It Could Happen Here Weekly 143

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Welcome back to you could happen here here daily dose
of something a little unsettling. I'm Molly Conger, your occasional
host here on this feed, and the host of a
new weekly show from Cool Zone Media called Weird Little
Guys that I think you'll probably like. Today, I'm a
little shamelessly promoting my own show by giving you a
little taste of the kinds of stories I like to
dig into over on the Weird Little Guys feed. So

(00:48):
remember last month when Donald Trump got shot? I kind
of don't. It feels like it was years ago. I
barely remember who I was during those tense few days
where it seemed possible Trump would ride that momentum to victory.
Imagining posters of that photo of Trump with blood dripping
down his face, fist raised, and then kind of didn't
matter at all anymore. The shooter wasn't a Biden sleeper

(01:11):
agent sent to take down the opposition. He was just
some kid with a rifle and the kind of uniquely
American desire to cause chaos with it. And that was
really hard for a lot of people to swallow. What
do you mean it doesn't seem like he was politically motivated.
He shot the former president. He shot him while he
was on stage at a rally for his campaign to
retake the presidency. Everything about the situation is political. How

(01:33):
could the shooter have had any other motivation? Thomas Crooks
wouldn't be the first guy to take a shot at
a president or a presidential candidate for no reason at all.
Far from it. While I was doing research for the
first episode of my show, which theoretically you could pick
up your phone and subscribe to right now while you're
listening if you wanted to, it got lost on a

(01:55):
few side quests. That's always happening to me. But as
I breezed past a quick mention of George Wallace, the
four term governor of Alabama, best remembered for his rallying
cry of segregation now, segregation, tomorrow, segregation forever. I'm not
going to do it in his accent. I'll spay that.
I remember that he got shot while running for president too,

(02:16):
during the primary in nineteen seventy two. He was paralyzed
after surviving an attempted assassination on the campaign trail. Surely,
whoever shot a man like George Wallace did it out
of a deep ideological commitment to something right. Maybe a
civil rights activist opposed to Wallace's views on race, or
a McGovern voter concerned that Wallace's cynical attempt to gain

(02:37):
the Democratic Party nomination after winning five states as a
third party candidate in sixty eight might actually work. Or
maybe he was a diehard Nixon supporter who saw Wallace
as a spoiler, siphoning conservative votes away from Nixon. But
that's not what happened. When Arthur Bremer shot George Wallace
four times in the chest and stomach on May fifteenth,
nineteen seventy two. It had nothing at all to do

(03:00):
with Wallace's policy positions, or Nixon's or McGovern's. It didn't
even have really anything at all to do with George
Wallace Bremer had been planning for months to assassinate Richard Nixon,
but it turned out that was too hard. He just
wanted to shoot somebody important. I hesitate to draw too

(03:22):
many comparisons to the Trump shooter because there's a lot
we still don't know and may never know. But it
did come out early on that Crooks was equally interested
in shooting Joe Biden. Trump just happened to have a
campaign rally close to where he lived in Pennsylvania, and
that rally happened to have weak perimeter security. Crooks had
also looked into how to get close to FBI Director
Christopher Ray, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and inexplicably, Kate Middleton. Yes,

(03:48):
that Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales. If Biden had
been campaigning in western Pennsylvania, or if Richard Nixon's security
hadn't been so tight, Crooks may have shot Biden and
Bremer may have killed Nixon. It doesn't seem like it
really mattered to either of them who they shot, as
long as they shot somewhat important. One of the funny

(04:08):
things about history is realizing that we've always been the
way that we are now there. Truly is nothing new
under the sun, because within hours of the attempt on
George Wallace's life, before any information was clear at all,
Nixon was demanding his aides put in a call to
the White House Deputy director of Communications, Kenneth Clawson, to
put out a statement that the shooter was a supporter

(04:28):
of George McGovern that was the front runner and the
Democratic primary, whom Nixon would go on to trounce terribly
at the election at the end of that year. So
Nixon saying, just say, we've got evidence, We've got unmistakable evidence.
Of course, they didn't have evidence of any kind, unmistakable
or not. And when the evidence did emerge, it certainly
didn't show the shooter working on the McGovern campaign, which

(04:50):
is the rumor Nixon was hoping to spread in those
early hours.

Speaker 4 (04:54):
Bob, definitely, day person, you know what I mean, put

(05:22):
it right away that you put it to get that
before they hit on the way.

Speaker 3 (05:36):
Now, we don't have thousands of hours of secret recordings
from inside the offices of today's Republicans, but we did
see something really similar in the immediate aftermath of the
Trump shooting. He's a Biden voter. He's a Democrat, he's
a radical leftist, he's Antifa. We can already tell. We
just know it's obvious. We have proof. The fact that
there was no proof of anything on day one doesn't matter.

(05:57):
It matters even less than no proof ever materialized. You
just have to get the rumor out first. You have
to make an impression while the cement is wet, and
sometimes that's permanent. One thing that is not on the
Nixon tapes, though, is a conversation that allegedly occurred that
afternoon in May nineteen seventy two that was reported by
Seymour Hirsh twenty years later in nineteen ninety two. Despite

(06:18):
a Supreme Court ruling in the seventies the tapes belonged
to the National Archives, the full volume of the Nixon
tapes were not made available to the public until two
thousand and seven. Now, Seymour Hirsh is not a making
stuff up kind of guy. I don't think he was
fabricating any part of this story. He's still alive and
has a sub stack at eighty seven years old. So
I don't want any beef with Seymour. That's not what
I'm saying. He has a decade's long career as an

(06:41):
investigative journalist and has a Pulitzer for exposing the cover
up of the Myli massacre. I don't think he's patting
the truth here. But in his nineteen ninety two New
Yorker piece called Nixon's Last cover Up, the Tapes he
wants the Archives to suppress, Hirsch wrote that the unreleased
tapes from the afternoon of the wall Is shooting contained
recordings of Nixon directing E. Howard Hunt, the retired CIA

(07:01):
officer who headed his White House plumbers, to break into
Bremer's apartment before the FBI could search it and to
plant McGovern campaign literature. Hunt's own autobiography admits only that
at Nixon's direction, Nixon advisor Charles Coulson did ask Hunt
to take a look around Brehmer's apartment. Even that this

(07:22):
is all taking place just a month before Hunt did,
in fact play a key role at the Watergate break in,
this isn't exactly unbelievable. I can absolutely believe that Richard
Nixon would ask E. Howard Hunt to break into a
building for some nefarious purpose, because we know he did
that at least once. And one thing the varying accounts
seemed to agree on is that Hunt was unable to
complete the assignment because the FBI had already sealed off

(07:44):
Bremer's apartment in Milwaukee before he got there. Hersh's peace
claimed the tapes contain recordings of Coulson breaking this news
to Nixon, that Hunt arrived too late and the apartment
was already under police guard, and further claims that on
the recordings, Nixon can be heard berating Coulson for not
doing more to slow down the FBI. Again, all completely
believable if you have even a passing knowledge of Richard Nixon,

(08:06):
and Colson himself related this account to Hirsh in nineteen
ninety two. The problem is we have the tapes now,
fifteen years after Hirsch's article was published. Researchers scoured the
newly released recordings for proof of this version of events,
and it isn't there. It's entirely possible that Colson is
recalling conversations that occurred outside the presence of the tape machine,
or is misremembering how much of this was actually spoken

(08:29):
aloud in what was simply understood. It's not out of
the realm of possibility that Colson is recalling something Nixon
definitely desired. It's just not all the tapes. Absence of
proof isn't proof of absence, of course, but we do
have a pretty complete record of Nixon's conversations on the
afternoon of May fifteenth, nineteen seventy two. Those missing eighteen
minutes are from a different frantic afternoon that summer. But

(08:53):
before we get to the rest of Richard Nixon's no good,
very bad day, here are some products and services. So
on May fifteen, Nixon got out of a budget meeting
around four pm, which was shortly after the shooting, and

(09:13):
that's when he first got the news. And we know
from the tapes that his first phone call was to
his own wife, pat and then he called George Wallace's wife, Cornelia.
He then asked Secretary of the Treasury John Connolly to
call Ted Kennedy to offer him full Secret Service protection,
which is not allowable under the structure of how that works,
but he wanted it done, presumably out of some combination

(09:35):
of the idea that Kennedy would be McGovern's vice presidential pick,
and maybe just the general idea that if people are
getting assassinated, you need to account for all your Kennedy's.
It's actually kind of wild to dig into the tapes
and see where everyone's heads were at that afternoon in
the Oval office. A recording from around seven pm captures
speculation that the shooting may have been a false flag

(09:55):
by Wallace's own people, but the idea is quickly dismissed.
He wouldn't have his own peace pople shoot him in
the stomach. That could kill you. They would have gone
for something less dangerous, like shooting him in the foot,
Which is a conversation we all had after the Trump shooting,
isn't it. Oh, maybe this is a stunt. Wait, why
would he have them fire at his head? That's so crazy, right,

(10:16):
it's I mean, it's the same conversation with different names
and body parts. Subbed him and this recording to captures
Nixon's top aids hoping that whoever did it was a
left wing NUTT.

Speaker 5 (10:32):
Would be one of his own people to whatever to
shoot that man off, and.

Speaker 6 (10:36):
They would have shot him in the foot or something.
Oh I haven't.

Speaker 7 (10:41):
Wouldn't be is not one of then of people shoot
him on the store to kill him?

Speaker 8 (10:48):
Oh?

Speaker 5 (10:48):
I think the guy. The guy has to be a
nut of some kind. I just told the left wing right, Yeah,
I silly, I think I could ken it was really
elaborating now rather than the writing. And I tried to
bring out the ring the writing crack.

Speaker 9 (11:10):
How hell to do that?

Speaker 5 (11:11):
It showed him twisted the.

Speaker 9 (11:12):
Start of plum people.

Speaker 3 (11:16):
So Nixon tried to put a thumb on the scale
after the fact, But the exact nature of his meddling
will forever be up for debate, I guess, and the
Nixon tapes aren't the only unique primary source for in
down that day. In the early months of nineteen seventy two,
as Arthur Bremmer prepared to shoot Nixon, gave up on
shooting Nixon and ultimately shot George Wallace, he was keeping
a diary, and in nineteen seventy three Harper's Magazine Press

(11:39):
published that diary. I couldn't find a physical copy of
the original bound book published by Harper's for less than
a small fortune, but it did find an archival scan
of the diary that was produced as evidence, and the
diary is a strange and fascinating document. Only the latter
half was published. He'd thrown away the first one hundred
and forty eight pages of fact. He notes on the

(12:00):
first page of the version that we have. In nineteen
eighty a construction worker named Sherman Griffin found those first
one hundred and forty eight pages, so this again, eight
years after the shooting. He found them wrapped in plastic
inside of a backpack underneath the twenty seventh Street Viaduct
in Milwaukee. From prison, Arthur Remmer tried to sue Griffin
for ownership of the document, saying it would only be

(12:21):
used to embarrass him and it was his. He owned it.
I need back, But in nineteen eighty one a court
ruled that Griffin could keep it. I'm sure it was
more complicated in the end, all the back and forth
in court, but ultimately Finder's Keepers. The portion we do
have is a lot of things. It's full of typos
and disorganized thinking, and sexual fantasy and the mundane rambling

(12:42):
stream of consciousness of a guy going about his day
to day life as he tries to figure out how
to shoot the president. A few months after it was published,
The New York Review published an essay by Gorvadal speculating
that Brehmer hadn't written the diary at all as a
literary critic it was his professional opinion that Brehmer could
not have written such a document, so it was riddled
with typos. The doll believes they come and go and

(13:02):
are not believable in their structure and format, as though
the writer is remembering as he writes that he's supposed
to be a twenty one year old bus boy of
mediocre intelligence. He also doubts that Bremer was well read
enough to make reference to Soljhanitsyn's day in the Life
of A von Denisovich or quit as he crossed the
Great Lakes call me Ishmael. Both Denisovich and Ishmael are misspelled,

(13:23):
but that could be intentional, he says.

Speaker 10 (13:26):
No.

Speaker 3 (13:27):
Gore Vadahal believes or perhaps would only like you to think.
He believes it's hard to say that the diary was
falsified in its entirety by E. Howard Hunt. Nixon Spook
and Hunt was a prolific writer, giving Vidal a large
volume of material for comparison, and he claims there are
similarities in the writing styles, and also notes that both

(13:48):
Bremer and Hunt use the phrase Harry hippies. They have
a distaste for Harry hippies. I wasn't alive in nineteen
seventy two. Maybe a lot of people hated Harry hippies.
But again, just as Hirsch's claims what the secret apes
in nineteen ninety two were called into question when we
got the tapes in two thousand and seven, but All's
essay was published in nineteen seventy three, seven years before

(14:08):
the first half of the diary was found. So even
if you're inclined to believe Hunt was crafty enough to
construct this elaborate plot with a fake diary and a
patsy shooter, it's a real stretch to think he would
even bother writing one hundred and forty eight pages, wrapping
them in plastic, hiding them inside of a backpack, and
tucking that backpack into a little nook under a bridge
in Milwaukee to be found by a construction worker a

(14:29):
decade later. That part just doesn't make a.

Speaker 10 (14:32):
Lot of sense.

Speaker 3 (14:33):
But maybe Gorbadal was just doing an elaborate bit that
I don't understand. The legacy of that diary lives on
in some surprising ways. In those early days after the
Trump shooting, before we all forgot what ever happened, I
did see a lot of people point out that the
last time a president took a bullet it wasn't over politics.
John Hinckley Junior shot Reagan to impress Jodi Foster. Remember, Okay,

(14:54):
here's where I admit something kind of embarrassing. I've always
just accepted that statement at faceback. It makes no sense,
but he wasn't acting rationally, so it's not something I
felt like I needed to make sense of. He shot
Reagan to impress Jodi Foster. I guess he thought she'd
find that impressive. No need to interrogate that further. I
mean a lot of women might find it impressive if

(15:15):
you shot Ronald Reagan, so there's not a lot of
follow up to do on that. The thing is, i'd
never seen the movie Taxi Driver. I never pieced together
that he thought shooting the president would impress Jodi Foster
because she starred as the child sex worker in the
movie Taxi Driver, in which the protagonist Travis Bickle plans
to shoot a presidential candidate named Charles Palatine. Hinkley shot

(15:35):
Reagan to impress Jodi Foster makes I guess like a
little more sense if you have that cultural context, and
I fear I may have been the very last person
in America to find that out. So maybe everybody else
already knew this next part too. I don't know, but
Taxi Driver owes a lot to Arthur Bremmer, the guy
who shot George Wallace. Screenwriter Paul Schrader has always denied

(15:59):
that he based any part of the movie on Bremer's diary.
In a nineteen seventy six interview, Schrader says he was
inspired by the shooting itself in nineteen seventy two, but
that the script was actually finished before the diary was
published in seventy three, and he registered the script with
the WGA, So that is provably true, right. But he
told film comments Richard Thompson in seventy six, I want

(16:22):
to emphasize that the script was written before any of
the diary was published. After I read the diary, I
was very tempted to take some of the good stuff
from it and add it to Taxi Driver, but I
decided not to because of legal ramifications. Bremer is sitting
there in jail with nothing better to do than sue us,
which is why I made certain the script was registered
before the diary came out, and that nothing was changed
after the diary's publication, And that's actually kind of prescient

(16:45):
of him, come to think of it. He's saying this
in seventy six that Bremer could file some kind of
nuisance lawsuit from prison, and that's years before Bremer tried
to get half a million dollars and his diary back
from that construction worker. And I'm obviously not a film buff.
We all just found out that I've never seen a movie.
So he won't say Schrader is not telling the truth here.
And maybe somebody who knows more about film would say, well,

(17:06):
there's a difference between a script and a screenplay, right,
those are different things. The script was done, but he
still could have changed the look and feel of how
it was shot. Because there are some scenes in Taxi
Driver that, unless Scorsese and Trader had some kind of
deep psychic connection to whatever forces in the universe motivated
Arthur Bremmer, they absolutely came from the diary. I read

(17:29):
the diary before sitting down to see what the movie
was all about. So when Travis Pickele, the titular taxi driver,
pulls up outside of a building with his fare, Martin
Scorsese himself in the back seat. I was doing the
Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme at my TV because the camera
pans to a woman in a window smoking a cigarette,
partially obscured by a gauzy curtain, And just a few

(17:49):
pages into Bremmer's diary, he describes a really similar scene
before he flew back to Milwaukee to try to cross
the border into Canada to shoot Richard Nixon in Ottawa.
He wrote this in his diary, My last night at
the Howard Johnson's in the Jamaica area in New York City.
I didn't sleep much. A beautiful naked lady across a
parking lot on the next motel out by her window
Florida ceiling, smoking cigarettes, and I had to watch her.

(18:13):
Her table room light was on and a thin veil
of curtain allowed me to watch her as she passionately
kissed a man who wore clothes. I never saw them
in each other's arms for more than a minute at
a time. They must have been fighting through binoculars. I
saw them gesture like Italians and open their mouths very wide,
very often. So maybe he finished the script before he
read the diary, but the diary absolutely influenced the way

(18:35):
the film was shot. According to Andrew Rausch's book on
the films of Bartin Scorsese, de Niro prepared for the
role by getting a New York taxi license and driving
around the city listening to a cassette tape of someone
reading the Diary aloud. The Diary is genuinely oh normally,

(19:01):
I'm firmly in the camp of please do not read
or recommend that others read the manifestos left behind by shooters.
There's not much to gain from it. It's what they
want with that and the other. There's plenty of writing
on the topic, but I don't really think anyone will
read Arthur Bremer's diary entry about leaving a nude massage
parlor frustrated that he's still a virgin, and feel inspired

(19:23):
to follow in his footsteps. But I do think it's
a fascinating document. I learned more about what's inside the
mind of a nihilist aspiring shooter from Bremer's diary than
I've learned from any self indulgent little manifesto left behind
by a mass shooter after failing to get his shot
at Nixon at the appearance in Ottawa in April, he wrote,
I just need a little opening and a second of time.

(19:45):
Nothing has happened for so long three months. The last
person I held a conversation with in three months was
a near naked girl rubbing my erect penis, and she
wouldn't let me put it through her failures. A few
pages later, he writes that he thought about getting really drunk,
but quote decided against it. Just wanted to pick a
fight with a bartender somewhere or someone get arrested, and

(20:06):
then where am I? I got something to do something
big before I ever get arrested again. He writes that
he's getting tired of writing he wants to be a
madman who kills, and then abruptly transitions to saying he
goes crazy when hears Johnny Cash's new single, quoting the
lyrics I shot you with my thirty eight and now
I'm doing time, before noting that a baseball game had

(20:28):
been canceled that day due to rain. Honestly, the document
it reminds me the most of is the diary kept
by Franklin Seacrest, the young man who set a synagogue
on fire in Austin in twenty twenty one. Large portions
of his diary were produced as evidence in his trial,
and his diary is sort of similar in that it's
a strange stream of consciousness accounting his frustrations with women,

(20:48):
his daily activities, going to class, arguments with his mother,
interspersed with these strange outbursts of violent desire, and they're
just sort of mixed in without any recognition that these
things are congruous. After taking two weeks away from his
diary to deal with the tragedy of failing to kill
Richard Nixon, remember went to see Clockwork Orange. As he

(21:09):
watched the movie, he decided he would kill George Wallace instead,
though he lamented that this was a second rate target, writing,
I won't even rate a TV in terruption in Russia
or Europe. When the news breaks, they never heard of Wallace.
If something big and nom flares up, I'll be at
the bottom of the first page. In America, the editors
will say Wallace dead. Who cares? He won't get more

(21:29):
than three minutes on network TV news. I don't expect
anybody to get a big, throbbing erection from the news.
You know, a storm in some country we never heard of,
kills ten thousand people, Big deal, Pass the beer? What's
on TV tonight? I hope my death makes more sense
than my life. And just days before he finally took
his shot, he wrote, yesterday I even considered McGovern as

(21:50):
a target. If I go to prison as an assassin,
solitary forever, guards in my cell, etc. Or get killed
or suicided, what difference to me? Ask me why I
did it, and I'd say I don't know, or nothing
else to do, or why not? Or I have to
kill somebody. It bothers me that there are about thirty
guys in prison now who threatened the pres and we

(22:12):
never heard a thing about him except that they're in prison.
Maybe what they need is organization. Make the first lady
a widow incorporated, chicken in every pot and a bullet
on every head, committee incorporated the whole to national convention
every year to pick the executioner. A winner will be
chosen from the best entry in forty thousand words or less,
preferably less on the theme how to do a bang

(22:32):
up job getting people to notice you? Or get it
off your chest, make your problems Everybody's On May thirteenth,
two days before the shooting, Brehmer attended a Wallace rally
in Kalamazoo, Michigan. There are photographs of Bremer at the
rally that day, and he even spoke to a police
officer who responded to a call about a suspicious vehicle
park near the venue. Brehmer told the officer he just

(22:53):
wanted to be early to get a good spot at
the rally and complied when asked to move his car.
His loaded thirty eight was in his jacket potet. He
writes in his diary that he could have taken his
shot that day, but at the last minute two teenage
girls caught between him and his target, and he thought
they'd be disfigured or blinded if he fired through the
glass they were pressed up against, writing, I let Wallace
go only to spare these two stupid, innocent, delighted kids.

(23:17):
His final entry, made the night before the shooting ends
with got a sign from campaign headquarters here to shield
the gun. Is there anything else to say? My cry
upon firing will be a penny for your thoughts. Round
four pm on the fifteenth, after Wallace finished addressing a
crowd in Laurel, Maryland, Bremer pushed his way through the
people hoping to shake Wallace's hand and unloaded his thirty eight.

(23:41):
He struck Wallace four times and wounded four others, a
state trooper, a campaign volunteer, Wallace's personal bodyguard, and a
secret Service agent. He was convicted and sentenced to sixty
three years, later reduced to fifty three years on appeal.
He was denied parole in nineteen ninety six after arguing
it as hearing that shooting segregationist dinosaurs wasn't as bad
as harming mainstream politicians, but it was released in two

(24:04):
thousand and seven. George Wallace wrote to Bremer in prison
in nineteen ninety five, telling him that he forgave him
for the shooting and hoped to correspond a bit to
get to know one another. Bremer never responded, and George
Wallace died in nineteen ninety eight. So we shot George
Wallace for no reason, and Robert de Niro's study of
the diary he left behind inspired the performance that made

(24:24):
Hinckley shoot Reagan. There's really nothing hard to believe at
all in the idea that Thomas Crooks wanted to shoot
the president just to be remembered as anyone at all.

Speaker 1 (24:53):
Hi and Welcome to the podcast. It's b James and
today I am joined by Nick. Been doing some reporting
on a forest occupation in Hint, which is a place
I used to live. Actually, Mick, would you like to
introduce yourself and sort of explain a little bit about
what you've been doing.

Speaker 9 (25:08):
Of course, Hi, I'm Meck. I am incidentally reporting on
stuff and I thought this was a pretty neat thing
to report on that I think people should know more about,
and it's also kind of a fun thing.

Speaker 1 (25:19):
So yeah, it's very accessible for people, Like if you
want to do like little forest occupying over the summer,
this is one that you can do pretty easily.

Speaker 9 (25:29):
Yeah. Yeah, you can skip your European festival season and
just go help at the forest occupation, which is cheaper
and much more memorable.

Speaker 1 (25:38):
Yeah you can. God, they used to have one of
those near the little town I lived in when I
was racing in Belgium, and it was a scene.

Speaker 9 (25:45):
Yeah, just lovely times.

Speaker 1 (25:48):
Yeah, great times. We should maybe explain like a little
bit about Hunt as a city, because I think if
people have seen it, or they've maybe visited, like they've
been to the middle of town, right and they've they've
seen the castle and then the waterhouse bar or whatever,
and they've been one of those sugar noses, but like
they may not have seen the whole city. So can
you sort of characterize the city.

Speaker 9 (26:07):
Of course, it's very diverse in the sense that the
scenery changes a lot. You've got some of these like
really old buildings that are just like speaking to your imagination.
But then there's also almost like concrete deserts. Yeah, I
would almost call them, where like the view on the
street is just an incredible amount of gray in varying colors. Yeah,

(26:29):
thats it was a beautiful city. I don't mean to
thresh talk cantier at all, but at times it's just
really gray.

Speaker 11 (26:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
Yeah, I've lots of memories of springtime and Flanders and
like gray sky and gray buildings and gray roads and yeah,
but also some very beautiful areas. So yeah, why did
you go ahead and explain to us a little bit
about this forest occupation?

Speaker 9 (26:52):
Okay, it's an occupation that's happening to a little north
of the city center. In terms of forest occupations, it's
remarkably accessible. So it's called the Womblehems Meson or ponds
for you English speakers. Out there, and it's part of
an industrial area called the Dauci, which is located just

(27:15):
west of the canal the Lever, which connects the port
of Hant, the third largest port in Belgium. The area
itself is about fourteen to fifteen hectares. I'm not sure
how to translate that to US numbers.

Speaker 1 (27:28):
I'm sorry, Yeah, neither terriblated American, doesn't matter.

Speaker 9 (27:33):
There's internet, Yeah, and the ar area is largely been
left to its own for a pretty significant amount of
time past twenty years now. There's two areas within the ponds,
as I'm going to call them, a northern part and
a southern part, and later down the line i'll explain

(27:53):
why that is important before I continue further on the highlight.
I went there mainly as a form of solidarity and support.
I had asked if people would be willing to talk
to me about in a journalistic or reporting capacity, and
they agreed to that. But I'm not a local, and
I also don't want to pretend i am, although any

(28:15):
listener will hear my accent and know that. So yeah,
we'll be mainly talking about the southern area, and there's
destination plans before this area there's essentially two parties that
are working together to turn these green areas into the
gray concrete deserts that we just talked about. These parties
are the municipality of Kent and the Lane, a government

(28:39):
organization that handles public transport and Flanders. So over the years,
there have been several plans to build or develop the ponds,
but up until last week. We're recording this in the
week of August eighth, but up until last week, no
permits were issued to actually finalize or realize these plans.
The northern part was supposed to be turned into a

(29:00):
sort of training area for bus drivers, while the southern
part is intended to be a parking lot for public
transport buses. The activists currently residing in the forest are
by no means against the idea of public transport, but
do think that the destruction of this piece of datuare
is counterproductive for both the locals and for climate change reasons.

(29:23):
There is enough concrete in the city already, and they
argue that alternative solutions have not been giving the attention
they deserve.

Speaker 1 (29:30):
Yeah, it seems like it wouldn't be hard to find.
Like I think they call it like a brown field
site like a former industrial site or in that area
of Flanders, to redevelop an old factory or a warehouse
complex or something. To do this rather than taking one
of the green spaces and destroying it and paving it over.

Speaker 9 (29:48):
You know, I don't know what the municipality was thinking,
but I'm sure there is like barren areas elsewhere that
can just as easily be repurposed in a way that
doesn't destroy nature. So the part that was most surprising
to me, and at the same time not at all,
is how this is being played out politically. To give

(30:11):
everyone a quick timeline, about twenty years ago, the municipality
designated these two zones that I talked about as to
be used for common use. I'll reumain it for those
speaking Dutch or Flemish well. At the same time the
ground was being bought by the public transport company the
lane plans for development started. There is even like an

(30:34):
unused tram bridge just outside the green zone and the occupation.
But for one reason or another, the permit to build
on the ground itself had expired, during which time nature
took it upon herself to reclaim the area. Now, what
I mentioned earlier is this difference between the north and
the south part. These are separated by train tracks, making

(30:56):
a very clear distinction between the two areas. The land
originally wanted to use the north part to make a
sort of training area, as I just said, but these
plans never materialized. At the same time, about three years ago,
another action group prevented the destruction of the northern part.
Now this is where I find it really interesting. The

(31:17):
terrain is still owned by the line and the municipality,
but they intend to give custody to a local environmental
group called Naturepunt, but only if the plans for the
southern part, where there's an occupation right now, are completed.
Oh yes, yes, interesting. Yeah. While I was talking to

(31:39):
my source, I was reading between the lines there as
a sort of an attempt to play these multiple environmental
organizations against each other, a sort of divide and conquer.

Speaker 1 (31:50):
M Yeah, very new theorious.

Speaker 9 (31:52):
When I asked my source about that, they said that
it was up to mediate whether or not I would
call it that, but that the existence of these plants
is just a reality.

Speaker 2 (32:02):
Now.

Speaker 9 (32:02):
I will not claim, probably for legal reasons, that there's
definitely some attempt to set these parties up against each other.
But from the information that I have, like if I
were a betting man, I know where i'd put my money.

Speaker 1 (32:17):
Yeah, that's really interesting, So like not true to put
it is not present in the forest occupation on the
southern side, is that right? Not that I'm aware of,
And so they'd stand to like they'd gain custody of
the northern society of the people on the southern side failed.

Speaker 9 (32:32):
Exactly, how anfair he is, exactly, And if the southern
side now succeeds in preventing like the tearing down of
the trees, then the northern side could become you know,
threatened again, and then this whole circus starts all over again.

Speaker 1 (32:48):
Right, Yeah, So both of them have the avested interest
in one of these well, in theory, the municipality maybe
would like them to think that both of them have
an interest in the paving over of one of these areas.

Speaker 9 (33:00):
But exactly, like someone has to lose in this equation.
And I find it interesting that that it's happening like this,
especially because hands kind of promotes itself on these green
zones that are mixed throughout the city and that are
then accessible for people by bike or for running or walking,

(33:21):
And then in that same breath there's also still the
oh yeah, one of these species of nature we need
to tear down because we need more concrete. Yeah, those
two views just don't align.

Speaker 1 (33:34):
Right, And like we said, there's no shortage of Concretely,
this is a very sort of post industrial area. It's
not like this is like a public facing thing that
needs to be in one area to be accessible to people, right,
Like they could store their buses, train their bus drivers,
you know, somewhere else in Flanders. It's not like it
needs to be right in town.

Speaker 9 (33:54):
Now. I'm certain there are other areas where you could
just as easily make a parking lot for buses. Yeah.
As for like a training grounds, I'm not sure how
that would work. But then again there I think there's
roads enough in the city for people to practice, like
even like industrial areas not to have very much traffic,

(34:14):
so that could still work without having to like again
get rid of a piece of forest just so people
can drive around in buses.

Speaker 1 (34:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (34:23):
But again, this is not an argument against public transport,
more in the like hypocrisy and senselessness of the plans
that are on the table right now.

Speaker 1 (34:34):
Yeah, and kind of trying to make people choose between
two things when they should be perfectly possible to have.

Speaker 9 (34:38):
Both, right exactly. I'm guessing it would also be more
cost effective if you take some other parts, because I'll
dive into that later. But there's also like pollution in
these areas that needs to be taken care of. So
just from a cost effective standpoint, I think there should
be alternative options that will keep everyone happier.

Speaker 8 (35:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:00):
So, yeah, described me your visit there, like, describe how
it was and what you winness there?

Speaker 9 (35:06):
Okay, Well I went there at the end of July.
I stayed a few days and it was really weird
because you're coming from again a tram stop, then you
have to walk for a bit and all of the
sudden it's like you're in a forest. It was. It
was really surreal almost to know that you're in the

(35:27):
middle of a big city but also have that kind
of like isolation from the sounds of traffic.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
Yeah. I mean that's lovely, right, It's nice that's that's
available at least for now.

Speaker 9 (35:38):
Oh yeah, I understand one hundred percent why people want
to keep that green space close to their homes.

Speaker 1 (35:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (35:45):
So the ponds are a mix of terrain like there's
like water hungry, like swampy areas when the ring has
been falling. There's lush grass fields with like little curvy
impromptu paths to take. And there's some parts where the
trees have been growing for long enough that people can

(36:06):
now build treehouses in them, which to me is quite
a good indicator that not much development or care has
been done in this terrain. There's an absolutely insane amount
of BlackBerry bushes, much to mydy light. And yeah, it's
just for an area that is relatively small in the
bigger picture. It just surprised me how many different faces

(36:29):
it has. It was a delight to be there. Locals
tend to use the area for walks or picnics, or
to take their dogs out. I've seen multiple people stopping
by just to pick the blackberries. The city itself calls
this entire area a green zone and a climate access
their words. What can has done is trying to create

(36:50):
a network of zones and roads that are accessible by car,
but not so much that there is a lot of
traffic on these roads, which makes them ideal for cycling, running, recreation,
or even transports if you would so choose. The website
of can itself promotes these areas is good for the
flora and fauna, for the environment, and subsequently for residents.

(37:12):
Then you need to be thinking of absorption of rainwater,
or keeping local populations of animals and plants healthy, or
just the cooling effect that nature has.

Speaker 1 (37:23):
Yeah, compared to black top.

Speaker 9 (37:25):
Exactly like fully, concrete cities tend to like not really
release their warmth as quickly as nature does it. And
it was surprising because it was really hot when I
was there, but in the shade of the trees, it
was perfectly doable up until the point where you actually exercised,
and then suddenly it was less cool. But different story again.

(37:47):
The website from the municipality itself acknowledges the importance of
the area for an endangered species of lizard and the
efforts that the city took to make sure that it
can still thrive there. More concretely, one person I spoke
to said that there are thirty nine protected species of
plants and animals living there, protected under both Flemish and

(38:09):
European law. So I'm not really sure why that's discarded
into the calculation. I'm not a municipality person. I don't
know also, I believe there have been sightings of foxes there,
mainly because we were told by the activists not to
eat the blackberries that are too close to the ground

(38:29):
due to the parasites that foxes may carry and can
subsequently like infect.

Speaker 1 (38:34):
People with Oh wow, yeah interesting.

Speaker 9 (38:37):
You know what else carries parasites, James?

Speaker 1 (38:41):
Is it the goods and services that we rely on
to pay for this podcast?

Speaker 9 (38:46):
Exactly, there's a fifty percent chance that these products and
services will give you one or another incurable parasite.

Speaker 1 (38:55):
Wonderful, and we're back. And you mentioned that there was
a problem with pollution in the wilderness space, you can explain,
like what kind of pollution then entails.

Speaker 9 (39:16):
Of course, in the past there has been like a
pollution of both the groundwater and the soil in and
of itself. That's not that remarkable. I've been told by
someone that Flanders has multiple spots where you can come
into contact with different forms of pollution. In the ponds,
there is both pollution in the soil and in the groundwater.

(39:37):
The soil itself contains asbestos, although it should be noted
that that is within like the acceptable regulatory norms. As
a refresher for listeners. Asbestos danger lies mainly in the
breaking or fracturing of the material, and the fibers that
release through that process is what makes asbestos so hazardous.

(39:58):
An effective way to mitigate is to make sure that
these fibers do not get into the air, for which
water tends to work. Wonders so, at least in terms
of asbestos, it seems very simple and cost effective to
just leave it undisturbed, because it's already an area that
likes to swallow up water, which then will isolate the

(40:19):
asbestos from the air and thus make it less harmful.
The water is contaminated with vocis. That's an acronym for
a variety of volatile organic compounds with some chlorine attached
to it. I don't know. I'm not a chemist. These
chemicals have several uses and applications in a variety of industry.

(40:41):
One of my sources told me that the specific chemical
is one point for dioxane, which is used as a solvent.
It's not the type of stuff you want to drink
or inhale, but serious exposure from contaminated soil or water
is pretty rare from what I've read. As my source
pointed out to content eminence in the water will overtime

(41:01):
degrade organically, a process called phytoremediation, where the presence of
plants and microorganisms and fungi will degrade the material and
reduce the toxicity. While reading into this, I found that
the same is true to an extent for asbestos, which
can be a source of like inorganic nutrients for these microorganisms.

(41:24):
So while you could point out that phytoremediation is a
longer process than sanitation, I personally think that it's just
common sense that letting nature do its work understir might
be significantly cheaper and more sustainable compared to putting additional
chemicals and substances in the ground to neutralize these vocis

(41:46):
also just a fun little side quest here. But in
order to monitor the area, the line employed a concierge
to walk the terrain on a daily basis. I'm unsure
if you can spot upcoming or in merging contamination with
the naked eye, but not my money that they used
to pay the guy.

Speaker 1 (42:05):
So this guy just his job was to walk around
the ponds.

Speaker 9 (42:09):
Yeah, pretty much. I'm told he had like a little
hut or a little shack from which he worked. The
guy was still working there at the time the activists
moved in, but the shack is gone, and so is
the gonecierge. I'm not sure about the details of what
happened there, but what I do find extremely funny is

(42:31):
that now officials and spokespersons from the development site are
claiming that the area is dangerous and that it is
for their own well being that the activists leave as
soon as possible, which doesn't really make sense to me,
Like either this argument is like incredibly disingenuous, or they
fucked over someone by paying them to take this incredibly

(42:53):
the risky job of walking over contaminated terrain.

Speaker 1 (42:56):
Yeah, and not to mention like all the people who
they allowed toward their dogs and click blackberries there and things.

Speaker 9 (43:03):
Exactly if it was that dangerous that people should not
be there, then I'm fairly certain they could muster better
fences than they did at the moment. Like I'm not
sure on offense economy in the broader sense, but there
should at least have been signs on the fences, and
there were none. So yeah, we're getting to the octupist groups.

(43:24):
The group that is currently occupying the trees is an
assembly of people who care deeply about the area itself.
I spoke on the record with one of them and
I would like to play this clip to let them
introduce themselves.

Speaker 11 (43:38):
I'm Elvid and one of the activists of the Window
Myths occupation which he occupied since the twenty of June,
and we occupy this because it's endangered. Is the lend,
which is the public transports company in Flanders, wants to
destroy this fifteen hector of nature for building a bus

(44:04):
deput so like a parking for buses.

Speaker 9 (44:07):
Okay, do you want to tell us about what what
you you and the group of activisties have done here.

Speaker 12 (44:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 11 (44:15):
So we live in the trees as much as possible,
and we we sleep there to make an eviction harder
and to have more power in our in our action,
like it's way more difficult for them to get us
out if we are on height and use other tactics

(44:36):
to to block them. And they also kndot start cutting
trees when we are in in the trees another trees?

Speaker 9 (44:48):
How is that for you?

Speaker 8 (44:51):
It's intends.

Speaker 11 (44:54):
Always and occupation of course, but also places of where Yeah,
very experiment with living together and where everyone's welcome.

Speaker 8 (45:05):
There are no door bells no walls.

Speaker 11 (45:08):
Furst are very open place where everyone can just come
in and feel like they are welcome, and it's not
owned by someone.

Speaker 2 (45:17):
It's not.

Speaker 11 (45:19):
Yeah, it doesn't feel like it's belonging to someone, which
you can easily.

Speaker 8 (45:23):
Have with the house, I think.

Speaker 11 (45:25):
But here there's all the space to make stuff, to live,
to take time for yourself, which makes it very healthy,
I think to live here by being in nature, people
are just more happy I think in general than in
the city and in the house. And yeah, we are

(45:47):
mainly building three houses. As you can hear, maybe probably.

Speaker 9 (45:55):
So as you've heard that was it's one of the
activists that I spoke to. As you've also probably heard,
is that there is construction going on in the trees.
There's multiple treehouses there at the moment, and that's where
they sleep. When I spoke further to our vidz, he

(46:16):
made clear like the demands that activists have, which is
mainly that they don't want the needless destruction of this area.
There's intention is to remain in the trees and make
it hard, if not impossible, for the trees to be felt.
There are multiple treehouses with enough stability and space for
multiple people on top of that they are preparing for
a possible eviction, all while also living happily and communally,

(46:40):
like every night they cook together, they're having dinner together.
I found it incredibly healing and wholesome to just have
a meal around a small fire with like a group
of like minded people, not hearing traffic or other urban noises.
A bright spot was one evening where someone played a
Dutch protest and just on the guitar satirizing an unamed

(47:02):
US president for his role in the Vietnam War, which
can't escape US politics even in the middle of a forest.
So then I would like to play a second clip,
and how do you want to talk about how your
relationship is with the neighbors around here?

Speaker 11 (47:22):
Yeah, the neighbors they started their own action committee for
more than three years ago, I think, and they have
already saved one piece of the Wildenhelm's myths, which is
on the north part of the training will. So this

(47:42):
one is now safe. It's only three hectors. But it
was also the land who wanted to destroy it for.

Speaker 8 (47:50):
Making a say, a place to practice to drive with the.

Speaker 9 (47:55):
Bush like a training ground for bus drivers exactly.

Speaker 11 (48:01):
So just put concrete on this swampy area to them
once in a while drive for the bus there as
if there is no other.

Speaker 8 (48:08):
Concrete in the city to practice d.

Speaker 11 (48:12):
But this is no safety and now the neighbors are
also for this big piece of the Williams Myths are
now going to start the court case against the decision
because the Ministry of thout the the Ministry of Environment,
they approved the permits for the style plants for the business.

Speaker 9 (48:37):
Okay, uh, that was yesterday that that was announced. So
how are you feeling. How are you feeling right now?
Do you have any plans on how to continue to
fight against the bulldozing of this place.

Speaker 11 (48:55):
Yeah, we are not surprised that she approved it. It
was we saw it coming a bit. But it's just
very ridiculous. And we will keep fighting, of course, because
this is a very Hypocrates and saying that we have
to save that nature. But in the meantime she proved

(49:15):
decisions to destroy them this kind of nature. So we
just continue to fight and the neighbors do it.

Speaker 8 (49:24):
With the court case. We keep yeah, we stay here
and we keep building and pepre for an eviction.

Speaker 1 (49:34):
That's really interesting. That diversity of taxet cooperation, I think
is really valuable in these kind of struggles. Can you
explain a little bit more about that, like how that works.

Speaker 9 (49:44):
Well, I think it was just the stars that aligned
for this particular goal. There is a neighborhood committee that's
also heavily opposed to the destruction of this area, but
it's mainly a well, a neighborhood committee. These are people
who will stand up to like the municipality, but entirely

(50:05):
through the legal system or the judicial system. And I
think this committee was like at least a year or
two maybe even more old before the occupation happened. And
the occupation also happens separately from the committee, So you
kind of have this, you know, alliance now between like

(50:27):
a group of people who will take more direct action
against the plans to destroy the place and this group
who is going to do that by filing court cases
against the plans that the land and the municipality are
trying to realize right now. It's really funny always because
one of my sources said, the people who are occupying

(50:48):
for us came down like angels. The activists really don't
like to be called that, but it's sort of yeah,
just they have a common they have a common goal
and for that, they're working together, and from what I've seen,
there is very warm and friendly contact between the groups.
I've seen multiple neighbors come by with like food or

(51:08):
building materials, like think of screws or nails, or like
wooden beams for construction. I think there was one person who,
like every Sunday, brings pancakes. I'm not sure if.

Speaker 1 (51:19):
They still do that, but it's pretty cool.

Speaker 9 (51:23):
Yeah, exactly. I've seen people come by and drop off
like bags of like dried beans and lentils. I think
it's really fascinating that how organically these two groups sort
of come together and in their common goal, but also
that the two different strategies kind of strengthen.

Speaker 1 (51:44):
Each other, right, Yeah, Like obviously you've got people who
wouldn't think of occupying forests, but then they find themselves
in solidarity with people who do. And I think that's
really cool that, like you said, there was no prior communication.
These folks just arrived, began the occupation, and the locals
will like, guess, this is exactly what we needed. Thank you.

Speaker 9 (52:06):
In so far as I understood it, that's how it happened.
As I said earlier, like the combination of text tactics
just make their path towards their goal so much more
tangible because by occupying the forests, they can't start like
early construction in the area, or I know some municipalities

(52:26):
or cities kind of begin with the with the destruction
prior to having permission. But then it's like, oh, yeah,
we've already started, so it's of no use anymore. Which
I'm not sure how common it is in other countries,
but I've heard of that in a with an activist
circles in the Netherlands and all the wild Is committee

(52:48):
is like doing the court cases and filing legal motions
and yeah, I think I think it's a really warm
and friendly contact.

Speaker 1 (52:56):
Yeah, that's so it's kind of nice to see exactly.

Speaker 9 (53:00):
Okay, I have one other clip. How does it make
you feel that the neighbors are so supportive as you
said that they're bringing food on a regular basis. I've
seen I think a few who brought materials even like
screws or nails. What does that do with your morale

(53:20):
or your motivation?

Speaker 11 (53:21):
Yeah, I think we wouldn't really be here if they
would be broad the busy puts, But of course they
are not because It's just a very stupid idea to
destroy this valuable nature fruit. But yeah, we we help

(53:43):
each other a lot, and we yeah, we keep each
other strong by supporting each other. And they were very
moved by us being here. And they even cats, they're angels,
which you don't like to be good.

Speaker 8 (54:05):
Yeah, that's it, Okay.

Speaker 9 (54:08):
Is there anything else you would like to share or
to have on on the record.

Speaker 11 (54:14):
Yeah, we would like to invite everyone to come here.
There's more inforant wonder mist and that snow blocks that
are and yeah, there will still be the whole court case,
so there was a chance we stay longer. But they
also have the legal right to to evictors.

Speaker 8 (54:39):
Which would also be paying for it.

Speaker 10 (54:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (54:54):
Obviously people who share will be familiar with Like for
ourt occupation in Atlanta, what's the state respond to this
look like?

Speaker 9 (55:02):
For a long time, there has been very little state response.
While I was there, the permit to develop the area
was granted, but for the most part, there's occasional a
car that drives by. I did receive word that a
few days ago, a few cops came in onto the terrain,
took pictures of everything, and the next morning there was

(55:25):
a drone flying over the camp. Yeah. Yes, so things
are like tensing up a bit and we'll have to
see how We'll have to see how it goes. Obviously,
like the case is still like in the judicial so
we'll have to see what comes from that. But up
until now, things have been quiet and peaceful.

Speaker 1 (55:47):
Okay, Yeah, because I think people sometimes obviously make the
US really strive to lead the world in police violence,
but I think that those people underestimate the capacity of
European dates stay violent.

Speaker 9 (56:01):
That's definitely true. Like our lack of guns makes it
that not many people are getting shot by police, but
against activists or protests, police can be pretty pretty violent.
I don't have much experience with Belgium police myself. I've
heard conflicting stories about them. I was at the May
first celebration in Brussels, became incredibly prepared, and then it

(56:25):
was all okay, literally nothing note worthy to mention. But
then when I speak to other people, I hear like, oh,
you know, Belgium police worse than the Dutch. But then
that very also varies from city to city, and that's
a whole nother rabbit hole to go down into. Yeah,
so for now, not much police action against the activists.

(56:48):
Not sure if or when that will.

Speaker 1 (56:50):
Change, right, So if people wanted to they said everyone
was welcome. Yes, and I presume they can drop in
for the day, or they can go and stay ruperiod,
or they can you know, commit staying until the forest
to say, is it easy to access? Can you walk there?
Could you like I take I guess ironically maybe could
you take a bus?

Speaker 9 (57:11):
And there is a trem that stops pretty close by.
They have an Instagram account that I don't know from
the top of my head because I don't use Instagram.

Speaker 1 (57:23):
We'll link in the notes.

Speaker 9 (57:24):
I think if you just search for like a woomble
mesa or womble hemp meths and you'll find something. You
can contact them there and they can give you more
details on how exactly to get there. Yeah, you can
come by for a day, you can comby for two weeks,
that's up to you. You're welcome there. What I would
like to urge everyone is if you plan on going there,

(57:46):
contact them about the supplies they need. When I arrived there,
I got some like some small kitchen knives and like
literally for cutting veggies, and some canned foods and some
first aid supplies because it is largely donation based what
they're doing there. So yeah, anything that you can spare
or can purchase for them would be greatly appreciated. To

(58:10):
check the website, check their Instagram. There might be a
Facebook page. I think there is a Facebook page for
those still using Facebook, So yeah, I would recommend it, like,
go over there, help out. They're very friendly people if
you're interested in doing something like this. This is like
a very entry level thing.

Speaker 1 (58:30):
Yeah, like you said, it's not just like a good
thing to do, it's also a nice fun thing to do.
Like it's these spaces could be really healing, just live
being among like minded people like you said, and in
nature exactly.

Speaker 9 (58:44):
And like when I was there, they gave like a
climbing workshop, so they taught me how I should climb
a tree with like gear around my waist and everything.

Speaker 1 (58:55):
It's cool.

Speaker 9 (58:56):
Yeah, and follow the agreements that people make between each
other site that there's not really any rules. You're free
to come for a day, you're free to stay for
two weeks, that's entirely up to you. Just it's nice
to help out, and even if it's just help with
cutting vegetables for dinner. Yeah, that's already incredibly appreciated. And

(59:16):
in the meantime people can do other stuff that needs
to happen around the camp. And yeah, in terms of activism,
this is a small step to do, but it can
also just be a really good experience for yours, for
you and all the while helping the locals and helping
the activists, which is the sort of mutual aid that

(59:37):
I would prefer to see a lot more.

Speaker 2 (59:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:39):
Yeah, I think it's great that it's integrated with the community,
and I think it's great that it's accessible for people
and hopefully folks will go bring something that they need.
It's cool that they can, you know, share skills. I've
learned a lot in different activist spaces. I think that's
really cool. Mick, is there anywhere that people can follow
you if they'd like to.

Speaker 9 (01:00:00):
Yes, I have a Twitter account now because I don't
see enough horrible shit. It's at two Sober Possums or
under the name Mick Smith, m I c K S
M I T. I don't think i've posted anything yet,
so I'll think of something funny. But feel free to
reach out there if for reasons. Yeah, I'm cool with that.

Speaker 1 (01:00:22):
Great well, thank you very much. I was. I think
that's really interesting. I hope people will go. If you go,
you know, send us a little message, let us know
how your experience was in the forest.

Speaker 3 (01:00:31):
I'd love that.

Speaker 1 (01:00:32):
It would make me happy.

Speaker 2 (01:00:33):
Likewise, what's jd My advances? This is it could happen

(01:01:01):
here a podcast that's not Behind the Bastards. But today
we're doing a little mini episode on our future possible
vice president JD Vance Garrison. How are you feeling today,
Welcome back to the program.

Speaker 9 (01:01:17):
Thank you.

Speaker 7 (01:01:18):
I'm feeling pretty good.

Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:01:19):
Yeah, I got a great five hours of sleep. I'm
good to go.

Speaker 2 (01:01:22):
Oh, I slept eleven Good for you.

Speaker 7 (01:01:24):
No, I've also been in the researching bad people whole
which keeps me up late at night.

Speaker 2 (01:01:29):
Yeah. I have to do the Walls episodes tonight so
we can go back to back on the vps. But
I decided to start with JD. Vance, And you know,
I had debated with myself is this guy worth a
full bTB episode? And I decided ultimately like no, you know,
I just don't think there's enough to him yet that
he deserves that. Perhaps that will change in the future.

(01:01:52):
But what I wanted to do was give the listener,
who I'm guessing has mostly just heard a few disjointed
things about JD.

Speaker 7 (01:01:59):
A few few things, one or two things, maybe one specific.

Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
Thing, one specific They probably they're probably aware of Hillbilly Elogy.
That was like a pretty pretty big book in the day,
and the movie was panned and that was kind of news.
They probably heard the couch fucking stuff. And then they've
heard allegations that he's like a straight up fascist, and
you know, he thinks that single women should be dragged
out into the street and shot or something like that.

Speaker 7 (01:02:23):
If you have a cat and you're a single woman,
you are onto logically evil.

Speaker 2 (01:02:27):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, a sociopath. And so I wanted to
provide some context for how he went from if you
can remember back to twenty sixteen, he was a liberal
darling for having written Hillbilly Elogy.

Speaker 10 (01:02:38):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:02:38):
He was this guy, this like never Trump conservative who
was explaining to everyone how the evil of trump Ism
had infested and you know, latched onto the minds of
small town Americans. Right, That's kind of how he was
framed today, where he's like this hard right maga guy,
literally Trump's you know, future right hand man, with what
sounds like explicitly dictatorial ambitions, and the mystery of this story,

(01:03:02):
all of it comes down to Peterteel Right. Many such cases, Yeah,
as is often the case, he's a major part of
life why things wind up where they are. The bones
of JD's background story are kind of important, so I'm
just going to give them rapidly. He was born in
August nineteen eighty four in Middletown, Ohio, born under the
name James Donald Bowman, but his parents divorced when he

(01:03:25):
was a toddler. His dad, his biodad, is pretty much
out of the picture right away. He is eventually adopted
by his mother's third husband, whose last name is Hamil,
and that's the name he's going to serve in the
Marines under. His mother was not very together. There's a
lot of neglect and poverty and some drug abuse in
his early life before his grandparents moved him from Kentucky
to Ohio. Now a lot of ink has been spilled

(01:03:47):
when the subject of Vance's supposedly autobiographical book, Hillbilly Elegy,
which paints him as a member of the aggrieved and
abused white underclass, the forgotten men of American politics, I'm
not interested in relitigating this stupid book, except to say
that I had a kind of similar background. My dad
was in the picture, but socioeconomically it was kind of similar.

(01:04:07):
We grew up in a very poor and troubled small town.
Eventually my caretakers got me out of there into a
more functional part of the country. And I can see
I see JD's book as kind of cynically positioned to
take advantage of the liberal outpouring of sympathy for rural
whites that followed Trump's twenty sixteen victory, an attempt to
position himself as someone who can explain why this part

(01:04:28):
of the country swept Trump into power. Now, the reality
is that this part of the country did not sweep
Trump into power. The core of Trump support in twenty
sixteen were aggrieved, but financially comfortable, suburban white people. Vance
did not write about poor folks addicted to oxy in
the hollers with any real empathy. He painted them as
helpless fools and mental children, in himself as better for
getting out. And that's really all I have to say

(01:04:49):
on the matter. To me, his early life suggests a
young man who wanted to set himself up for a
career in public life and took the most expedient actions
to do so. And that is the context in which
I see his service in the US Marine Corps. He
joined the Marines and got himself the job that would
get him as close to action as possible without requiring
that he actually do anything. His specific gig was public

(01:05:11):
affairs for a marine aircraft wing, So he is writing
about the shit that this aircraft wing is doing, which
is about the least job that you can actually have
in the military. He wrote that he was quote lucky
to escape any real fighting. After finishing his term, he
got a BA in polysci And I'm not saying that
you have to fight for you know, most of what

(01:05:32):
the military does is not literally fighting. I'm just saying
I see his specific positioning himself with this job as
him wanting to have Marine on his CV when he
goes into politics. Right, that's my allegation, right, not that
there's anything wrong with not.

Speaker 7 (01:05:48):
Fighting, sure, I mean, and it's also just good to
point out considering most of the rights attacks against Walls
right now are also about him not actually like seeing combat,
and Advance has gone after him for that specifically. Yeah,
trying to like allude to like Advance having more combat experience. Yeah,
both men did not like fire bullets at enemy combatants.

Speaker 2 (01:06:11):
No, and most people don't. But what I see with
Vance's service is I did this because it was a
line in my resume, whereas you don't do twenty four
years in the National Guard like just to set up
your political career. Now, you do that because you want
to be in the National Guard.

Speaker 7 (01:06:28):
Yes, Waltz was definitely more like a career man in
that sense.

Speaker 2 (01:06:31):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. After finishing his term, he got a
BA in polysci and philosophy from Ohio State and during
his first year in college he worked for a Republican
States senator. He's going to work for a couple of
Republicans in his college in grad school, you know, law
school years. Then he attended Yale Law School, where he
made friends with Jamil Giovanni, who would go on to

(01:06:52):
be a Conservative parliamentarian in Canada. He was mentored by
Professor Amy Chua, who wrote a book about being a
Tiger mom that made a lot of people angry and
was beloved by the chunk of the country who thinks
the children have it too easy. Chua helped to convince
him to write Hillbilly Elegy, which might be her worst sin,
almost definitely is her worst sin. I can forgive some
terrible acts towards children if you don't write the book

(01:07:14):
Hillbilly Elogy. It was when Vance graduated from Yale that
he first made contact with the man who would come
to define his adult political journey. Peter Teel, the PayPal
co founder and serial entrepreneur investor, had taken a rapid
turn from his earlier libertarian politics thanks to a growing
interest in a line of political philosophy known mostly as

(01:07:34):
neo reactionary or NRX thought, although today you'll more often
hear it described as the new right. I'm not in
love with either of those terms for this particular chunk
of the right, But I think neo reactionary is better
than new.

Speaker 7 (01:07:47):
Right, not as bad as dark Enlightenment.

Speaker 2 (01:07:50):
It's not as bad as dark and we'll talk the
worst of these three terms, by far the worst of
the three terms. So I tend to stick with neo reactionary.
Although if you hear new right being used' that's also
what this refers to.

Speaker 7 (01:08:02):
That's a term I've used sometimes. Yeah, yeah, what time
period is is is this like twenty seventeen, like where
are we at here?

Speaker 2 (01:08:08):
Twenty eleven is when he sees Peter Teal speak at Yale,
which he describes as like the moment around which his
life pivots.

Speaker 7 (01:08:16):
So this is pre the publishing of his book.

Speaker 2 (01:08:19):
Yes, yes, yes, he publishes he'llbilli Elogy in twenty sixteen.

Speaker 7 (01:08:22):
Okay, so he kind of got in on the ground
floor of some of this kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:08:25):
Yes, he is very early in Teal world. He is
one of the first, He's going to be one of
We're getting to that. But I want to talk about
what neo reactionaries are because the rest of this isn't
going to make sense unless we go into that.

Speaker 7 (01:08:35):
So sure.

Speaker 2 (01:08:36):
Vanity Fair writer James Pogue rather ably described the New
Right as a worldview in direct competition to the liberal
idea that economic growth and technological innovation would lead us
to a better future. Instead, the growth of big tech surveillance,
nanny state governance, and social justice culture war dominance has
created a system of oppression that will destroy everything good

(01:08:56):
in the world if not stopped. The primary high priest
of this fool of thought is Curtis Yarvin. Who in
the early aughts from about two thousand and seven twenty fourteen,
blogged prolifically as Mincius Moldbug. Now Yarvin is a computer programmer.
He is this guy who has had for most of
his career this desire to create a new computer operating
system that would like fix the way in which knowledge

(01:09:19):
is disseminated in a way that sounds kind of magical
to me. He never quite gets it working. And he
blogs about political philosophy the same way he talks about programming,
which he has this dream for a way to reorient
society after a soft, kind of peaceful coup. He always
emphasizes how peaceful it needs to be, that will be,
you know. Again, it's his way if he wants to

(01:09:41):
program society to make it work perfectly, you know, based
on his sort of set of values. And he writes
a series of essays about how he wants to reorient society.
And these essays become kind of the central underpinning ethos
of the messi assortment of philosophies that we call neo
reactionaries the new right.

Speaker 1 (01:10:01):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:10:01):
The basic idea is that this liberal nightmare healthscape can
only be stopped and turned back by replacing democracy with
an essentially monarchic system. Pogue describes Jarvin as arguing for
quote a Caesar like figure to take power back from
this devolved oligarchy and replace it with a monarchical regime
run like a startup. As early as twenty twelve, he
proposed the acronym rage retire all government employees as a

(01:10:24):
shorthand for a first step and the overthrow of the
American regime. What we needed, Yarvin thought, was a national
CEO or what's called a dictator. Now. A lot of
guys in the aughts become enraptured by Jarvin's ideas because
the way Jarvin writes, he spends most of his free
time because he gets bought out of a company he's in,
and he doesn't wind up like super rich, but he

(01:10:45):
winds up comfortable enough that he's for a while just
spending like five hundred bucks a month on books and
reading like old reactionary tracts, like books from the eighteen
hundreds of like monarchists arguing against the Enlightenment and socialism alike.
And so he peppers his essays with a lot of
different kind of archaic flourishes a lot of Latin, a

(01:11:07):
lot of like references to Greek and Roman philosophical figures,
and that is fucking catnip for a certain kind of guy.

Speaker 7 (01:11:14):
No, it makes it makes it seem like esoteric. It's
like it's kind of like, yes, liked hidden knowledge. It's
being like rediscovered that like holds the key to fix
all of our problems.

Speaker 2 (01:11:23):
Yes, he is. If you've read Enders game, he's doing
what Ender's brother does an Enders game, where he's writing
his little essays for the Internet, trying to like overthrow
the government using them. And there's a certain certain kind
of guy who is just deeply attracted to that idea.
One of those kinds of guys is a philosopher called
Nick Land. Land is an interesting character. We talk about

(01:11:46):
him a little during our AI Cult episodes. He's a
dude who comes out of academia and kind of has
has now moved around to essentially like fascist political philosophy
would be kind of the quickest way to describe Land today.
Although he's a complicated fellow. But he is the guy
who who comes up with the term dark enlightenment for
Curtis's writing. And this is the way in which a

(01:12:08):
lot of these guys, A lot of the guys especially
who are going to come into Jarvin's work around, you know,
the mid aughts are going to think about it right
where it's this, he has pulled the wool from my eyes. Right,
he has made it clear how doomed democracy is, that
it's fundamentally evil. And now that I've had this dark revelation,
I can never look at the world the same way again.

Speaker 7 (01:12:29):
Right, And like Land was trying to do the same
thing for like the previous like fifteen years, and he
attracted a small batch of like kind of like academic followers,
A whole bunch of his colleagues kind of got more
popular than him because they were slightly more reasonable in
many ways.

Speaker 2 (01:12:45):
Because Lance writing is never going to be like the
most viral thing on earth, right, like no, yeah, and
mode Bugs is a little better written for that, although
both of them are too dense. The guys who are
going to, like like Vance is going to be the
guys who are going to take his theories into like
mainstream politics, are going to need to trim the fat off.
You know. It's also worth noting Jarvin is the guy

(01:13:08):
who introduces the term the red pill to right wing politics.

Speaker 7 (01:13:11):
Right, Oh, I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (01:13:12):
Yes, as far as I've ever seen, Jarvin is the
guy who like starts using the red pill in like
a really concerted way to describe, like coming to these
understandings about you know, race science has a decent amount
to do with it earlier in Yarvin's writing career. But
like all of these ideas that we now call neo reactionary,
like that's that's a Jarvin original. He thinks the matrix

(01:13:34):
is a work of genius, of course, which it is,
but maybe not in the way that he thinks slightly. Yeah,
So anyway, Peter Teel falls in love because Teal is
by by two thousand and nine, Teal's writing stuff about
how he thinks democracy is incompatible with liberty. Right, And
when Peter Teel refers to liberty, he's not talking about
like your freedom to like to love the people that

(01:13:56):
you want to love, or do with your body what
you want to do with your body, talking about his
freedom as a guy with a lot of money to
not have to pay taxes. Right, that's primarily what all
of these guys mean by freedom. So Teal by two
thousand and nine is already enraptured with these anti democratic ideas,
and he finds Jarvin. It's kind of unclear to me,
does Jarvin actually start him on that road or I

(01:14:17):
think it's more that he has started down that road,
and he thinks Jarvin is doing a really good job
of setting up what he's been thinking. So he starts
pumping money into Jarvin. He funds some of his like
software ambitions. He's just kind of generally supporting him, and
he begins pumping money increasingly over the early to mid
aughts into an array of influencers and thinkers who are

(01:14:39):
in alignment with what we might call mold buggy in
thought right, and he's doing that up to this present day,
Pog writes. Teal has also funded things like The Edge
Lordy and Post Left. Infected New People sent him a
film festival which ended his week long run of parties
and screenings in Manhattan just a few days before nat
Con began. He's long been a big donor to Republican
political candidates, but in recent years has grown increasingly involved

(01:15:01):
in the politics of this younger and weirder world, becoming
something like an afarious godfather or genial rich uncle, depending
on your perspective. Podcasters and art world figures now joke
about their hope to get so called Teal bucks. And
if you're familiar with like the Red Scare podcast and
those ladies you're familiar with, like the Dime Square set,
a lot of them are into neo reactionary thought and

(01:15:24):
are the people that that paragraph is referring to right now.
While podcasters and cultural influencers have long been useful to Teal,
he's also tried to collect up and coming politicians with
uneven success. In twenty eleven, he gave a talk at
Yale while Vance was still a student, and discussed the
stagnation of technological progress in the United States. Vance wrote
that Teal was then quote possibly the smartest person I'd

(01:15:46):
ever met, And this moment is the moment that his
whole life pivots around meeting Peter Teal at Yale in
twenty eleven. We're going to talk about what comes after,
But Garrison, you know what isn't receiving any money from
Peter Teal.

Speaker 7 (01:15:59):
We also can say that there's no way to know
what he's doing.

Speaker 2 (01:16:02):
Right, It's entirely possible. It's entirely possible that we are
funded one by Peter Teal, And if so, thank you.

Speaker 7 (01:16:08):
Got to get those Teal books.

Speaker 2 (01:16:20):
And we're back. I've just uncovered that Peter Teal is
the mind behind Chumba Casino Garrison. This goes so much
deeper than I thought.

Speaker 7 (01:16:29):
What if Peter Tiel instead just got really into sports betting,
you know, instead of dealing with all this weird like
esoteric traditionalist, like like eighteen eighties racism philosophy. What what
if instead he just got really into I don't know,
the Bucks that's probably a sports team, right.

Speaker 2 (01:16:47):
He put eight billion dollars on the Raiders.

Speaker 7 (01:16:50):
He took a bath.

Speaker 2 (01:16:51):
He's fucked.

Speaker 7 (01:16:53):
He got addicted to it too, gone. We can save
so many lives. Sports betting really couldn't save lives.

Speaker 2 (01:16:59):
I've always said that Vance decided to abandon his planned
career in law, although I'm not sure I believe that
was ever his intended path.

Speaker 7 (01:17:05):
Absolutely not.

Speaker 2 (01:17:07):
No, he does a couple of years in law, and
he claims that Teal also is who made him decide
to convert to Christianity by defying the social template. I
had constructed that Christians were dumb and atheists were smart.
I don't know how much to believe that he's actually
a Catholic.

Speaker 7 (01:17:22):
Maybe I don't know, but like there's this whole new
batch of like yes people who are like a philosophically
Catholic or like yeah, they're Catholic in like a quote
unquote Hegelian sense when when they instruct these like larger
models of like human evolution and they view like Christianity
as this like yes, sing that will drive the human
species towards its like perfected form. And definitely the dark

(01:17:44):
Enlightenment to people are a significant chunk of kind of
what caused you to develop. And we're seeing that now
with like these fake movements like the Hegelian egirles, which
are kind of like with the like weird step child
of some of these like Dimes Square like influencer philosophy stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:17:59):
Yeah, and I would say he's definitely not a Catholic
in the sense that your aunt is right.

Speaker 7 (01:18:06):
No, no, no, no, no, no no no.

Speaker 2 (01:18:08):
He is a Catholic in the sense that, like he
believes there are things about social order and the roles
that people should have in society that Catholicism gets right.
And that's the sense in which he's a Catholic. Right,
So in twenty sixteen, the same year that Vance publishes
Hillbilly Elegy and becomes a liberal darling, he joins Mythral Capital,

(01:18:29):
a venture capital firm founded by Teal Peter Teel Advance.
All of these guys pretty much every time they create
a company, it's named after something in the Lord of
the Rings.

Speaker 7 (01:18:38):
Fucking A. J. R. R. Tolkien bullshit.

Speaker 2 (01:18:41):
He would be so unhappy with this.

Speaker 7 (01:18:43):
Because Tolkien was also a Catholic monarchist, but in a
very different.

Speaker 2 (01:18:47):
Way, in a super different way. Yes. So the two
young men that Teal adopts that he makes what are
called generational bets in is Blake Masters and JD. Vance.
And his bet is that if I really bankroll and
back these guys, they are going to be major figures
in US politics right for decades to come. And his

(01:19:09):
first step is he makes them rich. He helps them
get jobs and stuff that they get wealthy in. You know,
Masters is recruited in the same way as Vance. He's
given a cushy job in venture capital. He's handed a
shitload of Teal books to see what he can make
of them. And Vance is, you know, both of them
are decent enough at this Vance is okay at it,
and within two years he gets hired for one hundred
and fifty million dollar fund out of Washington that focuses

(01:19:30):
on finding young companies and overlooked US cities, places that
weren't seen as traditionally tech hups. Soon after this, he
goes into business on his own, if we can call
it on your own when Peter Teal is the guy
who backs your new company entirely, right.

Speaker 7 (01:19:43):
Sure, I do love that that Peter Teel somehow picked
the two most uncharismatic up and coming dudes.

Speaker 2 (01:19:51):
I mean, look at Peter, what does he know about charisma?

Speaker 7 (01:19:54):
Yeah, but like it is fun that he made these
two bets, and Mark Kelly just destroyed one of them.

Speaker 2 (01:20:01):
Yeah, criticize the bad for what you will, but one
of these weirdos go up against an astronaut on a
public debate.

Speaker 7 (01:20:11):
Jesus Christ, you know, say what you will about electoralism.
I'm excited to see the Walls Vance debate because I
think it'll be funny.

Speaker 2 (01:20:18):
Yeah, well, because Vance has big daddy issues and Walls
has strong daddy energy, so we could be in for
a very interesting night. So Vance forms his own venture
capital form Narya Capital. This is another lord of the
Rings reference. Narya is one of the rings of power,
which the rings of power are bad, very famously. You're

(01:20:40):
part of a con. An evil monster creates them to
enslave you. If you are wearing one of the rings
of power, you have been enslaved by Saarron. That's the point.

Speaker 7 (01:20:54):
They're very famously bad.

Speaker 9 (01:20:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:20:56):
Yeah. And of course one of the major investments Naria
Capital makes is into Pallentier, which is also named.

Speaker 7 (01:21:03):
Also famously used by the Evil Wizard.

Speaker 2 (01:21:06):
Yes, famously used by the Evil Wizard. Now, in twenty sixteen,
Vance portrayed himself as a never Trumper, calling the future
president want to be dictator? Well, ye know how many
people in America didn't he Rape is one of the
things Vance says about Trump. So he is like not
holding his punches against the man broken clock. But behind
the scenes he is in the process of being anointed

(01:21:28):
by the teal crowd, who again see him as a
bet in the future of American politics. Now, this is
not something I can claim to know with confidence, but
it seems to me from the extant information that Vance's
anti trumpism was performative, calculated to sell books. When he
thought he might have a future with a new more
conservative Democratic Party triangulating to battle populous trump Ism. The
fact that he remained close to Teal during this whole period,

(01:21:49):
and that Teal spoke at the twenty sixteen RNC strikes
me as evidence of a lack of any core political
beliefs beyond a personal desire for power. Now, it is
worth noting that, as a younger man, none of the
signs of social conservatism. He is always an economic conservative.
He's willing to work with Republicans right. He's one of
these guys who you could definitely see economically being in
line with their Republicans. But he does not evince any

(01:22:12):
kind of bigotry in his early life, particularly towards LGBT people.
One of his best friends from law school is a
transgender woman, Sophia and Nelson. He describes her in Hillbilly
Elogy as an extremely progressive lesbian and wrote in an
email to her, I recognize now that this may not
accurately reflect how you think of yourself, and for that
I am really sorry. I hope you're not offended, but

(01:22:33):
if you are, I'm sorry. Love you, JD. Sophia responded
the next day, saying if you had written gender queer,
radical pragmatist, nobody would know what you mean.

Speaker 7 (01:22:42):
Many such cases, right.

Speaker 2 (01:22:44):
The text of their emails has been shared with The
New York Times by Nelson. After Vance took a hard
turn to lean into the rights anti trans bigotry. This
was a move that pleased Teel himself, who has a
very law He has been anti trans and pushing anti
trans rhetoric for years before this was a mainstream thing
on the right, before the Matt Walsh types really started
pivoting Republican messaging around it. Right, Yeah, And I'm going

(01:23:07):
to quote from the Times here. Nelson, now a public
defender in Detroit, said they visited each other's homes, talked
on zoom during the pandemic, and exchanged long emails discussing
a range of subjects, from minutia of daily life to
weighty discussions of current events and public policy issues. Nelson
attended mister Vance's wedding in Kentucky in twenty fourteen. They
pondered doing a podcast together. He suggested they call it

(01:23:27):
The Lunatic Fringe, but Nelson and mister Vance had a
falling out in twenty twenty one when Vance said he
publicly supported an Arkansas ban on gender affirming care from minors,
leading to a bitter exchange that deeply hurt Nelson. He
achieved great success and became very rich by being a
never Trumper who explained the white working class to the
liberal elite. Nelson said, now he's amassing even more power

(01:23:47):
by expressing the exact opposite. And I think that's interesting.
It does kind of point to the whole There's no
core to this guy. There's nothing that he has ever
really cared about other than positioning himself most advantageously. And
I really do think that that gets at what actually
is inside JD. Vance.

Speaker 7 (01:24:07):
I mean, I mean, a proximity to political power is
the driving force for a lot of yeah, a lot
of like people who get into politics.

Speaker 2 (01:24:15):
Yes, frankly, yes, like yes, yeah, that's that's it. Now,
it's relevant that twenty twenty one was the year Vance
chose to pivot away from never Trump rhetoric and lean
into the right wing culture war bullshit. Narya had been
founded in twenty nineteen. It had been backed by one
hundred million dollars from Peter Teal, as well as funding
by Eric Schmidt and Mark Andresen. Their investments included Strive
asset management and investment funds started by Vivek Ramashwami, who

(01:24:38):
was Teal's classmate at Yale.

Speaker 7 (01:24:40):
Oh I did not know they were classmates.

Speaker 2 (01:24:42):
Uh huh, oh, yeah, it's the class the shit fell on.
For two years, he'd been allowed to keep up the
fiction of a principled economic conservative who was horrified by
the bigotry and corruption of Trump World. But by twenty
twenty one, with Trump out of office and Biden's presidency underway,
Teal made it clear that he needed something else from Vance.
We get our best texture of what Vance believed by
late twenty twenty one from Pogue's Vanity Fair piece, which

(01:25:05):
was written about a neo reactionary summit in October of
twenty twenty one. Quote. Vance believes that a well educated
and culturally liberal American elite has greatly benefited from globalization,
the financialization of our economy, and the growing power of
big tech. This has led an ivy League intellectual and
management class a quasi aristocracy. He calls the regime to
adopt a set of economic and cultural interests that directly

(01:25:26):
opposed those of people in places like Middletown, Ohio, where
he grew up in the vancy. In view, this class
has no stake in what people on the new right
call the real economy, the farm and factory jobs that
months disdained class life in Middle America. This is a
fundamental difference between New right figures like Vance and the
Reaganite right wingers of their parents' generation. To Vance, and
he said, this culture war is class warfare. Vance recently

(01:25:48):
told an interviewer, I got to be honest with you,
I don't really care about what happens to Ukraine, a
flick at the fact that he thinks the American led
global order is as much about enriching defense contractors and
think tank types as it is about defending America's interest.
I do care about the fact that in my community
right now, the leading cause of death among eighteen to
forty five year olds is Mexican fentanyl. His criticisms of
big tech as enemies of Western civilization often get lost

(01:26:10):
in the run of Republican outrage over Trump being kicked
off Twitter and Facebook, although they go much deeper than this.
Dance believes that the regime has sold an elusive story
that consumer gadgets and social media are constantly making our
lives better, even his wages stagnate and technology feeds an
epidemic of depression. Now he is backed entirely by social
media money. Sure Teel is one of the major backers

(01:26:30):
of Facebook. Right, of course, he is supported entirely by
the money of the people he claims to hate, who
he claims are destroying America.

Speaker 7 (01:26:38):
I do find this to be really interesting because it's
like a more conservative right reaction to like right wing neoliberalism. Right,
this is so different. Even though all these guys like
kind of talk about how they're like they're like Reaganites, right,
They're really not. Now they're going back to a much
more nineteen like twenties style of conservatism. Almost yes, before
like the Southern split before like like a new Deal

(01:27:00):
and we solidified more of like the Democrats being this
liberal party, this this more fiscally conservative party on the right,
and then that kind of gave way to like Thatcher
right England and the neoliberal takeover of the entire world.
It's like they're looking at how like neoliberalism has been
totally subsumed even by like the Democrats and like you know,
centrist left liberals, and they're reacting to it with this

(01:27:22):
much more socially conservative backlash. Yes, and that is really
the entirety of what's happened to the Republican Party the
last the last four years. And Trump's only a small
part of that, because even Trump doesn't really care about
some of these types of like culture war issues now
that these guys care about, Like these guys are even
like further to the right of Trump on like most
things in this kind of social vein and like where

(01:27:43):
you're viewing like you said, like a like culture war
is class war in terms of like this culture war
is like beating down like the poor white working class.

Speaker 2 (01:27:53):
Yeah. Absolutely, these small.

Speaker 7 (01:27:55):
Town farms aren't the real economy. They simply aren't. The
real economy is cal of Ornia and Texas.

Speaker 2 (01:28:01):
These beliefs, there's an element to which they sound compelling
because parts of this are the stuff that everyone on
the left has complained about neoliberalism, but like his solutions
are fantasies. Like, for one thing, the people who are
backing him are the same kinds of people and often
the same people who were very much gung ho behind
getting rid of American factory jobs in order to maximize
their profits and the consolidation of farmland into these giant

(01:28:24):
agricultural conglomerates, right, Like.

Speaker 7 (01:28:26):
He abandoned this part of the country because yes, because
he knows it sucks. Like, yes, it's not like a
pleasant place to live, like a decent life. It's very hard,
it's very difficult.

Speaker 2 (01:28:36):
Yeah, And it's in part because these kind of people
who came out of the Reagan era, like have no
use for factory workers or farmers in the United States.
All of that can be consolidated into these vast enterprises
that when there are human workers necessary, we can just
grab undocumented people from across the border. Right anyway, speaking

(01:28:56):
of grabbing people, these ads will grab you. Dah, We're back.
So by late twenty twenty one, Curtis Jarvin is still
a major figure in the neo reactionary movement. Vance has

(01:29:19):
started quoting him kind of obliquely, and in fact, during
this twenty twenty one National Conservative Conference that Pogue pivots on,
Vance makes direct reference to something that Yarvin has written
his ideas about, like we need this red Caesar when
he says during an interview, we are in a late
Republican period. If we're going to push back against it.

(01:29:40):
We're going to have to get pretty wild and pretty
far out there and go in directions that a lot
of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with. And you know
what that means is this late Republican he's talking about
Republican Rome before Caesar, you know, makes his play for power.
Like that's explicitly what he is comparing it to. And
it's because Jarvin's big thing is, we don't I don't want
a left or a right wing dictator. We want a

(01:30:02):
king for the whole country right that's going to represent everybody,
which is just not what kings do, It's not what
dictators do.

Speaker 7 (01:30:09):
This is so clearly there's also just like a fascist
line of argument, like an actual like actual like like
ideologically fascist, and no people call like, you know, Reagan
a fascist, but like he's not, He's a neoliberal. Neoliberals suck. Yes,
these guys are going back like actual like fascist political theory.
That's what Mullbug is reading, that's what he's writing about.

Speaker 2 (01:30:28):
And in twenty twenty one, Vance is saying this, I
think Trump is going to run again in twenty twenty four.
I think that what Trump should do if I was
giving him one piece of advice, Fire every single mid
level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace
them with our people. And when the courts stop, you
stand before the country and say the Chief Justice has
made his ruling, now let him enforce it. Which he's
quoting Andrew Jackson there, But he's describing like the end

(01:30:51):
of democracy, a.

Speaker 7 (01:30:52):
Dictatorial takeover, right, and laying out with a plan that
is very similar to a Project twenty twenty five y which
I know Vance does have something small connections too, because
a lot of his friends were involved in the planning
of that.

Speaker 2 (01:31:03):
But you can see Project twenty twenty five and what
Vans is saying here, These are all downstream of what
Jarvin's saying in twenty twelve of this rage acronym, replace
all government employees, right to retire all government employees. You know,
by the way, you will be glad to know that
by twenty twenty one, Yarvin has stopped openly using the
term dictator. So that's good. He just he just calls
it a monarchy a lot.

Speaker 7 (01:31:23):
Now, Oh, okay, that's good. Yeah, that's good.

Speaker 2 (01:31:25):
Now. JD's pivot, which he often credits with his conversion
to Catholicism, although you can see he's been on this
road for much longer than that. Was perfectly timed for
his Senate run in twenty twenty two. Peter Teel was
his biggest donor, providing fifteen million to the superpack that
backed him, which at the time at least was the
largest amount ever given to boost a Senate candidate.

Speaker 7 (01:31:45):
Yeah, is fifty million for a Senate run is crazy?

Speaker 2 (01:31:48):
It's nuts. JD had been a long shot candidate at
first because he's very unlikable, but the Teal money allowed
for a major ad blitz and the kind of media
prep work that only a well funded pack can provide.
His pack published the data on an open Medium page
with a username at protect Ohio values forms, which allowed
the pack to send info and advice to Vance without

(01:32:08):
violating federal campaign finance loss. Vance had been hit early
for comments made a few years back negative to Trump,
but he clawed his way back into the MAGA good
graces by appearing on Breitbart News, Tucker Carlson's Fox Show,
Steve Bannon's war Room podcast, and most of all, by
positioning to himself as a violent opponent of immigration from
a write up in Politico. In February, Thompson, Who's the

(01:32:29):
guy running the pack, posted a memo to the medium
site arguing that Vance had an opening to zero win
on immigration and border security, noting that he had a
personal connection to the issue given his mother's struggles with
drug addiction. The issue was near and dear to the
primary voters, the memo argued, and crucially could help in
nabbing Trump's support. To win a Trump endorsement, a candidate
has to show a growing ballot share. To get that,
a candidate has to own a critical issue, the memo read,

(01:32:52):
JD can do that, and that's exactly what JD does.
When he takes the stage at the Conservative Political Action
Conference in Florida later that month, he focuses his speech
entirely on immigration, and when his campaign goes up with
its first TV ad, it shows a direct to camera
Vance telling viewers that he nearly lost his mother to
poison coming across our border. Now by mid April, Trump

(01:33:13):
has become convinced that Vance's past mean remarks were water
under the bridge, and he calls an associate of Peter
Teal to say, Hey, I'm moving closer to endorsing Vance.
Teal by this point has also introduced Vance to David Sachs,
who adds another million dollars to his super PACs war chest.
On April fifteenth, Convinced by Vance's rising poll numbers and
impressive fundraising, Trump makes an official endorsement. This helps pull

(01:33:35):
Vance over the top, and he ekes out a narrow
win in the election that followed. The next year, Vance
repaid the favor, writing a January Wall Street Journal op
at where he endorses Trump as a candidate. In twenty
twenty four. This was back in. This is the start
of twenty twenty three. The Republican primary is just gearing up,
and the end of it is in enough doubt. You
can remember back then. It sounds silly now, but people

(01:33:56):
really thought DeSantis had a shot, right, And so he
is Vance. This is kind of in before any of
the other major Republican figures and backing Trump for his
reducts round right.

Speaker 7 (01:34:07):
Yeah, he's like one of the first to fall in
line here.

Speaker 2 (01:34:09):
Yeah. And there's a few people like Sarah Huckabee Sanders
had been seen as a potential Trump VP pick, but
she waits months to actually endorse Trump. Officially, so Vance
gets in on the ground floor, and this impresses Trump
that he is someone who he can count on to
be loyal. Vance wins more praise the next month, when
a train carrying hazardous materials to rails in East Palestine.
In Ohio, Trump makes a visit to the town as

(01:34:31):
one of the first stops on his campaign, and Vance
organizes the visit and he does apparently a good job
of this. Trump says to his entourage, this guy is
turning out to be fucking incredible.

Speaker 10 (01:34:41):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:34:41):
By this point, Vance has befriended Trump's oldest son, Donald
Trump Junior, and set himself to the task of well
and truly kissing ass to get on that twenty twenty
four ticket. By late January of this year, Vance and
his team had received enough friendly feedback from Trump World
that they decided to invest in a full court press.
Vance began showing up on TV networks that I'm considered enemies,
doing a reverse Buddhaj edge and throwing himself into the

(01:35:03):
enemy camp to take shots on behalf of the boss.
He also devoted himself to raising money for Trump from
the Silicon Valley VC set. Most of these guys were
Teals friends dudes like David Sachs. What finally put him
over the top, though, was an article Donald Trump Junior
gave his dad from bright Bart News about the man
then seen as Trump's most likely VP pick, Doug Bergham,

(01:35:25):
governor of North Dakota. The article's title was, Carl Rove
endorses Doug Burgham for Vice President and I do love that.
Carl Rove's endorsement is the fucking kiss of death right
now for a fucking VP candidate. Very funny place for
his story to have wound up. Not a bad call
by Trump, though, I gotta say, actually it is a
bad call for Trump. But also I get it. I

(01:35:46):
read one Politico article that argues this was the final
straw for Trump. It was this Carl Rove article. I
can't actually speak to that. It is worth noting that
in the months leading up to the RNC, Trump is
also being subjected to a charm campaign by all of
Peter Teal's friends. This huge pile of wealthy Silicon Valley
investors from the Washington Post quote. In the weeks before

(01:36:08):
former President Donald Trump announced his vice presidential pick, some
of tech's biggest names launched a quiet campaign to push
for one of their own. Ohio Senator JD. Vance, the
former president, fielded repeated calls from tech entrepreneur David Sachs,
pallanteer advisor Jacob Helberg, and billionaire venture capitalist Peter Teal,
Vance's former employer and mentor employing him to add the
one time Silicon Valley investor to the ticket. According to

(01:36:30):
three people familiar with the entreaties, all caps, we have
a former tech VC in the White House. Greatest country
on Earth. Baby. Delian Ashparov, of a partner at Teal's
founder's fund, wrote on X after the announcement of Vance's nomination.
Delian Sparova s Parov something like that, Jesus Christ, I
know it's fucking exhausting, but that is, you know, the JD.

(01:36:55):
Vance story, more or less, that's where he comes from.
That's who wants him to be the VP. It's all
of these fucking ghouls who want to own the world
and become It's these people who have achieved the highest
level of financial success you can achieve in any society
on the earth right now, and they found that it's
kind of empty. And it's kind of empty in part

(01:37:15):
because people can still be mean to you, and they
don't have to care what you believe just because you
have a lot of money.

Speaker 7 (01:37:21):
They don't like neoliberal capitalism because it fundamentally still has
a shred of like a democratic value. Yeah, and that
makes them too mad. Yeah. So instead they are going
back to like a much a much more like archaic
system where they can still maintain their personal wealth while
being like very influential through like a dictatorial means. They're

(01:37:43):
still like fundamentally capitalists, but almost in like a more
like fascistic feudal sense, like they.

Speaker 2 (01:37:49):
Want to be lords. Well, that's exactly it, that's what
they really want. They are terrified of death. And what
they're terrified of more than anything. What scares the mostly
about death is the idea that like all the success
they've scene goes away.

Speaker 7 (01:38:01):
It's meaningless, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 (01:38:03):
Fundamentally, all of this passes. No one is on top forever,
nobody is like matters.

Speaker 7 (01:38:09):
No one's in a care about PayPal in twenty years.

Speaker 2 (01:38:12):
That's the price of time, right, and they want to
stop the clock. That's fundamentally what near reactionaries are. There
are people who think I am special, I am super special.
The world should be oriented around recognizing how special I
am forever, and anything I can do to turn back
the clock is necessary justified like that. That's what these

(01:38:34):
people are. That's what they believe fundamentally.

Speaker 7 (01:38:36):
Like imagine being so mad that no one will remember
PayPal in two hundred years, that you try to install
a fascist takeover yes, Yes, of the United States of
America so.

Speaker 2 (01:38:46):
That PayPal always matters. It's these fucking guys anyway, Garrison.
That's the James Donald Vance story. Not his name.

Speaker 7 (01:38:54):
Is that his name?

Speaker 2 (01:38:55):
No, of course not. Maybe I forget. I forget. I
always forget what JD stands for, who can? Who gives
a shit? Hopefully he's not going to matter much longer.

Speaker 7 (01:39:04):
This is this is this is this is My biggest
thing going going into November, is that you know, if
the Democrats win on on on, like on their ticket,
that still means plenty of bad things around the world. Yeah,
but I also really don't want these freaks in there,
Like I really don't want them. They're they're like they're
like spooky. They're trying to do like this like like
esoteric larp in like the White House, like come on,

(01:39:27):
and most.

Speaker 2 (01:39:27):
Of the things that need to happen for the world
to get better can't happen while these people are in
power right like or close to power like they there
needs to be damage done to them, and I'm I'm
hopeful about that if nothing else in this election.

Speaker 7 (01:39:41):
And like electoral damages is only like one type. They
have to be like culturally humiliated, like they have to
be like culturally like rejected, being like no, like you
you are not actually the wizards of culture that you
kind of want to be, like no one likes what
you do, no one likes what you believe like that
that it has to be like this this larger this
larger like col battle. That's why they have like the
culture wars. This is like super important thing. That's why

(01:40:04):
they're so scared of like queer and trans people, especially
queer and trans people like that are like influential, whether
they be like you know, like teachers, whether they be
working like in media, making movies, television, writing books. That's
where they're so freaked out with that kind of stuff.
That's what they're trying to get out of schools. That's
why they're trying to stop Woke Disney. It's because they
know that no one's gonna want to listen to these
freaks when like gay people can make a good art

(01:40:25):
or like give a good history lesson. Yeah, that's like
there's that's like the strongest like anecdote to these like
just really really bizarre like esoteric ramblings about wanting to
go back to like nineteen ten like racist science, just weird,
weird shit.

Speaker 2 (01:40:42):
Yeah, you know. I think that these guys delved too
deep and too greedily if we're going to continue the
Lord of the Rings references, which by God, they're not
going to let us stop doing so. And I think
that there was this thing we used to I used
to talk about a lot when I tried to explain
like far right terminology to people back twenty nineteen, twenty eighteen,

(01:41:02):
five decades ago, a thousand years ago. That's my l
ron moment. I was there Garrison a thousand years ago.
We talked about like the term hide your power level, right,
which these Nazis used to use, and they've just completely
given up on that. No, and the thing that they
are seeing there was like all this. I was reading
that twenty twenty two article by Poe, which I think
is a really important snapshot because it's these people about

(01:41:24):
to head into twenty twenty four and they they know
before the dims do how badly down Biden is. Right,
the Democrats have not really taking seriously what a dangerous
position Joe Biden was going to be in for reelection yet.
But they also think that like, wow, all these young
people are showing up at our lame parties. That means
there's a broader sweep. All young people are becoming like

(01:41:46):
closer to reactionarys.

Speaker 7 (01:41:48):
Becoming like all weird treadcats.

Speaker 2 (01:41:50):
Yeah, we're capturing the culture. And that's just absolutely not
what was happening. And it would have been obvious if
like they had been capable of actually like listening to people.
But what we're seeing now is they did the most
dangerous thing you could do. Is they predicted and understood
one thing about the future, but nothing else right, And

(01:42:11):
so they understood the weakness that Joe Biden represented and
kind of the weakness of his control over the Democratic Party,
but they did not understand that, like other things are possible, right,
and including the fact that like Joe Biden and largely
the other people who were running the Democratic Party might
come to understand that weakness too, And after a disastrous

(01:42:32):
debate and a shooting, go, you know what, let's change course.
And I really think that that, above all else might
be what fucks them is they completely came out of
the woodwork. They were tired of having to pretend they
didn't want a king. They thought their time had come,
and perhaps it has not. Well still, we'll all see,

(01:42:52):
we'll all see.

Speaker 7 (01:42:53):
Well, I'm super excited to hear what kind of just
unhinged and bizarre things Tim Walls has done. Yeah, in
the next tale.

Speaker 2 (01:43:02):
Yeah, I'm just going to accuse him of having been
the Zodiac killer. You know that that's worked on a
couple of guys.

Speaker 7 (01:43:08):
Seems to work.

Speaker 2 (01:43:09):
Actually, yeah, So we're just going to do that. Call
it a night. Anyway, this has been JD vance. We've
been it could happen here, Go to Hell, I love you,
Clean your couch, Clean your couch. Shit, I need to
do that. Welcome back to It could happen here a

(01:43:47):
podcast about Tim Walls. And in this episode, Garrison and
I are going balls to the walls. Are you happy
with that? Garrison?

Speaker 7 (01:43:58):
What's skivitying your Biden?

Speaker 2 (01:44:01):
What does that even mean?

Speaker 7 (01:44:02):
All right, let's get going some fucking.

Speaker 2 (01:44:04):
Ging z bullshit Garrison because I won't take part in it.

Speaker 7 (01:44:08):
Yeah, I'm excited to hear about how Walls is either
great or terrible or probably a mix of both.

Speaker 2 (01:44:15):
Yeah. I mean, he's a politician and a pretty successful one,
so it's definitely going to be a mix of both.
For jd Vance, I figured the most relevant thing to
do is to talk about, like what does he actually
believe and where does he come from in the right,
because people had gotten pieces of that, but I feel
like unless you put it all together, it's not as useful.
So I hope we did that with Walls. He's not

(01:44:38):
a guy where there's anything sinister for you to know,
So I think the useful thing is kind of going
through his whole political biography and just kind of talk about,
like what is this guy done in his public life? Right,
That's kind of what I wanted to do here, so
that people actually know, you know, whether or not you
are making your mind up about whether or not to vote,
you're voting for harm reduction, you're anti electoral Here's this

(01:45:00):
guy who may or may not wind up being the
vice president, and here's what he's actually done in the
past when he's had any kind of power. It's worth
noting that kind of at this point here, Walls is
maybe the most popular politician at his level in the country.
This has happened very suddenly, but he's got something like
a plus sixteen net favorability among moderates, which is insane.

Speaker 7 (01:45:21):
Yeah, that's a lot.

Speaker 2 (01:45:22):
Yeah, it's wild.

Speaker 7 (01:45:23):
As someone who's looked at a lot of the favorability
ratings the past six months. Yeah, that is astonishingly high,
especially gotpared to where we were like two months ago
with Skibbity Biden, which was yeah, very low, quite dire.

Speaker 2 (01:45:35):
He's incredibly popular with the normies because basically everyone in
the country has positive memories of a guy like Tim Walls,
like whether it was like your favorite social studies teacher
or your dad. There is like a kind of rotund, balding,
very mechanically capable man probably somewhere in your life that
you have fond memories of, and Walls dredges those up.

Speaker 7 (01:45:57):
We are of a very Freudian country.

Speaker 2 (01:46:00):
Yes, for an idea of how like rapidly people have
gone from not really knowing who this guy is to
loving him. On August eighth, a UGU of Survey should
him with a net favorability rating of plus eleven, which
was up from plus one, and a survey conducted in
late July. In the same time frame, Jade Vance has
seen his approval ratings steadily drop.

Speaker 7 (01:46:19):
Yeah, isn't he like at like negative points?

Speaker 12 (01:46:21):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:46:21):
Yes, yes, yes, by any stretch of the imagination, at
negative points. And if you're just kind of looking at
Tim's life, which we're not really getting into because we
have limited time here and it's not the most important
thing I thought we could be talking about. But he
has a long history of doing decent things in his
personal life kind of most notably in the early nineties,
like ninety three ninety four, he sponsored the Gay and

(01:46:43):
Lesbian Alliance at his high school. And his reasoning was that,
you know, he was a soldier in the National Guard
and the football coach at that point, and he decided,
you know, him sponsoring the club in particular would have
the biggest impact. And I honestly, I think that's the
kind of thing that might have saved lives.

Speaker 10 (01:46:57):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (01:46:57):
Good thing to have done. Anyway, this isn't an episode
about his life and background. We're not going to litigate,
which we're not going to always any time litigating the
attacks on his military career, which seemed to confusingly say
that after extending his time in the Guard by four
years to participate in Operation during Freedom, he owed his
soldiers staying on even longer to fight in Iraq. I
could make the point that no grunt in any US
war ever found themselves in the shit and said, boy,

(01:47:19):
I wish the commands Sergeant major was here. But given
that JD Vance was played onto stage at the RNC
to a song with the refrain we got to get
out of Iraq and take our country back, I just
don't think these attacks are worth acknowledging it. All right,
the right has already acknowledged that was a stupid war
to fight in. Walls decided not to fight in it.
Good for him now when it comes to the current

(01:47:40):
war that is on everyone's minds, or one of the
wars that's on everyone's minds. Walls is fine on Ukraine,
but when it comes to the war that he's not
fine on the genocide in Gaza. Walls is in no
way that I can find really better than Kamala Harris.
But he did take a stand against the Iraq war
back when that mattered, which is I guess a little
bit of a point, but again doesn't really matter today,

(01:48:01):
And in any case, we're far afield from the subject,
which is what has Tim done in politics. So Tim's
political career he came late in life to that. He
was a social studies teacher. For a couple of decades,
he was a coach. He lived in Nebraska, then moved
to Minnesota, and in two thousand and six, after retiring
from the guard he was elected to Minnesota's first congressional district.

(01:48:22):
Now this was a tough campaign. His opponent in this
race was a sixth term Republican incumbent, Gil Gutneckt.

Speaker 7 (01:48:29):
Wait wait, wait, wait, good necked good Neckt.

Speaker 2 (01:48:32):
I'm guessing his family were knights, and it was used
to be like good night or something like that, like
gut k n Echt. But I don't know enough about
ancient German to tell you if that's really where his
last name came from. Yeah, yeah, But Walls came in
that he kind of goes against this guy who had
promised not to run for another term and then decided, actually,

(01:48:52):
I don't want to give up power. Not a thing
that's ever happened again, and Walls kind of came in
both when this guy had violated his promise to not
run again and near the peak of disillusionment and exhaustion
with neo cons Right, this is kind of the twilight
of the Bush years. Even conservative Americans are pretty fucking
tired of the Republican Party right this second, and Walls

(01:49:16):
exhibited a notable ability to connect with rural Americans who
mostly voted read. He did so with basically no funding
or larger national operation behind him. From a write up
in The New York Times, he had no money, no nothing,
said Representative Betty McCollum of Minnesota, who that cycle worked
on House Democrats recruitment team under their campaign chief Rama Manuel.
He had a grassroots campaign that he had put together

(01:49:37):
that I just knew was going to be dynamite. So
I went back and I told Rama Manuel, this guy's
going to win. He's great, and rom looked at me
like I was crazy. Walls was a dark horse candidate
and would claim around that time that his whole inspiration
for getting into politics was when he tried to take
two students to a rally for President George Bush and
they were kicked out because one student had a John

(01:49:57):
Kerry button. Now I found a blog by the Republican
staffer who kicked them out where he admits he made
a dumb call. He was kind of trying to be
a dick. He had seen Walls out protesting against Bush
like the day before, and he knew he was going
to kick them out of the rally, but he made
them stand in line for a long time before he
kicked them out, and he was like, I shouldn't have
done that. But his angle was that Walls wanted to

(01:50:20):
get denied and kicked out so that he could make
a big deal about it and use it as a
line on the campaign trail. That's probably what happened.

Speaker 7 (01:50:27):
Regardless, this is a very funny little domino leading to
big domino.

Speaker 2 (01:50:33):
Everyone likes Walls, who tends to meet him. Joe Biden
for the last year or two has seems been trying
to get him to do more events with Walls, just
because he put Biden in a good mood. I think
that's a big reason why Kamala picked him. He just
seems to be a very likable guy. But he's very
okay with lying to get what he needs. I mean,
he's a politician.

Speaker 7 (01:50:50):
He's a politician.

Speaker 2 (01:50:51):
Another good example of this would be his duy. Right
when he was thirty one, he got a duy, and
he is at times claimed basically that's why I decided
to like, I stopped drinking. I changed my life, I moved,
you know, I got my shit together. But his campaign
manager made a statement recently, Oh, he wasn't drunk. He
just couldn't hear the cop. I don't know who to trust,
politician or cop in this case, but the CoP's attitude

(01:51:11):
is like, well, I would be fine if he had
just like fixed his shit up, but he definitely was drunk.
And I don't have any trouble believing that a man
in rural Nebraska, a football coach in rural Nebraska, drove
drunk once.

Speaker 7 (01:51:23):
Right, No, that is not the most surprising thing in
the world.

Speaker 2 (01:51:26):
So I think he's a guy who's certainly he's not
naive political actor, right, He's not one of these guys
who's so so good and pure that he's not willing
to like fudge in order to make shit work for him.
And that's probably what he did at this Bush event
right now. That said, it would be hard to overstate
what a difficult task he picked for himself and trying
to unseat Gutneck. At the time that Walls ran, Minnesota's

(01:51:48):
first district had been held by one other Democrat in
the last hundred years, so he was the second Democrat
in a century to win in that district, and as
soon as he left, by the way, a Republican took back.
Over his six terms in Congress, he was one of
the more interesting legislators in the country. Walls was a
risk taker, supporting liberal votes on major issues even when

(01:52:08):
he was politically vulnerable. He opposed Republican legislation to make
doctors vulnerable to criminal penalties for performing abortions. He supported
a climate cap and trade bill on greenhouse gas emissions
that failed, and this really pissed some folks off. He
supported the Affordable Care Act, and kind of one of
the more notable things about him is there's stories of
when he was running for reelection, he would do town

(01:52:29):
halls in southern Minnesota and he would get attacked by
these red voters who had supported him early on for
backing the Affordable Care Act, and rather than like backing off,
he would lean into it and argue with them and
try to convince them. And you know, his numbers with
conservative rural Republicans got worse and worse every cycle basically,

(01:52:50):
so you could argue how good he was, but it
is worth something to me that he didn't back off.
He didn't do the well this might, you know, fuck
up my chances of reelection. Like he's never really been
that kind of guy. There's things that he believes and
he will just kind of like jam his flag into
the mud over them. That said, Tim was a pragmatist.
He voted for a resolution calling for the withdrawal of

(01:53:11):
US forces from Iraq within ninety days, but when that failed,
he voted in favor of continuing funding for the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tim also received an a from
the NRA during much of his time in office, voting
against gun control based on what seemed to be a
natural inclination to firearms and hunting. Walls may have been
the best shot in the Minnesota National Guard during the

(01:53:31):
time when he was there. He's apparently a very good shot.
He is an avid and skilled turkey hunter, and if
you talk to people who want game in the US,
Turkey is one of the more difficult game to hunt.
He developed a reputation as a guy who wouldn't apologize
for voting with liberals, but who would go across the
aisle when it mattered. During his time on the Veterans
Affairs Committee, which he ultimately chaired, he voted with Republicans

(01:53:53):
to make it easier for the VIA to fire employees,
even with union opposition, and he also pushed through change
just to improve GI Bill college access for veterans post
nine to eleven. One of the things I find interesting
about his record is that in twenty eighteen, he voted
against most of his party opposing an overhaul of the
VA healthcare system. He agreed everyone agrees that the system

(01:54:15):
needed to be overhauled, but he argued the proposal in
place would force the VIA to cannibalize itself, basically starving
the organization to try and fix it. And his attitude was, well,
it needs to get fixed. I'm not going to vote
for a change that might be worse than what we
currently have. While chairing this committee, Walls made strong connections
to Nancy Pelosi, who like basically everyone really came to

(01:54:35):
like Walls, and she's going to be one of the
people who's one of the strongest voices for picking him
as VP, and we will be back to talk about
more of that. But first, Garrison, you know who else
loves Nancy Pelosi?

Speaker 7 (01:54:47):
Probably these products and services. If they come from San Francisco.

Speaker 2 (01:54:50):
They're based in the Bay Area. She will break their
kneecaps if they don't like her enough. Ah, and we're back.
So one of the big shifts for Tim during his

(01:55:11):
time in Congress was away from the NRA. This started
after in twenty seventeen, after the Las Vegas mass shooting,
and then after the Parkland mass shooting, and then in
February of twenty eighteen, he writes an op ed supporting
what he calls common sense gun reform and donates the
NRA contributions to his campaign That cycle to some sort
of I think gun control cause. Walls's common sense gun

(01:55:33):
regulations include an assault weapons ban, and he is currently
in line with the Democratic Party on that if you
were curious. That same year, twenty eighteen, he launched his
campaign for governor of Minnesota. By this point, Walls had
bled much of his ability to win rural red votes.
It is accurate to say he was only really good
at this during his early years in Congress, his margins

(01:55:53):
grew a lot narrower over time, and once he hit
the governor's office, his support was largely in the cities.
Now it's one of those things where I think there's
been debate, Like some people have arguable he's not maybe
not the best VP pick because he actually isn't all
that good at getting these red rural votes. But I
just don't see that as where the elections coming down to.
Walls has great favorables with like suburban white people and

(01:56:16):
a particularly suburban like moderates, and that is like one
of the most important demographics to win. So I don't
believe the fact that he's he's kind of bled his
support with rural conservatives is really necessarily a mark against
him in an electoral sense. One thing I do appreciate
about Walls is how direct he is to people I dislike.

(01:56:36):
He decides in twenty eighteen to run for governor, and
during that run he has a meeting with a bunch
of business leaders at a luxury hotel. The president of
a machining company asks if Walls felt corporate taxes hurt workers,
and Walls replied, we're not taxing people, We're taxing corporations,
and I want to quote from a CNBC write up
for Jeff Baker, it was a bit of an O

(01:56:56):
shit moment. That's not what I wanted to hear, said Baker,
president of McFarlane truck Lines. There's a lot of stories
like that. He's been very willing to tax the wealthy
and to tax corporations to pay for things like children's lunches.
This is a consistent Walls move and it's something that
he absolutely is unapologetic about, and I think that's fine.

(01:57:17):
Minnesota currently taxes corporate income at nine point eight percent,
the highest rate in the nation. Walls did not back
down on this during his time in office. In fact,
that CNBC report found that quote Walls's policy battles have
a common theme. Walls supported either higher taxes on the
rich or businesses, and corporate leaders fought back. One of
their fights was over a one percent ser tax on
passive investment income over a million dollars. Another was a

(01:57:40):
tax on the wealthy. Walls signed into law that limits
standard and itemized deductions for households with gross incomes over
two hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Due to Republican control
of the legislature. Walls's first term was not hugely eventful
up until the COVID nineteen pandemic. This is because Republicans
retained control of the state legislature and were able to
stop much of his plan perform. We did get to

(01:58:02):
see more of the politician Tim Walls during COVID when
he stood up against Republican resistance more common sense pandemic
safety regulations. He earned a lot of hate from the
right for some of the more extreme COVID restrictions in
the country, which were put in place in Minnesota. In particular,
Walls threatened citizens with up to ninety days in jail
during the shelter in place period and threatened twenty five
thousand dollars fines for meeting in public. Minnesota instituted a

(01:58:25):
COVID hotline where people could inform on their neighbors if
they saw rules being broken. And I get why the
right is uncomfortable with this. I'm not fully comfortable with
this kind of stuff either, But given what was going
on at the time, I'm not going to slam the
man for trying to save lives in a very uncertain
and desperate situation. You know it beats the nothing that

(01:58:46):
a lot of state governors did, so I guess that's
kind of where I stand on that shit. Not long
after the pandemic lockdown started, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis.
Walls mobilized the National Guard after three days of riots,
earning praise from President Trump on June first, who said
what they did in Minneapolis was incredible. They went in
and dominated, and it happened quickly. And this is you know,

(01:59:09):
the National Guard do a lot of very violent shit
coming into crackdown on these protests. I know a lot
of people who were the ones cracked down upon. It's
one of those things where, yeah, he's a governor, you know,
I think pretty much any governor in this situation would
have sent in the National Guard in that sort of.

Speaker 7 (01:59:25):
Situation, especially after the burning of the Third Precinct.

Speaker 2 (01:59:28):
Especially after the Priconct got burnt. Which doesn't excuse it.
It's just like, well, yeah, he's not an anarchist, right like,
he's not your communist like revolutionary hero. He is the
governor of Minnesota. I'm just really not surprised that this happened.
It's you know, a pretty normal thing for a guy
in his position to have done yeah now, like every

(01:59:49):
other dim in creation. During the height of the uprising,
Walls voice support for a wide host of police accountability reforms.
He even voiced some degree of support for Indian qualified immunity,
but this did not last long, and as the backlash
against police reforms swelled up after the election, Walls joined
many iems and pulling back and even quashing moves for
greater police accountability. When he ran for reelection, he did

(02:00:11):
so as a tough on crime, law enforcement friendly democrat.
Right many such cases. Now, he did push through some
accountability measures. He used fifteen million in COVID funds to
pay for grants for community violence prevention. He pushed through
some requirements to increase data sharing from the police Licensing Board.

(02:00:32):
He pushed through a demand for state law enforcement to
share footage of police killings with the family of the
victim within five days. These are, I think we can
all say, minor accountability moves, very very very minor, he said.
Of these moves. They build trust in police, they build
trust in the systems, They build trust among communities, and
they provide the community with some basic closure and understanding

(02:00:53):
for families. Nothing builds trust, like a video of your
cousin getting shot in the back.

Speaker 7 (02:00:58):
Yeah, I have the biggest accountability thing that you get.
First look at the murder video.

Speaker 2 (02:01:02):
I don't know, Okay, I like, yes, I do think
you probably have to legislate that because otherwise police just
won't give it up at all. But like, yeah, I
wouldn't hang my hat on that.

Speaker 7 (02:01:14):
It is ignoring the main issue at play, Yeah, which
is the fact that we have murder right videos.

Speaker 2 (02:01:21):
It's like, come on now. There were some bigger reforms,
including limitations on no knock warrants, although again not like
a ban or anything, but it lacked a lot of
the stuff that activists in the state had pushed for,
including limits on police stops of motorists, and Walls had
agreed that there needs to be more movement in this direction,
particularly after the murder of Philando Casteele. It also left

(02:01:42):
out and asked for end to the statute of limitations
for wrongful death cases against officers. Walls had personally voiced
support for a ban on officers with white supremacist gang affiliations,
but this was also left out. Ultimately, State Rep. John
Thompson said to Walls at the time, you have the
power to do so, and all I've been getting from
your office is lip service. And I mean that we

(02:02:04):
don't need a news conference from you, governor. We need
a leader. So you're not gonna get a lot of
police reform under Tim Walls. That's just a pretty consistent
reality of the guy that said he can be forced
to do some things if you scare him enough. So
you know, keep that in mind. I guess first, keep
in mind these ads, and then we'll talk about the

(02:02:24):
environment and stuff, which is a happier story for Walls.
We're back. So Walls ran for reelection under the slogan
one Minnesota, and he managed another solid victory. Up to
this point, you would say he'd been a pretty standard

(02:02:46):
dim governor in a swing state. But something happened in
the twenty twenty two midterms that changed the course of
Walls's career in maybe the nation. The Democrats won a
slim majority in the state legislature. As David Schultz, a
political science perform or at Hamlin University, told CNN, Walls's
message immediately jerked away from one Minnesota to damn the
torpedoes and fuck the Republicans. Quote that agenda included codified

(02:03:10):
protections for abortion access, restored voting rights for felons who've
completed their sentences, driver's licenses for people regardless of their
legal status, a state child tax credit, free public college
for families making less than eighty thousand annually, protections for
gender affirming care, a paid family and medical leave program.
Walls signed legislation to move the state towards achieving one
hundred percent clean energy by twenty forty and to establish

(02:03:33):
a universal free school meal program that provides breakfast and lunch.
And that is a real solid spate of shit for
a governor to get done. And all of this is
about in a year, right, Like most of the shit
that Walls has gotten done as governor has been very recently,
because the dims had just taken back control, right, and
it's very narrow control. Amy Koch, a Republican and former

(02:03:55):
Minnesota Senate majority leader, said Walls definitely had not governed
like a moderate, and un like other governors with trifecta control,
had not emphasized in making deals with Republicans. Everything that
went forward was signed. She said, I'm not sure what
that says about him, but it definitely puts a Dent
in his argument that he's just this moderate Democrat from
the Midwest. And this is why progressives, many of them,

(02:04:15):
are excited about Walls, is that when he actually had
the opportunity, he was willing to say, Fuck the Republicans,
let's get some shit done. I don't care that we
only have one vote, right, yeah. Now, Walls has stated that,
in his opinion, political capital exists to be spent improving
people's lives. And this is an area where you can
say that he's put his money where his mouth is, right,

(02:04:36):
this is how he actually governed. Now, it's worth noting. Obviously,
he also promised to burn political capital on major police
reform and he gave that up. So you know, the
fact that he says he's going to do something like
any politician, not a guarantee it's going to happen.

Speaker 7 (02:04:49):
Well, and some of one of the more upsetting things
but not surprising things, is now that Kamala has basically
secured the nomination, she has rolled back many of the
progressive policies that she ran on in twenty twenty when
those seems to be more pre popular, right, you know,
that's not necessarily Walls, that is that's Kambala. But but
they're running on the same ticket. And again, like, it's
not surprising that she's not advocating for Medica for all

(02:05:09):
now that she is the actual nominee, right, But it
still is, you know, disappointing for people who are like, hey,
her actual policies four years ago were actually relatively progressive,
and now they are slightly more kind of in line
with like the mainstream Democratic Party views on most of
these issues.

Speaker 2 (02:05:25):
Right. And again, one of the reasons, maybe for a
little bit of hope, is that Walls has not really
been that guy during his time with the executive power, right,
and kind of the area where he's been best maybe
actually is climate change. Right, This is the thing dim
seem to like to compromise on the most. And Tim's
history here is interested in me, particularly because he's got
he doesn't have a perfect record, but it's genuinely pretty positive.

(02:05:48):
His major achievement was a policy passed in twenty twenty
three that required Minnesota to have a carbon free electric
grid by twenty forty. Now, this is the kind of
legislation that could just be virtue signaling, but Walls didn't
just say yep, we'll get it. Done by twenty forty,
when I won't be the fucking governor anymore. He backed
it up by approving a historic amount of state spending
on energy. The legislation included rebates on climate friendly technology

(02:06:11):
like air source heat pumps and electric vehicles, as well
as spending to improve home insulation and one hundred million
dollars for city extreme weather preparedness. Walls also signed a
bill to cut red tape for winden solar farms and
transmission lines, and the speed up permitting for infrastructure needed
to replace colon gas plants. So it was not just
a yeah, we'll definitely do this. It was a well,

(02:06:31):
there's certain things that need to happen for this to
be possible, and I am going to work to make
it easier to do those things. I'm going to make
sure that we're passing legislation that makes it easier to
do those things. And that that shows me someone who
sees this as important as not just a thing that's
virtue signaling, but as we need to figure out what
the actual concrete steps are to make this doable, and

(02:06:52):
that's something that gives me a little bit of hope.
The more questionable side of his environmental history is the
Inbridge Line three pipeline, which he and state regulators approved
in twenty twenty. This angered a lot of local environmental
groups and several indigenous tribes in the area. The pipeline
was argued to be necessary because the old one was
corroding and a spill risk, and of course, when the
new pipeline was constructed, workers punctured multiple aquifers. This seems

(02:07:17):
to have been a case of Walls being the politician
that he is. Trade unions supported the project because jobs,
and it's also worth noting this is twenty twenty, so
the dims do not have a majority in the legislature,
and there's just a lot less of a stick available
to Walls at this point. So you know, maybe he
would have ruled differently, or maybe he would have acted differently,
you know, have been in a more friendly situation.

Speaker 7 (02:07:37):
Yeah. I reported on this back in twenty twenty one. Yeah,
we did a two part series on stop Line three
where I traveled to the pipeline. Yeah, it's not surprising,
especially with pressure from trade unions to approve this pipeline.
From what I've seen, he did not have much to
do with the police crackdown on protesters. I've seen that alleged.

(02:08:00):
I'm not finding much to back that up. There's a
lot of like county sheriffs and other task forces working
directly with the pipeline company, like you know, Walls never
used National Guard against these people. I don't see much
from him being personally involved in suppressing these protests beyond
the fact that he's the governor. Like he's the top
guy in charge. He could shut that all down if

(02:08:20):
but he also doesn't need to be like actively involved
for that to happen, right, police will do it themselves, right,
And that seems to be mostly what took place.

Speaker 2 (02:08:29):
Yeah, that seems fair to say.

Speaker 7 (02:08:31):
And most of the extreme charges that top line three
protesters were getting, like a felony theft for locking down
onto construction equipment mostly have since all been dismissed in
the courts or at least taken down to a lower
and more appropriate charge.

Speaker 2 (02:08:45):
Yeah. So again, like with everything about this guy, he's
not perfect. He's not without some fucked up things in
his background. He's a politician, but on ballance a better
history on environmental stuff than most governors in the country.
I should also note here under Walls, Minnesota passed the
nation's most comprehensive ban on PFAS chemicals, a category of

(02:09:06):
industrial compounds that do not break down and run off
and have been associated with a bunch of cancers and
other health risks. It is a band that rolls out
over an eight year timeframe, so you know, maybe it's
not like who knows how well it will actually get executed,
but literally no other state has passed a ban this strong.
So I'm putting it in the ups for Walls category. Now,

(02:09:27):
that is kind of what I had to say. I
didn't want to end talking a little bit more about Palestine,
because again, Walls has a very mixed record here at best.
While he was in the House, he received APAX endorsement
and spoke at the group's twenty ten conference, where he said,
this Israel is our truest and closest ally in the region,
with a commitment to values of personal freedoms and liberties,

(02:09:48):
surrounded by a pretty tough neighborhood. You know, I might
quibble with me most of that, well, except with our
closest ally in the region. That's kind of hard to
argue with. After October seventh, he or state flags flown
at half staff and condemned the Hamas attacks. In early March,
he began endorsing calls for a permanent working ceasefire a
few days after Harris called for a six week ceasefire.

(02:10:11):
He's made statements about how the uncommitted protesters should be
listened to, the same thing about college protesters. But he
is not. He's not backing an embargo, right, He's not
you know, pushing any kind of like stick to actually
force Netanyahu's hand in any way. You would not say
he's the worst Democrat on Gaza, but he's not, you know,

(02:10:33):
particularly good either.

Speaker 7 (02:10:35):
He didn't lie about volunteering with the IDF. He did not.

Speaker 2 (02:10:38):
He did not lie about volunteering with the IDF as
a teenager. That's that's one thing we can say.

Speaker 7 (02:10:43):
But unfortunately the bar is quite low these days.

Speaker 2 (02:10:46):
Yeah, so you know that's Tim Walls a political biography.
I hope you now can walk away being like, Okay,
that's that's more or less who Tim Walls is.

Speaker 7 (02:10:55):
I do. I do feel it's important to end with
one more kind of anecdote about Walls that I learned
this morning, Okay, is that on I believe his first
date with his with his suite to be wife. When
he was teaching geography, he took her to see the
movie Falling Down, the nineteen ninety three Michael Douglas masterpiece,

(02:11:16):
incredibly based, which I feel like every single politician should
be forced to watch.

Speaker 2 (02:11:23):
I would make it a mandatory part of graduation. You know,
that was that was an important movie for me.

Speaker 7 (02:11:29):
It is a pretty funny first date movie. It's not
the worst, you know, It's not like it's not like
American Psychoach, which is also a great movie, but you know,
it is. It is a curious first pick. But I
think it is important that whoever is sitting in the
White House is familiar with Falling Down. Yeah, as it
as it kind of displays American male violence.

Speaker 2 (02:11:48):
It predicted a kind of guy who was just starting to, like, yeah,
creep up into public consciousness when the movie came out,
and who now commits a mass shooting every four weeks.

Speaker 7 (02:11:59):
Yeah. Yeah, So I think that is a very funny anecdote.

Speaker 2 (02:12:03):
Watch Falling Down, folks. It's a great date movie. You know,
maybe double Parrot with Event Horizon and really really gets an.

Speaker 7 (02:12:09):
Ax in Christ.

Speaker 2 (02:12:12):
All right, Garret, that's the end of the episode, how
you feeling pretty good?

Speaker 7 (02:12:15):
Pretty good? Honestly, well, you know, not great. You know,
actually the whole situation politically in the country is kind
of a nightmare.

Speaker 2 (02:12:22):
It's fine, it's fine.

Speaker 7 (02:12:24):
Somehow, I feel slightly better than I did two months ago.

Speaker 2 (02:12:26):
I'm gonna tell you, this is the best it's been
in a while, and maybe maybe the best in the
ll ever be again.

Speaker 7 (02:12:32):
Which also just points to how low the bar is
at the moment.

Speaker 2 (02:12:35):
Yeah, yeah, it's fine. Look, best case scenario, Matt Walsh
is mad. It is a little further than mad. We'll see,
We'll see if we can get like a welfare check
over at his house. Anyway. That's the end of the episode.
Good night and good luck, Carl Walls.

Speaker 1 (02:13:26):
In the last few weeks, indeed the last few months,
the eyes of the world have been on the a
Trustees aflicted on the people of Palestine on a daily basis.
For the first time in most of our lifetimes, tens
of thousands of people have taken to the streets to
lift their voices for a stateless station of Palestine and
against Israel's une checked mass murder of civilians. It's something
I never thought I would see in the US, and

(02:13:48):
one of my first visits here, I was staying at
a bed and breakfast in the Bronx in late December.
It was cold and now I was wearing a kafir
to stay warm, as I still often do. I remember
wearing it while I was talking to small guys. That's
what I was waiting for the train, and we talked
about Palestine for a long time. I ended up giving
one of them my kafir and he gave me some
cool badget so I still have one jacket somewhere. I

(02:14:09):
was hopeful after that, but since then I've lived here
for more than a decade. It was really not for
about fifteen years that I saw someone else in the
US without a direct connection to Palestine who wanted to
show up for the Palestinians. It's an important cause, and
it's one that we've been supporting here on our podcast
with our coverage and speaking for myself also with my
presence when I can. But as the word looked at Gaza,

(02:14:32):
bombs also fell on Kurdistan. It's equally hard, if not harder,
to find solidarity for the Kurdish freedom movement in the
United States. I have a Kurdish Kafir as well. A
Kurdish migrant that there met in the mountains gave it
to me on one cold night last year after I
said good.

Speaker 9 (02:14:47):
Evening to him.

Speaker 1 (02:14:48):
In Comanche. Stinks of campfires and cigarettes and I wearried
all the time. I don't think anyone has ever recognized
it l alone said anything positive about it. But someone
did once ask me if it was a rast thing.
So while our eyes have been on Gaza, those of
Turkish drones and warplanes have been on the mountains of
southern Kurdistan. Bombs have been going off in Kurdistan for

(02:15:10):
a very long time. Indeed, before Gernica, Britain was dropping
bombs on people in the Middle East without paintings to
commemorate it. Stick boundaries and alliances have changed a lot
since those first bombs, as has technology, but the fact
that death from above has remained a consistent tool of
the colonial state hasn't changed. When I was in Kurdistan

(02:15:32):
in October of twenty twenty three, it was amidst almost
constant drone strikes. I had to conduct my interviews in
a climate of secrecy and concern, somewhat for my own
safety but also for the safety of my interviewees who
took great and serious personal risks to come and meet me.
One of the people I met was Zagarros Heuer, a
spokesman for the Kurdistan Communities Union or in Kurdish Komasievakin Kurdistdani.

(02:15:58):
It's generally known as a casey k by It's Curtis's initials.
Recently I connected with Zagros again and I asked him
to explain the latest rounte of aggression.

Speaker 6 (02:16:07):
Hello, dear James, I hope you're doing well. As far
as your first question is concerned, I can say that
this operation has started from sixteenth of April, six days
before advanced visit to Baghdad, and in the last weeks
the Tekish Army has extended these operations and this invading

(02:16:31):
army has moved further deep into the Iraqi territory and
the Kurdistan region. Now they have set up checkpoints, they
stop civilians, they interrogate them. According to CPT report, CPT
stands for Community Community Peace Making Teams. It is a

(02:16:57):
civil society organization active in Iraq and Curlison region of Iraq.
According to CPT report, in the last months, there has
been two hundred thirty eight bombardments in those areas and
the two thousand hectares of agricultural land have been burned

(02:17:22):
to ashes. And now six hundred two villages are under
the threat of displacement and one hundred and sixty two
of them have already been displaced. They have been raised
to earth. From the start of this year, according to
CPT data, oney seven hundred attacks have been have been

(02:17:44):
done and this comes against the backdrop of attacks in
twenty twenty three where one thousand, five hundred forty eight
bombardments have taken place.

Speaker 1 (02:17:59):
If you're not familiar with the kk on whose behalfs
Agros is speaking, you can think of it as the
umbrella group that unites of various Kurdish freedom movements in Bakur,
North Bashur or South, Rajava or West, and Rodjulat or
East to use the Kurdish terms. These parts of the
Kurdish homeland are found in different states respectively. They are

(02:18:22):
in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. In each of these states,
Kurdish people represent a minority. Under the Assad regime in Syria,
Syrian Kurds were stripped of their citizenship and forced out
of their homes and what is known as the Arab
Belt program. In Turkey, they've been bombed, banned from speaking
their language, and even have their very existence denied by

(02:18:42):
the state. In Iran, tens of thousands of Kurds were
killed when they rose up for autonomy in nineteen seventy nine,
and they still cannot teach their children in their own language.
In Iraq, they were subjected to genocidal violence, chemical weapons,
and the murder enforced Arabization of tens of thousands of
Kurds what is known as the anphal If you ever
find yourself in Solomania or Slimani as it's known in Kurdish,

(02:19:06):
you can visit the incredible museum there, which documents a
tortured history of the Kurdish people at the hands of
the Iraqi state. It's a very moving place. On entering
the museum, you'll walk through a hallway that's covered from
floor to ceiling with broken pieces of mirrors. Each represents
a life cut short during the Anphile. After this entrance,

(02:19:27):
the first exhibit you'll see has a large sign that says,
in those days, we had no friends but the mountains.
It's an old and sometimes overused aphorism about the Kurds,
but it's not untrue. In the mountains of southern Kurdistan.
The Kurdistan Freedom Movement aims to liberate the Kurdish people
from all four states and indeed from the state altogether,

(02:19:48):
and it's in these mountains that's found a place where
it could avoid state violence. The mountains of Kurdistan have
long provided a safe place, and especially in recent years,
the mountains of Iraqi curtiss done controlled by Bathet Talabani's
Patriotic Union of Kurdis DAN, which shares power in the
Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq with the Kurdistan Democratic Party

(02:20:10):
headed by Masud Barzani. The Kurdish Freedom Movement that is
the KSEYK has been able to exist largely without the state. This,
of course, has always been unpopular in Anchor, and it
didn't Baghdad. A recent offensive by Turkey seek not only
to displace the PKK that's the Kurdistan Workers Party which
is part of the k c K and its allies

(02:20:30):
from the mountains, but also to extend their state control there.

Speaker 9 (02:20:34):
Now.

Speaker 1 (02:20:35):
I could go on find a diversion about James C.
Scott here, but that's another episode that I'm working on,
so I'll spare you instead. I asked Mohammed Hamasila, a
Kurdish historian, to explain the impact of this latest round
of aggression and how local people felt about it.

Speaker 12 (02:20:50):
People he had in the p K controlled area, what
are even in could the son who who selves our
sympathy with pick Ak sympathy with the sympathy so they
see that that the really extra stuggle against an enemy

(02:21:16):
went to invent the whole sun went to move Some
want to burn the vocal stand is in my point
of view, it's it's not that the case of of
Peak a k of and there are there they have
the same issue on the same stand with with with

(02:21:38):
with the with the Sirian part of of star people
here so especially getting one or not the pewty control.

Speaker 9 (02:21:51):
I think that.

Speaker 12 (02:21:53):
With the the struggle of Java, the struggle of of.

Speaker 9 (02:21:58):
And they did very issue.

Speaker 12 (02:22:03):
For their people and they have actually very concrete program
for the future.

Speaker 1 (02:22:12):
Turkey, however, seeing the existence of the movement as a
threat to its national security, has begun a campaign to
eliminate the movement wherever it finds it.

Speaker 10 (02:22:21):
As M.

Speaker 1 (02:22:21):
Hubbard mentioned, the history of the Kurdish people in Turkey
is one that's riddled with state of violence, and it's
that which I want to discuss today. Turkey has long
vacillated between the genocidal denial of the existence of Kurdish people,
recognizing that they exist only in so far as it
allows them to be targets for bombing. We could really
start this history almost anywhere in the twentieth century. Indeed,

(02:22:43):
following a series of suppressed rebellions, the entirety of northern
Kurdistan was closed military area in which Turkey did not
allow foreigners from nineteen twenty five to nineteen sixty five.
But I want to start it just after a coup
in nineteen eighty, when Abdullah Oujerlan had recently founded the
PKK or Kerdistein Workers' Party and was beginning to view
a vision of Kurdish liberation that was rooted in a Marxist,

(02:23:05):
Leninist and socialist analysis and ideas of national liberation. Soon
after the nineteen eighty coup, Turkey began to refer to
the Kurds as Mountain Turks, and although it doesn't do
this as much anymore, it did recently release school books
in Diarbacere, a majority Kurdish region that made no reference
to the Kurds or their language, and asserted that people
that spoke a dialect of Turkish don't they speak Kurdish.

(02:23:30):
It's this denial of their very existence. Zagreus told me
they made the Kurdish Freedom Gorillas take up arms in
nineteen eighty four, which is actually forty years ago yesterday.
You're listening to this on the day it comes out.

Speaker 6 (02:23:40):
But after the military of nineteen eighty and the inhuman
tortures in the notorious prison of the Arbaker Armed City,
the movement embarked on a strategy of legitimate self defense
and which manicure struggle against the Turkish state, starting from

(02:24:05):
fifteen of August nineteen eighty four.

Speaker 1 (02:24:08):
Since then, there have been periods of ceasefire and periods
of conflict, with tens of thousands of lives lost. Both
sides have killed civilians as part of their attacks on
the other. The most recent fire was signed in twenty thirteen,
and as a result, the PKK began slowly withdrawing to
the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. In twenty fifteen, when the

(02:24:28):
Syrian Kurdish YPG and YPGA fighters were leading the battle
against ISIS. Turkey broke the ceasefire between the PKK and
itself began attacking the Kurdish fighters, forcing them into a
war on two fronts. As far as Turkey is concerned,
the YPG, YPJ, KCK, ybs in a Zed Areas and

(02:24:49):
all other elements of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement are just
different names for the PKK, which it considers to be
a terrorist organization. Everyday life for Kurdish people in Turkey
can be hard. I've spoken to hundreds, if not thousands
of them in the last year, often sitting around fires
in the mountains, working together to build wooden shelters for
their children, or sharing the balls of beans that my

(02:25:11):
friend's cooked because the state refused to feed the people
it was detaining in the open air for days. These
aren't conversations I recorded, because that wouldn't be safe. There's
a very real danger of these folks not getting asilum
and being sent back to a country where they've seen
their friends murdered, their election results denied, their job applications
thrown away, and their language suppressed. Having them on the

(02:25:33):
record would be a huge risk to their safety. And
not every interaction I have with people, even people I'm
writing about, has she turned into content to go between
the adverts. So sometimes I just do things because I
like to do them. If you'd like to know more
about these stories, you could find a link to a
piece I wrote for the Kurdish Piece Institute in the
show notes. Anyway, here's an ad break. The situation in

(02:26:11):
Iraq is different. The Kurdish's an Actoma's region enjoys a
great degree of autonomy from Baghdad. They're chiefly run by
two parties, the KDP and the p UK. The KDP
enjoys influence in a Bile or how La and Kurdish
in Slomania. The p UK is in control. In these areas,
especially those of the KDP, a more neoliberal vision of

(02:26:32):
Kurdish identity is pursued. And how Laeri saw skyscrapers lit
up all night, huge mansions, but also the whole areas
of the city struggling to get by or sometimes not
even having actives a year around water. The vision of
Kurdish identity here is not a threatening to Turkey, and
the KDP seems to take the line that the PKK
or to keep it struggle within the Turkish borders. The
p UK has been more sympathetic to the KDK. The

(02:26:54):
PKK it's often in the mountains near Slamanian du Howk
that Turkey targets Kurdish rillers and their infrastructure. For the
last forty years, Turkey has remained extremely hostile to division
of Curdish liberation, with the democratic and federal system that
Ojerland and the movement that follows him have adopted. I
asked Zagorros to explain the connection between the Kurdish struggling

(02:27:15):
in North and East Syria, which many listens will probably
be familiar with, and the element to the Kurdish freedom
movement in other parts of Kurdistan, which they might not
be familiar with, and I'll ask interview. I spoke to
Zagros about history in Spain. Now it is history. To
give me a history lesson. By the way, he calls
the Ojilan leader appo here Raber appo in Kurdish, it's

(02:27:37):
a common contraction that's used all over Kurdistan, and Appo
is also the evocative form of the Commandji word for
a paternal uncle.

Speaker 6 (02:27:44):
A leader uncle migrated to the Middle East. He migrated
to Syria and Lebanon. I mean months before the military
coup in Turkey is the military coup of nineteen eighty.
He went there on his own. There was only one
comrade with him. First he entered the city of Kogani

(02:28:07):
and from the he found his way to Lebanon to Beirut.
In Lebanon he made relations with the Palatinian groups. He
even took part in the resistance of the Palastinian groups
against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. For nearly twenty years,
he waged the freedom of cruggle from Lebanon and Syria.

(02:28:31):
In doing so, he educated, he trained, and organized the
Kurdish people in Rajawa Kerkistan. In this sense, his struggle
is twofold. First day. He developed self awareness in the
people of Rajawa with regard to the natural and cultural identity,

(02:28:51):
and brought the Rajawa people together, who had been divided
by the many Arab builds and demographic change operations of
the bath regime. All these organizational activities were done despite
the Sudian regime, and he managed to run a delicate

(02:29:13):
balance to foil the repressive measures of the Syrian regime.

Speaker 1 (02:29:18):
There I just interject here to explain these terms. Bath
Is Syria and Haffazala Said and his son Bashi al
A Said attempted to divide and deny the existence of
the Kurdish people in many ways. Some of these included
omitting them from censuses, denying them citizenship, prohibiting the public
use of their language, and demographic transfers to installed belts
of Arab people in areas that were majority Kurdish. Nonetheless,

(02:29:42):
as I'd also saw benefit allowing the PKK to exist
within his borders, especially in the parts of Lebanon that
Syria occupied, in order to use them as a tool
against other states.

Speaker 6 (02:29:53):
Secondly, he got this Nationally and culturally aware people of
Rajena support the struggle in North Kydalstan. Therefore, thousands of
Rajawa youth were first organized and educated in villages in cities,
and then they joined the guerrilla struggle and fought in

(02:30:16):
North Kandestan in Baku Kalistan. This struggle served to unite
Rajawa and North Karalistan Baku Karalistan and developed shared national
political awareness and attitudes. Thousands of Rojawa youth boys and

(02:30:37):
girls film martyr in the ranks of the guerrilla struggle.
Leader Apple tried to reach out to all cities, to
all villages, to all families, and even to all individuals
in Rojawa, Kedistan. This has created a strong national, social, cultural,
and let's say, a philosophical point between Leader Apple and

(02:30:59):
the Rajava people. And because a neglected and divided people
had igunited around him.

Speaker 1 (02:31:06):
This isn't an episode about the entire history of the PKK,
and I wouldn't be the person to write that, but
I will attempt to speed run it here anyway. Up
I was arrested in Arabia in nineteen ninety nine. Ever
since then he's been held in prison, often without access
to visitors or his lawyers, and at some points on
an island where he was a solitary prisoner surrounded by hundreds,

(02:31:26):
if not thousands, of guards. His human rights are almost
universally knowledge to have been violated by this arrangement, and
despite a quarter century of detention and Turkish moves towards Europe,
there seems to be no willingness on a part of
the Turkish state to release him. In his time in jail,
he began to read more and correspond with many thinkers,
including Murray Bookchin. Bookchin influenced his thinking a great deal,

(02:31:50):
and gradually, through this and other influences, Arsland moved away
from a Marxist Leninist analysis and national liberation goals and
instead began to conceive feminist and ecological revolution that decentralized power,
ensured all authority positions were shared by a man and
a woman, and valued the environment as much or more
than the economy. This libertaria left ideology came to be

(02:32:12):
known as democratic confederalism, and it is a guiding ethos
for Java and indeed the Casey Care as a whole.
The civil war in Syria provided an opening that the
Kurdistan Freedom movement took advantage of as ASAD forces withdrew
from their regions to fight elsewhere. Didn't spring from the
ground in twenty eleven, but instead they'd spent decades building

(02:32:33):
a movement that they felt could replace the state. Today,
millions of people live, work and play under a democratic
confederist ideology in the Autonomous Area of North and East Syria,
where it was last year. It's not paradise, but it's
a special place, and by any metric, life there is
better than in the rest of Syria. Right now. For
over a decade, they've navigated a complex system of adversaries,

(02:32:55):
including the Syrian State, the Islamic State, and the Turkish State.
Just this week, all three of them have tried to
attack Rajava. More than fifteen thousand people men and women
have died in the decade long war against the Islamic State, which,
contrary to much reporting, remains ongoing. I sexually car bombed
a place not far from where I stayed last October

(02:33:17):
after I'd come home. At times, the USA has supported
the people of Vjavre in their battle against Islamic State,
but it's also stood by as Turkish bombs fell on them.
But though Rajava is by far the biggest territorial area
which to democratic confederalism is in practice, much as a
movement remains in the mountains of southern Kurdistan in what
is technically Iraqi territory, there are many more Kurdish people

(02:33:39):
in Turkey, and as a recent election results show, revolution
by the ballot box is not really an option for them.
Rajavre enjoys autonomy, but it is still very much ideologically
twinned with the part of the movement that remains in
the mountains and dedicated to its struggle against the Turkish state.
Turkey in return, has crossed the border with Iraq to
attack the KCK and anyone else you gets called the crossfire.

(02:34:02):
As Gross explained, this is not new, but the recent
change has been notable well.

Speaker 6 (02:34:08):
During the eighties, nineties and even after two thousand, the
Turkish Army used to do military operations to the other
side of the border into the Iraqi border for several months,
to a draw back to the other side of the
border to its own border afterwards after several months, and

(02:34:34):
in that period it only had limited number of barracks
and bases in the Iraqi and the Iraqi territory. The
change now is that Teki has built a new military
roads from Scratch to the Credit Sad region to northern Iraq.

(02:34:55):
It has built more than one hundred big and small
military basis barracks in the area and has no intention
to withdraw. As I said, the ultimate goal is to
is to annex all these lands to the Turkish territory.

Speaker 1 (02:35:12):
Today, Turkish troops can be found deep inside Iraq according
to the Community Peacemaker teams. Since December of twenty seventeen,
Turkish forces have built over forty bases anywhere from nine
to twenty five kilometers into Iraqi, Kurdistan's territory south of
its border end quote. They have dispatched hundreds of troops
and military vehicles into another state, set up checkpoints, and

(02:35:34):
even killed civilians a member of the Kig's military. The
Peshmerga fighting has caused massive wildfires. For example, in Sagale village,
about fifty five percent of the agricultural land has been
burned by Turkish attacks. Incidentally, Turkish selling the Autonomous area
of North and East Syria has also caused similar fires
and destruction of crops in agricultural areas. The Kurdish freedom

(02:35:57):
movement is very well established in the mountains southern Kurtis Down,
where they live in tunnels and caves. These they're not
caves of tunnels like you played in a little child.
We're talking about villages underground. This makes tracking them very hard.
As we heard another episode, many of the fighters said
to Curtis Down as Syrian Arabs, repurposed by Turkey and
ginned up on anti Kurdish sentiment. But this is perhaps

(02:36:19):
the least concerning of the ways that the tunnels are
being attacked. Zagros explained. Some of the other things that
they've seen.

Speaker 6 (02:36:26):
Is that they use dogs. They tie explosives to the
dogs and send the dogs into the tunnels and they
explode the doves wire remote control.

Speaker 1 (02:36:38):
In addition to the dogs, he says that the Turkey
state uses chemical weapons inside the tunnels, and they are
also reports of suicide bombers deathonating themselves. The KTK also
claims the Turkey uses thermobaric bombs sometimes called bunker busters,
which create a huge pressure wave from subsequent vacuum.

Speaker 6 (02:36:55):
Also, they are using tenmobodic bombs. We have documented the
use of these thermobotic bumps. There are remnants of these bumps.
They are using thermobotic or vacuum bumps against the tunnels,
and they are using some form of explosives which are
more powerful than thermobotic bumps. Got some freedom grillas have

(02:37:19):
developed literature for it because they do know what kind
of explosive we did. But it has the effect of
a nuclear bomb. We got some freedom grilla called nuclear bomb.
They call it so because the effects are high are
higher than the thermobotic bombs.

Speaker 1 (02:37:37):
I asked Mohammed to explain how people reacting to the
current situation.

Speaker 12 (02:37:41):
You know, you know in some parts of I coul
understand actually the areas under the control or the influence
of CHA instead of KDP. And you know that people
here have dislike this issue is like the Parson of

(02:38:03):
Turkey to this area. It's not just in past telling
people besides the Picaka elements and telling people and building
the whole agricultural area and you know, so and so on.

Speaker 9 (02:38:19):
So it's kind of an inversion.

Speaker 12 (02:38:21):
And but here some people on forces in in the
southern part of Kurdasa or you know, Iraqi for Dastan
like the sympathy with the Picaky sympathy, okay, as they
see that, they're so they're struggling against Turkey because if

(02:38:44):
there is no big a gay, even there is no
bigger gay, the Turkish forces will will not withdraw from
Kutsa when it controlled, any area of iraqis to be
saved or Southa, it will not withdraw. And it's it's
excuse is speaker ky, But thanks so on Earth this

(02:39:07):
telling something else.

Speaker 1 (02:39:09):
Despite what both my guests have seen as alienation of
the local population, Turkey's continuing with its attacks. I asked
aggress what do you thought the goals of this Turkish
invasion of Iraqua.

Speaker 6 (02:39:19):
The invasion and annexation of these lens is the prime
goal of Turkey. This goal is a long term goal
of the Turkish state since it has been created after
the Luzan Agreement. It has two aspects. Firstly, Turkey lays

(02:39:42):
claim to what was once part of the Ottoman Empire
one hundred years ago. Lays claims to the cities like
Mussil and Kirkuk and claims that these these are lens
of a Turkey. So the the invasion operation in the

(02:40:02):
area of Batina isap in Matina and Avashin. In the
areas around the cities of Armedia, Dea luxA and the Hook,
there are attempts to take control of these mountainous areas
and to materialize those long range goals. Turkey already has

(02:40:25):
a has a big military base near Musul I think
fifteen to twenty kilometers in northern Musuil. It is called
the Bashika Base. So if Teki manages to invade all
these areas in Badina I mean in the cities of
the Hook, mountainous areas of the Hook, Turkey would be
able to create a land bridge between these areas and

(02:40:50):
its base in Musil, and it will be far easier
for Turkey too. Let's say an ex city of Muslim
and Kirkuktu It's lands. Secondly, Turkey has a long term
goal of democratic demographic change in Kurdistan. As you know,

(02:41:11):
Kurdistan is a land, the ancestral land of the Kurts,
being divided between four countries Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria
being divided by borders. People from one side of the
border are Kurdish, put on the other side of the
ark Kurdish. In many cases, the borderline go through the cities.

(02:41:33):
They divide the cities. They have divided the villages. They
have divided the tribes they have they have divided large populations.
They have even divided families. This is one of the
characteristic of the border in Kurdistan.

Speaker 1 (02:41:45):
In fact, Turkey has Pigan so I think of an
Arab belt program is owned in Syria seeking to resettle
Syrian refugees. Turkish backs Syrian anti government rebels in the area,
so it took from Java in military operations over the
last eight years. This is part of Turkey's plan to
return as many as a million Syrian migrants to a
country still in the grips of a brutal civil war,

(02:42:07):
and pushed the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria
back from the Turkish borders or crush it altogether. For Turkey,
there's no distinction between Java and the PKK, and thus
Turkey claims the entirety of Ajava is a haven for terrorism.
Many Kurdish fighters and international volunteers who fought Isis for
years died fighting the Turkish army in a Frien and

(02:42:28):
the many other territories at Turkey has expanded into since
twenty seventeen. The fighting there was fierce and saw the
wig and the wipej the men's and women's armed forces
of Rejava battling a NATO army with modern armor and
modern airpower. After taking significant losses, they retreated and I
asked Sagarus what this means for people living in a

(02:42:49):
free who had just managed to return to some semblance
of normalcy after Assad's forces left and attack from me
on Nusra Front became less frequent.

Speaker 6 (02:42:58):
This is genocide. I'man forcing people to leave their lands
and replacing those people with people which are not from
that land. Forcing people to leave the ancestral land lands
which they have lived on for thousands of years, for
more than ten thousand years, and getting Arab Jihades Cheching

(02:43:20):
jihadis to live in those areas, it is a genocide
along with the ecocide which is now taking place. Thousands
of hectares of forests of agricultural land are now burning.
So what Turkey does is femicide, is ecoside, is genocide
in Kurdistan and these let's say, what now happens to

(02:43:43):
the curse is the same thing that happened to the
Armenians one thousand years ago. The genocide of the Armenians
was done by the people who had the same mentality
and the same mindset of are the one I can say.
So these areas are very strategic for the Kurds. They
bind the four parts of Kurdistan together demographically. And now

(02:44:07):
Arduan wants to draw a Jihadis buffer zone between these areas.
If occurred from Syria wants to go to the Kurdistan
under the invasion of Turkey, we call it North Kurdistan.
He will have to go through cities and areas populated

(02:44:30):
by Arab jihadists, by Chech and jihadists by Turkman jihadists
by jihadists have been which have been collected from around
the world. So this buffer zone, which is more than
one thousand kilometers long according to Arduna's plan and thirty
to forty kilometers wide, is expected to be inhabited to

(02:44:52):
be settled by the Jahadis which Ardouan has gathered from
x d ASH members ext not remembers Al Qaeda.

Speaker 2 (02:45:15):
At present.

Speaker 1 (02:45:15):
It's Turkish occupation. It's a situation in parts of Syria,
but it's also increasingly becoming likely it will be the
situation in parts of Iraq. This is often the case,
say to trying to use divisions in Kurdistant to their advantage,
and Turkey in particular is relying on the well worn
excuse of counter terrorism to mount its incursions deep into
a rock. Here's Mohammed explaining.

Speaker 12 (02:45:36):
That Pek is thinking like in such a way to
support to support maybe pick again. They don't say orally
that that thing, and KDP says that follow the instruction
of Turkey and the actually here, the force an influence

(02:46:02):
of Turkey and even Iran in the Buty controlled area
is very strong and people here as people of the nation,
I am not feeling comfort with such impassion such issues.

(02:46:23):
So we are lot like the owner of our right
decision in the area. So we're divided within Iran, Iran
and Turkey and so on, so and we are not
depending on our people. You know, thousands of people kill
for the nation, analysts, you know, hopes and now people

(02:46:50):
are frustrate with such such issues, with such situation.

Speaker 1 (02:46:56):
Mahmad also said that was really frustrating for him to
see Curish politicians influence by the states that they've been
trying to escape for a century.

Speaker 12 (02:47:04):
So we are here illustration from the north, Turkey, from
the east, Iran, from the south, Iraq and all are
they working that the people who pay thousands thousands of
of of you know Martyr Souther and so of uh,

(02:47:25):
you know, loss of the people. Why you are not
depending on your will or the force of your people,
Why you are became like like a feather, a feather
to the to the windsor of so forth, which are

(02:47:47):
not you're they're not your friends. Even in the east
and the North and the south, there are not new
But if you depend on your own people, on your
own historical hard and we have you know, we have
the legacy of this issue. We have the legacy of

(02:48:09):
struggle in this area from nineteen sixstiers.

Speaker 1 (02:48:13):
Indeed, the evasion of southern Kurdistan would not be possible
without the consent of both the Iraqi and Kurdistan regional authorities.
Sagress mentioned. Turkish President Worship Type du One visited Baghdad
on April the twenty second. This was his first visit
to Iraq since twenty eleven. During the visit, Iraqan Turkey

(02:48:33):
signed the Joint Security Agreement allowing Turkey to conduct military
operations deep within Iraqi territory. In return, Iraqi received desperately
needed water from Turkey and.

Speaker 6 (02:48:44):
Now in those areas, tens of thousands of Turkish troops,
hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles, drones, rods have been deproved
to the area. They are active every day, and they
are invading northern Iraq at a time and when the
border guards of Iraqi Iraqi Army border guards are standing

(02:49:05):
by and just watching. As you may know, as the
result of the agreement between the Iraqi State and Turky State,
Iraqi border guard forces, let's say they were decided to
be sent to the Iraqi Turkish border but now these
border guards are not under the Turkish Iraqi border. The

(02:49:27):
border that we now these border guards have been deployed
forty kilometers thirty kilometers deep into the Iraqi territory. They
don't go to the border. They are guarding the invading
Turkish army.

Speaker 1 (02:49:41):
For the people of the region, this means yet more
trauma and more displacement. They're already more than one million
displaced people in southern Kuristar. Some of them are living
in pretty terrible conditions. I've seen those refugee camps when
I was there last October, but these operations have created more.
Here's just one anecdotic displacement shared by CPT on their website.

Speaker 13 (02:50:03):
We met a man named Kakbashir who had tried to
build a cafe here. His dreams of a cafe had
been shattered by Turkish artillery and small arms fire coming
from the Turkish base on the hillside nearby. He was
originally from Segedde village, but had been displaced to Ghani
Village by the Turkish military five years ago due to
the loss of his farm in Seagatee. He has planted

(02:50:25):
some vegetables next to the side of his cafe He
gave each CPT member some sweet basil and invited us
to his village. When we arrived, a man dressed in
immaculate traditional Kurdish clothes stood transfixed staring into the valley.
He was staring at Mejia Village his home. Mijia is
one of at least nine villages displaced by the recent

(02:50:47):
Turkish operation. Kakbashir told us that displaced people from the
valley would visit this place daily to gaze upon their
cut off towns and farmland below.

Speaker 1 (02:50:57):
Despite month of shading embalming, the military trunk holds the
Kurdistan Freedom Movement remain intact, and the more obvious damage
has been done to civilians rather than military targets. The hPG,
which is the fighting arm of the Bikka, has been
able to obtain loitering anti aircraft munitions shut down several drones,
but it's still unable to shoot down fighter jets like
the US provided F sixteens to the currently bombing them.

(02:51:20):
For civilians without mounting caves or tunnels to hide in.
The impact is severe and people who have faced oppression
and persecution from Saddam Hussein Isis, numerous other states and
groups are now once again being displaced. I want to
finish up with the end of Zagorro's message to me,
in which he made a comparison with Palestine, like I
did at the start on the day of thus intrude Zagros.

(02:51:43):
Bombs made in the US had just been falling from
Israeli planes on too civilians in Palestine again, and we
discuss the fact that all the solutions being discussed hinged
around the need for states, one state or two states
to solve the problem. But this was a problem created
by states, and it was state sending bombs to another
state to drop on children. Both in Kurdistan and in Palestine.

(02:52:05):
There was a problem. Here's a cross reflection on nearly
ten months of bombing in Palestine and Kurdistan. And I
just want to explain here that Abu Baka or Baghdadi
was at one point the leader of ISIS. He's dead
now and when he says Dash, he's referring to the
former so called Islamic state.

Speaker 6 (02:52:22):
The struggle that is now waged in the mountains of
Kurdistan against the invading Turkish army. It is a continuation
of the struggle against Dash in Iraq and Assyria, because

(02:52:42):
ideologically there is no difference between Ardovan and Abba Baghadadi.
Baghdadi first took Musul, and now Aldovan wants to invade
Mussul too. Aldowan attacks all those places which have been
hubs of resistance against Dash. He attacks Sinjar, he attacks Kobani,

(02:53:05):
He attacks Candil Mountains, which are the home of those
who inspired and organized the fight against Aj. On the ground,
Erdogan's army is Dash in native uniforms, in native fatigues.
In recent days, Arduan accuses Natenno of committing genocide against

(02:53:27):
the Palacinians. Ntenno also accuses Erdogan of committing genocide against
the Kurts. In fact, what these two men say against
each other is is, to some extent right, both of
them have been commissioned by the forces of capitalist modernity
to eliminate two people, to eliminate the Curs and the Palatinians.

(02:53:53):
What n'itanejo does against the Palacinians is exactly what Erdoonan
is doing against the Kurts. What is needed is to
draw the attention of the world's public opinion to the
atrocities of Dugan's regime and the genocidal and ecosidal crimes
he commits against the Kurdish people and their land, which

(02:54:16):
is Kurdistan. The struggle in Palestine and Kurdistan are one struggle,
the struggle of two people against genocide and examination. Both
struggle needs support from the youth, from the women all
around the world, from democratic forces, from intellectuals, students, unions, workers,

(02:54:39):
from all people. People need to be united against Ardowan
as they were united against Dash, as they are now
united against the genocidal attacks in Palestine. The Turkish regime
can be protested everywhere in many ways. Turkish goods and
commodities can be boycotted because they are the source of

(02:55:02):
funds for Ardowan's war machine, for Ardowan's genocidal army. The
delegations can be formed and they can come to visit
Kurdistan and see with their own eyes the extent of
ecoside and genocide in Kurdistan. Free journalists can shed more
light on the atrocities of Aardovan in Kurdistan. Revolutionary youth,

(02:55:25):
revolutionary people, men and women can come and join the
struggle in the mountains of Kurdistan. Kurdistan is your home.

Speaker 2 (02:55:38):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 3 (02:55:44):
It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 9 (02:55:47):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources.

Speaker 3 (02:56:01):
Thanks for listening.

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