Speaker 1: All media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Hi.
Speaker 1: Everyone, it's me James, and I'm coming at you today
Speaker 1: with one of these little requests that I make sometimes
Speaker 1: when there's something that we would like you to do,
Speaker 1: when it's very important to do. So today I want
Speaker 1: to talk to you about Syria and specifically Northeast Syria.
Speaker 1: So with the world's eyes fixed on Syria, many are
Speaker 1: rightly celebrating as a brutal dictatorship of Bashara Lasad comes
Speaker 1: to an end. But for Kurdish and other minority communities,
Speaker 1: recent days have bought violent attacks, ethnic cleansing and occupation
Speaker 1: by Turkey's back Jahadis groups in an attempt to take
Speaker 1: advantage of the chaos by crushing the Rajava Revolution. Turkey
Speaker 1: and it's most openly committing war crimes against the regions
Speaker 1: autonomous communities. Many thousands have already been forced to be
Speaker 1: displaced and thousands more are in danger. To make matters
Speaker 1: worth this remains largely absent from the mainstream media reporting
Speaker 1: on Syria. If you'd like to share your solidarity with
Speaker 1: the people of northern and Eastern Syria, please call on
Speaker 1: Congress to take urgent action by passing the emergency legislation
Speaker 1: to stop the violence, hold Turkey accountable, and commit US
Speaker 1: sport to the Syrian Democratic forces and the diverse communities
Speaker 1: under their protection. If you want to take action today,
Speaker 1: you can go to defend Rajaba dot org. That's d
Speaker 1: E F E N d R oja va dot org.
Speaker 1: If you are able to the most effective action we
Speaker 1: can take right now is to call a couple of representatives,
Speaker 1: one representative and one Senator.
Speaker 4: A representative would be Gregory Meeks. He's from New York.
Speaker 1: He's a Democrat. He is a ranking member of the
Speaker 1: House Foreign Affairs Committee. His phone number is two zero
Speaker 1: two two two five three four six one Leevlon Bee.
Speaker 1: Senator James rish He's an Idaho Republican. He is a
Speaker 1: ranking member's Senate Foreign Relations committee. His phone number would
Speaker 1: be two zero two two two four two seven five two.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to have some talking points, you can
Speaker 1: find those on Defendbrajaba dot org. If you'd like to
Speaker 1: donate financially instead, especially to this humanitarian aid effort for
Speaker 1: the tens of thousands of people who have been displaced
Speaker 1: by the SNA's advances, you can donate to two organizations
Speaker 1: that I would suggest to. First would be Heavier Sre
Speaker 1: the Curtis Red Crescent. That's h E YVA s O
Speaker 1: R dot com and you want to go slash e
Speaker 1: n If you want to see their website in English,
Speaker 1: you can donate there. The other one will be the
Speaker 1: Free Burma Rangers who are currently working in Raka. I
Speaker 1: was talking to my friend Habat who works with them.
Speaker 1: You can donate to them at www dot free Free
Speaker 1: Burma b U r m A Rangers dot com. We
Speaker 1: will put all of this in the show notes, although
Speaker 1: if you're driving you have to write them down. Those
Speaker 1: are the concrete ways that we can help right now
Speaker 1: and what is unfolding as a very terrible situation in
Speaker 1: No Syria. Thanks, I hope you do an episode.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to it. Could happen to hear a podcast
Speaker 2: about Garrison Davis talking to me. Also, the world falling apart?
Speaker 2: How do you feel about that? Gear? How you doing?
Speaker 3: I'm pretty used to it by now, honestly. Yeah, we've
Speaker 3: been doing this whole thing for quite a quite a while.
Speaker 2: You sure have.
Speaker 3: Have you noticed that some of these some of these
Speaker 3: cabinet picks are a little funny, They're a little bit odd.
Speaker 4: Have you noticed that yet? I don't know. I get
Speaker 4: kind of a funny feeling about some of these guys.
Speaker 2: You've heard about this? Are you hearing about this? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I don't love it either, Gear. They don't seem cool
Speaker 2: and good.
Speaker 3: I mean, not all of them are like sticking around.
Speaker 3: I guess you know. Matt Gatz is now out of
Speaker 3: the job. Tragic, kind of like Icarus. He flew he
Speaker 3: flew too close to an elementary sc.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we've already got our scare Mucci. I was gonna
Speaker 2: make a Scaremuccie joke, but your joke was much better.
Speaker 3: It was a really fast turnaround for Gates too. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and now we're all watching Pete to see if he
Speaker 3: if cures the top job at the Pentagon. But today
Speaker 3: we're talking about this other guy named Cash Patel. How
Speaker 3: do you feel about Cash Ptel, Robert.
Speaker 2: Uh, not thrilled, kind of worry, not thrilled. Matt Gates
Speaker 2: really seemed like the kind of guy you used to
Speaker 2: make your sketchy Secret police and Cash Pattel as I
Speaker 2: guess your backup to that guy.
Speaker 3: Totally, yeah, or at least, like I don't know. Cash
Speaker 3: is different in a few ways, Like he does a
Speaker 3: lot more kind of dirty work because he's not like
Speaker 3: important as a person. He just wants to be seen
Speaker 3: by Daddy Trump. And this episode, we're gonna get into
Speaker 3: a little bit of Cash's backstory, what his plans are
Speaker 3: for the FBI as he is now nominated for the
Speaker 3: position of being director of the FBI, as well as
Speaker 3: kind of what Cash been up to in the four
Speaker 3: years since Trump's been out of office. So let's just
Speaker 3: start all the way back to the beginning for background
Speaker 3: on mister Patel here. Okay, So, Cash Pattel was born
Speaker 3: in New York, but after graduating law school in two
Speaker 3: thousand and five, he worked as a public defender in
Speaker 3: Florida for nine years before becoming a federal prosecutor in
Speaker 3: the National Security Division of the DOJ. He didn't really
Speaker 3: want to be a public defender. It's that he really
Speaker 3: couldn't get any other jobs because he wasn't like that's skilled.
Speaker 3: So he ended up just working as a public defender,
Speaker 3: even though it wasn't really what he wanted to do
Speaker 3: out of law. But once he got to the DOJ,
Speaker 3: he worked as a terrorism prosecutor. According to a DoD profile,
Speaker 3: Patel quote led investigations spanning multiple theaters of conflict and
Speaker 3: oversaw the successful prosecution of criminals aligned with al Qaeda, ISIS,
Speaker 3: and other terroot groups unquote. Patel also worked with quote
Speaker 3: counter terrorism units to conduct collaborative global targeting operations against
Speaker 3: high value terrorism targets unquote.
Speaker 2: Right, Okay, I'm sure he was good at that job.
Speaker 2: I'm sure he didn't have any really embarrassing failures during
Speaker 2: that period of time.
Speaker 3: No, No, I say that just for kind of his
Speaker 3: like more like surveillance background. But we will certainly get
Speaker 3: to his ability to complete these jobs on a reliable
Speaker 3: basis and like. Although that info is directly from the
Speaker 3: DoD's website, Patel himself has exaggerated his career record, claiming
Speaker 3: in a YouTube podcast to have been the quote unquote
Speaker 3: lead prosecutor in the case against the twenty twelve Benghazi attackers.
Speaker 3: Patel actually was not even part of the trial team,
Speaker 3: was only a junior staff member at the DOJ at
Speaker 3: the time, and he was removed from this case for
Speaker 3: clashing with the US Attorney's office. But this incident kind
Speaker 3: of marks the start of a few unfortunate events in
Speaker 3: his career that really started to kind of turn Patel
Speaker 3: against the justice system. To the New York Times, in
Speaker 3: twenty sixteen, Patel was thrown out of a courtroom for
Speaker 3: wearing quote rumpled khakis, boat shoes and a too small
Speaker 3: borrowed jacket unquote.
Speaker 2: I hate that he's got on my cousin Vinnie in
Speaker 2: his record, because that movie is great and it gets
Speaker 2: me on his side in a way I definitely shouldn't be.
Speaker 2: Did he Did he come in next wearing like a
Speaker 2: funeral director's tuxedo or a fucking band leader's tuxedo or whatever.
Speaker 2: I don't know how to describe the tuxedo Vinie Weares
Speaker 2: in the scene after that, anyway.
Speaker 3: No, he was just kicked out of the courtroom, with
Speaker 3: the judge saying, quote if you want to be a
Speaker 3: lawyer dressed like a lawyer unquote. Now this judge was
Speaker 3: also like a racist asshole. Not defending the judge here.
Speaker 2: And to be clear, Cash Bettel was not dating Marisitome.
Speaker 4: He could never pull Marsitome.
Speaker 2: He could never pull I mean, honestly jokes, who can
Speaker 2: That's yeah.
Speaker 3: But this incident is an important part of his career trajectory.
Speaker 3: A profile in The Atlantic details Patel as growing increasingly
Speaker 3: frustrated and disillusioned by his failure to navigate and rise
Speaker 3: up in the justice system, just collecting more and more
Speaker 3: personal grievances that fuel an animosity towards the bureaucracy of
Speaker 3: the legal system, based on people's apparent unwillingness to help
Speaker 3: him excel in his own career. But in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 3: Patel got his really first like big break, with Republican
Speaker 3: Representative Devin and Nunez hiring Patel to be the House
Speaker 3: Intelligence Committee's lead investigator to disrupt the Special Council investigation
Speaker 3: into Russian interference in the twenty sixteen election. Trump was
Speaker 3: impressed enough with Patel's work under Nunez that he gave
Speaker 3: Patel a job on the National Security Council and later
Speaker 3: served as chief of staff to Acting Secretary of Defense
Speaker 3: Christopher Miller. Trump mused about having Patel as deputy director
Speaker 3: of the FBI or director of the CIA in late
Speaker 3: twenty twenty after the election, but this led to harsh
Speaker 3: resistance from within his own administration, with ag Bill Barr
Speaker 3: saying that Patel would only become FBI director quote over
Speaker 3: my dead body, unquote. So I don't know if we'll have
Speaker 3: any updates on that, yeah say. But instead, back in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty, Trump just put Patel on the Pentagon transition team.
Speaker 3: Trump basically tasked Patel was doing dirty work and awarded
Speaker 3: him with promotions for following orders. Patel advised on the
Speaker 3: Ukraine impeachment, spread conspiracy theories that Ukraine, not Russia, meddled
Speaker 3: in the twenty sixteen election, created a list of intelligence
Speaker 3: agency officials to fire in February of twenty twenty, and
Speaker 3: helped manage the now dismissed a classified documents case against Trump.
Speaker 3: The former deputy national advisor to Trump, Charles Kupperman, said
Speaker 3: in an interview quote Trump wanted to make Cash a
Speaker 3: political executioner to root out and fire individuals on the
Speaker 3: White House staff who weren't being as loyal as he
Speaker 3: thought they should be unquote. So that's kind of a
Speaker 3: good look at him as a person, and like what
Speaker 3: Cash's rule is like specifically for Trump and with the
Speaker 3: possibility of the justice system becoming just more and more
Speaker 3: of like a tool to target Trump's political rivals, Cash
Speaker 3: is the exact guy that you would pick, especially for
Speaker 3: a job that has like an investigative focus like the FBI.
Speaker 3: But Cash isn't always good at his job necessarily.
Speaker 2: Well, who amongst us?
Speaker 3: We're gonna talk about one specific incident here that's one
Speaker 3: of like the wildest stories in like national security that
Speaker 3: I've ever read. In October of twenty twenty four, days
Speaker 3: before the election, the Pentagon was planning an operation for
Speaker 3: Sale Team six to rescue an American citizen, Philip Walton,
Speaker 3: who was kidnapped in Niger and being held in Nigeria.
Speaker 3: As the State Department was working to communicate with officials
Speaker 3: in Nigeria to clear airspace for the operation, Patel, who
Speaker 3: was not part of this operation, just called the Pentagon
Speaker 3: saying that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had gotten approval
Speaker 3: from Nigeria and the airspace was deconflicted, so as the
Speaker 3: Seals were about to land in Nigeria, defense officials couldn't
Speaker 3: verify that the flight actually had clearance, leaving the aircraft
Speaker 3: to circle over the target for hours as they scrambled
Speaker 3: to get approval from Nigeria. According to former Defense Secretary
Speaker 3: Mark Esper, Patel was never in communication with Mike Pompeo
Speaker 3: about this mission, and Defense officials concluded that Patel quote
Speaker 3: made the approval story up. Unquote. Cool guy, this is wild.
Speaker 3: You almost caught Sealed Team six like shot out of
Speaker 3: the air because you made up a story about having
Speaker 3: flight clearance.
Speaker 4: It's like, it's crazy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, this is exactly the guy you want
Speaker 2: running the FBI, for sure.
Speaker 3: A Pentagon official yelled at Cash, quote, you could have
Speaker 3: gotten those guys killed. What the fuck were you thinking,
Speaker 3: to which Cash replied, if no, but it got hurt.
Speaker 3: Who the fuck cares?
Speaker 2: Amazing stuff, amazing stuff.
Speaker 4: Let him cook crazy stuff.
Speaker 2: Look, here's the thing, Garrison, if it had gone the
Speaker 2: worst possible way it could have gone, we'd have been
Speaker 2: saved at least four interminable books and at least three podcasts.
Speaker 3: So like people like interviewed in the Atlantic, and I
Speaker 3: think the author of the profile on Cash kind of
Speaker 3: muses that, like maybe Cash just wanted this operation done
Speaker 3: before the election to give Trump like an extra win
Speaker 3: leading up to the polls. I don't know, it's it's
Speaker 3: it's certainly odd, but like Cash has a very like
Speaker 3: inflated sense of like personal worth. In an interview with
Speaker 3: Glenn Beck, he talked about how like people should should
Speaker 3: trust his expertise because quote, I've read the entire JFK file.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, geez you and Oliver Stone.
Speaker 3: Right, he makes comments like that, It's like no, no, no,
Speaker 3: like trust me. I know everything, Like I've read all
Speaker 3: the classified stuff that you're not allowed to. I'm like
Speaker 3: the smartest guy in the room. I've read everything, right,
Speaker 3: Like he's he uses this as like a as a
Speaker 3: way to like inflate his own personal worth and like
Speaker 3: flex to weird right wing online podcast.
Speaker 2: S grifters people have made this point. But it's guys
Speaker 2: like this that have convinced me that there's no at
Speaker 2: least no like perfectly known to intelligence smoking gun about
Speaker 2: the Kennedy assassination. That shit would have leaked so quickly no,
Speaker 2: if not before Trump was in office, then certainly about
Speaker 2: the time he was.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because you have guys like Cash Battel reading these files.
Speaker 4: There's nothing in there.
Speaker 2: There's no or at least if there is, it's the
Speaker 2: kind of thing there may be a smoking gun that
Speaker 2: someone who is deeply knowledgeable at the time period be like, oh,
Speaker 2: the fact that this guy was here at this time
Speaker 2: really means that this other thing happened, and like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: the Cash Hotel doesn't know shit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he is not smart enough to put any pieces
Speaker 3: together or maybe there's even still redacted and the versions
Speaker 3: that he's reading don't really have any like pertinent info.
Speaker 2: Right. People are just like, let's not give this guy
Speaker 2: the real one.
Speaker 3: No, No, this guy likelying about prosecuting the Bengazi attackers
Speaker 3: and almost got Seal Team six killed.
Speaker 2: Now, oh man, and of all this, out of all
Speaker 2: the Seal teams to get killed too, that's the one
Speaker 2: that would be the biggest news day.
Speaker 3: Do you know who would never kill Seal Team six?
Speaker 2: Robert I'm never gonna say never about killing Seal Team six.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, hopefully allegedly these products and services would
Speaker 3: never wish harm upon Seal Team six.
Speaker 4: All right, we are back.
Speaker 3: I'd like to talk a little bit now about Patel's
Speaker 3: actual plans for the FBI. Now, this job doesn't require
Speaker 3: a Senate confirmation, so we will see, you know, if
Speaker 3: he gets past that process or if he's gonna get
Speaker 3: pushed in through recess appointments, which we still don't really
Speaker 3: know if Trump will be able to pull off. But
Speaker 3: in terms of the FBI, we do have some idea
Speaker 3: about what cas has in mind, because he spent the
Speaker 3: past two years just talking about it a NonStop in
Speaker 3: books and interviews.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because he, like all these guys, cannot shut.
Speaker 4: Up, can't stop talking.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 3: In an appearance on The Sean Ryan Show in this
Speaker 3: past September, Patel said, quote, I'd shut down the FBI
Speaker 3: Hoover building on day one and reopen it the next
Speaker 3: day as a museum of the deep state. Unquote Okay, okay, cool.
Speaker 2: Sure, I do feel like you're underestimating the expensive office
Speaker 2: space and overestimating the availability of it, but sure, why not.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't think they can make a whole museum
Speaker 3: turn around in one day.
Speaker 2: But I also think you are really really underappreciating docents.
Speaker 2: It is not easy to get a docent up to speed, like,
Speaker 2: for example, it's a much harder job than you currently have.
Speaker 3: No, like Patel does talk about like trying to like
Speaker 3: clear out like the bureaucracy and red tape of the FBI.
Speaker 3: And though he has criticized the wide footprint of the
Speaker 3: FBI and its surveillance operations though really only the ones
Speaker 3: targeted against Trump and his campaign, Cash's ideal FBI would
Speaker 3: not in fact have like a more limited presence out
Speaker 3: in the world, saying that after closing the Hoover Building, quote,
Speaker 3: then I'd take the seven thousand employees that work in
Speaker 3: that building and send them across America to chase down criminals.
Speaker 3: Go be cops, your cops, go be cops unquote. So
Speaker 3: this is what you give like a seven year old
Speaker 3: the keys to the FBI, And this is this is
Speaker 3: this is the kind of stuff he's talking about. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's like I'm going to send all these administrative employees
Speaker 3: out into the world to chase down criminals.
Speaker 2: Now you say that, Garrison, I absolutely would put a
Speaker 2: seven year old in charge of the FBI. You know why.
Speaker 2: That's a blockbuster movie. Now, to be fair, that's a
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety seven blockbuster. But yeah, yeah, it's like that
Speaker 2: could thirty years ago. Can you imagine the cat cat
Speaker 2: young Mara Wilson running the FBI, fucking FBI. Yeah, perfect.
Speaker 3: You know, if we said it a little bit further,
Speaker 3: we could have like will we as like the villain,
Speaker 3: you know, like the.
Speaker 2: Evil kid heading the CIA. They also put it, but
Speaker 2: they put Will Wheaton in charge of the CIA.
Speaker 4: Yes, damn all right.
Speaker 2: You know what, Garrison, this podcast is done. You and
Speaker 2: I are writing a screenplay tonight.
Speaker 3: With the power of AI, I can just generate this
Speaker 3: whole movie instantly.
Speaker 2: Perfect, with a truly ghoulish guest appearance by Robin Williams.
Speaker 2: Just the worst taste imaginable.
Speaker 3: No, sorry, President Williams. God, oh dear, nightmare nightmare fuel.
Speaker 3: Now it's it's really unclear if if like Cash's plans
Speaker 3: here are like rhetoric, right, like you know, more vibes
Speaker 3: than like actual plan, you know, like expressing some kind
Speaker 3: of sentiment rather than like an actual practical like plan.
Speaker 3: But last year, Patel published a book titled Government Gangsters,
Speaker 3: the Deep State, The Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy,
Speaker 3: where he also proposed relocating the FBI headquarters out of Washington,
Speaker 3: d C. To quote prevent institutional capture and curb FBI
Speaker 3: leadership from engaging in political gamesmanship unquote, though the bulk
Speaker 3: of this book also details like why we must root
Speaker 3: out politicians, journalists, big tech, and quote unquote members of
Speaker 3: the unelected bureaucracy that operate the deep state, so you know,
Speaker 3: like the FBI engaging in a little bit of political
Speaker 3: gamesmanship is okay. In the appendix of this book, it
Speaker 3: contains the names of sixty alleged members of the deep state,
Speaker 3: most of them either like former Trump cabinet people who
Speaker 3: like turned on Trump or just like current Biden adamin people.
Speaker 3: It's all pretty silly, but it's not like he actually
Speaker 3: plans to take out political prosecutions away from like the
Speaker 3: FBI's operational structure. Like, come on, buddy, this is like
Speaker 3: your entire plan. In an interview with Steve Bannon last year,
Speaker 3: Patel reiterated the goal of targeted prosecutions against political enemies, saying, quote,
Speaker 3: we will go out and the conspirators, not just in
Speaker 3: the government, but in the media. Yes, we're going to
Speaker 3: come after people in the media who lied about American citizens,
Speaker 3: who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We're going to
Speaker 3: come after you unquote.
Speaker 4: So that's cool.
Speaker 3: Again, It's this is this is the basic stuff that
Speaker 3: Trump's been promising since like you know, the past four years,
Speaker 3: going after journalists, going after politicians.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: This quote specifically also just like reminded me that like
Speaker 3: there's like a real possibility that like the head of
Speaker 3: the FBI legitimately thinks the twenty twenty election was stolen.
Speaker 3: And like then I got to thinking, like how many
Speaker 3: of like the people operating the highest levels of government
Speaker 3: now genuinely believe the election was stolen in twenty twenty,
Speaker 3: which is like kind of kind of threw me for
Speaker 3: a loop. I like didn't really like process that like
Speaker 3: concept of like how just broken the reality structure will
Speaker 3: be with something like so like clear, yep, that's his
Speaker 3: FBI plans.
Speaker 2: Yeah, great, Well, seems like it's gonna end well for everybody.
Speaker 2: I don't know, what do you think you think he's
Speaker 2: gonna get confirmed? Because he's one I'm saying. People are
Speaker 2: focusing now that Gates is out, people are focusing way
Speaker 2: more on heg Seth, which is probably the priority because
Speaker 2: my god, that man should not be leading the Department
Speaker 2: of Defense.
Speaker 4: Because he's going to start a war.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's going to He's going to drunkenly and accidentally
Speaker 2: start a war. I'm not even worried about him like
Speaker 2: launching a conflict with China, right, Like we're going to
Speaker 2: wind up fighting an insurgency against the Portuguese because he
Speaker 2: gets fucking hammered and mixes up a couple of letters.
Speaker 3: Like I mean, I'm also like really concerned about Tulci Gabbard.
Speaker 2: Gabbard is top of my list because she is has
Speaker 2: just never met a dictator she doesn't like, and yeah,
Speaker 2: that's a scary person having that job.
Speaker 3: Patello's really bad and we're going to get into some
Speaker 3: more of his like kind of crank beliefs, but there
Speaker 3: is a level of basic competence. The fact that Tulci
Speaker 3: has been able to get into this position despite very
Speaker 3: very clearly having like deep sympathetic ties to Assad in
Speaker 3: Russia is like, yeah, super right.
Speaker 1: Name.
Speaker 2: She's evil but smart and incredibly power hungry. That's all
Speaker 2: that matters to her is getting into power. And she
Speaker 2: has things that she believes, and what we know of
Speaker 2: the things that she believes is chilling, like, yeah, but
Speaker 2: that's yeah, and we don't we we're talking about someone
Speaker 2: besides Tulci today.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yes.
Speaker 3: Now, since twenty twenty, Cash Patel has served on the
Speaker 3: board of directors for the parent company of Truth Social
Speaker 3: called Trump Media Technology Group, so he's been part of
Speaker 3: the team operating you know, Trump's version of Twitter, and
Speaker 3: back in twenty twenty two, Patel was openly talking about how,
Speaker 3: like the truth Social staff, we're trying to quote unquote
Speaker 3: incorporate to QAnon into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences.
Speaker 3: So this is this, this is the section where we're
Speaker 3: going to really get into Patel's super super heavy q ties,
Speaker 3: which is kind of like a throwback.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: We don't really talk about QAnon as much anymore, And
Speaker 3: I don't think Patel's interest in this is genuine. I
Speaker 3: think it is just to like, no, grow both his
Speaker 3: own brand and help boost the stock of truth Social.
Speaker 3: It's still like the closest that anyone in Trump's team
Speaker 3: has gotten to like openly endorsing q and on and
Speaker 3: like repeatedly True Social staff operate an account at q
Speaker 3: forms to piggyback off of q Andon's popularity. And draw
Speaker 3: in popular Q and on influencers. In February twenty twenty two,
Speaker 3: Patel posted a photo of a beer pint and the
Speaker 3: arm of someone wearing a flannel shirt, with text saying
Speaker 3: he was quote having a beer with Q right now unquote.
Speaker 3: Ptel continued to frequently interact with the Q account, make
Speaker 3: Q and on related posts, and do reoccurring appearances on
Speaker 3: Q and on linked podcasts, most notably the X twenty
Speaker 3: two Report, The Matrix Xxx Grove Show, and Red Pill
Speaker 3: seventy eight. It's been a while since I've listened to
Speaker 3: these types of shows, and it was it was like
Speaker 3: a huge throwback, ah man, and they're like all chugging
Speaker 3: along and now they're like chugging along better than ever,
Speaker 3: which is, you know, not ideal for me on these shows.
Speaker 3: Cash has praised the Q and on fandom researchers, saying
Speaker 3: both he and the President have been impressed. It's all
Speaker 3: like very pandering, but it really works for these people
Speaker 3: I've seen.
Speaker 6: On social media, on Trump, on truth social How could
Speaker 6: these researchers are? And I kind of wish I had
Speaker 6: some of them when I was doing Russia again, some
Speaker 6: of these other things you know, Devin and I talk regularly,
Speaker 6: and then you know, I talk with the President all
Speaker 6: the time as well, and we're just blown away at
Speaker 6: the amount of acumen some of these people have and
Speaker 6: how quick they are to grab it and suss through
Speaker 6: it and sort of thin it down and make it presentable.
Speaker 3: Later in that interview, Patel openly said that he publishes
Speaker 3: government documents on his website, Fight with Cash dot Com,
Speaker 3: specifically so that QAnon researchers will dig through them to
Speaker 3: make QAnon content. He openly said that's like why he'd
Speaker 3: like posts these documents.
Speaker 2: You see again, I'm sympathetic. Everything I do is for content, Garrison.
Speaker 2: That's that's just the way the world works now. Now
Speaker 2: the content must flow.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: Patel also has books just like you. Although he's been
Speaker 3: signing copies of his with the q andon phrase where
Speaker 3: we go one, do we go All?
Speaker 2: I mean, I do that too, and he.
Speaker 3: Has defended his use of the slogan on these QAnon podcasts,
Speaker 3: like in this clip from the Matrix xx Groove show
Speaker 3: where we go on.
Speaker 6: Where we Go All is, as you said, from a
Speaker 6: great movie that I watched a long time ago, and
Speaker 6: people took to it and so what you know, it
Speaker 6: doesn't mean everyone's a conspiracy theorist. And people keep asking
Speaker 6: me about all this cue stuff.
Speaker 2: I'm like, what does it matter.
Speaker 6: What I'm telling you is that there is truth in
Speaker 6: a lot of things that many people say, and what
Speaker 6: I'm putting out there is the truth. And how about
Speaker 6: we have some fun along the way.
Speaker 4: There's so many.
Speaker 6: People who subscribed to the where we go on, we
Speaker 6: go on all mantra, and it's what's wrong with it?
Speaker 3: I'm going to quote now from an article in Media
Speaker 3: Matters by Alex Kaplan, who's been reporting on Patel and
Speaker 3: his ties to QAnon since twenty twenty two.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 3: On yet another show in June twenty twenty two, Patel
Speaker 3: went even further, saying of q and on quote, we
Speaker 3: try to incorporate it into our overall messaging scheme to
Speaker 3: capture audiences because whoever that person is has certainly captured
Speaker 3: a widespread breadth of the Mega and America First movement.
Speaker 3: And so what I try to do, is what I
Speaker 3: try to do with anything q or otherwise, is you
Speaker 3: can't ignore that group of people that has such a
Speaker 3: strong dominant following unquote in the interview, Petel also said
Speaker 3: of Q and on there's a lot of good to
Speaker 3: a lot of it, and he agreed with the co
Speaker 3: host who said Q has been so right on so
Speaker 3: many things, saying, quote, I agree with you. He shall
Speaker 3: get credit for all the things he has accomplished because
Speaker 3: it's hard to establish a movement. Let's call it that,
Speaker 3: because that's what it is.
Speaker 4: Unquote. Oh boy, do you know what's also hard to establish?
Speaker 2: Robert uh an alibi.
Speaker 3: An alibi, and you know some people's alibis could be
Speaker 3: reading ads like the one that we're about to do
Speaker 3: right now.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's always my alibi.
Speaker 3: That really is always your fun Yeah.
Speaker 4: All right, we are back now.
Speaker 3: In these podcast guest appearances, he would often plug his
Speaker 3: book and advocate that listeners just join truth social and
Speaker 3: engagement with these more niche online streaming shows and podcasts
Speaker 3: fortifies the right wing online media ecosystem and draws people
Speaker 3: away from mainstream news like this is why he was
Speaker 3: going on those shows so much back in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 3: and Patel basically says as much on this episode of
Speaker 3: the X twenty two Report.
Speaker 6: They will never trust the fake news media again and
Speaker 6: for us that's always been the championing cause to get
Speaker 6: our people and mainstream America listening to your show rather
Speaker 6: than CNN and reading the New York Post or excuse me,
Speaker 6: the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Speaker 3: And I think part of why he's doing this, and
Speaker 3: whether he was told to do it or whether he
Speaker 3: just did it on his own volition, is that like
Speaker 3: having someone who's seen as being close to Trump, especially
Speaker 3: with national secured experience, it helps keep Trump supporters politically
Speaker 3: engaged by making them feel like they are getting special
Speaker 3: access to like exclusive information. It's all a part of
Speaker 3: keeping the mega movement alive when their site is not
Speaker 3: in power, while also building up a ground base of
Speaker 3: support in preparation for them to take power back. And
Speaker 3: that's what he did like a lot in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 3: Most of those podcasts were leading up to the midterms
Speaker 3: as well, so it is part of this general political
Speaker 3: strategy to engage with these like much more niche kind
Speaker 3: of smaller QAnon shows, which not only does like you know,
Speaker 3: grow their audience over time as well, it does help
Speaker 3: their audience grow, it also just establishes like a completely
Speaker 3: siloed media ecosystem away from mainstream news like that. That
Speaker 3: is part of what they're doing, right. That's why Trump
Speaker 3: made truth Social is to create more of these reality tunnels,
Speaker 3: more of these like information silos. Now, Patel kept busy
Speaker 3: in between twenty twenty and twenty twenty four with a
Speaker 3: variety of kind of griff ventures. I'm going to quote
Speaker 3: from the New York Times here.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 3: Mister Patel's company, Trishel, collects consulting fees, including one hundred
Speaker 3: and thirty thousand dollars last year from mister Trump's Truth
Speaker 3: Social site. He also made three hundred and twenty five
Speaker 3: thousand dollars over two years for strategy consulting for the
Speaker 3: pro Trump Save America pack and one hundred and forty
Speaker 3: five and twenty twenty one for fundraising consulting from friends
Speaker 3: of Matt Gates, the campaign committee for the now former
Speaker 3: House Republican from Florida.
Speaker 4: Unquote now.
Speaker 3: Last year, Patel's nonprofit charity, the Cash Foundation, received one
Speaker 3: point three million dollars in revenue, mostly from donations, though
Speaker 3: it's reported expenses totaled six hundred and seventy four thousand
Speaker 3: dollars wow, which is the majority of the moundy and
Speaker 3: nearly half of that was spent on promotion and advertising.
Speaker 3: According to The New York Times, the charity spent more
Speaker 3: on ads than they act actually gave away, which is
Speaker 3: fantastic charity work.
Speaker 2: Oh fuck, good work.
Speaker 3: Through this foundation, he also sells cash merchandise which is
Speaker 3: spelled K money sign.
Speaker 2: H Yeah, that's that guy's gonna really fbi.
Speaker 3: Well, including six packs of wine for two hundred and
Speaker 3: forty bucks and fifty dollars golf polo shirts. Part of
Speaker 3: these polo shirts have this like, you know, like pro
Speaker 3: America branding. I want to read the description of one
Speaker 3: of them. Tired of seeing your money go overseas, support
Speaker 3: your fellow Americans by purchasing our T shirt. Where do
Speaker 3: you think this T shirt's made?
Speaker 4: Robert China?
Speaker 3: Well it's made in Haiti, oh Haiti.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, the America of the Ocean.
Speaker 4: And South America.
Speaker 3: So you know you're still supporting Americans, just South Americans.
Speaker 4: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: Now this foundation is also fun to defamation lawsuits for
Speaker 3: a stop the steal activist and his friend and former
Speaker 3: boss at National Intelligence. But Patel's grifting does go beyond
Speaker 3: his foundation. Just earlier this year, Patel was hawking anti
Speaker 3: vaccine supplement pills from the company Warrior Essentials Wow, specifically
Speaker 3: the pills that claim to reverse the effects of the
Speaker 3: COVID nineteen vaccine.
Speaker 4: I love that.
Speaker 3: What if these pills just give you covid, they're just
Speaker 3: COVID pills.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you just want to get covid.
Speaker 4: Want to reverse the effects of the vaccine.
Speaker 2: It's a performance enhancered you know, if we could conviit, well,
Speaker 2: that's to say, if we could convince Joe Rogan covids
Speaker 2: to performance enhancer. I don't think we could get Joe
Speaker 2: Rogan's fans to spread any more disease than they already do. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's impossible.
Speaker 3: So this product that Patel was selling is called no
Speaker 3: Covid Dome, and it's allegedly formulated to quote destroy the
Speaker 3: toxic spike unquote caused by the mRNA vaccine.
Speaker 2: Now we should have called the COVID vaccines no covid
Speaker 2: it's a good name. That was just leaving money on
Speaker 2: the table. Or Novid.
Speaker 4: No It's good.
Speaker 2: Novid would have been a great note.
Speaker 4: It's good. Yeah, Novid's good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I go.
Speaker 3: According to journalist James Little, these no Covidum pills just
Speaker 3: contain basic supplement ingredients like tumeric extract, green tea extract,
Speaker 3: and vitamin D.
Speaker 2: Great.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a subscription for a thirty day supply is for
Speaker 3: forty nine dollars and ninety eight cents. Jesus chries, and
Speaker 3: a single order of pills is fifty nine dollars in
Speaker 3: ninety eight cents. They're really pushing the subscription because you
Speaker 3: gotta keep doing more pills every thirty days in order
Speaker 3: to really keep the vacs suppressed. In a post this
Speaker 3: past February on True Social Patel truth Spike the vacs
Speaker 3: order this home run kit to ridge your body of
Speaker 3: the harms of the vacs.
Speaker 4: Unquote, my god.
Speaker 3: I just can't believe that a guy like this could
Speaker 3: be FBI director. It's just it just it makes me.
Speaker 2: It's it's I mean, it probably will wind up being
Speaker 2: much more dangerous. But there is a version of this
Speaker 2: where the FBI just pivots to selling supplements like where
Speaker 2: you get where you get your estrogen and testosterone through
Speaker 2: the MBI. Look, as long as it's market it is
Speaker 2: like a performance enhancement.
Speaker 3: I would love to believe that a guy like this
Speaker 3: will lead to just general and competence. But I just
Speaker 3: can't let myself believe that, Like I think it's just
Speaker 3: going to become more and more targeted against like people
Speaker 3: who are good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're going to start, yeah with them. I mean
Speaker 2: it looks like just based on his enemy lists, they're
Speaker 2: going to start with Biden administration officials and people in
Speaker 2: the government. But like it won't end there. It's going
Speaker 2: to depend on what happens, Like it'll be a reactive,
Speaker 2: violent organization, which to a degree it always has been,
Speaker 2: but there's always been like more of a sense of
Speaker 2: like predictability that will not be present well.
Speaker 3: And specifically, Like you know, Patel has also been a
Speaker 3: recurring Gray Zone guest and is pretty close with that
Speaker 3: whole crew.
Speaker 4: That's not great for certain.
Speaker 3: People, but he really is the gift that keeps on
Speaker 3: giving in terms of like odd anecdotes, including his trilogy
Speaker 3: of books, which will be kind of the last thing
Speaker 3: I talk about here. So over the course of the
Speaker 3: past three years, Patel has written and published a children's
Speaker 3: book trilogy titled The Plot Against the King, where Patel
Speaker 3: himself appears as a wizard to defend King Donald from
Speaker 3: enemy plots.
Speaker 2: Oh God, the one thing we all used to be
Speaker 2: able to agree on is that we don't like kings.
Speaker 3: Here no, but now we have the FBI director who
Speaker 3: fancies himself the wizard to protect the king. I am
Speaker 3: going to read the description from the first book here
Speaker 3: quote a fantastical retelling of the terrible true story. Hillary
Speaker 3: Queenton and her shifty nine had spread lies that King
Speaker 3: Donald had cheated to become king. They claimed he was
Speaker 3: working with the Russianians.
Speaker 2: But how could that be Russians?
Speaker 4: Russian Onians.
Speaker 3: It's it's bad, okay, r U S S I O
Speaker 3: N I A N S.
Speaker 2: This is the kind of thing the FBI should be
Speaker 2: cracking down on. That's all. That's all I'll say about that.
Speaker 3: Cash the distinguished discoverer joined him as he uncovers the
Speaker 3: plot against the king and who was really behind all
Speaker 3: the lies unquote. Now Patel referred to this as quote
Speaker 3: the first ever children's Russia gate books unquote, which I
Speaker 3: gotta give him to him.
Speaker 4: That's probably true.
Speaker 2: That's almost well, no, because okay, you know what, I
Speaker 2: don't think it is, but it came from the opposite side.
Speaker 2: Do you remember when the fucking Crassenstein brothers put out
Speaker 2: that children's book about Robert Muller.
Speaker 3: No, oh, you're right, Yes, this is another lie.
Speaker 2: With Weave Bannon because his hair was a weasel. I think, yeah,
Speaker 2: this was another lie. This was another lie from Cash.
Speaker 2: The Crass and Steins beat you to this. This is
Speaker 2: truly the tear of man we're operating with. I'm going
Speaker 2: to start pulling every connection I have to somebody in
Speaker 2: Congress so that when he's being confirmed I can get
Speaker 2: up and hit him on this.
Speaker 7: You claim to have written the first children's book about
Speaker 7: them that I bring in the Crass and Steed brother.
Speaker 7: No oh, they're gonna sell MTG on crypto.
Speaker 2: It's gonna be amazing.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, there's two other books in the series. Part two
Speaker 3: Quote tells the fantastical story of how two inquisitive minds,
Speaker 3: Denesh and Debbie search for the truth to uncover evidence
Speaker 3: of a terrible scheme.
Speaker 2: Who has been forced by a court to announce in
Speaker 2: public that he did not uncover any scheme.
Speaker 3: Part two is titled two Thousand Mules. It is no
Speaker 3: longer available on Amazon due to like all the lawsuits
Speaker 3: around this just being fake.
Speaker 2: Because they broke a bunch of laws, because it was
Speaker 2: criminal and lies.
Speaker 3: Yes, search for the truth to uncover evidence of a
Speaker 3: terrible scheme to elect Sleepy Joe instead of King Donald
Speaker 3: on a choosing day unquote.
Speaker 2: Choosing day just called it election.
Speaker 4: Man, No, because it's fought. It's when they choose their king.
Speaker 2: There are kings that are elected anyway.
Speaker 3: The back of the book reads, come join Dneshan Debbie
Speaker 3: as they try to answer some troubling questions. Why did
Speaker 3: the counting stop in the middle of the night. Why
Speaker 3: were there more votes than people in the kingdom? What
Speaker 3: is up with all the glowing Pooh?
Speaker 4: Unquote? That is what it actually says. Now, why I'm not.
Speaker 2: What is the glowing Pooh supposed to be?
Speaker 3: I don't know, because I can't scam Amazon to buy
Speaker 3: the book and return it because it's no longer available
Speaker 3: on Amazon. I don't know what the glowing Pooh is.
Speaker 2: Sorry, listeners, if one of you has a copy of
Speaker 2: this book.
Speaker 3: Oh my god. Then Part three is titled Return of
Speaker 3: the King okay quote. It continues the silly yet important
Speaker 3: journey of the Maga King as he returns to take
Speaker 3: down Kamalala Law and reclaim.
Speaker 4: His throne unquote.
Speaker 3: Okay, so yeah, that's Cash Patel possible new FBI director.
Speaker 3: Oh who also produced a song titled Justice for All,
Speaker 3: which is a version of the national anthem but sung
Speaker 3: by all J six defendants in prison, with proceeds going
Speaker 3: to the Cash Foundation. So he also released a song
Speaker 3: which was not on my rap this year. Unfortunately.
Speaker 2: That's a shame and I'm just double checking something. Yes,
Speaker 2: and he stole the name of his song from a
Speaker 2: Metallica album, one of the better Metallica albums. This is
Speaker 2: the one that has one on it. Oh my god,
Speaker 2: you son of a bitch.
Speaker 3: I mean, it just is so odd to have the
Speaker 3: FBI director making a song with imprisoned J six defendants.
Speaker 3: You know, it really does is just throw my head
Speaker 3: into a little bit of a spin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it'll be interesting to see the current like FBI
Speaker 2: agents react to that, But I guess we'll see. We're
Speaker 2: all gonna learn a lot about the FBI, one way
Speaker 2: or the other.
Speaker 3: Any closing thoughts here on mister Patel, Now that we've
Speaker 3: done a very brief overview of his life story ending
Speaker 3: with this children's book.
Speaker 2: He seems like he's qualified to do something.
Speaker 4: That's what everyone's saying that's what everyone's saying.
Speaker 3: You No, Like, like every single person who's like announced,
Speaker 3: you know, you get a wave of headlines from people
Speaker 3: who work in government being like this is the most
Speaker 3: unqualified person ever nominated for this position, and like it
Speaker 3: just keeps happening that I don't even feel obligated to
Speaker 3: like quote or say any of these things, because like
Speaker 3: we all know what's happening, Like, yeah, we all know
Speaker 3: why this is going on.
Speaker 4: Like that doesn't that doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: No, And I think that's one of the things I
Speaker 2: have no desire in focusing on, Like what Trump is doing.
Speaker 2: That's like he's breaking the law, he's violating a norm.
Speaker 2: Like I want to hear you know, what are you
Speaker 2: again I do to stop it? Right? What is actually
Speaker 2: being done to try to resist this? Right? Like otherwise
Speaker 2: it's at least when it comes to stuff from elected leaders,
Speaker 2: you know, I'm just not interested in like, oh, he
Speaker 2: broke an outther a lot, Yeah, that's what he does.
Speaker 2: What comes next?
Speaker 3: And he hires guys like Patel to clean up his
Speaker 3: messes and do all his dirty work. And if they
Speaker 3: do it, they can slow the right to the ranks
Speaker 3: and become director of the FBI. Yeah, and that's the
Speaker 3: political strategy that they are all working with and have
Speaker 3: a run to success yet again in twenty twenty four. Well,
Speaker 3: I guess stay tuned for more happenings here as they
Speaker 3: continue for the rest of this week and for the
Speaker 3: next four years.
Speaker 2: Ah, welcome back. It could happen here. A podcast about
Speaker 2: the things that are happening all around us, including, shockingly
Speaker 2: in the last week something we did not expect two
Speaker 2: weeks ago, the fall of the Assad regime, which our
Speaker 2: official stance as a network is that fuck him. This
Speaker 2: is pretty good, but a lot of people feel differently,
Speaker 2: and to talk with me about that. Another guy who's
Speaker 2: always angry about Syria and also has been to Syria, James,
Speaker 2: And you know, just as a note, I think a
Speaker 2: lot of the people podcasting about this right now are
Speaker 2: talking about a place they've never been, although James and
Speaker 2: I have not been to EdLib. So you know, it's true.
Speaker 2: We're going to be fairly focused on our experiences in
Speaker 2: the Kurdish regions, but at least we're not just bullshitting
Speaker 2: about a place that we've read about on the internet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, claiming deep on the ground understanding of a place
Speaker 1: from ready, Yes, that is not us.
Speaker 4: Yeah we uh. I briefly look at regime held Syria.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah over from a comichelo where is kind
Speaker 2: of the governance capital of Rojava, but is also a
Speaker 2: big chunk of it was held by the Assad regimes.
Speaker 2: You would just periodically like see that fucker's face on
Speaker 2: the wall as you were a crossing the street.
Speaker 4: It's a good times.
Speaker 1: But my fixer would come around at noon for whatever
Speaker 1: reason when I was in Rajava, and like, I hate
Speaker 1: to sitting in the hotel, so I'd go out for
Speaker 1: walks around the market. Yeah, not advised by the old
Speaker 1: safety people.
Speaker 2: But no, one of the sketchiest cities I've been in, Yeah,
Speaker 2: because of the presence of regime troops.
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, everything else was lovely. Yeah, people are lovely.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'd be walking down the street and like I'd be
Speaker 1: looking around, see has anything interesting to go and see?
Speaker 1: And then you can literally take one wrong turn down
Speaker 1: the street and walk into to regime Syria, as you
Speaker 1: covered in in the Women's War. Like I was walking
Speaker 1: down one street and this man walked up to me
Speaker 1: and m curtis, she's not very good. Tried to say hello,
Speaker 1: told him my name and stuff, and then he starts
Speaker 1: getting more agitated, and he just starts repeating a higher
Speaker 1: and horror volume, a sad bad man.
Speaker 2: Yeah man, stay away, bro, stay away.
Speaker 4: He's like, you're going to fucking die to be.
Speaker 2: A fucking of all. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, girl expars to that guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, barsie barshi.
Speaker 4: Yeah it is. It was a very straight situation.
Speaker 1: It is no longer a straight situation because in the
Speaker 1: last week the A Side regime has crumbled. Statues of
Speaker 1: him have been torn down all over the country, which
Speaker 1: we love to see. It's another of us dancers other
Speaker 1: network is fuck a statue?
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, fuck most statues.
Speaker 1: Most statues. There are probably some cool ones. Does a
Speaker 1: lady hitting the Nazi with a handbag in Sweden? That's
Speaker 1: a good statue, But yeah, most statues, most statues of
Speaker 1: dudes in suits.
Speaker 4: Don't love them.
Speaker 2: No, very few dudes in suits. I want to see
Speaker 2: a statue.
Speaker 4: Of Yeah, I can't think of any right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not coming to me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm sure it will.
Speaker 1: So these statues have been torn down because your said
Speaker 1: regime has basically crumbled. It failed to really put up
Speaker 1: any meaningful resistance to this advance by different rebel groups,
Speaker 1: right by HTS, by SNA, by the Southern Front as well,
Speaker 1: and despite I guess even what I would have said
Speaker 1: two weeks ago, right me, even after they lost Aleppo,
Speaker 1: I assumed that they would regroup in Hama or Homs
Speaker 1: and they did not. They completely failed to do so.
Speaker 1: Their Russian backers more or less abandoned them, focused on
Speaker 1: getting their stuff and their people, those who survived out
Speaker 1: of the country, and as a result, there is no
Speaker 1: more a SAD regime. Right A SAD fled the country
Speaker 1: at some point. It was initially speculated that a Sad
Speaker 1: had fled on an aircraft on Saturday night as rebels
Speaker 1: were entering Damascus. That seems to be untrue, or perhaps
Speaker 1: it was true, but the speculation that aircraft had crashed
Speaker 1: or have been shut down, certainly it does not seem
Speaker 1: to SAD now seems to be.
Speaker 2: I think. Look, I made the call about two days
Speaker 2: before the regime fell that I felt he was out
Speaker 2: of the country, based on some reporting, including reporting from
Speaker 2: the Serian regime, that he'd gone to Iran first. I
Speaker 2: think he left days before it fell. I don't think
Speaker 2: he's Yeah, he's got enough instinct for self preservation that
Speaker 2: I think he got the fuck out of there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he didn't want to be found in a hole
Speaker 1: in the ground right like here, or end up like Canafi.
Speaker 4: I guess, so he left.
Speaker 1: It's quite possible that he was doing a sort of
Speaker 1: final please please help Me tour of Russia rum which
Speaker 1: turned turned into his eventual exile. In breaking news, Robert,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know if you've seen this
Speaker 1: telegram post, and obviously we can't confirm it because we
Speaker 1: don't have a direct clansi Assad regime. But allegedly he
Speaker 1: is planning on setting up a specialized hospital in the
Speaker 1: field of ophthalmology in Russia, Abkhazia and Dubai.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Great, great place for him to be working.
Speaker 1: Yeah, wonderful, cool stuff. Yeah cool. Yeah, not not at
Speaker 1: the Hague where he belongs.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyway, he is gone, and we have seen in response,
Speaker 1: like some of the worst social media posting that I've seen.
Speaker 1: And I don't want this to be like like Twitter review.
Speaker 1: I think that obviously that's pointless and pure ut but
Speaker 1: I want to address I guess this kind of really
Speaker 1: disappointing response I've seen from a lot of people on
Speaker 1: the left that oh, yeah, well either I mean you
Speaker 1: have the like the grey zone tendency, right that the
Speaker 1: sab was great actually in the protection of human rights
Speaker 1: in the region, and the like the Syria was socialism
Speaker 1: in Karna, which is obviously nonsense, right, Like, this is
Speaker 1: a person who, as we have seen in the last week,
Speaker 1: whose regime prisons were holding thousands of people, killed tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of people, tortured people to death in some
Speaker 1: cases in Sednaia prison, which is a big prison in Damascus,
Speaker 1: certainly a Damascus i should.
Speaker 4: Say, towards the coast.
Speaker 1: It looks as if there were children in that prison
Speaker 1: who were possibly born in that prison and may have
Speaker 1: never been out of that prison, which is like one
Speaker 1: of the most horrible things I've ever had to think about,
Speaker 1: you know, like like a little child four or five
Speaker 1: years old never having seen the sky. It's just it's heartbreaking,
Speaker 1: Like a lot of the things we are going to find,
Speaker 1: the things we're going to hear about in the next
Speaker 1: few weeks heartbreaking. And anybody who's prepared to apologize for
Speaker 1: that or prepared to say that that was good, I
Speaker 1: think you really need to question if there's someone who's
Speaker 1: aligned with you. But in addition to that tendency, there's
Speaker 1: one that sort of holds that in Syria, like what
Speaker 1: will come next is worse? Right, what will come next
Speaker 1: to or we don't know, of course, we don't know
Speaker 1: what will come next, None of us can see the future,
Speaker 1: but what will come next will make a sad look
Speaker 1: like it was a preferable option, And like, I feel
Speaker 1: that we need to address that because I think it's
Speaker 1: one of the long legacies of authoritarian socialist how do
Speaker 1: I say this, like the authoritarian socialist media project.
Speaker 2: And that kind of colliding with the Iraq war anti
Speaker 2: anti war movement, yes, you know, yeah, the whole hands
Speaker 2: off Syria thing that groups like the PSL, the Party
Speaker 2: for Socialism and Liberation we're doing when the rebel started
Speaker 2: this offensive, being like we've got to stop you know,
Speaker 2: these US backed rebels from taking you know, Syria for
Speaker 2: the empires, Like, man, the fuck it. It's not the
Speaker 2: US that was primarily backing the rebels that did most
Speaker 2: of the fighting. Like these guys are Turkish backed, you know, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: the extent that that even matters, right, Like the that
Speaker 2: like this is not the CIA did not orchestrate all
Speaker 2: of this. The guys the CIA were really trying to
Speaker 2: back in Syria basically all died.
Speaker 4: Like, yeah, they've gone.
Speaker 1: Some of the weapons, sure that the US supplied in
Speaker 1: Timber Sycamore are probably stood in the hands of HTS, but.
Speaker 2: Yes, some of them. But like even that's not the
Speaker 2: bulk of the weaponry that those fuckers know using.
Speaker 1: The entire weaponry of the Syrian arabambi is also in
Speaker 1: the hands of the HDS, which we'll move on to
Speaker 1: actually because maybe we should address that now before we
Speaker 1: address responses. Actually, yeah, when we talk about international involvement
Speaker 1: in Syria, right, we talk about the United States who
Speaker 1: has supported the SDF not as a project, and this
Speaker 1: is important. They don't support the Democratic Autonomous Administration nor
Speaker 1: from Assyria as a democratic project. Support is the SDF
Speaker 1: as a partner force in the fight against ISIS, and
Speaker 1: that's been very clear when they have failed to defend
Speaker 1: the anes against genocidal violence, ethnic cleansing in a free
Speaker 1: and right what we're seeing again now in the Talifat area.
Speaker 1: I'll use that terminology because if you want to look
Speaker 1: it up on Google Maps, that's easier to find the
Speaker 1: violence that we've seen repeatedly from the Turkish back Syrian
Speaker 1: National Army or Turkish free Syrian Armies are sometimes called. Right,
Speaker 1: the United States hasn't defended the people of the ans
Speaker 1: against and it won't because that's not what it's there
Speaker 1: to do. And as much as we would like it too,
Speaker 1: I don't think that as in the nature of the
Speaker 1: US mission in Syria, and I don't think it's in
Speaker 1: the nature of the US as a state to support
Speaker 1: a project which is seeking to build democracy without the state.
Speaker 1: It's not in the nature of the state.
Speaker 2: We stumbled backwards accidentally into exactly once supporting the good
Speaker 2: guys in the conflict, you know, specifically in the conflict
Speaker 2: with I. Yeah, like a broken clock, and we immediately
Speaker 2: ever since we have been trying as hard as we
Speaker 2: can to pull back and you know, betray them, yes
Speaker 2: to their deaths like that. That That is the story
Speaker 2: of US support of Rojava.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's not. This is not a US proxy state.
Speaker 1: Some people trying to tell you it is not a
Speaker 1: CIA revolution of some people are trying to tell you.
Speaker 2: Indeed, Now, part part of what gives fuel for that
Speaker 2: is there are a number of photos of like US
Speaker 2: troops really vibing with the WHITEPG and YPG and they're
Speaker 2: vibing with them, And you and I could both say
Speaker 2: this having been with those people. They're nice.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're fun, they're chill folks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they have good music and they like to done
Speaker 2: generally cool people.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, I enjoy that company. I have vibed with
Speaker 4: the WHITEPG.
Speaker 2: You know, like, it's hard not to see a bunch
Speaker 2: of young women who like left isis captivity and immediately
Speaker 2: said give me a gun. I'm going to learn how
Speaker 2: to use it and be like, yeah, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2: Good for you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's one of the coolest things that's happened in
Speaker 4: the Middle East in the past century.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And like, the United States does not have a
Speaker 1: plan for what has happened in the last two weeks,
Speaker 1: and it appears to be trying to think on the
Speaker 1: hoof right now. Joe Biden's foreign policy has been dog
Speaker 1: shit and it doesn't look like he's going to pull
Speaker 1: a one eighty.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: We should not expect the United States to save for Java.
Speaker 1: We should do everything we can to get the United
Speaker 1: States to continue supporting the people who gave more than
Speaker 1: ten thousand of their children in the battle against ISIS.
Speaker 1: The US didn't want to say ground troops right at
Speaker 1: Obama didn't want to have another ground war. Neither did Trump,
Speaker 1: and so they got people from the SDF to do
Speaker 1: the dying and a lot of the killing were they
Speaker 1: maintained an aerial presence, was a light ground footprint. We
Speaker 1: shouldn't expect the US to show up for the people
Speaker 1: who showed.
Speaker 4: Up for it. That's not in its nature.
Speaker 1: The only state that had a plan for what happened
Speaker 1: in the last two weeks appears to have been Israel.
Speaker 1: Disappointingly right, Russia and Iran seem to have largely scrambled
Speaker 1: extracted their state assets. Russia got some of its people out,
Speaker 1: they took some of the aircraft out, it ran.
Speaker 4: Likewise, the US seems to be kind of scrambling.
Speaker 1: I'm sure there are still some like odas, some Special
Speaker 1: Forces guys embedded with the SDF. I'm sure that in
Speaker 1: the areas where ISIS has written up, because in some
Speaker 1: areas where the regime has pulled back, there has been
Speaker 1: an increasing presence of ISIS sleeper cells trying to sort
Speaker 1: of once again control territory and attack the SDF in
Speaker 1: those areas. I'm sure that there are US special forces
Speaker 1: like directing air strikes, but I don't think the US
Speaker 1: is going to come and say Brisia. But the only
Speaker 1: country that had a plan was Israel. And what Israel's
Speaker 1: plan was was to invade Syria in the Golan Heights right,
Speaker 1: to increase their area of control, and then to bomb
Speaker 1: almost all of the aircraft. And perhaps I don't know
Speaker 1: it also includes air defense systems, but from what the
Speaker 1: IDF is saying today, they have bombed all of the
Speaker 1: Syrian Air Forces aircraft that had fallen into rebel hands.
Speaker 1: This includes ammunition for the aircraft. It includes the ammunition
Speaker 1: dump at Comishlow Airport. About half an hour before Robert
Speaker 1: and I started recording here on Monday, I saw a
Speaker 1: video from a friend in Kamishlow of the ammunition dump
Speaker 1: at the airport, which have previously belonged to the regime
Speaker 1: now belongs to the A and E s exploding after
Speaker 1: it had been hit by an IDFs. Right. So what
Speaker 1: they're trying to do, I guess, is deny any of
Speaker 1: those weapons to people who they perceive as a threat
Speaker 1: to their interests. Yep, and like there's been I don't
Speaker 1: know if you're seeing this also row it by a
Speaker 1: lot of like Israeli accounts being like, oh we stand
Speaker 1: with the curd Israel and the Kurds are won. And
Speaker 1: first of all, I want to warn you. I want
Speaker 1: to warn you that we have an advertising breakcoming. Robert
Speaker 1: is what I want to warn you about.
Speaker 2: Oh well, speaking of well, actually not speaking of the IDF, thankfully,
Speaker 2: but speaking about maybe the California State Highway Patrol. Here's
Speaker 2: some ads we're back.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Firstly, I think when you're seeing analysis about Syria, any
Speaker 1: when he talks about things in terms of these monolithic blocks,
Speaker 1: this Israeli counts, often we will support the Kurds. I
Speaker 1: would be sometimes I'll maybe use that to refer to
Speaker 1: A and E S or the SDF. But I really
Speaker 1: trend on too because it's a multi ethnic project. Right,
Speaker 1: like the areas that we'll talk about in a minute
Speaker 1: where the SDF is being attacked those areas, the largest
Speaker 1: component of the SDF is is Arab, yeah, forces right,
Speaker 1: and that that is the case in the SDF as
Speaker 1: a whole. Actually, the majority of the SDF is now Arab,
Speaker 1: not not Kurdish. I would be very skeptic of the
Speaker 1: expertise of anyone who refers to things in these monolithic absolutes, right,
Speaker 1: the Sunnis, the Shias, yeah, the alah Whites, the Kurds.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of different groups in Syria, and
Speaker 1: those groups are comprised of individuals, and those individuals shockingly
Speaker 1: have different and distinct goals and experiences and desires.
Speaker 4: Like there are.
Speaker 1: Absolutely al of whites who will have remained loyal to
Speaker 1: us sad there are others who, like the monstery did not,
Speaker 1: as we've seen in the last week, right, And so
Speaker 1: I would be skeptical of anyone who tries to paint
Speaker 1: things in those terms. And I would be skeptical, to
Speaker 1: return to what we were talking about earlier, Robert, of
Speaker 1: people who tell you that, like we should expect the
Speaker 1: one I see most is Syria to turn into Lebanon, right,
Speaker 1: And like you and I have been talking about this
Speaker 1: before we recorded, but that's not a useful example in
Speaker 1: my mind of what we're likely to see in Syria, right,
Speaker 1: And the reason for that is that like in Lebanon, yes,
Speaker 1: there was a there was like a US Air.
Speaker 4: Component, as there is in Syria. That's true.
Speaker 1: But I don't understand why we would look at the
Speaker 1: example of Lebanon, a place thousands of miles away, when
Speaker 1: we have at least two examples of governance in Syria, right,
Speaker 1: people who have been governing in one case for more
Speaker 1: than a decade significant.
Speaker 4: Parts of Syria. Like they have a government project.
Speaker 1: In the case of the ANS, I don't think it's
Speaker 1: fair to call it a state project. Like they would
Speaker 1: tell you that they're trying to build democracy without the state,
Speaker 1: which is something that which might not be popular with states, evidently,
Speaker 1: which doesn't let them the support of many states, as
Speaker 1: we've seen. But we have and with HDS in July
Speaker 1: and the Salvation government, Right, we have these two governance projects.
Speaker 1: They're extremely different, right. The Salvation Government under HDS is
Speaker 1: people have been arrested for playing music at their own weddings.
Speaker 1: It is, it is neither democratic nor particularly liberatory. And
Speaker 1: then we have the an S, which I would argue
Speaker 1: is the only democracy in the Middle East. Yeah, certainly,
Speaker 1: the only democracy where people of different ethnicities and genders
Speaker 1: matter the same amount.
Speaker 2: Yeah, certainly the only like multi ethnic democracy. Yes, in
Speaker 2: the Middle East. That's functional.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know you're you're straining the definition of democracy
Speaker 1: if you're constraining it by ethnicity, right, right, So I
Speaker 1: think you can make a good case for it being
Speaker 1: the only democracy in the Middle East. I saw this
Speaker 1: really atrocious BBC interview this morning. I'm trying to network.
Speaker 1: Some networks now have reporters on the ground in Damascus,
Speaker 1: and I've been trying to watch those to see sort
Speaker 1: of what's going on. It can be very hard to
Speaker 1: just get your news from telegram. Like I would also
Speaker 1: caution people who are perhaps new to this, who who
Speaker 1: are finding these telegram channels, to take everything you read
Speaker 1: on there with a pinch of salt. You'll see a
Speaker 1: lot of disinformation there. One of the BBC had an
Speaker 1: expert on and he was like, Oh, every time we
Speaker 1: see people pulling down statues of dictators, I'm a bit concerned,
Speaker 1: and like, I have to think about how to express this.
Speaker 1: It seems to me deeply as lamophobic or bigoted or racist.
Speaker 1: I don't quite know the white term to say. Oh,
Speaker 1: the people of this country and the places in the
Speaker 1: last ten twenty years where we've seen people pulling down
Speaker 1: statues of dictators have largely been in the Middle East
Speaker 1: right to say that, oh, these people are incapable of
Speaker 1: self governance, these people are incapable of living in peace
Speaker 1: with one another, But like they're not. We've seen that
Speaker 1: in Rajava, and I don't think that the right response
Speaker 1: now is to respond with skepticism to like the Syrian
Speaker 1: people's ability to live in peace. They've been at war
Speaker 1: for fifteen years, fourteen years, thirteen thirteen years, thirteen and
Speaker 1: a half years. But I think that there is not
Speaker 1: an appetite for more killing and more dying, certainly from
Speaker 1: what I've seen and what I've heard.
Speaker 2: No exhaustion is a factor here, Like you really cannot
Speaker 2: emphasize enough how long I mean, HTS and the SNA
Speaker 2: have been at this and how fucking tired, particularly like
Speaker 2: HTS has to be. Like this has been more than
Speaker 2: a decade of constant terror and violence. So I do
Speaker 2: think that that's going to be a factor, and like
Speaker 2: what happens next, I should hope it will be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean some things I don't know how to interpret. Right,
Speaker 1: HTS has asked the regime, police and authorities in cities
Speaker 1: to stay on Some of that is probably good, right,
Speaker 1: Like the people who ensure that the water gets pumped.
Speaker 1: I hope that they stay pumping the water. The people
Speaker 1: who were the police cybe regime. It's here an Arab republic.
Speaker 1: I don't want those people to stay on. I want
Speaker 1: those people to fuck off, and I want those people
Speaker 1: to be held accountable for the crimes that committed. But
Speaker 1: it doesn't point to sort of wild sectarian violence. We
Speaker 1: don't have the situation we had in Iraq, right, Right,
Speaker 1: we have a US occupation which sits inside its basis
Speaker 1: and it only leaves c biglely to kill people. Right
Speaker 1: from the perspective of the people living in Iraq, that
Speaker 1: that's what the US occupation looked like for the most part. Right,
Speaker 1: it's guys in big military vehicles who kill civilians by mistake.
Speaker 4: We don't have that here.
Speaker 1: There's not that resentment, generational resentment that allowed the Islamic
Speaker 1: state to grow there. Now, the Islamic state did grow
Speaker 1: through capturing a lot of state institutions, which is HTS
Speaker 1: is done. But I don't see that same resentment, and
Speaker 1: they don't see that same desire for sort of redemptive
Speaker 1: violence that we saw. That I might be wrong, right,
Speaker 1: that there might be more into communal violence. I have
Speaker 1: seen some videos of what looked like summary executions in
Speaker 1: Damascus today. That's very concerning.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But also I mean, look, there's some people who
Speaker 2: need to be summer really executed in.
Speaker 4: This you know. Yeah, if you've got to shoot someone,
Speaker 4: fuck it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: If you're looking at the photos of just like thousands
Speaker 2: of shoes and decomposed bodies, dissolved acid, its aid Naya prison,
Speaker 2: like you're liberating those places, you catch anyone who was
Speaker 2: working there. I'm not going to say that that's a
Speaker 2: bad thing to do. I might do the same thing,
Speaker 2: and there's that you in their circumstances.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I can't blame somewhere. I can understand someone doing that.
Speaker 2: What are you going to do?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I can understand that in the next few days
Speaker 1: they will probably be more of that violence, because we
Speaker 1: are literally in some cases opening the lid on some
Speaker 1: of the west crimes against humanity of this century.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, and they are going to be catching There
Speaker 2: are a lot of mok brat, you know, secret police
Speaker 2: guys who didn't get out, who were throwing on We've
Speaker 2: got videos of them leaving the palace throwing on civilian
Speaker 2: clothes yep, and I'm not going to be shocked if
Speaker 2: a lot of the justice process of that is ugly. Now,
Speaker 2: I do suspect that Joe Lannie is going to at
Speaker 2: least grab a chunk of those guys and do trials
Speaker 2: because he is really looking for state legitimacy, you know,
Speaker 2: and that's one way you get it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's his project now, But that's not going to
Speaker 1: be how all these guys go down. Some of these
Speaker 1: guys are going to die, and uh, yeah, they're just
Speaker 1: gonna get fucking got yeah. Yeah, And look, they got
Speaker 1: a lot of people they kind of had it coming
Speaker 1: to me and not particularly concerned about that. I'm more
Speaker 1: broadly concerned with, like what are you doing on the left?
Speaker 1: If you see people in the streets, you see people
Speaker 1: tearing down statues of dictators, you see people celebrating the
Speaker 1: end of a regime that oppressed them for decades, and
Speaker 1: you immediately go to, oh, this is bad, Like why
Speaker 1: do you even bother? If we don't believe that people
Speaker 1: can govern themselves, if we don't believe that the people
Speaker 1: in the street are normally the people who are right,
Speaker 1: and if we don't believe that the downfall of tyrannical
Speaker 1: regimes is.
Speaker 4: A good thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what what do you believe? You know, if you're
Speaker 2: just torturing it to be like, well no, you know,
Speaker 2: you and I both read that there was a post
Speaker 2: earlier today with someone being like these leftists purity politics,
Speaker 2: you know, to be angry that aside kept a lid
Speaker 2: on radical Islam and isis and just didn't do it
Speaker 2: super cleanly. And it's man, he was fucking guessing children,
Speaker 2: like what do you? Where are you here? Yeah? What
Speaker 2: is wrong with you? Come on? Man?
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is yeah, this is a person who drop
Speaker 1: chlorine gas on blocks of flats with little children in them, right, like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fuck this guy.
Speaker 1: It's good that he's gone. I wish he was dead.
Speaker 1: I'm sad that he gets to go and be an mphalmologist,
Speaker 1: like he, of all people, needs to be held accountable
Speaker 1: for his crimes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, some could have. We could have a song
Speaker 2: on Anteleirian kind of situation, right, Yeah, who's the Armenian
Speaker 2: who shot a member of the Turkey government in Berlin?
Speaker 2: Yeah we could have something like that, go down God willing?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you never know they yeah, I guess people
Speaker 1: there he's in Russia.
Speaker 2: Now he's in Russia.
Speaker 4: Someone will find him in his high end eye clinic
Speaker 4: one day.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's probably going to be going back and forth
Speaker 2: to Dubai. There's some Syrians who wound up in Dubai.
Speaker 2: Somebody might stab them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we can hope.
Speaker 1: But I want to take one more break talking of stabbing.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe we will get an advert for knives, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've never had a knife advert, have.
Speaker 2: We No, I don't know that we have. And I
Speaker 2: would sell the hell out of knives.
Speaker 1: Yeah, almost any knives, even crappy gas stach night, Like,
Speaker 1: if you make the ones that look like an oil slick,
Speaker 1: get in touch with the advertising department at iHeartMedia.
Speaker 4: We'll pimp them. All Right, we're back.
Speaker 1: The last thing I want to talk about, Robert, is
Speaker 1: how the rebels won, because there was not a lot
Speaker 1: of fighting after the collap Civil EPO, but before there
Speaker 1: was fighting, and in part how that fighting went I
Speaker 1: think led to the downfall of the morale of the
Speaker 1: Syriat army. Right, so there are some things here that
Speaker 1: both Robert and I are somewhat nerdy about about conflicts, right,
Speaker 1: like it there's something even when we're not attending was.
Speaker 1: We like to read about them, and you and I
Speaker 1: both take a great interest in history, and I think
Speaker 1: we'd be unwise to not look at this and learn
Speaker 1: from it, especially with HTS who massively professionalized since the
Speaker 1: ceasefire in twenty twenty. I think professionalists is probably the
Speaker 1: right word. Like that command, the technology, that the way
Speaker 1: they operated looked a lot more like a modern military
Speaker 1: than it did, you know, the militias, like I'm sure
Speaker 1: you and I both remember the early Syrian of a
Speaker 1: war for people who are a bit younger than us.
Speaker 1: Like some of the most incredible improvised weapons that I've seen.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, there was literally at one point they had
Speaker 2: an Ottoman era black powder or cannon on the back
Speaker 2: of a flatbed that they were using to hit regime positions.
Speaker 1: That they had literally taken out of the museum in
Speaker 1: a leopard to yaket it out of the museum.
Speaker 4: Fucking amazing stuff like theredible.
Speaker 2: Only I thought the top of like that sort of
Speaker 2: thing was when fucking insertance in Afghanistan would use seventeenth
Speaker 2: century Jazils to shoot at US troops. But the Ottoman
Speaker 2: cannon is really a was that's a flex.
Speaker 1: Yeah, with a huge flex they they also worked, you know,
Speaker 1: they fired propane cylinders out of huge tubes, these improvised
Speaker 1: motors they called hell cannons, Like really incredible and like
Speaker 1: it speaks to the ingenuity of people and their desire
Speaker 1: not to be oppressed, right, they desire to fight against
Speaker 1: state tyranny. But when we compare that to what we
Speaker 1: saw with HTS in twenty twenty four, a world of change. Right.
Speaker 1: In particular, I think it was very interesting that they
Speaker 1: captured armored vehicles and and they were able to combine
Speaker 1: armor and infantry very effectively, which is not easy to
Speaker 1: do right, that has eluded even some professional militaries. They
Speaker 1: also very effectively used drones, both drones to drop bombs
Speaker 1: and drones to adjust their artillery and mortifier, which I
Speaker 1: think is something that again like that modern militaries do,
Speaker 1: but it's not easy to do right, And it's not
Speaker 1: like HDS could do massive exercises in the lead up
Speaker 1: to this operation, like they seem to have professionalized very quickly.
Speaker 1: Another area that they were you can see that they've
Speaker 1: learned a lot from the conflicts in Ukraine and perhaps
Speaker 1: in Miammar too, was their use of FPV drones, a
Speaker 1: first person in view drone. How do you describe it.
Speaker 1: It's like your eyes are on the front of the drone.
Speaker 1: Is that a good description, Robert, Yeah, it's like you're flying.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And there are videos of whole classrooms of hts I guess, soldiers, militants,
Speaker 1: whatever you want, and called them practicing flying drones or
Speaker 1: using the controllers to play like a computer game where
Speaker 1: you have to like go through checkpoints and follow a
Speaker 1: route and things. And they seem to have developed like
Speaker 1: a training course that then gave them this drone brigade,
Speaker 1: which they used incredibly effectively. They had these massive first
Speaker 1: person view drones that were almost like a sort of
Speaker 1: Ersat's cruise missile, and it was I think one of
Speaker 1: those that penetrated some kind of command headquarters in Aleppo
Speaker 1: in the early days of the battle there, killed several
Speaker 1: important offices and commanders and helped to then spread that
Speaker 1: panic which they rode all the way to Damascus. Right, So,
Speaker 1: like this use of drones was extremely consequential. The other
Speaker 1: thing that they used in which we've seen the SDF
Speaker 1: use a lot, is these pulse art thermal optics. So
Speaker 1: a thermal optic sees heat, right, I guess would be
Speaker 1: the easiest way to describe it. And it maps heat
Speaker 1: in a visual fashion for the user, and in this case,
Speaker 1: they put them on their rifles and they're able to
Speaker 1: see other people. At our friend Carl, who we had
Speaker 1: on last week week before maybe Carl made a really
Speaker 1: good video about thermal versus night vision on his Arrange
Speaker 1: TV channel. I'll link it in the notes because I
Speaker 1: think it's worth people checking out. They're not familiar with
Speaker 1: this technology at all. The optics he used were not
Speaker 1: the optics they're using, but these thermal optics. You've seen
Speaker 1: them a lot with the SDF, especially in a freen
Speaker 1: like they'll do these night missions, right, and when you
Speaker 1: look at the recording from the thermal optic, it it
Speaker 1: looks like people are glowing because they are the hottest
Speaker 1: things in that area, and it makes it very easy
Speaker 1: to target people. And HDS us these a lot when
Speaker 1: they were attacking a LAPPA, right, these thermal optics that
Speaker 1: they mounted on their rifles, and they allowed them to
Speaker 1: pretty much. The United States used to talk about owning
Speaker 1: the night right. Yes, it had night vision where no
Speaker 1: one else does. Night Vision's proliferated a long way now,
Speaker 1: and that means that some of the ways that they
Speaker 1: used to use night vision they can't anymore. Like, for instance,
Speaker 1: they used to send out lasers that were any visible
Speaker 1: and the night vision to aim weapons. If your adversary
Speaker 1: has night vision as well, you've now created a giant
Speaker 1: line that goes right back to you if you're using
Speaker 1: a laser aiming device, So.
Speaker 4: You can't do that.
Speaker 1: But these thermal optics, especially when they're fighting against Assyrian
Speaker 1: Arabami who I mean, these conscripts are massively demoralized. Right,
Speaker 1: They're underpaid, they're under fed. Did you meet any when
Speaker 1: you were in Jab did you meet any people who defected?
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, I've met a number of people who had,
Speaker 2: and some who had also had to flee, like from
Speaker 2: Aleppo and whatnot, because they had been on like rebels
Speaker 2: fighting the Asad regime, and some had wound up in
Speaker 2: the SDF, some more just civilians living in the area.
Speaker 2: I also there's also a number of folks who commuted
Speaker 2: like to and from regime held territory just because like
Speaker 2: if you were someone that wasn't particularly wanted, you could
Speaker 2: do that. Yeah, it was a very confusing situation for
Speaker 2: a lot of people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, extremely And I think when you meet the people
Speaker 1: who have been regime soldiers and come across often they're
Speaker 1: like they seem to be happy being waiters or working
Speaker 1: in the mark in Risjaba because their pay was so
Speaker 1: bad and their lives were so miserable as conscripts that
Speaker 1: they'd rather just come and work, you know, any job
Speaker 1: they can get in ans. And I think when you've
Speaker 1: got those guys going up against well trained people from
Speaker 1: HTS with these thermal optics, with these using torones, that
Speaker 1: communications were solid. You know, you can tell from their
Speaker 1: appearance that a lot of these guys are professionalized. They
Speaker 1: were almost indistinguishable from US troops. Like I think you
Speaker 1: and I had both responded to this tweet about some
Speaker 1: YouTube guy was shocked that people were wearing helmets and
Speaker 1: body armor, which that has been the esthetic of violence,
Speaker 1: at least in places where the US has operated for
Speaker 1: I know, half a decade. Would you say, like the
Speaker 1: sort of US Special Forces?
Speaker 2: Look, yeah, I mean, and that's just the norm for
Speaker 2: dressing if you're fighting in a war anywhere on the
Speaker 2: planet now, yeh, Like, whether you're the Russian Army or
Speaker 2: some militia in Syria. It's you know, play carrier, usually
Speaker 2: like some sort of fast helmet, you've got you know,
Speaker 2: belt with sidearm mag pouches, and then usually either in
Speaker 2: akm or some sort of aar style weapon. Like everybody
Speaker 2: dresses that way. Everybody looks very similar. Yeah, now because
Speaker 2: it's just the most kind of I mean, number one,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of that gear lying around and it's cheap.
Speaker 2: And number two like it works, it's a load out
Speaker 2: that works.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's very practical. Yeah, for what they're doing.
Speaker 1: I think number three as well, like we should not
Speaker 1: understate the desire to look like your avatar and call
Speaker 1: of duty.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, it's also looks cool. It looks like being
Speaker 2: in a movie, and that is a that matters a
Speaker 2: lot to the kind of young men who start fighting
Speaker 2: in wars.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, people, I think if you've not been you won't
Speaker 1: realize how young a lot of these people are. This
Speaker 1: incredible professionalism or incredible professionism. I'm overstating it, but this
Speaker 1: dramatic change in the appearance and conduct of these rebels,
Speaker 1: particularly HTS, occurred over about three or four years from
Speaker 1: the cease fire in twenty twenty to this offensive in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four, and I think it gives us an
Speaker 1: insight into the way that war is changing, right, that
Speaker 1: access to information is easier than it ever has been,
Speaker 1: and access to a lot of these technologies has proliferated
Speaker 1: massively because we've seen in Myanmar, right, drones proliferate people
Speaker 1: three D print little night vision goggles in Memba. Spoke
Speaker 1: to Milk about it about a year and a half ago.
Speaker 1: People remember Milk from our Meanma series about three D
Speaker 1: printing little night vision goggles that use the camera from
Speaker 1: you know those security cameras, Yeah, that can kind of
Speaker 1: see at night. They use those and then a tiny
Speaker 1: LCD screen. Of course, drones are everywhere now, right, things
Speaker 1: like plate carriers even you see rebels in Meanma wearing them,
Speaker 1: buying them from Ali Express. Like all of the technology,
Speaker 1: all of the tactics are also much easier to find
Speaker 1: on the internet. You know, Robert and I have both
Speaker 1: spoken to people who go said they go on YouTube
Speaker 1: to learn about like military tactics and small arms even
Speaker 1: and you know, how to use different weapons systems when
Speaker 1: they capture them. I think it's a real change in
Speaker 1: the way that conflict is conducted, and it's one that
Speaker 1: we will probably continue to see as like, you know,
Speaker 1: the world isn't getting any more peaceful, Nope, and waste
Speaker 1: a lot of you know, Russia and Iran took a
Speaker 1: massive l in Syria. That doesn't mean that they're not
Speaker 1: gone as sort of global actors. We will continue to see,
Speaker 1: particularly Russia obviously fighting in Ukraine. And I think it's
Speaker 1: worth looking at what happened in Syria so that we
Speaker 1: can understand what we're going to see in other parts
Speaker 1: of the world.
Speaker 2: Yep. One of the ways I like to think about
Speaker 2: it that is crucial for people to understand is that
Speaker 2: Syria has largely been the laboratory in which the twenty
Speaker 2: first century was cooked up, Like all of our futures
Speaker 2: have to some extent been built in Syria. Both like
Speaker 2: this is where we get a lot of the fuel
Speaker 2: behind the right wing surge that has been occurring over
Speaker 2: the last few years, started because of the refugee crisis,
Speaker 2: you know, but also a lot of the tactics and
Speaker 2: weapons shit that like Israel is doing right now in Gaza,
Speaker 2: like Cereal, was the lab to a significant extent for
Speaker 2: how authoritarian regimes would crack down. And it was also
Speaker 2: the impetus behind a lot of the most significant things
Speaker 2: that have been happening over the last decade and change.
Speaker 4: So it might still be already.
Speaker 1: Yeah, siem and the Netherlands have stopped processing asylum applications
Speaker 1: from Syria, which is yeah, which is concerning yep. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's worth continuing to keep an eye on.
Speaker 1: I will continue to post about it, we will continue
Speaker 1: to inform you about it here, and we will continue
Speaker 1: to bring on people who have more expertise and insight
Speaker 1: than we do. So yeah, we hope you'll keep an
Speaker 1: eye on it. And I just want to end by
Speaker 1: saying that like the democratic project in Rojava is under
Speaker 1: a great deal of threat, Yes, currently more than it
Speaker 1: has been for perhaps a decade.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: They do not have an ally in the United States.
Speaker 1: They do not, as far as we know, have an
Speaker 1: ally in Israel. And from what we've seen, it's one
Speaker 1: thing what Israel says, it's another thing what Israel does,
Speaker 1: and what Israel has been doing today is bombing ammunition
Speaker 1: that they already have in the Anes, and that means
Speaker 1: that it's more important than ever that you do what
Speaker 1: you can to support them. If you go to the
Speaker 1: Emergency Committee for a JAVA, you can find them online.
Speaker 1: You find them on all different kinds of social media.
Speaker 1: They have a toolkit for supporting JAVA right now, I
Speaker 1: would urge you if you care about that project, if
Speaker 1: you care about building democracy without the state, care about
Speaker 1: building a place where women and men are equal. And
Speaker 1: the revolution was led by women, it's not a revolution
Speaker 1: that include women, it's revolution by women for women. I
Speaker 1: would encourage you to do what you can to support them.
Speaker 4: All right, yep, that's all.
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, Robert Evans here and this is it could
Speaker 2: happen here. Obviously. One of the things that's been happening here,
Speaker 2: probably the biggest story of the last week or so
Speaker 2: at least, is the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian
Speaker 2: Thompson by an alleged shooter named Luigi Mangione. Meggione is
Speaker 2: an interesting character. People have had a lot to say
Speaker 2: about him, and so I went through his online footprint,
Speaker 2: everything I can find on his social media, and I
Speaker 2: wrote an article for my substack, shatter Zone, and I'm
Speaker 2: going to be reading that in a slightly amended form
Speaker 2: for you now as today's episode. I've spent much of
Speaker 2: the last ten years reading manifestos and being a fly
Speaker 2: on the wall in different little online boltholes where extremists
Speaker 2: plan and seek to incite mass shootings. When Luigi Mangione,
Speaker 2: the suspected shooter of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was
Speaker 2: arrested at a McDonald's, it didn't take long for digital
Speaker 2: sleuths to put together a comprehensive record of his online activity.
Speaker 2: I will tell you now that nothing he read or
Speaker 2: posted explains why he gunned down an insurance executive better
Speaker 2: than this single image in the background of his Twitter
Speaker 2: profile and the images, of course, of an X ray
Speaker 2: showing four screws in someone's lower base spine, apparently due
Speaker 2: to a lumbar spinal fusion surgery. The day after I
Speaker 2: wrote this article, The New York Times published a piece
Speaker 2: after finding Luigi's read it. The piece by Mike Baker,
Speaker 2: Mike Isaac, and my old boss at Bellancat, Eric Tohller,
Speaker 2: confirms that he had a spinal fusion surgery, that he
Speaker 2: had dealt with back pain for years, which had been
Speaker 2: minor and then gotten much worse after a surfing injury,
Speaker 2: and had grown even worse after slipping on a piece
Speaker 2: of paper caused persistent problems, including pain when he sat down,
Speaker 2: twitching leg muscles, and numbness in his growing in bladder.
Speaker 2: According to The New York Times, he had that spinal
Speaker 2: fusion surgery, which he had been deeply frightened of ahead
Speaker 2: of time, but which resolved those symptoms, and then he
Speaker 2: continued to have other symptoms, probably unrelated to the back pain.
Speaker 2: It's unclear if the back pain came back, but what
Speaker 2: is clear is that he wrote constantly online about pain
Speaker 2: and about his struggles with various other health issues, including
Speaker 2: a persistent brain fog that he seemed unable to get
Speaker 2: care for. His friend R Jay, who lived with him
Speaker 2: at an intentional community for digital workers in Honolulu starting
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty two, confirms that Luigi suffered an injury
Speaker 2: shortly after taking a basic surfing class after moving there.
Speaker 2: This laid him up in bed for about a week,
Speaker 2: unable to move. His friends had to seek the special
Speaker 2: bed to help him with the pain. In general, we
Speaker 2: have ample confirmation that he was someone who dealt with
Speaker 2: a series of escalating health issues that changed him from
Speaker 2: an extremely active, physically fit young man into somebody who
Speaker 2: felt like they were no longer able to do or
Speaker 2: enjoy the things they had previously been able to do
Speaker 2: and enjoy. Now this is most of what we know
Speaker 2: about the health history of Luigi Mangione as of December tenth.
Speaker 2: Now when I record this twenty twenty four. As I
Speaker 2: write this, a purported manifesto is making the rounds online
Speaker 2: which discusses health issues his mother faced. It's still unclear
Speaker 2: if that manifesto is real. kN Klippenstein has finally gotten
Speaker 2: access to what he claims is the draft of the
Speaker 2: manifesto that the shooter had on him when he was
Speaker 2: arrested by the police. I don't know if that's a
Speaker 2: manifesto or something he wrote while nervous, because he largely
Speaker 2: addresses the cops in it and tells them you know
Speaker 2: what to expect when searching him. But again, at the moment,
Speaker 2: this purported manifesto that was also posted on substack, very
Speaker 2: unclear as to whether or not that's real. So for
Speaker 2: this today, we're going to stick with what we can verify,
Speaker 2: and what we can verify is that Luigi Mangione suffered
Speaker 2: from chronic back pain. He had five different books in
Speaker 2: his Goodreads that he read about dealing with back pain
Speaker 2: and healing from back pain, as well as other chronic
Speaker 2: health issues. If he is the shooter, then we can
Speaker 2: confirm he also chose to act out by targeting and
Speaker 2: insurance CEO. The New York Times has stated that he
Speaker 2: was arrested with a two hundred and sixty two word
Speaker 2: manifesto which has since been leaked, and in that manifesto,
Speaker 2: he describes the executives who run insurance companies as parasites
Speaker 2: who quote continue to abuse our country for I mince
Speaker 2: profit because the American public has allowed them to get
Speaker 2: away with it. In addition to all this, we know
Speaker 2: that Luigi came from a wealthy family. His grandfather made
Speaker 2: millions running a series of country clubs, nursing homes and
Speaker 2: office buildings and hospitals. One of his cousins is a
Speaker 2: Republican state legislator. It is unclear if Luigi had any
Speaker 2: access to the family money, but he was clearly financially
Speaker 2: comfortable enough to move to Hawaii and pay to join
Speaker 2: an intentional community. He had engineering degrees and a promising
Speaker 2: early employment history. This is a man who had options.
Speaker 2: He could have been almost anything he wanted to be,
Speaker 2: and the thing that he ultimately chose to do with
Speaker 2: his life after suffering a debilitating series of health issues
Speaker 2: was to shoot the CEO of United Healthcare, Luigi Mangione.
Speaker 2: Radicalized by pain. It's a well known fact that most
Speaker 2: terrorists tend to be radicalized in communities. Much of my
Speaker 2: career was spent watching eight chan turn from an imageboard
Speaker 2: dedicated into gamer gate into a machine for generating white
Speaker 2: nationalists mass shooters. These people often appeared as lone wolves
Speaker 2: to the untrained eye, but they were radicalized intentionally in
Speaker 2: and by a community. Much will be made in the
Speaker 2: coming days and months about Luigi's online footprints. I will
Speaker 2: go into some detail about where he spent his time
Speaker 2: and how we should characterize it, but I want to
Speaker 2: be clear at the outset that his intellectual diet does
Speaker 2: not seem to be what made him choose to take action,
Speaker 2: although it may have influenced the specific kind of action
Speaker 2: he took. Luigi followed a lot of accounts on Twitter
Speaker 2: that are wildly popular with young men, like Joe Rogan.
Speaker 2: He listened to Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson and agreed
Speaker 2: with them on certain things, but he also had cogent
Speaker 2: criticisms of their arguments and presentation. Here's what he said
Speaker 2: about Jordan Peterson on May fourteenth. This is why Jordan
Speaker 2: Peterson always bothers me. Overcomplicates everything he says aloud, wasting
Speaker 2: everyone's mental bandwidth and having to decipher it. The best
Speaker 2: teachers are the best communicators, clear, succinct, simple language, which
Speaker 2: does kind of gel with the fact that he wrote
Speaker 2: three words on the bullets he used to shoot that Ceo.
Speaker 2: Luigi also expressed frustration with wokeness and expressed opinions common
Speaker 2: on the libertarian tech influenced right, like a belief in
Speaker 2: the social benefits of Christianity, without expressing popular religious beliefs himself.
Speaker 2: I've found one post where he talks about how nature
Speaker 2: abhors a vacuum and shares an article about how Christianity's
Speaker 2: decline has unleashed terrible new gods. Some of his posts
Speaker 2: took the form of memes typical to online discourse of
Speaker 2: this type, but I've also read an essay that he
Speaker 2: wrote when he was fifteen years old, discussing how Christianity
Speaker 2: persevere over paganism in ancient Rome and that essay exhibits
Speaker 2: a long standing interest in this topic and a capacity
Speaker 2: to treat it with nuance. His paper is very well written,
Speaker 2: particularly for a fifteen year old, and while his conclusions
Speaker 2: are highly arguable, it's not the work of someone hopelessly
Speaker 2: brainwashed by culture war bullshit. Luigi liked to think and
Speaker 2: read and come to his own conclusions. He was interested
Speaker 2: in AI, in cryptocurrency, in life extension, and in a
Speaker 2: constellation of tech bro adjacent attitudes and philosophies often described
Speaker 2: as the Gray Tribe. I found one post where he
Speaker 2: talks about a senior speech he gave on the Future
Speaker 2: quote topics ranging from conscious artificial intelligence to human immortality.
Speaker 2: The term gray tribe was coined by an influential rationalist
Speaker 2: blogger and psychiatrist named Scott Alexander Siskin. He used it
Speaker 2: to refer to an intersection of nerd culture with Silicon
Speaker 2: Valley influenced ideology descending from the online rationalist movement. This
Speaker 2: community existed outside of traditional right left eye ideology. Now
Speaker 2: I've not found any evidence that Luigi was a specific
Speaker 2: fan of Scott, but he expressed appreciation for several figures
Speaker 2: associated with this big tent movement, including Peter Teel. If
Speaker 2: we describe Scott as representing the more liberal flank of
Speaker 2: the Gray Tribe, Luigi seemed to be drawn to folks
Speaker 2: closer to the right wing side of things. The worst
Speaker 2: person to use this terminology would probably be Teal associate
Speaker 2: Bilaji Shrinivasan, who has used Gray Tribe framework to describe
Speaker 2: his ideal big tech takeover of San Francisco and purging
Speaker 2: of progressives. However, I must stress that Luigi Mangione never
Speaker 2: expressed any support for this end of the ideology that
Speaker 2: I can find. He was a young man of libertarian
Speaker 2: inclinations who worked in big tech and had ties to
Speaker 2: San Francisco, but he was also clearly someone still making
Speaker 2: his mind up about the world. As information about him
Speaker 2: has come out, I have seen people on the left
Speaker 2: who initially saw his axis heroic lament that he was
Speaker 2: a bigoted tech bro. Scott Alexander has been credibly described
Speaker 2: as a eugenic supporter, as have many other people adjacent
Speaker 2: to the strains of rationalism and big tech ideology in
Speaker 2: which Mangione dabbled. Luigia's Twitter account does indeed include weird
Speaker 2: posts from his time in Japan, where he theorizes on
Speaker 2: how to solve falling birth rates by banning pocket pussies
Speaker 2: and video game cafes. At other points, he complains about
Speaker 2: Japanese citizens acting like quote unquote NPC's but race science
Speaker 2: and eugenics don't seem to have been a focus for him,
Speaker 2: and I would caution anyone against being overly reductive about
Speaker 2: a twenty six year old beliefs based purely on a
Speaker 2: handful of posts that bear no relation to his actions
Speaker 2: in the world. The evidence that we have of his
Speaker 2: online footprints suggests someone who was not unmoved by certain
Speaker 2: arguments rooted in social justice. He expressed admiration for a
Speaker 2: quote from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse five about criminalization of poverty
Speaker 2: in the United States. Quote America is the wealthiest nation
Speaker 2: in the world, but its people are mainly poor, and
Speaker 2: poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the
Speaker 2: American humorist Ken Hubbard, it ain't no disgrace to be poor,
Speaker 2: but it might as well be. It is, in fact
Speaker 2: a crime for an American to be poor. Even though
Speaker 2: America is a nation of the poor, every other nation
Speaker 2: has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely
Speaker 2: wise and virtuous, and therefore more esteemable than anyone with
Speaker 2: power and gold. No such tales are told by the
Speaker 2: American poor. Neluigi is certainly not the idealized leftist icons
Speaker 2: some had hoped, but he doesn't easily fit into any
Speaker 2: other box. We've got. His interest in gray tribe adjacent
Speaker 2: thinkers and self help books written by productivity hackers like
Speaker 2: Tim Ferriss is incredibly common among young men. Much has
Speaker 2: been made of the four st Hour Review. He gave
Speaker 2: industrial society and its future the manifesto of Ted Kazinski,
Speaker 2: But as with the rest of his media diet, he
Speaker 2: did not view Ted through the simple lens of hero worship.
Speaker 2: Here's what he wrote quote, he was a violent individual,
Speaker 2: rightfully imprisoned, who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend
Speaker 2: to be characterized as those of a crazy Luddite, however
Speaker 2: they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme
Speaker 2: political revolutionary. I know those words his condemnation of Kazinsky
Speaker 2: maiming innocent people are not just words, because we have
Speaker 2: seen the attack he allegedly chose to carry out, not
Speaker 2: a series of bombings that killed and maimed innocent people
Speaker 2: with no real power in our society, but a surgical
Speaker 2: strike against a man at the very top of the
Speaker 2: system he hated, and one that caused no collateral damage.
Speaker 2: He was capable of appreciating some of Kazinsky's conclusions, but
Speaker 2: ultimately the quote he chose to highlight in his review
Speaker 2: came not from the manifesto, but from a Reddit post
Speaker 2: made by a guy with the user name boss Potatoess,
Speaker 2: who otherwise mostly commented on the Grateful Dead. This post
Speaker 2: praises Kazinsky for having the balls to realize that peaceful
Speaker 2: protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere, and complains economic protest
Speaker 2: isn't possible in the current system. As a result, violence
Speaker 2: against those who lead us to such destruction is justified
Speaker 2: as self defense. Quote. These companies don't care about you,
Speaker 2: or your kids or your grandkids. They have zero qualms
Speaker 2: about burning down the planet for a buck, so why
Speaker 2: should we have an equalms about burning them down to survive.
Speaker 2: This is not the kind of radicalization pathway our media
Speaker 2: is good at discussing or analyzing. The things Luigi read
Speaker 2: and the people he interacted with online absolutely influenced what
Speaker 2: he did and how but Boss Potatoess is not some
Speaker 2: nazi on eight Chan trying to provoke a shooting spree
Speaker 2: for the lulls. He's a random dude angry about the
Speaker 2: things seventy percent or more of the country is angry about,
Speaker 2: and he's expressing a lack of faith in a peaceful
Speaker 2: way forward. If you read this post in its entirety
Speaker 2: as Luigi did, you can't miss the pain there, anxiety
Speaker 2: and horror at the inevitability of climate change and the
Speaker 2: looming knowledge that everything good and green on this earth
Speaker 2: is being fed into the bloody maw of an industry
Speaker 2: concerned only with maximizing profit. In more ways than one,
Speaker 2: Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. I know many people
Speaker 2: who suffer with chronic pain and ongoing medical issues. I
Speaker 2: will tell you that it is not uncommon, in dark moments,
Speaker 2: after fruitless, hours long calls about dropped medications or receiving
Speaker 2: surprise bills, for them to joke about what they'd like
Speaker 2: to do to the executives who run these companies. These
Speaker 2: are jokes made in moments of despair and pain. No
Speaker 2: one I know would ever act on them, because they
Speaker 2: all have lives. People to care for into whom they
Speaker 2: are responsible, they would never really do anything because the
Speaker 2: consequences to their own loved ones would be so severe.
Speaker 2: In the months before the shooting, Luigi had cut off
Speaker 2: all contact with his family. He admitted this in court.
Speaker 2: His parents eventually filed a missing's persons report in November
Speaker 2: of this year, and we have evidence that friends tried
Speaker 2: to contact him on his family's behalf via social media.
Speaker 2: As was first noted by a Twitter account, Luigi Mangione
Speaker 2: expressed interest in the works of Paul Scalis, a tech lawyer, writer,
Speaker 2: and prominent poster who writes about the Lindie effect, a
Speaker 2: concept that boils down to this the only effective joke
Speaker 2: of things is time. Scalus is popular among the set
Speaker 2: of people Magngione found himself drawn towards and writes about
Speaker 2: the wisdom of ideas from antiquity. It's not hard to
Speaker 2: grasp what a man with an academic interest in ancient
Speaker 2: realm might see in him. On December fourth, twenty twenty four,
Speaker 2: Paul made this post. Look, if you don't have any
Speaker 2: kids and you want of these guys just floating around
Speaker 2: the big cities. You got your education, but you never
Speaker 2: really used it. To make money. You got a dead
Speaker 2: end back office job and a future of just working
Speaker 2: somewhere until you're seventy five and then dying, Go ahead
Speaker 2: and do something. It's been suggested that this may have
Speaker 2: influenced Luigi, and I think the timeline makes it clear
Speaker 2: that cannot be the case. Luigia cut off contact with
Speaker 2: his family in most of his friends months before this.
Speaker 2: The evidence suggests that he had planned this attack for
Speaker 2: quite some time. He arrived in New York City on
Speaker 2: November twenty fourth, on a bus bound from Atlanta, where
Speaker 2: he did not reside. So I don't think this post
Speaker 2: represents a piece of his radicalization journey. Nor was Scalus
Speaker 2: advocating for people to kill CEOs. But the situation in
Speaker 2: mindset Scallus described does speak to a lot of young
Speaker 2: men like Luigi, young and educated, but without intense responsibilities
Speaker 2: or much hope for the future. This subset of society
Speaker 2: has always overproduced terrorists, revolutionaries, and of course, mass shooters.
Speaker 2: The United States has a mass shooter culture over the
Speaker 2: last several decades since Columbine, we have grown used to
Speaker 2: the idea that people who are angry and no longer
Speaker 2: care if they live or die will sometimes choose to
Speaker 2: go down killing strangers. In most cases, these shootings are
Speaker 2: totally random, the victims chosen with no concern beyond maximum
Speaker 2: body count and maximum attention. More recently, especially since twenty nineteen,
Speaker 2: mass shootings have become increasingly politicized. Different extremists, mostly right wing,
Speaker 2: have used them to put theory into praxis and earned
Speaker 2: free pr for their causes. Most people abhor these actions,
Speaker 2: but we have grown used to the idea that other
Speaker 2: people will use such acts as a way to spread
Speaker 2: messages that might otherwise getting gnat It is not coincidental
Speaker 2: that the white genocide conspiracy theories from Brenton Terrence christ
Speaker 2: Church Manifesto are now mainstream talking points and conservative politics.
Speaker 2: Luigimanngione grew up with all of this. He would have
Speaker 2: come to the same conclusions about the role shootings play
Speaker 2: in our society as any other reasonably aware person. What
Speaker 2: he did, was, of course, not a mass shooting, but
Speaker 2: the assassination, his actions afterwards, and his possession of a
Speaker 2: manifesto were all clearly plotted out by someone who knew
Speaker 2: the social script for how this kind of thing goes
Speaker 2: in the USA. In the wake of this shooting. Every
Speaker 2: media organization commenting on it has had to grapple with
Speaker 2: the waves of public enthusiasm for Luigi's actions. Right wing
Speaker 2: media figures condemning the left for celebrating this assassination have
Speaker 2: been criticized by their own readers and listeners. Insurance companies
Speaker 2: have pulled down lists of their executives from the Internet.
Speaker 2: This is because they too, understand the shooter culture of
Speaker 2: the United States. Like everyone else, they know that any
Speaker 2: mass shooting that meets with massive media coverage and in
Speaker 2: nas trist will spawn copycats. The assassination Luigi is believed
Speaker 2: to have carried out was new and exciting. It demanded
Speaker 2: the public's attention in a way that most mass shootings don't.
Speaker 2: At almost the same time, the United Healthcare CEO was
Speaker 2: gunned down, a gunman walked into a religious school near Oreville, California,
Speaker 2: and shot two young children before killing himself. This shooting
Speaker 2: drew almost no national attention. It was entirely drowned out
Speaker 2: by the execution of an insurance industry ceo. The armed
Speaker 2: and disaffected young men who are most drawn to this
Speaker 2: sort of thing will not miss this fact. I believe
Speaker 2: Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. The shooters who follow
Speaker 2: him will all have their own reasons for what they
Speaker 2: do for their own journeys to that violent end, but
Speaker 2: ultimately they'll do what they do because Luigi proved it's
Speaker 2: what gets attention.
Speaker 5: For Now, welcome to it could Happen here, a podcast
Speaker 5: where I your host Miya Wong, talks about inflation. We
Speaker 5: have covered inflation on this show extensively, and now it
Speaker 5: is once again time to return to it as we
Speaker 5: head into a world where concerns about inflation and the
Speaker 5: economy are the most cited justifications for people voting for
Speaker 5: one Donald Trump. But unlike our other Oh God, had
Speaker 5: so many episodes about inflation, this one is going to
Speaker 5: be a bit different. Is going to start out somewhat
Speaker 5: similar in that I am going to lay out a
Speaker 5: brief explanation of the sort of material causes of the
Speaker 5: inflation cycle and talk a bit about inflation theories, which
Speaker 5: is what we've been largely doing on this show for
Speaker 5: a while. And then I am going to explain why
Speaker 5: none of that shit mattered, why none of what was
Speaker 5: actually causing inflation mattered a single bit, because ultimately our
Speaker 5: experience of inflation and more importantly, of price in general,
Speaker 5: is based on a sense of justice, or as the
Speaker 5: academics call it, a moral economy, and not on anything
Speaker 5: that's sort of going on. So let's begin with what
Speaker 5: is going on with inflation.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 5: As we've discussed before on this show, most economists do
Speaker 5: not understand why inflation happens. People will take theories. Those
Speaker 5: theories are usually quite bad. There is no mainstream consensus
Speaker 5: on what is going on. As both me and my
Speaker 5: friends at the magazine Strange Matters have pointed out, former
Speaker 5: Federal Reserve Governor Daniel Tarulo said quote, the substantive point
Speaker 5: is that we do not at present have a theory
Speaker 5: of inflation dynamics that work sufficiently well to be of
Speaker 5: use for the business of real time monetary policy making.
Speaker 5: So again, this is a guy who used to be
Speaker 5: a Federal Reserve governor who has admitted that they have
Speaker 5: no idea what the fuck is going on within inflation.
Speaker 5: Looking at the extent to which people don't know what's
Speaker 5: going on to inflation and how the various theories simply
Speaker 5: don't work is a large part of Steve Mann's notes
Speaker 5: towards the theory of inflation, which is a Strange Matter's
Speaker 5: article that a lot of this will be pulled from.
Speaker 5: And we've had Ze on the talk about this before.
Speaker 5: So there are a lot of theories about inflation, and
Speaker 5: none of them work very well. Inflation on a fundamental
Speaker 5: level is just prices going up. People have this tendency
Speaker 5: to think about inflation in terms of the value of
Speaker 5: money going down, but on a pure level, all inflation
Speaker 5: says is that prices go up. Now, the most common
Speaker 5: theory of inflation is inflation is based on there being
Speaker 5: too much money in the economy. And the thing about
Speaker 5: those theories is that they don't work outside of like
Speaker 5: a very few specific examples of hyperinflation that loom large
Speaker 5: over our understanding of what inflation is, even though they
Speaker 5: have absolutely quantitatively and theoretically, they have absolutely nothing to
Speaker 5: do with the inflation that we've seen over the past
Speaker 5: four years. So instead of talking about that Shaite anymore,
Speaker 5: Man and the Strange Matter's crew developed what they call
Speaker 5: the supply chain theory of inflation. So I'm going to
Speaker 5: read the quote from Notes Towards the Theory of Inflation.
Speaker 5: As economist JW. And Mason recently remarked, on his website.
Speaker 5: Inflation is just an increase in prices. So for every
Speaker 5: theory of price setting, there's a corresponding theory of inflation.
Speaker 5: If inflation theory is downstream of price setting, this is
Speaker 5: still a quote from that article, but not the JW.
Speaker 5: Maansing quote. If inflation is downstream of price theory, then
Speaker 5: no account of inflation can begin with the macro economy
Speaker 5: at all, since prices are set at the micro level. Rather,
Speaker 5: you need to look at particular industrial sectors, their supply chains,
Speaker 5: and ultimately the pricing decisions of their firms. Only then
Speaker 5: are the true causes of inflation, both the internal failures
Speaker 5: of the industrial system and external shocks to it which
Speaker 5: can cause price rises revealed. Man's price theory is fairly simple, right.
Speaker 5: It flows from the basic observation that prices are set
Speaker 5: by guys in offices, not by something you know abstract
Speaker 5: as like market forces and supply and demand. In economic terms,
Speaker 5: what this argument amounts to is the argument that corporations
Speaker 5: are price makers and not price takers. Right, there's a
Speaker 5: bunch of guys they sit in offices and develop a
Speaker 5: strategy of but what prices are going to be? And
Speaker 5: that's you know, how they're set, and what matters to
Speaker 5: the people who develop prices are things like goodwill, which
Speaker 5: is to say, not pissing off their customers by raising prices,
Speaker 5: and things like their balance sheets which reflect, you know,
Speaker 5: their incomes and costs. Price in this model is just
Speaker 5: cost plus markup. And we know this is how prices
Speaker 5: are actually set because, as Man points out, people have
Speaker 5: gone through and done surveys of pricing managers and ask
Speaker 5: them how they set prices and the answer is costless workup.
Speaker 5: So what would cause these guys in offices to increase
Speaker 5: their prices, Well, these are companies that are all part
Speaker 5: of a global supply chain, a very very broad global
Speaker 5: supply chain, and a very complicated global supply chain. This
Speaker 5: means that if the cost of the stuff they buy
Speaker 5: from other suppliers on the chain in order to produce
Speaker 5: what they're selling, if those prices go up, because there is,
Speaker 5: to use a purely hypothetical example, a giant global pandemic,
Speaker 5: those costs increases eventually had to be passed down to
Speaker 5: the people paying the products, so that the corporation can
Speaker 5: maintain its balance sheets and maintain its sort of price
Speaker 5: plus markup as something that you know, covers their costs.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: This is what set off the giant inflation spike in
Speaker 5: the US and the Biden administration. You know, the cost
Speaker 5: side of cost plus markup exploded.
Speaker 4: But it doesn't really.
Speaker 5: Matter why the prices increased for our purposes, and our
Speaker 5: purposes are looking at sort of why Trump won the election.
Speaker 5: What was important, you know, about inflation wasn't even the
Speaker 5: price increases, It was the narratives around inflation and how
Speaker 5: we understand the economy at a moral level. So that
Speaker 5: we're going to turn to one of the most popular
Speaker 5: accounts of inflation, so called greedflation. Now, as we've said,
Speaker 5: price is cost plus markup, and you can raise prices
Speaker 5: because of cost, but you can also do this because
Speaker 5: you want to increase your markup. And this is something
Speaker 5: that happened during the inflation search. Companies realized that consumers
Speaker 5: were willing to accept higher prices without the usual good
Speaker 5: will hit because they thought the prices were going up
Speaker 5: because inflation was happening, and because they were willing to
Speaker 5: accept the higher prices and not you know, try to
Speaker 5: shop somewhere else, corporations went, fuck it, let's just keep
Speaker 5: jacking the prices up, and this really really pissed people off.
Speaker 5: It still does, and this is something that was true
Speaker 5: across the entire political spectrum.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: People were very, very angry about this sort of reflation thing.
Speaker 5: And that rage is more important than the technical details
Speaker 5: of why inflation happened, because the way we understand inflation
Speaker 5: is not through conventional economics. We understand it through the
Speaker 5: moral economy. And when we come back from a different
Speaker 5: kind of economy, which is to say, this ad break,
Speaker 5: we are going to examine what the moral economy is,
Speaker 5: how it differs from our sort of regular economy, where
Speaker 5: it came from, and why it's relevant to our situation now.
Speaker 5: And we are so back, all right, let's talk about
Speaker 5: the moral economy. The moral economy is a concept developed
Speaker 5: by the British historian E. P. Thompson in the early
Speaker 5: nineteen seventies. Thompson was attempting to explain the previous century
Speaker 5: and a half of bread riots by what he termed
Speaker 5: the English crowd by applying anthropological principles to their actions.
Speaker 5: I'm just going to read from Thompson's The Moral Economy
Speaker 5: of the English Crowd here. It is, of course true
Speaker 5: that riots were triggered off by soaring prices, by malpractice
Speaker 5: among dealers, or by hunger. But these grievances operated within
Speaker 5: a popular consensus as to what we're legitimate and what
Speaker 5: we're illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, baking, et cetera. This,
Speaker 5: in its turn, was grounded upon a consistent traditional view
Speaker 5: of social norms and obligations of the proper economic function
Speaker 5: of several parties within the community, which, when taken together,
Speaker 5: can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor.
Speaker 5: In outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as
Speaker 5: actual deprivation was the usual occasion for direct action. Now,
Speaker 5: the moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth
Speaker 5: century is about a very specific period in British history,
Speaker 5: which is to say, the seventeen hundreds, and about how
Speaker 5: people thought bread should be sold. Peasants and the new
Speaker 5: urban workers had very specific ideas about bread, about how
Speaker 5: bread should be produced, about who should be allowed to
Speaker 5: sell it, about where and when they should be allowed
Speaker 5: to sell it, about how it should be sold, how.
Speaker 4: It should not be sold.
Speaker 5: And because of this, you know, because of their experience
Speaker 5: in sort of previous systems, that before the sort of
Speaker 5: imposition of the free market system or quote unquote free
Speaker 5: market system. They have a very specific series of hatreds.
Speaker 5: They hate middlemen, they hate grainhoarders, they hate all of
Speaker 5: the aspects of the new quote unquote free market that
Speaker 5: impose additional costs and burdens on them. And they also
Speaker 5: believed that elites have a kind of moral duty to
Speaker 5: the masses based on the norms and traditions of their society.
Speaker 5: And when they welch on that deal in a way
Speaker 5: that makes people's lives worse, people get extremely pissed off.
Speaker 5: These peasants, and you know, urban workers particularly hated price increases,
Speaker 5: and they hated price increases so much that this frequently
Speaker 5: turned into riots. But the actual contents of these riots
Speaker 5: are very interesting. Instead of simply seizing all of the grain,
Speaker 5: they do something else entirely. Here's Thompson again.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 5: The central action in this pattern is not the sack
Speaker 5: of grainaries in grain or flour, but the action of
Speaker 5: quote setting the price. From a few lines later, they
Speaker 5: might then order the farmer just end quote convenient quantities
Speaker 5: to market to be sold quote and at a quote
Speaker 5: reasonable price. The justices were further empowered to quote set
Speaker 5: down a certain price upon a bushel of every kind
Speaker 5: of grain. So, if you follow this here, right, what's
Speaker 5: happening in these British bread riots is that the revolt
Speaker 5: isn't just about their you know, being a price to grain.
Speaker 5: It's that people have a very very specific moral understanding
Speaker 5: of what the price of grain should be, and they
Speaker 5: take direct actions that are designed to set the price
Speaker 5: of grain to the level they thought it should rest at.
Speaker 5: And this kind of action is extremely common sort of
Speaker 5: across Europe in this entire time period. Right, it's also
Speaker 5: a hallmark of the French Revolution. You can see in
Speaker 5: this right, in this sort of rage of a price
Speaker 5: in the sense of justice, the outlines of our current
Speaker 5: moral economy. You have, you know, staggering outrage's price inclerease
Speaker 5: is seen as on jests, which is reflation or just
Speaker 5: inflation in general, because people are just mad about the
Speaker 5: concept of the price going up, paired with rage at
Speaker 5: the elites, which manifests the sort of hatred of Joe
Speaker 5: Biden the Democrats for being the people who presided over
Speaker 5: these price increases. We also have our own rage about
Speaker 5: price gouging in immediate market terms. And this is something
Speaker 5: that the most annoying libertarians and the defenders of the
Speaker 5: market love to point out. There's nothing actually wrong by
Speaker 5: market economics about say Martin Skrelly jacking the price of
Speaker 5: medicine up until you can't afford it anymore, or you know,
Speaker 5: other things that we find extremely terrible, like people jacking
Speaker 5: the price of water when people need water, like bottled
Speaker 5: water dreat hurricanes. We are all outraged, So why do
Speaker 5: we feel morally strong about it? And that is the
Speaker 5: moral economy. Maybe this is something that you know, these
Speaker 5: these reactions, right, the emotional reactions we have to this,
Speaker 5: the sense of injustice that we feel, are almost entirely
Speaker 5: outside of the realm of what you would call traditional economics, right,
Speaker 5: And that's because we're functioning on something that is, in
Speaker 5: some senses older than that kind of economics. But there's
Speaker 5: something else going on here at a fundamental level. And
Speaker 5: what's important about you know, price and the reaction to
Speaker 5: inflation is that it's an outrage based on a sense
Speaker 5: of justice.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: This rage is not a measure of direct.
Speaker 5: Exploitation necessarily, I think it was the political scientist James C.
Speaker 5: Scott who wrote his own book called The Moral Economy
Speaker 5: of the Peasant, and Scott argues that, you know, and
Speaker 5: ib Thompson also argues this that it's the moral angle
Speaker 5: that causes people to revolt, not the direct level of exploitation.
Speaker 5: You can, in fact, you know, inflict hideous exploitation on
Speaker 5: people as long as they think that it's just. But
Speaker 5: when you violate these moral principles, that's when people really
Speaker 5: lose it. But it also means, right, the fact that
Speaker 5: the sense of outrage is not necessarily directly tied to
Speaker 5: the exploitation level. It means that rich people could be
Speaker 5: bad about inflation even though they're completely fine, because these
Speaker 5: people also still have this sort of sense of justice
Speaker 5: about what prices should be. Now, it's also worth noting
Speaker 5: here that it is possible to have high inflation rates
Speaker 5: and have everyone be fine. In fact, we have discussed
Speaker 5: scenarios like that on this show. In my episodes about
Speaker 5: the rise of Lulah of the current president of Brazil,
Speaker 5: we discussed how military dictatorship in Brazil produced an economy
Speaker 5: that was you know, you had twenty percent on year inflation, right,
Speaker 5: but also you had forty percent yearly wage increases, and
Speaker 5: so everyone was like kind of fine with it because
Speaker 5: the amount of money you were making was going up
Speaker 5: every year, So nobody really cared about even things like
Speaker 5: the military dictatorship itself. There was not an enormous amount
Speaker 5: of opposition to it. But then Brazil's trade unions figured
Speaker 5: out the government had been lying about inflation numbers, and
Speaker 5: this started off a series of protests that you know,
Speaker 5: would send Lula like into his blame his political career,
Speaker 5: and eventually this is one of the sort of dominoes
Speaker 5: that leads to knocking down the military dictatorship. And that's
Speaker 5: because you know, the level of exploitations people were living
Speaker 5: ut or hadn't changed. But the deal that they had made, right,
Speaker 5: the sort of deal with the military government of like,
Speaker 5: we won't do anything, our wages will continue to go up,
Speaker 5: and inflation will continue to work at a certain level
Speaker 5: such that we're still getting paid. That deal was violated,
Speaker 5: and that sense of injustice was powerful enough to really
Speaker 5: kickstart in extremely powerful Brazilian labor movements and kickstart at
Speaker 5: the fall of a dictatorship. Now, one of Thompson's arguments
Speaker 5: was that the success of Adam Smith and his Cohort,
Speaker 5: and Smith is moving around and making his arguments about
Speaker 5: what the free market is in the period where we're
Speaker 5: dealing with all of these sort of grand crises. His
Speaker 5: argument is that the success of Smith was moving economics
Speaker 5: out of the domain of morality where it was born.
Speaker 5: Economics was originally an aspect of moral philosophy, right, it
Speaker 5: was part of that discipline. But you know, Smith and
Speaker 5: as people move it out. And this is why liberal
Speaker 5: economists find the anger about inflation so incomprehensible. They see
Speaker 5: it in purely statistical terms and go like, look, the
Speaker 5: economy is great. Why is everyone mad? And you know,
Speaker 5: I could get into hear a bunch of arguments about
Speaker 5: whether or not this is actually true. I mean, I'm
Speaker 5: going to return to by sort of classic argument about like, well, yeah, okay,
Speaker 5: even if you believe all of the economic indicators are
Speaker 5: great versas people like I'm trans for me, the economy
Speaker 5: is it has an unemployment rate of like nineteen thirty
Speaker 5: six US great depression. So you know, there are a
Speaker 5: lot of people for whom the economic outlook is not good.
Speaker 5: People for whom you know, even the wage increases that
Speaker 5: they got in this period still leave them in sort
Speaker 5: of hideous and crippling poverty. And none of that shit
Speaker 5: matters because the statistics that these people are trying to
Speaker 5: use to try to get everyone to calm down are
Speaker 5: not operating in the inside of the moral economy. They're
Speaker 5: operating outside of it because they're from a tradition that
Speaker 5: is specifically about not working inside the moral economy, and
Speaker 5: the people that're interacting with are in the world economy.
Speaker 4: But why is it like this, right? Why do we
Speaker 4: have a moral.
Speaker 5: Economy that functions this way in the case of the
Speaker 5: peasants and you know, the working people of the seventeen
Speaker 5: hundreds across Europe, and you know this just goes on
Speaker 5: through the eighteen hundreds too. Right, we can trace the
Speaker 5: moral economy to a very very specific set of conditions
Speaker 5: and traditions and expectations rooted in how people traditionally bop bread.
Speaker 5: But what are the conditions of the modern American moral economy?
Speaker 5: To understand that, we need to turn to the concept
Speaker 5: of price itself. But first, do you know what guarantees
Speaker 5: low price? Actually, I probably shouldn't say the word guarantee,
Speaker 5: That is probably staggeringly illegible. You know what probably has
Speaker 5: low prices. It's the products and services that support this podcast.
Speaker 4: We are back.
Speaker 5: Now turn to price. The political economist Shimsheng Bickler and
Speaker 5: Jonathan Needson argue that price is the unit of what
Speaker 5: orders capitalist society. You know, price is like the fundamental
Speaker 5: unit of political economy. It's it's the thing that orders
Speaker 5: and structures the entire society. If you want to know
Speaker 5: more about this, read their book Capitalist Power. It's quite good.
Speaker 5: I am mentioning them because I'm about to misuse their
Speaker 5: argument completely in tandem with a quote from Marx that
Speaker 5: I am also about to misuse. And I am going
Speaker 5: to do this to make a different point. So I
Speaker 5: agree with Bickler and needs in that price is the
Speaker 5: unit that orders capitalist society. But what I'm interested in
Speaker 5: is price is what's called a social hieroglyphic. Now, social
Speaker 5: hieroglyphic is a term that's a one off term that
Speaker 5: Marx used wants to talk about how price like mystifies
Speaker 5: at hure value.
Speaker 2: Whatever.
Speaker 5: I don't care about that. I care about it because
Speaker 5: there's something very interesting about price itself, and there's something
Speaker 5: interesting about the notion of a hieroglyph Now March is
Speaker 5: using hieroglyph in the term of like it's something you
Speaker 5: have to be decoded, right, because he's writing in the
Speaker 5: eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 4: This is you know, everyone's obsessed with hieroglyphs.
Speaker 5: I am using hieroglyphs because hieroglyphs are also a method
Speaker 5: of encoding complex information into a single character.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: Price as a social hieroglyph is important because price is
Speaker 5: the mechanism through which we understand and often through which
Speaker 5: we fail to understand the world.
Speaker 4: Our entire lives.
Speaker 5: In the eyes of the people who rule this world,
Speaker 5: our entire lives are captured in a single number. Everything
Speaker 5: you do at work is ultimately just a price on
Speaker 5: a corporate spreadsheet. The entirety of the labor process of
Speaker 5: producing a good, every hour worked, every drop of sweat,
Speaker 5: every tier, every broken body, and shattered city and trade
Speaker 5: union is lined up in front of a firing squad,
Speaker 5: appears in the end as a simple number price. To
Speaker 5: express it another way, heals Daniel conn At the painted
Speaker 5: bird from their the butcher's share. Let's take a walk
Speaker 5: around the old bizarre, where every little thing has trafficed far.
Speaker 5: Every pair of pants and grain of rice contains this
Speaker 5: poorer story in its price, a story of the power
Speaker 5: people wield, a story about factories and fields, a story
Speaker 5: of which you'll never have to be aware, just as
Speaker 5: long as the butcher gets his share. Price, this single
Speaker 5: number is how we understand the world, and it causes
Speaker 5: us to treat price and thus inflation, as a matter
Speaker 5: of morality and not economic rationality, because price is the
Speaker 5: way that our society causes us to interact with people.
Speaker 5: It's the way we interact with objects. It is the
Speaker 5: thing that structures the way we all behave and understand
Speaker 5: the world. But price has another function. It is the
Speaker 5: gatekeeper of capitalist society. Because price and a man with
Speaker 5: a gun is what's standing between you and the ability
Speaker 5: to live your life. Outrage of the moral economics of
Speaker 5: price increases are similar, but not identical, to the impulses
Speaker 5: behind looting. Everything that you ever need and have been
Speaker 5: unable to get is when you walk into a grocery store,
Speaker 5: just sitting there right in front of you, but between
Speaker 5: you and it is a number and a man with
Speaker 5: a gun, and the man with a gun fucking hates you.
Speaker 5: So the moment you're free, you just take it. Price
Speaker 5: in the entire economic system behind it is organized very specifically,
Speaker 5: so you don't do this. E. P. Thompson argued that
Speaker 5: the moral economy was pre political. The movements that it
Speaker 5: produced could be extremely well organized, but they fundamentally were
Speaker 5: not the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.
Speaker 5: In twenty twenty, we for a brief moment saw the
Speaker 5: outlines of that movement. The uprising was crushed in its place.
Speaker 5: We saw the emergence of pre political concerns about price.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: We saw once again a massive panic about inflation. And
Speaker 5: this is not to say that you know, inflation didn't
Speaker 5: hurt people.
Speaker 2: It did.
Speaker 5: It was in large extents of fiasco. But look at
Speaker 5: the politics for a moment that this has produced. Right,
Speaker 5: What the media understands is economic anxiety, and what I
Speaker 5: think we can now better understand as the moral economy
Speaker 5: that is a result of the fact that our entire
Speaker 5: economic system is structured by price, and that we encode
Speaker 5: all of the information in our life into prices that
Speaker 5: we sell ourselves for, and that we in turn are
Speaker 5: sold things for those prices going up. The product of
Speaker 5: it was Trump, right, and there's I think a reason
Speaker 5: why these sort of pre economic explanations are preferred to
Speaker 5: the answers and you know, to the actions that people
Speaker 5: saw in twenty twenty four years later. Portland, one of
Speaker 5: the centers of the uprising, now has almost every grocery
Speaker 5: store the exit of it is armed guards with guns.
Speaker 5: And these guards are there to maintain the price system.
Speaker 5: They're there because for a very brief moment, people started
Speaker 5: thinking something dangerous. They started thinking, what if this didn't
Speaker 5: have a price?
Speaker 4: It's it could happen here.
Speaker 5: The podcast that's happening right now, this is maybe the
Speaker 5: foremost of the Putting Things Back Together episodes. I'm your
Speaker 5: host Miya Wong with me as James Stout guy. He
Speaker 5: likes it to put things together. Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 5: on the subject of putting things together over the last
Speaker 5: I don't even know three four weeks, the question I
Speaker 5: have been asked the most by everyone is how do
Speaker 5: I start organizing? And you know the problem with how
Speaker 5: do I start organizing is that it's not a question
Speaker 5: that has cleaner, simple answers. Now, the most common answer
Speaker 5: you get is just join an org. And the problem
Speaker 5: is that most of the people who you were hearing
Speaker 5: this from are already in an org. And want you
Speaker 5: to join their org.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Also, the problem is a lot of the orgs that
Speaker 1: are currently dominating left to spaces in the in the
Speaker 1: United States.
Speaker 4: Are trash, yeah, and bad for people, bad people in them,
Speaker 4: bad people who are not in them. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Here's a little test you can you can do. Is
Speaker 1: your org currently sad that Basha a Lasad is no
Speaker 1: longer governing Syria? Because if that's the case.
Speaker 4: Leave yep.
Speaker 5: And that's that's a lot of orgs that that's not Yeah,
Speaker 5: that takes most of them right now. We'll come back
Speaker 5: to orgs in a bit. But what I'll say about
Speaker 5: orgs is that, Okay, if you know an organization in
Speaker 5: your area that you like and you think does good
Speaker 5: work and most importantly spends their time actually doing work
Speaker 5: instead of either in fighting or talking about doing work,
Speaker 5: you join them. It will be good. But the important
Speaker 5: thing about organizations, and this is something we'll come back
Speaker 5: to you later. The important thing about organizations is they
Speaker 5: have a lot of people. Yeah, And the thing that
Speaker 5: makes organizing work is people. It's not organizations. It's not
Speaker 5: even necessarily ideological labels. It's there being a bunch of
Speaker 5: people who you can use and who want to do things. Yeah,
Speaker 5: but something I realized that the more I had these conversations, right,
Speaker 5: you know, I'm having it with friends, I'm having them
Speaker 5: with strangers, I'm having them with other organizers. And the
Speaker 5: more I had these conversations, the more I realize something
Speaker 5: sort of startling you. The person listening to this almost
Speaker 5: certainly already knows how to organize, but you don't know
Speaker 5: that that's called organizing. Yeah, that's a very good point.
Speaker 5: I have encountered some of the most stunning or I
Speaker 5: mean organizing that like I can't discuss the specifics of,
Speaker 5: but like some of the best organizing I've ever encountered.
Speaker 5: I have ran into you in the last three weeks
Speaker 5: some people who don't think that they're organizers and started
Speaker 5: talking to me about their stuff. I was like, what, Like,
Speaker 5: people are winning victories that like the like hardcore committed
Speaker 5: organizers haven't been able to do in like thirty years. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and it's just by random people who don't think they
Speaker 5: know how to do anything.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Can I tell a little organizing story?
Speaker 2: Do we have time?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, go for it.
Speaker 1: So I remember in like twenty eighteen, I am on
Speaker 1: a trip with a friend. We're coming back and we
Speaker 1: see the arrival of the migrant caravan. One of the
Speaker 1: migrant caravan is the one that everyone decided to have
Speaker 1: a fucking cow about right before the twenty eighteen mid terms.
Speaker 1: And at that time, they were corraling the people of
Speaker 1: the migrant caravan in a baseball stadium in Tijuana, and
Speaker 1: like it was raining every day, So the baseball stadium ends.
Speaker 4: Up looking like the Battle of the Psalm after like
Speaker 4: a couple of.
Speaker 1: Days, right, you know, kids in leady mud and shit,
Speaker 1: and I particularly know what to do, but evidently there
Speaker 1: were people there who were hungry and thirsty, and so
Speaker 1: I get three of my my friends. At this time,
Speaker 1: I was still making about half my money riding bicycles
Speaker 1: and in the other half writing. So my friends and
Speaker 1: I supposed to do a long bike ride. All of
Speaker 1: us are people who make a living riding bikes, right,
Speaker 1: we're not like expert organizers. And I was like, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: this is fucked.
Speaker 4: Which we do.
Speaker 1: We called a friend who has a company who makes waffles,
Speaker 1: where we obtained like as many waffles as we could
Speaker 1: physically carry across the border. At that time, we weren't
Speaker 1: able to get in. We found a way to get in.
Speaker 1: We began distributing the waffles. After that, we put something online,
Speaker 1: people sent us money, and we continued feeding people for months.
Speaker 1: None of us, I think, had a particular plan or
Speaker 1: a scheduled. Yeah, it is a bit chaotic at times,
Speaker 1: but we were able to do that and with a
Speaker 1: lot of other people. Clearly wasn't just us, right, but
Speaker 1: we were able to process tenths of thousands of dollars
Speaker 1: and feed thousands of people.
Speaker 4: Be everyone there, And.
Speaker 1: I've seen this countless times, especially working and organizing with
Speaker 1: well with refugees. For the most part, people are so
Speaker 1: good at organizing each other in themselves. Like when we
Speaker 1: got there with bottles of water and food, there are
Speaker 1: a thousand people who have not had sometimes a drink
Speaker 1: for days, let alone more than a thousand, I think,
Speaker 1: let alone something hot to eat. Right, Everybody made sure
Speaker 1: that the children and the sick people got what they
Speaker 1: needed first.
Speaker 4: Organizing is something that is very inherent in us as people.
Speaker 4: It just we don't call it that. Yeah, And that's
Speaker 4: part of what I want to try to the myth.
Speaker 5: I want to try to puncture with this because I
Speaker 5: think particularly in the US, but this is true in
Speaker 5: a lot of places. There's this way in which the
Speaker 5: organizer sort of TM capital T capital O. The organizer
Speaker 5: gets held up as this sort of I guess, even
Speaker 5: a particularly masculinist thing, which is it's this this guy
Speaker 5: with specialized knowledge, and that's just not true. This brings
Speaker 5: us something that I think is actually really important, which
Speaker 5: is what what even is organizing?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 5: And the answer is that most organizing is you get
Speaker 5: you get a group of people together, you get them
Speaker 5: to show up to something, and then you do something right.
Speaker 5: And the thing about this, right, that's something all of
Speaker 5: you know how to do. If you can organize a
Speaker 5: dinner party, right, if you can get eight people to
Speaker 5: show up to a place to eat dinner, you can
Speaker 5: do this. It is it is largely the same skill sets,
Speaker 5: and all of the skill sets that make people good
Speaker 5: organizers are skill sets that you have to develop to
Speaker 5: you know, work a job right.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: Like one of the things that comes up a lot
Speaker 5: in this which is less discussed and also kind of annoying,
Speaker 5: but you know you have to manage it is that
Speaker 5: organizing is about people and sometimes you have to you know,
Speaker 5: you have to do things like you have to manage
Speaker 5: people's egos. But like, I don't know, almost all of
Speaker 5: you work jobs or have work jobs, right, you have
Speaker 5: had to like deal with your boss being on one right,
Speaker 5: you have the skills to do this. You know how
Speaker 5: to do the interpersonal relationship stuff. It's just that you
Speaker 5: don't think about that as organizing, even though that's that's.
Speaker 1: Just what it is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's the core of it is getting people to
Speaker 4: do stuff, like like you do it every.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and the way you do this is by building
Speaker 5: relationships with people, right, And this isn't necessarily friendships, although
Speaker 5: that works. And like, one of the easiest ways to
Speaker 5: start organizing is by getting all of your friends together
Speaker 5: because you're already friends, you have pre existing relationships, and
Speaker 5: being like, Okay, motherfuckers, we gotta go do something.
Speaker 4: And actually I love that.
Speaker 5: The first thing that you brought up was an admittedly
Speaker 5: sort of medium ish scale lift version of this. But
Speaker 5: one of the very easiest things that you can do
Speaker 5: is you can just get food of some kind. You
Speaker 5: can either buy it or you can make it yourself,
Speaker 5: and you and a group of like eight people, not
Speaker 5: even eight people, you can do it with lower I
Speaker 5: know people who've done this just solo.
Speaker 4: Is that you can just go give food to people. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Literally it was this morning, so I'm tired.
Speaker 1: Yesterday morning, I have some mine house neighbors right and
Speaker 1: it was cold, and so I went out and gave
Speaker 1: them some hot breakfast, so hot coffee. It's super easy
Speaker 1: to do if you are struggling socially wherever you are,
Speaker 1: maybe you're finding a hide to make friends. I know
Speaker 1: that's the thing people often struggle, especially if you've moved
Speaker 1: to a new place or post pandemic, or you're still
Speaker 1: concerned with Liuvede gatherings or any of those things. Like,
Speaker 1: if you start doing that, you will find other people
Speaker 1: who want to do it too, Like so many of
Speaker 1: my friends I organize with are people. Like when we
Speaker 1: had the end of Title forty two and people were
Speaker 1: in between the fences that a lot of the people
Speaker 1: who I organize with now or who helped people with now,
Speaker 1: I didn't know. I just showed up with a giant
Speaker 1: sider generator that I happened to have and some stuff
Speaker 1: that we had to whip around a CAOL zone for
Speaker 1: and like people who care about the same things as
Speaker 1: you are generally cool and it's a good way to
Speaker 1: make friends, and then you can go on from there.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and there's a second compounding thing here too, which
Speaker 5: is that you know, feeding people it's a way to
Speaker 5: build relationships with people, and also it's a really good
Speaker 5: way for people to get to know you in general
Speaker 5: and know that you are someone who will help them
Speaker 5: with things. Yeah, and from there, and this is a
Speaker 5: very common except I mean this is I literally had
Speaker 5: this conversation with one of my friends who's like an
Speaker 5: old school Food Not Bombs organizer. Food Not Bombs is
Speaker 5: a very very it's a cool organization. You can just
Speaker 5: like found a food out Bobs chapter. They have like
Speaker 5: a couple of principles, or you can just do your
Speaker 5: own thing. And I'm pretty sure it's still like the
Speaker 5: largest anarchist project in the world. Yeah, because all it
Speaker 5: takes is you and like three other people and you
Speaker 5: just go feed people. But the thing is from doing that, right,
Speaker 5: if there's other things that you're concerned about, people will
Speaker 5: bring you their problems and you can help them doing it.
Speaker 5: And this is a very good way to get into
Speaker 5: other kinds of organizing because suddenly, once you start building
Speaker 5: these relationships. Everything sort of cycles and cycles, and you know,
Speaker 5: you get involved in more and more things. Yeah, and
Speaker 5: that's kind of a that's kind of a late stage
Speaker 5: thing that we're sort of jumping to a bit. But
Speaker 5: I want to go back to the beginnings of how so,
Speaker 5: how do you get a group of people together to
Speaker 5: do a thing? And the answer is you kind of
Speaker 5: already know how to because you presumably at some point
Speaker 5: in your life have like organized a group of friends
Speaker 5: to go do something, right, Like I've gotten a group
Speaker 5: of people together to go accomplish a task.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it could literally be anything, right, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you've got some people to go to a bar,
Speaker 1: you have the skills.
Speaker 5: One way I've been thinking about it recently and in
Speaker 5: my project is putting is thinking about it as like
Speaker 5: putting together a heist crew.
Speaker 4: And so, okay, I could vouch for this right.
Speaker 5: The feeling of walking up to eight people and telling
Speaker 5: them individually, I'm putting together a team and I want
Speaker 5: you it is.
Speaker 4: It feels you can just do it. There is nothing
Speaker 4: stopping you.
Speaker 5: There nothing in the world can stop you from just
Speaker 5: walking up to your friend and going I'm putting together
Speaker 5: a team, and it feels exactly as good as you
Speaker 5: think it would from the Ice movie.
Speaker 4: It rules, It's so fun amazing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and and and but this gets into also what
Speaker 5: kinds of people you want to do right, because obviously
Speaker 5: you know, there's two vectors of this. There's on the
Speaker 5: one hand, you have the aspect of okay, who do
Speaker 5: you know? Right, And a lot of organizing is just about,
Speaker 5: here is a problem, and I know someone who has
Speaker 5: some sort of skill or resource that can that can
Speaker 5: help deal with it, and you put people in touch
Speaker 5: with each other, and that's organizing. That's so much organizing
Speaker 5: is literally just hey, like I have like a broken
Speaker 5: part of my car. I know someone who's like a
Speaker 5: car mechanic, right, and you put them in touch, and
Speaker 5: you have successfully organized people, and you have built relationships,
Speaker 5: and you have made all of the sort of social
Speaker 5: web that creates organizing.
Speaker 4: You've made it stronger. Yeah.
Speaker 5: It also just feels good because you know, and that's
Speaker 5: an auxiliary benefit to all of this is that it's
Speaker 5: a great it's a great way to sort of break
Speaker 5: break the isolation we're all under.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think the best solution for despair is.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking of a quotation here something that the busy
Speaker 1: bee have no time for despair. But the thing that
Speaker 1: makes me feel better about the world is that I
Speaker 1: have seen that people can fix massive problems with very
Speaker 1: few resources by just showing up. And like I think,
Speaker 1: organizing is what gives me, what allows me to enter
Speaker 1: this period of time that we're entering into with a
Speaker 1: with a great deal more hope than I otherwise would
Speaker 1: have done.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and do you know what else will help you
Speaker 4: enter your situation with Is it the products and services
Speaker 4: that support this podcast.
Speaker 5: I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but
Speaker 5: we are not in control of the length of the ads.
Speaker 4: They just do it. We're sorry, here's a really long
Speaker 4: period of ads. I'm so sorry.
Speaker 5: We are back. So I want to I want to
Speaker 5: return to my highest career if I don't know if
Speaker 5: if you're a D and D person, the other way
Speaker 5: you can think about this is you're putting together like
Speaker 5: a Dungeons and Dragons party or like an RPG party.
Speaker 5: And the way you need to think about this is, Okay,
Speaker 5: so you've picked a thing that you want to do, right.
Speaker 5: You see, you've seen something in the world that is
Speaker 5: bad and you figure it you go, Okay, I can
Speaker 5: do this thing to solve it. And maybe and maybe
Speaker 5: that's you know, it's literally something as simple as feeding people.
Speaker 5: Maybe that's you know, I want to start. I want
Speaker 5: to start doing tenants organizing. I want to start because
Speaker 5: my rent is too high, right, people are getting evicted.
Speaker 5: I want to start doing like immigration defense.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And from there you make a list and that list
Speaker 5: is you know what you're interested in doing, and you
Speaker 5: try to match what things need to be done with
Speaker 5: people you know who have those skills. Yeah, and this
Speaker 5: is you know, this, this is is where you release
Speaker 5: and get into the higst things, right, because everyone has
Speaker 5: their sort of like highst role. Now, obviously part of
Speaker 5: this that you want is you want to create sort
Speaker 5: of balanced teams, right. You want people who have overlapping
Speaker 5: strengths so you don't just have only one person who
Speaker 5: can do a thing. And part of the way the
Speaker 5: successful organization works over time, and I mean just how
Speaker 5: successful organizing works is that eventually you are trying to
Speaker 5: organize yourself out of a job. Which is to say,
Speaker 5: you want your organization to function such that if you're
Speaker 5: not able to do it, you know, or just you're
Speaker 5: gone or you cycle onto a next thing, or you know,
Speaker 5: any any number of things that can happen. You want
Speaker 5: the organization to still be able to keep working without you,
Speaker 5: and you want you want you're trying to get people
Speaker 5: to be able to replace you as the person who's
Speaker 5: like organizing the thing, right, Yeah, And at this point
Speaker 5: we can start talking about the kinds of skills that
Speaker 5: people need for organizing, and a lot of people and
Speaker 5: this is unbelievably common when I talk to people, and
Speaker 5: like especially women and especially like a lot of non
Speaker 5: binary people and trans people particularly have this is that
Speaker 5: people don't believe that they have any skills and then
Speaker 5: you talk to them for five seconds and they're like, well,
Speaker 5: I'm good at carrying heavy objects, right, I'm good with kids,
Speaker 5: which is a huge one. We'll get to you in
Speaker 5: a second, right, Or like, I don't know, I have
Speaker 5: a car. That's a huge skill. There are so many
Speaker 5: different skills that are so useful for so many things.
Speaker 5: I'm just gonna go over lots of things that are
Speaker 5: actually really useful to get to get people a sense
Speaker 5: of like the kinds of things that there are. There
Speaker 5: are massive roles for so one of the most important
Speaker 5: ones and this is something you can you deliberately look for.
Speaker 5: You know, this is this is one of the things
Speaker 5: you do at the beginning of any union organizing campaign.
Speaker 5: Someone who's good at talking to other people and making friends.
Speaker 5: That is a staggeringly useful person because again, most most
Speaker 5: organizing is just talking to people and building relationships. And
Speaker 5: you know, one of the things you do when you're
Speaker 5: when you're doing your sort of they call it power mapping.
Speaker 5: But when when you when you're figuring out how you're
Speaker 5: going to organize a workplace, is you find the person
Speaker 5: who everyone likes and talks to and respects, and you
Speaker 5: talk to that person. Yeah, because that person can you know,
Speaker 5: can sort of like organize people down the chain because
Speaker 5: they have they have their relationships already, and also they're
Speaker 5: good they'll be good at, you know, talking to new
Speaker 5: people and and spreading your organization that way, and so, like,
Speaker 5: you know, if you're just someone who's social or and
Speaker 5: this is also very useful if you have a friend
Speaker 5: who is very social, because I know a lot of
Speaker 5: us are oporary social, but you probably have a friend
Speaker 5: that you're thinking of right now who is very good
Speaker 5: at conversations. That is charming and is good at making friendships.
Speaker 5: That person unbelievably useful, incredibly useful and compelling skill. Yeah,
Speaker 5: there are also things like research people who are good
Speaker 5: at and I think people are much better at research
Speaker 5: than they think to take like a tat a's organizing example. Right,
Speaker 5: one of the common things you have to do is
Speaker 5: find out stuff about a landlords, right, Yeah, and there's
Speaker 5: the higher difficulty version of that, which isn't that hard. Also,
Speaker 5: I want to mention this, but like going to a
Speaker 5: courthouse and finding records about who owns property companies.
Speaker 4: That high it's not that hard.
Speaker 5: It's like you could just do it, right, It's not
Speaker 5: as hard as you think it is from someone saying it.
Speaker 5: But there's also even just easier things than that, right,
Speaker 5: that all of you probably already know how to do,
Speaker 5: which is just looking at someone's social media profiles and
Speaker 5: finding out information about them. Yeah, and this is very useful, yeah,
Speaker 5: for like union campaigns, bosses.
Speaker 1: If you've ever been a person who uses dating apps,
Speaker 1: especially if you're a woman, yeah, yeah, then you know
Speaker 1: how to ocin. Actually maybe you don't credit yourself with
Speaker 1: that skill, but one hundred percent that like you've developed
Speaker 1: that skill to keep yourself safe.
Speaker 4: And you can use it for good. Do you want
Speaker 4: to explain what ocent is? And yes, how that how
Speaker 4: that process works?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Sure, So open source intelligence is it's an acream doesn't
Speaker 1: really need to exist. It's gathering information off open sources,
Speaker 1: things sort of openly accessible, right, as opposed to like humint,
Speaker 1: which is like being a spy, or singint, which is
Speaker 1: capturing signals. Open source information is you're creeping someone's Instagram,
Speaker 1: creeping their Facebook, looking at the weird fucking shit that
Speaker 1: they put on good Reads. Right, all the data that
Speaker 1: is out there, largely on the internet, about us. A
Speaker 1: lot of people put a lot of information on the Internet.
Speaker 1: And it's very easy. And I would imagine that if
Speaker 1: you're under fifty and maybe if you're over fifty two,
Speaker 1: like you just know how to do this because it's
Speaker 1: what you do anyway you want to find out about someone.
Speaker 1: And especially if you are a person who goes on
Speaker 1: dates with people who you haven't met before and haven't
Speaker 1: been introduced to by a mutual friend but you meet
Speaker 1: on the internet, you probably already do this to keep
Speaker 1: yourself safe.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and this is something that's very useful for I mean,
Speaker 5: there's so many use cases for this, right. There's you know,
Speaker 5: there's the very obvious ones where you're dealing with the
Speaker 5: local Nazi and you're trying to organize around like running
Speaker 5: them out. People say from them and you can find
Speaker 5: information about them. But I mean, it's useful for cops
Speaker 5: who are beating people. Is useful for politicians particularly, It
Speaker 5: can be very useful for it's useful for landlords. This
Speaker 5: happens all the time. It can be very very useful
Speaker 5: for bosses and union campaigns. Unions have like teams of
Speaker 5: researchers usually to like do this kind of stuff. But
Speaker 5: the thing is also and this is something I don't
Speaker 5: think people understand. Those guys, like the people they're hiring
Speaker 5: to be researchers are just you, but they got a
Speaker 5: job being a researcher for a union. Like they have
Speaker 5: the same skills as you. They know how to like
Speaker 5: Google stuff, and they know how to look through people's
Speaker 5: like dating profiles and like look through their their facebooks
Speaker 5: and Instagrams, and like a big one, a big one
Speaker 5: that that the rich people especially do not think about
Speaker 5: is like cash app and venmo oh venop because yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: because because people's peoples trying. People just leave public transactions
Speaker 5: out there like that. That's how they got what's his name,
Speaker 5: the congressional Gates. Can I legally call him the congressional pedophile?
Speaker 5: I guess they call him the accused pedophile.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the man credibly accused of sleeping with an
Speaker 1: underage woman lots of times, you know.
Speaker 5: And one of the ways they found that was that
Speaker 5: and also like paying paying for that right, yes, which
Speaker 5: is which is rape by the way, I want to
Speaker 5: be very clear about that, like, yeah, having sex with
Speaker 5: someone who is underage is rape.
Speaker 4: It is always rape, you know.
Speaker 5: And the way people found that was that they just
Speaker 5: looked through like his cash app history and they found
Speaker 5: all of these money transfers to people. You know, this
Speaker 5: is all very very simple stuff. That's that's very very
Speaker 5: useful organizing wise that you already know how to do.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Pinterest is another absolute back Yeah. People, Yeah, so much
Speaker 1: interesting people on a pinning that they be pinning. You know,
Speaker 1: if you're hearing some of these things and you think
Speaker 1: that you can figure out how to do this. That's
Speaker 1: also a huge skill finding people who are willing to
Speaker 1: learn things and willing to learn new skills is a
Speaker 1: huge benefit to organizers because you know this, this gives you, like,
Speaker 1: this gives you a flexible person, right, it gives it
Speaker 1: gives you someone you can like flex into into any
Speaker 1: of a bunch of roles that you need. And also
Speaker 1: can you know, pick up skills to learn things. Having
Speaker 1: a car and being able to drive.
Speaker 5: And I know a lot of you don't do this,
Speaker 5: but if you do do this, this is you immediately,
Speaker 5: even if you literally cannot contribute anything else to a project.
Speaker 5: Being able to just drive a bunch of water to
Speaker 5: a place, oh yeah, huge, staggeringly useful.
Speaker 1: The amount of things that people can't access because they
Speaker 1: can't get there, it's vast, especially when I when I
Speaker 1: talk to migrants right have recently arrived in the US.
Speaker 1: They don't have a US cell phone, they can't uber yea.
Speaker 1: Oftentimes nowadays you can't even pay for mass transit with cash.
Speaker 1: You have to have a special card and then you
Speaker 1: have to get to the place to get the card. Right,
Speaker 1: The problems you can solve by being able to drive
Speaker 1: someone five miles are enormous, especially in the US, where
Speaker 1: everything is designed around everyone owning a motor car at
Speaker 1: all times yep.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And like transport based skills are also very useful.
Speaker 5: I mean, if you hike a lot, that's a very
Speaker 5: very useful skill. There's a lot of sort of mutual
Speaker 5: aid projects. There's a lot of you know, I mean
Speaker 5: even things like like setting up summer camps is the
Speaker 5: thing that like leftist groups do right, and being able
Speaker 5: to hike very good for that.
Speaker 4: It's good for things like wilderness rescue.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of you know the James like the
Speaker 5: work you do that has to do with like going
Speaker 5: in helping migrants, Like being able to hike is staggeringly
Speaker 5: useful skill.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's very like, it's useful, it's important. It's
Speaker 1: okay if that's not something you can physically do or
Speaker 1: you know that that works for the way you like
Speaker 1: to live your life. Like another thing I was thinking
Speaker 1: of which can be massively important and people don't realize
Speaker 1: is if you know how to take off a tail
Speaker 1: light and replace the bulb in it. Yes, Like we're
Speaker 1: entering a time when people with darker, people with TPS,
Speaker 1: people who are undocumented, people are on temporary migration statuses
Speaker 1: are going to be definitely afraid of any interaction with
Speaker 1: law enforcement. If you can change the bulb on someone's
Speaker 1: tail light or their turn signal indicators of us in
Speaker 1: the UK, then you can meaningfully protect that person in
Speaker 1: a really important way.
Speaker 4: And it can literally take ten minutes.
Speaker 5: And this is something that you can scale up depending
Speaker 5: on how much skill you have. Right, there's even just
Speaker 5: very basic auto maintenance stuff is very useful for stuff
Speaker 5: like this.
Speaker 4: But you know, like if you're a.
Speaker 5: Carpenter, right, if you're an electrician, you do some kind
Speaker 5: of trade work, right, you do plumbing, right, that is
Speaker 5: the thing that is massively useful to a lot of people.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of other kind of just skills that
Speaker 5: you have from your job that can be very useful.
Speaker 5: I mean having someone to manage a spreadsheet oh yeah,
Speaker 5: yeah is aggeringly useful. And another one that I think
Speaker 5: people don't understand that they really have, but like being
Speaker 5: able to set up a meeting and like having a
Speaker 5: thing that lets you be like, okay, here's when everyone
Speaker 5: is free. Like you probably have to do this for
Speaker 5: your job or just for you know, trying to get
Speaker 5: your friends to go even just like be on a
Speaker 5: call together or like go have food or like just
Speaker 5: do anything. That is what literally, genuinely one of the
Speaker 5: most important skills you can possibly have as an organizer
Speaker 5: is the ability to just sort of like go talk
Speaker 5: to people and be like, hey, can you show up
Speaker 5: to this thing here? Yeah, and that is that is
Speaker 5: so much of just what organizing is. Can you be
Speaker 5: here at this time? And then trying to figure out
Speaker 5: a time.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So we're going to close out this sort of skill
Speaker 5: section with some I think just sort of like domestic
Speaker 5: these skills that I don't think people realize are super useful.
Speaker 5: If you have a button maker, you are instantly the
Speaker 5: single most useful person in any organization of that. Or
Speaker 5: you could obtain a button maker. They're very easy to use.
Speaker 5: But if you have one or you know the person
Speaker 5: who has the button maker, and suddenly you can just
Speaker 5: crank out buttons for every single event they rule. Everyone
Speaker 5: loves them. It helps, It helps me enormously. It's awesome.
Speaker 1: That's a badge for those in the Commonwealth. Also, if
Speaker 1: you have a sewing machine, yeah, I was about to
Speaker 1: mention that, Yeah, yeah, you're a hero.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of my friends recently made me a little patch
Speaker 1: and it's really cool and I like it and putting
Speaker 1: all my stuff. But if you can sew, like, that's
Speaker 1: a skill that I do not have. And it's so
Speaker 1: great when people can fix stuff for someone or you know,
Speaker 1: make stuff fit someone. You know, if you're a person
Speaker 1: who finds it hard to get clothes that you like
Speaker 1: to wear that make you feel good, and someone one
Speaker 1: of my friends could do that. And one of my
Speaker 1: friends was making clothes for another friend for like a
Speaker 1: renaissance fair, and it was a nice thing I've seen
Speaker 1: someone do for someone else in a very long time.
Speaker 1: It really made her like, yeah, feel like nice and
Speaker 1: cared for. And like you might think that like this
Speaker 1: is just a weird little thing that you like to
Speaker 1: do with your sewing machine, but you can meaningfully really
Speaker 1: make someone feel cared for using that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And that's a huge part of what organizing is right,
Speaker 5: and and that that goes into one of the things
Speaker 5: that is also an appreciable skill that's very useful, is
Speaker 5: I mean just like being nice to people, being kind
Speaker 5: to people, and having people around who are good at
Speaker 5: like keeping groups together. Yeah, And that's its own distinct
Speaker 5: kind of person is someone who can you know, keep
Speaker 5: all of the people who are involved in a thing,
Speaker 5: enjoying being around each other. That's that's that's a kind
Speaker 5: of person who's very valuable, and it's something that you
Speaker 5: can look for, you know. And if that's not you,
Speaker 5: like you can there's something you can you know, find
Speaker 5: in your friends. You can find in this sort of
Speaker 5: the people around you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 5: There's also something that I think you can tell when
Speaker 5: an organization is collapsing, because this is like the first
Speaker 5: thing with the quality drops drawing and graphic design are
Speaker 5: very very useful because a big part of what you
Speaker 5: do organizing is like you make a flyer and you
Speaker 5: put a flyer on a bunch of telephone poles to
Speaker 5: tell people that there's a thing happening. Yea, and yeah,
Speaker 5: you know, and this is also something you know later
Speaker 5: on you might be making a social media presence, but
Speaker 5: just having good artists and having good graphic design people
Speaker 5: is enormously useful for this kind of stuff. Yeah, and
Speaker 5: along this line, these things like making music, and there's
Speaker 5: a bunch of different ways this can go. This can
Speaker 5: be an immediate thing where you know, like you have
Speaker 5: people on a picket line, right and everyone's singing songs
Speaker 5: and this is great. We love this also, and this
Speaker 5: is another thing that you can be thinking about in
Speaker 5: terms of what skills you have and what things you
Speaker 5: can create benefit shows. This has been a huge part
Speaker 5: of a lot of how some of the Union stuff
Speaker 5: up here has been getting funded is by just having
Speaker 5: like punk benefit shows. And if that's the thing that
Speaker 5: you can do, well, you know people in bands, you
Speaker 5: know people who make music, you know people who just
Speaker 5: make stuff who are willing to contribut to the cause,
Speaker 5: that's great.
Speaker 1: I remember one of we had one night last September,
Speaker 1: so cold. We were in the desert and I'm like
Speaker 1: a thousand people, right, and we were at that point
Speaker 1: we were really struggling to feed everyone, even you know,
Speaker 1: because there was so few of us. But my friend
Speaker 1: bought out like their guitar and some bongo drums they had,
Speaker 1: and I think I had my harmonica in my truck,
Speaker 1: and like we were sitting around with these. We had
Speaker 1: some Seek guys, had some Weiga folks come from China,
Speaker 1: and then some Kourdish people and they were all explaying
Speaker 1: their different music and it was so nice like that,
Speaker 1: taking people out of a shitty situation for a moment
Speaker 1: with music. Again, like don't underestimate how important that it
Speaker 1: don't feel like if you have that skill, it's not
Speaker 1: a useful one.
Speaker 5: No, And this is something I've been starting to say
Speaker 5: more and more. If you need a three brained way
Speaker 5: to say this to someone who like is is like
Speaker 5: a curmudgety marks just who hates fun.
Speaker 4: Morale is a terrain of struggle that this is.
Speaker 5: There's a reason why more is one of the most
Speaker 5: important factors of military campaigns. You can't get people to
Speaker 5: do things if they're too depressed to do it. Yeah,
Speaker 5: And being able to raise people's morale, it's it's this
Speaker 5: massive if you want again, want to go into technical language,
Speaker 5: is a massive force multiplayer, right, It makes everyone you
Speaker 5: have enormously more effective, the better they feel about themselves
Speaker 5: and the better they feel about the situation they're in.
Speaker 5: And things like music, things like art, I mean things
Speaker 5: like pulling pranks.
Speaker 4: This thing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, if you were if you were in good practical jokester,
Speaker 5: this is a staggeringly useful skill. Both like in terms
Speaker 5: of you know, you need to be careful about whether
Speaker 5: you're you're playing your pranks on like other people in
Speaker 5: the ORG. But like you know, if you know how
Speaker 5: to just like pull pranks. This is a really really
Speaker 5: useful thing in like union campaigns, it tenants organizing. There
Speaker 5: are a lot of people who you can prank and
Speaker 5: it's very funny and it lowers their morale and it
Speaker 5: raises your morale.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I go back to your music as a
Speaker 1: like a like morale. It's a terrand of struggle. Like
Speaker 1: the other memory I have last year of playing guitars
Speaker 1: is in Rajava, being inside at night because everyone was
Speaker 1: getting drone struck all the time and it was dangerous
Speaker 1: to be driving around, sitting around with some ZD friends
Speaker 1: and like we spent all night playing the ood, which
Speaker 1: is like a it's like a guitar with a gord
Speaker 1: on the bottom and it to describe it like it's
Speaker 1: a string instrument. It's a string instrument, is what it is.
Speaker 1: And like that made everyone so happy. We had such
Speaker 1: a nice evening. Everyone was able to like get through
Speaker 1: it's a relatively difficult thing. Like, you know, it sucks
Speaker 1: that people are being killed and just for driving around
Speaker 1: are existing and they're bombing all this citly infrastructure and
Speaker 1: the power keeps going out and all these things. Right, like,
Speaker 1: but there's a reason that those people have kept ood
Speaker 1: around after fifteen thirteen years of war, and it's because
Speaker 1: it is important, and so don't overlook that.
Speaker 5: And you know, and resisting fear is another huge aspect
Speaker 5: of this, right. A lot of the ways that people like,
Speaker 5: a lot of the ways that you demobilize people. This is,
Speaker 5: this is why regimes like this spend a lot of
Speaker 5: effort trying to make people afraid. He is that it
Speaker 5: makes it harder for you to act. And things that
Speaker 5: you know, the things that make you less afraid, even
Speaker 5: if they sort of seem silly, are very very important.
Speaker 5: And you know, on sort of this note, one of
Speaker 5: the things that you know, as you've assembled your group
Speaker 5: of people, right, one of the things that that that's
Speaker 5: important to be able to sort of have a grasp
Speaker 5: on is that you can't just do organizing by having
Speaker 5: it only be the capital, the serious thing, the captialty
Speaker 5: organizing thing all the time. Your organization will not hold together.
Speaker 5: There has to be actual like bonds formed between you
Speaker 5: and the people you're organizing with and the people you're
Speaker 5: trying to help.
Speaker 1: I don't want to call out any organization in particular,
Speaker 1: there is an organization that perceives organizing to exist solely
Speaker 1: in the realm of wearing a high based vest and
Speaker 1: carrying a clipboard and getting people to write that email
Speaker 1: addresses down and then telling them to attend things, and
Speaker 1: like maybe there are several organizations like that. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I've just I've perceived one locally. If you don't have
Speaker 1: those bonds that, like those interpersonal relationships, like these things
Speaker 1: won't hang together. Like yeah, so many of my happiest
Speaker 1: organizing memories, like again going down James Memory Lane, I
Speaker 1: guess I have a memory of like Christmas Eve last
Speaker 1: year twenty twenty three, me and my friends have been out.
Speaker 1: I know some of them listen because some of them
Speaker 1: have come across from different states to help us at
Speaker 1: Christmas Holidays, which is nice. And it was cold, and
Speaker 1: we had been feeding people all day, and then we'd
Speaker 1: heard some people in another location that we'd gone to find.
Speaker 1: And then we got to the end of the day
Speaker 1: and like, rather than just going home, I had a
Speaker 1: bunch of we had some MRIs left the refugee emory
Speaker 1: sort of vegan. Lots of us are vegan, so we
Speaker 1: were like, we're not going to find any other vegan
Speaker 1: food in the middle of nowhere out here, So we'll
Speaker 1: set around eating the little vegan MREs and like just
Speaker 1: talking and like sharing some some thoughts and things we
Speaker 1: experience over the last months of doing this, And like,
Speaker 1: it's those moments that make your organizing groups so much stronger.
Speaker 4: No one's telling.
Speaker 1: Anyone to do anything. You know, there's genuine bonds and
Speaker 1: that the love and friendship we build up between each
Speaker 1: other doing things that are very important. Don't overlook the
Speaker 1: value of those because it's extremely valuable.
Speaker 4: And this is something that I think you can understand
Speaker 4: in your own life pretty easily, where Okay, if a
Speaker 4: random person on the street walks up to you and
Speaker 4: tells you to go do something, are you going to
Speaker 4: do it? It's like no, why No?
Speaker 5: Probably not, Like I don't know, Maybe it's something like
Speaker 5: really sort of, hey, there's children in a burning building.
Speaker 5: We're going to run in and grab them. But like,
Speaker 5: the odds are no, you're going to ignore them. But
Speaker 5: if your friend goes and tells you to do the
Speaker 5: same thing, and you know you've been friends with them
Speaker 5: for a long time and you really care about them,
Speaker 5: the odds of you doing it are much much higher,
Speaker 5: and that's all organizing is. It's finding ways to You
Speaker 5: have a thing to do, and you go talk to
Speaker 5: people and you ask if they want to help you
Speaker 5: do it. Yeah, and the stronger your relationships are, the
Speaker 5: more lucky that is to happen. And that's why it's
Speaker 5: very important to do things like you know, just like
Speaker 5: having potlucks, like bringing snacks and beatings. Oh yeah, and
Speaker 5: like you know, even if you're doing a potluck, it's
Speaker 5: good to you know, you do like one capital capital
Speaker 5: T organizing thing, right, you get like a little bit
Speaker 5: of work done, but mostly everyone's just sort of relaxing
Speaker 5: and eating chili or whatever.
Speaker 4: Yeah, if you're a baker, you know, you can bay people.
Speaker 4: It's a wonderful thing to God.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And just knowing how to cook. I realized I forgot
Speaker 5: to mention this one. Knowing how to cook is a
Speaker 5: staggeringly useful skill. And it's useful in literally every literally
Speaker 5: any kind of organizing you can possibly be. And it
Speaker 5: is a thing. It is a skill that is useful
Speaker 5: in like it's useful in war zones. It's useful like
Speaker 5: literally no matter what organization you are in, if you
Speaker 5: can cook for people, oh yeah, and you don't even
Speaker 5: and you don't have to be like a good cook.
Speaker 5: It's just like you can show up food that you
Speaker 5: have made. You have instantly made this whole thing more successful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely, Like I've had some wonderful meals in wazone
Speaker 1: and I've deeply appreciated those people. More broadly though, those
Speaker 1: ties like the way we organize without the state. The
Speaker 1: reason I believe that that is the way we should
Speaker 1: organize and the way we will continue to organize in
Speaker 1: a way that we can make the state irrelevant is
Speaker 1: because we understand each other as people and care about
Speaker 1: each other as people, and then we approach our organizing holistically,
Speaker 1: right with everyone in it knowing this person is good
Speaker 1: at this, but they're struggling with this right now, and
Speaker 1: I care about them, so I'm not going to make
Speaker 1: them do that right now. That is how we can
Speaker 1: build sustainable communities in a way that state cannot and
Speaker 1: in a way that capitalism cannot. Right because fucking hurts
Speaker 1: rent a car doesn't care or know about its employees
Speaker 1: in a way that we who organize with people and
Speaker 1: care and love one another do, and like that where
Speaker 1: our organizations will always be stronger than those created by
Speaker 1: capitalism of the state.
Speaker 5: Yeah, unfortunately, speaking of capitalism of the state, we're taking
Speaker 5: our last ad break where you want.
Speaker 4: Yeah, hopefully it's a Trentdica.
Speaker 2: We are back.
Speaker 4: So I want to wrap things up by doing a
Speaker 4: couple of doing a few things.
Speaker 5: I want to talk about some kind of basic organizing
Speaker 5: things that you're going to have to do that are
Speaker 5: not very difficult but are extremely important. And second, I
Speaker 5: want to talk a bit about how we did the
Speaker 5: first organizing project that I ever was involved in, which
Speaker 5: was tenants organizing, because it's really not that hard, right,
Speaker 5: you just go do the thing, it will happen, Yeah,
Speaker 5: and suddenly it ceases to be this like, oh, this
Speaker 5: domain of expert knowledge, and there's like, oh, this is
Speaker 5: a really difficult thing. If you just I don't know,
Speaker 5: you go give food to someone and suddenly you've done
Speaker 5: that and it's happened. So there are things that are
Speaker 5: important to like basic organizing stuff. Knowing how to book
Speaker 5: rooms from like churches, from libraries, from whatever, meeting spaces,
Speaker 5: and also knowing how to book rooms in places that
Speaker 5: like accommodate disabilities is a huge thing because a lot
Speaker 5: of people book meetings in places are a wheelchair accessible
Speaker 5: and it's a fucking fiasco. And you can avoid that
Speaker 5: very easily, but you have to put a little tiny
Speaker 5: bit of work into it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Literally, I reached out to a friend to book a
Speaker 1: room last night because I knew they would get at
Speaker 1: that stuff.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, there's arranging people's schedules, getting people show
Speaker 5: up for stuff, Things you can do to prepare if
Speaker 5: what you're doing is basically all the things we've been describing, right,
Speaker 5: getting together a bunch of people to do a thing
Speaker 5: that is technically forming an organization. Yeah, Now, how formal
Speaker 5: informat you want it to be, or just you know,
Speaker 5: maybe it's just your organizing project or whatever. There's things
Speaker 5: you usually want. You want some kind of email so
Speaker 5: people can contact you in tandem with the email. Something
Speaker 5: that's very helpful that I think younger people tend not
Speaker 5: to think about is getting Google Voice. Yes, when Google
Speaker 5: Voice lets you set up a voicemail account so people
Speaker 5: can call you and leave phone messages. I mean everyone
Speaker 5: should just do this because this is the way that
Speaker 5: a lot of older people communicate.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: They won't send you an email, but they will leave
Speaker 5: you a voice message, and it's very very useful for this.
Speaker 5: Childcare is something that's important. I did, I mean a
Speaker 5: lot is probably too strong of a word, but like
Speaker 5: I did childcare when I was organizing, and it wound
Speaker 5: up being really helpful because there's a lot of people
Speaker 5: with kids, and so you know, there's a couple of
Speaker 5: ways that this could work. One is that you know,
Speaker 5: you have everyone bring their kids. You have like a
Speaker 5: little space, you bring them like coloring stuff, you bring
Speaker 5: them toys, you bring them games, and you just sort
Speaker 5: of watch everyone for a while. And as an organizing thing. Again,
Speaker 5: if you're good with kids, that's very useful, staggeringly useful
Speaker 5: organizing skill.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Another way this stuff happens.
Speaker 5: Is you know, everyone pulls together ten bucks and you
Speaker 5: hire a babysitter, Yeah, for a bunch of kids. And
Speaker 5: that's a very useful organized thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I organize with people who have kids.
Speaker 1: I remember four years ago, fuck me twenty twenty a
Speaker 1: long time ago, and also yesterday, but like we were
Speaker 1: organizing to feed and house people and we were having
Speaker 1: a big Thanksgiving dinner and like some of my friends
Speaker 1: have very young children and they bought them. And I
Speaker 1: think it's actually really cool to do that. A like
Speaker 1: for those kids, it is normal that, like we look
Speaker 1: after people in our community. This is what we do
Speaker 1: and ever since I've been little, this is what we did.
Speaker 1: And like it's also very nice for people. Like a
Speaker 1: lot of my friends also brought their children down to
Speaker 1: the border, especially last year when we had because there
Speaker 1: were children there anyway, right, Yeah, some of my friends
Speaker 1: who bring their children down and their kids would play
Speaker 1: with the other kids, and like it doesn't matter that
Speaker 1: some of the kids are Kurdish and some of the
Speaker 1: kids are from China and some of them are from
Speaker 1: Columbia or whatever. Like, they'll get along just fine. When
Speaker 1: they're four or five years old, they don't care. They
Speaker 1: just want to kick a ball or see a Teddy
Speaker 1: Bear or something. Yeah, I think it's really good for
Speaker 1: your children to you know, you're bringing them into a
Speaker 1: world which is cruel and at times unequal, and like
Speaker 1: your kids seeing that, like we can make a difference
Speaker 1: and we can do this. I think it's one of
Speaker 1: the best educations you can give your children.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's something that's good for everyone involved.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, And it's also very I think one of
Speaker 1: the things I see a lot wh people are organizing
Speaker 1: thing with refugees of the end house is like they're
Speaker 1: just people, Like you don't need to be afraid of them,
Speaker 1: Like they don't want to hurt your children. And having
Speaker 1: your children around shows that, like you have grasped they're
Speaker 1: just people and that you feel safe and your children
Speaker 1: are safe around them. And I think that that's valuable too.
Speaker 1: You're giving both parties some dignity in that moment.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there are some other very basic things that I
Speaker 5: think are very important. If you've never done this before,
Speaker 5: I'm going to talk a little bit about how you
Speaker 5: run a meeting. Yeah, and you would think that this
Speaker 5: doesn't matter, and until you watch a group of one
Speaker 5: hundred people who don't know how to do this attempt
Speaker 5: to get anything done and they it just is a fiasco.
Speaker 5: And this is even true sort of smaller groups. Yeah,
Speaker 5: so I'm going to give you how to run a
Speaker 5: meeting one oh one, Okay. A very common way to
Speaker 5: organize meetings that people use all over the world and
Speaker 5: it's very effective is you have two things. You have
Speaker 5: an agenda and you have a stack. And those are
Speaker 5: like the technical terms for them. The agenda I mean
Speaker 5: is an agenda, right, you know what an agenda is.
Speaker 5: You put the things that you need to do on it.
Speaker 5: And another thing that's very helpful with these is you
Speaker 5: know you're going to be operating at our time constraints
Speaker 5: because people don't have forty five hours.
Speaker 4: To be in meetings, and my god, you don't want
Speaker 4: to be in a meeting for that long. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 5: Knowing how long roughly you want to talk about these
Speaker 5: things is very very useful and making sure that you're
Speaker 5: of moving the conversation through the stuff on the agenda
Speaker 5: because you have more stuff you need to talk about.
Speaker 5: All of this again, like this all sounds very obvious,
Speaker 5: and again you know how to do it, but until
Speaker 5: you've been in a room where people have not realized
Speaker 5: they need to do this, you don't understand how.
Speaker 4: I'm put on this stuff yet pain of it not happening.
Speaker 5: God, I have watched rooms full of like sciet these
Speaker 5: are like professional scientists, right, So this is the entire
Speaker 5: room of one hundred feet of people with physics PhDs
Speaker 5: who don't know how to run a meeting, and it's
Speaker 5: a shit show. And all of this stuff could have
Speaker 5: been avoided with with some very very simple things.
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 5: The other thing, and this is genuinely a piece of
Speaker 5: social technology, right, it is the stack It is very simple, right.
Speaker 5: You have one person who is the stack keeper, and
Speaker 5: whatsone wants to talk. You have one person talking at
Speaker 5: a time, and what someone wants to talk, they raise
Speaker 5: their hand, they make some kind of signal to the
Speaker 5: stack keeper, and that person writes their name down, and
Speaker 5: so you now have a list of who gets to
Speaker 5: talk in what order. And so you go down the
Speaker 5: list and people get the say things. And again you
Speaker 5: know how to do this. This is not like a
Speaker 5: complicated thing. But again I have watched people who collectively
Speaker 5: have like more PhDs than like I earn money in
Speaker 5: a week, Like who know, I can not be.
Speaker 4: Able to pick this out, and you do. I believe
Speaker 4: in you. I believe in you, dear listener.
Speaker 5: But you could do this. Yeah, there's a very common
Speaker 5: Sometimes this is one person and sometimes this is two people.
Speaker 5: A very common way to do it is to have
Speaker 5: a stack taker and then have someone who's the facilitator.
Speaker 5: And the facilitator's job is to call on the people
Speaker 5: and to try to like move the conversation forwards and
Speaker 5: get and make sure make sure everyone's involved. And also
Speaker 5: another important part of this, and this is again something
Speaker 5: you'll know from your stupid work meetings, is you have
Speaker 5: to get people like me to shut up.
Speaker 4: Your meetings can't just be one person giving a speech.
Speaker 4: You have to cut them the fuck off and you
Speaker 4: have to get to the next person. Yeah, and doing
Speaker 4: that courteously is a skill. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5: And finally on this note, there's a lot of if
Speaker 5: you want to go into the like more technical stuff,
Speaker 5: part of the things the facilitators use and part of
Speaker 5: you know, the formal name for this is like the
Speaker 5: progressive stack, but it's just a thing that's very useful
Speaker 5: in organizing is you want to make sure everyone in
Speaker 5: a room is engaged and talking and that it's not
Speaker 5: just three people who talk all the time. Yeah, and
Speaker 5: you know, and so the idea of the progressive stack,
Speaker 5: right is you're trying to find the most marginalized people
Speaker 5: in degrees, people who are least likely to speak, and
Speaker 5: you're trying to get them in first. And sometimes this
Speaker 5: is literally just like, hey, someone hasn't been talking in
Speaker 5: a meeting this whole time, and you can like ask
Speaker 5: them what they think about something or asked if they
Speaker 5: have anything to say, and a lot of times they will,
Speaker 5: but they just don't feel confident enough to say it.
Speaker 5: And this is this is a very very important skill
Speaker 5: for a facilitator or just even you could just do
Speaker 5: this in a meeting too, right, Like you can be
Speaker 5: the person who goes like, hey, do you have this
Speaker 5: this person have anything to contribute? And that is an
Speaker 5: enormous thing. Sometimes it can be you know, sometimes it
Speaker 5: can be a little bit awkward, but it's a very
Speaker 5: important thing because you're just losing out on people who
Speaker 5: have really really valuable ideas and contributions and plans. And
Speaker 5: if you just let the same three people give speeches,
Speaker 5: you can't get to the stuff that's actually useful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely, if you've been a teacher or in any
Speaker 1: way what you know, you probably have had you have
Speaker 1: this skill. You might not consider it a skill, but
Speaker 1: even if you've been a TA in grad school something
Speaker 1: like that, you probably know how to do this.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So I'm going to put all of this together briefly,
Speaker 5: and I'm going to run through basically how we started
Speaker 5: the first organizing project I ever day, which was a
Speaker 5: tenants union in Chicago. Okay, so this is based on
Speaker 5: my memory. It's been a long time since I did this,
Speaker 5: but my basic memory of what we did was okay.
Speaker 5: So one of my friends is an experienced organizer. I
Speaker 5: was like a tiny baby, right this this was my
Speaker 5: first offline organizing project ever.
Speaker 4: Right, I had no idea what was doing.
Speaker 5: I thought I was a guy, which, like, that's how
Speaker 5: much of a fiasco, Like little tidy baby bo who
Speaker 5: doesn't know anything?
Speaker 4: This was, you know.
Speaker 5: And so my friend talked to some people that he knew,
Speaker 5: and he knew that I, you know, I was interested
Speaker 5: in getting involved in tennis organizing, and we like went
Speaker 5: to a cafe and we sat down and we ate
Speaker 5: and we just talked about what we wanted to do,
Speaker 5: what our plans were, what things we needed to do
Speaker 5: to get this organization set up. We talked about ideological stuff.
Speaker 5: And that's actually is something else important too, is part
Speaker 5: of organizing is getting people to think intentionally about their
Speaker 5: actions and think politically about their actions. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 5: something that's very useful. You also have to make sure
Speaker 5: that you're not forming a book club. Like book clubs
Speaker 5: are fine, but you need to make sure you're organizing group.
Speaker 5: If you try to do a thing, has it just
Speaker 5: become a book club? But that that's you know that
Speaker 5: that was something that was very useful to us. And
Speaker 5: you know, we started making a plan. And our plan was, okay,
Speaker 5: we made a bunch of flyers and then we went
Speaker 5: out and I did this, and I walked around through
Speaker 5: a bunch of streets and put them a light post
Speaker 5: or whatever. And then we put them like we hung
Speaker 5: them up in the buildings of tenants, you know, because
Speaker 5: you can just like walk up the stairs right and
Speaker 5: you need to put them on the walls. And you know,
Speaker 5: we had this flyer, this firehead information. This flyer said, okay,
Speaker 5: we're starting a tenant's union. If you have tenant, if
Speaker 5: you have issues with your landlord, or you want to
Speaker 5: talk about tenants stuff like, come here. At this time,
Speaker 5: we had an email you can send us stuff. We
Speaker 5: had a phone number that you could call ye you know,
Speaker 5: and so okay, and so parallel to this, we like,
Speaker 5: I forget if it was a church or if it
Speaker 5: was some building, some set center or something. We booked
Speaker 5: a room. We were kind of lucky in that we
Speaker 5: had like local press people nice who we sort of
Speaker 5: knew and This is another useful like if knowing a
Speaker 5: journalist can be a very useful skill, because one way
Speaker 5: to get a project off the ground, if you're trying
Speaker 5: to get to a bunch of people, is by finding
Speaker 5: a journalist who is willing to cover it, because you know,
Speaker 5: we're we're finding founding like the first tenants union in
Speaker 5: this place, right yeah, And you know, so we had
Speaker 5: media coverage and we got kind of screwed when this
Speaker 5: event eventually came together because there was like three feet
Speaker 5: of snow that night. But people still came, like people
Speaker 5: still came in the blizzard, Like a lot of people
Speaker 5: showed up for this.
Speaker 4: But what are things that we do?
Speaker 5: We also, like, you know, we just we just started
Speaker 5: talking to people, right, We started talking to tenants about
Speaker 5: their problems. We just you know, we talked to our friends,
Speaker 5: We talked to the people they knew. We ended up
Speaker 5: talking to someone, you know, and this is the thing
Speaker 5: that just happens as it spreads by word of mouth,
Speaker 5: right people start contacting you. We ran into a really
Speaker 5: long time tenants organizer in the city who had a
Speaker 5: bunch of incredible stories about how our corrupt politicians got
Speaker 5: their jobs by portraying the old Tenets organizers. Right. That's
Speaker 5: the other thing is you know, another thing that happens
Speaker 5: in projects is you'll you'll sometimes you'll just you just
Speaker 5: pick up someone who's you know, has been doing this
Speaker 5: since like the sixties. Yeah, and it rules because they
Speaker 5: have a wealth of experience and they want to they
Speaker 5: want to do stuff.
Speaker 4: We plotted out what we were.
Speaker 5: Going to do at our meeting, you know, we were
Speaker 5: going to do some political education. We were gonna have
Speaker 5: a bunch of time for people to talk about stuff,
Speaker 5: and we were gonna, you know, get get people to
Speaker 5: understand what we were doing how they can start organizing.
Speaker 5: And then we did it, and I unfortunately don't remember
Speaker 5: much of what we talked about because I was off
Speaker 5: in another room taking care of a bunch of people's kids,
Speaker 5: which was very nice, but I don't I don't remember
Speaker 5: what we talked about. But like that, you know, but
Speaker 5: like you all of those things, right, all of those
Speaker 5: steps from the start of you get five of your
Speaker 5: friends to go eat dinner and you talk about what
Speaker 5: you want to do through someone makes a flyer in
Speaker 5: like Microsoft or whatever you make it in like PowerPoint,
Speaker 5: and that's publisher what's what's what's the one I'm blinking,
Speaker 5: I haven't used it in so long, the one you
Speaker 5: make greeting cards in a program and I've forgotten it
Speaker 5: is you see this to make Christmas cars. But like,
Speaker 5: you know, okay, so we made a flyer and we
Speaker 5: walked around and put the flyers up and we made it.
Speaker 5: We made an email, you know, we got a space together,
Speaker 5: we figured out what we wanted to do, and then
Speaker 5: we did it. Yeah, and you know, and there's a
Speaker 5: bunch of organizing from there, right, But like we had
Speaker 5: started a thing, and you can do every single one
Speaker 5: of those steps. And if you can't personally do one
Speaker 5: of those steps, you can think of a person who
Speaker 5: you know, who you can bring in to help you
Speaker 5: do these things. Because organizing you already fucking know how
Speaker 5: to do it. Yeah, you just have to go out
Speaker 5: there and do it.
Speaker 4: Yep, you can have faith. Yeah, and this has been
Speaker 4: it could happen here, go organize.
Speaker 2: Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 4: It could happen here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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