Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Hey, what's up? And welcome to it could happen here.
Speaker 3: I'm Andrew Siege, I'm Andrew's I'm on YouTube, and I'm
Speaker 3: joined by James.
Speaker 4: It's me.
Speaker 3: It's nice to be back with you, Andrew once again.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Indeed, indeed in a time of poly crisis, unfortunately, Yeah,
Speaker 3: the Hoesen crisis. People are pretty familiar with the lack
Speaker 3: of affordability of hoes in the way that hosen has
Speaker 3: been speculated upon, you know, the way that more and
Speaker 3: more people are finance difficult to get something as simple
Speaker 3: as shelter. Yeah, and it's particularly generational, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, Like I don't generally love generational discourse, but
Speaker 4: it is a marked difference for our generation compared to
Speaker 4: the previous generation in terms of Yeah, housing security.
Speaker 3: The data bears it out in terms of the age
Speaker 3: at which people of previous generations were able to get
Speaker 3: house in versus you know what millennials and our gen
Speaker 3: z are dealing with there housing is concerned. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 3: And then on top of that, we'll also lacking a
Speaker 3: lot of public spaces, places to gather, places to reflect
Speaker 3: the socialized game, to explore, to interact, to discuss. Land
Speaker 3: and housing and social spaces are really what at the
Speaker 3: heart of human survival. You know, we speak of the
Speaker 3: hearth as in that space where you know, humans were gathering. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but unfortunately that that ownership of that space has been
Speaker 3: concentrated in hands of a few people, you know, ritually
Speaker 3: EAT's and corporations, estate, and some cases still literal aristocracies. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm sure you're you're very much familiar with that.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, just thinking about like the land I grew
Speaker 4: up on for people who were not privy to Andrew
Speaker 4: and I talking before the show. I just spent some
Speaker 4: time with the gwitch in people like in the very
Speaker 4: north of Alaska there, just in the sub Arctic, and
Speaker 4: someone was asking me like about like how I related
Speaker 4: to my ancestral land. I was thinking about it, Like,
Speaker 4: the village I grew up in was entirely owned by
Speaker 4: one family. They owned our house, in every other house,
Speaker 4: and my dad worked for them, and so did almost
Speaker 4: everyone else who lived there. Like, wow, an extremely feudal relationship.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's unfortunately the experience of a lot of people
Speaker 3: through human history, or the extra experience of landlessness or homelessness. Well,
Speaker 3: homelessness is relatively recent, yeah, all things considered, but or
Speaker 3: paying extortion in rents, which a lot of people unfortunately
Speaker 3: would have experienced throughout that feuderal period into a capitalism.
Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 3: But the thing is, for as long as humans have
Speaker 3: been humans, long before the states existed, and long after
Speaker 3: the states existed, people are going to stay where they
Speaker 3: want to stay. They're going to be where they want
Speaker 3: to be, right and at those take a couple all
Speaker 3: these laws and restrictions and property rights, all these things
Speaker 3: and criminalize a very natural human inclination, people are still
Speaker 3: going to do it right. And that's thing that people
Speaker 3: do is now known as squatting. Right, But it wasn't
Speaker 3: always so chastised and criminalized with that terminology before it
Speaker 3: was just you know, you find a piece of land,
Speaker 3: nobody else is living there, you go in and use that
Speaker 3: piece of land to survive. So today we'll be talking
Speaker 3: about issues with land ownership, looking into its history as
Speaker 3: a resistance practice in England, and seeing where a politicized
Speaker 3: approach to squadron could take us in the future. Oh cool,
Speaker 3: Crime thinks article on squatron was really helpful for this,
Speaker 3: so I'll link it in the show notes. Land ownership
Speaker 3: and governance are inextricably linked. Private property and land then
Speaker 3: the mooge out of peaceful agreements, but violence, wars of conquest, colonialism, slavery,
Speaker 3: and steed repression have been the true foundation of these
Speaker 3: now considered noble and official property titles. What we call
Speaker 3: ownership today is just violence legitimized by law, and it
Speaker 3: follows a very similar structure whether you're talking about feudalism
Speaker 3: and empire, land inclosure, colonization. Your start of the violence,
Speaker 3: it becomes officialized and then rent is extracted. This is
Speaker 3: not something that people took line down. Of course, people
Speaker 3: have long resisted it, you know, But this is why
Speaker 3: the government responds with the police and the armies to
Speaker 3: protect the landlords, and the people have criticized and have
Speaker 3: called out these practices. Thinkers like Ricardo Flores Margon and
Speaker 3: Alexander Berkmann, peterco Potkin mcunan. All of these hammered home
Speaker 3: the point of the absurdity at the heart of land ownership,
Speaker 3: the idea that some of they could just pull up somewhere,
Speaker 3: claim an area of land as theirs, and back it
Speaker 3: by soldiers and pieces of paper. Now, anarchists not in
Speaker 3: the business of fixating on just one system of domination
Speaker 3: or the other, because they're very connected. You know, landlords
Speaker 3: and governments and all the other authorities contribute to the
Speaker 3: system of domination that we all live under. Assander's core
Speaker 3: rights in anarchists squat in and land use. In the West,
Speaker 3: land ownership and government use exploitation and manipulation in a
Speaker 3: similar manner. Where a landowner builds a fence, the government erects.
Speaker 3: Where land owner charges rent, a government levies taxes. Were
Speaker 3: landowner advertises a vacant house sas not to waste it
Speaker 3: as an income producer. In property, a government encourages migration
Speaker 3: to those of its territories which are not producing adequate revenue.
Speaker 3: We are landowner evict a tenant, a government wages war
Speaker 3: against the population. Right now, in the United States, as
Speaker 3: we can see, the government is asian war not only
Speaker 3: against its indigenous population, its black population, but also it's
Speaker 3: migrant population and a few other populations. The list unfortunately
Speaker 3: goes on.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like the two are so tied, right that, Like
Speaker 4: in many parts of the United Kingdom, like as it
Speaker 4: was moving towards, like before we had a universal franchise
Speaker 4: right where people could vote if it were citizens, and
Speaker 4: over a certain age, they had a property owner franchise right,
Speaker 4: like if you owned land, you could vote, and if
Speaker 4: you didn't then you.
Speaker 3: Couldn't landed voting. Yes, yeah, and a sense that is
Speaker 3: still reflected in the way that the government operates today.
Speaker 3: You know, the landowners, the capitalists, they still have far
Speaker 3: outsized influence with anyone else, considering the laws and the
Speaker 3: policies that our governments carry out.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, And this is really get into the heart of it,
Speaker 3: because you know, we may have had the abolition of
Speaker 3: slavery and the abolition of selfdom, but in no way
Speaker 3: that the formal abolition of those things end exploitation at all.
Speaker 3: It has continued in new and old forms. You know,
Speaker 3: without the police and armies and laws propping them up,
Speaker 3: private property would collapse. But those things still exist, and
Speaker 3: it is through those things that the power to exclude, extract,
Speaker 3: and dominate continues throughout our society and continues to uphold
Speaker 3: violence throughout her society. You know, slavery may have been
Speaker 3: formally abolished, but we still find it in the prison system.
Speaker 3: So if they may have been formally abolished, but we
Speaker 3: still find it in slightly different forms with debt and
Speaker 3: the way that people are tied on by debt, and
Speaker 3: as long as that principle of extraction and exploitation and
Speaker 3: and rent is not dealt with, we will continue to
Speaker 3: see new forms and old forms bringing up.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm going to play the devil's advocate for a moment,
Speaker 5: right and.
Speaker 3: See that Maybe you know, the problem is just the
Speaker 3: violence of its origins, the problem with land ownership and property.
Speaker 3: If it just came from violent origins and no other
Speaker 3: violence continued, maybe it could be excused. Maybe we could say, okay,
Speaker 3: well that's in the past and we can do stuff
Speaker 3: about that, but we could leave the system as it is.
Speaker 3: But the violence didn't stop with the way that the
Speaker 3: system originated. The violence continues, you know, as and as
Speaker 3: Core notes called ownership is enforced through eviction. You know,
Speaker 3: families are thrown out of homes, squatters beaten back by police,
Speaker 3: villagers raised to expand mining operations, et cetera. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: then these economic theft and cultural destruction involved as well,
Speaker 3: you know, because communities are uprooted and digest traditions are severed,
Speaker 3: neighborhood cultures getting raised by gentrification. And then all this
Speaker 3: dispossession drives unemployment because without access to land, people are
Speaker 3: forced into wage labor on the terms of capitalists. This
Speaker 3: is really how that rapid period of industrialization got started,
Speaker 3: you know, with the enclosure of the commons.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's just thinking about that. With the folks are
Speaker 4: with with right there. Their lifestyle is to hunt caribou.
Speaker 4: That is how they've lived for twenty thousand years. They
Speaker 4: also fish for salmon, but there are still some there
Speaker 4: are a fewer salmon due to climate change and the
Speaker 4: downstream effects of that. Right, But like they have their
Speaker 4: own land, a large portion of land. But it's the
Speaker 4: fact that someone in this case a Trump administration, could
Speaker 4: lease oil rights in other land which would directly impact
Speaker 4: their land. Because in this case, the Caribou can't carve
Speaker 4: if there are oil wells where they want to have
Speaker 4: their carves, right yeah. And so like it's not just
Speaker 4: that them having some land of their own does not
Speaker 4: provide a solution to the issue, which is that people can,
Speaker 4: under our current system own exploit and destroy a resource
Speaker 4: that should be common.
Speaker 3: I mean, it really highlights the absurd notion that you
Speaker 3: can just cut up land, right, yeah, exactly, but you
Speaker 3: can separate it by by boundaries and that its self
Speaker 3: contained and that we all the land and wars on
Speaker 3: the earth is connected, yeah, through all the cycles and systems.
Speaker 3: There's one big biosphere. Right.
Speaker 4: The damage done in one place will have an impact
Speaker 4: on another place. And I mean that's so very obvious
Speaker 4: to most of us now, but that our system of
Speaker 4: land ownership ignores that, pretend it doesn't happen, right yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Instead, we're upholding this ridiculous notion that you can
Speaker 3: maintain exclusive lordship, literal land lordship over a couple of
Speaker 3: acres of property and just do whatever you want with
Speaker 3: it because it's under your name.
Speaker 4: Right yeah, And that's that's your problem, because it's your land,
Speaker 4: and it's ludicrous, it's completely ridiculous to make that claim.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And on top of all of these consequences, you know,
Speaker 3: we're also dealing with poverty and hunger because when people
Speaker 3: are producing lots of food, rent and mortgages continue to
Speaker 3: keep people in a permanent state of paying just to exist.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Right, And then this concentrated ownership of land and of
Speaker 3: property produces inefficient production and environmental degradation because property ends
Speaker 3: upsitting idle or was used to speculate, even though millions
Speaker 3: of people are in need of that land are starving
Speaker 3: as a result of lack of access to that land.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Also, because so much land gets traded around as assets,
Speaker 3: as property, rather than it being what it is, which
Speaker 3: is our commonwealth, there's no need for the owner at
Speaker 3: the point in time to really care about, you know,
Speaker 3: the quality of the soil, the impact on the ecosystems.
Speaker 3: They don't have to. All they're concerning is their only
Speaker 3: need is to concern themselves with profit.
Speaker 4: Right, Like, it's an asset to be traded, not a
Speaker 4: thing that has inherent value and should be protected not
Speaker 4: just because of its economic value, but because it's all
Speaker 4: that we can leave future generations.
Speaker 3: Right exactly, And I mean With all these issues of
Speaker 3: the land in mind, I think we can talk now
Speaker 3: about how people have resisted, particularly in England. Yeah, which
Speaker 3: is really why I want to talk to you in
Speaker 3: particular with this episode.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, I'm excited to hear which which particular ifing
Speaker 4: you want to talk about.
Speaker 3: I mean, the story can begin in the first century, yeah, right,
Speaker 3: with the British tribes resisting the expansion of the Roman Empire.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: We could also speak about the Diggers of the seventeenth
Speaker 3: century in England in massacred for trying to reclaim common Land.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: England has a very long history of land struggles.
Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely, and it's completely or it's not lost to
Speaker 4: us now people have reclaimed, especially that the diggers, right,
Speaker 4: but there are still commons to an extent, but they're
Speaker 4: nothing like what they were, right, Like, you can go
Speaker 4: to Clapham Common and just get great as a sheep
Speaker 4: if you wanted to. And it's really sad that we've
Speaker 4: lost that. We've completely as a nation like accepted that
Speaker 4: land is the thing that people can only shouldn't just
Speaker 4: be for everyone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I kind of see how that would
Speaker 3: get to the extent that it did. Because you know,
Speaker 3: it was the capital of the British Empire and in
Speaker 3: many wes, the British Isles was the laboratory where that
Speaker 3: sort of experimentation with the control of people and land
Speaker 3: got started and was then able to expand elsewhere.
Speaker 4: Yeah, very much. So yeah.
Speaker 3: So, I mean, there's a long timeline that we could
Speaker 3: go through, but I really want to focus on the
Speaker 3: all the ways the people have been squatting in England
Speaker 3: over the twentieth century. You know, after the Second World
Speaker 3: War it's no surprise anyone that Britain was going through it.
Speaker 3: Whole neighborhoods were flattened, housing stock was in ruins, and
Speaker 3: for the six years while the bombs were fallen, not
Speaker 3: a single new home was built. So people took matters
Speaker 3: into their own hands. You know. Across the country, families
Speaker 3: and veterans began to squat because they came home from
Speaker 3: the war and they had nowhere to live. In Brighton,
Speaker 3: a group of ex servicemen call themselves Virgilantes, led by
Speaker 3: the legendary Harry Cowley, started cracking houses for families. The
Speaker 3: spirit of it eventually spread like wildfire and abandoned army
Speaker 3: camps which were once beent for miolition soon became makeshift neighborhoods.
Speaker 3: By nineteen forty six, over forty five thousand people were
Speaker 3: squatted in more than a thousand locations, and I mean
Speaker 3: the government was concerned this could only lead to anarchy,
Speaker 3: but faced with tens of thousands of people who had
Speaker 3: self frehoused, the state didn't really have any choice but
Speaker 3: to step back, right, you know, direct actions solved an
Speaker 3: issue that their bureaucracy couldn't solve, and the pr of
Speaker 3: kicking out a bunch of veterans from homes was not
Speaker 3: a line they seemed willing to cross at that point
Speaker 3: in time. Was times changed, but yeah.
Speaker 4: They wouldn't have any fear of doing that.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: It is only English that were squat in in the UK.
Speaker 3: You know, you also had Bangladeshi immigrants that end up
Speaker 3: coming into the UK, particularly around the nineteen seventies, and
Speaker 3: the issue was that single men couldn't get council housing
Speaker 3: unless they had a family, but they could bring their
Speaker 3: families over into the UK without housing, so it's like
Speaker 3: a cash twenty two. They had all these rows of
Speaker 3: council flats sitting empty, rotten, and young men who wanted
Speaker 3: to bring their families over, can't bring their families over,
Speaker 3: can't get housing, what are they gonna do? They end
Speaker 3: up squatting. Right, Organizers like Terry Fitzpatrick, working with groups
Speaker 3: like Race Today and later the Bengali House and Action Group,
Speaker 3: opened up derelict blocks to Bengali families. Pelham House, for instance,
Speaker 3: which was slated for demolition, was transformed into homes for
Speaker 3: three hundred people by the end of nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 3: Over one thousand Bangladeshis ended up living in East End
Speaker 3: squads during that period, and eventually, through that taking that
Speaker 3: full step of direct action, they won. By the early
Speaker 3: nineteen eighties, the council caved, rehoused the squatters locally and
Speaker 3: they ended up getting to live right where they wanted
Speaker 3: to live. But unfortunately, as you might expect, this came
Speaker 3: with racist violence. In nineteen seventy eight, altub Ali was
Speaker 3: stabbed to death by three skinheads in Whitechapel and there's
Speaker 3: now a park that was renamed in his memory, where
Speaker 3: the history of his people can be remembered and live on.
Speaker 3: Beyond the English Sandi Bangladeshi immigrants, you also had another
Speaker 3: marginalized group that took on the tactic of squatter in Brixton.
Speaker 3: The Gay Liberation Front took over houses along Rilton Road
Speaker 3: and Mile Road, creating a network of communal homes which
Speaker 3: shared the gardens, and as you can imagine in the seventies,
Speaker 3: eighties and nineties, you know, this was really a refuge,
Speaker 3: you know, for queer people dealing with isolation and hostility
Speaker 3: from their families, from their communities. These squats ended up
Speaker 3: becoming places where they can find love and solidarity and
Speaker 3: theater and radical politics. Raylton Road was also home to
Speaker 3: black radicalism and black radicals squat in in that territory.
Speaker 3: Ol of Morris and Liz Obi's squatted in the nineteen
Speaker 3: seventies and resisted multiple eviction attempts and their space evolved
Speaker 3: into Sabah Bookshop and later the anarchist one two one Center,
Speaker 3: which lasted until nineteen ninety nine. Now, this intersection of
Speaker 3: black queer and squatron created Brixton's reputation as a frontline
Speaker 3: of resistance police harassment, racist violence, and neglect would boil
Speaker 3: over into days of rioting in Brixton in nineteen eighty one,
Speaker 3: and amidst that chaos, the Gay squats of Realton threw
Speaker 3: open their doors, even dragon tables and chairs into the
Speaker 3: streets for a kind of riot party, a mix of
Speaker 3: drag and defiance. And through all this these squats allow
Speaker 3: people to survive. They became places where people could experiment
Speaker 3: with alternative living, even had some people declaring independence. There's
Speaker 3: a space in West London called Frestonia which is sued
Speaker 3: to own stamps and had a two year old as
Speaker 3: Minister of Education. Yeah, and then you had other squads
Speaker 3: ended up becoming seeds for future cooperatives and social centers
Speaker 3: and even some businesses for this goal and age of
Speaker 3: squat and kind of came into a decline by the
Speaker 3: nineties and two thousand sons gentrification and new laws had
Speaker 3: to tighten the screws. You know, streets like Barrington Square
Speaker 3: or Saint Agnes's Place which were once thriving squatted communities
Speaker 3: were cleared up. You know, the law was changed to
Speaker 3: make could unquote adverse possession harder, so long term squatters
Speaker 3: could no longer as easily claim ownership. And then sitting
Speaker 3: councils like Lambeth Council began selling off properties that it
Speaker 3: had ignored for decades. Evicting people who have been living
Speaker 3: there for decades, raising families.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I guess post Thatcher, like when they could sell
Speaker 4: off the council houses like that massively contributed to the
Speaker 4: decline of working class communities, right, and then Britain went
Speaker 4: through this extreme neoliberal turn in the late nineties with
Speaker 4: like New Labor and Labour's entire thing came to be
Speaker 4: punching down on the young people in the working class.
Speaker 4: So like it lines up with our general political.
Speaker 1: Like that.
Speaker 4: I was a teenager at that time, right, I remember
Speaker 4: how bleak it felt to be, like all the time
Speaker 4: getting this like oh cool britann you know, you know,
Speaker 4: like Britain is having its like renaissance as this like
Speaker 4: like like outside of empire, like as a cultural capital
Speaker 4: or whatever. Meanwhile people are struggling to get by and
Speaker 4: people fighting it hard to put food on their table.
Speaker 4: It was just such a I mean, looking back, it
Speaker 4: was the way things were going to be for the
Speaker 4: rest of my life, at least up to now, I guess.
Speaker 4: But at the time I remember it being such a
Speaker 4: jarring experience.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's it's quite an interesting quote unquote end of history, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, yeah, it's just the the end of caring.
Speaker 4: Like it was just such a yeah to be to
Speaker 4: be told that we'd like perfected human existence. Meanwhile, racialized
Speaker 4: violence was on the increase, right, Like people were struggling.
Speaker 4: We like had become more connected and aware of each
Speaker 4: other struggles. Like we could see people around the world,
Speaker 4: not just in the UK struggling, right. We saw the
Speaker 4: communities that like my parents grew up in, just gut
Speaker 4: it by the withdrawal of the failure of the industries
Speaker 4: that were there before. The whole town's with like no
Speaker 4: reason for existing anymore. And then to come on top
Speaker 4: of that and have like, oh yeah, but it will
Speaker 4: cost you more just to exist in this town which
Speaker 4: is shit now and there's nothing to do, but we're
Speaker 4: going to use all the power of the state to
Speaker 4: try and extract every penny that you have.
Speaker 3: Lets just squeeze everything out of you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, just a bleak vision going home now. I just
Speaker 4: see the continuation of that decline line of like some
Speaker 4: of those towns you know where there's no particular reason
Speaker 4: for people to live there, and it's where they're from
Speaker 4: and it's where their community is. But it's getting harder
Speaker 4: and harder for them to live there. And you know,
Speaker 4: the industries that used to at least give people a
Speaker 4: chance to like have a dignified life there are now gone.
Speaker 4: Get the ability of land laws to extract you know,
Speaker 4: mega landlords now right, These giant corporations building these generic
Speaker 4: homes all over the UK. It's still very much there,
Speaker 4: and the state has doubled down on supporting them and
Speaker 4: completely refuse to support its own people.
Speaker 3: Yep, in London, as and else where, the state and
Speaker 3: the capitalist market of hand in hand to really eraase
Speaker 3: our autonomy, our independence, our ability to live and to value. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, ivan as places like Berlin and Amsterdam and
Speaker 3: Copenhagen had some leaps forward where Squadron was concerned, you know,
Speaker 3: legalized housing cooperatives and that sort of thing. Particularly in London,
Speaker 3: that was the opposite of the case. You know, things
Speaker 3: got harder.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like Britain led the charge in like this kind
Speaker 4: of particularly cruel and callous neoliberalism right from the from
Speaker 4: the nineties to today, like with absolutely no concern for
Speaker 4: the well being of its people. Even Yeah, you would
Speaker 4: see it going to continental Europe, you know, compared to
Speaker 4: living in Barcelona, which I did later, like squad still existed.
Speaker 4: People economically things were equally dire, right, if not worse.
Speaker 4: Spain had a really rough time as fifty off two
Speaker 4: thousand and eight, but like the communities hadn't been quite
Speaker 4: so destroyed by the state as they were in many
Speaker 4: areas of the UK.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I don't want to paint a
Speaker 3: completely dark picture of London, right because there is still
Speaker 3: and I can struggle, there's still radical social centers. They're
Speaker 3: still yeah, yeah, squat, and I mean some squads end
Speaker 3: up being temporary, you know, short lived social spaces and centers.
Speaker 3: Speceis to help organize or to protest or to you know,
Speaker 3: create comment culture.
Speaker 4: But yeah, like it's not Yeah, I mean I've made
Speaker 4: London sound like some kind of like blade renal thing,
Speaker 4: which is not by any mean that I've not spent
Speaker 4: a great deal of my life in London. It's too
Speaker 4: much city for me, that's fair. But I do, like
Speaker 4: I enjoy visiting friends and their projects there and that
Speaker 4: kind of thing. And I think even post COVID there's
Speaker 4: been some resurgence. It's difficult. I don't want to suggest
Speaker 4: that things are not still extremely difficult for people trying
Speaker 4: to make it ends to meet because they are. But
Speaker 4: like people are aware of the concept of mutual aid
Speaker 4: who may not have been before, and that's been good. Yeah,
Speaker 4: there's still our squad to struggle. There is still people
Speaker 4: fighting very hard to like live a dignified life and
Speaker 4: secure that for other people as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, and that's that's really what I want to highlight.
Speaker 3: You know that what Squadron represents really is you know,
Speaker 3: you know, both a struggle for necessity but also an
Speaker 3: example of where I imagination can take us. You know,
Speaker 3: our resistance does not have to take on the same
Speaker 3: old forms of protests and to devoid per see. Right,
Speaker 3: there are things that we can do as ordinary people,
Speaker 3: whether we're black, whether we're gay, whether we're a Bangladesha immigrant,
Speaker 3: a veteran, as an ordinary person, you could you can
Speaker 3: also you know, take on the right action to create homes,
Speaker 3: resist racism, build communities and fight the state.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Like I think about a lot in Greece, right
Speaker 4: where anarchists have squatted places that were built for like
Speaker 4: the era when people could come from northern Europe to
Speaker 4: Southern Europe to spend their money and then avoid the winter.
Speaker 4: And since you know, general economic decline that doesn't happen
Speaker 4: as much. And now people have squatted those hotels to
Speaker 4: allow migrants a dignified place to live, right, Yeah, that's
Speaker 4: it's a really beautiful project. It's envisioning another world literally
Speaker 4: in the ruins of the old world exactly. I think
Speaker 4: it's a really beautiful thing that people do to you know,
Speaker 4: take that action to address not just to protest something,
Speaker 4: but to say, like the system which deprives people of
Speaker 4: even a safe place to live, even the dignity of
Speaker 4: being able to sleep in it under a roof at night, Like,
Speaker 4: we are going to take action that strikes at the
Speaker 4: roots of that to ensure that we give others that
Speaker 4: the dignity that they deserve. And that's really special.
Speaker 3: Agreed, Agreed. And I mean I don't want to romanticize
Speaker 3: squat in as you know, just a easy way of life.
Speaker 3: It certainly is not. But to a quote crime think
Speaker 3: the lesson of history is that in times of hows
Speaker 3: in deprivation, people squat the empty is the fact that
Speaker 3: this has been made illegal. There's not blind people to
Speaker 3: the empty buildings or to the use of squat and
Speaker 3: as a tactic, the crack speaker in Amsterdam East promotes
Speaker 3: the slogan what neat mag khan knogsteats what is not
Speaker 3: allowed is still possible forgive my terrible Dutch.
Speaker 4: Yeah mine's not much better. Yeah, I like that slogan
Speaker 4: a lot. Like I think the issue of homelessness in
Speaker 4: the United States in particular is something that like I
Speaker 4: think about a lot because I travel a lot. I
Speaker 4: remember sitting in a cafe in Kurdistan and i'd just
Speaker 4: been I was outside of just walking around, and some
Speaker 4: people invite me to join their dominoes game. So I
Speaker 4: was playing dominoes, you know, like practicing my terrible Kurdish,
Speaker 4: and these guys were asking me like is it true
Speaker 4: that like people, and like they were especially interested in,
Speaker 4: like the veterans who have been US soldiers, like sleep
Speaker 4: on the street in America, And I was like, yeah,
Speaker 4: that's the thing, like and they're like, why, what's the
Speaker 4: deal with that. I know the answer is that we
Speaker 4: have enough houses for everyone, but we've just treated them
Speaker 4: as a commodity to exchange. Right, We've been told that
Speaker 4: people can't live there, even though there's space for them
Speaker 4: to live, and even though it's actively hurting them living
Speaker 4: on the street. Right, it's such a condemnation of the
Speaker 4: situation we're in as a society in need.
Speaker 3: It is, what does the future look like? You know,
Speaker 3: none of us can really know. Yeah, but maybe we
Speaker 3: can sketch some outlines of how we can approach lanues differently.
Speaker 3: We could look to the past, and that's common traditions
Speaker 3: of the past as inspiration for what might return. And
Speaker 3: we could look to our own imagination of what the
Speaker 3: future can look like as we refuse domination. We can squat,
Speaker 3: of course, to show the cracks in this concept of property.
Speaker 3: You know, we can collective eze and collectively organize spaces
Speaker 3: for farming or production. You know, we can really, really
Speaker 3: could do any number of things. I think the guidance
Speaker 3: thread there has to be equity. Yeah, you know, it
Speaker 3: has to be recognition that nobody has a right to land.
Speaker 3: They don't use that absentee landlordism is something utterly absurd
Speaker 3: and can be rejected out right. I think we can
Speaker 3: also consider the non human in our approach to land
Speaker 3: in the future, you know, considering the the rights and
Speaker 3: responsibilities we have toward animals and plants that live in
Speaker 3: spaces that you know, should have their own existence beyond
Speaker 3: human utility. There will always be conflicts about how we
Speaker 3: can use these spaces and also how we might resolve
Speaker 3: these disputes. But I think it is clear that whereever
Speaker 3: there's somebody who attempts to monopolize land by force, we
Speaker 3: can respond adequately. I think the tactic of squatn is
Speaker 3: one small, unfinished but necessary step towards a future where
Speaker 3: we reject property, where land is shared, where domination is abolished,
Speaker 3: where we as a human community and as a living community,
Speaker 3: can free decide together how we live on this earth.
Speaker 3: We'll just have to see that's it for me or
Speaker 3: power to all the people this has When it can
Speaker 3: happen here, I'm Andressage. That is James Stout and peace.
Speaker 7: Hello everyone, and welcome to it could happen here. My
Speaker 7: name is Dana al Kurd, and I'm a writer, analyst,
Speaker 7: and researcher of Palestinian and Arab politics. I'm an associate
Speaker 7: professor of political science and a senior non resident fellow
Speaker 7: at the Arab Center Washington. I'm recording this on October nineteenth,
Speaker 7: twenty twenty five. Negotiators from a number of countries and
Speaker 7: Israel were in Cairo recently discussing the next phase of
Speaker 7: the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel. Hamas has since
Speaker 7: released all remaining Israeli hostages, as well as the bodies
Speaker 7: of those who were killed, and Israel has withdrawn from
Speaker 7: certain parts of the Gaza strip and started to release
Speaker 7: political prisoners as well as the bodies of Palestinians who
Speaker 7: have been killed after they were detained since October seventh.
Speaker 7: Some of the testimonies from these prisoners is just incredibly
Speaker 7: heart to stomach. The degree of the humanization that's been
Speaker 7: allowed to take place in these Israeli prisons, the torture
Speaker 7: and abuse that they faced is truly truly harrowing. Some
Speaker 7: of the Palestinian bodies that have been released are mutilated
Speaker 7: with extreme signs of torture. Some were released blindfolded and cuffed,
Speaker 7: returned with a noose around their neck. Greta Tunberg, who
Speaker 7: was on the flotilla recently trying to break the siege
Speaker 7: of Gaza, just also returned from Israeli prison where she
Speaker 7: was also abused and stripped and mistreated. She said in
Speaker 7: a recent interview, if they do this to a white
Speaker 7: person with a Swedish passport. We can only imagine what
Speaker 7: they do to Palestinians. And of course we are seeing
Speaker 7: this play out before our eyes. In a fair and
Speaker 7: just world where international law meant something, there would be
Speaker 7: consequences for this. Instead, today I want to talk about
Speaker 7: this plan that's been proposed by the Trump administration, the
Speaker 7: twenty point piece plan for Gaza. Reportedly, ex UK Prime
Speaker 7: Minister Tony Blair has been consulting with Trump and his
Speaker 7: son in law slash advisor Jared Kushner for some time
Speaker 7: hashing this plan out. We'll get back to him in
Speaker 7: a bit, as he's quite the character. This plan, as
Speaker 7: the name suggests, has twenty points, but it's a little
Speaker 7: light on details. It outlines the return of remaining Israel
Speaker 7: hostages very quickly, within seventy two hours. It says the
Speaker 7: Gaza strip needs to be quote demilitarized. It talks about
Speaker 7: the creation of an international stabilization force, an international security
Speaker 7: force to operate on the ground in Gaza with the
Speaker 7: eventual withdrawal of Israeli troops, but within a buffer zone,
Speaker 7: and this force would consist of soldiers from other countries.
Speaker 7: It also talks about the formation of a quote technocratic
Speaker 7: a political Palestinian temporary government to run the Gaza Strip
Speaker 7: territory until the peace process is concluded. But this temporary
Speaker 7: Palestinian government would only be allowed to engage in service provision,
Speaker 7: nothing more. That government would also be overseen by a
Speaker 7: quote Board of Peace run by Trump himself, his pal
Speaker 7: Tony Blair, and other yet unspecified members. There is some
Speaker 7: language on the economic development of a quote new Gaza,
Speaker 7: and some discussion of initiatives to promote tolerance, essentially to
Speaker 7: deradicalize Palestinians. Notably, the plan does not endorse ethnic cleansing
Speaker 7: of Palestinians from Gaza, which was wildly a serious thing
Speaker 7: on the table for a few months that Trump endorsed,
Speaker 7: but what it does say is still pretty insidious. Essentially,
Speaker 7: the plan says that a possible pathway to Palestinian self
Speaker 7: determination and statehood is conditioned on advances in quote Gaza's
Speaker 7: redevelopment and a quote Palestinian authority reform program that is
Speaker 7: faithfully carried out. Only then, the plan says, quote, conditions
Speaker 7: may finally be in place for a credible pathway to
Speaker 7: Palestinian self determination and statehood. Basically, if the Palestinians do good,
Speaker 7: if they comply with the International Security Force, if they
Speaker 7: take orders from the Board of Peace and quote reform
Speaker 7: the PA in some way, and what that means is
Speaker 7: a really big open question, then maybe their demands for
Speaker 7: self determination and statehood will eventually be discussed. As I've
Speaker 7: said before on previous episodes, that statehood part is a
Speaker 7: bit tricky because statehood means different things to different people. Apparently,
Speaker 7: Jared Kushner talked about maybe giving Palestinians a state without
Speaker 7: the annoying little detail of actual sovereignty is really prime
Speaker 7: minister that signed the Oslo Accords. Yet Zakrabin, which was
Speaker 7: the first time Palestinians and Israelis agreed to anything, directly
Speaker 7: said after signing that Israel would only ever give Palestinians
Speaker 7: something quote less than a state. The international community keeps
Speaker 7: recognizing a Palestinian state when the Palestinians don't really have
Speaker 7: control of any territory. It's like, is the state in
Speaker 7: the room with us now. It's also important to note
Speaker 7: here that the plan that Trump is proposing doesn't really
Speaker 7: include any Palestinian input, at least meaningfully. The goal from
Speaker 7: Israel and the US's perspective is for Hamas to be
Speaker 7: removed from the equation altogether. There's some discussion actually still
Speaker 7: of whether they will actually disarm or not, because Hamas
Speaker 7: has said to the media that it's not considering this.
Speaker 7: And as I mentioned, there is this throwaway line about
Speaker 7: reforming the Palestinian Authority, but what that means and how
Speaker 7: the Palestinian people actually factor in isn't addressed. Here's my
Speaker 7: educated guess. When Trump, an Israel, and the international community
Speaker 7: say they want to reform the PA, we have to
Speaker 7: look at what they've been doing and pushing for in
Speaker 7: the past couple of months to understand what that actually means.
Speaker 7: So for them, if we look at their track record,
Speaker 7: reforming the PA means figuring out an acceptable alternative from
Speaker 7: their perspective, to replace the octagenarian Palestinian President Mahamud Abbas,
Speaker 7: so that the PA can seem on paper more legitimate
Speaker 7: and better positioned to sign away Palestinian rights during future negotiations.
Speaker 7: They've already been pushing behind the scenes to set that up.
Speaker 7: They pressured Abbas to convene the Palestine Liberation Organization Central Council,
Speaker 7: change the bylaws, create a vice president position, and appoint
Speaker 7: the guy that's acceptable to the US and Israel to
Speaker 7: that role. That man was sena che Palestinian businessman and
Speaker 7: former security guy who polls at two percent with Palestinians.
Speaker 7: What reforming the PA does not mean it looks like,
Speaker 7: is actual democratic reform where Palestinians can choose not only
Speaker 7: their president but also on their legislative representatives and on
Speaker 7: the PLO legislative body, the National Council. It looks like
Speaker 7: reforming the PA doesn't mean all Palestinians will be allowed
Speaker 7: to participate if limited elections are held, and it seems
Speaker 7: it doesn't mean responding to what Palestinian civil society has
Speaker 7: been asking for, which is reforming the PA by reforming
Speaker 7: the PLO altogether so that all Palestinians can participate in
Speaker 7: the discussion of national liberation. We can guess that the US, Israel,
Speaker 7: and the international community quote unquote are unlikely to offer
Speaker 7: any of this because they've propped up the PA in
Speaker 7: the past and seem on propping up some puppet government
Speaker 7: of the PA in the future. But they need the PA,
Speaker 7: as some acceptable Palestinian entity to be even tangentially involved
Speaker 7: in future negotiations so that they can say, look, the
Speaker 7: Palestinians agree to this is legitimate, even if that PA
Speaker 7: doesn't represent people. Even if most Palestinians eighty five percent
Speaker 7: in the latest poll are dissatisfied with the PA's conduct
Speaker 7: and forty two percent support the the solution of the
Speaker 7: PA altogether, this is a dangerous game to play. Any
Speaker 7: sort of peace process in the future, as impossible as
Speaker 7: it seems at this current moment, that isn't predicated on
Speaker 7: the complete annihilation of one side of the conflict, will
Speaker 7: need some degree of public support. It will need societies
Speaker 7: involved in this conflict to buy into the process. Otherwise
Speaker 7: you get spoilers, you get political actors engaging in violence
Speaker 7: to disrupt the peace process, or you don't really resolve
Speaker 7: the underlying issues in an even compromised, satisfactory way and
Speaker 7: people get upset and the conflict continues. So, if you
Speaker 7: don't include people's buy in, what you're banking on is
Speaker 7: being able to suppress people, and what you want isn't
Speaker 7: really peace. It's authoritarian conflict management. It's illiberal. It maintains
Speaker 7: structural violence in the name of preserving peace. It means
Speaker 7: Palestinians wouldn't get the rights they have under international law
Speaker 7: the right to self determination, and it means the occupation
Speaker 7: in some form doesn't end.
Speaker 8: The thing is.
Speaker 7: This is well understood and it's well understood by the
Speaker 7: people involved in this twenty point piece plan for Gaza.
Speaker 7: Tony Blair, for example, was Prime Minister of the UK
Speaker 7: when the Northern Ireland conflict was being negotiated and settled.
Speaker 7: He understood then that public buy in was important. The
Speaker 7: Good Friday Agreement, which ended the conflict in Northern Ireland
Speaker 7: for the past twenty seven years, had not one, but
Speaker 7: two referendums, one for the people of Northern Ireland and
Speaker 7: one for the people of the Republic of Ireland. The
Speaker 7: process of getting to the Good Friday Agreement also included
Speaker 7: all groups militant groups from both sides of the conflict.
Speaker 7: This is what it takes for a conflict to be
Speaker 7: contained in some shape or form. But for some reason,
Speaker 7: when international leaders or ex leaders in the case of
Speaker 7: Tony Blair, think about conflicts in the Middle East involving Arabs,
Speaker 7: then public buy in, democratic processes, sustainable peace no longer
Speaker 7: factor into decision making. The buy in an opinion of
Speaker 7: the public matters, But apparently only certain publics. In other conflicts, also,
Speaker 7: like the breakdown of Yugoslavia, the perpetrators of genopocidal violence
Speaker 7: were held accountable by international They were taken to the Hague.
Speaker 7: They faced repercussions, of course, not perfectly, not entirely, not everyone.
Speaker 7: Some parties of the conflict that emerged in Bosnia after
Speaker 7: were rewarded for their violence. The vision of the Serbian
Speaker 7: leadership that committed war crimes in Bosnia came to fruition
Speaker 7: to some degree in the form of Republica Serpska today,
Speaker 7: which is a semi autonomous region that divides Bosnia Herzegovina.
Speaker 7: But nevertheless, the international community at least understood the necessity
Speaker 7: of holding perpetrators accountable for violence and war crimes, even
Speaker 7: if the execution was incomplete. In this case, there is
Speaker 7: no such discussion. A number of human rights organizations and
Speaker 7: the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory
Speaker 7: have found Israeli leaders President Isaac Hertzog, Prime Minister Benjamin
Speaker 7: Netanyahu and then Defense Minister Yuav Gallant personally responsible for
Speaker 7: the decisions made in Gaza, the decision to engage in
Speaker 7: genocide in Gaza, but the ceasefire plan, which they are
Speaker 7: billing as a quote peace plan for a new Gaza
Speaker 7: and they're trying to make the basis of future negotiations,
Speaker 7: says nothing about accountability for crimes committed. Trump, in fact,
Speaker 7: went in front of the Kanesset, the Israeli parliament, and
Speaker 7: insisted on his support for Prime Minister Nataniahu. He even
Speaker 7: got involved in Natanyahu's corruption case that he has domestically
Speaker 7: in Israel. Addressing President Isaac hertzog As Kanesse members clapped
Speaker 7: and jeered.
Speaker 8: Hey, I have an idea, mister president.
Speaker 3: Why don't you give him a pardon.
Speaker 7: That's what we're dealing with here, Just an audacious, outrageous
Speaker 7: display of corruption on so many levels. The fact that
Speaker 7: these guys are the guys putting together the so called
Speaker 7: peace plan quotes poorly for the sustainability of this ceasefire
Speaker 7: agreement beyond the first phase, beyond Israel getting what it
Speaker 7: wants the hostages a huge buffer zone that leaves Israel
Speaker 7: in control of Gaza's former urban areas, and possibly they
Speaker 7: might get the neutralization of Hamas, it's not clear that
Speaker 7: this ceasefire agreement can actually advance into a sustainable negotiation
Speaker 7: that maintains peace in the long run. It's why scholar
Speaker 7: Marika Sosnowski at the University of Melbourne, who studies ceasefire
Speaker 7: agreements in particular, calls this a strangle contract. She notes
Speaker 7: that Israeli withdrawal, release of hostages, and full aid being
Speaker 7: led into Gaza is the quote bare minimum you would
Speaker 7: expect both sides to acquiesce to as part of a
Speaker 7: ceasefire deal. She expresses concern that this agreement is highly
Speaker 7: coercive and that it quote enables the more powerful party
Speaker 7: to force the weaker party into agreeing to anything in
Speaker 7: order for them to survive. This is in direct contrast
Speaker 7: to a bargain between two equal parties that can sustain peace.
Speaker 7: She also very rightly notes that Israel could at any
Speaker 7: time claim the Palestinians are not abiding by the terms
Speaker 7: of the agreement and and the ceasefire, justifying restarting the war.
Speaker 7: The Palestinians have no leverage at all in this agreement,
Speaker 7: and obviously they can't rely on unbiased international mediation with
Speaker 7: the Trump and Kushner and Blairs of the world. At
Speaker 7: the helm of this Sisnowski quotes a Palestinian leader from
Speaker 7: Yermut Camp and Syria, who said to her quote, if
Speaker 7: there is a ceasefire, people know the devil is coming.
Speaker 7: I think that captures exactly everyone's fears in this moment.
Speaker 7: The Palestinian Civil Defense Agency says forty Palestinians have been
Speaker 7: killed in Gaza today October nineteenth. Children have been shot
Speaker 7: and killed in the West Bank after the ceasefire agreement.
Speaker 7: Israel raided the family homes of Palestinian prisoners in five
Speaker 7: districts across the West Bank before releasing them. Nataniehu has
Speaker 7: said he won't open the Rafah crossing. These all seem
Speaker 7: like Israeli violations to the ceasefire to me, but that's
Speaker 7: not how it'll be reported. And because the Trump administration
Speaker 7: has twisted the meaning of words, where domination equals peace
Speaker 7: and injustice equal stability. Once this happens, I fear very
Speaker 7: few will question the premise of this agreement and the
Speaker 7: entire peace process to begin with, a peace process for
Speaker 7: Palestinians aren't even allowed to participate. No one can be
Speaker 7: surprised when this doesn't last, and no one can be
Speaker 7: surprised that this cannot be the basis for sustainable peace.
Speaker 7: But Hey, I hope I'm wrong. Thank you for listening
Speaker 7: to this episode of It Could Happen Here. Here's Hoping
Speaker 7: for Justice and Peace.
Speaker 9: Welcome to Ake It Happened Here, a podcast that has
Speaker 9: increasingly become about tariffs in the second Trump regime. I
Speaker 9: am your host, Miil Wong, and oh boy, it has
Speaker 9: been a big few weeks for tariff news. We have
Speaker 9: tariff numbers on China that I'm not even going to
Speaker 9: bother to actually record right now because by the time
Speaker 9: this goes out, the numbers will probably be different. There
Speaker 9: are supposed to be major negotiations underway between Trump and
Speaker 9: the Chinese government to attempt to come to yet another
Speaker 9: trade agreement and stave off yet another round one hundred
Speaker 9: percent tariffs. Now, if you want to follow the sort
Speaker 9: of blow by blow of what exactly is going on,
Speaker 9: I'm going to just sort of refer you to my
Speaker 9: section tariff talk on Executive Disorder. However, com we need
Speaker 9: to take a deeper look at what structurally is going
Speaker 9: on in the global economy that is resulting in the
Speaker 9: demand for tariffs in the first place. And I think
Speaker 9: the place to go if that's the thing that you're
Speaker 9: trying to figure out. And we've talked about the sort
Speaker 9: of ideological aspects of this in other episodes. We've talked
Speaker 9: about the ways that the sort of politics of fascism,
Speaker 9: the politics of anti semitism, the politics of masculinity lead
Speaker 9: people towards these extremely ulternationalist policies that are specifically supposed
Speaker 9: to sort of protect the domestic blood and soil national
Speaker 9: industry and are supposed to protect material goods over services.
Speaker 9: But there are things that are happening structurally in the
Speaker 9: economy that make it such that people would consider things
Speaker 9: like the tariffs that have been happening under this regime
Speaker 9: as a solution to things that are kind of structural
Speaker 9: problems of the economy specifically. And this is what we're
Speaker 9: going to be focusing on today. Over capacity and steel. Now,
Speaker 9: some of you may be asking, Mia, why are we
Speaker 9: talking about steel over capacity? And I think there's a
Speaker 9: few important notes here. One, steel is in some ways
Speaker 9: emblematic of American tariff policy. It is I guess you
Speaker 9: would call it the most material of the tariffs, in
Speaker 9: the sense that it's the one where there's the most
Speaker 9: actual direct sort of material forces and direct lobbying groups
Speaker 9: asking for these specific tariffs. The American steel industry has
Speaker 9: been lobbying to some extent for some measures kind of
Speaker 9: like this. Steel is also one of the industries whereas
Speaker 9: as tariff rates are fluctuated and got up and down
Speaker 9: and whole waves of like Liberation Day, tariffs got put
Speaker 9: into place and then removed, and some of them we
Speaker 9: got put back into place a little bit. The steel
Speaker 9: tariffs were set at fifty percent and they've stayed at
Speaker 9: fifty percent since they were set. Basically, there's been a
Speaker 9: little bit of variation sort of before the final fix
Speaker 9: percent number was arrived at, but the steel tariffs have
Speaker 9: been one of the most stable tariffs. And the reason
Speaker 9: why it's been this stable if people can think back
Speaker 9: all the way to twenty eighteen, which I know that
Speaker 9: was a long time ago, but there was a miniature
Speaker 9: trade war between the US and China in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 9: and significant portions of it were focused on Chinese steel
Speaker 9: production specifically, and you know, this is one of the
Speaker 9: sort of fights that was had out. Nothing really structurally
Speaker 9: changed much from those. There was kind of a back
Speaker 9: and forth and then both sides kind of pulled back.
Speaker 9: But Comma, that's not happening this time. And what's interesting,
Speaker 9: and the reason that I was specifically talking about steel
Speaker 9: here is that it's now not just Trump that is
Speaker 9: tempting to institute large scale tariffs on steel. The European
Speaker 9: Commission for the EU has released a proposal to double
Speaker 9: tariffs on imported steel up to fifty percent, which is
Speaker 9: matched in the US, and also reduce the amount of
Speaker 9: steel that could be imported into the EU without paying
Speaker 9: any tariffs at all. And this is actually massive because
Speaker 9: this is an example of the EU effectively following US
Speaker 9: trade policy for very very similar reasons as the US.
Speaker 9: And if we can get to the bottom of what
Speaker 9: is going on here, and I promise we will, and
Speaker 9: I promise this will go towards something that is explaining
Speaker 9: really truly the macro dynamics of the entire global economy
Speaker 9: and why it's fucked. If we can actually trace out
Speaker 9: what's going on with these steel tariffs, we can do that.
Speaker 9: So let's talk about steel. Over Capacity as a concept
Speaker 9: is sort of convoluted. You know, you have to sort
Speaker 9: of ask the question, what is the quote unquote correct
Speaker 9: amount of steel? Because over capacity, you know, implies that
Speaker 9: there's capacity to produce steel over the amount that should
Speaker 9: be produced. So okay, how do you figure how MU
Speaker 9: steel should be produced?
Speaker 4: Eh?
Speaker 9: Very nebulous. It's also very difficult to measure because, okay,
Speaker 9: we're gonna try to measure steel over capacity. There's a
Speaker 9: lot of ways to do it that rely on things
Speaker 9: like utilization rates. Right, So you look at the steel facilities,
Speaker 9: you see how much they're being used at. You see
Speaker 9: how much you know excess capacity there is, how many
Speaker 9: how many factories are sitting empty one percentage of factories,
Speaker 9: you know, total outputs being used. This doesn't work because
Speaker 9: the utilization rates of these factories of this fixed capital
Speaker 9: varies seasonally, for example, and it varies due to not
Speaker 9: just the season, but a whole bunch of other factors,
Speaker 9: things like you know, labor supply, weather demand pulls, and
Speaker 9: of whole munch of other factors. Utilization rates of steel
Speaker 9: producing facilities are very rarely at one hundred percent, even
Speaker 9: in Marcus where demand at shrip supply. And this makes
Speaker 9: it very very difficult to measure China's actual quote unquote overcapacity.
Speaker 9: I am not going to even really try to give
Speaker 9: numbers because it's extremely subjective. How do I say this
Speaker 9: based on the research that I have done. I think
Speaker 9: the numbers you normally see in the West are inflated
Speaker 9: because they are not accounting for things like the weather,
Speaker 9: because it is in the interest of sort of Western
Speaker 9: research institutions, but for example, Western financial institutions, specifically steel companies,
Speaker 9: and they're sort of like allied China Hawk, you know,
Speaker 9: sort of like academics to have the number be as
Speaker 9: high as possible. You will also see numbers from people
Speaker 9: who are tied to Chinese government, And when I say
Speaker 9: tied to, I mean kind of in a loose ideological sense.
Speaker 9: In the same way as the China Hawks are, the
Speaker 9: Chinahawks tend to actually be more directly connected to the
Speaker 9: US government. Their numbers are probably also too low. But
Speaker 9: I don't want to give you the impression that I
Speaker 9: have a extremely certain understanding of what the exact number
Speaker 9: of millions of tons of xsdo production is happening. What
Speaker 9: we can sort of agree on is that there does
Speaker 9: seem to be some kind of overcapacity in the Chinese economy, right,
Speaker 9: and this is something that the Chinese Communist Party also
Speaker 9: agrees on. If you go back to a document that
Speaker 9: really really few people in the US have ever seen
Speaker 9: to have heard of, which is the wonderfully titled Opinions
Speaker 9: of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council on
Speaker 9: further Promoting the development of Ecological Civilization, which was one
Speaker 9: of the founding documentary Chinese environmental policy and the ideological
Speaker 9: sort of underpinnings of this thing called ecological civilization, which
Speaker 9: is the basis of Chinese environmental policy. One of the
Speaker 9: things that they mentioned a lot is specifically overcapacity. Right,
Speaker 9: They are actually very concerned about the overcapacity of steal
Speaker 9: from an ecological perspective. And this is sort of fascinating
Speaker 9: because we'll be looking at some scholars later who are
Speaker 9: favorably quoted in Chinese state media's sources describing how there
Speaker 9: isn't actually overcapacity because states say different things in different places,
Speaker 9: and this is in fact extremely common. But there does
Speaker 9: seem to be some kind of overcapacity, and the Chinese
Speaker 9: government was to some extent making attempts to reduce it
Speaker 9: during this sort of period of trade war. Now, the
Speaker 9: other issue we're talking about overcapacity is that overcapacity is
Speaker 9: an extremely political issue now, right, It's extremely weird because
Speaker 9: the Chinese seal over capacity is like my most niche
Speaker 9: thing that I've studied. I've had like a paper on
Speaker 9: this sitting in a drive on my computer for over
Speaker 9: half a decade. I have never brought it out until now.
Speaker 9: But it's become an extremely political topic because the different
Speaker 9: theories of stealover capacity have become a basis for a
Speaker 9: lot of genuine trade policy. Now. I think a very
Speaker 9: very interesting book at Chinese stealover capacity is from the
Speaker 9: book Understanding China's over Capacity. She's written by two Chinese
Speaker 9: economists that I think is a really interesting literature survey.
Speaker 9: This this is around bout twenty eighteen. But I think
Speaker 9: what's interesting about it it's from before the period where
Speaker 9: everyone in the West had sort of decided what they
Speaker 9: think caused Chinese steal over capacity, and so you can
Speaker 9: go back. You know, it's not just useful to sort
Speaker 9: of go back in time and look at the other
Speaker 9: theories that were sort of floating around academia before or
Speaker 9: a few of them got specifically selective for ideological purposes. Now,
Speaker 9: I mentioned earlier, we'd be talking about some economists. You
Speaker 9: don't think that's Chinese steel over capacity is real, that's
Speaker 9: these people. I think that part of their thesis is
Speaker 9: not very good. I think their survey of the literature
Speaker 9: on overcapacity, though, is very good. And one of the
Speaker 9: very interesting arguments they make this doesn't argue with a
Speaker 9: couple of other economists that has sort of disappeared from
Speaker 9: the literature is in argument about, okay, so there's steel
Speaker 9: production that's happening that doesn't need to happen. I think
Speaker 9: it's pretty fair to say that something is over capacity
Speaker 9: if it's producing a bunch of steel that sits there
Speaker 9: in rots because no one can sell it, which is
Speaker 9: a thing that happens with Chinese steel. And one of
Speaker 9: the most interesting theses that has really been abandoned, even
Speaker 9: though I think it is actually to a decent extent
Speaker 9: explanatory of a lot of very very weird stuff that
Speaker 9: happens in Chinese policy circles and a lot of just
Speaker 9: very baffling investment decisions, is specifically something about local caudras
Speaker 9: and their performance incentives. So, okay, something that's very important
Speaker 9: to understand about the structure of the CCP is that
Speaker 9: Chinese government institutions are sort of run by these caudras, right,
Speaker 9: and so if you are, for example, I don't know
Speaker 9: you are the mayor of a mid size city, right,
Speaker 9: you get performance evaluations and those sort of yearly performance evaluations.
Speaker 9: Sometimes there's less frequents than that, but those those performance
Speaker 9: evaluations rank you at sort of how good you're doing
Speaker 9: your job. And obviously there's political maneuver rank here too,
Speaker 9: But if you do a good job of hitting your targets,
Speaker 9: this is your path to advance upwards in the party
Speaker 9: and be moved from you know, like sort of running
Speaker 9: a small city to like being brought into caudra in
Speaker 9: larger cities, and you know, moving your way up the part,
Speaker 9: moving national positions. These evaluations are extremely important. You can
Speaker 9: also get sort of busted down if your evaluations suck. Again,
Speaker 9: there's also what politics are too, But these evaluations actually
Speaker 9: do matter. And one of the issues with these evaluations
Speaker 9: and these are also policy making implementation tools, right. You know,
Speaker 9: the central government can decide what kinds of policies they
Speaker 9: want to pursue, and then they can use these codure
Speaker 9: evaluations to make people at the sort of local level
Speaker 9: who are usually semi autonomous in ways that I think
Speaker 9: is not very well understood in the West, these countrare
Speaker 9: evaluations are ways to try to ensure that Chinese sort
Speaker 9: of local and provincial government policy kind of aligns with
Speaker 9: national party policy. And the waiting on these examinations is
Speaker 9: such that it has very very weird effects. And what
Speaker 9: I'm specifically talking about here is that GDP numbers are
Speaker 9: very very important to these codure value and it matters
Speaker 9: that it's specifically gross domestic product because GDP is a
Speaker 9: very very weird number, and there's a lot of stuff
Speaker 9: you can do to sort of juice GDP numbers that
Speaker 9: aren't really necessarily beneficial to an economy. So you can
Speaker 9: have a bunch of firms that are basically unprofitable or
Speaker 9: doing something that's like not particularly economically or socially useful,
Speaker 9: and that can still boost GDP numbers. And one of
Speaker 9: the things that happens with this is that you can
Speaker 9: boost GDP numbers by making a shit tout of steel
Speaker 9: that nobody actually really wants or uses. And because of
Speaker 9: the priority that's set on GDP numbers specifically, and there's
Speaker 9: also a whole bunch of these sort of weird financial
Speaker 9: games that you can play that's also played a major
Speaker 9: role in the way the Chinese housing bubble has played
Speaker 9: out and the way that the government has been unwilling
Speaker 9: to sort of you know, and when I say the
Speaker 9: government here, I be in both the national governments and
Speaker 9: also sort of these lower level governments have been unwilling
Speaker 9: to sort of let a bunch of debt bubbles that
Speaker 9: they've accumulated pop because those things prop up GDP numbers,
Speaker 9: and the incentive on the local level is to keep
Speaker 9: these numbers up. This used to actually be one of
Speaker 9: the things that people would talk about when they talked
Speaker 9: about Chinese steal over capacity. But it's complicated, like you
Speaker 9: can't very very easily explain this to you know, like
Speaker 9: a right wing congress person and have them go, oh, yeah, right,
Speaker 9: this is unfair to the American market, and so it
Speaker 9: kind of has like fallen out of favor and sort
Speaker 9: of like the explanation to steal over capacity you see
Speaker 9: in places like the New York Times. But I actually
Speaker 9: think this is one of the things that does, to
Speaker 9: some extent cause Chinese steal over capacity. Now do you
Speaker 9: know what doesn't cause Chinese steal over capacity? That's right,
Speaker 9: it is the products and services that support this podcast.
Speaker 9: So I wanted to talk about the local quadra explanations,
Speaker 9: because I actually think these are kind of important. And
Speaker 9: I want to talk about one other argument that's also
Speaker 9: not really used much that used to be a lot
Speaker 9: more common, which is an argument that Chinese economist makes
Speaker 9: that one of the reasons that there's overcapacity in Chinese
Speaker 9: steel production is that upwards wealth distribution leads to lower
Speaker 9: levels of consumption and thus over capacity. And so what
Speaker 9: is basically means and this is something that I think
Speaker 9: is actually also a thing that's the best structural problem
Speaker 9: in in the Chinese economies, that the Chinese economy is
Speaker 9: extremely highly unequal and wages, you know, like they have
Speaker 9: risen to some extent, but they're not rising anywhere near
Speaker 9: you know, like we've everyone in the US have seen
Speaker 9: that famous charge of productivity versus like labor gains, right
Speaker 9: like wage gains versus prouctivity increases. Wages in China have
Speaker 9: gone up, they have absolutely not kept pace with sort
Speaker 9: of productivity growth, and they also absolutely like have not
Speaker 9: kept pace with the amount of the profit being produced
Speaker 9: that is going to a very very small number of
Speaker 9: capital owners. And this actually to reach the structural problem,
Speaker 9: and this is we're seeing a very similar structural problem
Speaker 9: to this in the US, where there is a lot
Speaker 9: of consumption that if that money wasn't just all going
Speaker 9: to a bunch of rich people, people would actually be
Speaker 9: spending it on things, And particularly in Chinese context, the
Speaker 9: argument was that if if there was a better distribution
Speaker 9: of wealth, people would buy more houses, and this would
Speaker 9: actually reduce over capacity because suddenly a bunch of the
Speaker 9: slack capacity would be being used to like build houses,
Speaker 9: except people can't afford the houses. And this is a
Speaker 9: structural problem that like economists sort of note about for
Speaker 9: decades and decades, which is that China has been for
Speaker 9: a very long time. The whole thing was that they
Speaker 9: were trying to transition into a consumption economy, which is
Speaker 9: to say, they were trying to transition into an economy
Speaker 9: that was fueled by its own internal consumption. The US
Speaker 9: is to a large extent sort of kind of works
Speaker 9: like this, where you know, you want to increase the
Speaker 9: level of consumption and the amount of stuff that people
Speaker 9: in your country are buying, and this is a way
Speaker 9: to sort of like create a middle income country, right
Speaker 9: And China has historically not been able to do this,
Speaker 9: and haven't been able to do this because they won't
Speaker 9: raise wages. But you know, if they won't actually raised
Speaker 9: wages enough to increase people's consumption levels, then you're left
Speaker 9: for structural overcapacity because demand is being lowered because people
Speaker 9: don't have any fucking money. Now, this is another argument
Speaker 9: again and I think is also probably correct that is
Speaker 9: very much not talked about anymore because the argument that
Speaker 9: is used in in sort of understanding what's going on
Speaker 9: with Chinese seel capacity is about the Chinese subsidization of
Speaker 9: state owned enterprises at the expense of sort of private firms.
Speaker 9: And the argument here basically said, the state is propping
Speaker 9: up a bunch of unprofitable enterprises and they're holding sectors
Speaker 9: of the economy that should be you know, taken over
Speaker 9: by more efficient private firms, but they can't because they're
Speaker 9: being subsidized by the government. And this is sort of true,
Speaker 9: but this became a massive geopolitical argument because the argument
Speaker 9: from the American side, and when you hear anyone talking
Speaker 9: about steal of capacity, now this is the argument that
Speaker 9: you hear right, which that China is flooding the world
Speaker 9: with cheap steel because there's a whole bunch of like
Speaker 9: Chinese state own industries or just like Chinese businesses are
Speaker 9: just getting money from the Chinese government to produce steel
Speaker 9: and they're pumping cheap steel to the rest of the world.
Speaker 9: And this is not really I mean, like kind of
Speaker 9: this is happening, but it's also not the reason why
Speaker 9: there's large scale steal over capacity. And of course the
Speaker 9: argument is that China isn't competing fairly in the market,
Speaker 9: like this is very silly. Markets have never worked without
Speaker 9: large scale state quote unquote interference, Like American companies also
Speaker 9: get extremely high level subsidization et cetera, et ceteracy, all
Speaker 9: of US coregn policy. But you know, this is the
Speaker 9: political imperative that's behind a lot of the rhetoric coming
Speaker 9: out of steel producers and out of the American right
Speaker 9: about why there should be terrocists on steel. Now there's
Speaker 9: a problem though, which is that all of these arguments
Speaker 9: are very specific to China.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 9: The argument is that there are specifically steal over capacity
Speaker 9: in China because it's something structurally specifically wrong with the
Speaker 9: Chinese economy that's like makes it not a free market,
Speaker 9: and because of that, China's like unfair competing global market.
Speaker 9: And this is why there's so much over capacity of
Speaker 9: Chinese steel. This is wrong. There are individual parts of
Speaker 9: this where yeah, like there are things where there is
Speaker 9: excess capacity being produced by quadre evaluations and by to
Speaker 9: some extent like so we subsidization. However, Comma, there's a problem.
Speaker 9: And the problem here is that over capacity and overcapacity
Speaker 9: and steel is not just a Chinese phenomena. It is
Speaker 9: a global phenomena. It has been a global phenomena for
Speaker 9: a long time, and it is largely a product of
Speaker 9: the fact that we do not live in a global
Speaker 9: economy that can actually support the amount of production capacity
Speaker 9: that exists in the world. This has been a problem
Speaker 9: really since the seventies, and arguably even since the sixties,
Speaker 9: where as countries rebuilt from World War Two, and as
Speaker 9: some some sort of developments in global capital that we're
Speaker 9: going to be sort of like talking about soon happens
Speaker 9: that the product of all of this is that production
Speaker 9: has And this is kind of the thing that the
Speaker 9: sort of fascist right kind of intuitively understands. Production has
Speaker 9: become zero sum, right, It's very difficult to increase production
Speaker 9: in one country without having it, you know, affect production
Speaker 9: in the countries there isn't enough demand in the market
Speaker 9: to sort of like fuel all of these things. So
Speaker 9: why is there not enough demand to fuel the amount
Speaker 9: of supply that would be that would be necessary to
Speaker 9: make there not be over capacity. The answer to this,
Speaker 9: in sort of marketing theory is that, as they sort
Speaker 9: of put it, over production and under consumption are doubly constructed.
Speaker 9: I'm going to read a quote from end Notes, volume two,
Speaker 9: and then we're going to explain a little bit what
Speaker 9: that means. The wage allocates workers to production and at
Speaker 9: the same time allocates the product to workers. So what
Speaker 9: that means is that under consumption and overproduction are in
Speaker 9: effect the same thing, right, Because the way that we
Speaker 9: allocate workers to what thing they're going to do, and
Speaker 9: at the same time allocate products to those workers is
Speaker 9: the wage, which is one thing. So overproduction and under
Speaker 9: consumption are the same thing, right, and they're caused by
Speaker 9: the same structural elements of the wage relation. Now, this
Speaker 9: means that the Chinese capacity crisis is actually part of
Speaker 9: a larger crisis.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 9: You know the thing about the double construction, you know
Speaker 9: of overcapacity in unter consumption. Right, the fact that they
Speaker 9: are really the two things that's unified in the fact that,
Speaker 9: like your wage allocates what kind of productions you're doing
Speaker 9: and what you can consume. The fact that both those
Speaker 9: things combined are realized in this sort of secular crisis
Speaker 9: in what's called Marxist absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.
Speaker 9: So what the fuck is that the short version is?
Speaker 9: Over time in capitalist economies, there's supposed to be an
Speaker 9: increase of what's called the organic composition of capital. Basically,
Speaker 9: there are composition of capital is a way to measure
Speaker 9: how much in the pro labor process. It's like fixed capital,
Speaker 9: variable capital, so it's like how much factory is there
Speaker 9: relative to the amount of worker there is. And Marxist thesis,
Speaker 9: which has generally been born out, although we'll talk a
Speaker 9: little bit about that more later, is that this composition
Speaker 9: is going to increase, and as it increases, accumulation also
Speaker 9: needs to increase in order to maintain employment levels. This
Speaker 9: is sort of accomplished by things like automation, which reduces
Speaker 9: the size of the labor force, and thus, to quote
Speaker 9: and notes again, as accumulation proceeds, a growing superabundance of
Speaker 9: goods lowers the rate of profit and heightens competition. Across lines,
Speaker 9: compelling all capitalists to, as Mark said, economize on labor.
Speaker 9: So basically what this means is like as as capital
Speaker 9: gets turned into more capital and larger amounts of capital,
Speaker 9: this is the accumulation process. As this continues, right, you
Speaker 9: get this massive sort of increasing the amount of goods
Speaker 9: that are being produced. Eventually that lowers the rate of
Speaker 9: profit in a sector. And eventually what that does is,
Speaker 9: you know, in order to sort of economize on labor,
Speaker 9: capital increases the amount of automation reduces the amount of
Speaker 9: people that they need in the labor process. You know,
Speaker 9: this is what what's generally known as automation and the
Speaker 9: sort of crisis of people getting kicked out of the
Speaker 9: draws because of it. As this process is sort of
Speaker 9: generalized across sectoral lines across different parts of the economy,
Speaker 9: the relative demand for labor decreases and workers are spin
Speaker 9: out of the wage re line, which is the fancy
Speaker 9: Marxist way to say that become structurally unemployed. And you know,
Speaker 9: the thing that happens when you get kicked out of
Speaker 9: the capitalist wage relation is you get kicked into informal
Speaker 9: labor and slums, which you know decreases demand and increase overproduction.
Speaker 9: At the same time, over capacity is skyrocketing, right, because
Speaker 9: you have increasing numbers of people who have been spat
Speaker 9: out the formal economy who no longer have access to
Speaker 9: regular wages. The wages they get in the informal economy
Speaker 9: are less than the ones they would get in the
Speaker 9: formal economy. And as we were saying write, access to
Speaker 9: like the wage, both determines production and consumption. So if
Speaker 9: you lose access to the wage, right, and there's still
Speaker 9: more stuff being produced because of automation levels, what you
Speaker 9: get is a massive, skyrocketing double increase of overproduction and
Speaker 9: under consumption, right, because there's just not enough money to
Speaker 9: fucking buy the stuff. And the result of this is
Speaker 9: a miseration. Everything gets fucking worse. This sort of used
Speaker 9: to be an academic argument. It is no longer an
Speaker 9: academic argument. It is just the terrain on which economic
Speaker 9: policy unfolds. Now. The miseration thesis is this is you know,
Speaker 9: as a sort of like general law of capitalist accumulation
Speaker 9: is called has been argued about constantly. There have been
Speaker 9: ways that has been avoided. One of the biggest ways
Speaker 9: traditionally has been by capitalism sort of transforming goods into services.
Speaker 9: So for example, like the operative example of this is
Speaker 9: the transition in the US from rail lines to cars
Speaker 9: on something that points out, So you know, you get
Speaker 9: these new industries that are both labor or capital intensive.
Speaker 9: By replacing train with car, you know, you can absorb
Speaker 9: huge populations of workers as well as incorporate the peasantry
Speaker 9: into the industrial economy by sort of like converting these
Speaker 9: things into services. This has sort of been what the
Speaker 9: economy has been increasingly converted into a service based economy
Speaker 9: of various kinds. That's kind of what's happening now, you know,
Speaker 9: and you and you can see this process that work
Speaker 9: in the Chinese economy back when it was you know,
Speaker 9: really growing in the nineties and two thousands. But you know,
Speaker 9: once the peasantry had been absorbed as sort of both
Speaker 9: a new market and a new labor force with lower
Speaker 9: cost of production because wages are cheaper for a bunch
Speaker 9: of structural reasons, the old tendencies of capital set in.
Speaker 9: And so what happens inside of China was what was
Speaker 9: happening everywhere else in the world, which is that as
Speaker 9: labor saving technology begins to be implemented and you know,
Speaker 9: a bunch of services refused to be turned into new
Speaker 9: goods to like bolster the ranks industrial working class. You know,
Speaker 9: you get what's happened in the US, which is this
Speaker 9: this full transition to service economy shit that doesn't actually
Speaker 9: really grow. And you know, if if you look, if
Speaker 9: you look at Chinese growth rates, like they've been slowing
Speaker 9: for a decade, actually a little bit longer than a decade.
Speaker 9: And so you know, as China was integrated to the
Speaker 9: global economy, it too became caught in this cycle of
Speaker 9: industrial booms where you know, you get an industrial boom
Speaker 9: where you have a country with favorable exchange rates, the
Speaker 9: stallar that inevitably sets off, you know, the economies of
Speaker 9: the bad end of the exchange rate to collapse as
Speaker 9: they're forced to bear the way to global lower capacity.
Speaker 9: As as I've mentioned one hundred billion times on this show,
Speaker 9: it is the one thing I will make sure every
Speaker 9: it could happen here listener will be able to explain
Speaker 9: the Plaza Accords and the Reverse Plaza Cords. You know,
Speaker 9: but this is sort of this is sort of what
Speaker 9: the Reverse Plazai Cords and the Plaza Cords were about,
Speaker 9: was the US. This is the last time the US
Speaker 9: tried to, you know, use its just sort of like
Speaker 9: pure political power and military might to be like, eat shit,
Speaker 9: I'm going to force all of your countries to fuck
Speaker 9: with your currency so that our manufacturing economy will come back.
Speaker 9: And again, the US did that successfully and the Japanese
Speaker 9: economy collapsed because we'd needcap Japanese economy to do it right.
Speaker 9: And to some extent, Trump is attempting the farce as
Speaker 9: farce version of this with with these steel teriffs. Right
Speaker 9: to some extent, these tariffs are his attempts to pull
Speaker 9: the Reagan maneuver of Okay, we can just like force
Speaker 9: other countries to lower their capacity and increase our capacity
Speaker 9: at their expense. The problem is that, again, this production
Speaker 9: is zero sum, and if you do this, it will
Speaker 9: annihilate the rest of the global economy. And this is
Speaker 9: the sort of context behind all of the stuff that
Speaker 9: we've been seeing for the last like thirty years, which
Speaker 9: that actual profit rates have been collapsing for ages, and
Speaker 9: right now we're in the middle of a just unbelievably
Speaker 9: hideously staggeringly massive bubble that is maintaining the sort of
Speaker 9: last like fake vestiges of economic growth where billions and
Speaker 9: billions and billions of dollars have been sunk into all
Speaker 9: of this AI bullshit, and it's you know, like the
Speaker 9: tech driven AI is a significant specifically, specifically the AI
Speaker 9: stuff is a significant portion of total US economic growth.
Speaker 9: If you want to listen to why that's all going
Speaker 9: to go to shit, turn on effectively literally any episode
Speaker 9: of COOLSI and Media's own Exitron's podcast Better Offline and
Speaker 9: you will you will hear a lot about this. But
Speaker 9: you know, this has been that, like tech has been
Speaker 9: sort of the escape strategy of the United States. Traditionally,
Speaker 9: it's going to implode, it's going to do tremendous damage
Speaker 9: to everyone. But in the remains of that, and in
Speaker 9: this world in which profit rates are declining, and in
Speaker 9: this world in which increasing portions of the population are
Speaker 9: being spat out of the capitalist production cycle, in which
Speaker 9: increasing percentages of the world population are being kicked into
Speaker 9: an informal economy, and in this world of generalized overproduction
Speaker 9: under consumption, what's happening is that there is an enormous
Speaker 9: effort to get everyone to think that this is because
Speaker 9: of very specific tendencies of like the bad government over there,
Speaker 9: right that you know, over capacity and steel. Oh, it's
Speaker 9: just because the like the evil communist government in China
Speaker 9: is cheating at capital by giving their companies money, and
Speaker 9: so we're gonna do tariffs on them instead of that.
Speaker 9: And again, like it's easier for these academics to make
Speaker 9: this argument because there is kind of stuff going on, right,
Speaker 9: because there is this sort of cadure evaluation stuff, because
Speaker 9: there is to some extensi a subsidization of steel production.
Speaker 9: They can present this boogeyman to sort of pin what
Speaker 9: is really a global overproduction and under consumption crisis onto
Speaker 9: just you know, it's just as government we don't like.
Speaker 9: And then you can sort of implement these ultranationalists tariff policies.
Speaker 9: It's a way of deflecting the blame from capitalism onto
Speaker 9: another country and using nationalism to paper over the actual
Speaker 9: economic contradictions of capital. And if you want to escape that,
Speaker 9: it's not enough to sort of just get rid of
Speaker 9: Trump and go back to the previous retrade regime. You
Speaker 9: have to actually structurally change the thing at the center
Speaker 9: of all of this, which is the wage relation.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 9: You have to fundamentally change the fact that this economy,
Speaker 9: the entire economy, is based on there being classes of
Speaker 9: people who make money from owning things, and that there's
Speaker 9: an entire class of people whose labor is stolen every
Speaker 9: single day so that those other people can make money
Speaker 9: by owning things who do all of the actual work.
Speaker 9: And that's what's actually fundamentally at stake here. It is
Speaker 9: this question of are we going to continue to do
Speaker 9: tariff bullshit or are we going to take power from
Speaker 9: the people who caused all of this? From Trump, from
Speaker 9: Elon Musk, from all of the billionaires, from feel from
Speaker 9: all of the tech billionaires that funded them, from all
Speaker 9: of the Republican Party Cook Breathern networks. Are we going
Speaker 9: to destroy these people completely by getting rid of the
Speaker 9: social relations of capital that make this all possible. Or
Speaker 9: are we going to to sit here and let them
Speaker 9: continue to produce AI videos of them shitting all over
Speaker 9: us while they take all of our money and commit
Speaker 9: an ethnic cleansing and continue to fund genocides abroad.
Speaker 4: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the show. It's me James
Speaker 4: today and I'm very lucky to be joined again by
Speaker 4: eric A Mesa, who's the Borderlands coordinator for the Sierra Club. Eric,
Speaker 4: how are you doing.
Speaker 1: I'm doing okay, Jans.
Speaker 4: Thanks for us for the invitation, Yeah, thank you for
Speaker 4: joining us. Sadly, we don't have a lot of good
Speaker 4: stuff to talk about right now. It's pretty difficult time
Speaker 4: in the borderlands. But maybe we could start off with
Speaker 4: something that I've reported on briefly in our weekly news show.
Speaker 4: The Border Patrol is currently soliciting comment for its plans
Speaker 4: to build for the wall through the out Tide Mountain
Speaker 4: Wilderness and other areas west of Tikati, right, could you
Speaker 4: explain a little bit about what they're proposing and what
Speaker 4: consequences that will be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, hi, everybody so happy to be here and
Speaker 1: not so happy to be sharing the news. But so
Speaker 1: what the announcement was recently by the Border Patrol, especially
Speaker 1: on the San Diego area, is the announcement of the
Speaker 1: approximately nine point seven miles of new border barrier system
Speaker 1: and on top of that, over fifty one miles of
Speaker 1: what they call now system attributes and this is going
Speaker 1: to Kabacuche impact on the area. This is going to
Speaker 1: be about two point nine miles west of the Cut
Speaker 1: port of entry, going through an area that it is
Speaker 1: very remote mountain region and some of people and this
Speaker 1: are more familiar than I am. I've actually never been,
Speaker 1: but I've been talking to some of the local organizations,
Speaker 1: the new humanitarian aid in the region, and I know
Speaker 1: the Tekate Peak is in that area, and then you
Speaker 1: start going west into these beautiful mountains that are also
Speaker 1: the birthplace of the Tepana River. That's exactly the area
Speaker 1: where it's going to go. So right now, CVPS accepting
Speaker 1: comments and asking people in the community what kind of
Speaker 1: concerns do they have concerns in regards of the environmental
Speaker 1: impacts of a project like this, what kind of social
Speaker 1: and economical impacts? So they open up this section on
Speaker 1: their website with an email address where people can share
Speaker 1: some of these concerns. As you mentioned, and part of
Speaker 1: an environmental organization, but we also have all kinds of
Speaker 1: concerns for a project like this, including the border barrier
Speaker 1: and the system attributes, which are very poorly described for
Speaker 1: what they mean. Some of the things that they mentioned
Speaker 1: as system attributes is the increase of lighting, infrastructure, surveillance equipment,
Speaker 1: and new roads for access for border patrol vehicles. So
Speaker 1: one of the things that we're going to expect that
Speaker 1: we have seen in other areas is more blasting through
Speaker 1: the mountain, especially on areas where the mountains is so
Speaker 1: uneven the terrain, there is a lot of heavy machinery
Speaker 1: it has to come into those places to start bulldozing
Speaker 1: to level the terrain so they can start building this
Speaker 1: border wall. So we can expect some of that, and
Speaker 1: with that come a lot of issues because there's going
Speaker 1: to be the need to start drilling wells at the
Speaker 1: border to extract the water from mixing the concrete for
Speaker 1: the foundation. If there was any road out there, they're
Speaker 1: going to probably widen the road two or three times
Speaker 1: to allow this. Having machinery to access these remote areas,
Speaker 1: this is just going to be the beginning, just setting
Speaker 1: up the panels. But whenever you go to these places
Speaker 1: and start disturbing the native soil, you can expect all
Speaker 1: kinds of consequences in regards so invasive species of plants.
Speaker 1: You can also expect so floating and removal of native vegetation.
Speaker 1: In some cases, there is some species that are rare
Speaker 1: on the area that having these impacts you know, can
Speaker 1: be long lasting for them to be able to recover.
Speaker 1: If they're able to do so the area on the
Speaker 1: south side of the border, there is also an area
Speaker 1: where animals need to be moving back on course, so
Speaker 1: species like the native mule deer, a colony that leaves there.
Speaker 1: There is a mountain lion and other species of mammals
Speaker 1: pre much everything that is for inches, why it's not
Speaker 1: going to be able to make it do that border
Speaker 1: will Yeah. So yeah, we're just raising these concerns and
Speaker 1: sharing with the community so they're able to also as well.
Speaker 1: And an email to CVP crostoms and water but no
Speaker 1: and express these concerns and also to remember that these
Speaker 1: areas have been sacred size for the indigenous communities Diamond Memorial,
Speaker 1: so we might lose some very sacred sides for the
Speaker 1: tribes forever.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like I know the topic ta cut the mountain
Speaker 4: has been sacred to Kumiai. People believe it's Tuma in Kumiai,
Speaker 4: but it's been sacred to them for as you say,
Speaker 4: much longer than this has been the United States.
Speaker 1: That's correct.
Speaker 4: You and I have both seen it in different places.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: The damage that the border will does not just to people.
Speaker 4: I've seen mule deer running along it like trying to
Speaker 4: the clearly trying to find a way through. Right, this
Speaker 4: is habitual pathway. There are some areas near, very very
Speaker 4: near the boarder, like within one hundred yards of the border,
Speaker 4: where there are naturally occurring creeks and little ponds which
Speaker 4: will hold water at a time when water can be
Speaker 4: very hard to come across here. And so I've seen
Speaker 4: deer kind of distraught almost trying to get to this
Speaker 4: place where they've obviously learned that they can get water,
Speaker 4: but now they can't. It's really heartbreaking, on top of
Speaker 4: all the other cruelty that it does. I suppose we
Speaker 4: should address, Like I'm not sure how much we can
Speaker 4: accomplish by the comment period, right, but it has value nonetheless,
Speaker 4: like trying to do something, I think it has value.
Speaker 4: It shows that we didn't let this just happen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. I honestly am not very hopeful from
Speaker 1: those common periods because this is not the first time
Speaker 1: they're asking the community to provide input, and with past
Speaker 1: experiences that we have organized in all other areas, other
Speaker 1: segments of the world, even in all states, we haven't
Speaker 1: get a response even or an acknowledgment of these concerns.
Speaker 1: So Dalva itself is really concerning, but I think it
Speaker 1: is important that the communities around these areas are aware
Speaker 1: about this and they get involved, and that there is
Speaker 1: this community sentiment against this abuse of power that the
Speaker 1: administration continues to do, and the border lands and using
Speaker 1: them as the sacrifice zone as these testing grounds for
Speaker 1: what can potentially continue to happen or expand not only
Speaker 1: on the border but in other series, like we are
Speaker 1: seeing with the span of militarization nowadays.
Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely, like all the stuff that is really bad
Speaker 4: in America right now, like it started at the border,
Speaker 4: that's right. People are seeing it in their communities now,
Speaker 4: but like we've been seeing it where we live for
Speaker 4: a long time. Can we talk a little bit about
Speaker 4: there's been some other construction right then, with San Diego
Speaker 4: is not the only place right now that there's a
Speaker 4: significant Dieditetree allocation to construction a border barrier, and there's
Speaker 4: more construction east of San Diego.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, that's that's right. Most of the construction that
Speaker 1: is happening right now, it was with all funding that
Speaker 1: was from the twenty twenty one funds that were available
Speaker 1: since the first Rump administration, So we were hoping that
Speaker 1: that was going to be like the end of the funding.
Speaker 1: But since the proposal and passing of the quote unquote
Speaker 1: big beautiful Bill, we've got to remind ourselves that now
Speaker 1: the administration has allocated forty six point five billion dollars
Speaker 1: for border security, and that includes border barriers and system attributes,
Speaker 1: so pretty much anything related to border security right now,
Speaker 1: they have the funding to do it. They pretty much
Speaker 1: out the funding to put a double wall across the
Speaker 1: whole US Mexico border. Yeah, so that's that's huge. You know,
Speaker 1: In recent days, we got a new wave of contracts
Speaker 1: that were awarded. In October ten, we got this announcement
Speaker 1: that out of this funding, the forty six point five billion,
Speaker 1: they are located for a little bit over four billion,
Speaker 1: and this will fund them two hundred and thirty miles
Speaker 1: of new physical barriers and four hundred miles of surveillance
Speaker 1: technology across the US Mexico border from California New Texas.
Speaker 1: That's and they put up a new section on their
Speaker 1: website where there is a map you can navigate. It's
Speaker 1: an interactive map that shows every single section of the
Speaker 1: border and what they're planning to do with and as
Speaker 1: surreal as it sounds, they are planning to double up
Speaker 1: the wall. So in some places, in remote areas in
Speaker 1: the desert, like in organ Pai National Monument or Caveca
Speaker 1: Prieta in Arizona. In those areas, there is plans to
Speaker 1: build a secondary wall. So on top of the thirty
Speaker 1: food barrier that they have, they're planning to do a
Speaker 1: second one.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we have that semi seedarl right, we have a
Speaker 4: double thirty foot barrier.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The Biden administration used it to corral people seeking asylum.
Speaker 4: Right that they kept them in between the two walls
Speaker 4: and then denied that they were in detention. I don't
Speaker 4: know if we'll see that again, but like I guess
Speaker 4: just from my own experience, you know, participating in util
Speaker 4: aid along the border, like those remote desert areas are
Speaker 4: where people go. When we build wall in Otai, right,
Speaker 4: when we continue to detain and turn people back in
Speaker 4: less remote areas, they will take the risk of going
Speaker 4: to a more remote area and forcing people into those
Speaker 4: remote areas and then constructing barriers there too, is just
Speaker 4: going to cause more deaths. Said, it's not going to
Speaker 4: stop people trying to come because there are things that
Speaker 4: they are living which are terrible, but it will mean
Speaker 4: that they get stuck out there in the heat without
Speaker 4: water for longer rain.
Speaker 1: That's correct game. So exactly what you said people in
Speaker 1: San Diego in like the border in Otai, you already
Speaker 1: have the double walls, so you know, like having this
Speaker 1: hyper mac miilitarized area and how that is going to
Speaker 1: expand and the consequences of that is, as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: you push people out further more remote areas, and two
Speaker 1: things happen by doing that. First and most important, more
Speaker 1: people die. But also remember that these areas, like these
Speaker 1: remote areas were also like semi priestine wildlife environments that
Speaker 1: you never had humans moving through before. Now, as people
Speaker 1: have been pushed to these remote areas, you have this
Speaker 1: human traffic and not only migrants moving through, but you
Speaker 1: also have the border patrol chasing these migrants. And now
Speaker 1: you have border patrol wanting to build new roads to
Speaker 1: these wilderness areas. And all of these just gives building
Speaker 1: up into what's already a very fragmented landscape. So by
Speaker 1: adding all these quote unquote system attributes, because you're pushing
Speaker 1: and pushing people further and building these doggle walls, it's
Speaker 1: just going to end the last of the remaining wildlife
Speaker 1: remote migration corridors as well. So the impacts that this
Speaker 1: is going to help are huge.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, for like all living creatures. As you said,
Speaker 4: let's take a break, Eric, we'll come back and talk
Speaker 4: about it small. All right, we are back. Let's talk
Speaker 4: about like how people are organizing right like at this
Speaker 4: time time when it does seem really bleak at the
Speaker 4: border lands, Like the Trump administration didn't really construct very
Speaker 4: much war in its first iteration. It did construct a bit,
Speaker 4: but not as much as it wanted to. And you
Speaker 4: and I are both very familiar with the consequences that
Speaker 4: has had, right Like it has caused more people to die.
Speaker 4: The Biden administration continue constructing and quote unquote repairing border barriers.
Speaker 4: They also pioneered outdoor attention, and like it just seems
Speaker 4: like things with whoever gets elected, but more rapidly under
Speaker 4: Republicans get worse. What are people able to do? When
Speaker 4: We've spoken about this a lot on this show, but
Speaker 4: I'd love to hear your perspective too.
Speaker 1: It's been hard, honestly as a person working on environmental
Speaker 1: issues in the border because definitely, like the losers are
Speaker 1: much more than the wind sometimes, so that can be
Speaker 1: dis hard to end. Yeah, there has been some glimpses
Speaker 1: of hope. I think one of the things that we
Speaker 1: did here in Arizona that was definitely felt really good
Speaker 1: and gave us some hope is when the governor of
Speaker 1: Arizona decided to put some chipping containers and make its
Speaker 1: own makeshift wall. So a bunch of people really came
Speaker 1: together on the community outrage because this was just some
Speaker 1: really dumb idea and one of the most remote, beautiful
Speaker 1: areas where there is not even people moving through and
Speaker 1: it was just going to destroy the environment. And the
Speaker 1: governor went out there and spent two hundred million dollars
Speaker 1: of taxpayers money to buy these shipping containers and build
Speaker 1: this border wall. So we were actually all the community
Speaker 1: came together, We show up out there in the and
Speaker 1: stopped the machines and we said no, you're not going
Speaker 1: to move any further. And because what they were doing
Speaker 1: was actually illegal, we were able to get away with it.
Speaker 1: Those chipping containers are gone right now. Still, Arizona taxs
Speaker 1: payer paid two hundred million dollars to destroy their own
Speaker 1: environment just let that same thing we can be using
Speaker 1: that money for much better things. So I think that
Speaker 1: president and that movement, that sense of community that was
Speaker 1: built after that resistance, it is, has continued after that.
Speaker 1: Like there is a lot of self organized grassroots efforts
Speaker 1: going on for border resistance, you know, and that encompasses
Speaker 1: humanitarian groups, environmental groups, and we are also organizing nowadays
Speaker 1: here in Arizona to do some direct action, try to
Speaker 1: show up to the center of a valley which is
Speaker 1: where the border construction is going, and started raising some
Speaker 1: national attach to this issue, trying to invite our politicians,
Speaker 1: start invited our our native communities to speak out and
Speaker 1: using different methods such as art performance, bring up some
Speaker 1: different strategies together. You know. Now with the technology that
Speaker 1: we have available, is that how can we make these
Speaker 1: more mainstream and tell people across the nation what's going
Speaker 1: on and these remote areas. You know a lot of
Speaker 1: people a lot of connection to this valley, and this
Speaker 1: is the headwaters of the Santa Cluz River, the lifeblood
Speaker 1: of many communities across the southern Arizona. And at the
Speaker 1: same time, on the other side of the coin, you know,
Speaker 1: there is all the oppression by the government to anything
Speaker 1: that is against their will. So a lot of people
Speaker 1: feel a little bit afraid of showing up to direct action. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it is it's just walking that fine line or
Speaker 1: what can we get away with and still be able
Speaker 1: to make a ball statement and show opposition without putting
Speaker 1: people in danger.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, I think that is something a lot of
Speaker 4: people are really worried about. But it is important within
Speaker 4: the realm of things that we can do to show
Speaker 4: our opposition to this and to stand in solidarity with
Speaker 4: the animals and the indigenous people whose sacred spaces are
Speaker 4: being defiled, right and with migrants whose lives are being
Speaker 4: put in danger by this. I wonder, like, I find
Speaker 4: it so strange. I guess that like we're at a
Speaker 4: time when reporting on migration is becoming like like a
Speaker 4: major growth industry. I guess, editors who I could not
Speaker 4: get to respond to an email or pick up the
Speaker 4: phone for the last four years and now commissioning pieces
Speaker 4: of migration. But there still seems to be like a
Speaker 4: blind spot about the border in the American news media.
Speaker 4: I don't know why that is. I don't know if
Speaker 4: you have ideas about why there is, But the borderlands
Speaker 4: are such a special place for me anyway, you know,
Speaker 4: I've spent nearly twenty years of my life here. Some
Speaker 4: of my favorite places in the world are near the border.
Speaker 4: I think people think of the border as like Santi Zero,
Speaker 4: but it contains some wonderfully remote and special places. And
Speaker 4: I wonder if you have thoughts on why, like the
Speaker 4: border isn't something that gets talked about that much on
Speaker 4: a national level.
Speaker 1: I think it does talk about, but unfortunately the narrative,
Speaker 1: the digitian build around it is really negative.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's fair, and of course that's.
Speaker 1: With that intention, right, continue to build up this militarized
Speaker 1: state or sacrifice zone. And so whenever I talk with
Speaker 1: people that is here for the first time, you know,
Speaker 1: I do these group presentations for delegations that come from
Speaker 1: all over the to experience the Borderlands region, and they're
Speaker 1: like they have all these perspective, you know, for what
Speaker 1: they hear on the news about how horrible this is,
Speaker 1: and then they come here and they're like, Wow, people
Speaker 1: here is like really nice and we have a great experience,
Speaker 1: and I really inspire and it's like coming with this
Speaker 1: pre fabricated narrative on their minds of this wasteland sacrifice zone,
Speaker 1: you know, like and then going out after experience and yes,
Speaker 1: some of that, of course, if you go out to
Speaker 1: the to the border and experience the wall and the
Speaker 1: rolls and rolls of concerts in a wired to make
Speaker 1: it look like you're in a war zone. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: plows what you already have in your mind. You know,
Speaker 1: it just keeps building up the intensity. And then you
Speaker 1: hear the stories from people, the struggle, from my grants
Speaker 1: and stories from back in twenty twenty three when we
Speaker 1: have the search of migrants coming and all these things,
Speaker 1: you know, but at the end, people leaves with glimbs
Speaker 1: also like, wow, this place is really beautiful and a
Speaker 1: lot of wonderful things are happening, a lot of movements
Speaker 1: of people trying to organize and make it a better
Speaker 1: place and trying really hard to shift this narrative. You know.
Speaker 1: The borlands provide us a good opportunity, you know, because
Speaker 1: what we see today, like a friend of mine said,
Speaker 1: it can get worse, and it's going into that direction. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's going into that direction. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: it gives us an opportunity as a society, you know,
Speaker 1: because whatever happens at the border is definitely going to
Speaker 1: have a ripple effect in the rest of the country.
Speaker 1: So we are able to figure out a way to
Speaker 1: shift that narrative and look at the border like like
Speaker 1: people that lives and experience the word there and the
Speaker 1: culture of the beautiful things that the border has to offer.
Speaker 1: Then we hope that that's going to help change a
Speaker 1: lot of the things that are happening in this country.
Speaker 1: You know, but we need to start I think organizing
Speaker 1: from the bottom up. Yeah, a lot of grassroots therefore
Speaker 1: need to be happening, and I think a lot of
Speaker 1: media needs to cover this. You know, we usually don't
Speaker 1: cover the good stories.
Speaker 4: So yeah, yeah, you're right. Like it's funny that the
Speaker 4: right does cover the body, right, or that the you know,
Speaker 4: the Fox News kind of cardre does cover the body,
Speaker 4: Like I don't like the way they cover it, but like,
Speaker 4: the only national network guy I will see down there
Speaker 4: is the Fox guy for the most part. And the
Speaker 4: one thing I like to do with my friends, or
Speaker 4: like if someone comes to visit, you know, sometimes I
Speaker 4: have other independent journalists come visit to walk down to
Speaker 4: the border wall, and it seems very bleak, right because
Speaker 4: there's this big wall and it's covered in constantina wire,
Speaker 4: as you say, and maybe they are Marines or National
Speaker 4: Guard or Order patrol or any other leg it's people
Speaker 4: with guns right in different uniforms. But then if you
Speaker 4: turn around, you're in this really special place where you
Speaker 4: don't see the people and you just you can appreciate
Speaker 4: how beautiful it is. It's also very beautiful that, like
Speaker 4: you say, there's so much bottom up organizing, that there's
Speaker 4: so much people helping people of all different kinds. And
Speaker 4: that's something we also are in twenty twenty three, when
Speaker 4: Title forty two ended and subsequently the Biden administration detained
Speaker 4: people outdoors, like we saw an incredible community response of
Speaker 4: all different kinds of people of different political persuasions, different
Speaker 4: faith groups, which was a really beautiful thing. Like it's
Speaker 4: a thing that a lot of the rest of America
Speaker 4: right now I could learn from the government was brutalizing people,
Speaker 4: and people made that less bad. They kept them safe,
Speaker 4: and they'd been a lot more people who didn't make
Speaker 4: it throughout all attention if it wasn't for community support,
Speaker 4: like I want people to see that. I wonder if
Speaker 4: people want to support right, let's say they're not in
Speaker 4: the border lands. Can you think of good ways for
Speaker 4: them to be in solidarity, for them to even to
Speaker 4: experience like I know a lot of people who listen
Speaker 4: to this have come, like It's really wonderful for me
Speaker 4: to meet people when I'm not working, when I'm just
Speaker 4: out there in my capacity as someone who cares about
Speaker 4: other people, right doing water drops, doing mutul aid with migrants,
Speaker 4: or helping people at street release. To hear of people
Speaker 4: who listen to this and then decided to come from
Speaker 4: wherever they were and spend some time here and help, Like,
Speaker 4: that's a really a special thing. But you have other
Speaker 4: ideas on how people can can be in solidarity and
Speaker 4: can come and help.
Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely, again this question where we are and from
Speaker 1: different people that comes to busy. I usually recommend people
Speaker 1: to start with they are, you know, in their own communities,
Speaker 1: because there is reflections of border issues in your own community.
Speaker 1: There are people that are migrating that are might need
Speaker 1: some help. There are people that shelters and all these
Speaker 1: or just kind of only get involved with your local
Speaker 1: whatever you're passionate about. You know, it doesn't really have
Speaker 1: to be an environmental issue, but we are remember and
Speaker 1: social justice and environmental justice is the same thing.
Speaker 10: Yeah, we really like whatever you're passionate about, just getting involved,
Speaker 10: But I think the worst thing that we can do
Speaker 10: right now is just doing in order the fact that
Speaker 10: we are in a bad spot, you know.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people just want to continue
Speaker 1: writing their comfort song wave and it's that it's gonna end,
Speaker 1: you know. And I think we need to not only
Speaker 1: think about ourselves, but we need to think about the
Speaker 1: generations coming ahead of us. And I think it's especially
Speaker 1: for the people that us already had the opportunity to
Speaker 1: somehow live a life, you know, but there are somes
Speaker 1: that are about to start a journey, and I think
Speaker 1: it's our responsibility to make it the best as we
Speaker 1: can for them as well. So whatever you're passionate about,
Speaker 1: and if you really want to and you're passionate about
Speaker 1: order related issues and you're not able to come, try
Speaker 1: to support, you know, like financial help is, you know,
Speaker 1: we like it or not. We're in a capitalist society
Speaker 1: and we work with financial support. So a lot of
Speaker 1: these events that we're creating, a lot of these outreach
Speaker 1: that we're doing a lot of the people, like new
Speaker 1: generations that need jobs, that are wanting to join, like
Speaker 1: let maybe a non profit work or create the own
Speaker 1: movement or doing something related that's going to help the community. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So for those if you are able, those are really
Speaker 1: good ways to get involved and make them change.
Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely, Like there's a lot of things you can do,
Speaker 4: as you say, and I think it does help to
Speaker 4: build that networks of caring for people everywhere. Like, we
Speaker 4: want to live in a world where people take care
Speaker 4: of one another, and to do that, we have to
Speaker 4: start it everywhere. It's not like the border is the
Speaker 4: only place where bad things are happening. I know we
Speaker 4: draw a lot of strengths as people who live at
Speaker 4: the border from that solidarity, but also from seeing people
Speaker 4: do their own things wherever they're at. Like that is
Speaker 4: how we build a world where systems of oppression of
Speaker 4: let's able to oppress people.
Speaker 11: So yeah, And one of the things we see here,
Speaker 11: most of the decisions taken for the border are not
Speaker 11: taken by people from the border. A lot of these
Speaker 11: big all these decisions, like for example, Senator of Utah
Speaker 11: right now is putting up a bill for.
Speaker 1: The boarder to sacrifice a lot of public lands for
Speaker 1: new roads, and like new military installations. So it's like
Speaker 1: people from Utah are not directly on the border, but yeah,
Speaker 1: they can also send letters and comments or both these
Speaker 1: senators out, you know, and somebody that really cares for
Speaker 1: the environment.
Speaker 4: Yeah, if you're in Utah, your senator has been advocating
Speaker 4: to sell off the public lands that you own. That
Speaker 4: has said that, I mean their native land. It's all
Speaker 4: native land. It should be returned to its original custodians.
Speaker 4: But in the meantime, you own it and at least
Speaker 4: all of us can access it until Mike Lee gets
Speaker 4: his chance to sell it all off to his buddies
Speaker 4: in real estate. And like, you could be an extremely
Speaker 4: conservative person and we could disagree on a lot of shit,
Speaker 4: and I think we could find unity on that. Like,
Speaker 4: I do not understand how there is a constituency that
Speaker 4: wants to take land from the public domain and turn
Speaker 4: it into a military basis and or or fields and
Speaker 4: mcmhonsions for rich people to have as their second home.
Speaker 4: Like that should be it's a thing that everyone agrees on.
Speaker 4: And like he didn't stick the landing on it the
Speaker 4: first time in the reconciliation. The quote unquote, big beautiful
Speaker 4: Bill but I think that's a really good area towe
Speaker 4: engage people, folks who might not be like, yeah, I
Speaker 4: will show up for migrants. I think a lot of people.
Speaker 4: They could be people who enjoy the outdoors, people who
Speaker 4: just care about the environment, the Hook and Bullet crowd, like,
Speaker 4: there are a lot of people even if they don't
Speaker 4: quote unquote use public lands, like we all benefit from
Speaker 4: being there and future generation to benefit from them remaining
Speaker 4: un developed in a in a substantial way.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 4: Sorry, I just went off. And when that guy really
Speaker 4: pisses me off. This shit makes me so mad. Coming
Speaker 4: from a country that is entirely private land, it is
Speaker 4: to see someone being like, yeah, that's a good idea.
Speaker 4: It's fucking asinine.
Speaker 1: Eric.
Speaker 4: I wonder if people want to keep up with the
Speaker 4: Sierra Club, keep up with like, how they can the
Speaker 4: opposition comments If they want to know more about this
Speaker 4: new border construction and the impact would have, where can
Speaker 4: they Where can they follow along? Is their website or
Speaker 4: social media?
Speaker 1: Yeah, James, thanks to you. Yeah, we do have all
Speaker 1: of it. We try to engage people where they are,
Speaker 1: and we know social media is a powerful tool. We
Speaker 1: have a website Circulu Border LANs, people can look up
Speaker 1: some of the work that we do there. We are
Speaker 1: also active on social media. We are cir Club Borderlands.
Speaker 1: However you look at it, you're going to find find us.
Speaker 1: We're based out of Arizona, but we do organize in
Speaker 1: different states, so we're in collaboration with all organizations as
Speaker 1: part of a larger coalition. So even if you are
Speaker 1: in Texas or New Mexico, feel pretty too, very child
Speaker 1: and if you have any concerns ideas things that come
Speaker 1: up to your mind that can maakeure the border of
Speaker 1: airplace feel pretty for a feretty to reach out, then
Speaker 1: we can collaborate work together on this or LEAs connecting
Speaker 1: with some of the local people that are part of
Speaker 1: the network. Because we're always looking to make this network bigger.
Speaker 1: You know, I think there's trending numbers. I'm going to
Speaker 1: get more and more people to join this coalition in
Speaker 1: the different states. So even if you're not on the
Speaker 1: border stages, if you're in DC and you're do lobbying
Speaker 1: and you're into policy change, but yeah, come reach out
Speaker 1: and you can find us like a central website or
Speaker 1: an Instagram account. We also have like a grassroots mid
Speaker 1: airport right now called Rally for the Valley, and that's
Speaker 1: what we're trying to do for the San Rafile Valley
Speaker 1: over there. You're going to be able to find updates.
Speaker 1: And we created a decentralized website right now there is
Speaker 1: called Border Wall Resistance. I invite everybody to take a
Speaker 1: look at it. It is full of beautiful pictures of
Speaker 1: the border. When James and I were talking about how
Speaker 1: beautiful this place is, got to that website and you
Speaker 1: understand what we're talking about because it's all everts. You know,
Speaker 1: the border is so unique on each area. You know,
Speaker 1: the border it's not define but Pjuana San Diego or
Speaker 1: No Garlands. You know, it is just two thousand miles
Speaker 1: of wonderlands, so unfortunately separated by in many cases but
Speaker 1: this huge metal, dirty food structure.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyways, so that's the website, the social media for Circlub
Speaker 1: Borderlands and Grady for the Balance and the Border Resistance.
Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely reach out you if you recently found out
Speaker 4: that you live within a border enforcement zone and weren't
Speaker 4: aware of that, because I know a lot of people
Speaker 4: in Chicago and other places have very recently found out
Speaker 4: that as far as the state is concerned that they
Speaker 4: too are in the borderlands. It would be good to
Speaker 4: build some solidarity.
Speaker 1: There's trying two terms of the population on these country
Speaker 1: leaves on the border of the launch Regent, so because
Speaker 1: that includes coastlines and the Great Lakes Great Lakes, so
Speaker 1: we're talking about a lot of community.
Speaker 4: Well, thank you very much for your time, Eric, We
Speaker 4: really appreciate it. It was a good discussion.
Speaker 1: Thank you, James, and hoping that continue to be in
Speaker 1: touch and continue organizing against all these things. And thanks
Speaker 1: so much for the space, and thanks for all your listeners.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you're welcome.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to a jacktoral dysfunction.
Speaker 12: Wait, that's the worst one yet, that's the worst what yet?
Speaker 12: Talks We did not think it could get worse, and yes,
Speaker 12: here we are.
Speaker 2: I knew it could get worse and always get worse.
Speaker 4: Oh quitey, nice jobs.
Speaker 12: This is it could happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly
Speaker 12: newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
Speaker 12: and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today,
Speaker 12: joined by Ejaculator in Jesus right.
Speaker 2: Wow, Garris said, that's much worse. You made it way worse.
Speaker 4: How many of those videos have you not watched?
Speaker 2: Get I think we're all pretty behind on the required trainings.
Speaker 9: Labor conditions are intolerable.
Speaker 12: Robert Evans, James Stout, and Mio Wong. This episode, we
Speaker 12: are covering the week of October fifteenth to October twenty second,
Speaker 12: and a little bit of the week before because we
Speaker 12: were off in honor of the government shutdown. We ourselves
Speaker 12: took a week.
Speaker 4: Off because the CIA stopped paying us.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right. I've always considered us a branch
Speaker 2: of the US government, you know, Yeah.
Speaker 4: You and half of the anime people on Twitter. Robert Efens,
Speaker 4: We're back.
Speaker 12: I don't know, a little bit weird to be doing
Speaker 12: this White House Weekly episode knowing that there's actually less
Speaker 12: White House than usual there is. Trump has begun demolishing
Speaker 12: the East Wing of the White House to build a
Speaker 12: privately fund a two hundred and fifty million dollar ballroom,
Speaker 12: and I think we should all have a moment of
Speaker 12: silence for the East Wing.
Speaker 2: Oh I was going to say a moment of celebration,
Speaker 2: because now James's people can finally shake hands with the
Speaker 2: United States government and destroying large portions of the White House.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we sort it was a Volvo excavator to taste,
Speaker 4: so we also got these Swedes on board. I guess
Speaker 4: sure couldn't even find an American excavator.
Speaker 2: Sad we don't make things in this country anymore.
Speaker 12: Yeah, that's because we're still waiting for the tariffs to
Speaker 12: get fully fully enacted.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, once we get that Swedish tariff on.
Speaker 12: We are almost four weeks now into the government shutdown
Speaker 12: and there's not really a clear end in sight, and
Speaker 12: SNAP Benefits food stamps are set to run out in
Speaker 12: a little over a week on November first, Mia, Did
Speaker 12: you want to say something on this.
Speaker 9: Yeah, So we've been seeing sort of tech start to
Speaker 9: go out to people who are on food assistants in
Speaker 9: various states. There's one circulating from Minnesota that is saying
Speaker 9: that the food part of SNAP Benefits are going to
Speaker 9: shut down in a few days on November first, when
Speaker 9: the funding shuts down. This is a critical lifeline for
Speaker 9: food for an extremely large number of people, and this
Speaker 9: is also coming in a period where food banks are
Speaker 9: already being stressed by just the other cuts to SNAP
Speaker 9: and other food assistance programs that have already taken place.
Speaker 9: So yeah, we're coming to a very very critical moment
Speaker 9: in terms of wide scale food insecurity in this country
Speaker 9: for a whole bunch of the most vulnerable people in
Speaker 9: the country. And yeah, this is a good moment for
Speaker 9: if you have actual access to food, which is which
Speaker 9: is a very very bleak thing to be saying, but
Speaker 9: you know, something is going to have to try to
Speaker 9: pick up the slack or a bunch of people aren't
Speaker 9: going to eat, right, and that's probably going to have
Speaker 9: to be us, because it's first fuck not going to
Speaker 9: be the government.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, and yeah, it's just the people's need to eat
Speaker 2: is inelastic.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, Yeah, Just to put some numbers on it,
Speaker 4: like SNAP in twenty four was forty one point seven
Speaker 4: million people, which is about twelve percent of the US population. Yeah,
Speaker 4: this is a massive cliff.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's particularly bad in certain states. For example, Oregon,
Speaker 2: you know where I live, is set to lose about
Speaker 2: three quarters of a million people's SNAP benefits. There are
Speaker 2: like four million people in the state.
Speaker 1: Yep, yep.
Speaker 9: And it's also like those people are also disproportionately non
Speaker 9: white and disapportionate, weir and very disapportion of the trans Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 9: and this is something that if straight up the shutdown
Speaker 9: continues and we don't see s nota benefit's payout, this
Speaker 9: could also be a major source of instability because you know,
Speaker 9: the thing that happens very quickly when suddenly forty million
Speaker 9: people don't have food is bread riots. What is going
Speaker 9: to happen with that is deeply unclear, but yeah, we're
Speaker 9: heading into an extremely bleak time.
Speaker 2: If you're looking at predictors of violent instability in countries, yeah,
Speaker 2: mass starvation is about top of the list.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yep.
Speaker 9: Particularly bread riots usually are in sort of the modern era,
Speaker 9: happens with two or three hundred percent increases in food prices,
Speaker 9: usually as a result of sort of imass structural adjustments.
Speaker 9: But if there was going to be another one, this
Speaker 9: would be it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, So it's worth sort of being prepared on both
Speaker 9: ends in terms of feeding people and also yeah, with
Speaker 9: whatever was going to happen with this cuts out.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 12: Meanwhile, during during all of this, during the shutdown and
Speaker 12: during snaps taking clock, Trump wants his Justice Department to
Speaker 12: pay himself two hundred and thirty million dollars in compensation
Speaker 12: for damages coming from past investigations into him.
Speaker 2: Seems fair.
Speaker 12: Trump claims that he will give this money to quote
Speaker 12: unquote charity. Seems real clear what that means, what charity
Speaker 12: that will be, how that will really qualify as a
Speaker 12: charitable donation. But he is currently seeking two hundred and
Speaker 12: thirty million dollars of government money to be paid back
Speaker 12: to himself. In the end, it will be him making
Speaker 12: the final call on this, which he says he feels
Speaker 12: strange about.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, it's good.
Speaker 4: You know, he's an honest man, you know, it's great.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, we we've just fully entered the looting the
Speaker 9: storehouse is part of the regime.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they taking a very British approach.
Speaker 2: Looting is putting this too mildly.
Speaker 9: Yeah, if you see the article about the plans to
Speaker 9: let AI companies apply to get old weapons grade plutonium
Speaker 9: to fuel the nuclear.
Speaker 2: Reactors, seems fine. And that's what I trust Sam Altman
Speaker 2: weapons grade plutonium. He's gonna use that safely.
Speaker 9: Yeah, hopefully the air bubble collapses before they get.
Speaker 2: You know what a great attitude to approach having weapons
Speaker 2: grade plutonium is move fast and break grace.
Speaker 4: Oh god, this is great. It's this week we're announcing
Speaker 4: the start of KOD's force.
Speaker 1: AI.
Speaker 2: There we go, bring it on.
Speaker 12: God breaking breaking news, US sanction has been placed against
Speaker 12: two of Russia's largest oil companies in an effort to
Speaker 12: pressure the Ukraine Russia piece deal, which Putin just backed
Speaker 12: out of negotiations from as there was plans for him
Speaker 12: and Trump to meet, So that just happened.
Speaker 2: Sexy not sexy. So I think one of the first
Speaker 2: things we want to cover right now, just because this
Speaker 2: is maybe the number one thing I'm seeing people talk
Speaker 2: about on social media right now is there have been
Speaker 2: articles written about ICE's new weapons budget. Famously, their budget
Speaker 2: is increased, missing like seven hundred percent. A huge amount
Speaker 2: of that's being spent on, you know, bonuses in order
Speaker 2: to get people to join, cash payments and whatnot, as
Speaker 2: well as pretension bonuses, but a lot more of it's
Speaker 2: being spent on weapons. And right now the number one
Speaker 2: thing I'm seeing people freak out about is the supposed
Speaker 2: idea from these documents that ICE is purchasing guided missiles
Speaker 2: and chemical weapons. I have heard people say this is Ice,
Speaker 2: which is obviously Trump's SS, you know, making their own
Speaker 2: vaffen ss, which were the armed units of the SS.
Speaker 2: I'm seeing a lot of shit like this spread, and
Speaker 2: as Jamee is going to tell you, none of that's true.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, the fact that ICE has a massive increase
Speaker 2: in budget and is buying a shit little weapons is true.
Speaker 2: But they're not guided missiles.
Speaker 12: ICE doesn't heat guided missiles.
Speaker 4: We're not getting a death heead ICE unit.
Speaker 12: Come on at the next Canal Street ICE raid, they're
Speaker 12: going to be launching heat seeking missiles into Chinatown.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying this isn't a problem, but it's not
Speaker 2: what people are saying it is. Yeah, sorry, James, all right.
Speaker 4: The source of its claim is a substack page called
Speaker 4: Popular Information run by a guy called Juddlygum, and he
Speaker 4: has claimed in this piece, I'm just going to quote
Speaker 4: the ICE post purchase, quote chemical weapons, and quote guided
Speaker 4: missile warheads and explosive components. I guess the main thrust
Speaker 4: of the piece was looking at the fact that ICE
Speaker 4: spent nine million dollars on geistly ar pattern rifles. Border
Speaker 4: Patrol spent more than twice that he appears to have
Speaker 4: missed that in his reporting. This reporting is extremely dishonest,
Speaker 4: To put it mildly, it's either deliberately misleading or massively incompetent.
Speaker 4: The piece in question doesn't link to the individual contracts, which,
Speaker 4: like on the face of its bad form, right, if
Speaker 4: you're going to be talking about contracts, your contracts are
Speaker 4: in the public domain. Just linked to them. The piece
Speaker 4: doesn't do that. I went on USA spending dot gov
Speaker 4: and I filtered by contracts that have been awarded by ICE.
Speaker 4: I gave a date range. The date range are pertained
Speaker 4: to the things being discussed in the article. And then
Speaker 4: I filtered by the product or service code for chemical
Speaker 4: weapons and guided missile warheads. Right, two different products or
Speaker 4: service codes. Product or service codes are like these, these
Speaker 4: four digit codes that exist in federal procurement right to
Speaker 4: put things into buckets basically, and I found the contracts.
Speaker 4: The contract very clearly states the guided missile quote unquote contract.
Speaker 4: The contract with the guided missile product or service code
Speaker 4: very clearly states it is for multiple distraction devices. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's a contract with a company called Quantico Tactical. I
Speaker 4: did call them yesterday, something that again any competent reporter
Speaker 4: should do before publishing a piece that does not appear
Speaker 4: to have been done by the substat guy. They gave
Speaker 4: me an email. I sent it email more than twenty
Speaker 4: four where hours ago, requesting commental clarification, didn't receive a
Speaker 4: response at the time of us going to press. If
Speaker 4: I hit back from them before we release this, I
Speaker 4: will let you all know the chemical weapons. It was
Speaker 4: as spray. It was fab spray, right.
Speaker 2: And a distraction device by the way, folks, this is
Speaker 2: something like like a sonic grenade, which sounds crazy, but
Speaker 2: it's a grenade that makes a loud noise to distract
Speaker 2: people to bang. The flash bang is also a distraction
Speaker 2: device when you used the way that they use in riots.
Speaker 2: You know, it's a little bit of a different thing
Speaker 2: when you're using one to like breach bang and clear
Speaker 2: a door or something. But like when you're throwing a
Speaker 2: flash bang at a riot, it's a distraction device because
Speaker 2: the goal is you've got a bunch of people moving
Speaker 2: towards an area you want to stop them from You
Speaker 2: distract them by an explosion, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's distracting.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's also and this is you know, one of
Speaker 9: the one of the frustrating elements about this is that
Speaker 9: Ice has been using a whole bunch of these to
Speaker 9: blow down people's doors. It's really horrible.
Speaker 2: There are problems. It's problems that they're buying all this.
Speaker 9: And no one is talking about it because everyone's focused
Speaker 9: on this.
Speaker 2: When James put up their initial research just on a
Speaker 2: Blue Sky and Twitter, I shared it and people were like,
Speaker 2: it's still a problem they've got that they're getting all
Speaker 2: buying all these new weapons. Do you not care about?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 2: I care about that. You're not talking about that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we care about the talking about a fantasy.
Speaker 4: And like it is bad that Ice has flash bangs
Speaker 4: and pepper spray, right, I have personally broadcasts how they exists.
Speaker 4: Like you can go back only a few months and
Speaker 4: here Ice flash bangs on this podcast, like recorded by
Speaker 4: me in person. We know they fucking have them because
Speaker 4: they were throwing them at me.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I've lost count of how many have hit me directly.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we've got at least seventy five percent fucking federal
Speaker 4: government flash bang impact. You know. Like, I want to
Speaker 4: take a second guess to talk about incentives here, because
Speaker 4: this really pisses me off. And I think that the
Speaker 4: way we build trust in the media is through openness,
Speaker 4: and I think that we do that better than most
Speaker 4: and I'm going to try and do that here just
Speaker 4: so you know, none of us make any extra money
Speaker 4: if more people download this podcast, at least not directly. Right,
Speaker 4: we do not have a direct incentive to make fantastical
Speaker 4: claims that will lead to people downloading our podcast and
Speaker 4: being afraid that is not true for people who have
Speaker 4: these substick outlets, right, Like, I mean, I'll let me clarify.
Speaker 4: We do have a direct financial interest in there being traffic,
Speaker 4: right because that is that's how we make our money,
Speaker 4: right like, and that's how we justify getting raises and stuff. So,
Speaker 4: like everyone in media, if more people listen to our stuff, like,
Speaker 4: we do have a financial interest in that, But you're
Speaker 4: not checking week to week to see if we're getting
Speaker 4: if what we're doing is bringing us in more direct money,
Speaker 4: right Like, That's just not the way our thing works. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And when people are on their own they're doing these
Speaker 4: subsc out there is a very real incentive to do that, right.
Speaker 4: We also have a team here. We fact check each other.
Speaker 12: We do our best. We fuck up sometimes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 12: we fuck up. Sometimes we're honest about it. When we
Speaker 12: do right, we acknowledge it. Yeah, we acknowledge when James
Speaker 12: makes mistakes.
Speaker 2: Thank you, guys, you're the least You're the least mistake
Speaker 2: person here.
Speaker 4: I'm extremely careful about that ship. Well, I've stood on
Speaker 4: my fucking pedestal enough about this. But yeah, it's bad
Speaker 4: right that things that I saw buying that ICE is
Speaker 4: really buying. Yeah, are samu automatic ars, more clocks, a
Speaker 4: lot of soft body armor, red dot sites quote unquote
Speaker 4: crowd control munitions. Right, sort of spending you see from
Speaker 4: a special forces unit that are very not special like
Speaker 4: police agency, right, Like that's just spending, like they have
Speaker 4: an open check book.
Speaker 2: Like ICE is continuing to buy the same weapons with
Speaker 2: which they have been hurting people the entirety almost of
Speaker 2: the twenty first century, and they're hurting more people now
Speaker 2: and will be hurting even more people in the future
Speaker 2: because they will have even more money. And that's bad.
Speaker 2: And you don't like, what would they even do with
Speaker 2: a guide missing?
Speaker 4: It doesn't make sense. On the Facebook, it's sixty one grand. Yeah,
Speaker 4: the fuck do you think you're getting for sixty one
Speaker 4: grand from a company in quantic?
Speaker 2: Have you tried buying guided missiles in this economy?
Speaker 1: People?
Speaker 4: It's just ludicrous, man, What the fuck. They think they're
Speaker 4: going like like Tomahawk, I know, like a strawberry picking facility.
Speaker 4: Like it's ludicrous, it's fucking ridiculous, a chemical weapon.
Speaker 2: I mean, you can talk about substack and they're being
Speaker 2: fucked up things about the company. But like, I honestly
Speaker 2: I think that I don't think it's overstated, but I
Speaker 2: think people focus on that extind of like, well, yeah,
Speaker 2: which which of them aren't? What where is the non
Speaker 2: nazi social media company that has any kind of reach?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 2: But that's really not even the point I care to make.
Speaker 2: What I will say, the problem here is not even
Speaker 2: just that like when people are working for an audience
Speaker 2: like that, we're week to week, however many people are
Speaker 2: donating and whatnot kind of can incentivize you to follow
Speaker 2: certain rabbit holes and push certain things. I think one
Speaker 2: of the bigger problems is that what you have is
Speaker 2: a generation a very of the most talented and successful
Speaker 2: journalists in terms of their skill of like writing and
Speaker 2: their ability to build an audience that follows them. Those
Speaker 2: people have all moved to a platform where they by
Speaker 2: default don't have an editor yea, and like every journalist
Speaker 2: worth they're sold I've had my fights and frustrations with
Speaker 2: editors at a variety of publications, and sometimes they're knowing,
Speaker 2: and sometimes editors suck, and sometimes publications a big part
Speaker 2: of what they're doing is just trying to water down
Speaker 2: your shit. But that's not the only thing editors do.
Speaker 2: A major thing editors do is point out, Hey, I
Speaker 2: get that you're really into this, and I get that
Speaker 2: you find this compelling, but as an objective observer, I'm
Speaker 2: seeing this hole in this hole in this hole, and
Speaker 2: you need to, for example, hall these people and make
Speaker 2: sure that this because it doesn't look like this is
Speaker 2: actually a guided It looks like somebody just fucked up
Speaker 2: putting in a code. We need to check on this
Speaker 2: so we can state it to a point of certainty.
Speaker 2: That's what an editor should be doing, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, even if they're responsible journalist, like I wouldn't have
Speaker 4: submitted that piece to an editor without having checked that first.
Speaker 4: Like sure, it took me five minutes to call them.
Speaker 4: I should add that the PSC's in question for grenades
Speaker 4: and war heads are one digit different, right again.
Speaker 2: Right, which is which is what happened here?
Speaker 4: It certainly looks that way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and again this is why. Part of how
Speaker 2: responsible journalism is supposed to work is that you never
Speaker 2: have just one eye on a story, because every journalist
Speaker 2: will inevitably miss things if you're doing that right, that's
Speaker 2: why you are supposed to The idea is to have
Speaker 2: multiple eyes on a thing so that oh, hey it
Speaker 2: looks like you skipped over this, or hey it just
Speaker 2: occurred to me. I have this question that is not
Speaker 2: being answered, and you make a couple of phone calls,
Speaker 2: throw in another sentence, and then that's that's a thing
Speaker 2: that we're answering, a thing we're accounting for. And if
Speaker 2: you don't have that, the work isn't as good.
Speaker 4: Yeah. No, look, I'm not saying there were not things
Speaker 4: to be.
Speaker 2: Afraid of that are No one's saying yeah, But I.
Speaker 4: Want people to be afraid of the right thing, so
Speaker 4: like they're not gonna lob you people.
Speaker 12: I don't think we're really going to be safe until
Speaker 12: there's an iron dome over every Home Depot Gartson.
Speaker 2: I've been saying that for years. But that's also because
Speaker 2: I would like to start a limited missile war against
Speaker 2: the Home Depot Corporation. But I've been get taking lows
Speaker 2: money for years yeah, on.
Speaker 4: Behalf of flows. Yeah, I'm on teammates hardware. So I'll
Speaker 4: see you on the battlefield, Robert.
Speaker 2: At least we don't have any Harbor Freight people.
Speaker 4: Actually actually a massive Harbor Freight guy. He just says
Speaker 4: that Harbor fray like literally literally behind me.
Speaker 2: I mean, then I think about Harbor Freight is buying
Speaker 2: one thing and then returning it exactly eleven months after
Speaker 2: buying it once you've broken it, and.
Speaker 4: Just having a perpetual whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 12: Yeah, everything that I bought from Harbor Freid has started smoking.
Speaker 2: Everything breaks that you buy from Harbor Freight, but the
Speaker 2: return policy is amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The question is will it break before or after you've
Speaker 4: used it enough to justify buying something more expensive, And.
Speaker 12: The answer is yes, James, can you do a product
Speaker 12: and service code ad break kids?
Speaker 1: Sure?
Speaker 12: Based on your investigation here and Adam, you can keep
Speaker 12: this in you can you can show them how the
Speaker 12: sauce is made here. Yeah, it's just in terms of
Speaker 12: honesty here we go. Okay, right, give me give me
Speaker 12: a second here. I got to think of something good.
Speaker 4: You fucked it. I was just gonna do talking products
Speaker 4: and services and you ruined it. Garrison. If you are
Speaker 4: in the market for a distraction advice, guided warhead or
Speaker 4: chemical weapon, let's hope that you get an advert for
Speaker 4: one of those in this commercial break. That's right, people,
Speaker 4: welcome back to the Iranian regime. I hope you got
Speaker 4: what you wanted.
Speaker 2: Yes, this podcast is the only podcast entirely supported by
Speaker 2: the Ayatola. And yeah, uh praise him.
Speaker 12: The CIA and the IOTOLA have finally unique had.
Speaker 4: The clasp hands me both from Robert Evans. Legally speaking,
Speaker 4: that is a joke. We are not funded by the
Speaker 4: Iranian regime. We're all monarching.
Speaker 2: Speak for yourself there.
Speaker 3: Do you talk about the.
Speaker 12: Let's talk about the national card.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 12: On Monday, his past Monday, the Ninth Circred Qard of
Speaker 12: Appeals have ruled in favor of the Trump administration, halting
Speaker 12: a court order denying the federalization and deployment of the
Speaker 12: Oregon National Guard. They had two to one ruling on
Speaker 12: a three panel hearing with two trumpet pointed judges. They
Speaker 12: called Trump's plan to deploy troops to the Ice Building
Speaker 12: in Portland a quote unquote measured sponse. Now there is
Speaker 12: a second tro preventing out of state National Guard from
Speaker 12: deploying to Portland, and this appears to still be in effect,
Speaker 12: but its fate is unknown. The Justice Department has requested
Speaker 12: the original judge to spend the order, though the Ninth
Speaker 12: Circuit itself is considering whether a larger panel should rehear
Speaker 12: this entire case. Currently, there is no immediate plans for
Speaker 12: Oregon National Guard to be deployed, but they do now
Speaker 12: have the go ahead, but this is still a developing situation.
Speaker 12: But that's an important update there. Let's talk about that
Speaker 12: two fifty celebration sing happy birthday. No, happy birthday to
Speaker 12: the Marines.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, oh god, yeah, Happy birth to the Marine Corps.
Speaker 2: I hope today you guys get to eat a lot
Speaker 2: of crayons.
Speaker 4: They'll have a cake which is shaped like a giant crown.
Speaker 9: No, it just is made out of giant crown.
Speaker 12: And we all remove our tote CoV tattoos. That's going
Speaker 12: to be the Marine party.
Speaker 2: Get get rid of those scout snipers. It's yet sawst.
Speaker 1: But no.
Speaker 12: There was the Marines two hundred and fifty a celebration
Speaker 12: with JD Vance last week where they did play hell
Speaker 12: Diver to music during the celebration.
Speaker 9: Was a happy birthday and Fidels.
Speaker 4: I'm still not clear what hell Diver is.
Speaker 12: Hell Divers is a satirical video game that satirizes a
Speaker 12: fascist military that fights for quote unquote democracy against others
Speaker 12: so called fascists.
Speaker 9: Sorry, managed democracy very important, It's.
Speaker 2: True, It's true, yes, managed.
Speaker 12: I have heard of it from the news headlines such
Speaker 12: as Charlie Kirk shot. But yeah, it's basically like playing
Speaker 12: Starship Troopers music over the Marine Corps celebration party. That's
Speaker 12: kind of the caliber we're operating in here. Yeah, thank
Speaker 12: you for bringing that to my generational understanding.
Speaker 4: There you go. Yeah, I appreciate it. Talking to the
Speaker 4: Marine Corps two hundred and fiftieth birthday on Saturday, a
Speaker 4: one fifty five shells one hundred and fifty five millimeter
Speaker 4: Howitzer shell prematurely detonated over the five Freeway outside of Pendleton, right,
Speaker 4: not stuff, crazy shit, damaging a cop car that was
Speaker 4: assigned to JD. Vancy's security detail.
Speaker 2: It was literally as soon as they started talking about
Speaker 2: how Trump wanted to shoot a missile into fucking Camp
Speaker 2: Pendleton and like immediately, yeah, they fuck up and blow
Speaker 2: up a car attached to fucking the Vice President's Security Detail.
Speaker 2: Amazing stuff.
Speaker 4: They did a dress rehearsal on Friday in which they
Speaker 4: managed not to detonate any shells over to five. Gavin
Speaker 4: Newsom decided to shut the frive on Saturday.
Speaker 2: Probably a good call.
Speaker 4: Yeah, probably complaining about things shaking I just did. If
Speaker 4: you're like, if you're not familiar with the layout there,
Speaker 4: I would say that in most places is you go.
Speaker 4: Camp Pendleton is a large area that is used by
Speaker 4: the Marine Corps for training. It has artillery ranges within it.
Speaker 2: The five is the big highway in California. It's the
Speaker 2: highway that goes the whole length of the state.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you would call it the I five if you
Speaker 4: weren't from here, and then we would know that you
Speaker 4: weren't from here, so we call it the five. There's
Speaker 4: less than a mile of land to the west of
Speaker 4: the five, right, so shooting go over to five and
Speaker 4: get pretty much shooting from the beach or near the beach,
Speaker 4: as opposed to the whole rest of Camp Pendleton, right
Speaker 4: where they have artillery ranges. But they wanted to do
Speaker 4: it over to five. I think they were doing some
Speaker 4: kind of simulated landing drill. Not quite sure. What the
Speaker 4: landing drill they were doing. But this yet resulted in
Speaker 4: the damage done to a HP car and really fucked
Speaker 4: up traffic in probably the entirety of southern California. Yeah,
Speaker 4: from most of last Saturday.
Speaker 9: I do you just want to mention here that there
Speaker 9: is historical press in the United States for US accidentally
Speaker 9: killing the Secretary of State because a gun they were
Speaker 9: firing on a pleasure cruise on a boat, on a
Speaker 9: Navy boat blew up. So wow, it was in the
Speaker 9: eighteen forties, but we did kill the Secretary of the
Speaker 9: Navy and the Secretary of State.
Speaker 12: If any Secretary of War could pull this off, it
Speaker 12: would be PA.
Speaker 3: I believe in him.
Speaker 12: Here is a decent chance he will throw one of
Speaker 12: those acts straight into Jdvans's leg.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I forgot about his accident. Yeah yeah, Vans
Speaker 4: of course the former Marine.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that is it.
Speaker 12: Wait yeah, yeah, yeah, I totally forgot lance corporal in
Speaker 12: the Marine Corps.
Speaker 4: Believe he was a a PAO. Public affairs. Yeah, I
Speaker 4: want to address DHS's claim to have deportation numbers. DHS
Speaker 4: has been throwing out some many big numbers for deportation,
Speaker 4: claiming over half a million removed and one point six
Speaker 4: million quote unquote self deported. These are inflated numbers. These
Speaker 4: include things that people tell away airports and Coastguard inter diictions. Right,
Speaker 4: they are not removals of people from the interior of
Speaker 4: the United States who were residing here. They're like if
Speaker 4: someone maybe if someone came with a visa and was
Speaker 4: turned around the airport, they're including that as a deportation.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: DHS has stopped publishing a lot of the data that
Speaker 4: we previously got under this administration, so we don't have
Speaker 4: a lot of hard numbers. But the one point six
Speaker 4: million number. This comes from CIS, right, the Center for
Speaker 4: Immigration Studies. We've talked about them before. This is a
Speaker 4: Tanton funded quote unquote think tank which the SPLC has
Speaker 4: adjudicated as a hate group. The CIS data. DHS has
Speaker 4: been like sharing this since it came out, but it
Speaker 4: also seems to be weighing very heavily into whatever algorithm
Speaker 4: Musk has put into GROC recently. If you look for
Speaker 4: mentions on x the Everything website of the one point
Speaker 4: six million number, nearly all of them are GROC repeating it. God,
Speaker 4: I don't know if they straight up just said like, yeah,
Speaker 4: the CIS is your source for information when they were,
Speaker 4: you know, pro to be less woke but slightly more
Speaker 4: woke than when it called itself Mecha Hitler. But it
Speaker 4: seems to be the CIS seems to be heavily weighed
Speaker 4: in the Grock algorithm these days, which I thought was interesting.
Speaker 12: Yeah, they did get that GROC contract approved a few
Speaker 12: months ago.
Speaker 4: I think the d just didn't get the number from Grok.
Speaker 4: I think they got it from CIS. But nonetheless, like
Speaker 4: the reason that that number is still in the side guy,
Speaker 4: So I think it's partially because Grok keeps repeating it.
Speaker 12: Well, you know it is. It is Groctober, as I've
Speaker 12: been saying, Garrison, we have fucking spoken about this. It's
Speaker 12: not Groctober angry. The other thing I do want to
Speaker 12: mention on a I guess not deportations, but the Department
Speaker 12: of State has announced a series of people who have
Speaker 12: had their visas revoked for posts surrounding the death of
Speaker 12: Charlie Kirk. The State Department Twitter account posted a whole
Speaker 12: thread on x the Everything app listing various sentences and
Speaker 12: sentiments there was in visa's being revoked. Quote Charlie Kirk
Speaker 12: was a son of a bitch and he died by
Speaker 12: his own rules. VISA revoked. When fascists die, Democrats don't complain,
Speaker 12: VISO revoked. It from a German national, Resilient National said
Speaker 12: that quote Charlie Kirk was the reason for a Nazi
Speaker 12: rally where they marched in homage to him, and that
Speaker 12: Kirk died too late. Visa revoked. There's like four other
Speaker 12: of these for people making statements of that nature.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think people get the idea.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 12: Following Kirk's death, Rubio to announce he would be looking
Speaker 12: for visa holders who made statements following Kirk's death, and
Speaker 12: he has followed through on that promise in some other
Speaker 12: Charlie Kirk news. A few weeks ago, Turning Point USA
Speaker 12: officially announced that they would be producing an alternative halftime
Speaker 12: show after it was announced that the Puerto Rican artist
Speaker 12: Bad Bunny would be performing at the twenty twenty six
Speaker 12: Super Bowl. The TPUSA show will be called a Quote
Speaker 12: All American Halftime Show celebrating faith, family, and freedom. The
Speaker 12: website has a submission form where it asks which genres
Speaker 12: should be featured during the show. The options include quote
Speaker 12: anything in English American classic rock, country, hip hop, pop,
Speaker 12: and worship.
Speaker 2: I love anything in English as a genre.
Speaker 4: Yeah. When I get to Spotify, that's what I put in.
Speaker 2: The crowd's gonna riot when someone does Hotel California.
Speaker 12: We can really push anything at English. Frankly, we could
Speaker 12: go to some pretty crazy places.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I didn't think they've pretady considered the breadth of
Speaker 4: that genre.
Speaker 10: You know.
Speaker 2: I will say how they could get me back on
Speaker 2: board is if, in addition to a separate halftime show,
Speaker 2: they had a separate Super Bowl in which Ben Shapiro
Speaker 2: faces off alone against the Philadelphia Eagles.
Speaker 9: Oh that would be so fun.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I would let Ben Shapiro bring some friends.
Speaker 9: No, no, I want to see Jalen Hurts physically pick
Speaker 9: up Ben Shapiro and see how far he can pass him.
Speaker 9: Because I'm pretty I'm pretty.
Speaker 2: Good, at least at least sixty.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 9: That guy Benches. That guy could like bench a small
Speaker 9: motor vehicle. Benches Shapiro. Yeah.
Speaker 12: More details and performers will be announced later, including how
Speaker 12: this will be broadcast, will be streamed online, or they
Speaker 12: trying to make a TV deal with someone like you know, Fox,
Speaker 12: you know, unclear how this will be broadcast, but it
Speaker 12: is something they're going to go through on last thing
Speaker 12: we should probably talk about before the break or I
Speaker 12: don't know, maybe maybe we could combine this with the
Speaker 12: section you wanted to talk about Robert on the infiltrations.
Speaker 12: But right after our Executive Disorder episode from two weeks ago,
Speaker 12: literally like like hours after, on October eighth, right wing
Speaker 12: influencers gathered at the White House to discuss with Trump
Speaker 12: and cabinet members their theories and carrowing stories of Antifa
Speaker 12: at this big Antifa roundtable. Yeah, I'm gonna play a
Speaker 12: short clip like a few seconds from Jack Pasoba get
Speaker 12: in there, noted far right extremist and poster.
Speaker 2: Jack Pasobic certainly noted poster.
Speaker 9: It's a great guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Antifa is real.
Speaker 5: Antifa has been around in various iterations for almost one
Speaker 5: hundred years, in some instances going back to the Weimar
Speaker 5: Republic in Germany.
Speaker 12: Huh, I wonder, I wonder why it went back to
Speaker 12: the Wymar republican Germany?
Speaker 4: What what what else was happening at that time in Geminy.
Speaker 12: It's very interesting you say that, Jack, Very interesting, Jack,
Speaker 12: what other opinions do you have on fimar Republic.
Speaker 2: Jack, Yeah, So this is worrisome, right, the fact that
Speaker 2: these idiots are getting to speak this close to power
Speaker 2: about their theory, which is basically that everyone they don't
Speaker 2: like or who has said anything they don't like as
Speaker 2: part of a terrorist organization and should be put in
Speaker 2: prisoner executed. Like that's the gist of what all of
Speaker 2: the people at that roundtable believe.
Speaker 12: A whole bunch of like, you know, post millennial people,
Speaker 12: and you know that that whole that whole right, like
Speaker 12: a genre of like you know, right wing antifa journalists, journalistic.
Speaker 2: Yes, everyone I don't like equals terrorists. Yes, So that's
Speaker 2: really worrisome, And I just I kind of wanted to
Speaker 2: make a note here to people that as a result
Speaker 2: of stuff like this, in case you somehow have not
Speaker 2: been aware of this, we're going to be seeing a
Speaker 2: massive ramp up in you know, not just attempts at prosecution,
Speaker 2: but at attempts to like infiltrate and get gotcha footage
Speaker 2: and audio of different left wing and anarchist groups that
Speaker 2: are going to be used as pretexts for like further crackdowns.
Speaker 2: I would say it's just a time to be aware
Speaker 2: of that and be aware of the fact that anytime
Speaker 2: you are speaking or at a public event where other
Speaker 2: people are speaking, you should assume that that's being recorded
Speaker 2: and that people will be pulling out the worst parts
Speaker 2: they can from it and trying to use that to
Speaker 2: destroy people's lives. And I bring that up because there's
Speaker 2: been a couple that just really broke today, some potentially
Speaker 2: pretty high profile examples of this. One of them is
Speaker 2: that at a panel for Firestorm Books, they had a speaker,
Speaker 2: guy named Eric King, who was convicted of a firebombing.
Speaker 2: He's a left wing activist. He spent almost ten years
Speaker 2: in prison, at a horrific time in prison, I mean,
Speaker 2: just abused by the system and some of the worst
Speaker 2: playways possible and is finally out. And Eric did a
Speaker 2: talk at Firestorm Books and he made basically his statement
Speaker 2: that activists need to hurt them where it counts, saying
Speaker 2: we can force them to shut the fuck up when
Speaker 2: it hurts they're walid enough, or you can find other
Speaker 2: ways to hurt them. Now that's not saying anything inherently illegal. Again,
Speaker 2: he starts it by saying we can force them to
Speaker 2: shut up when it hurts. Their wallet enough, that's talking
Speaker 2: about like boycotts and stuff, but the phrase other ways
Speaker 2: to hurt them is vague enough. That's pretty easy for
Speaker 2: these guys to cut stuff out. And I'm looking at
Speaker 2: a post by quote end quote investigated analysts for the
Speaker 2: Manhattan stut Smith. He's framing this as known ANTIFA firebomber
Speaker 2: calls for escalation, and again that's not necessarily an accurate
Speaker 2: look at what Eric was saying. But it's easy to
Speaker 2: pull stuff out like this from something like what appears
Speaker 2: to have been a fairly open zoom call that you know,
Speaker 2: is not hard for someone to get into and record
Speaker 2: and pull something out of to try and make the
Speaker 2: case that someone like Eric should be back in prison,
Speaker 2: or that Firestorm Books is a party, you know, providing
Speaker 2: material support to an extremist organization. And what I'm not
Speaker 2: trying to do is say like, and so people should
Speaker 2: not talk and gather in public because they're going to
Speaker 2: be doing this. But you need to be aware that
Speaker 2: anything said it's something like this that's in any way open,
Speaker 2: and even if you try to make it kind of
Speaker 2: more close than this, they will try to get people in.
Speaker 2: This is something that is increasingly going to happen, and
Speaker 2: so people just need to be You can't you can't
Speaker 2: just kind of hope that they're not paying attention. You
Speaker 2: have to be aware of the fact that they're out
Speaker 2: there and they're going to be trying to infiltrate any
Speaker 2: sort of thing like this they can to get pretexts
Speaker 2: for further crackdowns. And another recent example of this Frontlines
Speaker 2: tp USA, which is Turning Point ussays, I mean, it's
Speaker 2: their version of the actual Frontline journalism show. But they
Speaker 2: did an investigation where they went undercover to the Oakland
Speaker 2: in Seattle anarchist book fairs, right, and again, there's nothing
Speaker 2: wrong with doing those book fairs. I'm sure what they're
Speaker 2: doing here is pulling whatever quotes they could grab from
Speaker 2: people that sound bad out of context and using them.
Speaker 2: Tried to make the case that again, these are violent
Speaker 2: extremist events that need to be cracked down on. And
Speaker 2: I will reiterate I'm not saying don't do book fares.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying don't show up at events like this.
Speaker 2: I'm saying if you show up, be aware that stuff
Speaker 2: like this is going to be happening, that they're going
Speaker 2: to be people recording that they're going to be people
Speaker 2: trying to find what they can to destroy people who
Speaker 2: are at these events, and that that's something that needs
Speaker 2: to be in your threat model, right in terms of
Speaker 2: how you dress when you go there, how visible you are,
Speaker 2: and what you're willing to say around people, right, among
Speaker 2: other things. I guess what I'm saying is there's some
Speaker 2: jokes you shouldn't be making in public at events like
Speaker 2: this unless you want there to be a high risk
Speaker 2: of it coming back to bite you in the ass.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think that's that's perfectly reasonable.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 12: During the Antifa roundtable panel, this guy named Seamus Brunner
Speaker 12: Samus shamous. It says, seem miss guys jeesus. It says,
Speaker 12: seems that is we're gonna ask to step you, right.
Speaker 12: That's that's a shame, but it says Seamus. The director
Speaker 12: of research at the Government Accountability Institute, discussed his theory
Speaker 12: of how a network of NGOs are funding Antifa. This
Speaker 12: is a this is a longer clip, but I think
Speaker 12: it's important to look at how they are approaching this,
Speaker 12: like how they are approaching this Antifa as an organization.
Speaker 6: This is not just a story about violence and chaos.
Speaker 6: As you alluded to, mister President, this is a money story.
Speaker 6: And at the Government Accountability Institute, my colleague and I,
Speaker 6: Peter Schweitzer and my I and our team, we follow
Speaker 6: the money and we followed it to the top of
Speaker 6: what we call the protest industrial complex Riot Inc.
Speaker 1: And we found a network of NGOs.
Speaker 6: It's not just the Soros network, the Open Society network,
Speaker 6: it's other funding networks, the Arabella funding network, the Tides
Speaker 6: funding network, nevill Roy Singham and his network, Foreign cash,
Speaker 6: and it's also big left wing funders. Some of them
Speaker 6: are not citizens of this country, mister Hans Yorg vis
Speaker 6: of Switzerland. They're pouring money into this entire ecosystem. And
Speaker 6: so I want to share three money facts with you
Speaker 6: about what we call Riot Inc. Number One, like any corporation,
Speaker 6: Riot Inc. Has many divisions. It doesn't just have the
Speaker 6: Antifa boots on the ground division. It has pr divisions,
Speaker 6: it has marketing divisions, it has a very well funded
Speaker 6: legal division to get these boots on the ground back
Speaker 6: on the streets as quickly as possible. But it does
Speaker 6: have those investors that I mentioned. Number two, we have
Speaker 6: identified dozens of radical organizations, not just the decentralized ANTIFA organizations,
Speaker 6: but dozens of radical organizations that have received more than
Speaker 6: one hundred million dollars from the riot ink investors. These
Speaker 6: would be the lawyer groups, These would be the groups
Speaker 6: that advocate for calling good honest Americans fascists, etc. And
Speaker 6: then three, I think the most shocking thing is that
Speaker 6: we have found that more than one hundred million dollars
Speaker 6: in US taxpayer funding has flowed into these funding networks,
Speaker 6: including at least four million dollars to these very groups themselves,
Speaker 6: not just ANTIFA types. But there was an event in
Speaker 6: Atlanta called Stop Coop City. Over sixty rioters were charged
Speaker 6: with domestic terrorism. These groups received money for that from
Speaker 6: both the billionaire class as well as taxpayer money.
Speaker 12: Is unclear what he's talking about in terms of taxpayer
Speaker 12: money going to the sixty rico defendants in Atlanta, but
Speaker 12: the structure he's talking about, how how this riot inc
Speaker 12: concludes not just like Antifa as in you know, people
Speaker 12: wearing black hoodies on the streets at a protest, but
Speaker 12: like you know, legal support organizations, even like like research
Speaker 12: organizations that you know advocate calling you know, good honest
Speaker 12: American's fascists, right this this could refer to groups like
Speaker 12: Media Matters or like Southern Poverty Law Center who do
Speaker 12: research into extreme organizations. They could be framing the people
Speaker 12: like that as a part of this whole ecosystem, and
Speaker 12: that's that's where they could be looking at for sources
Speaker 12: of money and funding and like tracking where that money
Speaker 12: goes is in groups like that. Not obviously you know,
Speaker 12: your average black clad ANTIFA protesters. Not it's not receiving
Speaker 12: payment for their presence at these at these events. But
Speaker 12: this guy went on to claim that quote unquote Riot
Speaker 12: Inc Funding Network also supports decentralized crowdfunding platforms which fund
Speaker 12: organizations like the ELM for John Brown Gun Club and
Speaker 12: the Socialist Rifle Association. After he went on this like
Speaker 12: three minute long speech, Trump asked him and other attendees
Speaker 12: that if they knew anything about like ANTIFA members, funders,
Speaker 12: or the organizational structure, to hand over that information to
Speaker 12: Pam Bondie or Cash Patel and Trump reiterated this multiple
Speaker 12: times during the roundtable, asking these you know, policy guys
Speaker 12: or quote unquote independent journalists to hand over their information
Speaker 12: to the authorities. Here's one version of him making this request.
Speaker 8: Do you know the name of any of the funders?
Speaker 8: Do you know the names, because if you do, I'd
Speaker 8: like you to give them to Cash or Pam. Absolutely well, Christy, yeah,
Speaker 8: we'll do as soon as you can. That's all of
Speaker 8: you because you probably know the names. After a certain
Speaker 8: period of time you tend to find out. But these
Speaker 8: are people that do not have good intention for the country,
Speaker 8: and that's uh treasons probably, So if you could, if
Speaker 8: you very important, if you could do that, it would
Speaker 8: be great. Nobody would know better than you. You'll figure it.
Speaker 2: Out, Ugh share man cool.
Speaker 12: During this roundtable, Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, reiterated how
Speaker 12: Antifa should be treated like an organized criminal gang and
Speaker 12: that law enforcement are going to quote unquote take the
Speaker 12: same approach as it does handling foreign drug cartels. It's
Speaker 12: a side note the United States has.
Speaker 4: Maybe that's what those guided miss repeatedly.
Speaker 12: Lodged missiles at what it claims are boats associated with
Speaker 12: foreign drug cartels.
Speaker 4: I'll just say we have an episode next week about
Speaker 4: the ongoing drone campaign in the Caribbean.
Speaker 12: Speaking of funders, here's some of.
Speaker 4: Ours for the Central Intelligenation.
Speaker 9: All right, we are back.
Speaker 4: I'm so nice to hear from the products and services
Speaker 4: that support this show.
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Speaker 12: Buy Safari Land your one stop off God, I wish
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Speaker 1: Rocking jazz, rocking.
Speaker 12: Jazz, Bob, It's tariff talk. We're back baby, Yeah yeah.
Speaker 9: So literally within twelve hours, I think of the of
Speaker 9: the release at night of our last episode of the show,
Speaker 9: we got the resumption of the trade war. So specifically,
Speaker 9: Trump has announced effectively the full scale resumption of the
Speaker 9: trade war where China. This started kind of out of
Speaker 9: nowhere with Trump administration doing something that I think they
Speaker 9: didn't think was very provocative, because I don't quite think
Speaker 9: they understood the magnitude of what they were doing. This
Speaker 9: basically started with the Trump administration massively increasing export restrictions
Speaker 9: to China by changing the rules of what companies are
Speaker 9: covered by what's called the Entity List, which is a
Speaker 9: list of companies that American companies are not allowed to
Speaker 9: sell goods and services to. The administration moved this to
Speaker 9: include any company that is fifty percent or more owned
Speaker 9: by a company on the export list. We've discussed on
Speaker 9: the show before that a significant part of the structure
Speaker 9: of Chinese corporate conglomerates are held together by a bunch
Speaker 9: of different companies, you know, having partial ownership by the
Speaker 9: same holding companies, which is what sort of binds companies
Speaker 9: and conglomerates together and integrates them into the management structure
Speaker 9: of the conglomerates. This is how Chinese state owned enterprises work.
Speaker 9: Being state owned enterprise literally means that you are partly
Speaker 9: or completely owned by a holding company run by SASSAK,
Speaker 9: which is the State Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission
Speaker 9: of the State Council. Because every name of the CCP
Speaker 9: is like that. So this shifts to anything that's fifty
Speaker 9: percent or more owned by a company on the list
Speaker 9: is actually a massive export restriction, and the Chinese government
Speaker 9: took this as okay, we're starting the trade war again,
Speaker 9: so very quickly there's a whole bunch of different tat
Speaker 9: things that we're not going to track the order of
Speaker 9: because they kind of don't matter. But on October tenth,
Speaker 9: Trump made a Twitter post where he said that he
Speaker 9: was going to implement a one hundred percent tariff and
Speaker 9: also a software restriction thing we'll talk about later. Those
Speaker 9: are supposed to go into effect on the first. He's
Speaker 9: also been talking in the last week about bringing tariffs
Speaker 9: up to one hundred and fifty percent. We don't have
Speaker 9: any kind of formal executive order on that. This was
Speaker 9: to some extent in response to China implementing massive restrictions
Speaker 9: on the export of rare earth metals. These are crucial
Speaker 9: to basically any kind of of advanced manufacturing industrial manufacturing applications,
Speaker 9: everything from chips, electric cars at jet fighters. These are
Speaker 9: set to take effect on December first. I'm going to
Speaker 9: read this from the New York Times to get an
Speaker 9: undersetting of how large these moves are. China refines ninety
Speaker 9: nine percent of the world's prosium, a kind of rare
Speaker 9: earth metal that is used in chips to preserve magnetic
Speaker 9: stability even when they become hot. In the last few years,
Speaker 9: Nvidia and other semi conductor manufacturers have changed the materials
Speaker 9: used in electricity management devices called capacitors, which is a
Speaker 9: really funny way to describe a capacitor, by the way,
Speaker 9: but on chips to make them more heat resistant. The
Speaker 9: capacitors are made from ultra pure dysprosium, which is extremely
Speaker 9: difficult to refine. A single refinery in Wushi, near Shanghai
Speaker 9: produces the entire world's supply, so prove New York Times.
Speaker 9: These export restrictions include any good that is produced with
Speaker 9: these rare earth metals, and require foreign companies operating in China,
Speaker 9: like for example, Samsung or any of the sort of
Speaker 9: South Korean or Taiwanese chip manufacturers to acquire export licenses
Speaker 9: to sell them to any other country that's not China.
Speaker 9: That is a absolutely massive restriction on export goods and
Speaker 9: also again a whole bunch of critical minerals that both
Speaker 9: the American military apparatus relies on and the American tech
Speaker 9: apparatus relies on. AI chips need a whole bunch of
Speaker 9: these things, so you know, in the middle of this process,
Speaker 9: the US also started charging Chinese built ships for docking
Speaker 9: at US ports, which China retaliated by imposing docking fees
Speaker 9: for American ships. I'm gonna gain read from New York
Speaker 9: Times here. The new rules are the most stringent for
Speaker 9: Chinese shipping companies, which for the most part, cannot avoid
Speaker 9: the levies. HSBC, an investment bank, estimated that Costco not
Speaker 9: that Costco different one, a large Chinese shipping line could
Speaker 9: pay one point five billion dollars in fees next year,
Speaker 9: which the bank said could reduce Costco's operating earnings by
Speaker 9: nearly three fourths in twenty twenty six. Again, it's it's
Speaker 9: worth it's worth noting that these shipping, these shipping companies
Speaker 9: are the backbone of blow trade. They also their margins
Speaker 9: are not very good and a significant number of them
Speaker 9: basically only didn't go under dream lock during the lockdowns
Speaker 9: because they effectively lied on their loan applications. And we're
Speaker 9: just sort of putting in their revenue as if the
Speaker 9: lockdowns weren't happening. So this is all very very fragile
Speaker 9: infrastructure that is being you know, attacked, and these these
Speaker 9: port fees are already in.
Speaker 12: Effect me doing gay cruising on my European trip. Yeah,
Speaker 12: I like global trade, all right.
Speaker 9: I continue, Oh god, Okay, So we also got to
Speaker 9: report today this is this is Wednesday, the twenty seconds
Speaker 9: this is being reported, So who fucking knows what will
Speaker 9: be happening by the time this episode comes out. But
Speaker 9: on Wednesday we got to report from Reuters about the
Speaker 9: other one of the other options that Shrum administration is
Speaker 9: considering for these massive sort of trade attacks on China.
Speaker 9: So I said, I said earlier when I talked about
Speaker 9: the one hundred percent tariff, Trump also mentioned a software
Speaker 9: export ban. So perb Reuters, what's being considered here, and
Speaker 9: again we have note we have very few concrete details
Speaker 9: about this. This hasn't been formally announced. My guests is
Speaker 9: that it's being leaked to Reuters by the administration, but
Speaker 9: I just don't know. But what they're considering, basically is
Speaker 9: a version of the sanctions that effectively Biden applied to
Speaker 9: Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, which restricts the export
Speaker 9: of any product maade with US software. This would be
Speaker 9: probably the most significant developments of the entire trade war.
Speaker 9: And so these are all incredibly significant escalations. A bunch
Speaker 9: of the stuff is set to go into effect on
Speaker 9: November first, which is very very soon now. In theory,
Speaker 9: Trump and Chijianping are supposed to meet at the meeting
Speaker 9: of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum in South Korea,
Speaker 9: but there's been no formalnouncements of their meeting. Trump that
Speaker 9: he was going to go to China and early next year,
Speaker 9: but that's again next year. The American one hundred percent
Speaker 9: tariff again November first. The Chinese export restrictions on rare
Speaker 9: earth metals again December first.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 9: The other issue here is that the actual event starts
Speaker 9: on October thirty first, and the first terrorists going to
Speaker 9: affect the next day.
Speaker 12: Very spooky, very spooky, indeed.
Speaker 9: Yeah, And so Trump is mad also about China refusing
Speaker 9: to buy American soybeans, the story we've been covering. Yeah,
Speaker 9: and you know, he's complaining about the rare earth metal stuff,
Speaker 9: and he's complaining about he's still yelling about fence and all.
Speaker 9: But it's also worth mentioning one of the fascinating things
Speaker 9: is Trump is continuing to piss off even more parts
Speaker 9: of his base with this stuff. So soybean farmers, which
Speaker 9: is again a huge portion of American farmers, are really
Speaker 9: mad at him. He's also pissing off cattle ranchers. So
Speaker 9: both the soybean farmers and the cattle ranchers are mad
Speaker 9: at for giving a bunch of money to Argentina and
Speaker 9: not giving them a bunch of money and cutting off
Speaker 9: their acts to Chinese markets because Argentina again is selling
Speaker 9: a whole bunch of stuff to China. One of the
Speaker 9: things that they sell to China is beef because Argentina
Speaker 9: is a major beef exporter, So they're all really mad
Speaker 9: at him for giving Argentina a giant bailout in order
Speaker 9: to try to save if they're failing economy under their
Speaker 9: unhinged an arco capitalist and president who has annihilated the
Speaker 9: economy even more than it was before. And then Trump's
Speaker 9: response to the cattle ranchers being mad at him was
Speaker 9: telling them to lower their prices, which means they're even
Speaker 9: more mad at him. So he is systematically alienating two
Speaker 9: of what should be his most important basis of support.
Speaker 9: And like the cattle industry has been a based Republican
Speaker 9: support for I mean since time in memorial. Effectively, the
Speaker 9: lumber and vanity tariffs so we mentioned last week have
Speaker 9: taken effect. Now there's been no rollback of them. And finally,
Speaker 9: I want to close on a story that we're going
Speaker 9: to be covering more on Monday, which is the continuing
Speaker 9: escalation of a sort of conflict between Colombia and the
Speaker 9: US after the US murdered about full of what appeared
Speaker 9: to be Columbian fishermen. Yes, Columbia has recalled its ambassador
Speaker 9: and in the US has said that it is going
Speaker 9: to eliminate all foreign aid and impose a tariff, the
Speaker 9: size of which they haven't given a consistent number. Four
Speaker 9: And this is, you know, very much could look like
Speaker 9: a pretty massive reorientation of American policy around Columbia, which
Speaker 9: has traditionally been an American ally and we've ran desk
Speaker 9: squads out of there for a very very long time. Yeah,
Speaker 9: and that has been the lightning round rapid fire trade
Speaker 9: war coverage because oh boy, yeah, yay, we've tariff talked
Speaker 9: all right.
Speaker 12: Before we close, I don't want to talk a little
Speaker 12: bit about one of the news stories this week about
Speaker 12: a US political figures being like Nazism. No, not the
Speaker 12: main candidate, and no, not that other Republican staffer who
Speaker 12: had a swastika in his cubicle. The political story that
Speaker 12: leaked messages from the New York Young Republican telegram chat,
Speaker 12: which already tells you that it's going to be problematic
Speaker 12: the fact that they have a telegram chat. But The
Speaker 12: Political reported that this chat contained messages about putting political
Speaker 12: opponents in gas chambers, loving Hitler, as well as plenty
Speaker 12: of anti semitism, talking about raping their enemies, and hundreds
Speaker 12: of uses of homophobic and racistlers. The chair of the
Speaker 12: New York State Young Republicans, Bobby Walker, allegedly called rape
Speaker 12: epic and wrote in the chat quote if we ever
Speaker 12: had a leak of this chat, we would be cooked
Speaker 12: on quote New York Republican Elease Stephanic first denounced this
Speaker 12: chat after the report, though later called the Politico piece
Speaker 12: a quote unquote hit job. The Matt Walsh side of
Speaker 12: the online right condemned those who leaked the chats, neglecting
Speaker 12: to discuss the substance of the chat itself, while Vance
Speaker 12: largely dismissed the affair, writing on x the Everything app
Speaker 12: quote I refused to join the pearl clutching when powerful
Speaker 12: people call for political violence unquote. Vance falsely referred to
Speaker 12: this as a college group chat when TEA members were
Speaker 12: as old as forty years old. A day later, while
Speaker 12: guesting on The Charlie Kirk Show, Jade Vance continued to
Speaker 12: push back on the seriousness of this story and play
Speaker 12: defense by repeatedly referring to the grown men involved, who
Speaker 12: are in their twenties and forties as kids and young boys.
Speaker 13: Somehow they got their hands on something like twenty eight
Speaker 13: thousand messages in someat group chat of I think twelve
Speaker 13: people that nobody's.
Speaker 2: Ever heard of.
Speaker 13: But they decided to just publish every single thing in
Speaker 13: the chat, whatever they found that they thought was the
Speaker 13: most salacious, and I think ten years ago there would
Speaker 13: have been a very different response to it. But people
Speaker 13: are starting to learn from this, and the vice president
Speaker 13: is one of the reasons why I'm sorry.
Speaker 14: Focus on the real issues, don't focus on what kids
Speaker 14: say in group chats. But there's another angle to this
Speaker 14: that I just have to be honest about. I mean,
Speaker 14: I'm like an old guy at this one. I'm forty
Speaker 14: one years old, I have three kids. You know, I
Speaker 14: grew up in a different world, right where not most
Speaker 14: of what the stupid things that I did when I
Speaker 14: was a teenager and a young adult, they're not on
Speaker 14: the Internet, Like I'm going to tell my kids, especially
Speaker 14: my boys, don't put things on the internet.
Speaker 2: Like, be careful with what you post.
Speaker 14: If you put something in a group chat, assume that
Speaker 14: some scumbag is going to leak it in an effort
Speaker 14: to try to cause you harm or cause your family harm.
Speaker 14: But the reality is that kids do stupid things, especially
Speaker 14: young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes, like that's what
Speaker 14: kids do. And I really don't want us to grow
Speaker 14: up in a country where a kid selling a stupid joke,
Speaker 14: telling a very offensive, stupid joke is caused to ruin
Speaker 14: their lives. And at some point we're all going to
Speaker 14: have to say enough of this, bs. We're not going
Speaker 14: to allow the worst moment and a twenty one year
Speaker 14: old's group chat to ruin a kid's life for the
Speaker 14: rest of time. That's just not okay. Like we live
Speaker 14: in a digital world. This stuff is now extin stone online.
Speaker 14: We're all going to have to say, you know what, no, no, no,
Speaker 14: we're not doing this. We're not canceling kids because they
Speaker 14: do something stupid in a group chat. And if I
Speaker 14: have to be the person who carries that message forward,
Speaker 14: I'm fine.
Speaker 12: With it, right once again, most of these guys are
Speaker 12: like in their thirties. These guys are our adults. You know,
Speaker 12: the New York Young Republicans is not a whole bunch
Speaker 12: of kids. These are young like political in political years,
Speaker 12: because everyone who runs the country is quasi geriatric. Self
Speaker 12: proclaimed theocratic fascist Matt Walsh said, quote, the right doesn't
Speaker 12: stick together. That's our biggest problem.
Speaker 4: By far.
Speaker 12: Conservatives are quick to denounce each other, jump on dog piles,
Speaker 12: disavow attack their allies. I said a few weeks ago
Speaker 12: that we all need to band together in the wake
Speaker 12: of Charlie's death, and the answer I got back from
Speaker 12: a lot of people on the right was basically no, well, okay,
Speaker 12: then guys, we'll just lose. Instead, the left will keep
Speaker 12: up the United Front and defend their guys no matter what. Well,
Speaker 12: we keep throwing each other to the wolves at every opportunity.
Speaker 12: Great plan. Unquote. Shapiro did beef a bit with Walsh
Speaker 12: on one of their daily Wire group podcasts regarding the
Speaker 12: substance of these chats. Shapiro did seem more concerned at
Speaker 12: the growing anti Semitic and not see fascistic element of
Speaker 12: the Republican Party whereas Walsh is does not care about
Speaker 12: that at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, not a problem
Speaker 12: for a self proclaimed theocratic fascist Matt Walsh. So that's
Speaker 12: that's one side of this whole political story that I
Speaker 12: wanted to talk about. You should just read the political piece.
Speaker 12: I'm sure lots of people have. It got pretty popular
Speaker 12: a few days ago. But I find the sort of
Speaker 12: I mean, I would have called it like the dissident
Speaker 12: right reaction, but when you have the vice president as like, yep,
Speaker 12: the guy leading the charge on this type of stuff,
Speaker 12: it's not really distanct Like there is a large number
Speaker 12: of Republicans who are condemning the contents of this chat,
Speaker 12: but you do have the vice president of the country
Speaker 12: playing defense for it, yeah, and for the people involved.
Speaker 9: And I think this is actually a very important thing
Speaker 9: about what the structure of the Republican Party is right now,
Speaker 9: which is these kind of low levels like staffers, right,
Speaker 9: the young Republican people, and these are a bunch of
Speaker 9: people who are also making White House policy. You know,
Speaker 9: Stephen Miller is you know, the guy who's doing a
Speaker 9: whole bunch of a whole bunch of the sort of
Speaker 9: ethnic cleansing deportation policy right now are just Nazis. They're
Speaker 9: just Nazis. And every time one of these group chats
Speaker 9: comes out, it looks like this. And that's a really
Speaker 9: significant factor in why American politics looks like this, which
Speaker 9: is that like the the people who are entering the
Speaker 9: Republican Party right now, who are like their sort of
Speaker 9: youth wing quote unquote, are these people and we're seeing
Speaker 9: their policies get enacted.
Speaker 3: It fucking sucks.
Speaker 12: I mean it's often baked in this like post ironic,
Speaker 12: like like joking way, where you know, obviously the Nazi
Speaker 12: some people in these circles say, obviously the Nazis themselves
Speaker 12: are bad, but we're using this as like a memetic signifier. Yeah,
Speaker 12: for like nationalism and for all of these things. Now
Speaker 12: there is a fair number of people who just will
Speaker 12: straight up defend the Nazis absolutely, but I think it's
Speaker 12: it's it goes beyond, like like this isn't German national socialism,
Speaker 12: Like it goes, it goes, it goes beyond to like
Speaker 12: they're using Nazism as a meme for their political project,
Speaker 12: and memes get used a lot in these types of
Speaker 12: safe spaces where people can joke around. So you see
Speaker 12: that very clearly here, but you also see it on
Speaker 12: like the DHS Twitter account you use, you see the
Speaker 12: same kind of like post ironic stuff, like a few
Speaker 12: weeks ago they we're fucking moon Man posting. You can
Speaker 12: google that one if you want to. We don't have
Speaker 12: time to explain, but that's a very old like internet
Speaker 12: nazi dog whistle. Yeah, and you know we've I've talked
Speaker 12: a decent bit about my feelings on like focusing a
Speaker 12: lot on like the DHS Twitter dog whistles. But yeah,
Speaker 12: it is it is in invoking of this stuff for
Speaker 12: this like mimetic like archetypal context that they surround themselves in.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and then you know, doing the actual thing, which
Speaker 9: is going out and rounding up a whole bunch of
Speaker 9: doing these Ice rights now white people and yeah, like.
Speaker 12: The ICE recruiting ads are like the clearest example of
Speaker 12: using this type of memetic imagery for their actual political
Speaker 12: project and then to act the thing physically. And it's
Speaker 12: it's very clear there because there's very little disconnect. It's
Speaker 12: an immediate transference.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a very straight line.
Speaker 12: Yeah, James want to close us up on the Great
Speaker 12: State of Alaska.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm talking about something and it's a great in Alaska.
Speaker 4: But we normally do your fundraiser at the end, so
Speaker 4: I wanted to put this here for those of you
Speaker 4: who are not aware, because this has really got enough coverage,
Speaker 4: in my opinion, A massive storm, in fact, the remnants
Speaker 4: of a typhoon slammed into the west coast of Alaska,
Speaker 4: leaving more than a thousand people without shelter along the
Speaker 4: Yukon Coskoquim River. These are Alaska Native villages, and their
Speaker 4: inhabitants are now climate refugees at the very start of winter,
Speaker 4: right in the coldest place in the United States. These
Speaker 4: villages are very remote. I spend some time earlier this
Speaker 4: year in Alaska Native village, not here in the interior,
Speaker 4: just in the Quichan territories. But these guys are really
Speaker 4: only accessible by small planes or by boats, which will
Speaker 4: make their recovery even harder.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: They're people who have lived by the ocean or by
Speaker 4: the river for as long as people have lived in
Speaker 4: the Americas, tens of thousands of years.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: A few months ago, the Trump canceled the twenty million
Speaker 4: dollar ground for flood protection, which would have covered Kipnook.
Speaker 4: One of these villages, Kipnook now and functioning doesn't exist.
Speaker 4: Houses were torn off their foundations.
Speaker 12: Right.
Speaker 4: There are multiple videos of people's whole houses floating away.
Speaker 4: It's not just an instance of neglect or even a
Speaker 4: single failure here, It's an example of decades of ignoring
Speaker 4: the voices of Indigenous people, especially Alaska Natives, when they
Speaker 4: tell us that the climate crisis is real and that
Speaker 4: it's already here. Right. When the media looks at climate change,
Speaker 4: they tend to want to look at data they can
Speaker 4: measure in terms of numbers, right, according to the model
Speaker 4: of Western science. But I would argue that the experience
Speaker 4: of Indigenous people who have lived on the land for
Speaker 4: as long as human beings have lived anywhere on this
Speaker 4: continent and have watched the changes and seen this disaster unfold,
Speaker 4: should be a warning to all of us that the
Speaker 4: climate crisis is already here. I reached out to some
Speaker 4: Alaska Native friends to ask where to donate, and they
Speaker 4: shared a page which will be in the show notes
Speaker 4: of the show. So if you're able to help, I
Speaker 4: think that's very important thing to do. Recovery for these
Speaker 4: people with this federal government, with being as remote as
Speaker 4: they are, will be horrifically difficult. Right now, many of
Speaker 4: them are living in anchorage right Like I said, they're
Speaker 4: going into the winter and then they don't have a
Speaker 4: place to live. It's an unmitigated disaster. So if you're
Speaker 4: able to help, I think it would be very much appreciated.
Speaker 4: Before I go, I will say that if you would
Speaker 4: like to email us, you can use our proton mail address,
Speaker 4: cool Zone Tips at proton dot me. If you send
Speaker 4: from a proton mail address and it's encrypted from one
Speaker 4: end to the other end.
Speaker 12: We reported the news.
Speaker 2: We reported the news. Hey, We'll be back Monday with
Speaker 2: more episodes every week from now until the heat death
Speaker 2: of the Universe.
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