So
Speaker 1: if we're seeing something like this at this early stage,
Speaker 1: I think there's a lot of potential there. And the
Speaker 1: thing this person brought up repeatedly is like, when we
Speaker 1: start seeing congressmen kicking indoors is when things are going
Speaker 1: to get interesting. If that happens, Like, that's kind of
Speaker 1: the stage at which there's a lot of potential for
Speaker 1: this to turn into something that could actually cause change,
Speaker 1: Like if you actually start getting government employees who are
Speaker 1: willing to do more than stand outside of their offices,
Speaker 1: like who are willing to take direct action to occupy
Speaker 1: those buildings or stop other people from and you've seen
Speaker 1: little bits of that, right. One of the things we
Speaker 1: did see is as these doge kids came along, federal
Speaker 1: employees refusing them entry, keeping doors locked. Now that was
Speaker 1: not illegal because these were literally, as it's been described
Speaker 1: in me by multiple people, just kids showing up demanding
Speaker 1: entry without any kind of a badge or evidence of
Speaker 1: who they are. Right when you get people who are
Speaker 1: willing to escalate from that and refuse entry, that's when
Speaker 1: we might actually see something start to seriously shift here.
Speaker 2: I mean, based on how much of what Musk is
Speaker 2: doing is just like bypassing Congress and doing like like
Speaker 2: a very kind of like typical like like Ola Garkic
Speaker 2: co coup, Like he's doing all those steps. And if
Speaker 2: you look at like what happened in South Korea a
Speaker 2: few months ago, we are not at the point where
Speaker 2: congressmen are literally like like you know, climbing over like
Speaker 2: fences barricading doors.
Speaker 1: We're not in South Korea territory yet, but yeah, but.
Speaker 10: Like their lawmakers like we're willing to do that.
Speaker 2: And and there is like I think waiting from people
Speaker 2: to like wait and see if our lawmakers are going
Speaker 2: to be willing to do the same to like protect
Speaker 2: the actual like functional aspects of our government, and like
Speaker 2: things are already happening, like we we are in some
Speaker 2: ways kind of already at this point. The USAYED website
Speaker 2: is now like completely removed, leaving only a note that
Speaker 2: claims that all personnel have been put on administrative leave,
Speaker 2: including overseas personnel. But this essentially leaves a whole agency
Speaker 2: shut down, but all done with like without an Act
Speaker 2: of Congress or even like an overstepping executive order from Trump.
Speaker 2: It was just it was just the unelected Elon Musk
Speaker 2: who decided to and carried out the closure of a
Speaker 2: government agency, which like should be like like should actually
Speaker 2: be like a criminal like there is like statutes that
Speaker 2: aren't designed to stop this from happening, just no one's
Speaker 2: enforcing them because they control almost every aspect of government.
Speaker 2: Musk has also closed the IRS direct file tax system,
Speaker 2: which has now forced taxpayers to use third party paid services.
Speaker 10: It's like he's doing this like one by one. I
Speaker 10: think the weakness that they have right now is that
Speaker 10: because you're causing so much chaos, because they're you're gonna
Speaker 10: talk about the FBI pers they're trying to do like
Speaker 10: you know, the thing that they're relying on is everyone
Speaker 10: is just going to let them in and just let
Speaker 10: them get walked over. But it's like, Okay, the thing
Speaker 10: about acting this muscleside the law is what guys with
Speaker 10: guns do you have who you can use to enforce this? Yeah,
Speaker 10: that's the thing where it's it's legitimately like, if there's
Speaker 10: serious resistance to them, they might start to crumple. Because
Speaker 10: the reason you work inside of the legal order or
Speaker 10: you have your own paramilitaries is so that you can
Speaker 10: have have like the guy with the gun to make
Speaker 10: you open the door. Yeah, And the more people who
Speaker 10: are willing to just be like no, fuck you, like
Speaker 10: and like force them to actually like find guys with
Speaker 10: guns who are willing to do.
Speaker 1: This, the odds are lower that you get a positive
Speaker 1: shift because people engage directly and aggressively with the cops.
Speaker 1: Then you have when some sort of like mid level
Speaker 1: military functionary is asked to drive a tank over a
Speaker 1: school teacher. Right Like, Historically, historically, if you look at
Speaker 1: when regimes fall, that happens more often than the waving
Speaker 1: a flag on top of like a pile of corpses. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: Like demands are ordered illegal illegal orders are given to
Speaker 1: people with guns and they're like, no, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to shoot at a bunch of teachers today. That's not
Speaker 1: the only way this kind of thing happens, but at least,
Speaker 1: like for my money, that's the likeliest positive outcome, right.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and if you look at the last world historical
Speaker 10: empire run by it incredibly unpopular genetocracy, it was the Soviets,
Speaker 10: and look at how they fell apart.
Speaker 1: That's that's more or less what happened.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, And like it's interesting that if we use
Speaker 4: a Bavarian definition of the state like that has the
Speaker 4: monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, right, that they've
Speaker 4: dismantled their apparatus for state violence as well. And this
Speaker 4: could just be like the blunt instrument of apparently offering
Speaker 4: every federal employee. I know, I've heard that they've tried
Speaker 4: to unretire Worldland firefighters who accepted their offer of retirement.
Speaker 4: Is extremely funny, but like it's it's very Yeah, if
Speaker 4: you're going to work, you're going to retire a bunch
Speaker 4: of FBI agents or fire them because, like Mia said,
Speaker 4: they are going to need hitters. They're going to need
Speaker 4: to use coercive force at some point, possibly very soon, Yeah,
Speaker 4: to get what they want to do done.
Speaker 1: And I think when it comes to that, the question
Speaker 1: is like which hitters. Yeah, because the the FBI and
Speaker 1: the CIA I mean are getting are getting gutted at
Speaker 1: the moment right now, Like so you're looking at like
Speaker 1: the NSA, you're looking at local police, Federal Protective Services,
Speaker 1: Apartment of Homeland Security, you know, and the marshals. Right,
Speaker 1: like these are kind of like the shooters Trump has
Speaker 1: to play with, and the military will remain an open
Speaker 1: question until the critical moment, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, FPS is infinitely expandable and it's mostly
Speaker 4: contract threat orbit and aspected about it before. But like
Speaker 4: that's the one that has a lot of potential to grow.
Speaker 4: And I think within local especially sheriff's departments, you got
Speaker 4: some people who weren't bat annihilated.
Speaker 1: Some of those Oh no, no, no, absolutely not. And
Speaker 1: I do think that, like sheriff's departments are kind of
Speaker 1: what haunt me the most. But that's also it's not
Speaker 1: purely a matter of like which agencies and organizations are
Speaker 1: going to back Trump in this, It's also a matter
Speaker 1: of like geographic location and DC. In DC, at least
Speaker 1: he can count on a lot less of those guys
Speaker 1: because like the Capitol Police aren't thrilled right now.
Speaker 2: You know, essentially what Elon is doing right now is
Speaker 2: exactly what he did to Twitter, except to the entire
Speaker 2: States of America, and like by the end of this process.
Speaker 2: It still might function on some level, right, Like Twitter
Speaker 2: still kind of functions, but it's just worse in every way.
Speaker 2: It's worse. It doesn't have the quote unquote good features
Speaker 2: it used to. It's it's buggy, it's full of Nazis.
Speaker 2: It's just it's it sucks more Like the previous version
Speaker 2: was was already bad and harmful, but the new one
Speaker 2: is just worse and without the aspects that made it
Speaker 2: semi worthwhile. And like, I'm going to do an episode
Speaker 2: like next week, like it kind of about about this,
Speaker 2: like specifically, and how musk is Twitter afying the entire
Speaker 2: government using like all of the same tactics, like refusing
Speaker 2: to pay leases on buildings, installing beds in agency headquarters
Speaker 2: to make employees sleep there overnight, having teenagers review code
Speaker 2: of like long standing employees. It's the exact same process.
Speaker 2: And if you didn't like what happened to Twitter, that
Speaker 2: process is now happening to the government itself.
Speaker 4: I can't wait for the Irs to send me a
Speaker 4: letter saying my pussy and io like that.
Speaker 3: That will be.
Speaker 1: Hey, now you've now you've gotten me back on the
Speaker 1: Trump trained. You know what I'm piacing out for the day.
Speaker 3: I'm on board.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 2: Before we close this segment and pivot to adds, I
Speaker 2: do want to shout out the work that Wired is
Speaker 2: doing right now.
Speaker 14: Man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Wired magazine is doing for some fantastic reporting on this.
Speaker 2: The DC Attorney is currently promising to go after individuals
Speaker 2: who post about DOGE employees. They might end up going
Speaker 2: after some of these Wired journalists who identified this gen
Speaker 2: Z Doge team that is wreaking havoc throughout the government
Speaker 2: with no oversight. Wired provided what should be you know,
Speaker 2: legally required, a necessary identification of public workers who Musk
Speaker 2: is trying to keep secret. The DC Attorney and like
Speaker 2: Trump's DOJ, is very mad about that. They might they
Speaker 2: might end up like going after these people. But fantastic
Speaker 2: work coming out of Wired right now. If you want
Speaker 2: to keep up to date on Musk's takeover, I strongly
Speaker 2: recommend checking out their work. I'll post some of those
Speaker 2: sources below. Let's go on a quick ad break and
Speaker 2: then come back to talk about the continuing kind of
Speaker 2: fake trade wars and immigration sick.
Speaker 3: All right, we're back.
Speaker 2: I'm going to pivot towards James and Mia to discuss
Speaker 2: tariffs and immigration take it away.
Speaker 10: Yeah, So on Monday, Trump sort of averted the market
Speaker 10: collapse that he had set off with his declaration that
Speaker 10: there are going to be twenty five percent tariffs on
Speaker 10: all goods from Canada and Mexico and also ten percent
Speaker 10: tariff on China. So let's let's go into like what
Speaker 10: actually happened. So the tariffs on Mexico and Canada are
Speaker 10: on hold for a month. However, the ten percent tariff
Speaker 10: on all Chinese goods did go into effect, and we'll
Speaker 10: get some more about what that's going to do in
Speaker 10: a second. But much more important, Trump eliminated the deminimus exception,
Speaker 10: which allowed like people and companies to ship goods from
Speaker 10: China that were worth under eight hundred dollars and not
Speaker 10: have to go through the formal customs process and you know,
Speaker 10: pay tariffs on it and also have to spend all
Speaker 10: of that time paperwork and shit. And before we get
Speaker 10: into the sort of devastating effect this is going to
Speaker 10: have on businesses, I want to make it clear that
Speaker 10: like regular people in China use this to send things
Speaker 10: to people in the US, like that that's a very
Speaker 10: normal thing. Yeah, that is now really really difficult.
Speaker 1: And about a third of YouTube ads are supported by
Speaker 1: people who run companies that make use of this loophole.
Speaker 10: Yeah, okay, so on the business side, this is actually
Speaker 10: really interesting because I think it's one of the I mean,
Speaker 10: not the first one. I think it's going to be
Speaker 10: a very very early example of Trump completely fucking a
Speaker 10: base that's been very very supportive of him, because this
Speaker 10: is going to liquidate huge portions of the drop shippy economy,
Speaker 10: right like all of all of the stupid YouTube shirts,
Speaker 10: like all of that stuff is just going to be annihilated.
Speaker 4: Can you explain drop shipping if people aren't familiar mere
Speaker 4: just like ten second versions.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 10: So drop shipping is a thing where you do an
Speaker 10: order and instead of having like an inventory, normally you'd
Speaker 10: have a warehouse a had shirts in it. Drop shipping
Speaker 10: you don't do that. You are now the intermediary and
Speaker 10: you have these manufacturers like print to consumption basically, and
Speaker 10: you can do this very cheaply, and then you can
Speaker 10: run the entire markup. But it works because of how
Speaker 10: cheap it is to get these like sort of small
Speaker 10: scale Chinese firms to like make stuff for you. Those
Speaker 10: people are screwed. Companies like Temu and Shian are either
Speaker 10: going to have to just completely eat shit or they're
Speaker 10: going to have to figure out a way to move
Speaker 10: their entire supply line through countries like Vietnam, which is
Speaker 10: going to be very difficult. I mean because Temo even
Speaker 10: getting stuff to the US has been kind of hard
Speaker 10: for them because of how the logistics network works. Yeah,
Speaker 10: and so obviously, like I don't think most people who
Speaker 10: listen to this show are that sad about Schian and
Speaker 10: Temu eating shit.
Speaker 1: But no, it is like a mixed bag because a
Speaker 1: whole lot of the MLM industry is going to take
Speaker 1: a header as a result of this.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, there's some stuff to like fuck them. But
Speaker 10: on the other hand, there are a lot of people
Speaker 10: who are going to eat shit who are not those people.
Speaker 10: And this is there is a huge, like range of
Speaker 10: industries that are run by very very small businesses, like
Speaker 10: it was even just like an individual person who like
Speaker 10: makes crafts and sells it, and those people are also
Speaker 10: screwed because they rely on getting the resources in from China.
Speaker 10: And there's a lot of sort of you know things
Speaker 10: like like people who build like hand like retro handheld consoles,
Speaker 10: oh yeah, and like I don't know, like custom ariosoft rifles,
Speaker 10: I do you talk about, Like there's a whole bunch
Speaker 10: of industries like that that are these like small scale
Speaker 10: production things that are just screwed that rely on this stuff.
Speaker 10: And so the ripples of this specific part of it
Speaker 10: are going to keep playing out basically no matter what
Speaker 10: else happens in this trade war. Yeah, it's also worth
Speaker 10: noting that tariffs on Mexico and Canada aren't gone, They've
Speaker 10: just been postponed for a month. So there is a
Speaker 10: real chance that we end up in exactly the same
Speaker 10: place that we were going into the weekend, where no
Speaker 10: one knows where these terrifts are going to take effected,
Speaker 10: basically blow a smoking crater in the world economy, and
Speaker 10: we get another round of the negotiations that James is
Speaker 10: going to talk about. It's already setting off a really
Speaker 10: sort of staggering right wing I mean not even necessarily
Speaker 10: right wing, just like a nationalist backlash in Canada that's
Speaker 10: kind of been like tearing up this sort of international
Speaker 10: right wing alliance and nationalists because suddenly Trump's coming after
Speaker 10: them and now they're they're really mad about it.
Speaker 2: Well, and because Trudeau announced that that he would be targeting,
Speaker 2: you know, like retaliatory tariffs is specifically at red States.
Speaker 2: We now have people calling him dark woke or dark Trudeau,
Speaker 2: you know, for very different reasons than they used to
Speaker 2: call him Trudeau.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, all right, all right, shop up high, right,
Speaker 1: all right, you're going to get canceled if you're not
Speaker 1: careful that outstanding.
Speaker 10: Speaking of getting canceled, what hasn't gotten canceled is the
Speaker 10: ten percent tariff on all Chinese good which is just
Speaker 10: now in effect. It's just happening. That's bad. It's going
Speaker 10: to increase inflation. It's also it's you know, it's it's
Speaker 10: sort of the opening round of this escalation to a
Speaker 10: trade war. China has retaliated with tariffs that are not
Speaker 10: a very big deal on US goods and some product
Speaker 10: control stuff, on expert control stuff on some rare earth
Speaker 10: minerals actually do with the rare smills, but like minerals
Speaker 10: you need for production stuff that isn't a big deal
Speaker 10: yet but could be.
Speaker 2: I mean, and we were all expecting Chinese tariffs. Having
Speaker 2: twenty five percent tariffs in Canada was not something I
Speaker 2: thought was like a looming.
Speaker 10: Milh Yeah, yeah, I mean I thought they'd do Mexico.
Speaker 10: I didn't know about.
Speaker 4: I'm very worried about the offshoring of Chinese labor and
Speaker 4: the impact that will have in places like Myanma, where
Speaker 4: China has these special economic zones, and it's something we
Speaker 4: will cover.
Speaker 8: We obviously have a lot of soci.
Speaker 10: Yeah Monday, Yeah, yeah, on Monday, we're recovering this spot.
Speaker 10: So I think something that's import to understand about these
Speaker 10: tariffs is that these terrifts are not economic policy. This
Speaker 10: is the mistake that all of the capitalists who backed
Speaker 10: Trump made is that they assumed that just like every
Speaker 10: other president who's made promise us like this, like Obama's
Speaker 10: promised to renegotiate NAFTA, they all assumed that because of
Speaker 10: economic policy, they'd be able to just like get Trump
Speaker 10: to be pro business and then he wouldn't do it.
Speaker 10: The mis calculation they made is that these are not
Speaker 10: economic tariffs. These are directly foreign policy, geopolitical tariffs.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 10: Their international relations are to the deal bullshit and the
Speaker 10: goal of it. And he's been deploying this against like
Speaker 10: I mean, Columbia, Denmark, He's threatening the EU. Now he's
Speaker 10: going to keep doing this with China. The goal of
Speaker 10: this is to directly use American consumer power as a
Speaker 10: weapon of imperialism to make these countries fall into line. Yeah,
Speaker 10: and now I will pass it the jame to talk
Speaker 10: about what he was specifically trying to get out of
Speaker 10: Mexico and Canada in this round.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so, like we expect about falling into line there.
Speaker 4: I think it's probably a good place to start. Like
Speaker 4: this kind of Trump brinksmanship is very typical of his style. Right,
Speaker 4: Nearly every media outlet, I think, fell for it this
Speaker 4: time that it did in his first term, like we
Speaker 4: got this, like this is going to cause the crisis.
Speaker 4: Trump was very nebulous in his goals for these tariffs,
Speaker 4: and as almost always like, he talked a lot about
Speaker 4: like America being treated unfairly. Right, he talked about the border,
Speaker 4: and he talked specifically about fentanyl. Soon, let's begin by
Speaker 4: talking about fentanyl. It just to be clear, it is
Speaker 4: true that some fentanyl comes into the USA from Mexico
Speaker 4: and to a lesser degree or so from Canada. The
Speaker 4: vast majority of the fentanyl that enters the USA from Mexico,
Speaker 4: about eighty percent of the convictions made as a result
Speaker 4: of that fentanyl entering the USA are made on US citizens, right,
Speaker 4: And ninety percent of the fentanyl that is seized is
Speaker 4: seized at ports of entry. So this idea that there
Speaker 4: are like Mexican nationals backpacking fentanyl through the desert, that exists,
Speaker 4: but it is not what is bringing the bulk of
Speaker 4: the fentanyl that is killing the people in this country
Speaker 4: into this country. There are multiple cases of DBP agent
Speaker 4: taking bribes to allow the drug into the country. I
Speaker 4: will link to two of them in the show notes,
Speaker 4: but know that there are more of them, and given
Speaker 4: the relatively high bar for cbpagent, anyone in DHS to
Speaker 4: be investigated, right, we can assume that there's something that
Speaker 4: happens on at least a semi regular basis. So what
Speaker 4: did Trump do to stop this fence not coming into
Speaker 4: this the country? Where did he get He got this
Speaker 4: promise that Mexico will deploy ten thousand troops to its border.
Speaker 4: In reality, this isn't much of a concession at all.
Speaker 4: The Mexican National Guard has been deployed to the border
Speaker 4: for years. Specifically, it's been deployed at gaps in the
Speaker 4: US border wall for more than a year, so people
Speaker 4: will remember our coverage of the open air detention sites
Speaker 4: in the cumber Andese County San Diego. All of those
Speaker 4: open air detention sites correspond to gaps in the border
Speaker 4: wall where migrants would enter, surrender to border patrol, and
Speaker 4: then be detained in open air. Each of those gaps
Speaker 4: now has a Mexican National Guard checkpoint in front of it,
Speaker 4: and they're there in conjunction with IM the National Institute
Speaker 4: of Migration in English, the INM has camps for the
Speaker 4: migrants who do come there.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: This is something that Biden obtained in I think late
Speaker 4: twenty three, early twenty four, and that's why we aren't
Speaker 4: seeing open ed attention one of the reasons, the other
Speaker 4: reason being Biden's a sylum band. We aren't seeing as
Speaker 4: many people crossing the border right. Mexican border towns also
Speaker 4: tend to be areas where the Mexican military deploys its
Speaker 4: troops because often they are places were organized crime occurves
Speaker 4: due to their proximity to the border and the market
Speaker 4: for drugs, and the fact that weapons from the US
Speaker 4: tend to flow into Mexico and that that's where large
Speaker 4: numbers of weapons for organized crime come from right. For
Speaker 4: more than a year, I've received press releases from Tijuana
Speaker 4: constantly talking about new unit arrives, Special Forces arrives, Army arrive,
Speaker 4: and then they'll have pictures of a parade.
Speaker 3: Right now.
Speaker 4: They never tell us when those units are leaving. They
Speaker 4: just keep telling us they're coming. So it's very hard
Speaker 4: to get a sense of actually how many troops are there. Sure,
Speaker 4: but the idea that Mexico is suddenly militarizing its border
Speaker 4: is kind of fascical.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and I want to There's been a lot of
Speaker 10: sort of cheerleading of shine Bomb, sort of like standing
Speaker 10: up to the US. And I don't think people in
Speaker 10: the US really understand the securitization on the Mexican border,
Speaker 10: and so something that I'm realizing that I don't think
Speaker 10: I just assume people knew about this, but I don't
Speaker 10: think everyone made into the western press much.
Speaker 6: Is that.
Speaker 10: So Like a few months ago in October, the Mexican
Speaker 10: Army just like opened fire on a convoy of like
Speaker 10: on a convoy of immigrants and this was on the
Speaker 10: border of Guatemala and just like killed six of them,
Speaker 10: shot twelve other people. So like and like there are
Speaker 10: massacres like that, like not infrequently right, like this is
Speaker 10: not a this is not a Mexico is pro immigrant
Speaker 10: like the US is anti immigrant thing.
Speaker 12: Like.
Speaker 10: Part of the part of the reason why Trump can, like,
Speaker 10: you know, sort of declare victory without getting any concessions
Speaker 10: or whatever is because of how murderous the Mexican armies,
Speaker 10: like border policy is already.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then the Mexican leaders have succesfully been able
Speaker 4: to paint themselves as leftists, exclusively being two inches to
Speaker 4: the left of a further and further right regime in Washington, DC.
Speaker 4: People can listen to the last episode of My Daddy
Speaker 4: and Gap series for an idea of how Mexico is
Speaker 4: constantly deporting migrants to its own certain states. I want
Speaker 4: to talk a little bit about the Canadian concessions very briefly. Again,
Speaker 4: ten thousand agents and a border spending that really doesn't
Speaker 4: change much in what in terms of what was already
Speaker 4: becoming a more militarized border.
Speaker 3: There has actually been.
Speaker 4: A significant flow of migrants from the US to Canada
Speaker 4: in the last couple of years, specifically a Francophone African
Speaker 4: people who would take that route. I'm aware of several
Speaker 4: TikTok influencers as one guy or following Chad who or
Speaker 4: he's in Canada now, but he's from Chad and he
Speaker 4: makes these videos explaining to Challian people how to go
Speaker 4: from Mexico into the US and then move up to
Speaker 4: Canada obviously where they can speak French, and that makes
Speaker 4: their lives much easier, right, It makes it much idio
Speaker 4: for not to not have to learn a language. Trudeau
Speaker 4: did agree to list cartels as terrorist organizations.
Speaker 1: That seems to be from what I can tell, the
Speaker 1: big move.
Speaker 8: That he made.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so it does allow for some economic sanctions, right
Speaker 4: if they attempt to use that Canadian border and sort
Speaker 4: of get around the United States. It's much less significant
Speaker 4: than a US listing, which we believe is coming. Canada's
Speaker 4: not going to use it to do covert operations inside Mexico.
Speaker 4: I don't think Canada's not going to be drone striking anyone.
Speaker 4: But when Trump listed the Codes Force, he then structs
Speaker 4: its leader, right with a drone I don't think Trudeau
Speaker 4: is going to be I don't think Canada's going to
Speaker 4: be doing that. But nonetheless, that is a concession, and
Speaker 4: perhaps there is some plan for that right, it certainly
Speaker 4: allows for, and I've said this before, at the economic
Speaker 4: sanctioning of people who provide material benefit to those organizations,
Speaker 4: or potentially the arrest of people who provide material benefit
Speaker 4: to those organizations, which is a large number of businesses
Speaker 4: in Mexico which end up being extorted or paying protection money.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 4: So we don't know what is going to happen with that,
Speaker 4: but it's one of the tools that Trump now has
Speaker 4: to use as another cudgel against it against Mexico. The
Speaker 4: last and perhaps most sinister of all development is this
Speaker 4: deal that Marco Rubio is struck.
Speaker 3: With boukele in de El Salvador. Right.
Speaker 4: El Salvador has said it will host US citizen criminals
Speaker 4: and deportees from any nation in its jail system. So
Speaker 4: I just read Boukelly's tweet.
Speaker 8: It's very short.
Speaker 4: We are willing to take in only convicted criminals parentheses,
Speaker 4: including convicted US citizens into a mega prison second, in
Speaker 4: exchange for a fee. The fee would be relatively low
Speaker 4: for the US, but significant for US, making our entire
Speaker 4: prison system sustainable. If you're not familiar, it means CHUAC
Speaker 4: terrorism confinements enter into Spanish.
Speaker 3: For people who haven't heard about this.
Speaker 4: It's the largest prison in the world that Bukelly opened
Speaker 4: in twenty twenty three, and it's a terrible place.
Speaker 3: There are cells of one hundred people.
Speaker 4: In that cell, there are eighty bunks, two toilets, and
Speaker 4: two basins. They are extremely confined. I think they get
Speaker 4: six point five feet of space per person. They get
Speaker 4: thirty minutes outside a day. They're forced to shave their heads,
Speaker 4: their ankles, and risk a chain. People are arbitrarily detained there.
Speaker 4: Sometimes the things like looking like they might be in
Speaker 4: a gang. Multiple human rights organizations including that, well, the
Speaker 4: State Department.
Speaker 3: It's not a human rights organization. Sometimes it's the opposite
Speaker 3: of that.
Speaker 4: The State Department itself has raised concerns about human rights
Speaker 4: abuse due to the quote unquote state of exception which
Speaker 4: exists in El Salvador, which allows the government to do
Speaker 4: these things without really any human rights ob sight. The
Speaker 4: US has already seemingly moved some migrants to Guantanamo Bay,
Speaker 4: to the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, and satellite imagery has
Speaker 4: shown tents going up there. Very few at the current time,
Speaker 4: and it seemed to come from Fort Lewis mccaud, which
Speaker 4: I couldn't work out. But there are tents. I guess
Speaker 4: I think I was washed. The Post had these satellite
Speaker 4: images of tents being constructed there. I'm trying to keep
Speaker 4: an eye on that satellite imagery. Of course, Biden open
Speaker 4: the door to outdoor attention. It's not impossible that we
Speaker 4: will see that again. But this Kaelic plan, this plan
Speaker 4: to send people to Al Salvador, especially US citizens, Evidently
Speaker 4: this is unconstitutional. The courts get to decide how much
Speaker 4: that matters, right, we don't, but this is deeply concerning.
Speaker 2: We're all waiting on the courts and we're all deeply concerned.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, there you.
Speaker 2: Go, one final break and then we'll come back to
Speaker 2: end and discuss Trump's targeting of teachers in relation to
Speaker 2: gender ideology. Welcome back. So, last week, Trump signed an
Speaker 2: executive order titled Ending Radical Indoctrination in K through twelve schooling,
Speaker 2: and part of its focus was to prevent teachers from
Speaker 2: calling trans students by their names and preferred pronouns, even
Speaker 2: promising to inflict legal punishment for doing so, basically like
Speaker 2: mandating dead naming, misgendering, and forcibly detransitioning students, and this
Speaker 2: order specifically took aim at quote unquote social transition.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 2: This is like the non medical social aspects of transitioning,
Speaker 2: like changing gender, names, pronouns, you know what facilities you use,
Speaker 2: socialization and like this TOYFF has historically been, you know,
Speaker 2: the most common form of transition for minors. It's the
Speaker 2: easiest to do. You don't even need you like your parents' help.
Speaker 2: But this order blames schools for indoctrinating children in quote
Speaker 2: radical anti American ideologies unquote, which they include gender ideology.
Speaker 2: As a part of the order, tries to mandate a
Speaker 2: national school bathroom band, restrict participation in school sports, and
Speaker 2: states that within ninety days, the Secretary of Education, the
Speaker 2: Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services,
Speaker 2: and the Attorney General shall provide Trump with a quote
Speaker 2: unquote ending in doctrination strategy to protect parental rights and
Speaker 2: eliminate all federal funding that directly or indirectly supports gender
Speaker 2: ideology and doctrination in K through twelve schools, including curriculums,
Speaker 2: teacher education, certification, licensing, employment, and training. Quote from the order, quote,
Speaker 2: the Attorney General shall coordinate with state attorneys general and
Speaker 2: local district attorneys in their efforts to enforce the law
Speaker 2: and file appropriate actions against k through twelve teachers who
Speaker 2: violate the law by one sexually exploiting miners, two unlawfully
Speaker 2: practicing medicine by offering diagnoses and treatment without the requisite license,
Speaker 2: and three otherwise unlawfully facilitating in the social transition of
Speaker 2: a minor unquote. So basically, the goal is to try
Speaker 2: to make calling a student by their name and pronouns
Speaker 2: illegal and wrapping this in either with some form of
Speaker 2: ex sexual exploitation, practicing medicine without a license, and using
Speaker 2: those as justifications for making this practice illegal.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 2: In response, school districts in Columbus, Ohio, Harrisburg, Virginia, and
Speaker 2: Montgomery County, Maryland announced that they would not comply with
Speaker 2: the order and continue to defend their students, according to journalists.
Speaker 2: To Aaron Reid, Seattle Public Schools published a statement reaffirming
Speaker 2: their commitment to protecting LGBTQUS students and staff, and later
Speaker 2: the California Department of Education pushed back on the legality
Speaker 2: of Trump's order. Other Blue cities and states have stayed
Speaker 2: quiet in the week since the order, with teachers and
Speaker 2: parents calling on places like the New York City Public
Speaker 2: School System to take a stance on if they will
Speaker 2: stand up for their transit students. So this is one
Speaker 2: side of the coin right now. The other side is healthcare,
Speaker 2: which we will close on now. In relation to Trump's
Speaker 2: executive order from his first week entitled Defending Women from
Speaker 2: gender ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal
Speaker 2: Government now, some hospitals have begun complying in advance by
Speaker 2: canceling patient appointments for gender affirming care. Denver Health and
Speaker 2: University of Colorado Health sacrificed the care of their patients
Speaker 2: for Trump's promise of continued funding by announcing that they
Speaker 2: would no longer be offering care including blockers and hormone
Speaker 2: replacement therapy for patients eighteen and under. The Virginia Commonwealth
Speaker 2: University and Children's Hospital of Richmond have also seen providing
Speaker 2: gender affirming care to those under nineteen. This past Monday,
Speaker 2: thousands of people gathered outside at the NYU Langan Hospital
Speaker 2: in protest of the hospital's choice to proactively comply with
Speaker 2: Trump's order to restrict healthcare. As the cancelation of two
Speaker 2: appointments for transpatients under the age of nineteen. Now, after
Speaker 2: these protests, which saw thousands of people protesting out in
Speaker 2: the streets. After this, the New York Attwority General sent
Speaker 2: a letter to the state healthcare systems saying that the
Speaker 2: state law requires that hospitals provide gender affirming care and
Speaker 2: claimed that the federal funding would not be impacted by
Speaker 2: inexecutive order. And like this really hammers on the point
Speaker 2: that like none of these executive orders are self enforcing,
Speaker 2: these all require proactive implementation by local actors. Doctor Jeremy
Speaker 2: Bernbaum was quoted in the New York Times. He's at
Speaker 2: pediatrician at the state run University Hospital of Brooklyn, and
Speaker 2: he was quoted as saying, quote, I am willing to
Speaker 2: go to jail to continue to provide your care, unquote.
Speaker 2: And you really can like protest hospitals that that comply
Speaker 2: in advance. The same thing with schools are these are
Speaker 2: targets that can provide actual pressure. And there's probably people
Speaker 2: on staff who are very sympathetic, and they just might
Speaker 2: be too scared to take a stance. Right now, and
Speaker 2: we have some breaking news as of this morning, State
Speaker 2: Attorney General from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Main Maryland, Massachusetts,
Speaker 2: New Jersey, Rhode Island, Nevada, Vermont, and Wisconsin released a
Speaker 2: statement saying that Trump's executive order banning trans healthcare is
Speaker 2: unlawful and the hospitals have a duty to provide care.
Speaker 2: So this is like the the most optimistic thing that
Speaker 2: we've seen so far. Now, obviously these these these are
Speaker 2: blue states. This is not going to impact red states
Speaker 2: who already have these types of bands either in process
Speaker 2: or you know, are going to have them down the line.
Speaker 2: At Georgia just put out a trans healthcare ban this
Speaker 2: morning for you know, a bill that'll reach our Senate
Speaker 2: in the next few weeks. But this is this is
Speaker 2: the current situation. Protests seem to have applied a degree
Speaker 2: of pressure that has gotten the state's attorney general to
Speaker 2: actually make a statement on this issue.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I will say, like so, I still teach, right
Speaker 4: a teacher at a community college, and sometimes through that
Speaker 4: we also teach high school students. If you are an
Speaker 4: educator or someone in healthcare, now is the time to
Speaker 4: be talking to your union about like how you meet
Speaker 4: this because like, the stronger we are the better we
Speaker 4: can confront this. And the only way to confront this
Speaker 4: is we all need to do it together. And like,
Speaker 4: these are conversations that we need to be having right now,
Speaker 4: Like we do not have time, and our unions are
Speaker 4: a very valuable tool for preserving our rights.
Speaker 10: Yeah, that's actually part of I was going to say.
Speaker 10: I've talked to a few union teachers who are like, yeah,
Speaker 10: we're gonna we're gonna go do this, We're going to
Speaker 10: go fight. So I expect in the next couple of
Speaker 10: weeks we're going to see more movement from the teachers' unions.
Speaker 10: And I think there's you know, there's an under I
Speaker 10: mean there's On the one hand, there is the threat
Speaker 10: that you know, these people do want to privatize the
Speaker 10: education system, right, so there is a chance that this
Speaker 10: is you know, trying to draw a backlash out of
Speaker 10: this is something that they're going to try to use
Speaker 10: to just completely eliminate like national federal education. But also,
Speaker 10: you know, this is something we've I want want to
Speaker 10: close this episode on that we've been talking about this
Speaker 10: whole time, right, is that this this whole coup is
Speaker 10: being carried out by a bunch of people with laptops
Speaker 10: and pieces of paper walking up the bureaucrats, and the
Speaker 10: bureaucrats doing what they're being told. Right, this is this
Speaker 10: is not a coup that's working with like an army
Speaker 10: that is showing up on your street. And you can go,
Speaker 10: like find the local bureaucrats who are the people who
Speaker 10: are supposed to enforce this stuff, and you can protest
Speaker 10: them and you can put some steel in their spine
Speaker 10: and make them make the administration actually try to do this.
Speaker 10: It's not that hard and they'll fucking cave.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, that's that's entirely what I was trying to
Speaker 1: get at earlier, and and you know, it ties into
Speaker 1: what James was saying, is like, this is the time
Speaker 1: to be making connections across as white a swath of
Speaker 1: the country as you can, including like everyone you can
Speaker 1: get in touch with who is not someone you would
Speaker 1: normally organize with, Like this is a moment of potential,
Speaker 1: and it's during moments of potential that you should be
Speaker 1: widening the swath of people that you connect to, because
Speaker 1: otherwise there's just no getting through this sort of shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we will be covering all these topics more in
Speaker 2: depth in our regular like daily episodes. I have a
Speaker 2: mind boggling, very frustrating episode on musk and the Trump
Speaker 2: campaign's promises of abolishing different departments of government, as well
Speaker 2: as a deep dive on like affirmative action and DEI
Speaker 2: wokeness in the coming weeks, and I'm sure we will
Speaker 2: all be focusing on different parts of this in our
Speaker 2: continuing episodes. But that does it for us today. See
Speaker 2: you on the other side.
Speaker 10: We reported the news.
Speaker 1: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 1: from now until the heat death.
Speaker 3: Of the universe.
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