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 got to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Welcome, Dick. It appen here at the podcast that we're
Speaker 3: starting as if it was a NOL podcast instead of
Speaker 3: doing some terrible thing like we normally do. I'm your host,
Speaker 3: Bia Wong. This is a podcast about things falling apart,
Speaker 3: and this is a putting it back together again episode. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and I'm I'm here with two workers from Donut Workers United,
Speaker 3: specifically at Loostar Donuts, Lydia and Ben, to talk about
Speaker 3: unionization efforts and some really terrible union busting stuff. So, Lydia, Ben,
Speaker 3: welcome to the show.
Speaker 4: Thank you, thank you for having us. Super excited.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, I'm really excited to have you two here.
Speaker 3: So all right, So Blue Star Donuts is a donut
Speaker 3: place in Portland's for people who are not in Portland's
Speaker 3: question work, which is probably a lot of you. I
Speaker 3: don't know, I don't know where you are right now.
Speaker 3: So I guess the place I wanted to start with
Speaker 3: talking about this is how how did you two get
Speaker 3: involved with this campaign?
Speaker 5: You know, it's actually for me, it was right before Halloween.
Speaker 5: I went to a coworker's house and you know, we
Speaker 5: had some drinks and hung out and she just sort of,
Speaker 5: you know, the conversation just sort of organically led to
Speaker 5: work and talking about work and you know, this is
Speaker 5: messed up at work, this is frustrating us. And then
Speaker 5: she was like, hey, like, what's your opinion on you know,
Speaker 5: union stuff? And I actually had when I worked at
Speaker 5: Starbucks in Texas, I had tried to unionize my location
Speaker 5: and it didn't.
Speaker 6: No one was interested, but I you know, they she.
Speaker 5: Asked us if we wanted to sign a union card
Speaker 5: or union authorization card, and I was all for it.
Speaker 5: You know, I'm very into it. So that's that's how
Speaker 5: it started for me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So bouncing off of that, it was I would
Speaker 4: say a couple of days before that Halloween party. For me,
Speaker 4: I'm pretty close friends with the woman who started all
Speaker 4: of this, and so I was visiting her and she
Speaker 4: just kind of briefly mentioned She's like, hey, do you
Speaker 4: know what's going on with Blue Star? And kind of
Speaker 4: open ended question, and you know this company almost every
Speaker 4: day something happens, so I was like, I mean, maybe
Speaker 4: maybe not what's going on? And she's like, well, like
Speaker 4: are you good with unions? And I'm like, oh, girl,
Speaker 4: of course i am. I was actually involved with a
Speaker 4: union and a previous job that was more higher end,
Speaker 4: like government board specific instead of an individual and I
Speaker 4: was like, yeah, it hit me what's going on. And
Speaker 4: she's like, okay, cool, we have a couple of people
Speaker 4: interested trying to unionize Blue Star. And I was like, oh,
Speaker 4: sign me up, Like let's do this thing. And then
Speaker 4: at that Halleen party when we were all kind of
Speaker 4: gathered there, we briefly talked about it and how messed
Speaker 4: up things were, swalk stories and it just kind of
Speaker 4: click that leads to my brain of like okay, yeah,
Speaker 4: let's do this. So that was that was my end.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it seems like it was a really a pretty
Speaker 3: quick campaign. I know you all had an election. Oh
Speaker 3: how many weeks ago?
Speaker 7: Was that?
Speaker 6: Likes ago? Yeah?
Speaker 3: I guess it'll be like three when this goes out. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so that that's that's a very very quick campaign. How
Speaker 3: many people like ish are are at the shop.
Speaker 5: It depends on if you're adding like all the satellites
Speaker 5: and versus like the regular Flagship store. I think we
Speaker 5: have thirty something at Flagship, which is the location on Jefferson,
Speaker 5: and then I think there's maybe fifty one employees total.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we're pretty scapared around all of Portland with one
Speaker 4: shop in Lake Oswego, but majority of us are in
Speaker 4: headquarters at Flagship.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: That's something I think is pretty interesting about this campaign
Speaker 3: and about a lot of the independent campaigns, is that, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's shops are it's shops that are pretty small shops
Speaker 3: that are split around, and it shops that, like you
Speaker 3: know it shops with high turnover. Now I was wondering, well, actually,
Speaker 3: I don't know. I'm assuming you get SiGe turned over because.
Speaker 4: There is a lot of turnover in the satellite shops
Speaker 4: for sure.
Speaker 5: I mean I would even say that there was a
Speaker 5: fair amount of turnover at Flagship. You know, we had
Speaker 5: a time where in our kitchen, which is the wholesale kitchen,
Speaker 5: which makes the donut bites. We referred to it as
Speaker 5: Red Kitchen. We had four people quit in four days.
Speaker 3: Jesus ghost.
Speaker 5: They didn't Yeah, they didn't replace those people. They expected
Speaker 5: us to continue working the producing the same amount with
Speaker 5: four less people. Yeah, but there were you know, a
Speaker 5: lot of like poached wororker like temporary workers that were
Speaker 5: coming and going while I was there.
Speaker 6: And yeah, some pretty serious turnover.
Speaker 4: That kind of happened with me last year. I was
Speaker 4: working at Blue Star for like about eight months. Oh
Speaker 4: it's the new year, I guess two years ago.
Speaker 3: And then I quit.
Speaker 4: I left, and then unfortunately last year I hit a
Speaker 4: little unemployment zone and I'm like I need a job.
Speaker 4: So I came back to Blue Star for about three
Speaker 4: months and this is when everything was going on. But
Speaker 4: long story short, Sorry, last time I was there, we
Speaker 4: kind of had a little bit of turnover as well.
Speaker 4: A lot of people were not great, and we had
Speaker 4: a lot of meetings and got some people fired. Granted,
Speaker 4: like Ben was saying, is that no one replaced them,
Speaker 4: and so it's very much of like we have to
Speaker 4: cover them and a lot more quantity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so has the sort of speed ups from that
Speaker 3: was that one of the main things that was driving
Speaker 3: the unionization or like what other kinds of things were
Speaker 3: like driving people into this.
Speaker 6: There were a few things, a few main things.
Speaker 5: Pay and inconsistency of pay was a real big issue.
Speaker 5: For instance, there was a person in our kitchen who
Speaker 5: me and her started around the same time. We had
Speaker 5: very similar previous experience. Neither of us were cross trained.
Speaker 5: We did the same exact job. She was making three
Speaker 5: dollars an hour more.
Speaker 6: Than I was.
Speaker 5: And so that kind of thing happens a lot at
Speaker 5: Blue Star. And there's one of the biggest things for me, honestly,
Speaker 5: was the point system, what they call the point system
Speaker 5: the disciplinary system at Blue Star. Basically, you get a
Speaker 5: certain amount of points that you're allowed to hit.
Speaker 6: If you go over that.
Speaker 5: Amount of points, you're done, you're fired, and you can
Speaker 5: get you know, I don't remember the numbers exactly, but
Speaker 5: it's like one point for calling out of a shift,
Speaker 5: half a point for being ten minutes late. See, there's
Speaker 5: all these things that you can earn. Yeah, there's all
Speaker 5: these things that you can earn points for. And it
Speaker 5: you know, if you reach that number eight, it doesn't
Speaker 5: really matter how good of an employee you are you're fired.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And on top of that, with the point system,
Speaker 4: it's incredibly unfair because you get points due to things
Speaker 4: you can't like the thing.
Speaker 6: It's very able.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And the main issue was traffic and crashes. If
Speaker 4: like a car crash happens and you're stuck in that
Speaker 4: you and you're like late to work because of it,
Speaker 4: even when you like let your managers know and let
Speaker 4: your team know, you still get punished for it and
Speaker 4: you get points and that counts to the eight point total.
Speaker 4: So that was a main part of the point system
Speaker 4: that really really had us upset and very unfair, honestly.
Speaker 6: Well, and it's it's very it's a very abless system.
Speaker 5: I mean there were multiple people in our kitchen alone
Speaker 5: that had chronic illness issues, myself included. And I there
Speaker 5: were two nights when in the three ish months that
Speaker 5: I was working there, two days where I had not
Speaker 5: slept it all the night before and I was literally
Speaker 5: not seeing straight, like I was seeing double. I couldn't
Speaker 5: walk in a straight line like, I was not okay.
Speaker 5: And you know, there's some heavy machinery and like some
Speaker 5: really hot oil in the kitchen and I was like,
Speaker 5: I really don't think I'm safe to come to work.
Speaker 5: And they're like, that's fine, you know, stay home, get
Speaker 5: some rest. But you are getting a point what Yeah,
Speaker 5: so you know, a very ablest system.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and going off of that as well, the whole
Speaker 4: thick time and PTO was a mess. And when we
Speaker 4: get like paid time off, it won't even cover a
Speaker 4: whole shift. We'll be lucky to get four hours.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: No, it's it's insane really and so I'll never forget.
Speaker 4: Like just recently, our special Christmas prize thing, our grand
Speaker 4: prize on the twelfth day was two hours PTO.
Speaker 6: Two hours ye, congratulations ye.
Speaker 4: And sick time too, yeah, they were super problems. Are
Speaker 4: like we were so hard for this, you deserve this,
Speaker 4: blah blah blah. And with sick time, it like will
Speaker 4: barely cover a day. And on top of that, if
Speaker 4: you're like sincerely sick, I got bronchitis on my birthday
Speaker 4: and I had to leave work for like a week,
Speaker 4: And around the like second or third day, my manager
Speaker 4: is like, okay, well for you to be excused properly,
Speaker 4: you have to go back and get a doctor's note
Speaker 4: from them, and to prove that you are not able
Speaker 4: to come into work and you know, I could ramble
Speaker 4: on like they they don't handle COVID. Well, they're like,
Speaker 4: if you can stand up, you can slap on a
Speaker 4: mask and come into work. And COVID specifically spread so
Speaker 4: quickly there because people were so scared aired of not
Speaker 4: coming to work that they would get punished and get points.
Speaker 4: This than the other that sick people will come into
Speaker 4: work and get other people sick. It happened, yeah, all
Speaker 4: the time.
Speaker 5: I mean I can think of specifically. We had a
Speaker 5: coworker who, you know, kind of young. This was you know,
Speaker 5: she was kind of getting her feet wet in the
Speaker 5: working world, and she had had some issues with illness
Speaker 5: and she came to work with strep throat. Yeah, because
Speaker 5: she was so afraid of getting I mean she literally
Speaker 5: was like in tears, like having a breakdown to the
Speaker 5: managers because she was like, I can't get fired, Like
Speaker 5: I need to keep this job and I'm afraid that
Speaker 5: if I don't come in, I'm going to get fired.
Speaker 5: And that's the kind of culture they create there with
Speaker 5: that disciplinary system.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's really rough because majority of these workers
Speaker 4: rely on this job, like this job is their income
Speaker 4: and they can't really do anything else, and it's so
Speaker 4: incredibly toxic there where they're just so afraid to not
Speaker 4: come into work because they will be punished over it.
Speaker 3: It kind of goes without saying, which means you should
Speaker 3: say it, which is like it is unbelievably discussing to
Speaker 3: literally put people's lives in danger because you don't want
Speaker 3: to let someone take like a few days off because
Speaker 3: they have fucking stripped. Like that's unbelievable.
Speaker 4: Yeah, over like peace and love to Blue Star, but
Speaker 4: over donuts like donut bite.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like yeah, well.
Speaker 8: Like like I don't, I don't, I don't think.
Speaker 3: I don't think it's okay to make like nurses go
Speaker 3: in when they're sick, but like donuts, like this is
Speaker 3: oh my god.
Speaker 5: Like you know, as you know, who cares if we're
Speaker 5: suffering as long as they make their bottom line?
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really one of those things. It's like, yes,
Speaker 3: like they will survive if slightly less donuts are produced,
Speaker 3: Like they will be fine. However, Comma all over here
Speaker 3: are getting terribly sick because of all the shit that
Speaker 3: is that is terrible.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, like I laugh all the time about it,
Speaker 4: and I you know, my roommate and I are like
Speaker 4: best friends. I come home almost every day from those
Speaker 4: shifts being like you'll never guess what happened over like
Speaker 4: the most craziest, hilarious things, and like I can't believe
Speaker 4: this is real, Like I'm experiencing this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we're we're going to talk more about the
Speaker 3: absolutely wild stuff that happened here. Unfortunately, after we come
Speaker 3: back from this ad break that pays some of the
Speaker 3: bills question.
Speaker 1: Mark, we are back.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I wanted to ask about some of the
Speaker 3: other stuff that's been happening at this shop because everything
Speaker 3: that I've ever heard about is just like, I don't know,
Speaker 3: just deeply weird. And it's well, I guess, I guess
Speaker 3: one place we can sort of start. It's like it
Speaker 3: seems like it's one of these places where they, I
Speaker 3: don't know, it has this very sort of like progressive
Speaker 3: eveneer around it, and then when it comes time to
Speaker 3: like you know, like like even sort of live up
Speaker 3: to those ideals, you just get this. Everyone's forced to
Speaker 3: come home with COVID.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it's it's so funny because you walk in
Speaker 5: and you know there's there's pride flags there, you know,
Speaker 5: all all of the workers are you know, queer and
Speaker 5: cool and progressive, and you know they're supporting the Shortland Teachers' Union.
Speaker 6: And yet you know, and this story is just disgusting.
Speaker 5: We had a worker in our kitchen, actually in Lydia,
Speaker 5: in an I's kitchen, who sexually assaulted two of our coworkers.
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 5: Yes, these women brought it forward to management. Management victim blamed.
Speaker 5: They thanked them for keeping it quiet and not letting
Speaker 5: it interfere with their work. Yeah, it was not handled well.
Speaker 5: That was specifically the manager of Red Kitchen, Brittany Bergner.
Speaker 5: A lot of just really like callous and inappropriate mishandling
Speaker 5: of that situation. Yeah, and it was really disgusting.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was disgusting. And I was so so grateful
Speaker 4: that I wasn't there when this happened, because I would
Speaker 4: literally tour this man apart. But the thing with that
Speaker 4: manager is that him and her got all really well.
Speaker 4: And what I've heard I wasn't there. I heard that
Speaker 4: there was some favoritism towards him, and so when these
Speaker 4: allegations came up, that's when she got She mishandled it
Speaker 4: a lot, and it was not dealt with properly at all,
Speaker 4: and it seemed very much swept under rug kind of
Speaker 4: very much. So, yeah, he did.
Speaker 6: Nobody talked about it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he did get fired eventually, but eventually that's the
Speaker 4: main thing. Yeah, it was handled right away.
Speaker 5: And the you know, the effect it had on these
Speaker 5: women that came forward that this happened to. I mean
Speaker 5: I I hung out with them outside of work where
Speaker 5: they would talk about, you know, what happened and how
Speaker 5: it was handled, and like, you know, they were sobbing.
Speaker 5: They were you know, their lives were torn apart over this.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's a very serious thing, as you know,
Speaker 5: we all know, to be sexual assaulted and then you know,
Speaker 5: to have it treated this way by someone who's in
Speaker 5: a position of authority over you, it's you know, I
Speaker 5: can't help but keep using that word disgusting. It's just
Speaker 5: it's inhumane and honestly, like that's Bluestar.
Speaker 4: Yeah, especially by a company that reaches how open and
Speaker 4: awesome and close family we are, and then behind the
Speaker 4: scenes they're actually mistreating their workers literally every single day.
Speaker 4: So it's it is, it is disgusting. I have no
Speaker 4: other word to describe it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, that's like someone's sexually assaulting you, and
Speaker 3: then them not being fired means you can fucking run
Speaker 3: into them at your job, which is like the fucking
Speaker 3: just absolute nightmare shit. That is like the worst fucking
Speaker 3: shit that can happen.
Speaker 6: And we all worked in the same kitchen.
Speaker 5: We all worked in the same kitchen, so we were
Speaker 5: guaranteed to see each other for most of the day
Speaker 5: every day. And it's like, you know, you expect these
Speaker 5: women to go to work and stare at this guy
Speaker 5: and and you know, talk and laugh with this guy
Speaker 5: who assaulted them, Like that's crazy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's absolutely fucking terrible. And I hope, I hope,
Speaker 3: like I hope fucking like some shit happens to these people,
Speaker 3: because like God.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, don't worry. We got him banned from some
Speaker 4: bars because classic thing is drugging drinks.
Speaker 3: Christ.
Speaker 4: So we've spread the word and got flyers, and I'm
Speaker 4: pretty sure he's banned I know for sure too bars,
Speaker 4: but I think others as well, I'm not sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, don't get me wrong. I will definitely go out
Speaker 4: of my way to destroy a man's life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so I guess, like you know, with with
Speaker 3: just like the absolute fucking horrifying shake going on, and
Speaker 3: also with YouTube, like you know, people doing organizing outside
Speaker 3: of the workplace to go after these people. It may
Speaker 3: it makes it makes a lot of sense that, you know,
Speaker 3: the unionization campaign has been going, and I wanted to ask,
Speaker 3: I want to well, I guess I wanted to talk
Speaker 3: about sort of the vote and the stuff leading up
Speaker 3: to the vote and the things that happened to YouTube,
Speaker 3: because oh my god.
Speaker 5: Yep, yeah, you know, we we had our vote on
Speaker 5: January seventeenth. There were seven votes that were left unopened
Speaker 5: that were challenged by Blue Star management. Three of them
Speaker 5: because the employees were no longer active employees, and four
Speaker 5: of them for honestly just like completely bullshit reasons, like
Speaker 5: they had to get a new envelope.
Speaker 6: You know, they they were there before the vote, but.
Speaker 5: Like seven minutes after the cutoff that you know that
Speaker 5: Blue Star wanted one person had to get a new ballot,
Speaker 5: and you know, it's like, these are these are technicalities
Speaker 5: that really should not prevent someone from having their vote counted.
Speaker 5: And so we as DW Star, objected to six of
Speaker 5: those challenges. The four that were very ticky tacky for
Speaker 5: obvious reasons, and that was the week end.
Speaker 6: That was the week of the big snow snowstorm as well.
Speaker 3: We should talk for people who weren't in Portland for this. Okay,
Speaker 3: so the city of Portland, this is the thing I
Speaker 3: have heard. I am a Chicagoan, so like I grew
Speaker 3: up in snowstorms, right, but the city of Portland, like
Speaker 3: this is I get, this is this is this is
Speaker 3: this is the this is the the Mia rants about
Speaker 3: the city of Portland for about five minutes thing because
Speaker 3: oh my fucking god, the city of Portland does not
Speaker 3: actually substantively do any kind of like street clearing. They
Speaker 3: don't do salt, they don't really. I think they might
Speaker 3: have like two snowplows. And this means that, you know,
Speaker 3: when it, for example, snows, and then the temperature goes
Speaker 3: back up, goes freezing, and it goes back down below freezing,
Speaker 3: the entire city is covered in a sheet of ice.
Speaker 3: And this lasts for days and days and days and days.
Speaker 3: It is terrible. I came into Portland's like in the
Speaker 3: middle of this, like you you walk three steps and
Speaker 3: you're just going flying on this ice. It is terrible.
Speaker 3: It is dangerous to drive it is dangerous to walk,
Speaker 3: it is it is dangerous to school on your butt,
Speaker 3: like terrible. I don't know, Like if you did this
Speaker 3: in Chicago, if the city of Chicago failed to clear
Speaker 3: the streets sufficiently that this was happening, the government would
Speaker 3: be would fucking collapse in a week. Portlander's you deserve better.
Speaker 4: I personally would have preferred snow, like six feet of
Speaker 4: snow over a half in ice, the ice over nane.
Speaker 4: The whole entire city shuts down, and it's it is
Speaker 4: incredibly dangerous, for sure, and the city does not prepare
Speaker 4: for it. The city, like landscape itself is not prepared
Speaker 4: for it. And yeah, it's awful. I tripped and fell
Speaker 4: like three times within a week, and my room and
Speaker 4: I were literally locked into our house for days, like
Speaker 4: four maybe five days. We could not leave. And on
Speaker 4: top of that, we had to turn our water off,
Speaker 4: like it was a whole night.
Speaker 3: There so many, so many people lost power, so many people's.
Speaker 4: Like yeah, growth and the NLRB building itself was shut
Speaker 4: down for I don't remember how long, but it was
Speaker 4: shut down, and.
Speaker 3: So it was.
Speaker 5: It was shut down for most of that week leading
Speaker 5: up to the vote. Our vote was on a Thursday,
Speaker 5: and I think Thursday was the first day that the
Speaker 5: actual office was open. There might have been some people
Speaker 5: there on Wednesday, but the office itself was closed the
Speaker 5: you know, Monday was Martin Luther King Junior Day, so
Speaker 5: that it was close closed. But you know, I tried
Speaker 5: to take you know, I in my little hatchback with
Speaker 5: two two wheel drive hatchbag, tried to drive across Portland
Speaker 5: to take people to the office to turn in their
Speaker 5: their ballots and because we were doing a mail in ballot,
Speaker 5: but some people had left it at the last minute,
Speaker 5: you know, as human beings do. And we we get
Speaker 5: you know, we drive across this ice and snow. We
Speaker 5: get to the NLRB office. There's security guards in the
Speaker 5: lobby and they say, well, you can't go up there
Speaker 5: as closed. I'm like, okay, uh, what about tomorrow. They're like,
Speaker 5: we don't know, we'll be here, but we can't guarantee that,
Speaker 5: you know, the nler B office will be here.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And so I.
Speaker 5: Call up our rep at the NLRB, Michael Moles, and
Speaker 5: I say, hey, like, what's the deal. When can we
Speaker 5: drop these off? And he goes, well, actually, you know
Speaker 5: you can drop them off. When we're not there. You
Speaker 5: can slide them under the door, you know, as long
Speaker 5: as it's the person, you know, as long as the
Speaker 5: person whose ballot is being turned in is turning in
Speaker 5: the ballot, like, you can't send someone else to do
Speaker 5: it for you. So we go back up on Wednesday
Speaker 5: and get some turned in. And you know, at this point,
Speaker 5: the people who wanted to turn in on Tuesday, they've
Speaker 5: got you know, they've got work, they've got other things
Speaker 5: going on. They have to find a time to get in.
Speaker 5: So we're going like Thursday morning, Thursday afternoon, right before
Speaker 5: the vote. And that's why all of these votes were
Speaker 5: you know, missing things or you know a little bit late.
Speaker 5: Is because the whole city was shut down for half
Speaker 5: a week, almost a week, and things got you know,
Speaker 5: mess up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like the fact that the City of Portland doesn't
Speaker 3: does not like refuses to buy snowplows and doesn't know
Speaker 3: that you can use beat juice as an anti ice thing.
Speaker 3: Like the fact that the fact the fact that the
Speaker 3: fact that the city leadership is utterly incompetent, like should
Speaker 3: not should not be a reason why your union vote
Speaker 3: doesn't your votes don't get counted. That is absolutely absurd.
Speaker 3: It's also like, you know, I mean, like okay, like
Speaker 3: I get like the responsible thing to do. Dream this
Speaker 3: storm was to close and a lot of places were
Speaker 3: fucking open, and that is a disaster. But the fact
Speaker 3: that the LRB is closed and all before workers are
Speaker 3: still happy to go to work is like, just oh god.
Speaker 6: Well.
Speaker 5: And I I emailed or I called Michael Moles again,
Speaker 5: our rep at the NLRB, and I was like, hey, like,
Speaker 5: this is kind of unprecedented, like can we push the
Speaker 5: vote out like a week just to make sure that
Speaker 5: everyone can safely get their ballots in? And he told me,
Speaker 5: in no uncertain terms that we would not be doing that.
Speaker 5: He gave me this, you know, long speech about how
Speaker 5: hard it is, how difficult it is, how you know,
Speaker 5: we have to get all these permissions. And you know,
Speaker 5: I'm fairly new to all the legal avenues and legal
Speaker 5: parts of union and stuff, and so I didn't really
Speaker 5: have a counter argument. So I was just like, you know,
Speaker 5: throw my hands up, Okay, whatever, we'll do our best.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 4: At the time, people are literally risking their lives. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and to drive cars, they're risking their cars. They're risking
Speaker 4: their lives trying to get these votes in. So that's
Speaker 4: why this appeal to these challenges are so important that
Speaker 4: it's not fair if we don't count in ice storm
Speaker 4: and the actual you have to.
Speaker 6: Account for that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So like all these things matter and should count,
Speaker 4: and that's why we're really pushing that these votes be
Speaker 4: counted well.
Speaker 5: In two of the votes where people who had quit,
Speaker 5: and one of those was was Lydia, and she was
Speaker 5: straight up intimidated into quitting.
Speaker 6: And you can Lydia if you want to talk about it.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh. Okay, So they I use this word
Speaker 4: pretty loosely, but the more I talk about the more
Speaker 4: it's true. They forced me to quit, point blank. Period.
Speaker 4: They pulled me into this meeting where at Blue Store
Speaker 4: they have these every thirty day check ins and meetings
Speaker 4: to talk about like how you're doing and how's the work,
Speaker 4: et cetera. So on our ninety day check in, we
Speaker 4: are promised a raise after working here for ninety days,
Speaker 4: but first we have to go through a whole meeting,
Speaker 4: and this whole like spectrum one through five. They rate
Speaker 4: you on different topics. So I come in and not
Speaker 4: only as my manager there, but hr and our head
Speaker 4: chef is there, and last time I did a ninety
Speaker 4: day that didn't happen, it was just my manager. So
Speaker 4: immediately I'm like, what is going on? This is weird.
Speaker 4: And we went through the normal stuff until chef interrupted
Speaker 4: and brought up my schedule. So at the time, I
Speaker 4: was working two jobs, Blue Star and another bakery. And
Speaker 4: before any of this, I checked in with my managers
Speaker 4: and chef to make sure that this was possible and
Speaker 4: okay to put me from full time to part time
Speaker 4: at Blue Star. And there they were thrilled. They were like, oh,
Speaker 4: that's so great for you. Congratulations. Yes, we can totally
Speaker 4: work with you. This is not a problem at all.
Speaker 4: I'm like, okay, great, awesome. And so they brought up
Speaker 4: my schedule and they're like, so we're gonna change some
Speaker 4: things with Red Kitchen and we're going to change production
Speaker 4: times and we're gonna bump everything up a couple hours.
Speaker 4: Totally fine, Okay, I get it. And I said I'm like, okay, well,
Speaker 4: you know I work until one pm, so you know
Speaker 4: I'm not available to be here until like two. And
Speaker 4: apparently that was an issue because my schedule, my availability
Speaker 4: is no longer working for them, which doesn't make sense
Speaker 4: because a closing shift still exists. And I'm I told them,
Speaker 4: I'm like, you can use me. I am part time,
Speaker 4: you can use me for like four hours closing, Like
Speaker 4: I am okay with that, and they shut me down.
Speaker 4: Chef kind of clicked her teeth and was like, you know,
Speaker 4: that's not really worth it for us, and what are
Speaker 4: you doing over the holidays because this is right before
Speaker 4: our Christmas break and I I was kind of confused.
Speaker 4: I was like, oh, nothing, I'm just at home. And
Speaker 4: she's like, okay, well you should really take this time
Speaker 4: to think about your future here with us, and like
Speaker 4: kind of me like stared at me, and I'm like what, Like,
Speaker 4: I what do you mean? And she's like, you know,
Speaker 4: we're changing some things around here and we don't want
Speaker 4: to get rid of you, we don't want to fire you,
Speaker 4: but you should really think about your future here and
Speaker 4: really leaned in and emphasized that and kind of like
Speaker 4: everyone was kind of like looking at me as if like, hey,
Speaker 4: we want you to quit, but we're not allowed to
Speaker 4: like say anything like that. And I asked my manager.
Speaker 4: I was like, it kind of sounds like you're not
Speaker 4: giving me any options here? What am I supposed to
Speaker 4: just leave? And they looked at each other and they
Speaker 4: look back at me. You're like, you know, we can't
Speaker 4: really say one thing or the other, so you know,
Speaker 4: we need your decision by the first and I'm like
Speaker 4: what I It was very it was very tense. It
Speaker 4: was very weird and awkward, and I was very confused
Speaker 4: because I never thought my job was on the line,
Speaker 4: never thought it was gonna be jeopardized. And I kept
Speaker 4: offering them different options. I was like, put me in
Speaker 4: front of house. You know, last year I was trained.
Speaker 4: I was actually supposed to be a manager in our
Speaker 4: other kitchen, but they kind of screwed me over on that.
Speaker 4: That's a whole different story. Like I know how to
Speaker 4: handle purple kitchen. Put me there, like I'm okay going
Speaker 4: from one job immediately into here to save time. And
Speaker 4: with every single option I was giving them, they shut
Speaker 4: me down and would not work with me at all.
Speaker 4: And then on top of that, they extended my ninety
Speaker 4: day period and from doing that, I was no longer
Speaker 4: allowed to get a raise. And yeah, like you have
Speaker 4: to finish ninety days and you get a raise, And
Speaker 4: I'm like period. That's the policy. Everybody knows that. But
Speaker 4: because my ninety days was extended like probation period, I
Speaker 4: was no longer allowed to get a raise.
Speaker 5: And what's funny is they extended my ninety days as well.
Speaker 5: I can talk about that more later, but this is
Speaker 5: it's just it's just odd because Red Kitchen, our kitchen,
Speaker 5: which at that point was made up of I think
Speaker 5: six people, all vocal union supporters, wore buttons every day.
Speaker 4: Yep, we were the most vocal people about it. We
Speaker 4: wore our union buttons every day. We like everybody knows
Speaker 4: that we were firm believers standing up for this union.
Speaker 4: And that kind of segues into the furlough situation where
Speaker 4: they all shut down our kitchen. They our whole entire
Speaker 4: team are six people of vocal union supporters suddenly no job.
Speaker 9: It's incredibly messed up. And we're going to come back
Speaker 9: from more unbelievably messed up stuff after this ad break,
Speaker 9: and we're back going.
Speaker 6: Back to the votes that were challenged.
Speaker 5: The other person who quit was one of the main
Speaker 5: organized She was her and one other person. Where the
Speaker 5: people who kicked off all of the organizing at Blue
Speaker 5: Star and basically she they changed around her schedule so
Speaker 5: much to kind of force her into quitting. She was
Speaker 5: very stressed with school and like just the way that
Speaker 5: they kept messing with her made her quit. Basically, she
Speaker 5: was afraid that she was going to be fired, so
Speaker 5: she went ahead and quit. And so that that was
Speaker 5: that other challenged vote. But yeah, the furlough situation is wild.
Speaker 5: And I also got my probation extended. I actually filed
Speaker 5: a unfairlyabor practice because of that, Because the reason they
Speaker 5: gave me for extending my probation was that I was
Speaker 5: bringing their words on paper, bringing the vibe down by
Speaker 5: complaining about working conditions. Bringing the vibe down by complaining
Speaker 5: about working conditions, and.
Speaker 4: This is how ridiculous this company is. Third reasons where
Speaker 4: I'm like, this must be the Truman Show, Like this
Speaker 4: is not real. Where are the cameras well?
Speaker 5: And first of all, complaining about working conditions is a
Speaker 5: federally protected act. I can do that and I cannot
Speaker 5: be punished for that. It is against the law, which
Speaker 5: is why I filed the ULP. Second of all, the
Speaker 5: reason I was complaining is because they had taken us
Speaker 5: down from three to four people opening shifts to two
Speaker 5: and the way two people work, Yeah, the way two
Speaker 5: people operates for opening shift in Red Kitchen is one
Speaker 5: person is mixing the dough and loading it into the fryer,
Speaker 5: and that is a constant thing. Like you you mix
Speaker 5: batches for like four hours like on like back to
Speaker 5: back to back to back to back, and the other
Speaker 5: person has to stand at the end of the conveyor
Speaker 5: belt and take the glazed bites off of the conveyor
Speaker 5: belt and put them onto trays. This is a non
Speaker 5: stop job. You cannot even walk away for a few seconds.
Speaker 6: And when you know.
Speaker 5: Typically, like the best practice that was done the entire
Speaker 5: time I was there up to this was that you
Speaker 5: did not do that position for more than an hour
Speaker 5: because it was physically difficult to stand in one place
Speaker 5: like that and do that and do those repetitive motions.
Speaker 6: And two, it's like fucking.
Speaker 5: Psychological torture because you're in the corner of this room.
Speaker 5: You're not speaking to anybody. You're literally just staring at
Speaker 5: your own hands. I mean, it's it's not like nobody
Speaker 5: likes to they call it catching. Nobody likes to catch.
Speaker 5: And I was doing this for up to three hours
Speaker 5: a day, uninterrupted and I have sciatic nerve issues with
Speaker 5: my leg and I you know, I made them aware
Speaker 5: of this multiple multiple times. I cannot catch for more
Speaker 5: than an hour at a time, and you know what
Speaker 5: I was doing catching.
Speaker 6: For three hours every day.
Speaker 3: So they're just trying to injury.
Speaker 6: So that's what I was, yes, and that's what I
Speaker 6: was complaining about. I was saying, I'm in pain.
Speaker 5: I'm literally having to go on muscle relaxers every single
Speaker 5: day because of the effect that this is having on
Speaker 5: me physically, Like I I can't sleep at night because
Speaker 5: my leg is so tense and it's in so much
Speaker 5: pain from fucking catching these donuts and putting them on trays.
Speaker 6: It's insane.
Speaker 5: And so you know, they're yet they're penalizing me for
Speaker 5: having the gall to voice the fact that what they're
Speaker 5: doing is literally ruining my quality of life.
Speaker 4: Really and going off that every single issue we bring
Speaker 4: up to management, they have the tone of like, well,
Speaker 4: that sucks, that's a bummer, deal with it, and literally, yeah,
Speaker 4: literally just like okay, and we're like, okay, fix it,
Speaker 4: because we are human beings with nerves and bones and
Speaker 4: we cannot stand on our feet for this long, like
Speaker 4: it's it's wild, it is.
Speaker 5: And you know that that kind of also segues into
Speaker 5: the furlough thing that we were all very vocal on
Speaker 5: union support. You know, I had filed at this point
Speaker 5: two ulps because of the extended probation and because they
Speaker 5: suspended me for three days for something that was absurd,
Speaker 5: and I had filed two ulps, and this came like
Speaker 5: right on the heels of that second ulp. They you know,
Speaker 5: we had Christmas Day off and I had taken the
Speaker 5: next day, the Tuesday off, so I was visiting family
Speaker 5: in Dallas, and I believe everyone else had that Tuesday
Speaker 5: off as well. And we come back on that Wednesday,
Speaker 5: and you know, we're working a red deer's shift.
Speaker 6: About halfway through.
Speaker 5: The shift, they say, okay, you know, we're having a
Speaker 5: red kitchen meeting. Everyone come into the office, which that
Speaker 5: had never happened before. We never had an all kitchen
Speaker 5: meeting like that. They pull us in and you know,
Speaker 5: we're all looking at each other on the way in, like,
Speaker 5: oh fuck, what are they going to do? Like are
Speaker 5: they going to reduce our hours? Are they going to
Speaker 5: fire one of us? You know what's happening? And we
Speaker 5: get in there and head chef Stephanie Thornton says, okay,
Speaker 5: so you know, we've had an issue happen. What's happened
Speaker 5: is our distributors have told us that they are returning
Speaker 5: a bunch of our product. It's you know, some of
Speaker 5: it's expired, but most of it is just fine, but
Speaker 5: it's nearing its expiration date, so they're returning it. I'm
Speaker 5: saying that m okay, sounds fake, but okay, And then
Speaker 5: they say, unfortunately, because of this, because we don't have
Speaker 5: space in our freezer to continue to put product in
Speaker 5: the freezer, to continue to make product and put it
Speaker 5: in the freezer, we are having to put you guys
Speaker 5: on indefinite furlough. You know, we don't have a return
Speaker 5: to work date. We don't have a plan for bringing
Speaker 5: you back. You know, we asked, can we get you know,
Speaker 5: those of us who are cross trained, can we work
Speaker 5: in other areas? Can you cross train those of us
Speaker 5: who aren't, so that we can work up front or
Speaker 5: work at a satellite store. You know, they are literally
Speaker 5: hiring for satellite stores. But they furloughed us, and we
Speaker 5: were asking can we do these other things? And they
Speaker 5: said no, point blank no, So all of a sudden,
Speaker 5: you know, six people who had jobs, you know, a
Speaker 5: minute or two ago. All of a sudden, we're facing
Speaker 5: For me personally, I'm facing homelessness. That's the reality, you know.
Speaker 5: And we have too our two shift leads. They are
Speaker 5: a couple and they live together and like that is
Speaker 5: their entire income. Yeah, and it's just on a kind
Speaker 5: of more personal note, it's wild. And maybe this is
Speaker 5: me being a little bit naive, but it's wild to
Speaker 5: have spent months in company with these people and have
Speaker 5: them pretend to care about me and then have them
Speaker 5: do something that quite literally puts my life in danger,
Speaker 5: especially because I had just signed up for healthcare with
Speaker 5: them and I have multiple chronic illnesses. I have to
Speaker 5: go to doctors regularly, And all of a sudden, I'm like,
Speaker 5: holy shit, my life has completely changed in thirty seconds.
Speaker 3: You know, this is the day after Christmas? What?
Speaker 6: Yeah, the day after Christmas.
Speaker 5: We were given two days notice, gez in two days
Speaker 5: starting on January first. You don't have a job, and
Speaker 5: we don't know how long, but you know, we'll let
Speaker 5: you know if we ever are going to do production again,
Speaker 5: and we can bring you back even just for a
Speaker 5: little bit, which they didn't. They started up production again
Speaker 5: and we were not told or called in or anything.
Speaker 4: I touch a little more on our shift leads for
Speaker 4: a second.
Speaker 7: Yes, there are a couple.
Speaker 4: They live together, but much like them, they are basically
Speaker 4: they're facing houselessness as well. And luckily they do have
Speaker 4: another roommate who can someone cover them, but that can't
Speaker 4: last forever. Yeah, and just the other day I had
Speaker 4: to run them groceries. They can't afford anything, and it's
Speaker 4: it's a huge buck over for them because they love
Speaker 4: they are so passionate about this job and like they
Speaker 4: rely heavily on it, and they got their pay raises
Speaker 4: and their higher positions and more responsibilities, and to be
Speaker 4: so betrayed like that from a company quite literally destroyed them.
Speaker 7: Are lead.
Speaker 4: He had a full breakdown and stormed out and walked out,
Speaker 4: and it affected them so heavily and so emotionally and
Speaker 4: still mentally, and they keep trying to, you know, find
Speaker 4: other jobs, and you know, still in contact. Just yesterday
Speaker 4: they sent me a screenshot of them talking to chef
Speaker 4: and being like, hey, is there any updates? Is there
Speaker 4: you know, any way we can come get our job
Speaker 4: back because you know, we're still waiting for you to
Speaker 4: tell us literally anything. And Chef said, oh, we don't know.
Speaker 4: We can't give you an answer right now, and just
Speaker 4: kind of brushed it off.
Speaker 5: And one thing that's particularly insulting is that they ended
Speaker 5: this meeting with us where they were telling us we
Speaker 5: were losing our jobs by giving us a sheet of
Speaker 5: paper on how to file for unemployment in Oregon. And
Speaker 5: the thing with an indefinite furlough, if you don't have
Speaker 5: a return to work date, then you have to go.
Speaker 5: You have to jump through the hoops of applying for
Speaker 5: jobs while you're like in order to get unemployment. So like,
Speaker 5: if you're if you have a return to work date
Speaker 5: and it's within four weeks of the uh, you know,
Speaker 5: the day that you got furloughed, you can get unemployment
Speaker 5: for that time.
Speaker 6: And you don't. You can just hang out and get unemployment.
Speaker 5: If you don't have a return to work date, you
Speaker 5: have to treat it as a layoff and you have
Speaker 5: to be making at like conscious efforts to job hunt
Speaker 5: every single week. You have to record those efforts. If
Speaker 5: you get an interview, you have to take it. If
Speaker 5: you get a position offered, to you. You have to
Speaker 5: take it, and it has to be in the field
Speaker 5: that you got that you got furloughed from, and there's
Speaker 5: all these very specific rules and it just makes it
Speaker 5: incredibly difficult, you know, all these hoops you have to
Speaker 5: jump through. It's dehumanizing, it's fucked up, and it's insulting, and.
Speaker 4: There is no support other than that. If you support,
Speaker 4: there's no severance package. There was no like short in
Speaker 4: the meeting, they're like, yeah, sorry, guys, this sucks, but
Speaker 4: like it just didn't feel real, like this full situation
Speaker 4: was not empathetic at all.
Speaker 3: And like obvious, and you know, you could tell their
Speaker 3: excuses bullshit because like okay, like let let let's say
Speaker 3: what they were saying was real that like, okay, they
Speaker 3: got a bunch of stuff return and they don't have
Speaker 3: room in their freezers. It's been a month. They should now,
Speaker 3: there's no way that they now still do not have
Speaker 3: room in their freezers.
Speaker 5: Like what Well, and here's the here's the kicker is
Speaker 5: that we were for maybe them a month, maybe over
Speaker 5: a month really since we filed the union petition, since
Speaker 5: we handed them the petition, we had ramped up production
Speaker 5: even though we were in the slow season, and we
Speaker 5: were not actually like the bites that we were making
Speaker 5: were not ordered by anyone. We were just putting. We
Speaker 5: were making extra to put in the freezer.
Speaker 4: Not only the freezer, but they rented a whole entire warehouse.
Speaker 3: We have a strategy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So they they did this, you know, I don't
Speaker 5: want to say they did this on purpose, but it
Speaker 5: is mighty suspicious to me that they're that they're building
Speaker 5: up these these you know, bites in the freezer when
Speaker 5: they didn't need them, when they didn't have orders for them,
Speaker 5: and now all of a sudden, oh, we don't have room.
Speaker 6: In the freezer, we have to let you go, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, oddly convenient.
Speaker 6: It is. It is.
Speaker 5: And that really ramped up when they when we gave
Speaker 5: them the union petition November seventeenth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which is just really very blatant retaliation.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I have filed an unfair labor practice for
Speaker 5: it's called what they call a lockout for the you know,
Speaker 5: us being furloughed, and it, like you said, it really
Speaker 5: is blatant, especially given that you know, even walking.
Speaker 6: Into that meeting, all of us were wearing our union buttons.
Speaker 5: I just why would you lay off an entire department,
Speaker 5: especially when that department is what is keeping your business afloat,
Speaker 5: Like that is the money maker for Blue Star is
Speaker 5: those wholesale bites, and we've.
Speaker 4: Been told that all the time. It's like these donut
Speaker 4: bytes make the money. So make that makes sense? Then
Speaker 4: why are you shutting down that money maker? And the
Speaker 4: other kitchen and front of house are like are still
Speaker 4: there still during production, like not touched by this at all.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And that's one of these things you get with
Speaker 3: employers all the time where it's like, well, okay, so
Speaker 3: employers very very clearly and obviously know where the money
Speaker 3: is made. They know exactly where the money is made,
Speaker 3: literally up until the moments that you start asking for
Speaker 3: more of the money you're making them, at which point
Speaker 3: suddenly like, oh who knows money comes from? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: you have.
Speaker 4: No money, even though the CEO has like at least
Speaker 4: three Tesla's totally oh.
Speaker 5: My god, yeah, like Katie Pope can't take a little
Speaker 5: bit of a pay cut so that you know, we
Speaker 5: can all keep our jobs and you know, survive.
Speaker 6: It's wild.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and like, and I mean this is one of
Speaker 3: the other things too, is that like businesses, you know,
Speaker 3: this is this is the the way capitalism works, is
Speaker 3: that business businesses would rather fucking lose money than have
Speaker 3: their employees have slightly like not be intobilitating pain, not
Speaker 3: be sick, and get slightly more money.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it is crazy to me because this whole you know,
Speaker 5: they're they're hiring all these lawyers to to you know,
Speaker 5: you know, handle the union stuff, and I'm like, you
Speaker 5: shut down Red Kitchen, you hire these lawyers, You're doing
Speaker 5: all these efforts, and I'm like, you would have saved
Speaker 5: so much money if you just recognize our fucking union,
Speaker 5: Like that's how easy it is, you know.
Speaker 4: And not only that, we have what five shops in Portland,
Speaker 4: we have a shop in la as well, Los Angeles
Speaker 4: where prices are extravagant, like they have money. We know
Speaker 4: they have money, and we're honestly at the point, I'm
Speaker 4: at the point of show me your books, show me,
Speaker 4: prove to me that you do not have this money,
Speaker 4: because then that would be a different discussion. Like it's
Speaker 4: just it's frustrating. It's typical corporate business, and I'm over it.
Speaker 4: And the I'm over it for how they treat me.
Speaker 4: I'm over how they treat my friends, my team. It's
Speaker 4: it's ridiculous and they should know better, honestly.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So is there anything else that you two want
Speaker 3: to make sure you get in?
Speaker 6: Maybe just the gofund me?
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, how.
Speaker 3: Can people support you support the union?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so we have a go fund me set up
Speaker 5: for the six furload workers to provide a month's worth
Speaker 5: of income two weeks for the employees who quit early,
Speaker 5: and that is it's called Help Loose our Employees Fight
Speaker 5: Union Investing. And right now we're at just under one
Speaker 5: thousand dollars. Our goal for all six of those people's
Speaker 5: incomes for a month is fifteen thousand, just under sixteen thousand.
Speaker 5: You know, I don't know if we'll ever reach that goal,
Speaker 5: but you know, the as much as we can get
Speaker 5: is great because right now, you know, I'm surviving on cereal.
Speaker 5: I know that the shift leads we were talking about earlier,
Speaker 5: you know, they're getting.
Speaker 6: Groceries from lydia. People are struggling.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I was definitely in my Survivor era on
Speaker 4: rice and beans. It was it's really tough, and you know,
Speaker 4: it is a big goal realistically, it is, but yeah,
Speaker 4: you know not to sound desperate, I think, but truly
Speaker 4: every little bit helps. If you can really only afford
Speaker 4: five or ten bucks, we'll take it. That is, we're
Speaker 4: so grateful for anything. And it's it's people's lives. It's
Speaker 4: literally people's lives. Multiple people are facing not being able
Speaker 4: to have a roof over their head because of this company.
Speaker 4: So truly, any little bit helps.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so please go help them out. I I don't
Speaker 3: know this it it's just really really brutal too and
Speaker 3: especially like again, like this is also a fucking terrible time,
Speaker 3: Like there's there's never a good time to like be
Speaker 3: at risk of losing your home. Winter is especially fucking
Speaker 3: bad for that. There are yeah, so there there's so many.
Speaker 3: There are so many sort of terrible compounding things that
Speaker 3: these union that these union busting companies are sort of
Speaker 3: relying on to screw over and intimidate and hurt the
Speaker 3: people who make them all their fucking money.
Speaker 6: So well, and that's what it did.
Speaker 5: It scared a lot of people into unfortunately voting no.
Speaker 5: It scared a lot of people who were really involved,
Speaker 5: you know, in the organizing process to step back and
Speaker 5: you know, not respond to our text messages and not
Speaker 5: continue to advocate for the union. It you know that
Speaker 5: us getting furloughed really fucked with our whole union campaign.
Speaker 3: So yeah, go go, go, give, go, go, give these
Speaker 3: workers your supports. They really need it, and yeah, go
Speaker 3: you know, and one thing again like that needs to
Speaker 3: sort of we need to sort of emphasize, is that
Speaker 3: this is illegal. They cannot fucking they legally cannot do this,
Speaker 3: but you know this is this is one of the
Speaker 3: things that is fucking hard about union organizing is that
Speaker 3: the law, assuming the law does like ever fucking catch
Speaker 3: up to these people. It takes time.
Speaker 4: And yeah, there is one little thing I do want
Speaker 4: to make sure people know about because we just found
Speaker 4: this out pretty recently. While we were doing shop visits.
Speaker 4: They have jars for tips that say tips are shared
Speaker 4: with the kitchen. They're not.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's not true.
Speaker 3: That's not true.
Speaker 4: We saw no tips, and there was an instance where
Speaker 4: we accidentally got tips, and one by one we were
Speaker 4: sent to the back to sign a form saying this
Speaker 4: was an accident, you are not gaining tips. Sign this,
Speaker 4: and they took our tips away. It's not fair. And
Speaker 4: on top of that, they're lying to the public. They're
Speaker 4: lying to their customers that kitchen is gaining tips when
Speaker 4: we're not.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I will say, in addition to the GoFundMe,
Speaker 5: we do have you know, if you're not able to
Speaker 5: support monetarily, we do have a Twitter and an Instagram
Speaker 5: where we post updates if you want to follow along
Speaker 5: with our progress and see you know, how our election
Speaker 5: goes and everything. It's just on both Twitter and or
Speaker 5: excuse me and Instagram. It is at DWU Underscore Blue Star.
Speaker 3: So yeah, well we'll have we'll have links to all
Speaker 3: this out of the description.
Speaker 4: Awesome. Word of mouth is really the biggest thing, even
Speaker 4: going off again, like, if you can't support us financially,
Speaker 4: you can just share the go fundme through friends, family, whoever,
Speaker 4: and just spread it out there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so go go go do that. Yeah, go
Speaker 3: help any way you can. And yeah, go go go
Speaker 3: fight your own bosses because they're screwing you, like screwing
Speaker 3: you in very similar ways. What's happening here two? Yeah,
Speaker 3: and this is the spy nicket up in here. You
Speaker 3: can find us at Twitter and Instagram at happen here
Speaker 3: pod and you can find more clos Obdia shows at
Speaker 3: closeid Media. Yeah, go go go into the world and
Speaker 3: make life worse for people who do terrible stuff.
Speaker 10: Hi, everyone, and welcome to it could Happen here podcast
Speaker 10: about how things are falling apart and people trying to
Speaker 10: put them back together. Today, more in the how things
Speaker 10: are Falling apart category. We are talking about the border
Speaker 10: again and I'm joined by Gen Budd, who you've heard
Speaker 10: from before, but just a reminder. Jen is a former
Speaker 10: senior patrol agent with the Border Patrol and now an
Speaker 10: immigrant rights activist.
Speaker 7: Welcome to the show, Jo, Thanks for having me again.
Speaker 10: Yeah, you're welcome. So we're gathered here today, I guess
Speaker 10: to talk about this ridiculous spectacle of the Texas National
Speaker 10: Guard occupying some border adjacent land. The border as right
Speaker 10: down the middle of the river there, so they're not
Speaker 10: actually occupying that the physical border, right, they're occupying that
Speaker 10: the nearest land spot to it is that right.
Speaker 7: Correct, The border in that area is in the middle
Speaker 7: of the river.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and preventing Border patrol from accessing the river. And
Speaker 10: I think, like we were just talking before we recorded,
Speaker 10: but the reporting on this has been a bit kind
Speaker 10: of slap shot. A lot of it have just been
Speaker 10: social media posting so I was hoping that you could
Speaker 10: help us understand, like a this isn't like like a
Speaker 10: standoff between Texas and the Border patrol, right, but it's
Speaker 10: not like Texas kind of swept in and suddenly they
Speaker 10: were there and they weren't there before it. Border patrol
Speaker 10: had to allow this to happen. To agree, is that
Speaker 10: fair to say?
Speaker 7: I think it's fair to say. I mean, at the moment,
Speaker 7: I think the administration is trying to portray that, you know,
Speaker 7: the Border Patrol tried to come out there and rescue.
Speaker 7: I think the latest I've heard is that reportedly there
Speaker 7: were six people in the river that were surrounding and
Speaker 7: they went to go rescue them, and the Texas Military
Speaker 7: the I guess Texas National Are ended up blocking them
Speaker 7: and saying they can't go. Now, this park is a
Speaker 7: very well known park that during the Trump administration they
Speaker 7: were trying to build a wall. They've been wanting a
Speaker 7: wall there, but the people in that city, I believe
Speaker 7: it's equal pass is that they you know, they don't
Speaker 7: want a wall there. That's the city park and they
Speaker 7: just don't want a wall right there. And so Greg
Speaker 7: Abbott has sent in Texas National Guard to put up
Speaker 7: all the razor wire, all the you know, plotation devices
Speaker 7: with she would call it a sal blade on the
Speaker 7: middle of it that they claim saves lives. All this
Speaker 7: stuff apparently is rescue technique stuff, and they claim it
Speaker 7: it saves more lives than it hurts. And so the
Speaker 7: people that put out this stuff to injure people or
Speaker 7: claiming that they didn't allow people to drown. So I
Speaker 7: find that hard to believe. But at the same time,
Speaker 7: the Border Patrol is the Border Patrol is always silent,
Speaker 7: you know, they are always silent about this. They let
Speaker 7: CBP talk to talk for them. They'll let the administration
Speaker 7: talk for them. The Union is claiming that Greg Abbott
Speaker 7: is the best thing in the world. They think it's
Speaker 7: great that he stopped their own agents from rescuing a
Speaker 7: woman and two children. So apparently three of the people
Speaker 7: got back to shore on the Mexican side, and then
Speaker 7: the woman and two children ended up drowning and their
Speaker 7: bodies were found on the Mexican side. Texas military is
Speaker 7: claiming that when they were notified that people were in
Speaker 7: the river, they went and they shined lights and they looked,
Speaker 7: but they didn't see anything. We did have the I
Speaker 7: don't know if it was Texas military. It was in
Speaker 7: the area of the state of Texas on the same
Speaker 7: Rio or Grande, where some either National Guard or Texas
Speaker 7: National Guard or military or somebody just was sitting in
Speaker 7: a boat in front of a woman with a child
Speaker 7: and she was starting to sink into the sand because
Speaker 7: it's like quicksand over there, and they wouldn't rescue her,
Speaker 7: and Border patrol drove by really fast and put away,
Speaker 7: So it's not surprising that they wouldn't go rescue them.
Speaker 7: This is the first time that they publicly said that
Speaker 7: they've had a confrontation with a border patrol. But I
Speaker 7: don't think the Border Patrol tried very hard to rescue them.
Speaker 7: I mean they do have boats and stuff.
Speaker 10: Yeah they have yeah, yeah, they're there are many way helicopters. Yeah,
Speaker 10: they have lots of equipment to rescue people sometimes just
Speaker 10: let's desire, shall we say?
Speaker 7: Yeah, And I mean it's to me the interesting thing
Speaker 7: is watching democratic politicians point their fingers at Greg Abbott,
Speaker 7: and rightly so for this, for this scene, but yet
Speaker 7: at the same time, what the Border Patrol does every day,
Speaker 7: their deterrence pulse these every day kill people every day,
Speaker 7: so the Border Patrol is not doing anything different. So
Speaker 7: to act like, oh my god, we didn't get out
Speaker 7: to save these migrants and we really wanted to is
Speaker 7: kind of like, well, I mean, people die probably every
Speaker 7: hour crossing that river and you haven't cured before, and
Speaker 7: we've been doing it since nineteen ninety four. So it's
Speaker 7: kind of it's kind of hard to get really upset
Speaker 7: at Greg Abbott, who's doing nothing but what the National
Speaker 7: Border Patrol has done for, you know, thirty something years.
Speaker 7: And at the same time, the victims are always the
Speaker 7: migrants that you know. That's what we should be upset about,
Speaker 7: is that our policies, whether federal or state, are killing
Speaker 7: people who are seeking asylum and seeking safety. That's what
Speaker 7: it is.
Speaker 10: Yeah, exactly. I think like this attempt to make it
Speaker 10: like Republican governor is killing migrants thing is an attempt
Speaker 10: to like distract us from the fact that democratic president
Speaker 10: is killing migrants in much greater numbers just by virtue
Speaker 10: of the amount of land covered by you know, Biden's
Speaker 10: jurisdiction compared to Abbots. But yeah, I think it's very hypocritical.
Speaker 7: And it's it's funny to you in that or I'm
Speaker 7: not funny but ironic, and that the Border Patrolley Union
Speaker 7: is putting out the numbers of when Trump's last year
Speaker 7: as president of death on the southern border, and these
Speaker 7: are just the ones that they find, not yeah, the
Speaker 7: actual number, which is usually three to four times as many.
Speaker 7: And then they're saying, oh, look in Biden's year, this
Speaker 7: has been twenty twenty three was the most deadly year.
Speaker 7: But it's like, you know, you guys never cared about
Speaker 7: how many people were dying before, and now the sudden
Speaker 7: you're like, you're killing more Miran than anybody else.
Speaker 4: Are you jealous? What's the deal?
Speaker 10: Yeah, like the idea that these people that can send
Speaker 10: that they're like in a cumba. They keep people in
Speaker 10: open air attention for up to a week and in
Speaker 10: the freezing cold. You know, in San Diego Santasedro, people
Speaker 10: are two people have died Santa Sedro, one person has died.
Speaker 10: In the number probably dozens more people have died crossing
Speaker 10: in other routes that we haven't seen this year. It's
Speaker 10: it's been not as wet as previous winters. But just
Speaker 10: in my just in this week, I've seen people in
Speaker 10: extremely dire medical distress. And I've seen border patrol scream
Speaker 10: at those people and scream that people trying to help
Speaker 10: those people, and not do anything to help. So I'm
Speaker 10: finding it hard to buy that this is all Greg
Speaker 10: greg Abbott's fault, not that Greg Abbott is't a piece
Speaker 10: of shit. Yeah, I think we're in agreement on that,
Speaker 10: but like, yeah, the the attempt to lay all the
Speaker 10: blame at Greg abbots feet and suggests that there is
Speaker 10: a complete bipartisan agreement it seems, on killing migrants even
Speaker 10: like we don't see in the Trump era, we saw,
Speaker 10: you know, AOC turn up and cry at the you know,
Speaker 10: unaccompanied children or the other separation of family separation attention,
Speaker 10: and we don't even see that anymore, Like we don't
Speaker 10: have any ear of that. And that's reflect in the press, right,
Speaker 10: we don't see anywhere near as much coverage of the
Speaker 10: brutality at the border as we used to. One thing
Speaker 10: that you've mentioned before we started with that you had
Speaker 10: there's some like there's pretty clear case law or Supreme
Speaker 10: Court decisions at least about like what BP could have
Speaker 10: done or what their rights are visa VI. The National Guard,
Speaker 10: could you explain some fat well as.
Speaker 7: Clear immigration precedent. So in eighteen seventy five, so prior
Speaker 7: to the Civil War, a little bit after the Civil War,
Speaker 7: states had always done their own immigration. So if you
Speaker 7: showed up in a boat on New Orleans in New
Speaker 7: Orleans Harbor, they would have their own immigration. You would
Speaker 7: have to pay a lot of times. In the California area,
Speaker 7: California was charging, especially Chinese migrants who were coming over
Speaker 7: for the railroad and the gold Rush and things like that.
Speaker 7: When they brought groups of Chinese women over, then California
Speaker 7: would label the ball as prostitutes and no good people,
Speaker 7: and then they would put them in jail and then
Speaker 7: find the captain of the ship like five hundred dollars
Speaker 7: a person, which is by today's standards it's like over
Speaker 7: fourteen thousand dollars, such a lot of money. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: And so one of the one of the female migrants
Speaker 7: in eighteen seventy five, So you had no right to
Speaker 7: hold us in jail. You don't have this right. There's
Speaker 7: nothing that says that you have this right according to
Speaker 7: US law back then. And so the case is called
Speaker 7: Chai cchy Lung Lung versus freemen. And in eighteen seventy five.
Speaker 7: The Supreme Court decision was that immigration is solely the
Speaker 7: federal government's right to enforce and not the states, simply
Speaker 7: because of diplomatic relations. Also that we have treaties with
Speaker 7: other countries, and we have relationships with other countries, and
Speaker 7: they believe that while allowing states to do their own
Speaker 7: immigration would then hurt the United States in diplomacy with
Speaker 7: these other countries. And then the other thing that they
Speaker 7: mentioned was that there have been no due process given
Speaker 7: to the migrants during the time, and that's sufforded to migrants,
Speaker 7: whether they're undocumented or not, based on the Constitution. And
Speaker 7: then recently in two thousand. The most recent time that
Speaker 7: it was brought up was in twenty twelve when Arizona
Speaker 7: sued the United States. The Supreme Court upheld in that
Speaker 7: case that law enforcement can question citizenship during a legal stop,
Speaker 7: but denied other parts of the Arizona law SB. Ten
Speaker 7: seventy which allowed their peace officers to act like immigration officers.
Speaker 7: And they said, the reason why they can't do that,
Speaker 7: which is what greg Abbott is doing. The reason why
Speaker 7: Supreme Court said they can't do that in twenty twelve
Speaker 7: was because of Article six clause two, which states that
Speaker 7: the Constitution federal laws treaties made under federal authority take
Speaker 7: priority over state laws. So it's, you know, the supremacy clause. Basically,
Speaker 7: it's what it is. And so it's kind of like
Speaker 7: what Trump did when he was in office, where he
Speaker 7: starts separating children, and he starts putting everybody he crosses
Speaker 7: the border, whether it's for asylum or for nefarious reasons,
Speaker 7: in between the courts. He we'd take away their children.
Speaker 7: And I mean, that was in violation of the nineteen
Speaker 7: eighty Refugee Act, and yet nobody really fought it on
Speaker 7: that basis. I'm not sure why they didn't find it
Speaker 7: on that basis. I'm not an attorney, so I can't
Speaker 7: tell you, but at least you know this this decision
Speaker 7: Chai Lung versus Freeman, It's been around since eighteen seventy
Speaker 7: five and was brought up in twenty twelve, and the
Speaker 7: Supreme Court awesome used Chai Lung to make its argument
Speaker 7: of why Arizona couldn't have certain parts of SB ten
Speaker 7: seventy out. So what Greg Abbott is doing is the
Speaker 7: same thing Trump is, and is like, oh, will break
Speaker 7: the law, and you can take me to court and
Speaker 7: we'll see if this court agrees with what the last
Speaker 7: court said. So they're just breaking the law and then
Speaker 7: enduring people to take them to court is simply what
Speaker 7: they're doing. In in the middle of this. Obviously the
Speaker 7: migrants are caught, the humanitarian organizations and everybody's caught. It
Speaker 7: causes chaos, basically, is what it's doing.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's causing an absolute mess at the border. And
Speaker 10: I think understandably what you hear from migrants is like,
Speaker 10: the people who are better informed, who have access to information, resources, finances,
Speaker 10: are telling me that they don't want to go to Texas,
Speaker 10: right because right, it's a mess, and it's a mess
Speaker 10: that kills people. And that's exactly what it's supposed to be.
Speaker 10: It's supposed to be uncertain, and it's supposed to be cruel,
Speaker 10: and so people who have the chance to you will
Speaker 10: come here. People who can't afford to right that they're
Speaker 10: coming north directly and it sort of takes us is there,
Speaker 10: you know, if they head directly north, but that that's
Speaker 10: where they end up. Texas has a huge amount of border.
Speaker 10: Of course, then they're the people who tend to be
Speaker 10: the ones who are forced across there, and unfortunately that's
Speaker 10: realotten the much higher as you said, at much higher
Speaker 10: death rate. Right, Nick, it's do you have a sense
Speaker 10: of like I suppose it will be hard to tell
Speaker 10: because we have very little and were proper statistics, but like,
Speaker 10: what is the most fatal kind of part of the border.
Speaker 7: It's difficult to tell if it's the Sonoran Desert or
Speaker 7: if it's the Rio Grande River. And I say that
Speaker 7: because we don't see half the bodies, or we probably
Speaker 7: don't see ninety percent of the bodies.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I know a lot of deaths are on the
Speaker 10: t reservation to reservation in there's.
Speaker 7: The bombing very goldwater bombing area that nobody's allowed in,
Speaker 7: but when they are occasionally allowed in, they find like
Speaker 7: groups of thirteen fifteen skeletons.
Speaker 3: And stuff like that.
Speaker 7: So I think it's a tassa between the Sonoran Desert
Speaker 7: and the Rio Grande River. The other problem with Texas's
Speaker 7: border is that primarily the majority of the property on
Speaker 7: the border in Texas is private property, and they tend
Speaker 7: to be very large ranches which may be no ranch
Speaker 7: hand or anybody goes out, you know, through the acres
Speaker 7: to see this, and they might never ever find the bodies.
Speaker 7: It's kind of like the Sonoran desert and po nation
Speaker 7: and then the bombing range and then just the fact
Speaker 7: that the desert will just destroy the bones pretty quickly,
Speaker 7: especially once the winds cover thinks up that we have
Speaker 7: a fair amount and Campo, as you know, in the
Speaker 7: Hakamba Campo wilderness area and the mountains and the Laguna Mountains.
Speaker 7: But I don't think it's near as bad because you
Speaker 7: can look at those mountains and see how bad they are,
Speaker 7: and most people don't want to dare across those mountains,
Speaker 7: but many still do. Obviously I worked up there. You
Speaker 7: you're familiar with that area, and so we have more
Speaker 7: than our fair share for certain. Yeah, but I would
Speaker 7: say I would say probably it's between Texas the Rio
Speaker 7: Grande and then the Sonora doesn't.
Speaker 10: For sure, Okay, yeah, yeah, I think I think that
Speaker 10: makes sense. It's probably a good time for us to
Speaker 10: break the border. Is getting people. These adverts probably aren't,
Speaker 10: but they're still not great. So you enjoy these products
Speaker 10: and services. All Right, we are back, and Jen, I
Speaker 10: wanted to ask, like, with regard to these I think
Speaker 10: there's a couple of things that people might not be
Speaker 10: clear on. We've tried to explain them on the podcast before.
Speaker 10: The first is like Border Patrol will always say that
Speaker 10: all the BP agents are first responders, right, It's this
Speaker 10: line that they have, and like do they like in
Speaker 10: terms of rescues, are they sort of like technically obliged
Speaker 10: to make rescues. I mean, I've seen people in very
Speaker 10: great stress and I've seen Border Patrol do nothing more
Speaker 10: times than I can count, So like I'm wondering, like
Speaker 10: is there some kind of like technical obligation that they
Speaker 10: have that they're just ignoring or is it sort of
Speaker 10: at the discretion of the agent whether they think it's safe.
Speaker 10: What's there like official policy there?
Speaker 7: Well, if you're an agent in the field and you
Speaker 7: come upon a migrant drowning in the water or you know,
Speaker 7: has slipped and broken their leg and you're trying to
Speaker 7: decide if you should go down into this area or
Speaker 7: jump in the water and stuff, it is up to
Speaker 7: the individual agent to decide if they can handle that.
Speaker 7: So what you find most often the agents who are
Speaker 7: in the boats and working on either the oceans and border.
Speaker 7: They work on the ocean in California and they work
Speaker 7: on the ocean. Yeah, and then obviously along the Rio Grande.
Speaker 7: All those agents have specific training obviously and swimming. All
Speaker 7: agents have training and swimming, but not at the level
Speaker 7: that the agents who are working on the water deck.
Speaker 7: So you have to go through extra training when you
Speaker 7: take that position. It's like being on a horse patrol.
Speaker 7: You have to go through horse training and so forth.
Speaker 7: But all agents are trained in just basic CPR, just
Speaker 7: basic splinting, that kind of first aid stuff. But not
Speaker 7: all agents are what they call it, not Vortech, but
Speaker 7: four Star, the rescue organization that they have now, and
Speaker 7: that's didn't start until like the late nineties. And I
Speaker 7: didn't even see him when I was an agent, even
Speaker 7: though I was there until two thousand and one. I
Speaker 7: didn't see him out in Campo whenever we had a
Speaker 7: call about a rescue in Campo, at least the old
Speaker 7: Campo station that was on four Skate Road before they
Speaker 7: changed it all around. We had to go out in
Speaker 7: teams and that's the only time we worked in teens.
Speaker 7: Otherwise we hiked alone is if we were doing a rescue,
Speaker 7: especially in the wintertime, because it was even more dangerous
Speaker 7: and movie hiked all night until we found them. So
Speaker 7: US regular agents just on the line would just move
Speaker 7: our positions and keep going. And we didn't necessarily have
Speaker 7: any specific training. We didn't repel a lot of helicopters
Speaker 7: back then and do all that stuff. What I think
Speaker 7: that they started for was because we had a lot
Speaker 7: of attrition in the nineties, and it was more about
Speaker 7: getting US regular agents that patrol the border away from
Speaker 7: the border because we were having that's when our massive
Speaker 7: suicide started, because of all the death that we were seeing.
Speaker 7: And I think it was an effort to keep the
Speaker 7: average agent from seeing the brutality of what they were doing,
Speaker 7: quite honestly, and so like I as an agent had
Speaker 7: lots of experience with dead bodies and so forth. But
Speaker 7: agents today who are on the line, they don't. They
Speaker 7: sit in their trucks, they watch the cameras, and then
Speaker 7: when a dire thing comes out that somebody needs to
Speaker 7: be rescued forced our handles handles it. They might go
Speaker 7: do perimeter things and help out a little bit, but
Speaker 7: they're not involved in the actual rescues. You know, in
Speaker 7: my day, I didn't know. I didn't know that many
Speaker 7: agents who had never seen who had never experienced that,
Speaker 7: And I kind of think in a weird way that
Speaker 7: that's what makes today's agents so non caring, so non
Speaker 7: sympathetic to the migrants. We didn't call them invaders. And
Speaker 7: it's not to say that we weren't racist and we're brutal.
Speaker 7: It's just it's gotten even more brutal and more racist
Speaker 7: since since I was an agent, And certainly I would
Speaker 7: say that the brutality that may have happened that would
Speaker 7: have happened maybe on an individual basis or with certain
Speaker 7: groups of agents. It's now policy throughout the whole agency,
Speaker 7: and you're expected to be that brutal. And if you
Speaker 7: can't be that brutal, then you can't hack it. So
Speaker 7: but the idea that they're all first responders, that just
Speaker 7: means they wear a bad and have a gun and
Speaker 7: have a car with you know, red and blue lights
Speaker 7: on it. But they're not all necessarily trained in like
Speaker 7: the type of rescue that we're talking about in the
Speaker 7: Hakamba area in the mountains that takes very physically. I
Speaker 7: could do it when I was younger, but obviously I
Speaker 7: can't do it now. Yeah, Yeah, we would have to
Speaker 7: get our best best agents, and especially if we went
Speaker 7: north at the checkpoint north of I eight up into
Speaker 7: the Lagunas, we would have to get our best fit
Speaker 7: agents up there to do that.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and it seems like that I don't see them
Speaker 10: as much, certainly, like when there's a search and rescue now,
Speaker 10: just like everything else at the border very often falls
Speaker 10: on volunteers and community groups and people who are willing
Speaker 10: to give their time and take the nonnegtible personal risk
Speaker 10: to rescue people.
Speaker 7: Because he I think we might have rescued more people
Speaker 7: back then, even with half the amount of agents, simply
Speaker 7: because when we got the call, we went and we looked,
Speaker 7: and sometimes we'd meet the federal allies right at the
Speaker 7: border and they show us this is a group, and
Speaker 7: so we looked for the sign and then we could
Speaker 7: you know, frog it and get ahead of it. Whereas
Speaker 7: today if you call a bors Star, will all the
Speaker 7: Boord store agents have to get their gear on and
Speaker 7: then they have to get in the helicopter and then out.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and I mean that's even if they're willing. So
Speaker 10: like I know with a group that made a call
Speaker 10: this weekend for a gentleman who was in distress and
Speaker 10: had been suffering very greatly from exposure, and the agent
Speaker 10: in the office said it would be hours, maybe days
Speaker 10: before they arrived, right, So like if you can get through,
Speaker 10: if you can get them to come out, like you
Speaker 10: know that this and that that's very common. That's something
Speaker 10: that that's not unusual at all. The disdain for coming
Speaker 10: to right, the disdain for people's lives, right for coming
Speaker 10: to rescue them. It is extremely obvious, really, and like
Speaker 10: that's a that's not someone haves to be located. Like
Speaker 10: I can give you a GPS reading down to you know,
Speaker 10: I think it's twenty figures, you know, extremely accurate location.
Speaker 7: It's just oh, yeah, we didn't have that in our day.
Speaker 7: I mean there was GPS, but we didn't have GPS capability.
Speaker 7: I never worked with GPS, so I worked with a
Speaker 7: compass that was pretty much.
Speaker 10: Yet, Yeah, it's yeah, I mean they have more technology
Speaker 10: than you know.
Speaker 7: I know, the agents today tell me they can see
Speaker 7: each other in the field. So they have something or
Speaker 7: their GPS system to tracked each other and so they
Speaker 7: can see where each other is. We never had.
Speaker 10: Yeah, they did to military technology, just like everything else
Speaker 10: that trickle down to the border patrol and sometimes trickles
Speaker 10: from the border patrol down to the military actually with
Speaker 10: a lot of the surveillance technology. Like, I think another
Speaker 10: thing that people might not be aware of, and this
Speaker 10: is something that I think has happened recently but being
Speaker 10: young for several years now, is the deployment of the
Speaker 10: National God to the border. I think people know that
Speaker 10: that is happening in Texas, but I think people probably
Speaker 10: aren't aware that there's also a federal mission to the border,
Speaker 10: right that the encompasses much more than Texas. And what
Speaker 10: are they National God, Well, I mean they I know
Speaker 10: they sit outside detention camps in Ukumber shouting at me,
Speaker 10: but what is their mission in theory at the border?
Speaker 10: What are they doing there?
Speaker 7: Well, in theory their mission at the border is now
Speaker 7: they have these giant processing tints, you know in San
Speaker 7: Diego and in Cheese on ane of the things. So
Speaker 7: in general, what they're supposed to be doing is not
Speaker 7: actively arresting or apprehending people, because that, according to the law,
Speaker 7: would violate it. What they're supposed to be doing is
Speaker 7: is maybe sitting in a stationary spot operating the scope
Speaker 7: where they can tell border patrol at night. You know,
Speaker 7: there's a group over here, DA DA DA, and then
Speaker 7: the rest of the time they're mostly supposed to be
Speaker 7: work working in the processing centers, assistant people if they
Speaker 7: need to go to medical or if they need this
Speaker 7: or that, and so they're just supposed to help so
Speaker 7: that the agents don't have to sit around and babysit
Speaker 7: so much so that they can be back in the field.
Speaker 7: That's what they're supposed to be doing. And I mean
Speaker 7: lots of presidents have done it. Barack Obama did it,
Speaker 7: you know, so it's not unusual unusual. What is unusual
Speaker 7: is that in Texas you have Texas DPS and the
Speaker 7: military Texas National Guard actually pretending like they are border
Speaker 7: patrol agents and running around and apprehending people even though
Speaker 7: they do not have that legal authority. The US government
Speaker 7: has not given it to them. And then the other
Speaker 7: thing I think which is legally the most dangerous is
Speaker 7: where they push the migrants back into the water. Number one,
Speaker 7: The law is that if you set foot on US soil,
Speaker 7: then you're entitled to an immigration hearing if you so choose,
Speaker 7: and you cannot turn somebody back. Agent cannot legally turn
Speaker 7: somebody back once they've crossed, so once they're across that
Speaker 7: middle part of the river, they're in the United States
Speaker 7: and they're your problem now. So you have to deal
Speaker 7: with that, and you have to process them. You have
Speaker 7: to figure out who they are, you have to friend
Speaker 7: and records checks and all this other stuff. It'd be interesting.
Speaker 7: You know. The Biden administration has it pressed Abbot on this,
Speaker 7: and I've always wondered, why are they allowing him to
Speaker 7: do this and take over immigration as a state authority. Yeah,
Speaker 7: I think they just don't want to fight it.
Speaker 10: Yeah, they don't want to be attacked on like this,
Speaker 10: like this idea that Biden's like, there's this myth of
Speaker 10: Biden's opens borders, which is actually ridiculous, and be like,
Speaker 10: as Erica reminded us last week, like we all as
Speaker 10: US passport holders, have open borders to us all over
Speaker 10: the world. It's very problematic. We think other people shouldn't.
Speaker 10: But yeah, I think the idea of like looking weak
Speaker 10: or like, you know, he wants to himself against an
Speaker 10: attack from the right.
Speaker 7: So's the same reason why he won't get rid of
Speaker 7: the Border Patrol Union, because you know, the Border Patrol Union.
Speaker 7: Now that Donald Trump, before he left Diet, he gave
Speaker 7: them what's called security designation, So there are they are
Speaker 7: a security organization now, which means they're like the FBI,
Speaker 7: they're like the DA and all this other stuff, and
Speaker 7: so they can't have a bargaining unit. So the Border
Speaker 7: Patrol Union is actually illegal under five USC seven one
Speaker 7: one two, little b little sixth. But Biden is weak
Speaker 7: and he doesn't want to look like he hates unions.
Speaker 7: He always wants to look like he's strong on unions
Speaker 7: because he's a union politician, and he refuses to get
Speaker 7: rid of them. But the fear and the reason why
Speaker 7: that law exists is exactly what we see them doing now,
Speaker 7: where the union representatives who are Border patrol agents, they
Speaker 7: have national security information and they're actively working against this
Speaker 7: current administration.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that's why we have it.
Speaker 7: But he's just weak and he won't do anything about.
Speaker 10: It, right and it certainly I think whoever wins next time,
Speaker 10: they're not going to do anything about it now. Yeah,
Speaker 10: I think either way. You like also pattention to the
Speaker 10: VP union and I think it's one of the worst
Speaker 10: accounts on Twitter dot com. But I also like, I'm
Speaker 10: in the event of a Republican victory which at the
Speaker 10: moment it's looking like Trump might be then nominee. Right, Certainly,
Speaker 10: it seems for support for Trump kind of these people
Speaker 10: seem to have his ear on immigration and they seem
Speaker 10: to want the same things. Right, So I'm wondering Biden
Speaker 10: has been bad. His border policy has been objectively bad,
Speaker 10: and it's very hard for me not to see it
Speaker 10: as racist. Like it's very hard for me not to
Speaker 10: see his immigration specifically favoring white people and specifically disadvantaging
Speaker 10: black people. And I don't think I could be persuaded
Speaker 10: that's not the case. What do you think, Like it
Speaker 10: seems that immigration policy only moves one way and it
Speaker 10: just gets worse and worse, and border policy does the same.
Speaker 10: What are they like demanding and what do you think
Speaker 10: is sort of at stake in the upcoming election this
Speaker 10: year's election regarding the border.
Speaker 7: So I was paying attention to what Speaker Johnson was
Speaker 7: saying before we logged on to talk, and he was
Speaker 7: saying that there was going to be no deal for
Speaker 7: the border unless Donald Trump was the one doing the deal.
Speaker 7: So he doesn't want to even fund the border patrol
Speaker 7: right now. So, I mean, my impression of what the
Speaker 7: border patrol, and what the Union is trying to do
Speaker 7: at this moment is that they are trying to make
Speaker 7: the border as chaotic as absolutely possible, and that is
Speaker 7: their goal. They want bodies, black and brown bodies coming
Speaker 7: over that fence, and they want the optics of it.
Speaker 7: That's what I think is going on, and that's why
Speaker 7: I think that they're picking specific cities to have a
Speaker 7: lot of the migrants come through. I think that that's
Speaker 7: the reason why they have like specific cities, because you
Speaker 7: saw like a couple of weeks together, they're like, oh
Speaker 7: my god, the border's being overrun and oh my god,
Speaker 7: what are we going to do? And this and that,
Speaker 7: and then you realize it's just like three or four sectors,
Speaker 7: and even within those sectors, it's just one or two areas.
Speaker 7: It's not the entire border. Is it problematic? Is it chaotic?
Speaker 7: Is it a human rights disaster for the minents? Yes?
Speaker 7: Is it that for the border patrol? No? I think
Speaker 7: the border patrol is adding to it. And in fact,
Speaker 7: when I do the numbers and you compare like the
Speaker 7: staff that we have back when I was an agent
Speaker 7: and the staff that they have today, they're not even
Speaker 7: apprehending half the amount that each agent apprehended when we
Speaker 7: were in the patrol back in the day. And so
Speaker 7: you know, for them to apprehend the group now, when
Speaker 7: I see them apprehend a group of life, even ten people,
Speaker 7: twelve people, they will take five agents to apprehend twelve people.
Speaker 7: I have apprehended one hundred people by myself, and that's
Speaker 7: not safe. I shouldn't suggest that people do that, but
Speaker 7: I have apprehended It is normal for a border patrol
Speaker 7: agent to apprehend twenty to thirty people by themselves, including
Speaker 7: a female agent who's at the time was super skinny
Speaker 7: and super small. And the reason why is because the
Speaker 7: vast majority of migrants aren't criminals and they're not trying
Speaker 7: to hurt you. So that's why a single agent can
Speaker 7: apprehend so many people. But today they use like six
Speaker 7: or seven agents to apprehend groups, and so I'm not
Speaker 7: sure why they're overwhelmed. Quite frankly, they should be able
Speaker 7: to handle three hundred and four hundred thousand people a
Speaker 7: month in the border patrol if they have to.
Speaker 10: Yeah, even though a world without the border patrol would
Speaker 10: be better, in a world without this bloated and violent
Speaker 10: and overfunded and really terribly just just a mess of
Speaker 10: quality and violence that we have now would be a
Speaker 10: lot better, but things could get a lot worse for
Speaker 10: those people, like even the time it takes for them
Speaker 10: to be processed, and that the time it takes for
Speaker 10: them to have their hearing. Immigration law could change for
Speaker 10: the worse very quickly if either person wins presidency. And indeed,
Speaker 10: like it seems that Biden has floated like a return
Speaker 10: to Title forty two as a as a compromise to
Speaker 10: get funding for Ukraine. So like, yeah, this inefficiency doesn't
Speaker 10: just like even when people are apprehended, their failure to
Speaker 10: do their jobs hurts people right like it it puts
Speaker 10: them at greater risk.
Speaker 7: It does. And I mean a lot of the things
Speaker 7: that the Border Patrol has done has created it and
Speaker 7: made these things worse. A lot of the areas out
Speaker 7: near Sasabe, a lot of people never even crossed until
Speaker 7: Trump put that wall out there because they didn't have
Speaker 7: road access to a lot of that area. And if
Speaker 7: you did have road access, you had to have a
Speaker 7: very serious four by four to get out there. You
Speaker 7: can't do it in a regular car, and you can't
Speaker 7: do it in a kind of city type of four
Speaker 7: by four. You need a serious four by four to
Speaker 7: get it into some of those areas. And then just
Speaker 7: our policies are deterrence policies. You know, when I was
Speaker 7: an agent in the nineties, it costs you know, probably
Speaker 7: somebody from Central America costs about eighteen hundred dollars to
Speaker 7: get here. Now it's ten thousand or more dollars. So
Speaker 7: we've made it profitable for people to smuggle people in
Speaker 7: and cross them illegally. Illegally, We've created this entire situation ourselves.
Speaker 7: I mean, I don't have any doubt that other countries
Speaker 7: that maybe don't like that, you know, all the migrants
Speaker 7: coming across, the destabilization that will cause with people who
Speaker 7: are racist or who don't know anything about the border,
Speaker 7: they all see that as a bonus. But the fact
Speaker 7: of the matter is is that people who are crossing
Speaker 7: they still need asylum, they still have serious needs. Just
Speaker 7: because you know, I've seen some people floating around that
Speaker 7: people are pushing migrants across our southern border to destabilize US.
Speaker 7: I don't know if that's necessarily true. We don't have
Speaker 7: any proof of that. But even if they are, isn't
Speaker 7: the better attitude to have because asylum is legal, isn't
Speaker 7: the better attitude to have? Well, how can we better,
Speaker 7: you know, help these people and not let this destabilize
Speaker 7: who we are and make them part of our communities
Speaker 7: and so forth. I think that's a better choice than
Speaker 7: sending them out to the desert or to drown in
Speaker 7: the rivers.
Speaker 10: Yeah. Absolutely, And I think it bears. I mean, people
Speaker 10: listening to this will probably be in agreement that, yeah,
Speaker 10: these people should be treated preticunanty and respect adless. And
Speaker 10: I generally don't buy that they're being shipped on mass
Speaker 10: to destabilize this country. But I think even if you
Speaker 10: don't care about their rights, every single advance advance is
Speaker 10: around word, right, But increase in surveillance, every single increase
Speaker 10: in state violence, every single incursion into individual rights starts
Speaker 10: at the border, but it doesn't stop there, right, Like,
Speaker 10: if you've protested in twenty twenty, you were surveilled by
Speaker 10: technology that came from the border. You were sometimes targeting
Speaker 10: by Leslie for weapons that were first issued to border patrol,
Speaker 10: Like you're the intelligence that police now gather began with
Speaker 10: border patrol. Like so much of the even the stuff
Speaker 10: that we see used at the border today or the
Speaker 10: stuff that we see using surveillance today overwhelmingly comes from
Speaker 10: either border patrol or the Israel as a border. And
Speaker 10: also most of these things are the same companies, right,
Speaker 10: Companies that do one also do the other. And so like,
Speaker 10: I guess if people are talking to people who don't
Speaker 10: seem to care about the rights of migrants, which is
Speaker 10: a worryingly large amount of our society, like this will
Speaker 10: come and bite someone else in it, like to include
Speaker 10: the people who decided to storm the capitol on January sixth,
Speaker 10: twenty twenty one. Right, Like, lots of this effectant technology
Speaker 10: that bit them in the Ayes came from the border
Speaker 10: and the people they hated.
Speaker 7: And that's absolutely true. And I mean, you know it's
Speaker 7: the Border patrol says this, but they mean it in
Speaker 7: a different way. They say, what happens at the border
Speaker 7: doesn't stay at the border, and they mean that because
Speaker 7: they try and portray migrants as all criminals. So they're
Speaker 7: trying to tell people, oh, see, these criminals are going
Speaker 7: to come to Iowa or Illinois and so that. But
Speaker 7: I say, in the fact that the surveillance has come
Speaker 7: into you because you know, I mean you know, in
Speaker 7: San Diego, we got street lamps out here that can
Speaker 7: listen to US and video US YEP and track wherever
Speaker 7: we're going down the street, from lock to block. And
Speaker 7: it's ridiculous. You can't even walk your dog without being
Speaker 7: surveilled around here. And yet we're far from them, twenty
Speaker 7: miles from the border, north of the border, and it's
Speaker 7: still surveilled around here. And so all of that surveillance, yes,
Speaker 7: that's being used on American citizens. And when you go
Speaker 7: to places like McCallan, so the Rio Grande Valley sector
Speaker 7: right now, it's really slow. They're getting about a little
Speaker 7: over one thousand, maybe two thousand apprehensions a week, which
Speaker 7: is really slow size of the sector. And they're like,
Speaker 7: you know, they have so much surveillance, Like you can
Speaker 7: see there's a tower, there's a tower. There's a tower there,
Speaker 7: and it is all this Israeli technology and they can
Speaker 7: listen to cell phones and that usually needs a warrant.
Speaker 7: But apparently down here on the border, and I've had
Speaker 7: current border patrol agents tell me the Fourth Amendment doesn't
Speaker 7: exist down here. It's like, what is that one they're
Speaker 7: teaching here in the academy now doesn't exist down here,
Speaker 7: and apparently that's what border patrol agents think, and they
Speaker 7: think they have to do I do anybody that they
Speaker 7: see and all this other stuff, and it just it's
Speaker 7: it's interesting how much this is spreading, how much the
Speaker 7: checkpoints are spreading. And you know, like in mind, we
Speaker 7: didn't do invasive searches if it wasn't obvious, we didn't
Speaker 7: stop them. And nowadays they'll do on full body cavvy
Speaker 7: searches at a checkpoint and I'm like, what I heard that?
Speaker 7: And so all this stuff is just gonna it's just
Speaker 7: getting further and further into the interior of the United States,
Speaker 7: like we saw in the trip nutrition like you said, yeah,
Speaker 7: it's going to be brought back out for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah. So I wonder, like how do we I mean,
Speaker 10: it does seem very bleak, like I which is why
Speaker 10: I like to devote so much of my time to
Speaker 10: like mutual aid work on the border, because it's a
Speaker 10: meaningful way to help. But how do we move the
Speaker 10: needle to a more humane place? Like this is one
Speaker 10: of the places where like I think, like we should
Speaker 10: do whatever we can to make this like even if
Speaker 10: it's something that would normally be this tasteful to us,
Speaker 10: but like, yeah, what is it that we can do
Speaker 10: to either, like maybe change people's minds, Like I'm sure
Speaker 10: you yourself have changed your mind on what we need
Speaker 10: to do on the border and to because the conversation
Speaker 10: around the border is not only toxic, but it's also
Speaker 10: so deeply rooted in ignorance and lack of understanding, and like,
Speaker 10: I don't think we were talking about this before we
Speaker 10: started back. Like I encountered a three year old girl
Speaker 10: the other day who was extremely cold. She had her
Speaker 10: feet have been wet and cold for hours days and
Speaker 10: she was the cold beyond shivering, and we were trying
Speaker 10: to warm her up, and it was very disstressing. I
Speaker 10: don't think many people have seen that. And I don't
Speaker 10: think even you're like sort of hardest border big at
Speaker 10: face book uncles would want to look that in the
Speaker 10: face and be like, yeah, that's what we should do. Damn,
Speaker 10: I'm really proud of this country, So how do we
Speaker 10: move this to a better place?
Speaker 1: Do you think?
Speaker 7: I think one of the biggest mistakes that the Biden
Speaker 7: administration did was that they didn't, you know, in the beginning,
Speaker 7: they hired a lot of really really good people, like
Speaker 7: I think Andrea Flores was one of the administration people,
Speaker 7: and she knows her stuff, and I think that they
Speaker 7: had this idea from what she had said that the
Speaker 7: people that support immigration and immigrant rights in this and
Speaker 7: that she was saying that they were viewed as soft
Speaker 7: hearted individuals on immigration and they were too soft and
Speaker 7: they didn't understand border security. One of the things that
Speaker 7: Biden should have done was start educating Americans about why
Speaker 7: the asylum system is so important and what the benefits
Speaker 7: are that it brings to us. And they have never
Speaker 7: done that. There's no about it. There's nothing And I
Speaker 7: don't know if NGOs do it on that large environment
Speaker 7: on cable news or whatever, because they don't really watch
Speaker 7: mainstream news and stuff. But Americans are just astonished it.
Speaker 7: Like when I started doing the TikTok videos and explaining,
Speaker 7: you know, border patroling, the people in green cbps and
Speaker 7: Blues people didn't know just the basic things. The majority
Speaker 7: of Americans who feel that they have a very a
Speaker 7: very specific view on immigration, whether they hate it or
Speaker 7: they love it, they don't know much about immigration. They
Speaker 7: don't know how it works. They literally think people just
Speaker 7: get off their couch and go let's just go to America.
Speaker 7: And they just hop over the fence and they all
Speaker 7: have money and they're all getting free stuff and this
Speaker 7: and that. So this administration, the government has done nothing
Speaker 7: to explain what is happening and why it happens. And
Speaker 7: I always say that the asylum system is essential to
Speaker 7: national security. What we saw in the Biden administration when
Speaker 7: he first opened up the ports of entry to allow
Speaker 7: specifically Haitians to apply at the ports of entry, we
Speaker 7: saw the amount of Haitians go from the crossing in
Speaker 7: between the ports it regularly. We saw it going from
Speaker 7: you know, thousands down to like one hundred and something.
Speaker 7: So the idea is that you have to have a
Speaker 7: robust and humane asylum system where you're processing people where
Speaker 7: they don't have to wait so long that they're going
Speaker 7: to give up across it regularly. Because the vast majority
Speaker 7: of people who believe that they have a legitimate asylum.
Speaker 7: Clane and I do think that what constitutes the asylum
Speaker 7: needs to be revisited because it's outdated, especially now that
Speaker 7: we have client and change. But is that you want
Speaker 7: those people to come and be inspected. We want people
Speaker 7: to come and stand outside the port of entry and
Speaker 7: wait and be inspected by CBP. If we're going to
Speaker 7: have a border, we're going to have all this. We
Speaker 7: would want that so that then we could say, Okay,
Speaker 7: we've checked them. They appear to be okay, they're going
Speaker 7: to this place. Now they have an immigration hearing before
Speaker 7: a judge. We're going to make sure that they get
Speaker 7: the system and you know, and then see it more
Speaker 7: as a system that's a benefit to us instead of
Speaker 7: creating enemies, which is what we're doing now. Every time
Speaker 7: a migrant turns around, even if they do are able
Speaker 7: to get into the United States the quote unquote legal
Speaker 7: way at a port of entry, they're still met with
Speaker 7: you can't work for one hundred and fifty days, and
Speaker 7: then you can't do this, and you can't do that,
Speaker 7: and you have to show up. And so we're constant.
Speaker 7: Everything is punishment, Everything is punitive in our immigration system,
Speaker 7: and we can't do that. We want these people to
Speaker 7: become citizens. We want these people to become part of
Speaker 7: our our society. We need it, and so we have
Speaker 7: to we have to have somebody bold enough to explain
Speaker 7: this to the American people. If you close the asylum system.
Speaker 7: Everybody's going to cross regularly, just like they did in
Speaker 7: Title forty two, and you're going to get tons and
Speaker 7: tons of bodies coming across the wall. We need to
Speaker 7: be bold enough to say we want a humane and
Speaker 7: robust asylum system where families can wait together and be processed.
Speaker 7: And then, you know, I mean the decision between should
Speaker 7: we fund detention centers and home people who are crossing
Speaker 7: just waiting for their immigration hearing in detention, or should
Speaker 7: we fund you know, humane services, like let's get you
Speaker 7: into whatever city you're going to. Let's help you find
Speaker 7: a school for your kids, Let's help you learn English,
Speaker 7: let's help you find a job, Let's help you and
Speaker 7: you can hire and pay people to do that instead
Speaker 7: of putting people in attention. It doesn't have to be
Speaker 7: a punitive system. We've just made it that way because
Speaker 7: the people on the for profit prisons before Trump was
Speaker 7: supposedly elected, they were lobbying Jeff Sessions and Steven Miller
Speaker 7: when he was working for Jeff Sessions and so Geo
Speaker 7: and all them. They're the ones that decided this is
Speaker 7: how we're going to go. And the fact of the
Speaker 7: matter is is I know, I think we're on a
Speaker 7: disagreement with open border versus you know, or having border
Speaker 7: patrol at all. But I always say an open border
Speaker 7: is just as dangerous as a closed border. And when
Speaker 7: when you close off the asylum system, that forces everybody
Speaker 7: to then cross in between the ports of entry, and
Speaker 7: that is what does overwhelm border patrol. So if you
Speaker 7: don't want to overwhelm your border patrol, then you have
Speaker 7: to pull them back and you have to start processing
Speaker 7: people like they're supposed to be processed at the court
Speaker 7: of entry. The other thing people forget about is we've
Speaker 7: had four years, literally four years of the asylum system
Speaker 7: being shut down because of MPP and Title forty two.
Speaker 7: Those are Trent policies. It took by no while to
Speaker 7: get through all those. But what do you think all
Speaker 7: those people that were sitting around for four years are
Speaker 7: doing there waiting? They're turning to get over there. So
Speaker 7: we have a backlog not just the people in the
Speaker 7: United States waiting for the immigration hearing, we have a
Speaker 7: backlog of people in Mexico waiting to come across. So
Speaker 7: they created this whole thing themselves. I find it very
Speaker 7: interesting the press never mentions that basically what TRUP did
Speaker 7: was close the whole immigration system down and kick the
Speaker 7: can down the road.
Speaker 10: Yeah yeah, I mean consciously or unconsciously. It's like shaken
Speaker 10: up a can of beer and then someone's going to
Speaker 10: take a little off at some point, you know, and
Speaker 10: it's going to blow out. Oh yeah, and it's been
Speaker 10: willing to and so it's still going to get kicked
Speaker 10: down the road. I mean, people have come in since
Speaker 10: the end of title forty two, but as you say,
Speaker 10: there's a huge backlog, and people aren't, as you say,
Speaker 10: going to stop coming, right because like it's dangerous getting here.
Speaker 10: I've walked those trails. They're not easy, and they're certainly
Speaker 10: not easy when you're carrying your kid and it's raining
Speaker 10: and it's dark, but it's I've also been in Syria,
Speaker 10: in Iraq and in other places where these people are
Speaker 10: coming from, and I understand why they're doing it, and
Speaker 10: I would do it too if I had a family
Speaker 10: and I wanted to escape that. So I think we're
Speaker 10: laughing if we think that we're going to I mean,
Speaker 10: we've tried to make our border as unpleasant as those places,
Speaker 10: and it's deadly as those places, right, and fortunately we
Speaker 10: failed and so that doesn't mean people will stop coming
Speaker 10: whatever we do.
Speaker 7: We've had thirty years of walls and border patrols, concept
Speaker 7: of deterrence policies that they claim will prevent people from
Speaker 7: crossing irregularly or illegally, and they've all failed. And I
Speaker 7: think it's time to try something new. I think it's
Speaker 7: time to stop listening to the people who get all
Speaker 7: the money and get all the guns and get all
Speaker 7: the militarizations saying it has to be this way. It
Speaker 7: does not have to be that way. And I think
Speaker 7: it's very important to point out that we live in
Speaker 7: the United States of America. Even though we have a
Speaker 7: lot of problems and we're possibly losing our democracy in
Speaker 7: our country right now, it is still far better than
Speaker 7: the places that these people are coming from, and we
Speaker 7: should be thankful for that and then figure out a
Speaker 7: way to protect ourselves as just as we can.
Speaker 10: You know, yeah, yeah, I think I think that's yeah,
Speaker 10: it's a good place to end. Like, we should be
Speaker 10: grateful that for now we live in a much more
Speaker 10: stable place and that we were able to we have
Speaker 10: the resources to welcome people, and we do the benefit
Speaker 10: to our communities when we.
Speaker 3: Have from us.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we need people right now.
Speaker 10: So yeah, people forever bitching about not being able to
Speaker 10: find people to work and also at the same time
Speaker 10: turning away people who would love. You know, every migrant
Speaker 10: I meet in the cumber message me on WhatsApps saying, Hey,
Speaker 10: struggling to find work because they don't get work authorization.
Speaker 10: Right there are a lot of jobs that you're doing,
Speaker 10: and a lot of people who want to do them,
Speaker 10: and but we're so wrapped up in our bigger trendenophobia
Speaker 10: that we won't let them do it right.
Speaker 7: We've made it as difficult for them as we absolutely
Speaker 7: positively can.
Speaker 10: Yeah, Jen, thank you for joining us. Is there any
Speaker 10: way that people can like follow you on line? You've
Speaker 10: done a really good job at sort of cracking some
Speaker 10: of the board patrols nonsense recently. So where can people
Speaker 10: find that?
Speaker 7: They can find it on jin the j E N
Speaker 7: Nthudd dot com.
Speaker 10: Great mesair, it's a good resource. And well, thank you
Speaker 10: so much, jenf. We really appreciate your time.
Speaker 7: I appreciate you.
Speaker 11: Jeerz bye, Okay, hello, welcome to It could happen here.
Speaker 12: This is Sharene today. I am joined by you know
Speaker 12: you know him.
Speaker 3: You love him.
Speaker 12: It's Robert.
Speaker 10: Hi, Robert Ah.
Speaker 2: Someone knows me and loves me.
Speaker 3: That's nice.
Speaker 12: Robert is here today to talk with me to Charles McBride.
Speaker 12: But I met Charles fairly recently doing just pro Palestine
Speaker 12: stuff online, and I really liked his work. He's here
Speaker 12: to talk about some things that I think are very
Speaker 12: important to like Ukraine, and why helping Ukraine is not
Speaker 12: the same thing as aid to Israel and all that
Speaker 12: good stuff. And yeah, let's just get right into it.
Speaker 12: I want to know your experience with Ukraine. Can you
Speaker 12: just tell us a little bit about that first?
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 13: First of all, thank you sharing so much for having
Speaker 13: me on. This has been one of my favorite podcasts
Speaker 13: for a while. So this is kind of a slightly
Speaker 13: surreal moment going into my experience with Ukraine. I double
Speaker 13: majored in history in comparative religion in college, and I
Speaker 13: was kind of interested in sort of the post Soviet sphere,
Speaker 13: and I worked on some kind of post Soviet issues
Speaker 13: when I lived.
Speaker 10: In Washington, d C.
Speaker 13: After school, and also was deeply interested in Eastern Orthodox Christianity,
Speaker 13: which is kind of why I took an interest in
Speaker 13: that region. So I remember in like twenty fifteen, I
Speaker 13: watched this Vice video called Russian Roulette that popped up
Speaker 13: on my YouTube feed, and it just completely it just
Speaker 13: put Ukraine on the map for me in a way
Speaker 13: that I'd never really thought about before. I thought of
Speaker 13: it as the Ukraine. Yeah, Yeah, my Muscovite Russian history
Speaker 13: professor had always talked about it as a part of Russia. Yeah,
Speaker 13: And she had denied, you know, I was during the Midaan,
Speaker 13: the Revolution of Dignity. I was in college, and she
Speaker 13: denied that Ukraine had any autonomy. She echoed all the
Speaker 13: putinesque sort of talking points about CIA intervention and neo
Speaker 13: Nazis and stuff, and I didn't really know what. I
Speaker 13: didn't know at that point. So then I, yeah, I
Speaker 13: got interested in in sort of what was happening in
Speaker 13: the lead up to the Russian invasion. And I had
Speaker 13: been following this guy who went over to Syria a
Speaker 13: couple of years ago named Aidan Aslin, And in my
Speaker 13: conversations with aid And he'd sort of told me a
Speaker 13: little bit about kind of what stuff was like in
Speaker 13: going on in Ukraine, and I got very interested. I
Speaker 13: was following him and all of his friends and what
Speaker 13: they were doing. And at that point, I had, you know,
Speaker 13: about four or five years of nonprofit humanitarian experience under
Speaker 13: my belt as long as as well as sort of
Speaker 13: a historical political understanding of the region. And so when
Speaker 13: the war happened, when the full scale invasion happened, I immediately
Speaker 13: started trying to fundraise, trying to help out, trying to educate,
Speaker 13: and mostly to try and cut through Russian propaganda because
Speaker 13: there were a lot of people in my sphere who
Speaker 13: were just retweeting straight up Russian propaganda. They were elevating
Speaker 13: you know what you and I know who are basically
Speaker 13: Kremlin adjacent individuals in the United States who have sway
Speaker 13: and leftist circles, some of whom have re emerged in
Speaker 13: the Palestine discussion, much to my chagrin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I'm sure we'll talk about that more later.
Speaker 3: I would love to.
Speaker 10: Get into that.
Speaker 13: Yeah, And so, yeah, in my hope was to kind
Speaker 13: of to do that, and as I was sort of
Speaker 13: working with Ukrainian It's one of the things they said is, hey, man,
Speaker 13: everything happens here. You have to be in Ukraine to
Speaker 13: get anything off the ground, So you need to come here.
Speaker 13: And I'm like, are you insane's there's a war going
Speaker 13: on in your country. So I said yes, and yes, yes,
Speaker 13: I am in retrospect. So second week of the war,
Speaker 13: I booked a plane ticket, flew over there, a crossed
Speaker 13: the train into Poland, scared out of my mind, got
Speaker 13: in touch with the Ukrainians I've been talking to previously,
Speaker 13: and after a mad hustle from the train station, was
Speaker 13: very comfortably drinking tea and a cute little apartment in
Speaker 13: Leviv with somebody's grandmother, and I was like, this is
Speaker 13: this crazy experience. So I spent two months in Ukraine.
Speaker 13: At the beginning, my attention was to sort of identify
Speaker 13: gaps in the medical supply chain, particularly things that were
Speaker 13: going to be initially overlooked in the mad dash of
Speaker 13: refugees and reset men and all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 13: And one of the things we identified was like prescription
Speaker 13: medication for people coming from the east to the west.
Speaker 13: And yeah, I think it's important that not a lot
Speaker 13: of realized that people coming from eastern Ukraine, a lot
Speaker 13: of them had never visited cities like Leviv until the
Speaker 13: start of full scale invasion, predominantly Russian speakers, and you know,
Speaker 13: for them, Leviv was almost like going to Poland, and
Speaker 13: it was a very new thing for them. But you know,
Speaker 13: your medical issues don't stop just because someone invades their country.
Speaker 13: In fact, oftentimes they get worse. And so what I
Speaker 13: was trying to do initially was find a way to
Speaker 13: address that, and that led me into contact with Rostaslov Philippinko,
Speaker 13: who's one of my dear friends and the co founder
Speaker 13: of the organization that we started together called Mission Harkiv.
Speaker 13: So that organization worked initially on prescription medications and then
Speaker 13: started distributing high end oncology drugs, which are very difficult
Speaker 13: to transport, very lucrative to steel, and very difficult to
Speaker 13: store because they have to be kept at a constant temperature.
Speaker 13: So we focused on those things while everybody else was
Speaker 13: focusing on tints and you know, and clothes for refugees
Speaker 13: and that sort of stuff. And as a result, we
Speaker 13: carved out a very interesting niche in terms of the
Speaker 13: humanitarian response and are still going strong with that today.
Speaker 13: And so that was initially kind of why I went
Speaker 13: over there for that first two months, and since then
Speaker 13: I've been back over to film a documentary, sort of
Speaker 13: an artistic short documentary called Note of Defiance, and then
Speaker 13: I was involved with another documentary project which is hopefully
Speaker 13: forthcoming in the next year.
Speaker 2: Nice. Yeah, I don't think I've talked about this on
Speaker 2: the show, but kind of my relationship with Ukraine and
Speaker 2: eventually going over there and starting to report on what
Speaker 2: was happening started weirdly enough as a result of the
Speaker 2: fact that I had friends who went to the big
Speaker 2: burning Man event in Nevada, and I wound up traveling
Speaker 2: with one of them in India, this Ukrainian woman who
Speaker 2: lived in the Bay and when stuff started in late
Speaker 2: twenty thirteen, which is when the Revolution of Dignity is
Speaker 2: kind of the common Ukrainian name for it. You'll also
Speaker 2: hear it referred to as like the twenty fourteen revolution
Speaker 2: of the Madan Revolution. They're all talking about the same thing,
Speaker 2: which is when the guy who was the President of
Speaker 2: Ukraine trying to make himself into a dictator. This dude,
Speaker 2: Victor Yanikovich, who is this incredibly wealthy oligarch who literally
Speaker 2: built a golden palace for himself with like a fake
Speaker 2: lake that had a boat on it, that was a restaurant.
Speaker 10: For just him.
Speaker 2: For like the level of rich oligarch asshole we're talking
Speaker 2: about here, cracked down really brutally on a student protest,
Speaker 2: which it kind of culminated in this kind of escalating
Speaker 2: occupation of the Center Square in the capitol that basically
Speaker 2: got built into an ice fortress and like the middle
Speaker 2: of the Ukrainian winter. This very very like pretty epic
Speaker 2: story of successful resistance because this guy is eventually forced
Speaker 2: out the police riot unit, the bearcoot who had done
Speaker 2: had been literally killing people by dropping them naked, and
Speaker 2: like ice drifts and stuff, are disbanded. It's a really
Speaker 2: remarkable story and I just kind of fell into it
Speaker 2: because my friend connected me with a couple of people
Speaker 2: who were on the ground there who were friends of hers,
Speaker 2: who were Ukrainians in the tech industry who traveled to
Speaker 2: the US every year or so for Burning Man and
Speaker 2: so when this occupation of the Maidan started, they were like, well,
Speaker 2: we know how to, like we're used to making soup
Speaker 2: and food for large numbers of people and like running
Speaker 2: little chunks of a camp, so we'll just start We'll
Speaker 2: just do the thing that we do at our camp
Speaker 2: out over in Maidan. They were part of the thing
Speaker 2: they were part of was the Automidon, which was this
Speaker 2: like mobile unit of resupply where people would like basically
Speaker 2: drive supplies to and from different areas of occupation in
Speaker 2: the city. It was a pretty dangerous job as things escalated,
Speaker 2: but that was my ind and I wound up talking
Speaker 2: to like, I don't know, twenty or thirty people like
Speaker 2: actively the entire time the occupation was going on. There's
Speaker 2: like two folks I never was able to get back
Speaker 2: in touch with who just kind of like dropped off
Speaker 2: at a certain point. Like it was a really sketchy
Speaker 2: time for a lot of people. But I wound up
Speaker 2: traveling there the year after, right after the early part
Speaker 2: of the invasion, started to report from Avdifka, which is,
Speaker 2: you know, was had been under siege for a year
Speaker 2: at that point and is still under siege today, for
Speaker 2: an idea of like that's a decade now basically that
Speaker 2: this this little town has been shelled.
Speaker 12: Yeah, anyway, Yeah, I didn't know that about burning Man.
Speaker 12: That's well, it was a weird.
Speaker 2: Way to get connected to it. Yeah. I just got
Speaker 2: a message from this friend of mine who was like, hey,
Speaker 2: somebodies from my camp are like trying to overthrow their government.
Speaker 3: Do you want to talk to them.
Speaker 10: I was like, well, yeah, that sounds pretty dope.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's your remo. That's wild.
Speaker 13: You know what burning Man really does apply It provides,
Speaker 13: It really connects all, doesn't it. I have some weird
Speaker 13: like tangential burning I've never been.
Speaker 2: But I have like neither of I actually yeah.
Speaker 13: I'd like Burning Man devotees who play a large role
Speaker 13: in my life and it's just very interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the weird little connections you get. And I
Speaker 2: was kind of disappointed, you know. To me, this was
Speaker 2: because the whole time, especially like the late twenty thirteen
Speaker 2: early twenty fourteen, as this was going on, I was like, well,
Speaker 2: they're probably all going to get killed, right, like just
Speaker 2: you know, we were several years in the Syrian Civil
Speaker 2: War at this point, Like I was not optimistic, and
Speaker 2: that's not what happened. And then there was like this
Speaker 2: counterpoint of realizing a few years later that oh, a
Speaker 2: shocking number of people on the left think it was
Speaker 2: a bad thing that they overthrew their government. Yeah, which, yeah,
Speaker 2: I guess gets us into like the kind of thing
Speaker 2: you wanted to talk about, which is the difference in
Speaker 2: providing military aid to Ukraine versus Israel. Yeah, which I
Speaker 2: don't know. I mean, from my standpoint, it's pretty obvious, right, Like,
Speaker 2: one country is fighting a military that has a massive
Speaker 2: industrial base, much more powerful than it and is killing
Speaker 2: large numbers of civilians, and they have proven their ability
Speaker 2: with military aid to react effectively to this invasion. And
Speaker 2: the other case, I don't think I need to explain
Speaker 2: which one, but it's Israel is a country with a
Speaker 2: massive arms industry that is fighting people who have no
Speaker 2: arms industry of any kind and primarily killing civilians. So
Speaker 2: I can very easily justify one of those groups of
Speaker 2: people getting US weapons and one of them not needing
Speaker 2: any additional weapons.
Speaker 10: That's right, ye.
Speaker 13: See, Robert. None of that is justified because of the
Speaker 13: existence of the Ashok Battalion. There is no right for
Speaker 13: any Ukrainian grandmother to get access to her insulin because
Speaker 13: there's a couple of Nea Nazis that were stationed in Mariople.
Speaker 13: But truly, that is that is about how sophisticated. A
Speaker 13: lot of the leftist critiques of the Ukraine of supporting
Speaker 13: Ukraine are I think a lot of it comes in
Speaker 13: one of the things that I talk about, and I
Speaker 13: talked with Sharin about this when we went on Instagram
Speaker 13: Live together. Is that a lot of leftists seem to
Speaker 13: live in kind of a weird, little cinematic universe where
Speaker 13: only the US and Israel can be the bad guys,
Speaker 13: and by extension, France and the UK, you know, and
Speaker 13: YadA YadA. But as a result of that, they have
Speaker 13: this just really strange view of global affairs that literally
Speaker 13: no one in the countries they're talking about share. Somehow,
Speaker 13: Russia and Iran and China and Cuba are all aligned
Speaker 13: in a sort of anti imperial axis because they oppose
Speaker 13: the interests of NATO and the United States. And I
Speaker 13: think that's just so, that's that's patently ridiculous, but it
Speaker 13: plays a big role in conversations like what's going on
Speaker 13: in Palestine. Yes, people will invoke, well, why are you
Speaker 13: giving all this money to Ukraine instead of giving money
Speaker 13: to people the relief for the Maui fires, or you know,
Speaker 13: doing why are we doing medical medicare for all? So
Speaker 13: it's like it's a convenient because it's the military industrial complex,
Speaker 13: it's the Iraq War, it's all these things that we
Speaker 13: as leftists were taught to hate. But it's they're being
Speaker 13: used for good. It's like America is actually being the
Speaker 13: arsenal democracy and doing the thing that we did in
Speaker 13: World War Two that helped the Soviet Union march into Berlin.
Speaker 2: Well, and it's also, I think an important thing to
Speaker 2: notice when we talk about the it's always framed as
Speaker 2: the US is giving this amount of money to Ukraine.
Speaker 2: What's what's happening is we are taking stockpiles of arms
Speaker 2: we already have worth that much money, and we are
Speaker 2: sending them there like they're not right like that that
Speaker 2: is overwhelmingly like the the what kind of aid we
Speaker 2: are sending over So these are extant weapons that are
Speaker 2: sitting in the US doing nothing and being like the Bradley's.
Speaker 2: We didn't just build a bunch of new Bradley's. We
Speaker 2: had a shitload of them. We weren't using them anymore
Speaker 2: because they were not very useful in the conflicts that
Speaker 2: we were fighting.
Speaker 3: Right that Bradley is Mrs Yeah.
Speaker 13: The United States is like really itching to like need
Speaker 13: high Mars right now. No, Like, all of this stuff
Speaker 13: we're sending to them has been mothballed for basically since
Speaker 13: the Goal War, and people don't understand that.
Speaker 2: It is funny to me to imagine, like, yeah, let's
Speaker 2: send that stuff to Maui for the fires. That's what
Speaker 2: they need, is they need long range artillery. That's really
Speaker 2: gonna that's really gonna help them heal.
Speaker 13: I'm in favor of sending lethal aid to the indigenous
Speaker 13: residents of Maui, but I think that's it, that's.
Speaker 5: It.
Speaker 2: You talked me into it. And I think we have
Speaker 2: enough mothballed tanks for both of these causes.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I think.
Speaker 12: For me, the comparisons for Ukraine and Palestine, it started
Speaker 12: with how it was presented in the media. It just
Speaker 12: it rought people the wrong way when the Ukraine Median
Speaker 12: struggle was presented in a certain way and the Palestinian
Speaker 12: struggle was not, and people can draw some draw a
Speaker 12: comparison like whiteness and all this stuff. Absolutely, yeah, and
Speaker 12: I just it got me, really, it really irritates me
Speaker 12: because it's not like the Oppression Olympics, Like we're not
Speaker 12: trying to compare or demonize Ukrainians. We should demonize the
Speaker 12: media for not representing Palestinians in the right way. But
Speaker 12: I think that is kind of the origin of the
Speaker 12: comparison that I saw.
Speaker 2: Anyway, Yeah, and I think that's that's really worth digging into,
Speaker 2: because there's a couple of First off, it is absolutely
Speaker 2: an injustice that Ukrainian resistance and that light is seen
Speaker 2: as inherently just and not just. Palestinian resistance is demonized
Speaker 2: or often ignored, But like all sorts of resistance by
Speaker 2: people who are being harmed around the world, it partially
Speaker 2: is or in large part as a result of like
Speaker 2: US and other Western countries policies are not seen in
Speaker 2: the same light as Ukrainian resistance. I certainly agree with
Speaker 2: that stance. That's not the refault of anybody in Ukraine. Right,
Speaker 2: this is we are not talking about a country that
Speaker 2: exercises power on the global stage. We are talking about
Speaker 2: a cash poor nation that has been struggling with Russian
Speaker 2: imperialism for most of the time that most of the
Speaker 2: people listening this, actually all of the time that everybody
Speaker 2: listening to this has been alive in one form or another, right, Yes,
Speaker 2: And so I think it's perfectly fair to point out
Speaker 2: the ways in which the media reports unequally on these conflicts,
Speaker 2: on what's happening in Palestine, what's happening on stuff like Buka,
Speaker 2: and on the mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza, right,
Speaker 2: I think that that is worth pointing out, But it's
Speaker 2: also not worth blaming Ukrainians over they are not participating
Speaker 2: in that just by saying, hey, it's bad that our
Speaker 2: civilians are being massacred by rockets, right and other forms
Speaker 2: of weaponry. By the way, like that that's not on them, Yeah.
Speaker 13: I think so also kind of flip that on its head.
Speaker 13: I mean, this part of it is the media narrative.
Speaker 13: You know, it's easier. Ukrainians are mostly hot white people
Speaker 13: in the eye of the Western media, and it's easy
Speaker 13: to cheer for the hot white people who have you know,
Speaker 13: everyone everyone. A lot of people have been to Ukrainian restaurant,
Speaker 13: they're familiar with some Ukrainian maybe songs, so they have
Speaker 13: friends if they live in a place like la or
Speaker 13: New York, you know Ukrainians, you're familiar maybe even with
Speaker 13: some Ukrainian media. And it's and it's kind of like
Speaker 13: this accessible thing, you know. And also like there's other
Speaker 13: aspects of it to which you're even stranger, which is
Speaker 13: that Ukraines produces like a huge amount of the world's
Speaker 13: fashion models. Like that's a very accessible thing. For people
Speaker 13: to get behind in the nice liberal media. And you
Speaker 13: could see these in these initial broadcasts being like I've
Speaker 13: never seen anything like this with seeing all these European
Speaker 13: looking refugees and it's like a right, they're multlearly.
Speaker 12: Like that where they're these are not Arabs like they
Speaker 12: say it with their chests, you know, like these these
Speaker 12: are people like us.
Speaker 13: But for the flip side of that is that that
Speaker 13: leftists are reluctant to be charitable to Ukrainians because they
Speaker 13: also see them as hot white people who don't need
Speaker 13: any help. Yeah, and they're unwilling to admit that Ukrainian Ukrainians,
Speaker 13: like Gosans, also suffer from a settler colonial state as
Speaker 13: their neighbor with a history of ethnically cleansing and genociding them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean part of the reason for that is
Speaker 2: that the neighbor that ethnically cleansed in gen well one
Speaker 2: of them, because actually they had several neighbors ethnically cleansing
Speaker 2: genocide them. But the Soviet Union like did a significant
Speaker 2: amount of that during the Holy Dulmar. Now Germans also
Speaker 2: carried out a massive genocide in Ukraine like and by
Speaker 2: the way, a huge number of the Red Army soldiers
Speaker 2: who successfully helped defeat the Nazis were Ukrainians. As a note,
Speaker 2: this is you often see this thing where people will
Speaker 2: point out there were a significant number of Ukrainians that
Speaker 2: fought with the Nazis, and they tend to ignore that, like, yeah,
Speaker 2: and there were even more Ukrainians who fought with the
Speaker 2: Red Army. Like both of those things happened. It was
Speaker 2: a world war and Ukraine was right in the middle
Speaker 2: of it. It's a very ugly situation, and it kind
Speaker 2: of comes down to this inability of a lot of
Speaker 2: people to not even nuanced to care about accuracy when
Speaker 2: that accuracy is not like ideologically convenient, when it points
Speaker 2: to some of the ugliness and messiness of war. I
Speaker 2: find that very frustrating. Like I sympathize with because I
Speaker 2: was reporting on the Syrian refugee crisis from the refugee
Speaker 2: trail right after actually I was in Ukraine, and it
Speaker 2: is unfair that like Ukrainian refugees were treated differently. But
Speaker 2: the people to blame for that is the news media,
Speaker 2: not refugees who have lost their homes. In fact, I
Speaker 2: suspect that a lot of Ukrainians have a different attitude
Speaker 2: themselves towards the suffering that they witness during that period
Speaker 2: of time because they've now been through it. It's just
Speaker 2: like a human thing now, you know what that's like.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I mean as a Syrian person who oh, for
Speaker 12: the past like over a decade, I really really fucking
Speaker 12: got on my nerves every time I would see them
Speaker 12: not talk about Syria, or when they did it was
Speaker 12: not a good way. And then when they started really
Speaker 12: embracing Ukrainian refugees or talking about them in a different way,
Speaker 12: I'm not gonna lie, it made me mad, but not
Speaker 12: at Ukrainians. Like I think even now, we should have
Speaker 12: criticized the media back then, but like they're doing the
Speaker 12: same thing now with their fucking headlines about Israel and Palestine.
Speaker 12: It's always how it's presented versus the people it's presenting.
Speaker 12: Like when someone when some dumb newscaster is standing in
Speaker 12: front of a group of Ukrainian refugees behind him and
Speaker 12: he's like, these are not Arabs, these are white people.
Speaker 12: They didn't say that he did, so I don't know.
Speaker 13: Yeah, And also like I encourage everyone to ask Ukrainian,
Speaker 13: particularly Eastern Ukrainians' opinions on the Western media and like
Speaker 13: Westerners in general, because two years into this war, they
Speaker 13: have a lot of them, and I imagine that they
Speaker 13: would you would find a lot of the sentiments shared
Speaker 13: by the Ukrainians. They don't always appreciate how they're portrayed
Speaker 13: in the Western media, as you know, brave defenders of
Speaker 13: their country or sook covered refugees coming off of a railcar.
Speaker 13: You know, they have a lot of opinions on these
Speaker 13: sorts of things. They feel patronized, they feel babied in
Speaker 13: some senses, and they feel like they will be ultimately
Speaker 13: abandoned by us, which is already coming to pass. Yeah,
Speaker 13: and as the attention shifts to things like Gaza, you know,
Speaker 13: it's difficult for them to feel like they have any friends.
Speaker 12: Yeah, no, I want to get into that. But let's
Speaker 12: take our first break, and yes, we will jump back
Speaker 12: in and we're back. Okay. We had just been talking
Speaker 12: about how the support for Ukraine has kind of changed recently.
Speaker 12: Can you get into that little bit.
Speaker 13: I'm not even necessarily sure that it changed so recently.
Speaker 13: I remembering over there and it was wall to wall
Speaker 13: coverage from the moment I set foot from the moment
Speaker 13: it started to really up until the Oscars and the
Speaker 13: Chris Rock slap is what we all talked about as
Speaker 13: last oxers, like this is yeah, the last Oscars and
Speaker 13: the Chris Rock slap and all the attention that that got.
Speaker 13: Was the moment that a lot of the volunteers talked about,
Speaker 13: is the moment where people started to want to forget
Speaker 13: about Ukraine. There was still a lot of coverage, but
Speaker 13: suddenly it was like, you don't have to be obsessed
Speaker 13: with Ukraine. You know, Ukraine's now a second page story
Speaker 13: instead of a first page story. That was around the
Speaker 13: same time that the Russians withdrew from Kiev, So suddenly
Speaker 13: there wasn't there wasn't this expectation that Kiev was going
Speaker 13: to fall and the capital be taken in Zelensky would
Speaker 13: be captured, and it started to slow up. Even then,
Speaker 13: you know, the donations dried up, the attention dried up,
Speaker 13: and by the time I went there in the winter
Speaker 13: of twenty twenty three last year, it was like people
Speaker 13: already wanted to forget. I mean, I live in Los
Speaker 13: Angeles and a lot of people here were saying things like,
Speaker 13: oh wow, is that still going on? Really nice, well
Speaker 13: meaning people who knew I'd been over there. They were
Speaker 13: just like, is that you know, is that still a
Speaker 13: war going on?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 13: Here we are in twenty days. It's going to be
Speaker 13: two years of this. Yeah, my friends over there are exhausted,
Speaker 13: and they don't They're now a page eight story.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And it's this comes back to like how Americans like
Speaker 2: to think about conflict. We have an enormous appetite for
Speaker 2: war and for you know, a particularly what we consider
Speaker 2: a just struggle for up to a couple of months, right,
Speaker 2: and then people were very excited when, yeah, the Russians
Speaker 2: invade everyone. The expectation, both from like military experts in
Speaker 2: the West and from certainly civilians is that like Russia's
Speaker 2: going to crush them immediately, and then they don't. There's
Speaker 2: this real upset, come from behind, underdog victory and Americans
Speaker 2: love that, but then like it, it's not a total
Speaker 2: immediate victory, and in fact, it turns into at this
Speaker 2: point and really really brutal, ugly slow war of attrition
Speaker 2: and maneuver, which is like what war is, right, Like
Speaker 2: that that's how any sort of near peer conflict is
Speaker 2: going to boil out. And it's not a kind of
Speaker 2: thing that is resolved quickly, and it's not a kind
Speaker 2: of thing that is resolved without cost. And as soon
Speaker 2: as that became clear Americans, it didn't. It doesn't fit
Speaker 2: into that like ninety minute Hollywood vision of how a
Speaker 2: conflict is supposed to go right. There was no The
Speaker 2: Ukrainians didn't blow up a death star and end it right,
Speaker 2: like I mean, actually that's not what happens in the
Speaker 2: movies either, but like it's it's still it was not
Speaker 2: the quick, clean end that a lot of people were
Speaker 2: expecting and hoping for. And as a result, people are like, well,
Speaker 2: now it's a quagmire and now it's like we have
Speaker 2: to start looking for some way out of this thing,
Speaker 2: which by the way, has cost us very little. Like
Speaker 2: my stance on like when is this over is like, well,
Speaker 2: I guess when Ukraine says it's over, right, Like if
Speaker 2: the Ukrainians want to come to the negotiating table and
Speaker 2: negotiating into hostilities, then like that's their business. But up
Speaker 2: until that point, I think the business of the United
Speaker 2: States is to continue to meet our treaty obligations, which
Speaker 2: we should we should note like the United States and
Speaker 2: NATO are obligated to support Ukraine in a war over
Speaker 2: its sovereignty because they gave up their nukes with that understanding, right,
Speaker 2: this is.
Speaker 3: What happened when Retail the country.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, we said you give up your nukes and
Speaker 2: we got your back, like this is this was the
Speaker 2: promise we made And as far as I'm concerned, that's
Speaker 2: the only interest I haven't like. My answer is like,
Speaker 2: how long should we support them? Well, as long as
Speaker 2: they're fighting, and.
Speaker 13: We've been keeping that promise for the cost of five
Speaker 13: percent of our defense budget. And like you mentioned earlier,
Speaker 13: it's it's already stuff that's mothballed since the Gulf War,
Speaker 13: sitting around waiting to be used.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 10: I mean the idea of giving them F sixteen.
Speaker 13: Every country in the world, practically, at least in the
Speaker 13: NATO Alliance, it seems like everyone has an F sixteen.
Speaker 13: I think we're giving them a turkey now too, Like
Speaker 13: it's not a big deal to give a couple of
Speaker 13: F sixteens to the Ukrainians or a couple of Bradleys
Speaker 13: or Abrams or what have you. And I think that people,
Speaker 13: especially on the right, but also on the left, who
Speaker 13: get obsessed over the amount of money that we're sending
Speaker 13: or the amount of equipment in personnel. Especially when they
Speaker 13: see these stories about corruption, they don't they don't understand
Speaker 13: the scale of how small this actually is relative to
Speaker 13: the United States other commitments, like to Israel, and they
Speaker 13: get sort of myopically focused on this and they use
Speaker 13: it as a reason to dislike Ukraine. The Right will
Speaker 13: never like Ukraine because Zelensky was the guy who made
Speaker 13: Trump look bad and got him impeached. I think it's
Speaker 13: that simple. Yeah, it's wild that like well, also, I
Speaker 13: mean the Russian interference and stuff. You know, the Republican
Speaker 13: Party now resembles Russia more. But it's wild that Republicans,
Speaker 13: you know, thirty years ago were super anti Russia and
Speaker 13: now the Russia's best friend, and they think Ukraine are
Speaker 13: sort of Satanist whatever, yeah, to and on corrupt people.
Speaker 2: And it's to kind of emphasize how small five percent
Speaker 2: of the Defense Department budget is the Pentagon. This is
Speaker 2: from like a twenty twenty two story. The Pentagon can't
Speaker 2: account for several trillion dollars in assets, which doesn't mean
Speaker 2: we don't fully know where they are, but it means
Speaker 2: that like Pentagon record keeping has sort of like lost
Speaker 2: huge amounts of assets over the years. At the moment,
Speaker 2: like right now, the Pentagon, like as of November twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: had failed six audits in a row, and as far
Speaker 2: as I can tell, I don't think they've actually ever
Speaker 2: passed an audit of like all of their resources. Like
Speaker 2: there's huge amounts trillions of dollars in assets that like
Speaker 2: we can't fully document. It's it's when you think about
Speaker 2: like the amount of money that we've actually sent over
Speaker 2: there as a defense or as a percentage of just
Speaker 2: like this stuff that we can't fully account for in
Speaker 2: our militaries, like Arsenal, it's a tiny fraction of that,
Speaker 2: let alone a fraction of like our Defense Department's total assets.
Speaker 2: And it also this gets back to when people talk
Speaker 2: about like corruption in Ukraine, and by god, Ukraine has
Speaker 2: a history of government corruption, which is part of what
Speaker 2: the revolution in twenty fourteen was about, right, But it's
Speaker 2: particularly silly to complain about that as a reason not
Speaker 2: to send them weaponry when we know the US Defense
Speaker 2: Department is massively corrupt, a huge amount of corruption involving
Speaker 2: not just like not specifically even like military officials, but
Speaker 2: involving civilian contractors, involving like the agencies we contract to,
Speaker 2: involving the money that we've sent over the course of
Speaker 2: like the eight trillion dollars or so that we've spent
Speaker 2: on the war on Terror. A huge chunk of that,
Speaker 2: hundreds of billions of dollars of the money that we
Speaker 2: spent on the war on Terror is just gone. Billions
Speaker 2: of it disappeared in the form of cash pallets that
Speaker 2: we just lost, right, Like, this is the amount of
Speaker 2: money that it has cost us to support Ukraine in
Speaker 2: this war. Is a rounding error of the shit we
Speaker 2: lost just as a matter of business, Like it just
Speaker 2: adds like it's like.
Speaker 13: A rounding earrow of like what we gave to Halliburton.
Speaker 2: Yes, you know, yes, to build hospitals that didn't work
Speaker 2: in Afghanistan.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 13: In speaking of Afghanistan, I think a lot of people
Speaker 13: look at you, they look at the Afghanistan withdrawal and
Speaker 13: they think, oh, this is what Ukraine's going to be like.
Speaker 13: But I think that brings up the point of story,
Speaker 13: what are we getting for that five percent of defense budget?
Speaker 13: You know, we gave a bunch to afghan and we
Speaker 13: ended up getting the same situation that we had when
Speaker 13: we went in there in two thousand and one, the
Speaker 13: Taliban and control. But now they have billions of dollars
Speaker 13: worth of America the state of the art American military equipment.
Speaker 2: And hundreds of thousands of Afghan people died in the
Speaker 2: interim exactly.
Speaker 13: And then you contrast that with like, well, what is
Speaker 13: our five percent of military budget? Get us in Ukraine
Speaker 13: and you look at what this is doing to Russia.
Speaker 13: Russia gained abou zero point one percent of Ukrainian territory
Speaker 13: in the year twenty twenty three, second year of war,
Speaker 13: and to do that they lost about one hundred thousand soldiers.
Speaker 13: Now there's a lot of people in Russia, and that's
Speaker 13: always been the thing about Russia is that they have
Speaker 13: these this depth of recruiting that they can pull on,
Speaker 13: but they're taking out recruiting ads in like Saint Petersburg,
Speaker 13: in Moscow, and in like the wealthy that they're going
Speaker 13: hard on, like recruiting from wealthy urban centers instead of
Speaker 13: sort of the traditional rural areas where they bring in
Speaker 13: all their recruits, which which is evidence to me that
Speaker 13: they're suffering from a manpower shortage in the same way
Speaker 13: that the Ukrainians are. Yeah, and that's one of the
Speaker 13: things that particularly frustrates me when people say that we're
Speaker 13: not what are we getting for our money? Because that's
Speaker 13: that's it, Like Russia is on the ropes. People just
Speaker 13: don't want to admit it. People see a slight incremental
Speaker 13: Russian gain or they feel like there's a standstill on
Speaker 13: the Ukrainian counter offensive and they think, oh, well, let's
Speaker 13: just throw in the It's.
Speaker 3: Like, no, can't.
Speaker 13: You can't stop the pressure now, and Pudin is finally
Speaker 13: kind of ready to come to the negotiating table, it seems,
Speaker 13: and the Ukrainians, you know, need our help more than ever.
Speaker 13: And that's kind of the frustrating ourspact. I went on
Speaker 13: I went on the Hill TV the other day to
Speaker 13: talk with someone who said, basically, she said, is there
Speaker 13: any hope for Ukraine? Like very already fatalistic about the
Speaker 13: whole thing, like are they already on the ropes? And
Speaker 13: I was like, no, they're not on the ropes. And
Speaker 13: this is a narrative that we need to change. We
Speaker 13: need to understand that there's a very there's a huge
Speaker 13: difference between what military aid gets us in Ukraine versus
Speaker 13: what it gets us in Israel and Afghanistan.
Speaker 2: And there's it's also like a significant change in like
Speaker 2: who is being killed by those weapons, right because even
Speaker 2: when we talk about the use of like the US
Speaker 2: use of weapons in foreign countries, we are often talking
Speaker 2: about these kind of these brush fire conflicts, these insurgencies
Speaker 2: in which a great deal of the fighting takes place
Speaker 2: in and around civilian populus. Is And obviously there are
Speaker 2: Ukrainian cities that have been under siege for quite a while.
Speaker 2: But when we're talking about like the Ukrainians firing or
Speaker 2: giving them him Our systems or giving them Bradley's, we
Speaker 2: are talking about weaponry that is being used to break
Speaker 2: fortifications on along a line of contact, which isn't as
Speaker 2: zero never is a zero civilian casualty endeavor, because those
Speaker 2: don't exist in war, but is a significantly less involves
Speaker 2: significantly fewer civilian losses than the kind of wars that
Speaker 2: we have fought for most of the time that I've
Speaker 2: been alive, right, because we're simply not using the weapons
Speaker 2: are not being used in the same way. Bombarding a
Speaker 2: trench line is not the same as firing a cruise
Speaker 2: missile at what you're pretty sure is a terrorist hideout
Speaker 2: in a city, you know.
Speaker 13: Right, And we have been reluctant to give them any
Speaker 13: weapons that could do that. I mean, some notable exceptions
Speaker 13: would be like the strike on the naval command center
Speaker 13: in Sevestopol. Yes, some other drone limited but but ansoly.
Speaker 13: Most of those are drone strikes from drone factories where
Speaker 13: the Ukrainians create their own stuff, And there have been
Speaker 13: some limited civilian casualties in their incursions into Russian territory
Speaker 13: because we won't we won't give them any weapons that
Speaker 13: go into Russian territory.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they give anything they want, yeah, well shit, anything
Speaker 2: else to.
Speaker 13: Get everything they want.
Speaker 2: I mean, we can't say that's not the case for
Speaker 2: whoever comes up next, because a number of our advertisements
Speaker 2: are random, but hopefully not and we're back, all right.
Speaker 2: One of the things you have to keep in mind
Speaker 2: when you think about like is what what is the
Speaker 2: US capable of doing that is positive and what is
Speaker 2: the US capable of doing that's negative? Is that the
Speaker 2: United States is fucking massive, right, Our budget is fucking massive.
Speaker 2: And we talk on this show, on my other show
Speaker 2: about a lot of horrible things our government has been
Speaker 2: involved in, which doesn't which does not detract from the
Speaker 2: fact that US aid, and particularly food aid, is like
Speaker 2: a survival matter for tens of millions of people around
Speaker 2: the globe. Right Like this is one of those things
Speaker 2: when the Republicans are talking about wanting to like cut
Speaker 2: all foreign aid that the US gives to basically everyone
Speaker 2: but Israel. What that means when you talk about that,
Speaker 2: you are talking about like starving populations of people larger
Speaker 2: than most major American cities. Because the US is massive,
Speaker 2: and the aid that we give is you know, usually
Speaker 2: not it's not really that significant a chunk of our budget,
Speaker 2: but for the countries, for a lot of countries that
Speaker 2: receive it, it's like critical to survival food aid and
Speaker 2: medical aid that we've given over the years. And I
Speaker 2: think that also gets into like one of the things
Speaker 2: that's important about understanding like how what impact you might
Speaker 2: have on what's going on in Ukraine. You don't have
Speaker 2: to if you if you have too much of a
Speaker 2: bad taste in your mouth, or the idea of supporting
Speaker 2: US military aid to anywhere. There's a lot of aid
Speaker 2: that's not military that's necessary right as you do, Charles.
Speaker 2: People need medicine right like you are having a positive
Speaker 2: outcome on like the people in Ukraine, if you are
Speaker 2: helping to increase their access to food and medicine, and
Speaker 2: that's not morally complicated. It's always there's always some moral
Speaker 2: complexity in handing out weapons around the world. Handing out
Speaker 2: medication is incredibly simple from an ethical standpoint, at least
Speaker 2: from where you're never a bad guy for giving medicine.
Speaker 2: It doesn't even matter who it's too, like.
Speaker 13: Well, your bad gut Israel apparently.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes they will drone strike you, but I don't know.
Speaker 2: I think that like one of the nice things as
Speaker 2: an American you don't have to. Realistically, the fight over
Speaker 2: Ukrainian aid right now is primarily something that is happening
Speaker 2: in Congress, and at this exact moment in that fight,
Speaker 2: there is very little URI can do. But there is
Speaker 2: a lot, as you prove, Charles, there is a lot
Speaker 2: that individual people can do to help other individual people.
Speaker 2: You may not have access to a Himer system or
Speaker 2: any more Bradley tanks to give the Ukrainians, although if
Speaker 2: you do, please please give them over they'll appreciate them.
Speaker 2: But there are a number of ways in which you
Speaker 2: can help, like the actual people suffering on the ground.
Speaker 2: And I think that that's like, that is right now
Speaker 2: what regular people can actually do.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I totally agree. I would push back a little
Speaker 13: bit and saying that there's not a lot that we
Speaker 13: can do in terms of the congressional fund because I
Speaker 13: think that people do. I mean, I remember, from back
Speaker 13: in my time working adjacent to politics, I remember someone
Speaker 13: told me a statistic where it said it took five
Speaker 13: phone calls to an office of a congressman for them
Speaker 13: to rethink their stance on an issue.
Speaker 2: I'm interesting.
Speaker 6: I have received.
Speaker 13: Texts from AIDS to congressmen Republican and Democrat who sit
Speaker 13: on like House Armed Services Committee or you know, Defense
Speaker 13: and that sort of stuff, saying like, hey, what's with
Speaker 13: this Ukraine? Like what's your take on the Ukraine stuff?
Speaker 13: Should we be giving them all this money? I don't
Speaker 13: really support it, but you went over there? Do you
Speaker 13: think they're using it?
Speaker 4: Well?
Speaker 13: And I'm like, holy, holy crap, am I actually getting
Speaker 13: this text? But yes, absolutely, Like yeah, you need you
Speaker 13: need to do that, you need to green light whatever,
Speaker 13: you need a green light to send that over there.
Speaker 13: And I think if more people, you know, we're especially
Speaker 13: now when a lot of congress people don't want to
Speaker 13: engage with the gaza issue but are looking for like
Speaker 13: good wins with their constituencies, like get to know your
Speaker 13: local Ukrainian constituency in your area, start a campaign to
Speaker 13: go to the regional office of your congressmen, find out
Speaker 13: which committees they sit on, and and pressure them for
Speaker 13: sending aid to Ukraine. I mean, that is something you
Speaker 13: can do. But on the individual level, yeah, you you
Speaker 13: can still raise awareness. You can you can connect the
Speaker 13: decolonial struggle of you Ukrainians to that of Palestinians and
Speaker 13: other peoples. Someone who does this extraordinarily well is Yulia Timoshenka.
Speaker 13: Not the Ukrainian politician. She's a young Ukrainian influencer and
Speaker 13: advocate who went to Nyu Abu Dhabi and sort of
Speaker 13: got kind of got pilled on the whole Palestine thing
Speaker 13: and has really eloquently tied the Palestinian and Ukrainian struggles together.
Speaker 13: So you can point people towards resources like that and
Speaker 13: let them know that there are at least some people
Speaker 13: in Ukraine who see that, who see that connection, and
Speaker 13: then you can also, of course, you can support humanitarian
Speaker 13: initiatives in Ukraine very carefully. Please just do so very carefully.
Speaker 13: I would say there's a lot of there's a lot
Speaker 13: of people who went over there and started initiatives that
Speaker 13: were more or less good, but mostly kind of ineffective
Speaker 13: because they did not actually engage and include Ukrainians in
Speaker 13: that process. My role with everything involving Ukraine is just
Speaker 13: like just to ask Ukrainians about it, Ask Ukrainians what
Speaker 13: they need, figure out what it is that their priorities are,
Speaker 13: and make sure that you're including them on your philanthropy
Speaker 13: and your charity. They will understand what is most impactful. Yeah,
Speaker 13: my organization has experienced a lot of success by being
Speaker 13: entirely run by Ukrainians and being based in Arkiv. And
Speaker 13: as everyone else is funding and resources have dried up,
Speaker 13: Mission Harkiv is being handed projects from larger NGOs who
Speaker 13: are leaving the region. Because we focus on a local response,
Speaker 13: it also means that you know, donations to organizations like
Speaker 13: that go farther because they're going to higher Ukrainians rather
Speaker 13: than paying for the flights of some westerner to go
Speaker 13: back and forth, you know, and do a fundraising, you know,
Speaker 13: coming in from New York and do a fundraising pitch
Speaker 13: and go back. It's actually going towards This was a
Speaker 13: commitment I made to myself and my partner and I
Speaker 13: went over there. My partner at Mission Harkive was that
Speaker 13: I was never going to expense like a flight or
Speaker 13: a meal or anything to Mission Harkive. So you know,
Speaker 13: all that's come out of my own pocket. And that
Speaker 13: means that every donation that we have gets to go
Speaker 13: pretty much directly into our programs. So you can still
Speaker 13: do that as an individual, you can help in that way.
Speaker 13: And the awareness thing is a huge part people are
Speaker 13: forgetting Ukrainians feel abandoned, like making even just the act
Speaker 13: of putting a Ukrainian flag on your notes or like
Speaker 13: tweeting about Ukraine occasionally is seen as such a huge
Speaker 13: act of solidarity at this stage in the game that
Speaker 13: the Ukrainians will love you for it.
Speaker 2: I really love that you bring up the kind of
Speaker 2: pitfalls of and this is not this is Ukraine right now,
Speaker 2: in particular because it was such a huge international story
Speaker 2: at the start of the expanded invasion and that always
Speaker 2: brings out not just grifters but also well meaning people
Speaker 2: who are going to raise money and try to start
Speaker 2: initiatives in that country, it may not be doing it
Speaker 2: in the most cost effective way possible. And I really
Speaker 2: like what you said about like the importance of verifying
Speaker 2: that where you are supporting is not just doing the work,
Speaker 2: but is like doing the work in the best way possible.
Speaker 2: And one of the really important things to look at
Speaker 2: for is like, well, how much money are they spending
Speaker 2: on sending Westerners to and from this place?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: It's one thing if like it's an area that lacks
Speaker 2: access to medical professionals and they're flying out medical professionals
Speaker 2: to do like trauma work or whatever, like there's really
Speaker 2: like that's obviously important, but this is something that like
Speaker 2: a lot of my friends in Iraq and Syria also experienced,
Speaker 2: like the frustration of like in GEO workers staying in
Speaker 2: nice hotels and driving you know, fancy vehicles, where there
Speaker 2: were local organizations doing things like maintaining refugee camps that
Speaker 2: needed the support. I think that's always really important to
Speaker 2: try to do your research so that the support you give,
Speaker 2: the awareness you raise, and the money that you donate
Speaker 2: actually goes where it needs to get.
Speaker 13: I think I mean that opens a whole broad category
Speaker 13: of maybe this is a subset essay waiting to happen.
Speaker 13: But I've been playing with this idea of like the
Speaker 13: idea of conflict vultures, these people who sort of descend
Speaker 13: on a conflict or a disaster zone for a variety
Speaker 13: of reasons. You know, maybe it's fundraising. Maybe they work
Speaker 13: for a big NGO and this helps get them in
Speaker 13: the news, so they fly themselves out there. Maybe it's
Speaker 13: a war and they want to be a hero where
Speaker 13: they want to present themselves as a hero, and they
Speaker 13: end up raising a bunch of money for their equipment
Speaker 13: and stuff, and then stay far away from the fighting line,
Speaker 13: living in nice hotels like you said. Or maybe it
Speaker 13: is like you said, well, meeting people who just take
Speaker 13: up air from the people who need it and take
Speaker 13: They're like sponges that just absorb all this Western energy
Speaker 13: because they're they're a relatable face. And I've encountered all
Speaker 13: of those people in Ukraine. The reason I went to
Speaker 13: Ukraine is because I was like, if I'm going to
Speaker 13: fundraise for this initiative, people are going to give more.
Speaker 13: They're gonna be more invested if they see an English
Speaker 13: speaking American talking to them about this stuff. But I
Speaker 13: came in with the perspective that I can't be centering
Speaker 13: myself on this. The idea is to deflect onto what
Speaker 13: the Ukrainians are doing and elevate their stories rather than
Speaker 13: saying I'm here, I'm posing with the bach mout entrance sign.
Speaker 13: I just delivered seven muffins and a generator to like
Speaker 13: a place that was cleared out by the Ukrainians, you know,
Speaker 13: six months previously. It's more like, Okay, how how do
Speaker 13: you take Americans are very generous people. How do you
Speaker 13: take American philanthropy, American dollars, American wallets and directed towards
Speaker 13: the people who are actually going to change, who usually
Speaker 13: are not Americans. These large NGOs they serve a purpose.
Speaker 13: The UN serves a purpose. Doctors without borders, direct relief,
Speaker 13: you know, World Central Kitchen, they do it. They do
Speaker 13: a great job in like a specific thing. But a
Speaker 13: lot of times, if you're giving to the United Nations
Speaker 13: or you're giving to one of these big NGOs, that
Speaker 13: sets a fundraiser in the immediate aftermath of something, your
Speaker 13: money is going to remodel an office in Rome or
Speaker 13: New York, or Washington, DC, and you're not really reaching
Speaker 13: the people that you're trying to help. And I think
Speaker 13: if more Americans understood that, they'd be more responsible with
Speaker 13: sort of how they spend their money in a philanthropic sense.
Speaker 12: Yeah, Charles, you have been awesome. Thank you so much
Speaker 12: for coming on and telling us your experience. And yeah,
Speaker 12: where can people find you on the internet if you
Speaker 12: want to be found?
Speaker 13: Some I go back and forth. Sometimes I don't want
Speaker 13: to be found and sometimes I do. But you can
Speaker 13: find me pretty much everywhere with at Charles McBride. That's
Speaker 13: McBride with a why, except on Twitter at random. I
Speaker 13: don't have that handle. And then I just launched a substack,
Speaker 13: which is I guess Charles McBride dot substack dot com,
Speaker 13: and that's where we'll be. I'm kind of shifting towards
Speaker 13: more long form content to write about my experiences with
Speaker 13: these things and sort of a more digestible long form
Speaker 13: wave people engaging with important issues like this Awesoh and
Speaker 13: if you're interested in the organization I help set up
Speaker 13: in Ukraine, it is mission dot harkive on Instagram or
Speaker 13: missionharkive dot com and.
Speaker 12: I can put all the info in the description for yes,
Speaker 12: listeners and everything, but yeah.
Speaker 10: Sweet excellent Charles. Yeah, thank you, Charles, Thank you, guys.
Speaker 13: I appreciate it.
Speaker 8: Hey everybody, and welcome back to you. It could happen
Speaker 8: here show about the ways things are falling apart. Well,
Speaker 8: welcome back to you the listener. Welcome to me, your
Speaker 8: guest host. I'm Molly Conger, filling in for James for
Speaker 8: a few weeks. If you're happy to be hearing my voice,
Speaker 8: feel free to share that feedback anywhere you post online.
Speaker 8: If you're upset about the state of affairs, I suggest
Speaker 8: writing your congressional representative or mailing a cryptic postcard to
Speaker 8: your local ATF Field office. As your guest host, I'll
Speaker 8: try to bring you the it could Happen here content
Speaker 8: you know and love, dispatches from the front lines of
Speaker 8: our dystopia updates on the people trying to unravel society
Speaker 8: as we know it, and what's being done to stop
Speaker 8: the rising tide that threatens to swallow us all. Today
Speaker 8: I'm joined by a Garrison, and I'm going to tell
Speaker 8: them a little bit about what's been going on with
Speaker 8: Patriot Front.
Speaker 14: Hello, Patriot Front, fantastic one of the gayer groups of
Speaker 14: Nazis operating in the United States.
Speaker 8: It's just guys being dudes, Garrison, You wouldn't understand.
Speaker 3: I certainly wouldn't know.
Speaker 8: You may remember Patriot Front from such iconic moments as
Speaker 8: getting arrested and mass at a gay Pride event in
Speaker 8: Idaho in twenty twenty two, having their internal calms leaked repeatedly,
Speaker 8: nearly constantly, constantly, including some videos of questionably sensual path downs,
Speaker 8: or accidentally giving several members mild carbon monoxide poisoning by
Speaker 8: forcing them to ride in the back of the U
Speaker 8: haul truck. You've probably seen their stickers on a trash
Speaker 8: can in your local downtown, or maybe you've driven by
Speaker 8: a racist banner drop. But when all is sudden done,
Speaker 8: hopefully you'll only remember them as having been sued into
Speaker 8: the center of the Earth, which is what I want
Speaker 8: to talk to you about today.
Speaker 3: Oh all right, that's I I'm unbelievably excited.
Speaker 8: We won't be getting into the sensual pat downs. Unfortunately,
Speaker 8: this is just court records.
Speaker 14: Okay, Well, I can always I can always find that
Speaker 14: on telegram.
Speaker 3: That's fine.
Speaker 8: But before we get into who is suing Patriot Front,
Speaker 8: let's get a quick refresher on who they are and
Speaker 8: how they came to be scurrying around and matching windbreakers
Speaker 8: promoting a white ethno state, because I think their origin
Speaker 8: story really informs the way they've backed themselves into this corner.
Speaker 8: Patriot Front came into existence in late twenty seventeen when
Speaker 8: it's splintered off the now defunct neo Nazi group Vanguard America.
Speaker 8: The split was months in the making, with a power
Speaker 8: struggle brewing between Vanguard America leader Dylan Hopper and a young,
Speaker 8: up and coming fascist named Thomas Russo, who was at
Speaker 8: that time barely out of high school. In the months
Speaker 8: leading up to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville
Speaker 8: in August twenty seventeen, Rousseau edged Hopper out of his
Speaker 8: own organization in what Hopper called a literal coup. By
Speaker 8: the time Vanguard America was marching in the streets of Charlottesville,
Speaker 8: Rousseau was not only in control of the group's internal communications,
Speaker 8: he was calling the shots on the ground. Hopper didn't
Speaker 8: even attend, and it was that event, the Unite the
Speaker 8: Right rally, that birthed Patriot Front. In those chaotic morning
Speaker 8: hours of August twelfth, twenty seventeen, a young man named
Speaker 8: James Alex Fields Junior joined the men under Russeau's command.
Speaker 8: He didn't ride with the core group from Texas in
Speaker 8: their rented van, which they called the hate Bus.
Speaker 3: Oh my wait, did they really call it the hate bus?
Speaker 8: Rousseau was back then he was sort of Asthmador's protege.
Speaker 8: I don't know that they'll claim that now, but back
Speaker 8: then at like this adult alcoholic nazi was mentoring this
Speaker 8: fascist team like he was. He had just GRADUATEDIZ.
Speaker 3: Many such cases.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so they came up in the hate bus space
Speaker 8: all right. Mcfields drove here alone. He drove overnight from Ohio,
Speaker 8: but he was wearing the group's uniform, a white polo
Speaker 8: khaki pants and carrying a shield bearing Vanguard's logo. He
Speaker 8: joined in with the members of Vanguard America as they
Speaker 8: loitered around a public park, chanting Nazi slogans. Field stood
Speaker 8: shoulder to shoulder and a line of Vanguard members guarding
Speaker 8: the entrance to the park where the rally was to
Speaker 8: be held, preventing counter protesters from entering. A Few hours later,
Speaker 8: after the rally had been called off by the State police,
Speaker 8: declaring an unlawful assembly, Fields drove his Dodge Challenger into
Speaker 8: a crowd of counter protesters, killing heather Higher and injuring
Speaker 8: dozens of others. In later litigation, Dylan Hopper, responding for
Speaker 8: Vanguard America, was asked about his immediate reaction to hearing
Speaker 8: about the attack that afternoon. In the group's discord, Hopper posted,
Speaker 8: Commi's died. That's good enough for me. This was, of course,
Speaker 8: before he'd seen the photos of the murderer mingling with
Speaker 8: his hate group. In a deposition three years later, he
Speaker 8: didn't disavow that initial reaction. He said heather Hire's death
Speaker 8: was a tragedy the same way it would be tragic
Speaker 8: if a surfer who knowingly entered shark infested waters was
Speaker 8: killed by a shark, saying it was that woman's choice
Speaker 8: to be there. But he maintained that Fields was never
Speaker 8: a member of the group, that anyone could have put
Speaker 8: on a white polo and stood near them in the park,
Speaker 8: that anyone could have handed Fields that shield. His testimony
Speaker 8: was that Vanguard America didn't actually have membership list, there
Speaker 8: was no official record who was a member, but he
Speaker 8: somehow also knew that Fields was not a member. In
Speaker 8: that twenty twenty deposition, he claimed that he spoke to
Speaker 8: Rousseau in the days after the rally, and Rousseau admitted
Speaker 8: that he had been the one to make the choice
Speaker 8: to allow Fields to march with them in an attempt
Speaker 8: to make the group appear larger than it really was,
Speaker 8: and Fields himself never claimed to be a member of
Speaker 8: the organization. In his federal sentencing memo, his defense attorney
Speaker 8: wrote that he'd never been a member of any organized group.
Speaker 8: But the damage to Vanguard America was done, and almost
Speaker 8: every photo of Fields taken that morning, just hours before
Speaker 8: he committed a hate crime murder that would send him
Speaker 8: to prison for the rest of his life, he certainly
Speaker 8: looks like he's with them. After the rally, as Rousseau
Speaker 8: was still trying to make his way home to Texas,
Speaker 8: he posted in the Vanguard Discord about the issue with
Speaker 8: the man who ran into protesters with his car. He
Speaker 8: was certainly not a member, and none of us know him.
Speaker 8: Our shields were given widely to anyone at the rally,
Speaker 8: and we had many extras. There's no criminal conspiracy, but
Speaker 8: handing a person a piece of wood and agreeing on fashion. Legally,
Speaker 8: we have been in contact with folks with legal experience
Speaker 8: and we're fine as far as PR. Yes, it's bad,
Speaker 8: But last week they called us evil, white supremacist Nazi killers,
Speaker 8: and today they're calling us the same thing.
Speaker 3: Shrug it off.
Speaker 8: When members complained that they shouldn't be disavowing the actions
Speaker 8: of the murderer, Rousseau clarified that quote. The statement never
Speaker 8: said that what he did was wrong, just clarified that
Speaker 8: he wasn't a member. People aren't buying it anyway, So
Speaker 8: neither Rousseau nor Hopper were willing to say what Fields
Speaker 8: did should not have happened. They didn't disavow the murder.
Speaker 8: Hopper's comments seemed genuinely supportive of the murder. They were
Speaker 8: willing to cheer on the bloodshed, but the way the
Speaker 8: blood looked on their own hands was going to be
Speaker 8: a pr problem. Now, for me, the whole Nazi thing
Speaker 8: is kind of a deal breaker from the start, branding wise, Like,
Speaker 8: just from the jump, there's a branding issue. There's an eagle,
Speaker 8: there's a fascies, there's the blood and soil thing. It's
Speaker 8: just it's not a good look.
Speaker 3: Could you briefly explain what a fascianes is. So it
Speaker 3: is a bundle of sticks, right.
Speaker 14: It's it's an old Roman symbol, right.
Speaker 8: Right, it comes from you know, the Roman Empire. So
Speaker 8: it's this very you know, return to tradition. Mussolini brought
Speaker 8: it back.
Speaker 14: Yeah, and like you can break one stick pretty easily,
Speaker 14: but if they're all bundled together, then it's then then
Speaker 14: it's then it's harder to break.
Speaker 8: Apes together strong. Yeah, sorry, just so that the prevy
Speaker 8: for the new planet of the Apes. But that's not
Speaker 8: the issue for them in this twenty seventeen rebrand, Right,
Speaker 8: it's the Nazi thing, not the deal breaker. But it's
Speaker 8: hard to shake the association with a hate crime. Murder
Speaker 8: was a member, But the pictures of the murderer holding
Speaker 8: your logo and standing right next to you are going
Speaker 8: to follow you. So just three weeks after the rally,
Speaker 8: Thomas Rousseau announced in the Vanguard America Discord that he
Speaker 8: was launching a full rebrand, calling the new group Patriots Front.
Speaker 8: That s gets dropped later, but Patriots.
Speaker 14: Front, Yeah, that is a way worse name. Yeah, Patriots Front.
Speaker 14: To say that is that it's really hard to say.
Speaker 14: They've not possessive either. There's no apostrophe. It's just like
Speaker 14: Patriots Front. Oh yeah, that's weird. They made a good call,
Speaker 14: dropped in that.
Speaker 8: S so they really fine tuned it there in the end.
Speaker 14: That was the only the only good thing they've done
Speaker 14: besides just keep getting arrested.
Speaker 8: But yeah, so the message wasn't changing, The ideology is
Speaker 8: not changing. The manifesto got a little fresh polish, but
Speaker 8: the real change was optics. Rousseau recognized the need for
Speaker 8: broader appeal, for new recruits and for plausible deniability on
Speaker 8: the group's surface. You can get away with saying a
Speaker 8: lot more Nazi shit if you put an American flag
Speaker 8: on the hats and a founding father on the homepage
Speaker 8: than you can if you're sporting a son and rat
Speaker 8: and posting Hitler memes.
Speaker 14: Yeah, all of their their kind of outwards visual style
Speaker 14: is all very like American.
Speaker 3: It is it is, it is. It is American.
Speaker 14: There's a bit of like a military kind of kind
Speaker 14: of a cleanness to it, but it's very much like
Speaker 14: they're going full Americana.
Speaker 8: Oh yeah, it's it's it's Americana. It's like Patriot Kitch, right,
Speaker 8: Like it's a few ten signs away from being a
Speaker 8: fud rockers.
Speaker 14: Yeah yeah, yeah, but it's it's it's very much not
Speaker 14: like German Nazi. It's like, right, it's like USA with
Speaker 14: some like US army signifiers that kind of stuff.
Speaker 8: But the you know, the sentiment behind it is the same.
Speaker 8: You can take away the black eagle and the fascie
Speaker 8: like actually they kept the fascies.
Speaker 3: It's just red, white and blue. Now us say all
Speaker 3: the way, baby, I mean to be fair, money to
Speaker 3: be fair.
Speaker 14: The United States of America also uses a fascie.
Speaker 8: Right, I'm not like, you know, crying for the sullying
Speaker 8: of the of the branding of the Night in America.
Speaker 8: But it's clear what the intention was here. Yes, it's
Speaker 8: to sort of hide behind that Americana. But in the
Speaker 8: six and a half years since that rebrand, Thomas Rousseau
Speaker 8: has maintained tight personal control over the entire group, now
Speaker 8: called Patriot Front. You can almost read that as a
Speaker 8: reaction to his first major setback as a white supremacist organizer.
Speaker 8: You know, he'd led some smaller rallies in Texas before
Speaker 8: Unite the Right, but that was his first big day
Speaker 8: out commanding the Nazi group. Right, And as a result
Speaker 8: of that day, the entire group was tarnished by the
Speaker 8: association of you know, in their telling, some random guy
Speaker 8: who was just near them, We.
Speaker 14: Just happened to hang out with people who like doing murders,
Speaker 14: you know.
Speaker 8: Right, you know, like it goes like what Hopper was
Speaker 8: saying in his deposition, right, like, well, she was in
Speaker 8: shark infested waters. Like, by your own admission, you are
Speaker 8: the sharks. Yeah, you're saying you are a flesh eating shark.
Speaker 8: But that's not possible anymore now, right, So you can't
Speaker 8: just be some guy who's marching with Patriot Front because
Speaker 8: their events are never announced ahead of time. You have
Speaker 8: to get the official group merch from the group, after
Speaker 8: being interviewed and vetted. You can't just show up and
Speaker 8: march with them unless you're a member, because only members
Speaker 8: know when the events are going to be. Yeah, there's
Speaker 8: no chance that some unvetted hangar on is going to
Speaker 8: be standing near them. And that does solve the problem
Speaker 8: posed by someone like James Fields, but it creates a
Speaker 8: new problem, real legal liability, by establishing so clearly and
Speaker 8: so firmly that anybody who's marching with you wearing your
Speaker 8: hat and your jacket, following your orders through the megaphone.
Speaker 8: You have established that all of those people answer to you,
Speaker 8: and you know them, and you approve that they were there.
Speaker 8: Now you're responsible.
Speaker 14: Yeah, you make the classical mistake of having an actual
Speaker 14: official members list.
Speaker 8: Right, so now you no longer have the option of saying, well,
Speaker 8: that guy wasn't with us, We don't know him. And
Speaker 8: that's where the lawsuits enter the picture. So right now
Speaker 8: there are three active federal lawsuits against Patriot Front, one
Speaker 8: in Virginia, one in Massachusetts, and one in North Dakota.
Speaker 8: And the underlying actions and some of the claims vary,
Speaker 8: but all three lawsuits are making the same central claim,
Speaker 8: a Section nineteen eighty five complaint alleging a conspiracy by
Speaker 8: Patriot Front and its members to deprive the plaintiffs of
Speaker 8: their civil rights. And I think it's really interesting. This
Speaker 8: is dry as hell. Maybe that's only interesting to me
Speaker 8: that I think it's really interesting to look at the
Speaker 8: original context of that statute, right that code section It
Speaker 8: comes out of the Enforcement Act of eighteen seventy one.
Speaker 8: Are you familiar with the Enforcement Acts? Going going into
Speaker 8: deep civil war lore, you know, going back to reconstruction,
Speaker 8: I'm Canadian.
Speaker 3: I don't.
Speaker 14: The American legal system is but something I've been learning
Speaker 14: the past ten years. It is by no means the
Speaker 14: specialty of my research or knowledge.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'm not like a big Civil War guy.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 8: I have, accidentally and against my will, learned a lot
Speaker 8: about the Civil War because we've been arguing about these
Speaker 8: statues for a few years. Sure, but reconstruction I think
Speaker 8: is really overlooked.
Speaker 4: You.
Speaker 8: In my own education in public school, there was like
Speaker 8: two paragraphs about reconstruction and then we just sort of
Speaker 8: like moved on.
Speaker 14: I had like a semester on it. It is certainly
Speaker 14: one of the more tragic periods of American history, how
Speaker 14: we seem to almost have figured something out and then
Speaker 14: it all went down the drain pretty.
Speaker 8: Quick, like we really whiffed it. But the Enforcement Act
Speaker 8: of eighteen seventy one is also called the ku Klux
Speaker 8: Klan Act.
Speaker 14: Oh oh oh, yeah, these guys, we're a getting somewhere.
Speaker 8: So when President Grant signed the KKK Act into law
Speaker 8: in eighteen seventy one, support for reconstruction was starting to falter,
Speaker 8: and there was genuine fear that the eighteen seventy two
Speaker 8: presidential election would bring on a new wave of clan
Speaker 8: violence in the South. And that's starting to sound a
Speaker 8: little familiar, isn't it. You know, people are getting tired,
Speaker 8: People are getting tired of being asked to address deep
Speaker 8: rooted systemic inequalities. There's an upcoming and uncertain presidential election.
Speaker 8: There's growing fear of vigilanti violence by roving bands of
Speaker 8: masked racists. You know, like everything old is new again.
Speaker 3: That sounds like kind of like right now, Yeah, that's wild.
Speaker 8: So you know, there have been other enforcement acts. This
Speaker 8: wasn't the first one, but the ku Klux Plan Act
Speaker 8: was specifically tailored to address the question of freelance violence. Right, So, normally,
Speaker 8: if you are suing over a civil rights violation, there
Speaker 8: are only remedies available to you when your rights have
Speaker 8: been violated by a state actor, a cop, a government body,
Speaker 8: the law itself. The irsu can can really only seek
Speaker 8: legal remedy when your rights are violated by the state.
Speaker 8: This one's a little different because during reconstruction, a lot
Speaker 8: of that violence, the intimidation, the actions being taken to
Speaker 8: deprive Black Americans of their newly granted rights, was being
Speaker 8: undertaken by private actors organizing together. Again, it's starting to
Speaker 8: feel familiar.
Speaker 14: Yeah, it's not like there could be groups of armed
Speaker 14: extremists monitoring voting sites trying to scare people away from
Speaker 14: from voting in an election. That could never happen.
Speaker 3: Now we've learned no lessons.
Speaker 8: Right, So, groups of white men organizing themselves, wearing matching outfits,
Speaker 8: conspiring to undertake actions to intimidate, harass, and harm the
Speaker 8: people they believe that are standing between them and the
Speaker 8: white America they were born to, right. Yeah, So the
Speaker 8: statute originally provided for both civil and criminal liability for
Speaker 8: these conspiracies. Interesting, and that first year Grant went hard
Speaker 8: in the paint with it. Oh like, he he went
Speaker 8: full hog like. As soon as he signed this into law,
Speaker 8: he was red d So in that first year or
Speaker 8: two after he signed the act, he broke the back
Speaker 8: of the Klan. Hundreds of klansmen were prosecuted in South
Speaker 8: Carolina alone. They were arresting so many klansmen so quickly
Speaker 8: that hundreds of them just went to their local courthouse
Speaker 8: and turned themselves in because they knew it was coming.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, it killed the Klan. Wow.
Speaker 8: But even before the Supreme Court decided twelve years later
Speaker 8: that I mean, when it comes to the crime part
Speaker 8: of this, maybe we should let the States handle it, right,
Speaker 8: so it no longer has a criminal liability component.
Speaker 3: So this just the civil liability left under that law.
Speaker 8: But even before the Supreme Court made that ruling in
Speaker 8: eighteen eighty three, the Klan Act prosecutions pretty much ended
Speaker 8: when reconstruction died, right, it was this brief moment in
Speaker 8: time when there was any appetite to do anything about this, Yeah,
Speaker 8: and it.
Speaker 3: Faded out pretty quickly.
Speaker 8: So today it's up to the victim to seek their
Speaker 8: own civil remedy when they're terrorized by the sons of
Speaker 8: the clansmen.
Speaker 3: We couldn't reconstruct well, do you know what we should construct?
Speaker 4: Molly?
Speaker 3: Oh god, Yeah.
Speaker 8: Robert told me that if I don't come up with
Speaker 8: a cool way to throw to ads, he's gonna put
Speaker 8: me in a dog kennel and air drop me onto
Speaker 8: an island where successful podcasters hunt people like me for sports.
Speaker 14: So that does sound like something he would say. But
Speaker 14: we could construct a compelling ad transition.
Speaker 8: Let's take you to the ads, all right, and we
Speaker 8: are back Garrison, and I'm going to tell you what's
Speaker 8: in these lawsuits.
Speaker 14: I'm so excited to hear about Patriot Front having to
Speaker 14: read a niche law.
Speaker 3: Well, the problem is they're pretending they don't have to.
Speaker 14: Oh well, that is also what I would do. I
Speaker 14: would be like, no, no way, I am not reading that.
Speaker 3: Fuck you. Well, we'll get to that in a second.
Speaker 8: So the first case filed was in Richmond, Virginia, so
Speaker 8: right here in my backyard.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 8: So, thanks to repeated leaks of Patriot Front's internal communications
Speaker 8: and documents, we actually have video of them doing what's
Speaker 8: being alleged in this lawsuit.
Speaker 3: Which is inconvenient for them. It's not great.
Speaker 8: So the suit alleges and the video literally shows that.
Speaker 8: In October twenty twenty one, a couple of Patriot Front
Speaker 8: members vandalized a mural in a public park in Richmond.
Speaker 8: The mural celebrated American tennis legend Arthur Ash. Ash was
Speaker 8: born and raised in Richmond and started playing tennis as
Speaker 8: a child in Brookfield Park, which in the fifties when
Speaker 8: Ash was a child, was one of the few public
Speaker 8: parks opened to black residents. It was also the park
Speaker 8: that his father was the caretaker of. Right, So Arthur
Speaker 8: ash Richmond public parks, like this is a relationship from
Speaker 8: his childhood.
Speaker 3: R Yeah, it's like a very important place.
Speaker 8: You know, one of the best tennis players in American history,
Speaker 8: and he grew up his father worked for the park.
Speaker 8: He learned to play tennis at that park. That park,
Speaker 8: Brookfield Park, actually no longer exists, but the park where
Speaker 8: the mural was installed is in a predominantly black neighborhood.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 8: In the video they filmed of the vandalism, one Patriot
Speaker 8: Front member supportively tells two others to quote, get the
Speaker 8: fucking N word.
Speaker 3: They say it, I'm not, yeah.
Speaker 8: But the N words face as they're covering it up
Speaker 8: with spray paint and then play. So they filmed this themselves, right,
Speaker 8: They filmed this themselves and used it in later promotional videos.
Speaker 3: Videotaping this crime spree was the best idea we ever had.
Speaker 14: This is so funny that they just can't stop filming
Speaker 14: them doing crimes.
Speaker 8: Like they're not just taking notes on the conspiracy, they're
Speaker 8: filming themselves enthusiastically participating in it.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: Funny.
Speaker 8: You know in the promotional videos there's no sound, but
Speaker 8: in the leaked documents. It's the original uncut video like.
Speaker 14: Once you have like discovery or something. Also, all all
Speaker 14: all that audio exists, that is, it is the privilege
Speaker 14: of the court to be able to listen to that.
Speaker 8: Well we have so you know when they cut their promos,
Speaker 8: you know, they're playing like cool music over it. But
Speaker 8: in the leaked version that we got from I think
Speaker 8: it was in the Rocket Chat leaks.
Speaker 3: It was in the second big leak.
Speaker 8: Okay, you can hear them saying, like, you know, get
Speaker 8: the fucking N words face as they're spray painting over
Speaker 8: Arthur Ash's face and then stenciling over that with their logo.
Speaker 3: Sure, they're just like, hey, it was us. They're just
Speaker 3: like leaving it fair.
Speaker 8: And just so we're super clear about this, this is
Speaker 8: racially motivated. Put that on the tape, like.
Speaker 3: Uh yeah yeah.
Speaker 8: And so this is probably the weaker of the three cases. Right,
Speaker 8: the plaintiffs in this suit are basing their nineteen eighty
Speaker 8: five claim that you know, this is a racially motivated
Speaker 8: conspiracy to interfere with the right of black residents to
Speaker 8: enjoy a place of public accommodation, right that a place
Speaker 8: of public accommodation is sort of the legal structure for
Speaker 8: places where you're not a to fuck with my rights.
Speaker 8: In this case, it's a public park. The suit makes
Speaker 8: a similar and separate claim under Virginia's civil conspiracy law
Speaker 8: for racial, religious, and ethnic harassment, and unlike the other
Speaker 8: two suits, this complaint is pretty specific about who the
Speaker 8: defendants are, because they recorded the planning meeting and the
Speaker 8: act of vandalism, and because anti fascist researchers have identified
Speaker 8: many of the real names behind the pseudonyms. So these
Speaker 8: plaintiffs name not just the organization itself and Thomas Rousseau,
Speaker 8: but seven individual members who were involved, and they hope
Speaker 8: to identify nineteen John Doe defendants in discovery. And so
Speaker 8: the most recent suit, the third one to be filed.
Speaker 8: We'll get back to the second one and a second
Speaker 8: is similar to the Richmond suit because it also arises
Speaker 8: out of an instance of vandalism. But this one looks
Speaker 8: a little stronger. I think I should be clear I'm
Speaker 8: not a lawyer. I just an enthusiastic consumer of the law.
Speaker 14: Yes, you spent a lot of time reading what I
Speaker 14: would call extremely boring documents.
Speaker 8: Oh, I love my document. I pay thousands of dollars
Speaker 8: a year to look at these documents. Oh, it's that
Speaker 8: drill post like, please, someone please help me, someone who's
Speaker 8: good at budgeting.
Speaker 14: We will do our best to give you as many
Speaker 14: documents as you want, Molly.
Speaker 8: These documents cost ten cents a page. I'm a single
Speaker 8: issue voter on free access to federal court documents.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all my homies hate Pacer.
Speaker 8: So in the Richmond case, we have black residents and
Speaker 8: a black neighborhood alleging a racial intimidation at a place
Speaker 8: of public accommodation, a public park. But in North Dakota,
Speaker 8: the suit is brought by the North Dakota Human Rights Coalition,
Speaker 8: the Immigrant Development Center, and an unnamed plaintiff who works
Speaker 8: at the Immigrant Development Center. I mean it arises out
Speaker 8: of two acts of vandalism at the International Market Plaza
Speaker 8: and Fargo, North Dakota. The International Market Plaza is run
Speaker 8: by the Immigrant Development Center. It's a large indoor market
Speaker 8: space that supports immigrant run small businesses and has community
Speaker 8: spaces for the immigrant community.
Speaker 3: Sounds cool.
Speaker 8: Yeah, there's shops and restaurants and after school programs for
Speaker 8: kids and business development classes.
Speaker 3: I'm sure there's great food.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 8: It seems nice, they seem like people. In September of
Speaker 8: twenty twenty two, Patriot Front trustpassed onto the nonprofits property
Speaker 8: and spray painted the windows with their logo. And so
Speaker 8: this was not an isolated incident, right, Patriot funt had
Speaker 8: targeted other businesses in the Fargo area and the months
Speaker 8: leading up to this, including a queer worker owned coffee shop.
Speaker 8: So the tenants at the marketplace knew who Patriot Front
Speaker 8: was and what the message is in the windows meant,
Speaker 8: and they were understandably frightened to have been targeted and
Speaker 8: fearful that this could escalate, and it did. Two days later,
Speaker 8: Patriot Front came back to the marketplace and destroyed a
Speaker 8: mural celebrating multiculturalism, including placing Patriot Front logos over the
Speaker 8: faces of women in hijobs in one panel.
Speaker 3: Of the mural.
Speaker 14: Yeah, I've had to like call up shops or businesses
Speaker 14: after they've been targeted or I've like seen I've like
Speaker 14: seen on telegram like oh, this thing's happening in this
Speaker 14: area and be like explained to like this poor this
Speaker 14: like poor employee, like who who this is and why
Speaker 14: it's happening, and like what to do? Because they're often
Speaker 14: very like confused, they don't know what's going on. Yeah,
Speaker 14: it sucks that which they started like involved just to
Speaker 14: other people trying to like make just like live out
Speaker 14: their day, but also like specifically targeting people of color,
Speaker 14: targeting the LGBTQ community, and.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 14: It is a fortunately very common occurrence because a lot
Speaker 14: of Patriot Front's activity, when they're not marching around getting
Speaker 14: beat up in Philadelphia, are just putting up like stickers
Speaker 14: and doing graffiti like that. That is kind of most
Speaker 14: of what they do. Sometimes they'll do like a banner
Speaker 14: drop or something.
Speaker 8: Well they think about the stickers is I don't know
Speaker 8: if everyone is deep in lore, but it's required.
Speaker 3: So it's that's what they call their activism.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 14: In order to be a member, you have to post
Speaker 14: pictures of you putting up stickers.
Speaker 8: Like there are like spreadsheets and documents, and your network
Speaker 8: director is keeping tabs, and you have to report in
Speaker 8: every week about what activism you've engaged in, and you
Speaker 8: have to provide video and photo proof of you doing
Speaker 8: these acts of vandalism, which.
Speaker 14: Is a pretty smart on Patriot Front's part, because they
Speaker 14: also sell their stickers so it's it's a great pyramid scheme.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's got MLM energy. Yeah, I know.
Speaker 14: Uh, Robert Rundo and the Patriot Front guy were like
Speaker 14: working together on a sticker manufacturing business for a while.
Speaker 14: I don't think that's working out super well for Rundo, but.
Speaker 8: Uh, yeah, he's some currently awaiting trial in prison, right
Speaker 8: I believe.
Speaker 14: So, yeah, after fleeing to what is it like Romania
Speaker 14: for like Belgrade expert, Yes, yes, Serbia, that that's that's
Speaker 14: where it was.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, rough.
Speaker 8: But so in this case, you know, it's this is
Speaker 8: not just stickers, right, the stickers that you can peel
Speaker 8: off it. You know, you're uncomfortable, you're scared, but you
Speaker 8: can peel tho stickers off and move on with your day.
Speaker 8: They spray painted over a mural that cost forty five
Speaker 8: thousand dollars.
Speaker 14: Oh so well this is this is interesting because I'm
Speaker 14: not a law expert, but they may be financially liable
Speaker 14: for that extremely high cost.
Speaker 8: Right, So unlike in the Arthur Ash murral, which was
Speaker 8: property of the City of Richmond. You know, so the
Speaker 8: plaintiffs in that suit don't own that mural. They just
Speaker 8: feel that they've been infringed upon because now they're afraid
Speaker 8: to go to the public park. In this case, the
Speaker 8: plaintiff has been financially damaged to a significant degree.
Speaker 3: This mural was.
Speaker 8: They got a grant, they had community input, it was
Speaker 8: made by local artists, and now it is destroyed. It
Speaker 8: is a thing of value, it is their property, and
Speaker 8: the law really cares about property. Oh yeah, now we
Speaker 8: have quantifiable damage to property belonging to the plaintiff. After
Speaker 8: these two incidents, individual shopkeepers had to buy their own
Speaker 8: security cameras, They shortened their hours because they were scared
Speaker 8: to be thereafter dark, and the marketplace as a whole
Speaker 8: actually still operates on reduced hours due to safety concerns.
Speaker 8: The executive director of the nonprofit had to buy a
Speaker 8: security system for her home and doesn't like to go
Speaker 8: to work unaccompanied. I mean, it's genuine fear in this place.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 14: That's the other thing is that these sorts of acts
Speaker 14: of vandalism come with like an implicit threat of violence
Speaker 14: that we can get together a crew of five guys
Speaker 14: wearing masks and show up at this place of work,
Speaker 14: or we could already be there when you arrive.
Speaker 8: Well, there was the Actually in the lawsuit, one of
Speaker 8: the paragress in the suit says, you know that the
Speaker 8: day after this happened, because the day in between the
Speaker 8: two separate acts, a couple of white guys acting sketchy
Speaker 8: were wandering around the marketplace taking pictures of people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I bet yeah, people are scared.
Speaker 8: The marketplace's immigrant shopkeepers and customers absolutely understood the intent
Speaker 8: of this vandalism, and it was the same message that
Speaker 8: they chanted here in Charlottesville. You will not replace us,
Speaker 8: right loud and clear, those in that spray paint. And
Speaker 8: so their ability to transact business, to use a place
Speaker 8: of public accommodation, to feel safe in public was taken
Speaker 8: from them in an organized, pre planned act, arising out
Speaker 8: of discriminatory animus. And again that that sort of discriminatory
Speaker 8: animus clause is important in application of this statue.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 8: So, in the North Dakota suit, they're suing Patriot Front,
Speaker 8: the organization Thomas Rousseau as its leader, and the regional
Speaker 8: network director for that area, Trevor Vellescu. And they're also
Speaker 8: seeking to identify ten John Does in discovery, so they
Speaker 8: don't know who all of these guys are that are
Speaker 8: getting sued, but they're gonna find out. And the third suit,
Speaker 8: Boston lawsuit, is really the most straightforward. A black man
Speaker 8: got assaulted.
Speaker 3: There's video.
Speaker 8: The video is actually taken by a member of Patriot
Speaker 8: Front from the Again, it.
Speaker 3: Gets worse, it gets worse.
Speaker 8: So the video was taken by the member from inside
Speaker 8: the ranks of the march, and it shows members making
Speaker 8: physical contact with Charles Morrel on a public sidewalk in Boston.
Speaker 8: So they were up there. It was just before fourth
Speaker 8: of July. They were marching on Boston's Freedom Trail.
Speaker 3: I think I remember this one, yeah.
Speaker 8: And Charles Morrell was outside the public library. He was
Speaker 8: a busker, he was playing music outside the library on
Speaker 8: the sidewalk. And this video didn't get leaked. This video
Speaker 8: they posted themselves, they proudly on their telegram channel, yep,
Speaker 8: and they posted it on their telegram channel the day
Speaker 8: the lawsuit was filed.
Speaker 14: Genius genius move. Once again, the galaxy of brain folks
Speaker 14: over at Patriot Front just cannot stop putting pretty dog
Speaker 14: shit electronic music over videos of them doing crimes.
Speaker 8: And so even though I would say if thirteen months
Speaker 8: after this incident occurred, I'm just randomly posting a video
Speaker 8: of this happening.
Speaker 3: That's so weird.
Speaker 8: I would say it's probably because you know that you're
Speaker 8: being sued. But there are a few They have not
Speaker 8: acknowledged this lawsuit. They don't acknowledge that the suit exists.
Speaker 14: Which which the government loves. When people don't acknowledge lawsuits
Speaker 14: that are happening to them.
Speaker 3: You can't just like la la la la la your
Speaker 3: way out of a lawsuit. Red.
Speaker 14: You can try to go into hiding like forever and yeah,
Speaker 14: we'll see how that goes.
Speaker 8: And so, just a few weeks ago, when Patriot Front
Speaker 8: was like wandering around in the snow at the March
Speaker 8: for Life in DC, a reporter asked Rousseau about the
Speaker 8: incident in Boston. He didn't bring up the lawsuit.
Speaker 3: I wish he had. I would love to get him
Speaker 3: on tape on that one.
Speaker 8: But you asked him about the incident in Boston, and
Speaker 8: Rousseau continues to claim that, like, look, we've posted the
Speaker 8: video and it exonerates us.
Speaker 3: I'm sure, oh, I'm sure it does, buddy. When I
Speaker 3: watched the.
Speaker 8: Video, I mostly just see a masked gang of fascist
Speaker 8: using their custom made and branded metal shields to beat
Speaker 8: a black man who's using a public sidewalk, forcing him
Speaker 8: into the street and slamming his head into the pole
Speaker 8: and he had to get stitches. But I guess it's
Speaker 8: like it's up for the courts to decide if him
Speaker 8: being in their way was the real crime here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, they was.
Speaker 14: I mean it's funny because like it's it's it's not funny,
Speaker 14: But I have I have, I have seen cops before
Speaker 14: used the exact same justification. Yes, it is different because
Speaker 14: cops are special little boys because you can't sue them. Yeah,
Speaker 14: but no, it is funny how much Patriot Front are
Speaker 14: just trying to act like want to be cops who
Speaker 14: do graffiti.
Speaker 8: Right, Like if you wanted to be a riot cop,
Speaker 8: like most cities are hiring.
Speaker 3: Be a riot cop. That's not that hard.
Speaker 8: I've seen a lot of guys doing it that I
Speaker 8: don't think are capable of much else. Yeah, So in
Speaker 8: this in the bus in lawsuit, the name defendants are
Speaker 8: just Thomas Russo and Patriot Front, but they are hoping
Speaker 8: to identify John doe'es one through ninety nine.
Speaker 3: Well, I only wish them good luck.
Speaker 8: So Garrison, you were saying you know, you can't just
Speaker 8: hide forever, right, I.
Speaker 14: Usually not, Well, you could try, You can certainly that. Look,
Speaker 14: you can always try. There are certain people Hidig who
Speaker 14: I wish only the best. There are many others Hidig
Speaker 14: who I think are probably bad people. And it's not
Speaker 14: like I enjoy the violence of the state. But if
Speaker 14: someone happens to stumble into experience the experiencing the violence
Speaker 14: of the state will also wanting to wish violence upon
Speaker 14: me and my friends. I'm not gonna stop that from happening.
Speaker 8: So these lawsuits, right, they got filed, But filing a
Speaker 8: lawsuit just means you paid a fee to give it
Speaker 8: to the court clerk. When you're suing someone, you have
Speaker 8: to serve them with papers. To serve them with papers.
Speaker 3: You have to find them. You have to track them down.
Speaker 3: And normally that's pretty straightforward.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 8: People have homes, they have jobs, they have routines, they
Speaker 8: have friends and family. There's places they go, there's places
Speaker 8: they shop. You can you can find most people because
Speaker 8: most people aren't hiding, and most people aren't good at hiding.
Speaker 8: But Thomas Rousseau does not seem to want to be found.
Speaker 7: Now.
Speaker 8: The first suit filed the Virginia suit. They did manage
Speaker 8: to serve Rousseau at that house in Grapevine, Texas that
Speaker 8: his father was had owned no longer owns, but he
Speaker 8: and some other Patriot Front members were living in that house.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 8: But not long after those papers were served to him there,
Speaker 8: that house was sold in a foreclosure sale.
Speaker 14: God, I'm sure that house smelled awful. Imagine Oh, it's.
Speaker 8: Like you've never got to feel bad for the foreclosure
Speaker 8: sale guy. It's like a gym locker in there. Imagine
Speaker 8: stafving to stage that house for sale.
Speaker 14: The only only worse at smell is inside the Patriot
Speaker 14: in front U hauls because oh wow, driving six hours
Speaker 14: in the Idaho the Idaho summer, with like thirty other
Speaker 14: guys in the back of that truck, it must be awful.
Speaker 8: Do you remember. I think he was in the first leak.
Speaker 8: Some of the guys were complaining about how when they
Speaker 8: had to ride in the back of the U haul
Speaker 8: they were getting sick and like passing out and be like.
Speaker 3: Oh, you're walked in there throwing up ivan just smell
Speaker 3: everyone else's vomits, but.
Speaker 8: Also like there's carbon monoxide and it's hot.
Speaker 3: Like you're not to be back there. It's so funny.
Speaker 8: But the advice that the advice that Russo gave them,
Speaker 8: when they were saying like, hey, like we were getting
Speaker 8: sick back there, like it's it's not safe, like we
Speaker 8: were barfing and passing out, he recommended that they practice overheating.
Speaker 3: Yeah, gett just get better.
Speaker 14: Get Yeah, like you like endurance tested, just start hanging
Speaker 14: out in the back of you hauls for fun.
Speaker 8: That's actually not how heatstroke works.
Speaker 14: But no, I'm pretty sure you could just think your
Speaker 14: way through heatstroke. I look, I guess I think a
Speaker 14: chat alpha male should be able to sit in a
Speaker 14: packed truck for seventeen hours be totally fine.
Speaker 8: So the house, the stinky house, sold foreclosed. So by
Speaker 8: the time the Boston lawsuit process server came to find
Speaker 8: him there, it was already for sale. Yeah, there's nobody,
Speaker 8: nobody to serve. So they hired a legal research firm.
Speaker 8: They sent process servers to addresses all over Texas and
Speaker 8: they came up empty. So what do you do when
Speaker 8: a guy who knows process servers are looking for him
Speaker 8: can't be found?
Speaker 3: Should have served him at that march in Washington, d C.
Speaker 8: Honestly, why were they not mobilized for that, I could
Speaker 8: have told you they were going to be there.
Speaker 14: I mean, I think that would require some collaboration with
Speaker 14: like anti fascists, researchers who like know when these things
Speaker 14: are happening, so like that, I think that's probably why
Speaker 14: is that that's just a little bit tricky. But if
Speaker 14: there were more willingness for collaboration, I think that probably
Speaker 14: could be successful.
Speaker 3: You can find him.
Speaker 8: Right, So, if I were two, for example, file a
Speaker 8: lawsuit against you today.
Speaker 3: Well, and I what if I did, I'm so innocent
Speaker 3: if I just never if I just filed my lawsuit,
Speaker 3: pay the fee to file it, but I just never
Speaker 3: served you.
Speaker 8: Oh, that's on me. That's my fault. I can't take
Speaker 8: the necessary steps. My suit's going to get dismissed. But
Speaker 8: if I'm really trying, I'm hiring investigators, I'm knocking on
Speaker 8: neighbors doors to ask if they've seen you. I'm looking
Speaker 8: under every rock for any sign of where you might be.
Speaker 8: That's different. That's not on me anymore, that's on you.
Speaker 8: And there's ample precedent for this right and the law
Speaker 8: is pretty clear. You can't escape being sued by playing
Speaker 8: cat and mouse.
Speaker 3: The old Tom and Jerry method.
Speaker 8: And I feel like once I start saying things like
Speaker 8: the federal rules of civil procedure, people are going to
Speaker 8: turn the podcast turn off.
Speaker 14: That doesn't for us today, folks, that it could happen here,
Speaker 14: Thank you for listening.
Speaker 8: But so in federal court, the rules allow alternative service
Speaker 8: by means that are allowable in that state. Right, so
Speaker 8: even though they're in federal court in North Dakota, they
Speaker 8: can use methods available in North Dakota courts to serve
Speaker 8: their defendants. And so in North Dakota, if you've tried
Speaker 8: your best, you've exhausted the normal means, conducted a diligent search,
Speaker 8: you can do what's called service by publication, which means
Speaker 8: you just publish a notice in the newspaper.
Speaker 14: Really, yeah, oh that's I didn't know that. That's interesting.
Speaker 8: And you have to you have to try really hard first, right,
Speaker 8: they really did try. They hired investigators, their hard servers,
Speaker 8: like they did, they did their due diligence. Yeah, and
Speaker 8: so the judge said, okay, you tried your best. Put
Speaker 8: it in the paper that they got mad. Put it
Speaker 8: in the paper.
Speaker 3: That they got sued. And so they did.
Speaker 8: They published the notification in a Cass County, North Dakota
Speaker 8: newspaper for a few months in a row. And so now,
Speaker 8: as far as that court is concerned, they've been served
Speaker 8: all right.
Speaker 7: And it worked.
Speaker 3: A few weeks later, they got a lawyer.
Speaker 14: Oh oh, okay, this is this is this is a
Speaker 14: news to me.
Speaker 8: Yeah, things are moving, things are making. For the North
Speaker 8: Dakota lawsuit, the two named individual defendants, Thomas Russeau and
Speaker 8: network director Trevor Bileescu.
Speaker 3: They got a lawyer.
Speaker 8: And his name's gonna sound familiar to you because it
Speaker 8: is Jason Lee Van Dyke.
Speaker 3: Oh oh well, I yeah, you gotta love Dyke.
Speaker 4: Cus.
Speaker 3: I'm like, what's not to love? What a good kind?
Speaker 3: Not a good kind?
Speaker 14: Oh wait wait, I'm receiving some special intel. This is
Speaker 14: not not what I was thinking.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 8: Unfortunately, if his name does sound familiar to it might
Speaker 8: be because for thirty six hours towards the end of
Speaker 8: twenty eighteen, he was the national chairman of the Proud Boys.
Speaker 8: But then actually he quit instead.
Speaker 3: Honestly, what are this? What are the smarter moves?
Speaker 8: So he'd represented Proud Boys in various legal actions over
Speaker 8: the years. He was a member for several years, but
Speaker 8: as his LinkedIn currently and rather aggressively notes, he is
Speaker 8: not a proud boy anymore.
Speaker 14: A lot of a lot of people are asking questions
Speaker 14: about my shirt already, saying I'm not a proud boy.
Speaker 4: Huh.
Speaker 14: Interesting, Yeah, I feel like I actually, I actually, I am
Speaker 14: familiar with this guy. He was involved in a suit
Speaker 14: with the group I was looking into a few years back.
Speaker 8: Yeah, he's done a little bit of movement lawyering, so
Speaker 8: this isn't his first rodeo. And he denies that he
Speaker 8: is a member of Patriot Front, though he has spoken
Speaker 8: to the press on numerous occasions claiming to represent various
Speaker 8: members of.
Speaker 3: Patriot He's non member. Yeah, I mean, I mean sure,
Speaker 3: I like.
Speaker 8: He has specifically denied allegations that he is Patriot Front
Speaker 8: user John Texas in the leaked.
Speaker 3: Chats, although oh, okay, well, he.
Speaker 8: Says that he is not John Texas has a lot
Speaker 8: in common with Jason Leevenda But okay, Jason le Vandyke
Speaker 8: denies that he is John Texas.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, I'm sure.
Speaker 14: I look, I have no reason to not trust a dyke,
Speaker 14: so yeah, I'm sure that's fine.
Speaker 8: Yeah, And it's interesting. So he lives in North Texas
Speaker 8: right where you know. Oh oh, he does home home
Speaker 8: base for these Patriot Front boys. Yeah, he's never practiced
Speaker 8: in North Dakota before. He's not barred in North Dakota.
Speaker 8: Wait what inexplicably? So you know, you have to take
Speaker 8: the bar exam to be in a state bar normally.
Speaker 8: Normally to get admitted to a federal court, you have
Speaker 8: to be barred in that state. North Dakota doesn't require that.
Speaker 8: Just have to pay a fee. Okay, So it's a
Speaker 8: little it's strange. He applied to be admitted to the
Speaker 8: federal court in North Dakota right around the time this
Speaker 8: lawsuit got filed.
Speaker 3: Huh.
Speaker 8: But then he didn't actually enter an appearance until the
Speaker 8: judge said, yeah, they've been served. You can't hide.
Speaker 3: So he didn't know about it, Yeah, he was just yes,
Speaker 3: I guess.
Speaker 14: It seems like it seems like he knew he was
Speaker 14: just working with Patriot Front to make it harder to
Speaker 14: be served. Is Again, that's not a legal claim I'm making.
Speaker 14: I'm just just making a guess.
Speaker 8: I'm just saying he has never practiced in North Dakota before,
Speaker 8: but he did apply to be admitted to the court
Speaker 8: around the time the lawsuit was filed. That's ah interesting,
Speaker 8: the boss and case is a little wilder. Right, So
Speaker 8: it's twenty twenty four, we're all online, and it's not
Speaker 8: actually unheard of to get permission from the court to
Speaker 8: serve someone electronically if you've tried everything else. Yeah, I've
Speaker 8: heard of cases where someone got served by a Facebook messenger,
Speaker 8: which just feels demeaning.
Speaker 14: Wow, that's that's so depressing. Imagine you can send.
Speaker 3: A Minion sticker with it. Oh god, horrible vibes.
Speaker 8: But I need to do a little more research to
Speaker 8: figure out if this is the first time a federal
Speaker 8: judge has had to decide whether a gab d M.
Speaker 14: Is legally So you know your joke, there's no way, no,
Speaker 14: absolutely not. Yeah, okay, well we will we will learn
Speaker 14: what gab is after I take a break.
Speaker 3: I need to like walk around for a few minutes
Speaker 3: and just process that for a second.
Speaker 14: You guys, yea, here's here's some ads. I'm just I'm
Speaker 14: just going to process that for for for a while.
Speaker 14: All Right, we are back, Molly. I hope that a
Speaker 14: lot of a lot of our listeners don't know what
Speaker 14: gap is they should on there, but that means that
Speaker 14: you have to explain what gab is, which isn't that hard.
Speaker 3: It's just kind of annoying.
Speaker 8: It's just sort of like a less functional Facebook for Nazis.
Speaker 14: Well, I think originally it was Twitter for Nazis, but
Speaker 14: now Twitter is Twitter for Nazis, but it.
Speaker 8: Has more of a sort of Facebook interface.
Speaker 14: To me, oh, I always I always thought of it
Speaker 14: as having a way more of like an of like
Speaker 14: an older Twitter uter face.
Speaker 8: Yet because it has it has like groups and a marketplace,
Speaker 8: like it.
Speaker 14: Does have groups of market But I think it started
Speaker 14: as a Twitter clone that started to a Facebook features
Speaker 14: that's mostly to like.
Speaker 8: Sort of like the evolutionary thing where everything turns into
Speaker 8: crabs boomers turn everything into Facebook.
Speaker 14: Yes, yes, exactly. It is the Facebook evocation of all
Speaker 14: social media. I think those changes were made to like
Speaker 14: to support more like a collaboration between users, because they
Speaker 14: wanted it to be like a place for Nazis could
Speaker 14: like also organize. But yeah, it very much started in
Speaker 14: like what year it was, like twenty eighteen ish, I want.
Speaker 3: To say twenty sixteen.
Speaker 8: Oh, I could pull the incorporation documents, but I think
Speaker 8: I think it's a little older than that.
Speaker 3: But it wasn't popular until I didn't get a gab
Speaker 3: account until twenty eighteen.
Speaker 8: It was in the news a lot on twenty eighteen. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 8: mass shooters were using it and then their accounts were
Speaker 8: in the court documents. But it was already, you know,
Speaker 8: popular among certain sets.
Speaker 4: It was.
Speaker 3: It was certainly around for a while. Their logo is
Speaker 3: a frog.
Speaker 14: I'm sure there's nothing I'm sure that's completely normal, but yeah,
Speaker 14: it started off as just a social media app for Nazis,
Speaker 14: almost exclusively used by white supremacists.
Speaker 3: It's a free speech platform. It is a free speech platform.
Speaker 14: It was kind of it was, I like Parlor came
Speaker 14: a few years later, which was more like a maga
Speaker 14: ish version, like Gab was for like actual Nazis, right,
Speaker 14: Whereas Parlor you could.
Speaker 3: Find like you know, like like anyone.
Speaker 14: From like mega people, conservative politicians, you could you found
Speaker 14: a lot of like Proud Boy chapters. But Gab was like, no,
Speaker 14: you were like explicitly white supremacists.
Speaker 8: There's not a lot of plausible deniability in a GAB
Speaker 8: account the way there was maybe with Parlor a little bit.
Speaker 3: Now, a Gab is still a thing, I think.
Speaker 14: Uh, I mostly use it to watch the GDL, who
Speaker 14: posts a lot on GAB. But I think a lot
Speaker 14: of unfortunately, a whole bunch of people who were on
Speaker 14: gab are just now back on actual Twitter.
Speaker 3: Or in prison.
Speaker 14: And you know, some would say that those two things
Speaker 14: and a lot of gob which is not actually true
Speaker 14: because prison is way worth the same.
Speaker 8: The same posts kind of got them to both places,
Speaker 8: just different.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, anyway, so okay, but that's gap.
Speaker 14: I did not know that a future of GAB could
Speaker 14: be serving some could be serving someone lawsuit papers. That
Speaker 14: is something I did not know.
Speaker 8: Well, it turns out you can't attach a PDF to
Speaker 8: a gab DM, so we could run into some trouble.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, this is so dumb.
Speaker 8: So Charles Morrell's lawyers were given permission to serve Patriot
Speaker 8: Front and Thomas Rousseau via several online means. Right, so
Speaker 8: in this motion for this this permission for alternate service,
Speaker 8: they identified two email addresses and social media accounts regularly
Speaker 8: used by the group on Telegram, Odyssey, Bitshoot and GAB.
Speaker 14: I mean, I certainly would have gone for Telegram Odyssey
Speaker 14: and bit shoot are like YouTube and twitch clones for nazis.
Speaker 14: In case the listener is curious, don't go there. Don't
Speaker 14: not worry, do not go there.
Speaker 3: My god, I I have been on there way too
Speaker 3: much this week, and I have seen some of the worst.
Speaker 8: Yet it's not good on there. No, it's a process server, right.
Speaker 8: This This person who normally just like waits outside your
Speaker 8: work to serve you with papers is like now on gab.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 8: So the process server contacted all of the identified accounts.
Speaker 8: And so when I was researching this, you know, I
Speaker 8: was trying to get an idea of how common this is,
Speaker 8: what the usual means are, And so I was looking
Speaker 8: through the cited case law and the motion, and one
Speaker 8: of the cases they cited kind of caught my eye.
Speaker 8: It's havelish v bin Laden.
Speaker 14: Oh him, I that name sounds familiar. Was was he
Speaker 14: the one that did that thing around like twenty twenty.
Speaker 3: Three ish years ago? Was it born then? How old
Speaker 3: I was? I was not? Oh no, I was kidding Jesus.
Speaker 3: I thought I was just ribbing you. Oh my god.
Speaker 14: Unfortunately, Yeah, Well, it is that bin Laden, right, it is.
Speaker 14: It is the It is the guy, Okay.
Speaker 8: It's the one, the one you're thinking of. So that's
Speaker 8: a lawsuit that was brought by families of people who
Speaker 8: died in nine to eleven. So last year a federal
Speaker 8: judge in New York gave those plaintiffs permission to serve
Speaker 8: legal notice to the Taliban via Twitter DM like the Taliban.
Speaker 3: What a time to be alive? What a time to
Speaker 3: be alive?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 14: I mean yes, I the Taliban Twitter account is certainly fascinating.
Speaker 14: They're they're trying, they're trying to hold the Taliban responsible
Speaker 14: for nine to eleven.
Speaker 10: Huh.
Speaker 8: I don want to get like deep into the weeds about
Speaker 8: this particular case, but there's something seized. So like judgments
Speaker 8: have been awarded, there are seized funds sitting somewhere in
Speaker 8: the released they want they want this money, right, and
Speaker 8: so they needed to serve notice to the Taliban that
Speaker 8: they want this money.
Speaker 3: And so as wild as that sounds.
Speaker 8: There's actually a lot of similarities in the underlying legal
Speaker 8: logic here. So in both of these cases, the court
Speaker 8: is pretty specific that they're not just saying like, yeah,
Speaker 8: just like DM whoever, and it's good enough.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 8: So in both of these cases, the account identified as
Speaker 8: being appropriate for service is pretty clear that it belongs
Speaker 8: to the person who's supposed to be served, and that
Speaker 8: that particular account has been used to make statements that
Speaker 8: indicate the individual already knows about the lawsuit. So this
Speaker 8: DMS the service by ADMA. It's going to be a surprise, right,
Speaker 8: this isn't going to be the first time you're hearing
Speaker 8: about this, Like the court knows that you know, okay,
Speaker 8: which I just need to see the red receipt that
Speaker 8: you know.
Speaker 3: Uha, got it.
Speaker 8: So in the case of the Taliban, the court notes
Speaker 8: that the accounts had previously published press releases related to
Speaker 8: the funds at issue in the underlying litigation. So it's
Speaker 8: like they they're posting about it. They know they're certainly
Speaker 8: posting the talent. The Taliban is posting about the funds, okay.
Speaker 8: So in this case it's Russeau's bravado biting him in
Speaker 8: the ass, right, and he.
Speaker 3: Loves and he loves posting my God.
Speaker 8: And the judge specifically refers to the fact that they
Speaker 8: posted the video of the incident the day the suit
Speaker 8: was filed, which indicates actual knowledge.
Speaker 14: Yes, which is also a very interesting legal move on
Speaker 14: the part of Russo.
Speaker 8: Like the judge is reading your posts and he doesn't
Speaker 8: think they're good.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 14: Uh, nothing more scary than having to read out your
Speaker 14: posts to a federal judge.
Speaker 8: Jesus Christ post every day like a judge is going
Speaker 8: to read them over your shoulder, right, Yes, So they're
Speaker 8: just like randomly and for totally unrelated reasons, posting this
Speaker 8: thirteen month old video the day of the lawsuit gets filed.
Speaker 3: The judgeesn't buy that fast. Again, a fascinating legal move.
Speaker 8: And so back to the Richmond case, right, we're still
Speaker 8: talking about service. And so the Richmond Keys, because it
Speaker 8: was filed first, maybe they weren't expecting to get sued.
Speaker 8: And because more of those plaintiffs were actually identified by
Speaker 8: anti fascist researchers, they actually had managed to serve most
Speaker 8: of their defendants. They found Thomas Dale, Nathan Noyce, aident Tradinnick,
Speaker 8: and Daniel Cherecci at their homes. A private investigator tracks
Speaker 8: Jacob Brown down hiding at a home owned by his
Speaker 8: mother in upstate New York. William Ring was.
Speaker 3: Actually sorry, god, what a bunch of losers.
Speaker 8: But William Ring was actually the easiest defendant to find.
Speaker 8: His papers were actually handed to someone to give to him.
Speaker 8: But this person was authorized to receive those papers because
Speaker 8: they were a corrections officer at the Fayette County Prison
Speaker 8: in Pennsylvania. Ah Ring was a guest up there serving
Speaker 8: a sentence for beating a man over the head with
Speaker 8: a baseball bat wrapped.
Speaker 3: In barbed wire.
Speaker 10: Hmm, curious.
Speaker 8: It was an altercation over refrigerator. It's very unclear.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's so sad.
Speaker 14: I thought it was gonna be like some horrible racist assault,
Speaker 14: and there could be an element of racism in this.
Speaker 3: I'm not familiar with the case.
Speaker 8: No, don't worry, Garrison. He was there for a second
Speaker 8: defense that occurred around the same time, but separately separate counties,
Speaker 8: even where he punched a child in the face after
Speaker 8: telling her to go back to Mexico.
Speaker 14: Okay, there, we see that. That is what I That's
Speaker 14: what I was expecting.
Speaker 3: All right, Yeah, that sounds about right.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 14: It does suck that sending Nazis to prison also has
Speaker 14: so many negative consequences.
Speaker 3: To fix the.
Speaker 14: Furthering of the White Premaces project is really reliant on
Speaker 14: there being Nazis in prison, and it sucks that that
Speaker 14: is such an organizational hub of them, because these people
Speaker 14: should not be around other people.
Speaker 3: Ah man, Yeah, just.
Speaker 8: As an interesting assidne In both of those criminal cases.
Speaker 8: He hired a guy I've seen before. Very interesting. His
Speaker 8: name is Josh Smith. He was the lawyer that Matt
Speaker 8: Heinbach hired to represent him in the sins vy Kesler
Speaker 8: case a few years ago. Man, he's interesting to see
Speaker 8: an old friend again.
Speaker 3: Man with the most real name, Josh Smith. Oh, it's
Speaker 3: because it's not his real name. That's well, there we go.
Speaker 8: He was he was born Daniel Nussbaum.
Speaker 3: Of course, of course he was. I I clocked that immediately. Wow. Good,
Speaker 3: good for me.
Speaker 8: Yea, he was raised Jewish. But now he's a Holocaust
Speaker 8: and I are, Oh what.
Speaker 3: This is so sad? Oh my god, he joined to
Speaker 3: not see gay. Yeah, what the fuck? Oh god, he's like,
Speaker 3: I have to pick a wider name. Josh Smith. Wow,
Speaker 3: what a loser.
Speaker 8: He's not a very good lawyer either. His perform his
Speaker 8: performance in the science case with some of the strangest
Speaker 8: courtroom behavior I've ever seen. Like the judge had to
Speaker 8: keep reminding him of like you can't like that's not
Speaker 8: the law, Like you can't just say stuff.
Speaker 3: I love a courtroom behavior being described as strange.
Speaker 8: Like when the judge has to repeatedly remind you, like
Speaker 8: how the law works, like how making motions works, like
Speaker 8: you can't just yell stuff. It was a rough trial
Speaker 8: for him. His client does oh millions of dollars.
Speaker 3: He's the reverse Saul Goodman.
Speaker 14: Oh my gosh, Jesus Christ.
Speaker 8: Having hired him for his criminal cases and is in prison.
Speaker 8: But he didn't hire him to represent him in this
Speaker 8: lawsuit because he didn't get a lawyer and he defaulted. Wow,
Speaker 8: And so he if you default on a case, it
Speaker 8: means you're not allowed to participate anymore. And so the
Speaker 8: case is going to keep going and maybe you get
Speaker 8: found liable, but like you don't get to participate anymore.
Speaker 8: So when it's over, if you're liable, like that's kind
Speaker 8: of fun.
Speaker 3: Fuck you, huh.
Speaker 8: And so Thomas Rousseau, Jacob Brown, and Patriot Front are
Speaker 8: also defaulted in that lawsuit. But the other guys, the
Speaker 8: other guys got a lawyer. They hired another guy we've
Speaker 8: seen before. His name is Glenn Allen. He's a Maryland
Speaker 8: based attorney who lost his job as counsel for the
Speaker 8: Baltimore Police Department after the SPLC identified him as a
Speaker 8: longtime member of the old school neo Nazi group National Alliance.
Speaker 14: Wow huh. Curious said that the police would have an
Speaker 14: Uzi lawyer.
Speaker 3: That's weird. Surely there's nothing to interrogate there.
Speaker 8: No, there's nothing weird going on in Baltimore at the
Speaker 8: police department at all.
Speaker 14: It is certainly funny that they just hired the old
Speaker 14: police Nazi lawyer for their Nazi club.
Speaker 3: Lawyer.
Speaker 14: Who's Who's someone who's been fighting from the police from
Speaker 14: being a Nazi.
Speaker 3: So he's been keeping pretty busy the last few years.
Speaker 8: He's spent a couple of years trying to sue the
Speaker 8: SPLC for saying true stuff about him being a member.
Speaker 3: Of National Alliance.
Speaker 8: It didn't work out, didn't work out, and he currently
Speaker 8: represents Warren Baylong in a doomed appeal of a previously
Speaker 8: dismiss lawsuit against the City of Charlottesville, who're failing to
Speaker 8: protect his right to have a good time at Unite
Speaker 8: the Right.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 3: Well, it's so.
Speaker 8: It's sort of I don't know, it's like feels a
Speaker 8: little slapstick, right, Like we're just like throwing characters in
Speaker 8: there we've got We've got the formerly Jewish Holocaust deny
Speaker 8: your Nazi. We've got the guy in prison for punching
Speaker 8: a little girl. Oh, the girl he told to go
Speaker 8: back to Mexico is Puerto Rican. I don't know that
Speaker 8: that matters to him. But she, she can't, she can't
Speaker 8: go back to Mexico.
Speaker 14: Not being racist. Challenge level impossible.
Speaker 3: We're just like throwing characters in here. We gotta know
Speaker 3: it is. It is very curtoonish. Yeah, but here we
Speaker 3: are at the end.
Speaker 8: Right, I've taken up a lot of your time to
Speaker 8: take care of us and telling you my little story.
Speaker 8: But what happens now? Right, there's three live cases. They're starting,
Speaker 8: they're starting to crawl forward now that the judges agreed
Speaker 8: that you can serve them. I'm so excited for discovery.
Speaker 8: My god, it's gonna be a treat. It's for me anyway,
Speaker 8: I'm getting the documents now. Obviously, the plaintiff's goal here
Speaker 8: is recovery of damages. That's what the law allows for.
Speaker 8: They can they sue because they want to recover damages,
Speaker 8: and I wish them well in them. I'm not like
Speaker 8: holding my breath. I think we can get some idea
Speaker 8: of what to expect here by looking back at the
Speaker 8: Signs by Kessler lawsuit against the United the Right organizers.
Speaker 8: It took four years to get to trial. Discovery was
Speaker 8: stymied by guys dropping their phones in toilets, So we're.
Speaker 3: Just showing up.
Speaker 14: I'm sure a lot of what these lawyers are doing
Speaker 14: are collaborating with defendants to make as a little come
Speaker 14: out and discovery as possible, because that is beyond the
Speaker 14: actual court case. The thing that could actually be most
Speaker 14: damaging to them is discovery like that, that is the
Speaker 14: actual thing. So I'm sure they're using all this extra
Speaker 14: time when they're avoiding recognizing the lawsuit to try to
Speaker 14: tidy up any dirty laundry they may have in a
Speaker 14: semi legal fashion.
Speaker 8: Well, they can't do that, and so I'm not going
Speaker 8: to accuse anyone of a crime. Right, destruction of evidence
Speaker 8: is not allowed. It's called spoliation. Right, So once you
Speaker 8: have actual knowledge that you're being sued, you are no
Speaker 8: longer allowed to destroy anything that might be discoverable.
Speaker 3: Do people still do it? Sure? They always?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 8: Am I implying that anyone is committing a crime at
Speaker 8: this juncture. Legally, no, we'll see. But you know, looking
Speaker 8: back at scigns, I don't think anybody's going to squeeze
Speaker 8: a few million out of any of those guys, right,
Speaker 8: Like they were found liable, but they're not going to
Speaker 8: pay right, And Thomas Rousseau started running his club for
Speaker 8: friendless boys right out of high school. He doesn't have
Speaker 8: a job, he doesn't have assets. He's not going to
Speaker 8: pay anybody any money. But what it can do is
Speaker 8: slow them down. They have to get lawyers, they have
Speaker 8: to show up in court, they have to participate in discovery.
Speaker 8: We've already seen plenty of leaked coms and internal planning documents,
Speaker 8: but now those documents and more will be entered into
Speaker 8: the court record.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 8: So you know, researchers like you and I, we put
Speaker 8: out information all the time and people see it and
Speaker 8: it makes a difference. But when something comes in with
Speaker 8: sort of the impromatuur of the court's legitimacy, like once
Speaker 8: you put a bait's number on that bad boy, they
Speaker 8: could put it on the news, the real news where
Speaker 8: normal people see it.
Speaker 14: Right, yesh, your like niche, not your niche like no
Speaker 14: blogs the site that like twelve people check it.
Speaker 8: On right, So like your mom watching Matt Out is
Speaker 8: going to see this, where like she's not reading Unicorn Riot.
Speaker 8: So this will put this information in front of more people,
Speaker 8: will have more legitimacy. But I think the biggest impact
Speaker 8: this is going to have is on the willingness of
Speaker 8: potential members and current members to participate.
Speaker 3: Right. Yeah, it makes things way more risky for people
Speaker 3: wanting to do this sort of stuff.
Speaker 8: Like, maybe you're gonna think twice about your group mandated
Speaker 8: racial intimidation now that you know you.
Speaker 3: Might have to pay for that.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you know, maybe joining looks a little less appealing.
Speaker 8: You know, it's hard to be optimistic about relying on
Speaker 8: the courts to meaningfully undermine white supremacist organizing.
Speaker 3: Sure, but it's worth a shot to gum up the
Speaker 3: works with whatever tools you have.
Speaker 14: Absolutely, I may not believe in like the law system
Speaker 14: TM as this as this like universally good thing, or
Speaker 14: even like a like a like a valid thing, but
Speaker 14: I'm certainly willing to have it severely inconvenience my ontological enemies.
Speaker 3: Like is it the best solution?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 3: Is it a solution? Maybe not at all, But it's
Speaker 3: worth a shot.
Speaker 8: It'll be you know, I'm gonna enjoy reading the documents
Speaker 8: either way.
Speaker 14: Absolutely, No, that is. I am extremely intrigued to see
Speaker 14: what will come out uh in discovery, and I wish
Speaker 14: these people only the worst. So well, Mollie, that was
Speaker 14: that was fantastic. That was extremely informative. You know, I
Speaker 14: always think it's impossible to find new ways to laugh
Speaker 14: at Patriot Front, Yet here here we are.
Speaker 8: Imagine opening that DM. I wish they had record, they
Speaker 8: record everything. I wish they'd been recording that.
Speaker 14: God, that'd be funny. Yeah, imagine getting served via GAB.
Speaker 14: I would just get you know, I I shouldn't say
Speaker 14: that anyway. Well, where can people find you online, Molly?
Speaker 14: Besides on our show?
Speaker 3: Now, I know, I'm very excited to be here.
Speaker 8: You can find me on Twitter at Socialist dog mom
Speaker 8: my name I chose as a little joke before I
Speaker 8: realized it was going to be my job.
Speaker 3: That is. That is the same That is the same
Speaker 3: thing with my Twitter presence. So we are we are
Speaker 3: in the same boat there.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you mostly just find me on Twitter. You can
Speaker 8: find me on my my ghost newsletter. It's like substack,
Speaker 8: but there's less nazis there. It's called the Devil's advocates.
Speaker 8: There's a link to it on my Twitter I post
Speaker 8: about what happens when you take white supremacy to court.
Speaker 14: Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Molly. We will we
Speaker 14: will talk again soon to learn about I'm sure even
Speaker 14: even new and more more ridiculous things that you have
Speaker 14: stumbled across by reading these documents. I am too adhd
Speaker 14: to look.
Speaker 3: At it only ever gets worse, Garrison, Welcome to the
Speaker 3: very special lunar New Year's episode of vikadap Here. I'm
Speaker 3: your host, Mia Wong, and today we're talking about China,
Speaker 3: and more specifically, we are talking about the Chinese state
Speaker 3: and the persistent question that haunts American national security experts
Speaker 3: and leftists on social media alike, is China maoist? Now,
Speaker 3: if you, gentle listener, are not embroiled in a kind
Speaker 3: of running turf war with American China watchers like I am,
Speaker 3: you may rightly be asking, wait, what people actually believe this?
Speaker 3: And the answer, unfortunately is yes, yes they do. And
Speaker 3: those people get to write in major media outlets. Here's
Speaker 3: the New York Times how she returned China to one
Speaker 3: man rule. For decades, China has built Guyard rails to
Speaker 3: prevent another Mao. Here's how Hijimping has dismantled them and
Speaker 3: created his own machinery of power. Here's also The New
Speaker 3: York Times. This one, I guess technically is from the
Speaker 3: opinion section. But Uh Xixiping is the second coming of
Speaker 3: Maosee Dung. Here's the Wall Street Journal. China wants to
Speaker 3: move ahead, but Sijiping is looking to the past. As
Speaker 3: China's leader embraces more elements of Maosee Dung's rule, It's
Speaker 3: people are confronting more uncertain future. Lest you think this
Speaker 3: is purely an American phenomena, here's Al Jazeera, which is
Speaker 3: funded by the government of Catter is Xijimping China's new
Speaker 3: Mao Ze Dung, which she casting himself as a twenty
Speaker 3: first century Mao. China risks arbitrary rule. Here's foreign policy
Speaker 3: the Maoist roots of She's economic dilemma. In contrast with Dang,
Speaker 3: she has embraced a distinctly Maoist socialism that emphasizes personal
Speaker 3: sacrifice for the collective good, HARKing back to the Cultural
Speaker 3: Revolution of the nineteen sixties and seventies. The British, of course,
Speaker 3: are also not immune to this Mao derangement syndrome. I
Speaker 3: guess I would call it Chi Jimping's pilgrimage to Red
Speaker 3: Mecca brings back the Mao factor. So you know, this
Speaker 3: is a very, very common sentiment. It's been a very
Speaker 3: common sentiment for most of the last dec I haven't
Speaker 3: even done some of the most common ones, like you,
Speaker 3: if you expand a little bit out from just Xijimping
Speaker 3: is the new Mao ones, you get a lot of
Speaker 3: like Xi Jimping is the most powerful leader since Mao,
Speaker 3: which is kind of true. And I think this is
Speaker 3: part of why this sort of strategy works, because people
Speaker 3: do not want to actually differentiate between different kinds of
Speaker 3: authoritarian systems. There are many, many different kinds of dictatorships,
Speaker 3: and people are just loath to actually look at the differences.
Speaker 3: And you see this. This is not just the sort
Speaker 3: of American media class thing. You see this in political
Speaker 3: science literature all the time. Political science literature, especially in
Speaker 3: the US, has this tendency to divide the entire world
Speaker 3: into this sort of neat classification of dictatorships and democracies.
Speaker 3: And as a product of this, I have had to
Speaker 3: read some truly truly appalling articles that were published in
Speaker 3: peer reviewed journals. On my absolute I don't know if
Speaker 3: favorite is the right term or the most cursed one
Speaker 3: that I ever saw was it was an article about
Speaker 3: like the read the quote unquote resource curse and this
Speaker 3: argument about whether like having a bunch of oil means
Speaker 3: that you were inherently gonna have an authoritarian government or whatever.
Speaker 3: So they have this chart that's supposed to be tracking
Speaker 3: like the quote unquote time to a democratic transition of
Speaker 3: a bunch of non democratic societies by like just how
Speaker 3: much how much natural resources they have. Now this this
Speaker 3: chart has in the same category Saudi Arabia, a theocratic monarchy,
Speaker 3: and also Hoaxayist Albania, a country whose political line was
Speaker 3: that Mao did it Mao hard enough. And these are
Speaker 3: just being treated neutraally as the same type of governments
Speaker 3: because it's not a representative democracy. North Korea is another
Speaker 3: good example of this. You see people in the US
Speaker 3: calling North Korea hereditary monarchy like all the time, and
Speaker 3: it just isn't. Leadership of the party state passes between
Speaker 3: members of a family. But that's not actually enough to
Speaker 3: make something a monarchy unless you're prepared to argue that, like,
Speaker 3: the US is a monarchy because we had two Bushes
Speaker 3: as president. Now on the grounds that that's extremely funny,
Speaker 3: I'm not wholly unsympathetic to that argument, but it's not.
Speaker 3: Calling the US a monarchy because of the two Bushes
Speaker 3: is not a very serious academic argument. It is just
Speaker 3: a joke. And that's I think, how we should be
Speaker 3: treating people, like people calling North Korea a monarchy because
Speaker 3: it's not a monarchy is not just there's a guy
Speaker 3: who's in charge and it passes to another person who's
Speaker 3: related to them. It's not just that there's someone who
Speaker 3: you could call a king. There is a whole political
Speaker 3: system beneath it, right, there's a whole network of like
Speaker 3: princes and courts and land titles and inheritances and who
Speaker 3: when who doesn't have royal blood, and there's there's you know,
Speaker 3: there's a whole you know, and the economic system of
Speaker 3: a monarchy as has changed over time. Right, monarchies are
Speaker 3: very old. You know, we now have like capitalist monarchies
Speaker 3: like the Saudis. You know, we've had feudal monarchies, We've
Speaker 3: had sort of pre feudal monarchies, but you can't simply
Speaker 3: reduce monarchy to one guy in charge. That is absolutely absurd,
Speaker 3: But people just do this all the time. Now, North
Speaker 3: Korea is organized along the lines of a party state,
Speaker 3: where this is, you know, a sort of shortening of
Speaker 3: one party state. Technically speaking, there are actually other parties
Speaker 3: in North Korea, and this is true of China as well,
Speaker 3: but they don't really do anything. And this is not
Speaker 3: the episode where I'm going to have to try to
Speaker 3: explain the difference between the United Front and the United
Speaker 3: Front Works Department. That's another time. But they are functionally
Speaker 3: one party states. There is one party that actually does
Speaker 3: the ruling, and then there's a couple of other parties
Speaker 3: that keep around for appearances, who might do consultative stuff.
Speaker 3: But even in terms, even knowing that something is a
Speaker 3: party state doesn't actually tell you a huge amount about
Speaker 3: how that system actually functions. And this is where we
Speaker 3: come to the core elements of today's episode. How does
Speaker 3: the modern Chinese state operate and how is it different
Speaker 3: from previous iterations of the Chinese state. So to answer
Speaker 3: this question, we need to start. We need to start
Speaker 3: with the origins of the party state itself and the
Speaker 3: party state really in the sense that we're dealing with
Speaker 3: is born with the Soviet Union. Well, I mean, I
Speaker 3: guess it technically creates the Soviet Union a little bit,
Speaker 3: but it's it's born it's bored of the October Revolution
Speaker 3: and the Bolshevik taking consolidation of power. On the other hand,
Speaker 3: you know, party states are not built in the image
Speaker 3: of Lenin. They're built in the image of Stalin. And
Speaker 3: the thing that makes you know, sort of like what
Speaker 3: the party states that come after it, what makes them
Speaker 3: function is the way that sort of Stalin consolidates power.
Speaker 3: And Stalin consolidates power by using the rules of the
Speaker 3: Bolshevik Party to maintain control over members of the state apparatus,
Speaker 3: even though technically speaking he doesn't he doesn't have like
Speaker 3: you know, he'd keep be doing these doesn't technically have
Speaker 3: the formal authority to do as a member of the government,
Speaker 3: but he has the authority to do as a member
Speaker 3: of the party. And this is how Stalin consolidates his
Speaker 3: power and sod walls out Trotsky et etc.
Speaker 6: Et cetera.
Speaker 3: However, Comma, this is where people make mistakes when when
Speaker 3: they're trying to sort of understand what Stalinism was, which
Speaker 3: is that they make this mistake of looking you know,
Speaker 3: of kind of projecting back the later Soviet Union on
Speaker 3: you know, onto sort of like nineteen thirty's Stalinism, and
Speaker 3: the mistake that they make is the assumption that Stalinism
Speaker 3: is purely a bureaucratic doctrine, right, It's purely about season
Speaker 3: control the bureaucracy and using a bureaucracy to consolidate power.
Speaker 3: And that is just not true. Part of Stalin's success
Speaker 3: and you know, as bleak as that like success is.
Speaker 3: Part of what Stalin does is mobilize masses of people
Speaker 3: against parts of the party and in parts of the
Speaker 3: state bureaucracy that oppose him, that you you know, did
Speaker 3: do things like denunciations to like you know, and to
Speaker 3: weaken their bureaucratic power. And this means that Stalinism is
Speaker 3: not a pure politics of state bureaucracy the way that
Speaker 3: sort of later Soviet governments are. It's a combination of
Speaker 3: bureaucratic power and also the direction of mass mobilization, of
Speaker 3: the mobilization of large numbers of people to go do
Speaker 3: a thing towards the end of consolidating power. This interplay
Speaker 3: the control of bureaucratic power checked by mass popular and
Speaker 3: mobilizations is the characteristic element of Stalinism. Both of these tools,
Speaker 3: both the bureaucratic apparatus and mass mobilization, are used to
Speaker 3: maintain Stalin's personal power. Now, Maoism, for all of its
Speaker 3: claims to be the direct ideological air of Stalin is,
Speaker 3: Maoism is Sallanism are not the same thing in sort
Speaker 3: of like Mao era or China. And you know, you
Speaker 3: can trace this towards from sort of like Mao's insurgency
Speaker 3: era through the time he's in power to the end
Speaker 3: of the seventies. During that period, China is, if anything,
Speaker 3: even more prone to mass popular and mobilization as a strategy.
Speaker 3: Some of this is ideological. Maoism is to a large
Speaker 3: extent a kind of internal critique of Stalinism that you know,
Speaker 3: I mean, like so people in like you could argue about,
Speaker 3: you know, how good were the intentions of the people
Speaker 3: who are in charge of the Chinese Communist Party in
Speaker 3: like the twenties and thirties, Right, But they're not They're
Speaker 3: not stupid, right, These people are smart. These people understand
Speaker 3: that there are a lot of problems with the Soviet system.
Speaker 3: These are people who watched a bunch of their comrades
Speaker 3: get murdered because the Soviets fucked up. So these are
Speaker 3: people who understand the threat of bureaucrat as a to
Speaker 3: a revolutionary movements and the formation the potential formation of
Speaker 3: a new ruling class composed of sort of like management
Speaker 3: and bureaucratic cadres. But on the other hand, because it's
Speaker 3: an internal critique of Stalinism and not like an external
Speaker 3: critique of Stalinism, Maoism is utterly unwilling to try to
Speaker 3: solve these problems by actually giving like workers or peasants,
Speaker 3: like any kind of autonomy or democratic control over anything,
Speaker 3: except for like the most trivial minutia of like shop
Speaker 3: floor bullshit. And the result of this is that you know,
Speaker 3: you can't defeat the bureaucracy with democracy, so what do
Speaker 3: you how do you actually deal with it? And the
Speaker 3: result is what's called campaign style mobilization. These are mass
Speaker 3: mobilizations of extraordinary large numbers of people to do it,
Speaker 3: you know, to to do a task right. There's a
Speaker 3: lot of different sort of things they try to do
Speaker 3: with this. Sometimes they're tried they're used for economic ends.
Speaker 3: This is like the Great Leap four, which is this
Speaker 3: mass mobilization of people to increase productive capacity. It is
Speaker 3: a fiasco. Now, part of this Auso was political, right,
Speaker 3: Partly this is MAO trying to use mass mobilization against
Speaker 3: the bureaucracy in a way reminiscent of Stalin, but at
Speaker 3: a much much larger scale. And the other you know
Speaker 3: part part of what's going on here is that the
Speaker 3: bureaucracy of the Soviet Union is much stronger than the
Speaker 3: bureaucracy of China, right, because you know, the Bolsheviks kind
Speaker 3: of have a state like bureaucracy sort of intact that
Speaker 3: they're able to sort of graft themselves onto China like
Speaker 3: doesn't have like a functioning government at all, Like there's
Speaker 3: no functioning central state in China when the Maoist eventually
Speaker 3: like knock off the Nationalists. So you know this this
Speaker 3: this always means that the level of bureaucratization is lower
Speaker 3: in China, but you know, it's still it's there's still
Speaker 3: that's still like the state building process is still one
Speaker 3: of the things that Maoists are trying to do. And
Speaker 3: this is you know, this is sort of what Mao
Speaker 3: is tending to check. But this doesn't work. The Culture
Speaker 3: Revolution ultimately fails, and part of its failure is that,
Speaker 3: you know, Okay, so in order in order to like
Speaker 3: stop the dread specter of like democratic election of factory
Speaker 3: councils and shit mao like cobbles together this coalition of
Speaker 3: soldiers like loyalist red Guard factions and some of the
Speaker 3: pre existing bureaucracy. And these people are these are people
Speaker 3: who end up running the country through the seventies, and
Speaker 3: that is just another bureaucracy. And through this whole period,
Speaker 3: China continues to get more and more bureaucratic. Now, this
Speaker 3: is the most cliche thing that you can possibly say,
Speaker 3: but unfortunately I do have to say it. The Culture
Speaker 3: Revolution had a massive impact on subsequent Chinese policy. Every
Speaker 3: Chinese leader from Danzhou Ping on, including Xiji Ping, and
Speaker 3: this is something that is not very well covered in
Speaker 3: the American press, but every single one of these people
Speaker 3: agrees that the Culture Revolution was a mistake. And you
Speaker 3: can see the results of this analysis in how the
Speaker 3: min modern Chinese state mobilizes resources. Now, do you know
Speaker 3: how you can mobilize resources. It's buying the products and
Speaker 3: services contained in these ads. We are back. I don't
Speaker 3: know why I'm saying we. It is kind of just
Speaker 3: me and you the listener, But I guess, I guess,
Speaker 3: I guess that's technically plural. So let's get into how
Speaker 3: the modern Chinese state is very, very different from the
Speaker 3: previous kind of Chinese state, right because, you know, like
Speaker 3: the Mao era, for everything that goes wrong with it, right,
Speaker 3: for all of the reality that is an absolute disaster,
Speaker 3: is based on in a lot of ways, what we
Speaker 3: would call grassroots style organizing. Right, It's based on getting
Speaker 3: a bunch of people to go out and do a thing. Now,
Speaker 3: the modern Chinese state doesn't do this in the same way.
Speaker 3: The closest thing that they have to sort of like
Speaker 3: Maoist mobilizations are you know, there is still a thing
Speaker 3: that's called a campaign stylen mobilization, but it's not the
Speaker 3: same thing at all as the Maoist system. So let's
Speaker 3: ask the question, what the fuck is campaign style mobilization?
Speaker 3: So I'm gonna go to the academic literature on this.
Speaker 3: A group of professors, writing for the journal Public Administration Review,
Speaker 3: in a very colorfully named article called campaign Style Enforcement
Speaker 3: and Regulatory Compliance describe it. Thus, following the literature, we
Speaker 3: define campaign style enforcement as a type of policy implementation
Speaker 3: involving extraordinary mobilization of administrative resources under political sponsorship. Now,
Speaker 3: this definition is very interesting because if you look at
Speaker 3: what is being mobilized here, right, it is not masses
Speaker 3: of people. You're not trying to do mass popular mobilizations.
Speaker 3: You're mobilizing administrative resources. And this is something that becomes
Speaker 3: very clear the more you look into the sort of
Speaker 3: literature here. I'm going to quote from a piece called
Speaker 3: Revised Blue Sky Fabrication in China by Yongdongshen and Anna
Speaker 3: l Ahlers during the Mao era. This is campaign style
Speaker 3: mobilizations aimed at nothing less than mobilizing society as a whole.
Speaker 3: While when they occur today, political campaigns are usually foremostly
Speaker 3: addressed at the state apparatus i e. Especially party and
Speaker 3: government organizations, at all levels of the political hierarchy, and
Speaker 3: ultimately at cadres in other words, the implementers of the
Speaker 3: policy goals at stake. Accordingly, Elizabeth Perry has called this
Speaker 3: transformation quote from mass campaigns to managed campaigns. Moreover, contemporary campaigns,
Speaker 3: or better campaign style politics mainly take the form of
Speaker 3: a disciplinary, supervisory and sanctioning campaigns such as anti crime
Speaker 3: campaigns or the recently reinforced corruption campaign or be regulatory
Speaker 3: enforcement or policy goal attainment acceleration campaigns. So Okay, that's
Speaker 3: kind of a lot, but I think I think it's
Speaker 3: worth actually, you know, taking this in a little bit
Speaker 3: of detail. That same article defines like the characteristics of
Speaker 3: what campaign style, a campaign stylen mobilization is. So they
Speaker 3: have a defined goal, they have political sponsorship, there's a
Speaker 3: high degree of urgency, there's a defined period of time,
Speaker 3: tightly coordinated operation, the pooling of extraordinary resources, and public involvement.
Speaker 3: So that article of the one about blue sky fabrication
Speaker 3: is studying the twenty sixteen G twenty meeting in Hangzhou
Speaker 3: where the government sets out to make sure that there
Speaker 3: is actually like a blue sky for the event. Now,
Speaker 3: this is a massive undertaking because Chinese air pollution is
Speaker 3: fucking atrocious. This is something that I might view another
Speaker 3: Fall episode about this at some point. Chinese air pollution
Speaker 3: is unbelievably bad. It kills unfathomable numbers of people every year.
Speaker 3: It's gotten a little bit better since I was last there,
Speaker 3: But like when I was last in Beijing, like I
Speaker 3: didn't fucking I only saw the sky one time in
Speaker 3: the time I was there, because and that was only
Speaker 3: because it rained. And so after it rain, the sky
Speaker 3: was blue for like a few hours in the small
Speaker 3: just like consumed it again. So in order to make
Speaker 3: sure that there was like a blue sky for pr
Speaker 3: purposes for this G twenty meeting, because China wanted to
Speaker 3: sort of show off, there was a massive, massive deployment
Speaker 3: of resources. And this becomes one of the sort of
Speaker 3: campaigns down mobilizations, and these mobilizians. You know, they may
Speaker 3: not be sort of MAOIs style mass mobilizations of like
Speaker 3: getting people to go do the thing, but they are
Speaker 3: massively intrusive. They include things like shuddering fact is moving
Speaker 3: millions of people, restricting like who can drive them what days, like,
Speaker 3: restricting whether or not you can like use like cooking
Speaker 3: stuff in your house. But Comma, we need to look
Speaker 3: at how these things actually happen. So the way that
Speaker 3: these campaigns start basically is for for the large scale ones,
Speaker 3: you have mobilization that flows basically down the lines of
Speaker 3: the state. Right, they start from the federal governments and
Speaker 3: then they go to local governments and regional governments and
Speaker 3: implementation you know, for sort of scientific stuff.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: So if you look if for you know, going back
Speaker 3: to the sort of example of the G twenty for
Speaker 3: you know, in order to do the scientific coordination for it,
Speaker 3: you get a very very broad, sort of broad reaching
Speaker 3: like coalition or coordination between scientists at universities as well
Speaker 3: as at research institutes and government agencies, and you're pulling
Speaker 3: them all together in order to produce like, like I
Speaker 3: don't know, you're like air quality measures, right, And these
Speaker 3: efforts also can very rapidly fold in the governments of
Speaker 3: other provinces. So what does it actually mean in terms
Speaker 3: of how these mobilizations work. What it means is that
Speaker 3: mobilization is a way of moving around different state and
Speaker 3: sometimes just kind of pseudo nonstate actors like universities and
Speaker 3: research institutes. It's a way of moving those resources around
Speaker 3: in such a way that you can accomplish a thing. Now.
Speaker 3: One of the kind of defining characteristics of a lot
Speaker 3: of these campaigns, and not all of them, like the
Speaker 3: anti corruption campaigns obviously are sort of different, but a
Speaker 3: lot of these campaigns rely on scientific and technical mobilization.
Speaker 3: Both in the sense of what resources they're moving, right,
Speaker 3: you moving scientists around, but also in terms of public justification.
Speaker 3: And this is also something that's very different, Like there
Speaker 3: is ideological justification going on, but like in like a
Speaker 3: Maoist sort of like like a high culture revolution like
Speaker 3: period or even greatly forward period, you're mostly using sort
Speaker 3: of ideological like direct ideological motivation to get people to
Speaker 3: go do a thing. Here. It's very technical, it's very scientific,
Speaker 3: it's very technocratic. And one of the products of this,
Speaker 3: one of the products of sort of how technocratic everything
Speaker 3: is is that and this is something Shen and Ahlers
Speaker 3: are very clear about. There is like no there's no
Speaker 3: public comment here, right, Like the way these campaign mobilizations
Speaker 3: work is the state tells you what you are doing,
Speaker 3: and you are not telling them back like anything. Like
Speaker 3: you are not negotiating with them, you are not in
Speaker 3: a dialogue, you are not submitting comment. They are just
Speaker 3: telling you what to do. And this goes from like
Speaker 3: regular people all the way up to like corporations, right,
Speaker 3: Like even large corporations. A lot of times with these
Speaker 3: like campaign style things don't get a like negotiate a
Speaker 3: deal or whatever the fuck it it just sort of happens. Now.
Speaker 3: You may have noticed in the original one of the
Speaker 3: original descriptions, I was talking about one of the def
Speaker 3: things they have as the definition is public mobiles is
Speaker 3: mobilization of like the public. But we need to be
Speaker 3: clear about what that means so that it doesn't get
Speaker 3: confused with like maoism. So what do we say, there's
Speaker 3: mobilization of the public. It's stuff likely. So during the
Speaker 3: G twenty campaign, there were like they would the CCP
Speaker 3: would like have old people volunteer to like walk around
Speaker 3: their neighborhoods and like snatch on anyone who was like
Speaker 3: using their cooking stove. So like that's the kind of
Speaker 3: mobilization we're talking like. These these are not like these
Speaker 3: are not like Red Guard tribunals, like dragging people out
Speaker 3: of their houses. This is like a seventy year old's
Speaker 3: person incredibly nosy seventy year old going like, ha, this
Speaker 3: person using their cooking stove. You know how you can
Speaker 3: get a cooking stove that you can actually use? Uh,
Speaker 3: maybe these products and services I don't know if we're
Speaker 3: sponsored by cooking stoves, but you know we could be.
Speaker 3: There could there could be a cooking stove, product and
Speaker 3: service out there waiting for you and we're back. Now,
Speaker 3: we should also look more at some of the methods
Speaker 3: of how this stuff happens. Right, So one of the
Speaker 3: things that's happening is part of this campaign is part
Speaker 3: of the part of the plan to reduce pollution. Is
Speaker 3: they need the Chinese government wants to move a bunch
Speaker 3: of people out of out of the city right now,
Speaker 3: A Maoi style thing would just tell the people to
Speaker 3: fucking leave. The way that the way that the modern
Speaker 3: Chinese government does this is to send people like basically
Speaker 3: free travel vouchers. Shennon Ayler's report, the value of these
Speaker 3: vouchers is more than one point five billion dollars, So
Speaker 3: like that's dollars, right, that's that's like, so you know
Speaker 3: this is this is these are very expensive campaigns. But
Speaker 3: but you know this is the way that the Chinese
Speaker 3: state moves in a lot of these cases, right when
Speaker 3: they're trying to move when they need to move a
Speaker 3: bunch of people, they deploy vouchers. So some of these
Speaker 3: campaigns are using even more like technocratic means to get
Speaker 3: things done. So looking back at the article of campaign
Speaker 3: style enforcement and regulatory compliance, we find examples of what
Speaker 3: is technically campaign style mobilization. Okay, quote, for instance, the
Speaker 3: central government either waived the loan interest for corporate spending
Speaker 3: on basically these like desulfurization things to make industrial like
Speaker 3: exhaust not have sulfur in it, or cover these expenses
Speaker 3: using central environment central environmental funds. In addition, an innovative
Speaker 3: green electricity policy offered that point zero zero two three
Speaker 3: cent price premium per kilowatt hour to power plants that
Speaker 3: installed one of these systems. So this is like exactly
Speaker 3: the opposite of how a booist campaign would do this, right,
Speaker 3: Like they are these factory people are getting like price subsidies,
Speaker 3: and like they're waiving the interest on loans. Now, we've
Speaker 3: been focusing on campaign style mobilization because those are the
Speaker 3: most sort of extraordinary kinds of mobilization. But most policy
Speaker 3: isn't even implemented by campaign It's implemented by normal biaucritic processes.
Speaker 3: And this is even less booist than the sort of
Speaker 3: campaign stylen mobilizations. Now, most people, a lot of people
Speaker 3: who describe China as booist are describing their oppressive apparatus.
Speaker 3: But here they have things exactly backwards, right, Contrary to
Speaker 3: the government and socialist period, which was sort of governed
Speaker 3: by mass mobilization, the modern Chinese government is almost pathologically
Speaker 3: adverse to anything that even smells like mass popular mobilization.
Speaker 3: And this isn't to say that China doesn't have protests
Speaker 3: like it does. There are protests in China, but comma
Speaker 3: like a lot of these. You well, there are protests
Speaker 3: like there are like ecological like Nimbi protests. There are
Speaker 3: like real estate there's a lot of real estate protests,
Speaker 3: and some of those, some of these are allowed. There
Speaker 3: are protests, one of the very common forms of protests
Speaker 3: against not getting paid by your boss. But even attempting
Speaker 3: like and most of these protests aren't like you just
Speaker 3: aren't really anti government, right, Like they're not sort of
Speaker 3: like they're not calling for the downfall of the regime
Speaker 3: or whatever. They're like pissed off about a corrupt local government.
Speaker 3: But even attempting to documents, all of the protests that
Speaker 3: happened in China in a given year canon has landed
Speaker 3: people in prison. So you know, the state is not
Speaker 3: super happy about this. And if we look at what
Speaker 3: happened to mass protests in twenty twenty two. They were
Speaker 3: brutally suppressed, and you know, the sort of anti like then,
Speaker 3: even things that weren't even really that big but we're
Speaker 3: kind of antecedents of ists that attempted to use sort
Speaker 3: of maoist politics were also unbelievably quickly like stamped out.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: There was the oppression of the student workers movement in
Speaker 3: late twenty tens. On the student sort of worker like
Speaker 3: maoist movements. The Chinese state does some sort of like
Speaker 3: limited mobilization online, you know, in terms of sort of
Speaker 3: like they have this like pr strategy thing overseas of
Speaker 3: like wolf warrior diplomacy or whatever. It's unbelievably cringe. But
Speaker 3: even then, these are not even close to the kinds
Speaker 3: of mobilization the state and the party could, like nationalists
Speaker 3: mobilizations they could unleash if they wanted to. And this
Speaker 3: is because instead of working through mass popular mobilization, the
Speaker 3: state isn't maoist, and because it's not maoist, it works
Speaker 3: through the bureaucracy. Policy implementation works by going from the top,
Speaker 3: and then if they go down to local government's local
Speaker 3: government respond it goes back up to the top again,
Speaker 3: it comes back down and the policy gets it implemented. Right,
Speaker 3: Like you know, when when there are mask like you know,
Speaker 3: mass campaign style things, they're not. They're not mass mobilizing people.
Speaker 3: They're mobilizing research institutes. They're mobilizing like government bureaus. They're
Speaker 3: they're they're shifting bureau and technocrats around. Now, I think
Speaker 3: I think there's a lot of reasons for why the
Speaker 3: Chinese governments is sort of like pathologically adverse to anything
Speaker 3: that even sort of smelled like kind of smells like
Speaker 3: male style politics.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: One of them is that, you know, these are we
Speaker 3: talked about this before, but like these are people who
Speaker 3: a lot of these people lived through parts of the
Speaker 3: Cultural Revolution, like they saw really fiascos emerge out of
Speaker 3: this stuff. But you know, the other thing that they're
Speaker 3: that these people are afraid of is that so you know,
Speaker 3: when I say these people were around for the Culture Revolution,
Speaker 3: like these people saw the Chinese working class take the
Speaker 3: city of Shanghai nineteen sixty seven. Right, this is all
Speaker 3: and this is part of the reason why Tien then
Speaker 3: rattles them so much because they you know, they nearly
Speaker 3: watch the working class take another Chinese city, and these
Speaker 3: these are people who have a you know, and I
Speaker 3: think understand this on a more visceral level than most
Speaker 3: other political leaders. Understand that if they if they don't
Speaker 3: correctly manage situations and like stamp up popular mobilization like
Speaker 3: they could, you know, there there are worlds where they
Speaker 3: fucking wake up, thet dragged out of their houses and
Speaker 3: the Chinese working class hangs them from lamp posts. Right,
Speaker 3: that's a real threat. And this is part of why
Speaker 3: you know, they're using something that's something that's called neoliberalism, right,
Speaker 3: the disenchantment of politics. They this is, this is why
Speaker 3: the state, even when it's doing repression, operates through sort
Speaker 3: of technocratic and bureaucratic means. Now, journalists resort to calling
Speaker 3: this maoism because they're lazy hacks who are also racist.
Speaker 3: But you know, we we can see pretty clearly by
Speaker 3: actually looking at how the state functions that this is
Speaker 3: not maoism. Maoism is built on mass popular mobilization. The
Speaker 3: modern CCP is built on stamping out mass popular mobilization.
Speaker 3: This has been niked, happened here, Yeah, happy to lean
Speaker 3: your New Year's everyone.
Speaker 2: Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
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