It Could Happen Here Weekly 174

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also 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 1 (00:26):
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
It's James today and I'm joined by Jenny Keaston, who's
a writer, activist and someone who's been in and out
of Northeast Syria for a long time working with the
women's movement, and today we're going to be talking about
the situation in North and East Syria since the fall
of the Asad regime, some of the conflict that has
been happening in a resistance of the SDF. Welcome to
the show, Jenny Eida.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
Yeah, First of all, it's not sure having him be
happy to be here.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
Yeah, you're welcome, of course. So I think if we
start off, people have been messaging me a lot of
various platforms about the the letter that Abdullah or Juland wrote,
and I don't want to dress that in its entirety
today because we've got something coming up on that we're
going to talk to some people from the Freedom for
Abdullah your campaign, but I do want to use it

(01:14):
as a jumping off point because I think it a
has reminded people, as we spoke about before the show,
that North and East Syria exists and the SDF exists,
which has been largely missing and like the legacy media
reporting on Syria, but b like there's been atrocious reporting
on what it means for the SDF, even though there's

(01:36):
a very clear answer to that. So for people who
have you been reading papers which either just ignore the
existence of the FDF entirely or speculate as to what
they're going to do when they've given a very clear answer,
could you explain to people like where this leaves the SDF.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
Yeah, sure, no, So thanks for that. And yeah, I've
also been gay a lot of questions about chanslater, and
I'm really glad to hear that you guys are going
to program on it because Western media wants to reverce
it in this way. It's very snazzy and there's like
bolts with the blue and something crazy is happening. Really,
it's unfortunately it has to actually be talking about in

(02:12):
a kind of more long term and intelligent way that
sets the context and like yeah, puts that and makes
things a bit more clear, because it is something with
a background and it's connected to a lot of things,
and of course that whole political process that a Jan's
recent statement is a part of. It's going to affect
the situation here in northern East Siria because the situation

(02:32):
here a lot of the time depends on the actions
of the Turkish state and on expansion. It is on
an aggression from there, and so as the political situation
shouldn't changes, it will affect that. What it is not
is like a call or a statement that means that
the SDF has to lay down their arms and started
this thing. This is for several reasons, absolutely not what

(02:52):
it is. The main one of those being that the
SDF is not and never has.

Speaker 3 (02:57):
Been the.

Speaker 1 (02:59):
And that's something that they've tried many times over the
years to make it very clear, but unfortunately hasn't always
been like heard and acknowledged. And so whatever this statement
means that you guys will go into that in your
program whatever it is for the PKKA. But the situation
is not fair to stand. It's a different situation here,
and so the SDF is in a moment of like

(03:21):
a big question and a big change. But it's much
more to do with what's been happening in Syria politically,
and to do with the government and the interim government
had said, yeah, government that installed themselves here, and the
regime games, and of course the ongoing war and situation
of invasions that they're facing. So there's a lot of
big questions for the SDF. But I think it's important

(03:42):
right now that we don't kind of confuse and misunderstand
but this sort of parallel process that's going on.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
Yeah, definitely, And I think if people are hearing this
and you're new to the show, this is your first
time hearing the sea of acronyms that is the Ish
freedom movement. Academic you to The Women's War, which is
a series that Robert made. I have a book but
you can't read it yet, still editing it, or you
could listen to one of our numerous other if you
search for a Java or Northern East Syria or Syria

(04:10):
in our feed. I'm sure you'll find a lot to
explain those acronyms to you. But yeah, we've had this
situation right where since December, the situation in Syria has
drastically changed and we now have two state actors. Well,
we have lots of stay active. We always had lots
of state actors intervening in Syria, but we have this
new state actor in the Syrian state, right and I

(04:32):
think people if they're you know, if they're like reading
the New York Times or god forbid, seeing Charles Lister,
then that they'll have a certain vision of this that
sort of exempts the SDF. It sort of just ignores
this whole area of Syria and says like, oh, well,
the Syrian Revolution has succeeded. I think we should address

(04:52):
like what has happened to the SDF to northern East
Syria since the collapse of the said regime in December.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
Yeah, so obviously what's happened toy Syria in northan As
Syria and t SDF is very connected to the whole
overall Syria process. And you're right when you hear the
reporting on it, I think lots of parts of it
can get erased in kind of depending who's talking and
what their angle is or whatever. There are a lot
of things left out, not just the Kurds in north

(05:22):
of Eassyria, but other minority ethnic groups or like women
organizing across Syria, like all of these things. It's a
very complex situation, which I won't pretend I can completely
lay out and summarize for everyone in five minutes. But yeah,
what you did have was the culmination the end of
a period and a massive change when as you say,

(05:43):
there was a regime change, there was a change of government,
and that happened with this like offensive sweeping down from
Idland to Damascus, succeeding in taking over the government in
Damascus from the Asad family, which was the end of
a sixty one year brain which caused absolute jubilation, say
to say, all across Syria, and that includes where I
am and lone from Syria because anyway, just yeah, people

(06:06):
were very happy and celebrating. But also there were cities here.
When you look at the map and you see this
like sending autonomous region, what you had to understand was
that there were actually within the cities, there were neighborhoods
and sections that were still under the ASAD government. It
wasn't as simple as like the whole city is in
the autonomous administration. So here as well, even there were

(06:27):
still statutes of a Sad and people took the streets
and tore them down, and really close to actually where
I'm recording this today, there's a roundabout where they took
down the statue of a Sad and it's been replaced
by pictures of the martyrs of people who have fallen
fighting for the autonomy of the region here and fighting
for their political system. So you know, it's very very beautiful. Yeah,
people celebrated and more happy with a qualifier, with a

(06:51):
very big qualifier, you know. So that jails opened as
well and the flags went up, and yeah, it was
a real moment of jubilation, celebration. But unfortunately the force
which eventually succeeded in toppling a Sad and installing itself
as the now as they're saying that interim or transitional
government Syria, you know, we can say it was not

(07:13):
one of the many like progressive democratic alternative forces that
originally in the uprisings weakepped the A SAD government. Yeah,
back in twenty and eleven. Since then, things have changed,
and isn't a podcast directly about that. I'm sure you
guys speak about it as well at other times, but
instead what you have is HTS, who are kind of

(07:35):
conglomerate militia of these different militia groups. There's another acronym
for you there names I.

Speaker 3 (07:40):
Think, yeah, three languages acronyms.

Speaker 1 (07:43):
Pointing people to resources is always very useful. And they
are kind of mixed up amalgamation of different militias who
are operating in Syria. And what's crucial to say about
them is that they're you know, their political back and
a perspective. A lot of people in these organizations are
like really really similar unfortunately and all too familiar to

(08:06):
the people here who fought against ISIS, the Islamic State,
because they're coming from similar backgrounds, and also to al
Qaeda and the organizations who were kind of the Syrian
branches of al Qaeda. But like, I've played a really
direct role in finding HTS and they want to now
sort of put on a new face, put on a suit,
go out and shake the world's had it and become

(08:27):
world statesmen from the government, which unfortunately it looks like
all of our governments are all too willing to very
quickly accept. And we'll get in a minute we can
talk a bit specifically about the roles that and almost
your listeners are in the States, so that the American
government has been playing here. But yeah, so there's a
big qualifier on how much people are celebrating because of

(08:50):
the very dodgy history and the real like threat the
xts's politics holds unfortunately, particularly for ethnic minorities, on women,
and they're established their power and it's by no means
a kind of non violent or peaceful process, and there's
a lot of tensions flaring up with a lot of problems. However, yes,

(09:11):
it is the case that in a lot of Syria,
the majority of Syria outright like warfare on the ground
as for an asstop because there's one group have taken
power and so we're in a different moment, we're in
a different kind of process. So what's different up here,
what's different up in the north and East, and what's
not being discussed as much. And the point that I'm
often trying to make, what I'm trying to write articles
and doing interviews at the moment is that like actually

(09:33):
the war in the whole Syria has not completely stopped.
YEA mostly yes, you can say in most regions, but
significantly here in northern Eastyria. It's not just that there
is still classes or flare ups between different groups like
there might be in other regions. There is like a
full scale invasion, a ground invasion with air support that

(09:54):
has also been going on. Yeah, and that was tied.
Where has that come from? Like what is that? Ones
that look like this is another group another history letter
had drill in for you. But the important thing to
understand is that this offensive was tying to coincide with
the HCS takeovers. Also has a lot of links with
the Perkish state, and I wouldn't I personally would bot

(10:15):
those with bars to say that that government is a
Turkish public government or that the relationship is that direct.
But there is a relationship there and what you saw
when they kind of successfully went on the offensive was
at the same time, other armed groups which operate are
kind of loosely affiliated and mostly operating on a mercenaries
of a paid basis rather than being kind of ideologically

(10:39):
driven or whatever, but are affiliated under the name the SNA,
the Syrian National Army, which is even more confusing because
they're not and were never the National Army of Syria
what they are. And yet these paid militias, which yeah,
we can describe if he might describe as hard as gangs, mercenaries,

(10:59):
et cetera, et cetera, and it kind of depends that
it's like a mix of different forces. What's very important
there is the very close relationship that they have with
the Turkey state that essentially the Turkish government has made
the choice that it wants to continue its aggression and
its expansionism onnotany Syria, and other than immediately sending their
own army, they instead pay and fund and direct and

(11:22):
support these militias who are also operating for their own benefit. Yes,
but the relationship between them their actions right now in
the Turkish state, it's much more direct. So at the
same time as you have this this sweep to the
south that caused the Regimi change in Syria, heading to
the east, so to originally the reason Zeppa, followed by
the city at Mindage in the region around there, you

(11:42):
have this onslaught from the essay and that is what
the SDF, if you originally mentioned, are currently up against.
And that's the situation that we're in and it's it's
still ongoing. It's very much not stopped. It's still much
very much like hot engagement and hot fighting that is happening.

Speaker 3 (11:56):
Yeah, And it's like sometimes to introduce your other econom
we use like TFSA to refer to some of those groups,
like the Turkish Free Syrian Army, and that they're essentially
an operation by the Turkey state to co oper to
what was initially a democratic grassroots revolution more than a
decade ago. And like, if you haven't been following, I
suppose it would be easy to be confused by this,

(12:17):
But the SNA have not been backwards in documenting their
war crimes in the advance towards I guess their advanced
westwards towards the Euphrates and even over the Euphrates, and
there have been some really horrible things, some of them,
like I've shared online if people want to. They're not
hard to find if you want to find them, but
are not going to put them right in front of you,

(12:38):
because they're horrible. And as the SNA have advanced, they've
reached a couple of locations that are very crucial, right,
and that's where they've been kind of stopped by the SDF,
because the SDF haven't been in like such a large
sale conflict for the last couple of years. They've been
fighting against like Islamic State splinter cells and to a degree,

(12:58):
the SNA. But like the SDF has modernized a lot
more than the SNA have, I guess in the past years,
right that they've embraced the use of first person view drones.
They've even shut down several Turkish Biractar drones, which they
previously if they had the ability to do it then
then they weren't able to use that ability until very recently.

(13:20):
So like they in a sense, their resistance has been
very impressive, right because we have, on the one hand,
it's the second largest army in NATO giving its like
full support to the SNA, and on the other hand
we have the FDF, which is interior US partner force. Right,
there are US bases still in Syior, there are US
troops still in Syria, well yeah for now, But like

(13:44):
I mean, I remember when I was in Java in
October twenty twenty three, the US shot down a Biractar
drone over a US base and then it did not
shoot down the dozens of other Biractar drones that were
bombing the cities the city that you're in right now,
city that I was in, other cities. You know, I
met a mother who had lost her fourteen year old

(14:06):
son to one of these dwined bombings. Really like horrific
and just cruel bombing of all of very clearly civilian targets.
So like, the US is there, but they're not doing
anything to help supposedly their friends, supposally their partners. And
like every interview I conducted began with like five minutes

(14:27):
of me being asked why the Americans weren't being friends
when the SDF had been friends to them in a
battle against ISIS, And like, that's not something I have
a good explanation for, other than like I think most
Courtish people can understand the difference between people and government
and people and state, and like I might have a belief,
but it's not the same as the government of the US.
So can you explain the role of the US here

(14:48):
because people will be very confused, right, And I think
it's easy to sort of simplify this as like America
is in Syria for oil, but there's a little bit
more to it than that.

Speaker 1 (14:59):
Right, yeah, absolutely, And again it's it's such a big question,
and it's a question of how far back do you go?
How far do you zoom out? Sense keep As you
keep moving back from today, the plot kind of thickens
and as you you know, if you imagine if you're
looking at the Google maps of Steria and then you

(15:21):
you click the button that takes you out and out,
and the map gets wider and wider, the story kind
of fills itself in as well. Like that seems to
make more sense when they are put in that context.
And I think a good place to start maybe is Yeah,
this consistent for a long time, like American attitude to

(15:44):
this whole region, not just Sylia, which is to play
yet to play very carefully to your advantage and make
alliances where it suits you and continue to where it
suits you and not stick to them where it doesn't.
And that is Yeah. One aspect of that is the resources,
which goes further than just oil, is also gas and

(16:06):
is also the resource of the space to create a
trade route, right, Like, that's a really important question in
the Middle East at the moment, and it's one of
the reasons that Kurdistan is such an important place politically,
a lot of these lines of potential trade routes and
these kind of lines of power and money they intercept
and they cross over here. So there are all these

(16:28):
different resources at play. And I think another thing that's
important to look at is that, yeah, the US as
the US government as you put it, as distinct from
the citizens in anyway, doesn't just go into this blind
and kind of react day by day. It's not like
a reactive force in the world. The US government is
and would you know, proudly announced I think as well

(16:49):
with Creey thing on this one point that they are,
no matter who the administration is and where it's politically
leaning at the time, a very proactive force. They have
a plan where that they go and they try and
put it into practice. And famously, historically and very intensely,
a lot of that has played out in the Middle
East because of the Middle East position in the world
resources and the role that it's played in kind of

(17:12):
who gets to be the big dog in the world
over the years and throughout history, it's become for those
various reasons that very important. And so yeah, again without
it's many podcasts of its own, and I'm sure you

(17:34):
are making them, So I won't try and like summarize it,
but I think you can't talk about America's role in
Syria and the Middle East in general without mentioning like
Israel and the role Israeli state place for for and
with America and things like. You know, we're all sort
of following and for you guys following more closely because

(17:54):
we're all following the current Americans administration and leadership and
what's been coming out of there. And sometimes you think, like, God,
is it just not when you look at something like
you know, the video for like the new Gaza that
they're going to make, for example, and Trump's Gaza whatever
that was. Yeah, yeah, So I mean it makes it sick.

(18:15):
And then you're also not sure if it's it's serious
or if it's mad. But I think unfortunately it's actually, Yeah,
it's quite an intelligent play. And what it speaks to
that is relevant to what I'm saying here is this
kind of long term flat right that to annihilate a
region to the best of your ability so that you
can move in and develop it. Yeah, is a tried

(18:36):
and tested method of many many governance, and America is
not the only one. But at the moment we're at
kind of crucial moment in the Middle East when one
sort of wall of forces are trying to greatly reduce
the role and power of some others so that they
can put their plan into place and so that they
can yeah, they can, so they can make money. You know,

(18:59):
you always were following money and where development can be
made and where trade routes can be made. And so
what happened the tiny of the regime change that we've
just discussed, the timing of HDS being able to move
into the Masters and take it over. It's no coincidence
that it came after like a shift in the Israeli
like genocidal war on Gaza, and after what the then

(19:22):
military action they were taking against Tesbola in Lebanon, which
they felt then had up to a point achieved what
they wanted to achieve, and then things kind of moved
to Syria. Right, So I'm not saying that the new
government has kind of come from has been sponsored by
that at all. I think there's a huge amount of
tension there. But the withdrawal of like the weakening and
or withdrawal of forces to Iran and Hezbela here played

(19:44):
a huge role with then being able to establish themselves
as a government. So that is also something that you
know that's not directly necessarily every step sort of kind
of puppeteered by the US at all, but it is
a part of the politics that the US has kind
of long historical influence on and that it backs and
that it's in conversation is in the whole of the

(20:05):
Middle East. It's this kind of greater Middle East plan,
it's vision for it, if you if you will. And
the other aspect that I think is important to talk
about is the US's relationship with North and Eastria specifically
you mentioned they're like, you know, there's like supposed friendship
with we can say that like friendship with the Kurds
as people will refer to it. Or the alliance and

(20:27):
coalition between the SDF and the US, which was sort
of most most famous and most well known during the
fight against isis when the international coalition, it's always the
spearheaded by America, was bombing and providing air support for
the SDF as the as they pulled it. The boots
on the ground, the actual brand force that could go

(20:49):
and take territory back from Isis, which yes, did look
like a kind of did look like a friendship. But
I think from both sides, everyone always that that was
a practical alliance, perhaps perhaps a strategic alliance at best.
We can say, but I think that the US has
not got a history of operating on a basis of

(21:11):
like friendship or of that kind of commitment to the
forces it works with, and a lot a lot of
history and modern recent history can attest to that. And
from the side of people here, I think it's really
important to say that, yeah, people were angry, and that
you know what you heard you were talking about interviewing
people and then kind of being like, well, what are
they doing? Like we we fought all with them, partly

(21:33):
on their behalf like and then they deserve Yes, people
are angry, but the more kind of politically engaged someone
is sort of moving up that scale, I think the
less face they ever had in the US.

Speaker 3 (21:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:44):
So, and now you've got the US kind of muttering
about withdrawing their troops from Syria, right yah, And as
Daja who because they said this before, I was actually
here when they said this reportant back in twenty nineteen.
I also have be in northern East Syria, and it
was I'm not wrong, it was Trump again. If I

(22:05):
turned out and they said we were drawing our forces
from Syria, did they actually withdraw Not exactly. No. You
still saw them driving around in big cars, mostly right
next to the oil fields. It was a bit it
was almost tomical, sort of like when party and parts
next to the oil fields. But that withdrawal was symbolic.
That withdrawal was they withdrew from bases right on the

(22:26):
border with Turkey, which lies just to the north of
Syria and as such just next to north of Eassyria
for anyone without the about the map immediately in their head,
and they announced it very very clearly and very publicly,
and so it was a kind of it was a
green flag to say to Turkey, yeah, coming on, you come, yeah,
we're not going to stop you. We're not gonna because

(22:47):
what you don't want to do is hit an American
by accident, as you gave the examples. They you know,
they brought down a drum, but it was over an
American base, not because it was bombing civilians nearby, which
dozens of other were, And so that you had that
kind of symbolic withdrawal led to in twenty nineteen. It's
one of the times that Turkey has like annexed section
es centrally annexty section of Syria North and East Syria

(23:09):
under the remit of the Autonomous Administration, but nonetheless still
technically Syrian territory. And in that time it was sarah
Kanya and Gerrispi, which people may have heard of, and
so that, yeah, that was the like green flag to
Turkey to take that step. And at that time, yeah,
maybe share. It's a lot of a lot of political stuff,
a lot of acropins, a lot of all this and

(23:30):
maybe I'll just SHAREO be anecdote. Yeah, at that time
when they made the announcement they were going to leave,
people organized a march to an American base, and I
was here at the time and I joined it with
some of the women's organizations. It was the most amazing day.
Like I sort of went home and wrote this massive
journal antique. I've already been here for a very long time,
but my mind was still a bit blown by it.

(23:51):
For one thing, it was such an example of how
the social movement here works and what society is like
in all the complexity, because yeah, a lot of people
here are very wedded to the liberatory, progressive, grassroots democratic
women's freedom ecological movement that I'm sure you've spoken about

(24:12):
in your programs on Rashava, and thousands and thousands of
people completely take ownership of that and see themselves in
that and are the driving force of that. Obviously, that
doesn't mean every single person here is one hundred percent
sold on movement at all. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:25):
Some of them are trying to get on with life.

Speaker 1 (24:27):
Some of them just trying to get on with life.
Some of them are you know, I mean, if you
talk about women's freedom, there's always going to be really
few men or a bit like what does this mean
for me? What do I have to give up? So
it would be sick, it would be silly and new
topics to say that everyone's talk we sold. However, nobody
wants to get invented by one of the largest armies
in NATO. Yeah, so you have this sort of actually

(24:48):
even broader than usual kind of coming together, like groups
from the sort of like tribal clan structures here that
are still like a really political force, and that don't
you know, have a kind of uneasy truth and sort
of slowly learning each other. Relationship with the movement, you
can say, but they really came out in force as

(25:09):
well as well as like the Curdish movement as well
as like lots of different ethnic groups. And we marched,
and to be honest, I didn't know we were going
through an American based A lot of people didn't. It
was quite confusing days because I think they didn't want
to announce things too widely until they got there and
we went and did this kind of the Yeah, they
like read out a letter symbolically. I think in some
of the Arabic community leaders went up to the base

(25:32):
and we the majority of people. There's got hundreds of
hundred of people in this crowd, and they stayed back
at a distance. And I found out later that that
is because the American soldiers said, if two bigger groups
of people come close, we will we will open fire.
Like that that information was given. Yeah, I don't know
what they were scared of.

Speaker 4 (25:48):
You know.

Speaker 1 (25:49):
It's like like any march here, the people in the
front row are always ranks.

Speaker 3 (25:52):
Yeah, yeah, it's old ladies.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
No different on that day. I mean they're a bit scary,
to be said. I don't think that it's a bit
embarrassing if the American soldiers would keep together them but
that stuff of it's judge. But while we were there
by like your chance, the fleet of not tacks but
big armored cars rolled in and there was just this
moment I really clearly remember, just pause, and they rolled

(26:19):
through the crowd, and the crowd parted and turned and looked,
and nobody teared or clapped. Obviously there was no sense
of oh, it's the Americans, right, yeah, but nobody sort
of through you know, for anything else, through insults or
chanted anything negative either. There was just this stillness and
this really helpable energy of this kind of sense of

(26:40):
people looking at you know, obviously they're just these soldiers
that happened to be driving these trucks, but they really
symbolized something more than that. And people were kind of
looking sort of insisting that you looked them in the eye,
saying like, hey, if anyone owes anyone, you owe us.
After everything we fought for and everything we've.

Speaker 3 (26:59):
Done, I have thirteen thousand marches. They were called exactly.

Speaker 1 (27:04):
Yeah, so many people lost in the fight isis and
so much like blood and sweat and fears given, and
there was just yeah, this palpable sense of like, at
least have the decency to kind of look at us
and admit what you're doing, because you know what you're doing. Yeah,
and it really yeah, it really felt it was very
kind of moving at the time, and that I feel

(27:25):
like it's very symbolic into politics here of how you know,
someone asking the other day what was it like for
people to rely on America knowing that they'd betrayed them,
And I said, well, they didn't, they never relied on them.

Speaker 3 (27:35):
Yeah, I know I was relying on aera.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
Yeah, but you know, there's that kind of the expectation
of at least some sense of dignity. That is a
very important concept for people here in dignity and yeah,
so yeah, that that is I always remember that that
would yeah say again, and it's confusing. That was five
five and a half years ago. Now, yeah, and now

(27:57):
you've got this sort of is history repeating itself talking
about with the troops. But I think it's important to
understand what that means. What that means is they're talking
about potentially giving a greed of blag for more military aggression,
and I think they kind of haven't decided yet. It's
really going to do it, and there's a lot of
things in the balance, and in terms of I'll just
say one more, one more thing, and I think gets

(28:20):
a bit longer in terms of like the plan for
Syria and America's role, like this is my opinion. I
can't say for sure that this is the definite reality,
but my understanding in the situation is that once again
people here in this in this movement are kind of
caught between a rock and a hard place. And the

(28:40):
rock and the hard place now looks like You've got
the new government that set itself up in Damascus, Yes,
and their goal, if they can wangle it and get
the outside and international support, is to build your sort
of socially at least, if not politically, the model is
going to look a bit like Afghanistan and the Colabat, right,
Like from the signs of changes they've made to the constitution,

(29:02):
incidents of like violence, sectarianism and feminist side of been rising,
attacks they've already made on women's rights like very rapidly,
and things that have been put in like the president
that legally has to be in Muslim all of this stuff, right, Yeah,
that's sort of their plan. But on the other hand,
I think if you kind of let the American government
loose on Syria to build up its plan. At the moment,

(29:25):
I think they are seeing an opportunity to use this
kind of formula from Iraq into and I think they
want to create this sort very open to capitalist market
who trade kind of space in which the North and
East area with majority though not entirely Curtis, can sort
of play this role that the Kurdistan region of Iraq

(29:46):
has played.

Speaker 3 (29:48):
I don't know what you call it, like a safe
conduit to capital. Like it's a very stark difference. If
people haven't traveled that part of the world to be
in pol a Bill and then to us into Java,
that you can see the impact that a decade of
that being the safe place to have your oil company
headquarters has had on the Ghatstan regional government. Yeah, I've

(30:20):
better move on before we finish up. I want to
talk about the current manifestation of resistance right and specifically
at Tishrin Dam, because that's something that A has been
reported on and B like it mirrors what you saw
in twenty nineteen, and that like it's not just a
military resistance, right, but also like a civil sized society resistance.

(30:44):
Can you explain maybe if people have seen anything, they've
seen that horrible video of people dancing and then SNA
drone just dropping a mortar bomb right in the middle
of them, But can you explain how we got there?

Speaker 1 (30:54):
Yeah, of course, now, yeah, great, I'm glad you asked that,
because in some sense they know there is horrible stuff
in there. But this is the this is the beautiful bit,
this is the great bit, the bit that, yeah, we
soon be talking about at the moment. So, yeah, the
Tissuing Dam is a big tydro electric facility that is
on the Euphrates River. And if you look at a
map Asia, Euphrates is kind of in the middle of

(31:16):
the top and that is the region roughly where there's
offensive that we spoke out of the Turkish funded militias,
which has come from from the west across to the east,
at times closer and further away from the river, and
currently like a few kilometers away, that's where that offensive
has been stopped by the FDA and cannot progress any

(31:38):
further despite intensive air support from Turkey, and they're sort
of increasingly putting pressure on that, but it hasn't got anywhere.
But it's close, right, you know, it's not too far away,
and people are following the news. And what's right on
the other side. If you get across the river there
there's the dam, and then there's a bridge further to
the north of Krakos at bridge that's similarly kind of crucial.

(31:58):
And if you get across the river, you're not far
away at all from the city of Kabani, which I'm
sure most of your lessons will parad off. Is this
massively important symbol of anti fashion resistance. It was one
of the ignition points of the revolution for the social
movement here and it was really important a plight against Isis.
And I think it's safe to say that Turkey via
the SNA had its eye on Cabani again and that

(32:22):
this is in fact an attack on Kabani, which has
been kind of held back. And so the Dan is
important symbolically as this like strategic river crossing. It's this
kind of no pass that are like they will not
pass moment. It's also important logistically, like for the society
here because it's a hydroelectric facility. It supplies electricity, helps

(32:42):
with the supply of water for various reasons. For thousands
and thousands of people. It's now out of action, might
go without saying, but when you're in the middle of
an active war zone, you can't keep running a place
like that. So that is directly attacking and impacting the
society and normal communities here, and so yeah, it's no
wonder that those normal communities and that society but always

(33:04):
feel very very implicated and are kind of ready to
to stand up and defend themselves. It's not as Yeah,
the military assault is not kept separate from the society
in the society is also under attatch indirectly attacks on
infrastructure such as that, and directly by like drone strikes
on many many civilian targets. Unfortunately, Yeah, in recent times

(33:26):
that has increased, particularly in villages surrounding Banni, and you
seem like kids also hospitalized and killed as a part
of that. So on the eighth of January, what began
was that what they call a convoy, like a big
big trek of different vehicles got together and arranged and
organized from different towns across Anotomy Syria to go to

(33:48):
Kishin dam As. This very like the day symbol is
very clear like important physical location and also very symbolic
thing where war has also been fought before. There's also
in previous campaigns against for example, there was fighting in
the regions, so people feel like, you know, their sons
and daughters have fought for diffree river crossing before. It's
still you know, it's there in the historical memory as well. Yeah,

(34:11):
and people went and since then, which is almost exactly
two months as we're recording this, we're right around the
two months anniversary months and there's been a constant presence
there protests on the dam and that's got several different
kind of aspects to it. It is mostly to raise
the voices and raise awareness and make visible what's happening.

(34:31):
And yeah, if it's hard to understand why like hundreds
of people would go from their homes to somewhere that
is closer to the active fighting, to somewhere that's in
a very unstable region, Like yeah, first of all, you
have to understand that nowhere in notedly Syria is actually sick,
right like in Commas, for the city where I am,
there's been residential buildings bombs dropped on them from drones

(34:52):
like within the last couple of months as well. It's
not like and there's this sense of safety wherever you are.
The difference is a sense of doing something about and
of standing together and coming together in these like amazingly
brave and amazingly creative ways that only the communities have
not in Assoria can manage. So Yes, Unfortunately, during these
two months there have consistently been air strikes on the dam,

(35:15):
and I don't have the exact statistics, and you wouldn't
necessarily get an honest answer about how many of them
have come directly from Turkey and how many have come
from SNA drones, right, but the Sena drunes are paid
for by the Turkis state anyway, So at the end
of the day, yea morally, how much difference does it make?
And they have attacked the civil protests there and up

(35:37):
until now, I believe twenty five civilians have been killed
and many more than that hospitalized. But despite this, and
in the shadow of this, with the most beautiful defiance
like that, protest has continued. And what the videos that
maybe don't get shared as much or shared enough that
people might not have seen are also these images you know,

(35:58):
which are very I can attest are very real because
I went there myself a few weeks ago, which is
everybody getting out and dancing at the slightest opportunity or
the slightest excuse, lack of an excuse, and the most
amazing art that's been made, like paintings of the people
who've been killed, or they would say here fallen martyr.
In these two months, Yes, there's been theater, like theater

(36:21):
performed using the bits of the bombed out cars that
were bombed just a few days before as props to
kind of like, yeah, tell the story of what's been happening,
like the most like creative things. Also statements for the press,
and all your different organizations show ups, so like the
organized youth show up as the youth, and obviously the
women's organizations as women saying like, you know, this is

(36:43):
our revolution, this is our community, and we know what
it looks like when it gets occupied. We're not just
going to stand by and see it happen again. It's
our land, it's our water, and it's our kids. Is
the refrain that kind of gets repeated over and over again.
And of course they're they're in solidarity as well with
the with the SDF themselves, with the military force. It
would be it would be crazy if they weren't, because yeah,

(37:05):
they are also embedded in their communities. No, they're not
extracted from the society the way that most kind of
state armies are. So yeah, the situation at Tiswine is
still ongoing, and when I was there, it was it
really was the most amazing experience. There were bombings while
I was there, and tragically, one of the people I
got to know there who was a journalist, his name

(37:25):
was Eggy Brush. Just less than two weeks after I
got back, I found out that he'd also been killed
in another drawne strike.

Speaker 3 (37:32):
So it was, Yeah, it's.

Speaker 1 (37:35):
Very very just kind of doesn't it doesn't stop, the
aggression doesn't stop, but nonetheless people kind of coming together
to resist it doesn't stop either. And once I'd been there,
it seemed a lot less crazy or hard to imagine
that people would come together around it because you see
like the immense power that it was, and you see

(37:55):
that how everyone here has lost someone. Know, like the
vast majority of people here lost members of their family.
You said yourself, thirteen thousand fallen in the fight against
Isis alone, and since then, like war one way or
another has been going on. So people know what lost
means already they've already lost, but they're not going to
let that make them step back. They're gonna do their

(38:17):
fall and loved ones justice and continue to stand up
in their name. And yeah, it's a very sort of
big thing, but it's really powerful when you see it
in person and and all that kind of humanity and
humor and joy despite the situation.

Speaker 3 (38:32):
Yeah, no, that is a very unique thing to courts
down And like the Kurdish freedom movement, it's this sort
of joy. I mean, I've think it's very similar in
Burma rightly, where they also do they love to dance,
oh well in a war, and like it is one
of the things that I think, like the joy. It
is hard to explain and I was sort of writing
long on time here, but I just like when people

(38:54):
hear Syria and to exemp when they hear me and
mad or they'll think of wars. But like you should
also think about all the people who exist outside of
the conflict, or who don't think this outside of it.
It's around word, but who who are not fighting at
the front line. Like the experience of revolution is very
joyful one even amidst very difficult times, and it's difficult

(39:17):
to explain it if you haven't experienced it, because it
sounds so juxtaposed, but it isn't necessarily. The guy have
actually really fond memories of meeting Kurdish people coming into
the United States in the mountains at a time when
the United States was retaining people outdoors in very difficult conditions,
and like dancing with them there at a time when

(39:38):
like it was miserable. The ability to salvage joy. It
gives you a sense of sovereignty, I suppose, and I
can understand why that's such an important part of the
Curdish freedom movement when every expression of Curtis's identity has
been suppressed for so long, like the ability to seize
your moments what James Scott would call like little small
acts of resistance, Like it's important. It's it's more important,

(40:01):
I think people understand. And if you're understanding it from
a Western military doctrine, it doesn't fit. But that's because
you're using the wrong framework. Yeah, exactly, Jenny. If people
are interested in following your work about this, or perhaps
they're interested in doing what they can to support the
revolution and what is a challenging time, a very changing time,

(40:23):
how can they do both those things?

Speaker 1 (40:25):
Yeah, so well, if they are interested in following the
sort of updates and so on that I've been doing.
I've got Instagram and TikTok channels, which are both at
j Keston. I'm assuming you can stick that written form somewhere.

Speaker 3 (40:40):
Yeah, we'll put it in the show notes.

Speaker 1 (40:42):
And Telegram channel as well if people find it easier
to sort of get Yeah, that's just the most condensed
way to kind of download information, videos or whatever, which
you can find under the same name, and there's also
links to it on the on Instagram, TikTok and on there.
We've got we linked tree that has some suggest for
if people want to support, like ways to donate, say

(41:02):
to the Kurdish Red Present and stuff like that. And
then specifically, yeah, I mean there is a lot that
people can do and whatever it is, it all starts
with getting more I wouldn't say informed, I would say
getting more connected. Right, So getting informed is a part
of that, but not just in the sense of information learning,
like it's also connecting with like the feeling of things

(41:25):
here and why it's become so important to so many
people across the world, not just people from here. Yeah,
and the more we learn about that, I'm all, we'll
start to see like how we can be a friend
to the movement here and where how our role can fit.
And I know that there are specifically in America a
couple of organizations, is it that theybi book Chain has

(41:45):
been really prominent in organizing one of them.

Speaker 3 (41:48):
Yeah, Emergency Committee for Java.

Speaker 1 (41:50):
Emergency Committee for a Java, that's the one. Yeah, I
mean had emergency in there somewhere. That's definitely worth looking
up and following a lot of the work that they do.
And you also got like think it's like the Kourdish
Piece Institute, that kind of lobbying, and so yeah, there
are some there is some stuff from coming from the
United States as well, But I think, yeah, the more

(42:11):
people get a chance to kind of learn about stuff
here and see the connection and be able to see
and find themselves in it, And I think that's got
a lot to do with what you were just speaking about.
Hearing you put so well, I wouldn't extend it much more,
but yeah, like people here, it's really there's always war happening,
and always war kind of filing on top of you,
but that's never what it's about. The question is always

(42:33):
what are you're fighting for and what you're fighting to defend?
And what would you be doing if there was no war.
Everyone here'll always say if there was no war, we'd
still have enough work to do with all the really
like I was that word ambitious, like social transformation that
people here are really committed to. There's enough going on
and it's very big and as you put it, it's
very beautiful and very joyful, and so that's Yeah, that's

(42:55):
the bit that I encourage people to try and learn
more about, because that's the bit that makes you stay.
It makes peopleeople like me stick around for years, finding
out more and more, making friends and getting closer and
closer to there.

Speaker 3 (43:06):
Yeah, I think that's a very good way to put it.
So yeah, I encourage people to do all that. Thank
you so much for your time doing I note it's
late there, but we really appreciate you joining us today.

Speaker 5 (43:13):
Thank you so much than cheers, hello, and welcome to

(43:35):
it could happen here. It's time to finally continue our
journey through Latin America and Anarchiston.

Speaker 6 (43:43):
Now.

Speaker 5 (43:43):
So far we've covered almost every country in Latin America
at this point, including Peru, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Central America.
The country is the former Grand Colombia like Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia,
and also Cuba and.

Speaker 6 (44:00):
A few other islands in the Caribbean.

Speaker 5 (44:02):
And now before we get to the really big history
that I've kind of been saved as the finale, that
is anarchism in Mexico, we're going to be talking about
the anarchist movement in Uruguay.

Speaker 6 (44:16):
So my name is Andrew Sage.

Speaker 5 (44:19):
You can find on YouTube as Andrewism and you can
also find the bulk of the research for today's episode
in an Hill Capialities, aptly titled Anarchism in Latin America.
I'm joined today by James me again and it's been
a while.

Speaker 3 (44:36):
Yeah, it has been a while.

Speaker 6 (44:37):
Nice to be back, great to be back in conversation.

Speaker 3 (44:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (44:42):
So, before we could really get into the history of
anarchism in Uruguay, I probably should give some context as
to how Uruguay became Uruguay. And well, my source for
this history is primarily the Encyclopedia Britannica. So before the
whole scoog of European clonalism, what is now known as

(45:03):
Uruguay supported a population of about five thousand to ten
thousand people, which were.

Speaker 6 (45:09):
Organized in semi nomadic groups.

Speaker 5 (45:11):
You had the Tarua, the China, and the Guarani Indians primarily.
So the first European visits took place first in fifteen sixteen,
and they weren't particularly successful or of interest. Spain was
looking for gold and looking for silver. That was their
incentive for colonization at the time, and they didn't see

(45:33):
any of that, so they didn't have much motivation to
stick around. It was until the sixteen twenties, over a
century later, that Jesuit and Franciscan missionary set up religious settlements,
but unfortunately, by then, Uruguay's native population had already begun
to collapse. Thousands of people were succumbing to European diseases,

(45:54):
so they had no immunity to a couple of centuries later,
in eighteen hundred, Uruguay continued along with the very small population.
At this point it was about thirty thousand people in total,
and a third of their population lived in the capital
city of Montevideo.

Speaker 6 (46:12):
Another thirty their population.

Speaker 5 (46:14):
Were African slaves who worked on ranchers and meat processing plants,
and as domestic servants. Meanwhile, the elite, whether they be
wealthy traders, bankers, or landowners, mostly traced their roots to Catalonia,
the Basque Country, the Cleary Islands, and other parts of Spain.
We get into eighteen ten, when a lot of the

(46:34):
Latin American countries had been fighting for their independence Boros
Aires Argentina was among them. But while Argentina was fighting
for its independence, Montevideo was a Royalist stronghold backed by
the Spanish military and naval forces. On the country side,
it was a different story though Uruguay's greatest independence zero

(46:55):
kind of came out of that space. His name was
Jose Crevasio Artigas, and he originally led a Spanish cavalry unit,
but eventually turned against the crown in eighteen eleven and
rallied an army of rural fighters, freed African slaves and
anti royalist leaders from Montevideo. So with the back in

(47:16):
from Buenos Aires, his forces were able to score key
victories and eventually oust the Spanish. But Artigas had much
bigger ambitions. He wanted a confederation of provinces to resisted
the dominance of Buenos Aires. In fact, he wanted Montevideo
to become the center of a rival confederation, as prior

(47:36):
to Argentina becoming Argentina, it was sort of a loose
confederation centered in Buenos Aires. Artigas's ideas also included things
like redistributing the land to freed slaves and Poiuguayans, which
made him obviously very popular among the poor and very
much a threat to the elite. Eventually, he was forced

(47:58):
into exile because because he made some enemies that basically
sat on their hands as the Portuguese Brazilian forces invaded
and took over the region despite his exile, though the
fight really wasn't over, you know. After the occupation, which
was often called Brazilianization, it was resisted very heavily by

(48:20):
locals and exiles, and of course Argentina, which had become
some lot of a rival power to Brazil in the region.
It saw Brazil's influence in Uruguay as a threat. So
eventually one of Artigas's exile officers, a guy named Juan
Antonio Lavaller, would lead a force that would cross the

(48:42):
river and reclaim Uruguay. The fight would end in a
steel meat and then British deplomat to step in, because
of course the British had their own interests in the region.
But eventually, in eighteen twenty eight, a treaty was signed
officially created in Uruguay as an independent Natia buffer state
between Argentina and Brazil. In eighteen thirty, Uruguay's first constitution

(49:06):
was ratified, and at the time the country had a
population of just seventy four thousand people.

Speaker 6 (49:12):
All that war kind of left the country in ruins.

Speaker 5 (49:17):
A lot of the once wealthy colonial families were devastated,
the cattle numbers had plummeted, and the threat of both
Argentina and Brazil still persisted despite the treaty at being signed.
So then the nation ended up being split into two
rival factions. You had the faction that was led by

(49:37):
Uruguay's first president and then you had the faction that
was led by Uruguay's second president, and they became face
rivals that ignited a civil war known as the Gera
Grande or Great War.

Speaker 6 (49:50):
I'd make a long story short.

Speaker 5 (49:51):
The first President's supporters became known as the Colorado Party
and they controlled Onetevideo, and the second president supporters became
known as the White Party or the Blanco Party, and
they dominated the countryside, and so they were to fight
from time to time, each side being backed by different parties.
The Blancos were backed by Argentina, the Colorados were backed

(50:15):
by France and England, and then eventually Brazil, and after
about a decade of war, there was still no clear
victory as to who came out of it as a
success in state. The interior of the country was devastated,
government was bankrupt, its very existence as an independent nation

(50:36):
came into doubt, and the divisions between the people who
backed either party became more stark than ever. Eventually, the
Colorados were able to force Blancos out of power thanks
to their back in by Brazil, and that move ended
up alarming Paraguay, who was also a freedom Brazil's influence.

(50:58):
So Paraguay ended up launching in what became known as
the War of the Triple Alliance, which is something I
covered in the episode of Paraguayan Anarchism. Eventually, after getting
out of the civil wars and all these disputes and
foreign powers medalist affairs, we have the situation Uruguay found
itself in in the nineteenth century, a situation that waves

(51:21):
of immigrants and also anarchism would find themselves in So
Capelletti identifies a few of the early forces that shaped
igu radicalism before anarchism and cynicalism. The first factor shape

(51:45):
in the radical landscape in Uruguay's eighteenth century was utopian socialism.
It came to Uruguay with Eugenio Tanddet in eighteen forty four,
and he was a French utopian socialist and follower of
Charles Freyer.

Speaker 6 (51:59):
Who was one of the founders of utopian socialism.

Speaker 5 (52:02):
That whole milieu advocated for reconstruction of society based on
communal associations of producers known as falanges. And then with
their influence afterwards came the next force of influence the
Italian migrants who had fought in.

Speaker 6 (52:19):
The Civil War.

Speaker 5 (52:21):
These were Republicans who eventually became socialists. And in the
next influence was the mutualist movement that was inspired by
put On in the eighteen seventies, first arising in Uruguay
among artisans and workers and establishing mutual aid societies to.

Speaker 6 (52:37):
Meet people's needs.

Speaker 5 (52:39):
A friend of Pedros of Prodona himself, a guy named
Jose Ernesto Gilbert, had actually moved to Monte Video for
a bit after being exiled from France, and I don't
think he did anything too actively political. He did pursue
botanic studies in Uruguay, and I believe there was some
kind of creature.

Speaker 6 (52:59):
Named after so let's cool, you know, so fun fact.

Speaker 5 (53:04):
Finally, as we kind of exit the nineteenth century, you had,
of course the rise of unions and internationalist organizations in
the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. You had fights for workers' rights,
you had the struggle for an international socialism, and you
have what Capital identifies as a Euroguaian section of the
Association International de Trabajadores, which was established in eighteen seventy

(53:28):
two and engaged in a public action in eighteen seventy
five that had some two thousand attendees. They established something
of a manifesto where one line had asked, who better
and of greater faith than ourselves can destroy the criminal
exploitation to which we are condemned as a whole. The

(53:48):
manifesto basically ask workers to unite, and this was in
a time where anarchism was finally starting to pick up
in the region.

Speaker 6 (53:57):
Another group formed in eighteen seventy six.

Speaker 5 (53:59):
This was the Ferracion Regional de la Republca Oriental del Uruguay,
later called the ferracanal Uruguaya or f O r U.
And they published papers like Social, La Lucha Obrera, la Fravadores, Liman,
Spasion and Solidaridad. And it was a very small but

(54:23):
virgin in movement, but they didn't take very long to
start making some moves, as Capelletti noting they celebrate the
anniverstry of the Paris Commune in March eighteenth and collected
forty pesos on behalf of libertarian prisoners in Lyon. They
also collected money to support their papers and to support
peoples and efforts elsewhere, like in France. What's interesting about

(54:46):
the Uruguayan anarchists is that they were among the most
internationalists that I have found so far. You know, like
other parts of Latin America, they did have a large
immigrant population. Yeah, but because I suppose the size of
Uruguay compared to other countries, the immigrant population was probably
larger proportional to their neighbors. So they ended up having

(55:10):
a much greater connection to movements and you know, things
that happened in other parts of the world, including their
home countries.

Speaker 3 (55:18):
Yeah, that makes sense. Was there. I'm trying to remember
exactly when this began, but like there was a movement
among anarchists, I guess in the early more in the
early twentieth century to like learn Esperanto as part of
their internationalism.

Speaker 5 (55:31):
Yes, that's actually a history that I would love to
cover in an episode.

Speaker 3 (55:35):
I will connect you to somebody who wrote books about
it with pleasure.

Speaker 6 (55:39):
Really yeah, yeah, that'll be fantastic.

Speaker 3 (55:41):
My first book was about the anti fascist Olympics and
the last surviving Popular Olympian, the Guardo Vivankos, died in
twenty twenty two in Canada and an old people's home.
I've been trying to visit him, but because of the
COVID restrictions for in the old people's home, I wasn't
able to. But he he had served as a Esperanto

(56:03):
translator at the Popular Olympics and like lived out his
whole life with the stream of like if we can,
if we can, if we can break down the linguistic
barriers between workers, and we can we can get together
and change things.

Speaker 5 (56:16):
Wow, that is fascinating. You know what's interesting about the
whole Esperanto connection to anarchism is that long before I
really got into anarchism or even learned about anarchism. I
actually tried to learn esperanto.

Speaker 3 (56:31):
Let's here you go. It worked. Did they see that
this is what they wanted? You saw the barriers fall
down once you there, once you began speaking esperando.

Speaker 6 (56:39):
I didn't get very far.

Speaker 5 (56:40):
I think it was around the time when like dueling
A first introduced it into their like courses, Okay, and
I saw it, and I like did like a brief
reading on it, and I was like, oh, this looks interesting,
and so I tried to pick it up and I
studied it for a little while, but I didn't get
particularly far. Yeah, but now we're looking in the connection
between Esperanto and atnarkis, I'm just like, wow, you know,

(57:02):
the seeds were already there in a sense.

Speaker 3 (57:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you were ready for it. That
was a dream of the of the nineteen twenties and thirties.
I'm glad that you're living.

Speaker 6 (57:12):
In for sure.

Speaker 5 (57:13):
And actually we're about to enter, well at least the
twentieth century. In our little historical review here, anarchists almost
really sunned to finally pick up steam by this point
becoming very commonly known across Iuruguay. In fact, by nineteen eleven,
according to Capitaletes research of the official stats, there were

(57:35):
one hundred and seventeen thousand industrial workers in Uruguay, and
of those, ninety thousand were affiliated with the FRU. So
what's seventy six percent of those industrial workers were affiliated
with an explicitly anarchist organization that included port workers, construction workers,

(57:55):
metal workers, horse drivers, railway workers, and a lot more.
And to be honest with you, I'm not entirely show
what kept them from taking Boulder action compared to some
of their neighbors, considering their proportion the numbers they had,
But unfortunately didn't take very long for the movement to
be divided, particularly after the Russian Revolution. There was, of

(58:20):
course the influence of Bolshevik ideas that had split the
movement somewhat, bringing workers onto the Bolshevik cause, and then
of course you had Bolshevik sponsorship. It was within the
USSR's interest to support USSR aligned movements worldwide, and so
a lot of libertarian groups around the world went into

(58:41):
decline in that time, including in Uruguay. Some of the
unions and up faltering under the pressure of both the
state and of course the new draw that was the
Marxist Leninist groups. But of course the Libertarians never really
gave up, they don't tend to historically speak it. So

(59:04):
the unions and groups continued acting, continued producing papers. In fact,
there was a major surge and unionization in the nineteen forties.
According to Poor Sharkis the feracio and anarchista i Uruguaya,
especially among the textile workers, royal women talkers, construction workers
and meat packers. And then outside of the union and
paper pushing scene you are set Uruguaian writers that continued

(59:27):
to shape the cultural scene with anarchist ideas. Florencio Sanchez,
for example, was a playwright in the Rio de la
Plata region whose experience in nationalist militias led him to
align himself with anarchist circles. He worked as a journalist
while actively participating in anarchist organizations and publications, including La
Partesta in Bunros Airis. His plays tackled social issues such

(59:50):
as class struggle, intergenerational conflicts, and the hardships of the
working class. Then you also had other Uruquian literary figures
influenced by anchism and contributing to the libertarian literary movement,
including poet Julio Herrera Ierseg, novelist Torresio Kiroga, and Bohemian
writer Roberto de las Carreras. And interestingly, there was another

(01:00:14):
notable figure in anarchism connected perhaps the most or one
of the most notable figures in anarchism, and that was
the friend and biographer of Erico man A Testa himself,
Luigi Fabri. Fabri founded the journal Study Sociali, which was
one of the strongest libertarian publications in Uruguay and Latin America,

(01:00:36):
and after he died, his daughter, Lucy Fabri, continued his
work and edited the journal until nineteen forty six. Lucy
Fabri was also one of the founders of the FAU
and she also published quite a few books in her time,
many of which have yet to be translated into English.
I wish I could you know, check them out.

Speaker 3 (01:00:57):
Yeah, Paul Shaky, he just mentioned he's the guy He's
translated like a library of anarchist text.

Speaker 6 (01:01:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:01:05):
Yeah, I think translators they don't get as much praise
as they should. You know, they're a really underrated contribution
to the movement and to the propagation of the movement
to new spaces.

Speaker 3 (01:01:16):
Yeah. Absolutely. I translated some text for a zine last year,
and it is a lot of work.

Speaker 6 (01:01:22):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (01:01:23):
Yeah, massive respect to people who do that.

Speaker 5 (01:01:25):
Unfortunately, translation is not as simple as just going wood forward,
you know. You really do have to get the spirit
of the text out of it somehow, sometimes with different
phrasing and that kind of thing.

Speaker 6 (01:01:37):
Yeah, exactly, it's difficult.

Speaker 3 (01:01:38):
Google can't do.

Speaker 6 (01:01:39):
That for you, yep.

Speaker 5 (01:01:41):
I mean, I appreciate having the ability to like go
on a website and like have Google Translates translate the
web page quickly for me, but that has very clear
and obvious weaknesses, you know when you go through it
in terms of actually translating the information. Yeah, it's good
for like getting like a vague gist, right, but professional

(01:02:03):
translators aren't going away anytime soon.

Speaker 3 (01:02:06):
No. No, it's a great thing to do if you
if you have a couple of languages, like to make
the world visible from someone else's perspective. It's such a
wonderful thing to be able to try and share that.
It's really special. Yeah, particularly for.

Speaker 5 (01:02:19):
The last less well known or less popular languages. Yeah,
you know, although you'll be surprised, some of the most
popular languages, most widely spoken languages in the world, are
still lacking some key translations of some very key literature.
You know, you'd be surprised, like the kinds of texts
that we take for granted, the theory and stuff we
take for granted that's just not available and VICEIVI sir,

(01:02:44):
you know, there's probably a lot of gems out there
that I've yet to hit.

Speaker 6 (01:02:49):
The English language definitely.

Speaker 3 (01:02:51):
Yeah, yeah, like just because especially if it's a big language,
like a language is something like Arabic of Spanish, Mandarin,
where so many people speak it already, Like there's less
need to translate it because like it's it's getting out there.
I suppose that pizza that isn't quite the same like
urgency to translate it, but the ideas get out through
sort of paraphrase, I suppose, because enough people can readly

(01:03:14):
in the ritual language and then paraphrase it in other languages.

Speaker 5 (01:03:18):
Yeah, as long as the idea gets there, you know,
the exact words may not necessarily be important.

Speaker 3 (01:03:24):
Yeah, there's some beauty and like the piece I translated
was pretty sure, but it's the Belgian anarchists who fought
in the Spanish Civil War and then went into exile
in South America. But the way he writes about the
revolutionary moment is one of the most perfect and beautiful
enclculations I've ever read, so like it was nice to
be able to share that.

Speaker 6 (01:03:42):
You should send that to me. What is it called.

Speaker 3 (01:03:44):
It's called rejecting or refuting the legend by a guy
called Louis Mercy. A Vega was the name he went by.
Sometimes he also called himself Charles Riddle. That neither of
those were his real names, but there's the names he
lived most of his life under. I've been reading a
lot of translations if to Rooty column memoirs. Another wonderful
one is called Sons of the Night, which is by
an Italian anarchist who foll in Spain and they live

(01:04:06):
the rest of his life in France. And then it's
a beautiful book. Because he was a groundskeeper at the
Libertarian Club in Marseille, the young people of the Libertarian
Club were so influenced by his life and his experiences
and the way he talked about the world that after
his passing they translated his diary and then wrote this
huge historical sort of The footnotes are four times long

(01:04:28):
as a book because the footnotes explain that the things
that he's talking about and who the characters are, and
it's it's a really kind of beautiful text. And it
has the authors called themselves the Shewmnologues like that, the
followers of Antoine j Minez. So it's kind of anonymously
authored and I thin it's a really special like literary project.

Speaker 6 (01:04:47):
Wow, that's something that always moves me.

Speaker 5 (01:04:49):
You know, when somebody is able to have such an
impact on the lives of others that even in their.

Speaker 6 (01:04:56):
Absence, people you know, continue their lives.

Speaker 3 (01:04:59):
Were Yeah, yeah, it's a really special thing. I'll send
you a link to it when with them, but I've
diverted us a long way from Uraguai. I'm sorry.

Speaker 6 (01:05:07):
Oh, that's fine, that's fine.

Speaker 5 (01:05:09):
I think for this episode, there's just one other interesting
moment in Uruguay's anarchist history that I want to cover,
and I'll leave it at that before the next episode.

Speaker 6 (01:05:19):
But going down this rabbit hole was actually really interesting
for me.

Speaker 5 (01:05:33):
So there was an experiment in the fifties in Uruguay
called the Communidad del Sur, which was an anarchist intentional
community experiment, and capolet He talks about it briefly as
an effort by folks to live and work and eat
and rare children together away from the injustices of capitalism

(01:05:54):
on the state. Now, anarchism is not about establishing intentional communities,
but many anarchists have found great reprieve and great joy
in establishing those communities, in finding love and care and
connection in those spaces. So these people spent about twenty
years living together, making decisions together, sharing finances, and sharing education.

(01:06:18):
But the Irguayan military dictatorship stepped in and put an
end to the project in nineteen seventy six. They spent
that time afterwards living in exile. First they settled in Peru,
and then they ended up in Spain, and then after
that they found themselves in Sweden, of all places, where
they continued their communal life and engaged in international political education.

(01:06:42):
So that's all I ended up learning about them at first.
But I wanted to digg a little deeper and find
out what happened to them after that, and I wasn't
finding that information in English language sources, so I ended
up unfortunately having to lean upon Google Translate for the
Swedish and Spanish wikipedias, but those pages went into a

(01:07:05):
little bit more depth, and so I was able to
find out that this group ended up taking part in
the occupation of the Mulvaden neighborhood in the late seventies,
and they also translated Latin American anarchist texts into Swedish
and vice versa. And then when the dictatorship in Uruguay ended,

(01:07:26):
they returned to Uruguay with the money they raised with
the hell of their Swedish comrades, and initially a few
stay in Stockholm, so there was a split effort between
Uruguay and Sweden for a bit, but the ones in
Sweden were able to send money and equipment home and
so eventually they were all able to focus in Uruguay
and set up a printery and established a farm in
the countryside outside Montevideo on land purchased with money collected

(01:07:49):
in Sweden, where they focused on collective farm and organic agriculture,
and apparently there's still active today. I found what seems
to be their website, but it's no accessible.

Speaker 6 (01:08:01):
It's down.

Speaker 5 (01:08:03):
I tried to dig fit on web archive, but I
wasn't getting much information out of that. But I also
found of Swedish website that was talking about the activity,
and I'll drop that in the show notes as well.

Speaker 3 (01:08:13):
Yeah, that'd be cool.

Speaker 5 (01:08:14):
So that particular website they said, and this is the
rual translation of what they said, but it was quote.
In parallel with the other activities, the organization runs a
farm which produces sweets from figs, goofer, blackberries and such
aus fruits. It also presuves vegetables such as peppers and
eggplant and produces its own tomato sauce. This small scale

(01:08:35):
industry that the organization has built up is mainly run
by a women's group, Comunidad There's Sosuro also participates in
the collective Lapi Tanga that works for equality between women
and men and against violence against women end quote. So
they're doing some really important work in Uruguay after all
these years. I can't find their exact location, but it

(01:08:55):
seems they're based somewhere in La Palce. If anybody wants
to reach out for food, the details what they're up
to these days, their story is really fascinating to me,
So I'd love to find out just that whole idea
of this group feacing this victoria repression, resettling somewhere else,
catching their breath, engaging actions elsewhere, and then me are
being able to return home and continue the work. I

(01:09:18):
find that very inspiring.

Speaker 3 (01:09:20):
Yeah, that's really cool. That's what we hope for, you know,
when like people are forced into exile, to be able
to return eventually and to be like accepted into the
community where they find themselves and able to like, like
you say, catch your breath and build their strength and return.
That's really cool.

Speaker 6 (01:09:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:09:37):
I mean shout out to the Swedish anarchists who would have,
you know, moved in solid arity with them and help
them set up and that kind of thing if they did.

Speaker 3 (01:09:45):
Yeah, Swedish has been really good at accepting migrants and refugees.
Unfortunately a number of people who had received assignment in
Sweden were killed this week, so that fucking sucks, IRB
to them.

Speaker 6 (01:09:58):
Yes, I think it just the mood is shifting as
a lead.

Speaker 3 (01:10:03):
Yeah, all around the world thanks to the wonder of
social media, I think.

Speaker 5 (01:10:07):
Yeah, but you see the digression we had about translation
and ended up connecting.

Speaker 3 (01:10:12):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, beautiful. Yeah, everyone listening, start learning Esperanto.

Speaker 5 (01:10:20):
I think that's a great hobby yellow I do question.
I think it was like a really cool project and
it's time. I don't know how well it can pick
up today.

Speaker 3 (01:10:31):
Like Esperanto in the Age of Ai is an interesting
I'd love to hear from Esperantis, honestly, like if we
have Esperantis who listening. I still have a great deal
of admiration for the project and like for the people
who participate in it, and I've had a lot of
communications with them because of their relations to Spanish anarchism,
and they've always been the nicest, most interesting, welcoming people.

(01:10:51):
So like, yeah, if you want to be I Esperanto guest,
please hit me up.

Speaker 6 (01:10:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:10:57):
Yeah, maybe eventually I will get back into Esperanto and
pick it up again. I'm still still working on my Spanish,
as listeners can probably tell, but.

Speaker 6 (01:11:08):
We'll get there.

Speaker 3 (01:11:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:11:11):
So we'll leave it here for today, but next time
we're going to venture into how anarchists stayed active throughout
the twentieth century and also contributed to the development of
anarchist strategy internationally. Until then, I've been Andrew Sage, I've
been here with James Stout and you can find me
on YouTube dot com, slash andrewism on picture dot com,

(01:11:33):
slashly and true. This is it could happen here, Heast
be with you.

Speaker 7 (01:11:58):
Welcome to kadap Here increasingly ruled by an absolutely unhinged
and unrestrained band of Nazis, and apparently they're democratic collaborators.
I am your host, Mia Wong with Vus James Stout.

Speaker 3 (01:12:10):
I'm nia's collaborator today. Yay, this is a collaborator. Good.
We are talking today about collaborator bad.

Speaker 4 (01:12:17):
So.

Speaker 7 (01:12:18):
On Friday, Senator Chuck Schumer and his allies, in an
act of democratic collaboration with the regime that looks even
more hideous now than it did then, in the wake
of a series of absolutely horrific deportations in the last
few days, voted for basically a continuing funding resolution. So
this is this is a little bit complicated, but I

(01:12:41):
believe in US we can get through a little tiny
bit of Senate bullshit. So basically what's happening is that
they need a resolution to keep funding the government for
a little bit until more negotiations.

Speaker 3 (01:12:50):
Can happen to fund a budget. There has been a budget.

Speaker 7 (01:12:53):
Basically, like we keep seeing this over and over again.
They're keep being continuing funding resolutions, they keep almost being
government shutdowns, because if there's not a continuing funding resolution
and there's no budget, the government doesn't have any money.
What happened here was that, So in the Senate you
can filibuster this and a whole bunch of senators Schumer
and others. We will be reading out later after we
talk about what this resolution actually did, because it's unhinged.

(01:13:16):
So you've probably been hearing. If you've been hearing about this,
you've been hearing you called a culture vote. So what
that is is basically the absolute shortest version of it is,
it's a vote to kill a philibuster on the bill.
You filibuster by continuing debate. Culture ends debate, c et cetera,
et cetera. So this resolution is staggeringly unhinged. It is
not a very long funding continuation. It includes thirteen billion

(01:13:39):
dollars and cuts a non military spending and also six
billion dollars in military spending cuts. There are a lot
of things that have been sort of defunded by this,
including like a lot of like housing and urban development stuff.
It's research ship, you know, and that's obviously really bad.
Because normally with these resolutions, you're just sort of like

(01:14:00):
continuing the funding, right, But this is not a normal
continuing resolution.

Speaker 3 (01:14:07):
This is.

Speaker 7 (01:14:10):
It is over It is very very over dramatic to
do the thing that a lot of people have been doing,
which is comparing it to the enabling.

Speaker 3 (01:14:16):
Acts that the Nazis passed. Yeah, it's not.

Speaker 7 (01:14:19):
But but Comma, this is a completely unhinged continuing resolution.
There has never been a continuing resolution like this ever,
and it is Jenny Wineley. It is another step down
the path of effectively having Trump running the government as
a dictator by sort of pure fiat. And Okay, you

(01:14:42):
can sally say this and you think this is an exaggeration,
but what this continuing Resolution actually does is normally in
one of these resolutions, Congress tells the executive how parts
of the budget are supposed to be sent, right, it
does allocations. It'll be like, okay, so there's this money
for this thing. It goes to this purpose and you
have to spend it here. This continuing resolution just.

Speaker 3 (01:15:05):
Like doesn't do that.

Speaker 7 (01:15:07):
Yeah, And the goal of it is just to let
Trump do whatever the fuck he wants with the money
by not actually giving out congressional things to specifically allocated.
So this is more of a thing we've been seeing
more and more, which is congress specifically like delegating and
abandoning its constitutional power to be the people who set
the budget and just heading it over to the executive

(01:15:28):
so there can be a single unitary executive that runs
the entire governments.

Speaker 3 (01:15:31):
Yeah, I mean when you combine it with the open
defiance of the court. So you saw this weekend with deportation, right, like,
it's not a good not a good outlook actually, like
it is in terms of the old separation of powers,
which is supposed to be a thing.

Speaker 7 (01:15:48):
Yeah, you know, you could you could argue about whether
the American Revolution was about the king being able to
set taxes because that was technically a thing controlled by
the British Parliament. But like it is, for example, the
issue that like the Revolution of seventeen eighty nine was
fought over, right like like that that there shouldn't be
a single unitary executive who gets to fucking set the budget.

Speaker 3 (01:16:10):
It's fundamentally I don't want to say unconstitutional, because I
guess I don't get to decide what is unconstitutional. And
to the extent that it matters.

Speaker 7 (01:16:19):
Fucking fuck if we get well, I mean it doesn't matter. Yeah,
but it is like obviously hideously unconstitutional.

Speaker 3 (01:16:24):
It's entirely against the basic principles of the constitution, right,
like the scene kwan, none of the US Constitution, to
use a fancy word, is separation of powers. Is It's
not like the kind of the point of a thing
is to not just have one older dude in charge
like like that that is the English way.

Speaker 7 (01:16:42):
Yeah, and this is this is the fundamental like principles
upon which the liberal notion of democracy is based. And
I use liberal in like the seventeen early eighteen hundred
cents of the word liberal, right, which is that, like
you believe in democracy. This bill effectively just allows Trump
to do funded defund programs at will. I mean there's

(01:17:02):
you know, there are there are specific things like boundaries
in which she can't and can't do this. But I'm
gonna read some stuff from Senator Patting Burray, who is
the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which is
the committee that handles like where money goes in the budget.

Speaker 3 (01:17:19):
Right, it's a budget appropriations et cetera.

Speaker 1 (01:17:21):
CA.

Speaker 7 (01:17:21):
So she, you know, is one of the Senatorsho sort
of understands is intimately she wrote a fact sheet about this,
which is fucking terrifying. I'm just going to quote from
that because good God. Quote under this continuing resolution, that
Trump administration could, for example, decide not to suspend funding
previously allocated for Combating Fence and all the Support Act
and other Substance abuse and mental health care programs or

(01:17:43):
specific NIH priorities like Alzheimer's disease and vaccine research, and
instead steer funding to other priorities if it's choosing. It
could also pick and choose which military construction, Army Corps,
or transit improvement and expansion projects to withdraw funding without
direction from Congres, leaving democratic states and priorities in the lurch.

Speaker 3 (01:18:03):
Yeah, that's that is like that's not great, Like even
like I don't think people realize how much damage is
could do and like, yeah, yeah, they have a year
of just randomly slashing fit. Not only is it the
programs who are affected, right, things that are cut, the
certainty that contractors will get paid, The certainty that if

(01:18:25):
you have a contract with the government it is a
reliable thing like that will have devastating economic consequences. If
they just start randomly yoinking contracts and not paying people.
That's they did with the USAID suppliers, right.

Speaker 7 (01:18:39):
Yeah, So, like there is also a bunch of funding
cuts for things like the Army Corps of Engineers, and like,
there are a lot of valid criticisms you can have
about the Army Corps of Engineers and for example, the
way it has structurally fucked the entire city of New Orleans.
But the thing is not giving them money to do
hurricane prevention is not going to help that. And the
thing about this, right, because this resolution has thirteen billion

(01:19:00):
in direct budget cuts and then it also allows Trump
to do more cuts on top of it by doing
by doing these funding allocation things. Right, So it's it's
like it's it's a fucking like double Yeah, it's sort
of double set of cuts here. And this includes you know,
he can he can reallgate money away from the FAA.
One of the most absolutely terrifying ones is that this
continuing resolution allows RFK Junior to eliminate funding for the

(01:19:22):
universal flu vaccine.

Speaker 4 (01:19:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:19:24):
I was talking to someone in a medical profession about this,
Like there's a serious chance that is won't be h
one developed in the US for next year and we'll
just use the European one. Great stuff.

Speaker 7 (01:19:35):
You know, this is really the substantive problem with this
entire thing and why it is genuinely an act of
like an act an act of collaboration worthy Avichy France
to fucking pass this, to pass this fucking bill. Is
that again you are handing control of like the budgets, right,
you're handing direct control of just like how budget allocation

(01:19:58):
stuff gets gets fucking out with to like Elon Musk,
Trump and RFK Junior, and they can just fucking do
this shit with it.

Speaker 3 (01:20:06):
Yeah, we've already seen some of this, like manipulation of
federal government funding, like with with Columbia University. Oh, we're
gonna get to that. Yeah, okay, good exciting.

Speaker 7 (01:20:17):
Yeah, So other things. It defunds FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund,
which is bad because a bunch of funding, the FEMA
Disaster Relief Fund has been get this exhausted because there
were a bunch of fucking disasters. Guess what, there's gonna
be more of disasters. Guess what, There's not going to
be money in ease the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund.

Speaker 3 (01:20:35):
Yeah, that's bad. Yeah. And here's the thing.

Speaker 7 (01:20:38):
We have not fucking hit the worst part of this
continuing resolution yet, like all of that, right, like the
monopolization of power in the hands of the executive, you know,
like the potentially funding of the flu vaccine.

Speaker 3 (01:20:51):
We have not hit rock bottom yet.

Speaker 7 (01:20:53):
Rock bottom is this getting resolution quote slashes one hundred
and eighty five million dollars seven percent of the total
program from defense nuclear non proliferation programs, including the programs
that prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear and radioactive material, remove
radioactive materials at risk of being misused or causing a

(01:21:14):
catastrophic accident, and to ur and monitor foreign nuclear fuel
cycle in weapons developments, nuclear materials movement or diversions, and
nuclear explosions.

Speaker 3 (01:21:23):
Cool. So we are defunding the nuke police again for
a third time, and this one looks like.

Speaker 7 (01:21:29):
It's actually gonna fucking stick because I don't think any
of these fucking people actually understand what the defense nuclear
non proliferation programs do.

Speaker 3 (01:21:38):
Yeah, I mean, because they will on one about Iran
and enriching uranium for years. Have they have they just give?
Have they moved on?

Speaker 1 (01:21:46):
Well?

Speaker 7 (01:21:47):
I like this as as we're going to see in
a second, this budget is being written by just fucking clowns,
like just absolute dipshits.

Speaker 3 (01:21:55):
I don't I don't know who the fuck is doing this.
That's what I sometimes wonder is, like, who comes with
these numbers? Like it's like staffers, it's literally an army
of staffords.

Speaker 7 (01:22:05):
Yeah, the senators re voting for these bills most often
have no idea what the fuck is in them. It's
all run by an army of staffers. And the thing
about it all being run by an army of staffers,
and the fact that Republican staffers are increasingly drawn from
a class of like genuinely the most unhinged people who
have ever lived, this class of fucking internet gropers and
fucking white nationalists bullshit, means that one of the parts

(01:22:29):
of this I think people have heard about is the
one billion dollars in spending that was cut just from
like the city budget of Washington, DC. Now, looking at
what's happened next, I genuinely think they did this by accidents.
That's been the explanation that's been given is that they
literally did it by accidents. And the reason I think
it might actually be true, it's it's either it's either
actually true or they saw the pushback. But immediately after

(01:22:51):
this bill got passed, there was like a separate bill
that was drafted to restore the funding, and that was
approved unanimously by the second So it might legitimately have
been a mistake. So it was either legitimately a mistake
or all of these people realize that the entire population
of DC was about to like fucking march on the
capital of Pitchforks. So I don't know one of those
two things. So we're not talking much about the DC
stuff because it seems like the funding is going to

(01:23:13):
come back, though if it doesn't well cover the catastrophic
impacts of that. And there's one more thing, James, which
I couldn't find details of, but one of the things
that's supposed to do is eliminate protections for people an
immigration course.

Speaker 3 (01:23:25):
Fantastic, Great, allow the Attorney General more power. Yeah, I
was just looking this up. Actually, Like, let me there
was an office founded under Biden that was the Office
of the Obficely Immigration Detents from Ombudsman, which was like
supposedly to exist to like examine people's conditions in immigration detention. Right,
And I'm wondering to what extent it still exists. Yeah,

(01:23:48):
Like I don't know. I was just trying to find
that out. I would have to go through the resolution,
and maybe I will at some point, but yeah, there
is stuff that the federal government does right now that
provides people with some protections in immigration courts, right, and yeah,
I can see. I mean, look to the extent that
that matters because they're just deporting people in open violation

(01:24:11):
of court orders right now, we don't know. But it's
still bad either way, right, taking away the very few
protections that might have. Yeah, it's bad. Yeah, So speaking
of bad things, we're going to go to ads and
then we're going to come back.

Speaker 6 (01:24:36):
We are back.

Speaker 7 (01:24:39):
So, having said all of this about this bill, fully
ten Democratic senators voted to avoid shutting down the government
and fucking past this unbelievably hideous resolution, which again like
defunds the nuke police. Again, they are risking like global
annihilation by doing this. And I'm just going to read

(01:25:01):
out the names of everyone who did this, because there's
been a lot of focus on Chuck Schumer, and Chuck
Schumer is to like probably the primary person responsible for this,
but fuck every single one of these people.

Speaker 3 (01:25:10):
He's a quistling in this scenario, like the capital Q quisling.

Speaker 7 (01:25:14):
Yes, yes, okay, so Chuck Schumer, Katherine Cortes, mosto Dick Durbin,
which is actually a surprising one because Durbin suburban's about
to retire.

Speaker 3 (01:25:23):
He he was my old senator in Illinois.

Speaker 7 (01:25:24):
I actually know he wasn't wow a complicated I shtually
fucking don't remember one of the which one of them
I had?

Speaker 3 (01:25:29):
Uh?

Speaker 7 (01:25:30):
But Durbin is, you know, he's like senior party leadership guy.
He's usually been in like the kind of left I
guess of the like old Democratic leadership, which is not
very far left.

Speaker 3 (01:25:44):
But he fucking voted for this.

Speaker 7 (01:25:46):
John Fetterman, to the surprise of absolutely no one, Kirsten Gillibrand,
to the surprise of absolutely no one. Yeah, Maggie Hassan,
Agnes King, Gary Peters, Brian Schatz, and Janine Shaheen now
notably miss on that list. Tim fucking Kine voted against this.
Do you know how bad a Republican budget thing has

(01:26:07):
to be for Tim fucking kin to vote against it
and be like, hey, guys, what the fuck are you doing?

Speaker 3 (01:26:14):
Yeah? And the thing is like, as a Democrat, the move,
just if you want to get re elected is to
vote against it and then blame them for everything bad
that happens this year because of the budget thing, right
if you have no moral backbone whatsoever. And I'm sure
like there are things in this continuing Resolution which really
screw over rural areas, right, like some of the funding

(01:26:35):
that was allocated. Oh yeah, And like Cain is at least,
I guess astute enough to see that when things get
harder of his constituents, he can go, yes, they did this,
and I voted against it, and you need to return
me to office so I can continue opposing this shit,
which is very cynical approach. Yeah, but then, yeah, we've
just got Chuck Chuck Schumer who just kind of bowed

(01:26:57):
down and kissed the ring.

Speaker 7 (01:27:00):
And you know, the response to this is staggering. I
genuinely I have never seen anything like the kind of
anger I'm seeing it. I I've seen that Schuber for
the past few days. This has happened Friday.

Speaker 3 (01:27:10):
Like Indivisible, which is like a pretty so indivisible.

Speaker 7 (01:27:14):
Is like a sort of NGO thing that's like a
like tries to get it's like a sort of vaguely
progressive thing and tries to get people to vote for
the Democrats.

Speaker 3 (01:27:21):
Yeah, and like register voters and stuff.

Speaker 7 (01:27:24):
Yeah, And they've been getting into fights with the Democratic
leadership because they keep telling people to call their senators
to tell them to oppose bills and nominations, and the
Democrats are like, we don't want to impose bills.

Speaker 3 (01:27:32):
In twenty twenty. In mobilizing the vote in territory, for instance,
like an indivisible to played a really important role, so
like they're not negligible in their power.

Speaker 7 (01:27:44):
No, Yeah, and like they are calling for primary Chruck Schuber,
R slash neoliberal is calling for AOC.

Speaker 3 (01:27:53):
The primary Chuck Schumer.

Speaker 7 (01:27:55):
Do you know how fucked things have to be for
our slash neoliberal to be backing AOC against Chuck Schumer,
like fucking nearer tandin is Agrey with Bertie Sanders criticizing
Schumer for voting for this bill, like this is like,
I I don't know, I think there maybe there are

(01:28:15):
probably are people in the audience here who's like weren't
paying attention enough or like don't remember, or like weren't
old enough to be around for like like the Bernie wars.
But this is like every faction on every side of
like the whole series of fights from like twenty fifteen
and like Bernie's first thing through twenty twenty, even like

(01:28:35):
the mid late twenty twenties, Like all of these people
were on exactly polar opposite side. They fucking hated each other,
and they're all like coming together specifically to agree on
a fuck Chuck Schumer campaign to the point where like
again like Arslaus neoliberal and like Nearer, Tandent, who are
like have been just absolute stalwarts at the party right
for ages are like are.

Speaker 3 (01:28:55):
Backing AOC primarying Chuck Schumer. Yeah, it's a total cultural
victory for the Bernie bros. Is what's happening. It's a
Democratic party.

Speaker 7 (01:29:05):
Well, and again, the Chuck Chuber is the head of
the Democratic Caucus in the Senate.

Speaker 3 (01:29:08):
Yeah, minority leader of the United States Senate.

Speaker 7 (01:29:11):
Yeah, he is, you know, he is unbeliefably powerful, and
I mean, like the people criticizing him.

Speaker 3 (01:29:15):
He got criticized.

Speaker 7 (01:29:17):
There was a joint statement on funding bill in the
Senate from the Democratic minority leader in the fucking House,
Hakim Jeffries, and the Democratic Whipcathleen Clark, and the Caucus
chair peri agular and like Hawkim Jeffries is as ferociously
anti socialist of a politician as there exists in all

(01:29:37):
of Congress. He is like implacably hostile to even like
the most like barraest progressive things whatsoever. He is just
staggeringly opposed to. And they released a joint statement against this, right,
what is sort of happening here, And it's happening fucking
too late to stop anything, But what's happening here is

(01:29:58):
like we are genuinely starting to get a kind of
and I'm seeing this sort of online. We've been I
think we've been seeing the sort of echoes of it
is like, but there's a kind of realignment happening among
you know, obviously this has been being opposed by people
outside the Democratic Party and by a lot of the
Democratic Party's base for ages right and the Democratic Party's base,

(01:30:19):
and also just like people who don't want to get
be ruled by fascist forever have had, you know, incredibly
staunch opposition to all of the collaborationists investment happening. But
what's happening right now is that like the actual like
inside of the Democratic Party, there was a fucking rupture happening,
and inside of the people who are like, you know,
like inside of the politic cost there was a rupture
happening between people who are collaborationists and people who'd like

(01:30:39):
want to be less collaborationist.

Speaker 3 (01:30:41):
And this is to the point where like Nancy Pelosi
came out against this.

Speaker 7 (01:30:46):
Yeah, and the reason they're doing this is because a
lot of these people are fucking terrified because they are
looking at a couple of things. One they're looking at
what the Trump administration is doing, and they're going, holy shit,
Like near A Tandon is looking at them, fucking just
black bagging. It's just like just fucking black bagging Mamu
Khalil and is going like, holy shit, we are maybe
about I mean, it's maybe eight steps away from that

(01:31:08):
happening to be, but that's eight steps that you can
fucking like, that's a path you can walk down. And
this is also these people that are realizing just the
unbelievable anger among just like regular what you would call
sort of like regular liberals who aren't like, like, you
vote for the Democrats, but if you aren't like.

Speaker 3 (01:31:27):
Yeah, they're not like on Twitter with a blue wave emotion.

Speaker 7 (01:31:30):
But the thing is, even the people on Twitter with
a blue wave emoji, and again, like the arch last
neoliberal people are like the most ideologically committed of all
of these people, right, Like even the most unhinged nerds
who are like obsessed with like individual house races and
like very very specific, weird technical policy stuff that allows
them to justify supporting all these unhinged policies, even those

(01:31:53):
people are turning on them. And the reason this is
all happening, and I think this is a very very
important thing to understand about the entire political landscape going forward,
is that one of the core, an extremely important basis
of Donald Trump's support is in the leadership of the
Democratic Party, particularly the Democratic Party in New York, Right Schumer,

(01:32:13):
this is Eric Adams. This is also increasingly becoming true
of people like Gavin Newsom and a lot of the
sort of Democrats out of the Bay to some extent,
And you know, and you can you can see this
in sort of various border states too, where you know,
these people fundamentally are doing this because they fucking agree
with him. That's why why, that's why they're fucking collaborating.

Speaker 3 (01:32:33):
Yeah, or at the very least like and perhaps it's
in a sense worse that they don't agree with him,
but they don't care enough to not like they're doing
it because they think they can personally benefit.

Speaker 7 (01:32:47):
No, I don't think that's true. And my evidence for
why I don't think that's true is I'm going to
read some stuff from from the New York Times interview
that they would chuck Schumer right after he did this. Okay,
So in this interview with the New York Times, he

(01:33:09):
gets asked about Trump cutting four hundred million dollars of
funding for Columbia University for I guess, not like publicly
executing the Palestine protesters.

Speaker 3 (01:33:18):
And again, yeah, Columbia University.

Speaker 7 (01:33:20):
That is an institution that he represents in the Senate, right, Yeah,
Like that's like his that's like his fucking thing. And
his response was, well, obviously they didn't crush the campus
protests hard enough, but cutting four hundred million dollars spending
might hurt students who didn't protest, like maybe, And he's
not even clear about that, right, So if you read
between the lines of what he's saying, his arguments is

(01:33:42):
that it's actually fine for Trump to do all of
these fucking budget cuts of all of these people from
these universities, as long as it's specifically targeting pro Palestinian protesters,
such as anyone who's vaguely pro Palestine. And he also
gets you know, he gets asked about the Trump administration
just straight a black bagging Moo Khalil, and he says, quote,
I don't know all the details yet. They're trying to

(01:34:04):
come out and there'll be a court case which will
determine it. If he broke the law, he should be deported.
If he didn't break the law on which and just
peacefully protested, he should not be deported. It's plain and simple.

Speaker 3 (01:34:15):
I mean, how is it hard to not make an
equivocating statement on that. No, because he agrees with it.
He thinks it's fine. He thinks it's fine.

Speaker 7 (01:34:22):
The Trump administration fucking black bagged this guy, like again,
who is who it was? A permanent US resident. He
thinks that it is okay. That here's the thing, he's
not even disagreeing with the actual literal black bagging. And
I want to point this out, like even if Amu
Khalil like legally committed a crime, like that's not a
fucking deportation thing.

Speaker 3 (01:34:43):
The section of the United States they're using to justify
deporting him is not one that has been used before.
This is not he did not do a felony, and
they're not suggesting that he did do a felony. And
like if Schumer can't find it in himself to condemn that,
like yeah, like folks need to move on because because
he agrees with it, Like that's the thing, Like, yeah,

(01:35:03):
what he is saying here is that he agrees that
if a permanent legal US resident commits any crime, well
doesn't though he's not accused, he's not accused of a crime,
like he's he no, no, that's not's no.

Speaker 7 (01:35:15):
But this is specifically what says Schumer said, quote, if
he broke the law, he should be deported. What his
stance is is that if someone who is a permanent
US resident breaks the law while at a Palestine protest,
even if it is a misdemeanor, even if it is
fucking jaywalking, that they should be deported. That is the
Trump administration line. Like that is it is slightly less

(01:35:36):
than Trump administration line, but that is that is a
genuinely fascist political line. She just straight up agrees with
the administration. He is a slight matter of degree like
off from them, but like he's he just like he's
collaborating because he fucking agrees with them. He agrees with
them both on on the fact that the state should
be used to like destroy anyone who supports Palestine, and

(01:35:59):
she agrees with them on the fucking deportation ship. Because
you know, this was one of the other things that
Democrats have fundamentally aligned with Trump on since twenty twenty
is that fundamentally, like they agree that we need more
immigration controls and we need to do more border violence.
You can see the evidence of this from when they
fucking passed that just unhinged fascist bill to do allow
border state of emergencies.

Speaker 3 (01:36:20):
Yeah, and that's stuff that they proposed and didn't pass
because they were republiants tenty to kill it and then
Biden executive order banning asylum. Like I think what it
comes down to is that for the Democrats, the existence
of people who oppose the genocide in Palestine and the
existence of migrants is seen as inconvenient, and they're prepared
to do away with any rights so as people might have,

(01:36:42):
and even do away with those people rather than engage
with them in any way. Right, they I'm sure, people
like Schuma continue to blame people from both of those
movements for their ass whooping that they took at the
polls in twenty twenty four because they decide, I did
that it was more important to do genocide than it

(01:37:03):
was to listen to Vose in this country rather than listening.
Now they're blaming them, and the only logical way for
them to go is right, and the only logical place
for them to take it is more state violence.

Speaker 6 (01:37:14):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:37:15):
Yeah, But there's another aspect of this too, which the
thing I want to close on, which is okay, So,
why why have the Democrats been shifting so far to
the right since twenty twenty right, and particularly since after
twenty twenty two when they needed to sort of win
it contesta for election. And the answer is that after
twenty twenty all of their politics became about opposing the
uprising because they you know, that there was a period
dream the uprising where they were scared enough that like

(01:37:36):
you get like the Kent cloth shit, and they're like,
you know, and they're talking about like and Biden like
runs on a significantly more left wing platform than like
Kamala Harris did, right, yeah, like because of the particularly
because of the pressure of those protests. Now obviously, like
presidential platforms just lies, right but right, yeah, it's just
likes you need to tell to get the votes.

Speaker 3 (01:37:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:37:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:37:57):
But on the other hand, the fundamental politics of Democratic
Party in the last half a decade has been opposing
the uprising. It's the thing that's, you know, behind all
of their turn to tough on crime politics. It's the
thing behind their their's sort of anti immigrant politics, the
thing behind the turns they've been taking on trans politics.
And the problem with this particularly like the anti black,
anti crime shit and the anti immigrant stuff, you know

(01:38:18):
who else. His entire politics like came into the fucking
political sphere as the right wing reaction to the uprising.
Oh wait, Donald Trump. Donald Trump walked down the fucking
escalator in twenty fifteen, immediately in the wake of the
giant uprisings in Baltimore in twenty fifteen, which I think
people have sort of memory holds, like Ferguson and Baltimore.
He like, it's like right after Baltimore that Trump fucking

(01:38:41):
comes down the escalator and that and people forget how fundamentally,
the right wing reaction to those protests deranged people who
even the Tea Party hadn't pushed like far enough to
vote for Donald Trump.

Speaker 3 (01:38:54):
It was like it was reaction to this. Yeah, that's
when we saw the oath Keepers for the first time
as well, Like this kind of militant right really grew
dramatically in response to that.

Speaker 7 (01:39:04):
Yeah, And this is the sort of fundamental thing that's
going on, is that there's now an entire class of
people who are running the Democratic Party.

Speaker 1 (01:39:12):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:39:12):
This is a fucking Chuck Schumer. He is, like, I mean,
quite possibly the most powerful Democrat in the country, and
he is just straight up a collaborationist.

Speaker 3 (01:39:20):
Yeah, it might legit become that like AOC is more
powerful than Chuck Schumer in the next few weeks, you know,
he is that the reaction against Chuck Schumer from establishment
Democrats is stronger than anything I've ever seen from them.

Speaker 7 (01:39:34):
He lost Seth Moulton, which I didn't even think was possible. Yeah,
But I think there's there's one more important note to
sort of say here, which is that, like, you know,
the response to this that I've largely been seeing is
everyone going, Okay, we need a primary these people. Okay,
are you looking at the rate at which stuff is
happening in this country? Like you do you think that
we are going to be able to wait until the

(01:39:54):
fucking primaries?

Speaker 3 (01:39:55):
Yeah, six years the seventh places, right.

Speaker 7 (01:39:57):
Yeah, until we can like a t to fucking do
shit here, Like absolutely not. No, they were like there
literally is regardless of what you think about electoralism as
a strategy, there is literally not time to wait until
the next election cycle. Like again, they have defunded the
nuke police for the third time. So the opposition to
this isn't going to come from inside of the electoral

(01:40:18):
system because again that ever coats are being run by
collaborators and there's not enough time to fucking oust them.
So if you if you want this to not continue,
you were going to You're going to have to find
ways to do organizing outside of that system. We have
approximately one million episodes about this. You can also go
back to my you already know how to organize episode.

Speaker 3 (01:40:37):
But yeah, look, call your centator if you want too.
But if that's the net total of your political activity,
then like right now, it's probably not going to make
a difference in time, and really consider it it's the
most useful use of your time. Yeah, and maybe make
some beans or sew something nice for someone instead. Well
as well, you could listen to it while you sew
something nice. You could call them while you're cooking, you'll beans.

(01:41:01):
Hell yeah, well this has been It could happen here. Yeah,
down with the collaborationists. Yeah, fuck them. Yeah, absolutely fucking fun.
Chuck Schume in particular.

Speaker 8 (01:41:34):
This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. Tesla
derangement syndrome is sweeping the nation the last week. On
March eleventh, President Donald Trump starred in a thirty five
minute Tesla commercial broadcast live from the White House driveway
to news stations across the country. This presidential ad campaign

(01:41:56):
started with Trump announcing that he himself would buy a
Tesla in some of his unique advisor Elon Musk, whose
business ventures have taken a sour turn as of late,
to assist Trump with his purchase, The South Lawn was
temporarily turned into a Tesla showroom with five different models
parked in a row to choose which shiny new car

(01:42:18):
to buy. A significant portion of this Tesla sales event
was spent by Trump praising Elon Musk's work at DOGE,
as well as Elon's business ventures, and complaining about people
treating Elon Musk unfairly, saying that he quote shouldn't be
penalized because he's a patriot.

Speaker 9 (01:42:40):
My guess, I'm just telling people, this man is a
great patriot, and you should cherish him. You should cherish him.

Speaker 10 (01:42:47):
You know.

Speaker 6 (01:42:47):
I have a little statement.

Speaker 9 (01:42:48):
We have to take care of our high IQ people
because we don't have too many of them.

Speaker 1 (01:42:53):
We got to take care of him.

Speaker 8 (01:42:56):
As for the cars, Trump mentioned that he actually already
a cyber truck for his granddaughter Kai, which Trump called
the coolest design, but this time he chose a red
Tesla model. S Upon climbing in the car that secret
service does not allow him to operate, Trump remarked, Wow,
everything's computer. At the end of the live streamed Tesla commercial,

(01:43:21):
Trump said that he would pay with a check, though
for the duration of the event, Trump served as both
buyer and salesman as he read off from a sheet
of notes on pricing and features for various Tesla models,
like how quote Tesla's can be purchased for as low
as two ninety nine a month.

Speaker 9 (01:43:38):
So I'm out of information that's put into priv Yeah,
I want to make a good deal here, you know,
I do notice this they have won, which is thirty
five thousand dollars, which is pretty low. What is that
all about?

Speaker 8 (01:43:52):
This whole charade was an explicit attempt to rescue Tesla's
plummeting stock price and help foster a new demographic of
electric car buyers, anti wo conservatives looking to show support
of Elon Musk, Doge, and the new Trump administration through
consumer purchases. Trump himself said that he hoped doing ads
for Tesla on the White House driveway would help Tesla's

(01:44:14):
stock value and encouraged others to buy Elon's cars. The
next day, Tesla shares did rise four percent, but are
now trending back down amid a global wave of protests
against Tesla four Musk's involvement with Doge and the Trump administration,
as well as Elon's Nazi curious behavior. Trump has tried

(01:44:37):
to face this wave of hate against his new best friend,
head On truthing on his platform of choice Truth social
last week quote, Elon Musk is putting it on the
line in order to help our nation, and he is
doing a fantastic job. But the radical left lunatics, as
they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla,

(01:45:00):
one of the world's greatest automakers and Elon's quote unquote baby,
in order to attack and do harm to Elon and
everything he stands for. They tried to do it to
me at the twenty twenty four presidential ballot box. But
how did that work out?

Speaker 3 (01:45:16):
Unquote.

Speaker 8 (01:45:17):
There's a lot to impact there, from Trump calling Tesla
Elon's baby, despite Elon carrying around his baby at the
White House near twenty four to seven, to bizarrely declaring
protest boycotts as illegal. Not only has Trump called the
Tesla boycott illegal, but during the White House car commercial,

(01:45:37):
he announced that vandalism of Tesla's will be labeled as
domestic terrorism, promising that perpetrators will quote unquote go through hell.
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said, quote ongoing and heinous
acts of violence against Tesla by radical leftist activists are
nothing short of domestic terror unquote. There's certainly has been

(01:46:00):
a surge of violence targeted at Tesla vehicles and dealerships,
which I will discuss in detail later this episode, but
for the past months, there's also been a wave of
nonviolent protests and mass mobilization against Musk and Tesla at
dealerships all around the country and even overseas, which the
aforementioned boycott is a part of the quote unquote Tesla

(01:46:23):
takedown protests. Call to quote sell your Tesla's, dump your stock,
join the picket lines. We're tanking Tesla's stock price to
stop Musk unquote. Their website has a map of Tesla
dealerships around the world and a list of upcoming protests
at various locations, which can be searched through via zip code.

(01:46:44):
There have been reoccurring weekly protests at dealerships every Saturday
in cities across the country, with demonstrations at more than
fifty Tesla showrooms attracting crowds of between dozens to a thousand,
like in tucsona, Arizona. The boycotts and public demonstrations certainly
aren't helping Tesla's stock price and international reputation, but they

(01:47:08):
are not the only display of displeasure directed at Elon
and Tesla, as others are employing more direct methods to
damage the company. Beyond peaceful protests, picketings, short lived dealership occupations,
and waiving anti Elon Musk signs outside Tesla stores. Tesla

(01:47:29):
vehicles themselves have become the nation's hottest graffiti mural service. Actually,
around the world, people have been using Tesla's to scribble
epithets against Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Even some eco
conscious owners of Tesla vehicles have defaced their own cars
with stickers that read I bought this before he was

(01:47:49):
a Nazi, which, hey, you can also put on your
old Kanye West records. Speaking of Kanye West, some individuals
have taken to marking Teslaus with a swastika, which at
first raised eyebrows and confused some investigators as typically when
there's swastika graffiti, it's supposed to be anti Semitic in nature,

(01:48:11):
whereas in this case, based on external factors, this is
most likely a public attempt to link Elon Musk and
Tesla with Nazism, following Musk's own anti Semitic posts, fall
right politics, and the whole salute thing. Stickers and flyers
have spread from the UK to San Francisco, reading don't

(01:48:32):
buy a swasti car, but it's not all stickers and
graffiti we'll talk about the other Tesla attacks after this
ad break.

Speaker 3 (01:48:50):
Okay, we're back.

Speaker 8 (01:48:52):
One of the most bizarre instances of Tesla vandalism was
when forty four wheels were stolen off twelve sold Tesla's
in a Texas parking lot on Valentine's Day. Investigators say
they don't currently have any leads since the nearby security
cameras weren't recording and the Tesla cameras were not active.

(01:49:13):
These Teslas were actually being stored in an Amazon parking
lot six miles away from their home dealership. Allegedly, Tesla
is contracting with other businesses to store their cars. A
midwave of vandalism at Tesla dealerships. On March eleventh, wheels
were damaged on multiple vehicles at a Tesla dealership in Dedham, Massachusetts.
In Meyers, California, Tesla superchargers keep being sabotaged, with epoxy

(01:49:38):
found in the charging cable and anti elon musk graffiti
with chargers marked with swastikas. Seven Tesla charging stations at
a shopping center were arsened outside of Boston, Massachusetts, on
March third, and on March seventh, Maltov cocktails were thrown
at a Tesla charging station in South Carolina with long

(01:49:59):
live Ukraine on the ground in red paint. A twenty
four year old man was taken into custody on March thirteenth.
But it's not just wheel thefts and supercharger sabotage. Tesla
dealerships have been a target for anti musk graffiti, vandalism,
and armed attacks. Some commentators have been conflating the picketing

(01:50:21):
protests and graffiti with actual instances of arson and property destruction,
people like libs of TikTok labeling simple spray paint as
quote unquote trans violence or trans terrorism, which is not
to say some people aren't taking a more destructive approach
towards their elon musk grievances. Whether that qualifies as terrorism

(01:50:43):
is another issue though. On January twentieth, a man wearing
black pulling a wheelie cart approached a Tesla dealership in Salem, Oregon,
and threw a Molotov cocktail at a cyber truck. Surveillance
footage shows the man pull out ignite and throw three
more Molotov cocktails from his rolling cart before realizing an

(01:51:03):
eyewitness is charging their Tesla nearby. The man in black
pulls out a suppressor mounted AR style rifle and points
it at the witness as they drive away, before continuing
to throw more Molotov cocktails at parked vehicles. A rock
was used to break the glass of the dealership showroom,
and another Molotov cocktail was thrown inside the building. A

(01:51:24):
criminal complaint claims that this incident caused around five hundred
thousand dollars in damage to the dealership, including damaging seven
Tesla vehicles. A month later, on February nineteenth, the same
dealership was hit again, this time with gunshots breaking through
windows and hitting vehicles. In early March, a forty one

(01:51:44):
year old man was arrested in connection to both incidents,
with court documents claiming fingerprints were identified on recovered glass
bottles used for explosive devices and the suspects car was
identified in footage captured by a police car parked near
the Tesla dealership a bit north of Salem. In Tigered, Oregon,
there have been two incidents of gunshots being fired at

(01:52:05):
a testa dealership just this month. A Tigered police press
release reads quote for the second time in a week,
Tigered police are investigating shots fired at a Tesla dealership
Early this morning, March thirteen, twenty twenty five, around four
fifteen am, more than a dozen shots were fired at
the dealership, causing extensive damage to cars and showroom windows.

Speaker 3 (01:52:28):
Unquote.

Speaker 8 (01:52:29):
There's also been a series of incidents at a Tesla
dealership in northern Colorado. A spree of anti musk graffiti
and vandalism started in January, with Molotov cocktail style and
scendiary devices found on the scene. On February seventh, police
responded to a call about graffiti and possible arson at
the dealership. A few days later, a security guard confronted

(01:52:51):
an individual spray painting the front windows of the dealership,
and on February twenty fourth, a suspect was arrested at
the dealership, a li a, llegedly in possession of bottles
and gasoline.

Speaker 3 (01:53:03):
She was charged.

Speaker 8 (01:53:04):
In late February, another person was arrested allegedly in connection
to a similar, yet unrelated incident at the very same
dealership in Loveland, Colorado, after molotov cocktail style device was
found burning between two Tesla vehicles on March seventh. Rocks
were also used to damage both the building and multiple

(01:53:25):
cars at around eleven pm on Sunday, March ninth, four
cyber trucks erupted into flames at a Tesla parking lot
in Seattle, Washington. On Monday, March seventeenth, two cyber trucks
were set on fire at a dealership in Kansas City.
Here's how local TV news reported the incident.

Speaker 11 (01:53:44):
Around eleven pm, officers were called to a fire at
a car.

Speaker 3 (01:53:48):
Lot car Hire Dealer shifts in the parking lot.

Speaker 11 (01:53:51):
AKCPD officer was close by when he noticed smoke coming
from a Tesla cybertruck. The officer used his fire extinguisher
to try to put out the flames, but the fire
continued to spread. CASEFD was called into help.

Speaker 12 (01:54:04):
Our crews got on scene and the fire was in
two cyber trucks. It had spread from one to the other.
We were able to get water on them. Copey, this
amounts for water. Get the fire out.

Speaker 7 (01:54:15):
Now.

Speaker 11 (01:54:15):
Federal agencies are getting involved. We saw an ATF officer
with a bag of evidence. They say this incident follow
similar reports from across the country of violence at Tesla dealerships.

Speaker 9 (01:54:27):
I mean you're eventually going to get caught right.

Speaker 11 (01:54:29):
Reaction to this incident has been mixed with some condemning
the crime and others who see it as a former
protest towards the automaker.

Speaker 8 (01:54:37):
And just a few days ago, on March eighteenth, an
individual addressed in all black fired gunshots and through maltov cocktails,
damaging five cars at a Tesla service center in Las Vegas.
The Las Vegas Review Journal writes that the FBI Joint
Terrorism Task Force is investigating the matter. Quote agents arrived
at the scene early Tuesday, according to FBI by Agent

(01:55:00):
in Charge Spencer Evans. Evans said that while it was
too early to call the attack in active terrorism, it
had quote unquote some of the hallmarks and a potential
political agenda unquote. Now this particular instant in Las Vegas
really got to Elon Musk, who spent the rest of
the day complaining on Twitter that Tesla has quote done

(01:55:23):
nothing to deserve these evil attacks unquote. Attacks on Tesla
have not been contained to the United States. In early
March twelve, Teslas parked outside of a dealership in southern
France were set ablaze, and outside Berlin, unknown persons set
fire to a high voltage transmission line on a power pylon,

(01:55:45):
cutting power to a massive Tesla manufacturing plant in Germany
for multiple days. This follows a series of direct actions
and a forest encampment where the Tesla gigafactory seeks to
expand by leveling two hundred and fifty acres of forest.
The German forest encampment lasted nine months before being successfully
raided by police this last November, with police destroying treehouses

(01:56:08):
and trashing tents. After the whole My Heart goes out
to You salute and subsequent endorsement of AfD, Musk's reputation
in Germany specifically is suffering steep decline. To quote the
Washington Post quote, Tesla stock has fallen by more than
thirty five percent since Trump's inauguration, and last year the

(01:56:28):
company suffered its first annual sales drop in more than
a decade. In Germany, Tesla car sales plummeted by seventy
six percent in February compared with a year earlier, according
to figures released Wednesday, and some owners have expressed buyer's
remorse over owning a car some now see as a
symbol of far right politics, a stark departure from the

(01:56:51):
environmental consciousness it once epitomized, and we'll talk more about
how these protests are affecting Tesla's international resputation after this
ad break. Okay, we're back right. After the November election,

(01:57:16):
Tesla stock surged to a never before seen high of
one point five four trillion dollars, but as Musk's direct
involvement in the government was ramped up, Tesla has fallen
to about seven hundred and seventy seven billion. The massively
inflated value of Tesla stock is directly related to the
public perception of Elon Musk and Tesla stock greatly determines

(01:57:41):
Musk's own net worth, which is down more than one
hundred and forty billion from this past to December peak.
When Elon's reputation gets damaged, so does Tesla's and vice versa.
Tesla stock has been declining for nine consecutive weeks. JP
Morgan analysts recently said that Tesla has lost so much

(01:58:02):
value so quick that there really isn't any comparison.

Speaker 3 (01:58:05):
Quote.

Speaker 8 (01:58:06):
We struggle to think of anything analogous in the history
of the automotive industry in which a brand has lost
so much value so quickly unquote, and Forbes writes quote
last week, JP Morgan analysts described the recent melting of
Tesla's perception, especially in pockets of the world in which
Musk inserted himself into right wing politics, such as Germany.

(01:58:27):
About fifty three percent of respondents to a CNN poll
published last week said that they hold a negative opinion
of Musk, compared to roughly thirty five percent with a
positive view and eleven percent with no take unquote. Overseas,
Tesla sales in general are way down, even as electric
vehicle purchasing is going up. New data from the European

(01:58:49):
Automotive Manufacturers Association show that Tesla registrations in the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland,
and the UK have dropped by forty five percent when
you compare January twenty twenty four to January twenty twenty five,
and this decline from Tesla comes as overall electric vehicle
sales have increased thirty seven percent in the same January

(01:59:13):
twenty four to twenty five head to head comparison. China's
own evs are surpassing Tesla in global production and sales
in China, which is a huge EV market, and Chinese
manufacturer BYD is on track to overtake Tesla in global
sales this year, and so if you consider the Tesla

(01:59:34):
protests as a sort of public display of unhappiness with
Tesla and Elon Musk, combined with all these other economic
factors impacting the automaker, if these trends continue, Musk and
Tesla could be in real trouble. After the Las Vegas
attack this Tuesday, Musk went onto Fox News to explain
the situation as he sees it.

Speaker 4 (01:59:56):
Yeah, it turns out when you take away people's you
know what, the money they're receiving. Fortunately, they get very
upset and they basically want to kill me because I'm
stopping their fraud. And they want to hurt Tesla because
they're stopping this terrible waste and corruption in the government.

(02:00:18):
And well, I guess they're bad people. Bad people will
do bad things.

Speaker 8 (02:00:26):
Essentially, Tesla is seen as an extension of Elon, and
right now, Elon is seen as an extension of the
Trump government, and even if people feel powerless to stop
the government, hurting Tesla is seen as a much more
achievable goal with ripple effects that reach Elon, Doje and
the Trump administration. And compared to protesting the government. Tesla

(02:00:50):
is a soft target, with cars and dealerships all across
the country, not justin state capitals or in Washington, d C.
Whereas government facilities are to hard targets by both being
less accessible and more protected. GP Morgan analysts wrote, quote,
mister Musk's work with the Department of Government Efficiency has

(02:01:10):
proven controversial domestically, and while as many members of the
political right may be pleased as those on the left
are displeased, the effect on Tesla sales seems nevertheless negative.

Speaker 3 (02:01:23):
Unquote.

Speaker 8 (02:01:24):
Musk is certainly trying to make the best of it
by tapping into the previously untapped ev market of mega conservatives,
And though the Tesla brand is gaining popularity amongst conservatives,
that demographic is just far less likely than liberals to
actually switch from a gas to electric car. Still, the

(02:01:44):
President and conservative media have been doing a lot of
free Tesla commercials. Last week, Sean Hannity announced on air
that he would be buying a Tesla.

Speaker 1 (02:01:54):
I don't believe in cancelation.

Speaker 13 (02:01:55):
I don't believe in cancel culture, you know, and I
know maybe it's not going to make up a difference,
but you know what, after I drove my friends Tesla,
I went, and I already picked out the one I want.
It's called the the what is it called the s plaid?
And do you realize this thing? An electric vehicle has

(02:02:16):
one thousand and six horsepower and goes from zero to
sixty two in two point zero seconds. And this thing
rips and you can go about four hundred miles without
a charge. And I don't drive enough to go further
than four hundred miles, So I'm good. And maybe it's
just a gesture on my part, and I like it.
I like new technology, but it's just a way of saying,

(02:02:38):
you know, look what they're doing to this guy.

Speaker 8 (02:02:41):
On Friday, March fourteenth, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that
she is opening an investigation into the attacks against Tesla. Quote,
if you're going to touch a Tesla, go to a dealership,
do anything, you better watch out because we're coming after you.

Speaker 3 (02:02:56):
Unquote.

Speaker 8 (02:02:57):
She released a statement on Tuesday after the Las Vegas arson, writing, quote,
the swarm of violent attacks on Tesla property is nothing
short of domestic terrorism unquote. Musk just can't seem to
understand that tons of regular people really hate him now

(02:03:18):
and instead has to invent some grand conspiracy against him.

Speaker 3 (02:03:23):
Here's how he explained it on Fox News.

Speaker 4 (02:03:26):
Yeah, I mean it's really come as quite a shock
to me that there's this level of really hatred and
violence from the left. I thought the left of the
Democrats were supposed to be the party of empathy, the
party of caring, and yet they're burning down cars, They're
fire bombing dealerships, they're firing bullets into dealerships, They're just

(02:03:51):
you know, smashing up Tesla's. Tesla is a peaceful company.
We've never done anything hopeful. I've never done anything hawful.
I've only done productive things.

Speaker 3 (02:04:00):
So I think we just have.

Speaker 6 (02:04:03):
A deranged it.

Speaker 4 (02:04:06):
There's some kind of mental illness thing going on here,
because this doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 1 (02:04:11):
Yeah, I think there are larger forces at work as well.

Speaker 4 (02:04:13):
I mean, I don't know who's funding it and who's coordinating,
because this is crazy. I've never seen anything like this.

Speaker 8 (02:04:20):
On X the Everything app. Musk is much more open
about who he suspects are these larger forces. Musk has
spread claims that quote unquote multiple Democrat NGOs are coordinating
quote attacks on Tesla dealerships, staff, and vehicles. Last night,
a number of cyber trucks were torched in Seattle. Democrats

(02:04:42):
are becoming increasingly more desperate and violent.

Speaker 3 (02:04:45):
Unquote.

Speaker 8 (02:04:46):
People in Musk's replies posted about how protesters are being
paid by quote Democrat fundraising platform Act Blue, which is
funded by Soros.

Speaker 3 (02:04:57):
Unquote.

Speaker 8 (02:04:58):
Act Blue seems to be the rights new favorite conspiracy
topic from claiming that you said was illegally laundering money
to Democrats through Act Blue, and now that Act Blue
itself has the ability to funnel money to activist groups.
Act Blue doesn't give away money or directly fund anything.

(02:05:18):
It's a donation based platform for registered organizations. This is
like saying go fundme paid.

Speaker 3 (02:05:24):
For your top surgery.

Speaker 8 (02:05:26):
No people donated on a fundraising platform. But nevertheless, this
claim is going gangbusters on X the Everything app and
being boosted by Musk and his associates. A popular right
wing politics account on X called insurrection Barbie posted that quote.
Attacks on the Tesla dealerships, which have been linked to

(02:05:48):
the Indivisible Project, a left of Stalin ngo that organizes
street protests for the Democratic Party with shady prepaid debit
cards that they run through Act Blue, are committing economic
terrorism meant to Tank Tesla's stock and drive a wedge
between Musk and Trump.

Speaker 3 (02:06:07):
Unquote.

Speaker 8 (02:06:10):
Elon himself has claimed that a mysterious investigation quote unquote
has found quote five Act Blue funded groups responsible for
the Tesla protests, Troublemakers, Disruption Project, Rise and Resist, Indivisible Project,
and Democratic Socialists of America. Act Blue funders include George Soros,

(02:06:33):
Reed Hoffman, Herbert Sandler, Patricia Bowman, and Leah Hunt Hendrix.
If you know anything about this, please post in the replies.
Thanks Elon unquote. Now, the main organizations behind the Tesla
takedown protests, two activist groups called the Troublemakers and the

(02:06:53):
Disruption Project, don't even fundraise on Act Blue, that they
have no affiliation, but that hasn't stopped Elon from targeting
specific activists and accusing them of committing crimes simply for
organizing pickets outside stores, meanwhile invoking the old antisemitic George
Soros conspiracy as Elon himself has funneled hundreds of millions

(02:07:16):
of dollars to right wing politicians this past year, and
has threatened to primary any Republican Congressman who doesn't cave
on Trump's agenda. So anyway, that is what's happening with
Tesla derangement syndrome all across the country and even the world.
Every day it feels like we are getting closer and

(02:07:37):
closer to the cool zone.

Speaker 3 (02:07:39):
See you on the other side, Oh Lord, that the

(02:08:03):
coming has begun, The coming has begun. This is that
could happen here.

Speaker 8 (02:08:09):
Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the
White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.
I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout,
and Robert Evans.

Speaker 2 (02:08:19):
Yes, and as James Stout just noted, the coming has begun,
so we're going to also begin.

Speaker 8 (02:08:27):
This episode we are covering the week of March twelve
to March nineteen. Obviously, the most important piece of news
right now is that Minnesota Republican state Senator Justin aich Lord,
who just last week sponsored or co sponsored a bill
that that legally recognizes Trump derangement syndrome as a mental
illness which disqualifies you from possessing firearms, was literally that

(02:08:49):
same day rested in a sting operation for trying to
meet up with and have sex with a minor.

Speaker 3 (02:08:57):
Like literally he was like to have been texting this.

Speaker 2 (02:09:01):
He thought what he thought was a kid, but what
was really a federal agent while he was finalizing the language.

Speaker 8 (02:09:08):
It's it's it's truly phenomenal. Pedal club theory never fails. Anyway,
Let's move on to the actual important stress, which is
mostly bad.

Speaker 3 (02:09:19):
This has been a pretty rough week. Yeah, it's been
a pretty rough week.

Speaker 6 (02:09:21):
It sucked.

Speaker 3 (02:09:22):
Yes, So I guess I'll turn to James Stout me, Hi, everyone, hija,
Well the day you're listening, it's it's neuro's neurosis bab yeah, yeah,
Burdish listeners.

Speaker 6 (02:09:32):
See.

Speaker 3 (02:09:33):
So I want to talk today about rendition, and this
has been reported his deportation. Like, I guess it technically
falls within deportation. But what's happening here is that the
Trump administration has begun renditioning people who it accuses of
being members of trender Ragua, which is a Venezuelan gang
and the La Mara Sabbath the MS thirteen as they're

(02:09:54):
known here.

Speaker 6 (02:09:54):
Right.

Speaker 3 (02:09:55):
It has done this based on something called the Alien
Enemy to Act. The way it's able to use the
Alien Enemies Act is that it has designated these gangs
as foreign terrorist organizations rather than as like international crime organizations,
and it's usually Alien Enemies Act to expedite their removal.
We spoke about the Alien Enemies Act in a podcast

(02:10:16):
that I made last November with Robin Sophe about parts
of the Lord that Trump administration might use for its
mass deportation agenda. They're now using this one, and very briefly,
it's a two hundred and twenty six year old piece
of legislation that hasn't been used since World War Two,
when it was used to justifying tournament camps, which were
a bad thing. These people aren't being deported back to Venezuela, right.

(02:10:39):
The US doesn't have relations with the Moduro regime, although
it has deported people back to Venezuela on an airline
that was previously sanctioned, which could now land in the
US for the express purpose of deportations, which is great. Instead,
they're being sent to Al Salvador. They're being sent there
with no trial or hearing or seemingly right to appeal.

(02:11:00):
When they get to El Salvador, they've been parade in
front of video cameras. Very degrading treatment. Right. Their hair
is being shaped, sort of being walked with their heads
forced down, they're being filmed on their knees while all
their hair and facial hair is removed, and then they're
being sent to second If you're not familiar with this,
it was the subject of State Department human rights reports

(02:11:22):
very recently, and now we are sending people there. It's
a mega prison in El Salvador. It roughly translates terrorism
confinement or terrorism detention center. I guess it's been very
recently built by Bokel who's the president of El Salvador,
and it's part of his Supermanodoro like Iron Fist. Super
Iron Fist would be the way you were translated. I guess.

(02:11:43):
It is routinely criticized by human rights organizations for the
disgusting conditions of people are kept in right, the United
States government intended to send three hundred people there, and
in return it paid six million dollars to El Salvador
for the cost of their detention. At the time that
I wrote this, two hundred and thirty eight people who

(02:12:03):
were accused of being part of trendell our work was
sent there, and then twenty three who accused of being
part of MS thirty. They were removed on flights the trumpdministrations,
claiming they were removed before a district court judge in
DC blocked their removals. But there are a series of
timelines that you can see online, some of which will
be linked in the source of this episode, would suggest

(02:12:24):
that they were in the air when he blocked their removals. Nonetheless,
the judge very explicitly said, I'm quoting here. Any plane
containing these folks that is going to take off or
is in the air needs to be returned to the
United States. This is something that you need to make
sure is complied with immediately. This did not happen. The
planes continued traveling to Ossabadoid, stopped in Honduras, and then

(02:12:45):
these people were paraded before the cameras, right, and they're
now presumably being detained in this prison, which doesn't let
basic s ender the human rights. The government has given
various reasons for ignoring this ruling from the judge. Press
Sextuary Caroline leave It claimed that there was quote no
lawful basis for it. Obviously that the process here is,

(02:13:06):
if you don't believe then judicial ruling is correct, you
stop doing the thing and appeal it. You don't just
keep doing the thing and say like, oh, well, I
don't believe you. It's not true. Obviously, this only matters
in so far as the judge can enforce his decision.
They also claimed in court that the verbal order that
the judge gave is not the same as a written one,
and they claim that because the flights where every international waters,

(02:13:26):
this was a foreign policy matter, and that the judge
couldn't intervene in a foreign policy matter. That's a power
of this reserve to the executive.

Speaker 8 (02:13:34):
I mean, like all of these justifications are really like
freaky in terms of constitutional power and stuff.

Speaker 3 (02:13:39):
Yeah, this is there are fringes on the flag, so
Admiralty Court apply is kind of done.

Speaker 8 (02:13:43):
Yeah, But specifically that last one, being like it doesn't
count because we're over international waters is like, yeah, super
frightening in terms of like human rights abuse.

Speaker 2 (02:13:54):
This that's not the way anything works, especially since it
was like a US airline.

Speaker 3 (02:13:59):
Yeah yeah, and in terms of yeah, you basically don't
have human rights because like it's they're forcing a loophole
that doesn't exist in the same way that George W.
Bush did in the in the early two thousands with
Guantanamo Bay. He was never stopped from doing it.

Speaker 6 (02:14:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:14:15):
Yeah, well, I I honestly I think I think the
thing that this is closer to is the other things.
So I think Guantanamo Bay is the one that gets remembered.
But the other part of the CIA torture program was
the US would just ship people off to places like Syria. Yeah, yeah, Syria.
Egypt is Syria and the egypt biggest Yeah maybe yeah, yeah,

(02:14:37):
we did need you to.

Speaker 2 (02:14:39):
Syria's torture program had largely been cobbled together by a
former SS guy.

Speaker 3 (02:14:44):
It's all, It's very good.

Speaker 6 (02:14:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:14:45):
I also want to read a line from the legal
argument that Trump's lawyers made before this judge, because it
is fucking horrifying. Quote, enemy aliens are not entitled to
seek any relief or protection in the country that doesign
get the enemy is absent dispensation by the president c
Citizens Protection League. And then in parentheses noting common law

(02:15:06):
ruling that alien enemies have no rights, no privileges unless
by the king's special favor. So every single part that
is horrifying. Also horrifying is the fact that if you
actually look up the common lawal citation, the next words
after king special favor is in a time of war.

Speaker 3 (02:15:20):
Yeah, so yeah, that's the idea here, right, that we're
a war with these foreign terrorist organizations and these are
essentially like spies or yeah, and this is this is
this thing.

Speaker 7 (02:15:30):
We're like, well, no, obviously we're not like that. We
don't have there's no state of war, Like, no state
of wars have ever been declared. But because of the
way the War on Terror sort of functioned, they're they're
they're trying to claim these things. And then again like
the fact that they're saying that anyone they declare an
alien has literally no protections at all in the country,
no rights at all can be anything can be done
to them. It's unless specifically the president decides that they

(02:15:52):
have rights. Is unbelievably hideous. It is pure, pure state
of exception, the total fac shit. It's fucking horrifying.

Speaker 3 (02:16:03):
Yeah, and it's entirely unconstitutional, right, Like, you don't have
to be a radically left person to believe that humans
have rights. Yeah, I want to really briefly, like one
of the criteria that was used here so so ice criteria,
so they have to have two identifying signs to be
classified as a gang member. One of them that has
been used very heavily. Here is tattoos. We know from

(02:16:23):
court filings that one man, Barrios, he has a football tattoo, right,
like a tattoo of a football with a crown on
it is this diocelic god underneath it was supposed to
be I guess similar like a play on the logo
of Al Madrid. But they've used this to claim that
it's evidence he's a member of a gang. Gangs like
tender Agua don't have like gang signed tattoos, right, Yeah,

(02:16:44):
but they're smarter than that, Like they've seen what's happened
to gangs like MS thirteen because who do. Like Madras,
Central American gangs have have had these things like as
part of their tradition for a while, and they've been
used heavily by law enforcement. I remember Christmas Eve twenty
twenty three. I was in the desert with my friends
and a large number of my joints across that day.

(02:17:05):
I remember meeting a Venezuela man who was like covered
in tattoos. They had to toe very heavy tattooed. That
dude spent the entire day building a shelter for someone
else's sick kid and then slept by himself in the
freezing cold outside, and like, I know, I've been thinking
about that guy a lot because under this ruling, right,
like just his appearance of having tattoos would have him

(02:17:26):
classified as a terrorist. And like when thousands of Americans
living within an hour of that place did nothing, and
that little girl who was sick had nowhere to sleep,
like this guy took it upon himself to help, even
when he himself was in a difficult place, And it
just really makes me kind of sick. I think that
this is where we're at now.

Speaker 2 (02:17:47):
Yeah, no, I mean it's it's it's a damning indictment
of the character of people who are the voter base
in this coatttery, And it's a damning indictment of like
what particularly liberals in the left failed to stop because
this was a this was a train that we could
see coming for a while, like the propaganda campaign against

(02:18:08):
these folks, yeah, and a necessary ingredient, and the Republicans
getting their way on this was democratic politicians, and you know,
to be entirely fair, quite a few prominent thought leaders
on the left absolutely folding and not just not just
failing to like counterpoint this stuff, but like diving in

(02:18:30):
on it because they either had prejudice of their own
or they saw it as like an opportunity. But like,
you know, the whole nativist deal is just disgusting. Yeah, yeah,
I don't know what else to say. I can't just
keep yelling about it.

Speaker 3 (02:18:45):
Yeah, it's not all a slippery slope. And I'm not
saying that they're both as bad as each other, because
what's happening now is much worse than anything that happened previously.
But like, yes, when we could detain people, including little
children outside and we could leave them there in the snow,
and like little babies could be shift ring, and I
could be giving away my own coat almost every day
I was out there because I was worried someone's baby

(02:19:05):
was going to die of hypothermia, we kind of conceded
that these people didn't have rights, right and the Democratic
Party let that happen, and people on the left let
that happen. And that is a stepping stone on the
pathway to where we're at now.

Speaker 2 (02:19:19):
Yep, just as like with all the shit that's that's
happening right now, like in terms of like the disappearing
of political opponents and whatnot, Like you can draw a
line from that from like the Patriot Act, you know,
from Obama targeting a US citizen in I think Afghanistan. Like,
there's all of these are like obviously things were not

(02:19:41):
nearly as bad as they are right now in those administrations,
but like they're not unrelated. You know, this kind of
unitary executive theory is a through line through the last
several administrations, and if anyone had pushed back prior to
this point, Trump wouldn't be able to do a.

Speaker 6 (02:19:58):
Lot of what he's doing. Yep.

Speaker 3 (02:20:01):
What we are doing is pivoting to ads. Yeah, right now.

Speaker 2 (02:20:17):
We're back and we're talking Ukraine Ukraine. I'm sorry that
I shouldn't Ukraine if you want to, Yeah, I don't
know why I did anyway. So, if you've been kind
of paying attention over the last month or so, we've
had a little odyssey in terms of US Russia Ukraine relations,

(02:20:38):
and the gist of it is that everybody claims to
want an end to the fighting.

Speaker 3 (02:20:43):
You know, at least off and on.

Speaker 2 (02:20:45):
Putin has kind of like made some motions to that
has absolutely not acted as if this is something he
particularly cares about. Trump clearly does want a ceasefire because
he wants to be able to take credit for it.
And Zelenski also clearly wants to cease fire. But there's
been some kind of some pretty significant like hold ups.
One of them has been around Ukrainian minerals. And you know,

(02:21:10):
in February you had the administration talking a lot about
how the US was going to gain control of Ukraine's
minerals in order to pay us back for our support
of their war effort. And Zelensky drew a very firm line,
as he often does, like no, I'm not gonna You're
not just going to get all of this, all of
our country's minerals. And I should note here that like

(02:21:32):
this is a fairly significant issue in global terms. It's
estimated that Ukraine has about five percent of the planet's
critical raw materials, including massive reserves of graphite. They're somewhere
in like the top five countries in terms of proven
graphite reserves, which among other things, is a critical ingredient
for batteries in electric vehicles. They supply about seven percent

(02:21:54):
of Europe's titanium. They're home to a third of European
lithium deposits. This is not an exhaustive list that's just
kind of you know, to start things off. And initially,
when there was this kind of pushback from Zelenski saying like, no,
you're not just going to get all that putin, came
in and was like, well, hey, you know, we've occupied
a bunch of Ukrainian land that has raw minerals on it.

(02:22:16):
Will give those to you, right, And so this went
back and forth, and eventually Zelensky and Trump's people put
together like a deal that they were supposed to sign
earlier this month that was like at actual like bilateral
agreement on the use of Ukrainian minerals. And essentially what
it would have done is the deal did call for

(02:22:38):
Ukraine to use its mineral resources to repay the United
States to the tune of about half a trillion dollars,
but not in a manner like where they were just
handing us their minerals. Essentially, Ukraine would contribute fifty percent
of revenues earned from the future monetization of government owned
mineral resources and other natural resources. But these were critically

(02:23:01):
revenues earned from those resources like future modernization, right, so
new mines, new oil and gas plants not included in
this were like current reserves, like actively being exploited for profit.
So kind of the key to this is that, like
mining is not something that you can turn around on
a dime. Generally, once you have actually proven you know

(02:23:25):
that you have sort of the reserves in an area,
it takes about twenty years to actually get like mines
up and running, and you know, this is an extremely
expensive process. So one of the reasons why Ukraine considered
this a good deal for them is that we're essentially
putting a lot of those revenues in the hands of

(02:23:45):
the US. But it was revenues from minerals that Ukraine
was not currently exploiting and that the US would help
and provide funding to exploit. So it was not just
paying back the US. It was something that would allow
the rebuilding of the Ukrainian economy post war. There were
some issues with this, including the fact that mining is

(02:24:05):
an extremely energy intensive task in Ukraine is in the
middle of an energy crisis at the minute, But among
other things, it would have brought the US in and
given them a financial stake and continued peace in the region,
which was seen as positive. That all blew up at
a White House meeting a couple of weeks ago, where

(02:24:25):
if you remember JD Vance and Trump basically had a
little like wwees SmackDown with Zelensky. It was a pretty
ugly meeting, and after that kind of talk of the
bilateral mineral deal faded significantly. Now what's interesting is that
just today it's come out that Zelensky and Trump have

(02:24:47):
had further conversations and there's a new deal apparently on
the table, or at least the White House claimed that
there was a new deal on the table. Both the
White House and Zelensky's office said that it was a
very post productive meeting. There's some evidence that Zelenski, after
that big blow up, has been kind of doing the
thing you've got to do with Trump, which is like

(02:25:08):
massage him and say nice things to him so that
he'll like you more, and that Trump has gotten kind
of frustrated with the fact that Russia clearly has not
been overly motivated to move towards the ceasefire. But then,
in the middle of this meeting that everyone seems to
agree went really well, the White House comes out and says,
and we're working on an agreement where the US will

(02:25:28):
control all of Ukraine's nuclear reactors, and Ukraine came out
and said, no, we're not absolutely we did not say
that that was a deal. So I don't know what's
actually going to happen here. Ukraine is a massive, like
nuclear energy state. In fact, the only European country that
competes with them or that is like on the same

(02:25:49):
level as they are in Europe in terms of nuclear
industry is France. They've got four nuclear power plants with
fifteen reactors in total. Now, obviously, like the Zapharizia plant
is still under Russian control, which is a significant chunk.
It's like six of the fifteen reactors in the country,
and Ukraine is in the process of building more. They've

(02:26:11):
actively added capacity since the end of the Soviet Union,
and so one of the promises for sort of future
Ukrainian economic stability is that they will be able to
export nuclear energy to the rest of Europe, which is
also going through an energy crisis. So it's unclear what's
going to happen. There's definitely evidence again that Zelensky has

(02:26:33):
kind of figured out how to massage Trump a little bit.
There's a quote from an article in The Conversation that
I found very interesting here While Trump still leans towards
putin his relationship with Zelensky seems to have improved. The
Ukrainian president appears to have learned that Trump doesn't have
a long memory and that flattery goes a long way
with the US president. Trump meanwhile, is no longer calling
Zelenski a dictator, and yet there is no mention of

(02:26:55):
halting US military aid or intelligence to Ukraine. There's the opposite,
in fact, is the US has said it will assist
in finding more patriot missile defense systems after Zelenski mentioned
they were sorely needed. By giving Trump credit for the
ceasefire initiative, Zelensky is putting the ball in Russia's court,
and his apparent receptiveness to Trump's idea about the US
taking over Ukraine's nuclear power plants will appeal to Trump's

(02:27:15):
transactional instincts in addition to offering Trump business deals. And
I don't fully know what the conversation is saying here
because Ukraine or Zelenski's office has stated like we're not
considering handing the US control. I think this may be
something like what happened with the energy deal, where essentially
what they talked about was the US having a financial

(02:27:36):
interest in the rebuilding an expansion of the Ukrainian nuclear
power grid, which would be an extension of existing programs
because Ukraine's nuclear power grid is already very reliant on
a US nuclear energy company, Westinghouse, that provides both the
raw fuel for nuclear reactors to Ukraine and also provides

(02:27:56):
a lot of actual technology for different kind of system
in the reactors. So I kind of think that what's
happening here is that basically it was floated like, well,
we can extend and expand this deal, so the US
will have a financial interest in this potentially very large
Ukrainian industry, and then Trump and his people kind of

(02:28:17):
took that and said to everyone else, Yeah, the US
is going to be in charge of Ukraine's nuclear power.
That's my best guess for what happened here.

Speaker 7 (02:28:26):
It really seems like we're relearning one of the last
lessons from the administration, which is, if you can be
the last person in the room with Trump.

Speaker 3 (02:28:32):
You can put what he does.

Speaker 7 (02:28:34):
Hey, yeah, I.

Speaker 3 (02:28:37):
Mia, do you want to do a tariff talk? Wait?

Speaker 2 (02:28:39):
Wait, did you say tariffs, Garrison or did you say.

Speaker 6 (02:28:48):
Jazz rock jazz bot?

Speaker 3 (02:28:51):
Sorry, locking jazz lock jaz.

Speaker 2 (02:29:00):
Ah, God feels good every time. Okay, miya, sorry, you
can talk about the actual news now.

Speaker 1 (02:29:04):
Let's do this.

Speaker 7 (02:29:05):
So the news we have today is that effectively every
single thing I have talked about on tariff talk before
this is just the fucking prelude, you know. And though
those have been very very extreme tariffs, but these are
effectively going to be looked back on as the opening
series of skirmishes and sort of probing defenses. On April seconds,
Trump is going to crash the entire world economy. He

(02:29:28):
is calling this Liberation Day. On April second, he is
planning to impose reciprocal tariffs on every single country on Earth.

Speaker 2 (02:29:37):
Finally, you know what, I'm completely on board. As long
as we're finally sticking it to those snotty fucks in Oman,
you know, then everything's good. It's about goddamn time.

Speaker 7 (02:29:50):
Now I'm gonna take a fucking victory lap here because
I have been talking about this for a very very
long time.

Speaker 3 (02:29:54):
I talked about this last year. I talked about this
the beginning of last year, talked about this the end
of last year.

Speaker 7 (02:29:57):
The entire media seems to have short of forgotten about
this until they all suddenly remembered this week that Trump
had promised to do reciprocal tariffs. So what reciprocal tariffs
are in theory is if there's a tariff on something
and I from another country, the US matches it. So
the way the Trump administration thinks about tariffs is deeply weird.
So they're including things like value added taxes on goods
in countries.

Speaker 3 (02:30:17):
Wow, which is like a sales yeah, packs in the US.

Speaker 7 (02:30:20):
Yeah yeah, But also like subsidies and also and this
is the part that has gotten less things, but quote
unquote currency manipulation. Now, how the fuck do you do
you calculate that for literally every single country on Earth?
Who knows business insider has some reporting on this where
where they talk to some insiders and okay, so literally
there are not enough people working on tariffs to like

(02:30:43):
calculate out individual tariff races for every single country on Earth.
It looks like the plan right now, when this is
also just to change, because again, this is the Trump administration,
and who the fuck knows what they're gonna be saying
or doing in two weeks. But what we know right
now is it looks like they're going to separate every
country on Earth into three tiers of tariffs. So it's
going to be like a low tier, a mid tier,
and a high tier. And it's it's unclear exactly what

(02:31:05):
levels they're going to be. These are going to be
on top of all of the additional tariffs that they've
already imposed. So say, for example, trying to gets put
into high tier one, they put like a fifty percent
tariff on it. That means a terrifra. It's going to
be seventy percent because there's already twenty percent tariffs on
their business. Insider seem to think twenty percent is like
the low one. I don't know about that. I think

(02:31:26):
they're going to be pretty high.

Speaker 3 (02:31:28):
We have no idea.

Speaker 7 (02:31:29):
And again, so what's happening here is Trump is declaring
this Liberation Day because he has convinced himself. I think
I finally understand what's going on in his brain, which
is that he has convinced himself that like, if you
have a trade deficit with a country, that means the
country's robbing you.

Speaker 3 (02:31:42):
Right, yes, yes, again.

Speaker 2 (02:31:43):
Trump's firm, lifelong belief is that if you are selling something,
you've won, and if you're buying something, you have lost.

Speaker 7 (02:31:52):
Yeah, Now, this is not how international trade works at
all for the US. Like the entire US empire absolutely
fuier is based on outsourcing a bunch of political violence
to other countries so you can buy goods at cheap rates, right,
Like that's that's that's, that's what the empire is.

Speaker 2 (02:32:08):
Yeah, we love buying things. It's the entire basis of
our civilization.

Speaker 6 (02:32:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:32:13):
Yeah, The reason Jeffrey Bezos was that the inaugration is
because we like to be buying.

Speaker 7 (02:32:18):
Yes, yeah, and so is something I mentioned, you know,
back back when I was talking about this in the
tariff episode right after the election, is that the thing
about reciprocal tariffs, right, is that it means that if
if anyone attempts to to fight a trade war with
the US, so another country imposes twenty percent tariffs, the
US will also impost twenty percent terriffs. And this just
spials out of control into a version of a trade
war so unhinged, like none of us have ever seen

(02:32:39):
anything like it in our lifetimes.

Speaker 3 (02:32:40):
Oh yeah, brother, yeah, that's coming.

Speaker 7 (02:32:43):
We have We now have April second as the day
everything explodes. I also want to want up put Like
another note here, the hope has always been from a
lot of countries and a lot of the financial markets
and a bunch of companies that these terrorifts are going
to have more exemptions, because there were some exemptions on
stuff in the initial tariffs on Mexico and Canada.

Speaker 2 (02:33:02):
Well, and he kept going back and forth.

Speaker 7 (02:33:03):
Right, yeah, but now we're getting into terroifts with which
you have no exceptions. The steel and aluminum tariffs have
had no exemptions at all.

Speaker 3 (02:33:11):
What we've been hearing.

Speaker 7 (02:33:12):
So one of the things I've been noting is that
Canada and EU have been basically mobilizing in the trade
war and imposing reciprocal terroists in the US. China has two,
Mexico has not. Apparently Mexico still thinks that they can
negotiate to be in like the lowest tier of tariffs,
which won't completely destroy their economy. Fuck if I know
why they think that, but who knows. Yeah, but that's

(02:33:34):
the fact. That's effectively the tariff news we have right now.
We have again April second, quote unquote Liberation Day, the
day that this all goes into a fact. I bet
they wanted to do April first and realize that they couldn't.

Speaker 3 (02:33:45):
No, Yeah, I didn't think that. No Trump.

Speaker 8 (02:33:48):
Trump announced this during his Joint Congressional address, and he
openly said that he originally wanted to do it on
April first, at the start of the month, but decided
not to because he is too superstitious as a person. So, yes,
originally they were going to be on April first, and
then they pushed him back to April second because they

(02:34:08):
didn't want it to be on April Foul's day.

Speaker 3 (02:34:10):
That's good. That's a good.

Speaker 8 (02:34:12):
So that's a great, great extra insight into the mind
of the US God King.

Speaker 1 (02:34:19):
Cool.

Speaker 8 (02:34:20):
Anyway, let's go on ad break and then come back
to discuss all of the other bad things that are
happening in the country.

Speaker 3 (02:34:38):
Okay, we're back.

Speaker 8 (02:34:40):
The first thing I want to kind of open to
a group discussion on is that On Tuesday, March eighteenth,
the federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking Trump's ban
on trans people serving in the military, ruling that the
blanket ban likely violates constitutional rights of Steven Miller responded
to the ruling by writing, District court judges have now
decided that they are in command of the armed forces?

Speaker 3 (02:35:03):
Is there no end to this madness?

Speaker 6 (02:35:05):
God?

Speaker 3 (02:35:06):
Fuck.

Speaker 1 (02:35:07):
So.

Speaker 8 (02:35:07):
I know this is a topic that like we've discussed
a lot, as you know, we're not all big US
military defenders, no.

Speaker 2 (02:35:16):
But it's mostly done bad stuff in my lifetime.

Speaker 8 (02:35:20):
But we still take like, almost like an ontological issue
with this band because it essentially creates just a secondary
class of citizen with fundamentally different rights from the rest
of everyone else, and that is never a good thing.

Speaker 2 (02:35:35):
It's like, so right now, one of the semi positive
news stories is that Trump's ATF is going to be
for the first time restoring people's Second Amendment rights who
had them taken away because they were involuntarily institutionalized. And
I've seen a lot of liberals being like, oh, they're
just gonna let more crazy people have guns. This is bad,
And like, I have to disagree whether or not you

(02:35:56):
like it. The Second Amendment is a fundamental right under
the Constitution, and it's bad to say that this class
of people forever lose a fundamental right because they're involuntarily institutionalized.

Speaker 3 (02:36:08):
That's bad.

Speaker 2 (02:36:10):
And likewise, even if you hate the US military's role
in US imperialism, which fine enough, the right to serve
in an integrated military has been a major underpinning of
most of the civil rights movements, like a foundational depending
of most civil rights movements in this country's history, going

(02:36:32):
back to the Civil War, you know, black civil rights,
including LGBTQ rights and including women's rights. Right, It's like
it is significant. And so the fact that the GOP
is attempting to peel this back and essentially reverse integration
of the military is bad for two reasons. One, it represents,
as you've said, creating separate classes of people and peeling

(02:36:55):
fundamental what are considered under the law in this country,
fundamental rights away from groups of people. And it's also
just dangerous for them to remake the military into an
all white organization, right, like all white male organization. There's
a reason why that's also.

Speaker 3 (02:37:12):
Dangerous to you.

Speaker 2 (02:37:13):
So, yeah, I think people should care about this, even
if they're you know, leftists.

Speaker 3 (02:37:18):
Yeah, And like, especially in this country, the military represents
one of the few social mobility tools that exist.

Speaker 4 (02:37:25):
Right.

Speaker 3 (02:37:25):
People don't just join the military because they country, to
what you might have seen on Twitter dot com, they
want to go to Middle East and kill people. Sometimes
they do it because they want to get a chance
to go to education. Sometimes they want to do it
so they get a chance to have healthcare.

Speaker 6 (02:37:37):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (02:37:37):
And like trans people serve at a higher rate, then
it says people may not be the case for very
much longer. By it like that has been the case.
And they have rights to use however they want. They
don't just have rights to use how you or I
or anyone else would like them to use well, And.

Speaker 2 (02:37:52):
That's also a broad truth. For the US military, members
of marginalized groups have always served at a higher rate
than basically anyone else. This includes like Native Americans serve
at a higher proportion of like their population within the
country than most other groups, in part because traditionally, serving
in the military was a way in which to gain

(02:38:14):
acceptance and entrance into American society.

Speaker 8 (02:38:18):
It's also just like another world, like you can field
in some ways, like insulated from like yes, the hoarders
you might experience in like regular suburban life oddly enough, Yeah,
to weigh.

Speaker 3 (02:38:29):
Out of the isolation that so many people experience in
the world.

Speaker 7 (02:38:32):
And like, is it extremely bad that the way that
you enter your into American society is by being a
part of the imperial war machine?

Speaker 3 (02:38:39):
Yes? Yes, but also the war machine is going to
be there whether you are in it or not. Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:38:46):
And the actual fundamental important thing here is again what
we've been saying is that like the fundamental basis of
liberal democracy, going back to the American Revolution, going back
to the French Revolution, going back to like the original
liberal revolutions, the fundamental principle of is that everyone is
equal before the law, and the moment that ceases to
be true, and it has not been true in this
country ever, but you know, we're seeing increasing numbers of

(02:39:09):
people who are not considered equal before the law. We
just spent this entire fucking like first part of this
episode talking about what happens when people are considered to
have no protections under the law, which at the state
can just fucking black bag you and send you to
a goolag. Yeah, Like that is bad. That's what's that
fundamentally at stake here, not like whether you think the
army is good.

Speaker 3 (02:39:29):
Yeah, And imagine for those people, like when they people
could have served nineteen years, right, they could have been
just about to get their twenty years and get their
retirement and will now not get that, Like they they
signed up expecting a thing, right, Like there was a
quid pro quote there that they would give twenty years
of their life and possibly a lot of their health
to the United States government in in return, they will
get health care and a pentrum for the rest of

(02:39:51):
their lives. And people are now going to lose that.

Speaker 1 (02:39:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:39:54):
In some related news, the VA just announced that quote
effective immediately, the VA will not to offer cross sex
hormone therapy to veterans who have a current diagnosis or
history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with gender dysphoria unless
such veterans are already receiving such care from the VA,
or such veterans we're receiving such care from the military

(02:40:15):
as a part of and upon their separation from from
the military service, and are eligible for VA healthcare. So
basically they will not be emitting like new patients to
receive gender affirming health care.

Speaker 3 (02:40:28):
Well, unless they're sist gender it seems like oh yes, correct, yes,
if it's just basically assists men can still receive gender
affirming hormones.

Speaker 8 (02:40:35):
Sure, be Like I kind of get annoyed when people
do that, like comparison and is like that's never like
we're falling into like this art for trap of like
we're actually using words to mean what they mean, and
like they're not using words like that, you know, like
whenever people like laugh about haha, they banned pronouns at school.
Now now you can't say the word I and you're
like no, like come out like what like that's not

(02:40:58):
what they mean, Like you have to understand like the
dog whistles that they're using.

Speaker 3 (02:41:01):
Yeah. I found it interesting though that they seemingly like
you tried to even get around like that like linguistic
thing in the statement sure.

Speaker 8 (02:41:09):
I mean like it depends what you mean by gender dysphoria, right,
Like you could theoretically you could have gender ysphoria because
your assists male and you want to become more masculine, right,
Like all of these diagnoses have like a very fuzzy
ontological underpinning. Right, these are just categories that we're projecting. Yes,
but this is you know, probably not great. It's probably

(02:41:29):
isn't a good thing. Like, for instance, if you already
have VIA healthcare, you're not in the military anymore, and
now you decide that you would like to receive gender
affirming healthcare, now you can't at least through the VA.

Speaker 1 (02:41:39):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (02:41:40):
So as a as a related thing, let's see I.

Speaker 8 (02:41:43):
Think we should kind of close with or like bookend
our discussion on like like the immigration stuff and the
black baggings and deportations which have been happening. A German
immigrant named Fabian Schmidt who's lived in the States.

Speaker 2 (02:41:58):
With the green courge German named Beautifl.

Speaker 8 (02:42:00):
Since two thousand and eight, so like he's lived here
quite a while. He immigrated with his mom. He was
detained and tortured at the Boston Logan Airport upon returning
from a visit to Europe. The man's mother says that
he was quote unquote violently interrogated at the Logan airport
for hours and was stripped naked, put in a cold
shower by two officials, and pushed back into an interrogation chair.

Speaker 10 (02:42:21):
I'm going to.

Speaker 3 (02:42:21):
Quote from w GBH quote.

Speaker 1 (02:42:24):
She said.

Speaker 8 (02:42:25):
Schmid told her immigration agents pressured him to give up
his green card. She said he was placed on a
mat in a bright room with other people at the
airport with little food or water, suffered sleep deprivation, and
was denied access to his medication for anxiety and depression.
He hardly got anything to drink, and then he wasn't
feeling very well and he collapsed said a senior, which
is his mom. He was transported by ambulance to mass

(02:42:48):
General Hospital. He didn't know it at the time, but
he also had the flu unquote. Now Schmid has since
been transferred to multiple ice facilities. He had a misdemeanor
charge for marijuana possession in California back in twenty fifteen,
but that charge was dismissed the following year due to
changes in state law. But I think that this incident
may have flagged Schmidt on the customs and border protections

(02:43:11):
like database and Hillary Beckham, CBP's Assistant Commissioner for Public Affairs,
give a short statement reading quote, when an individual is
found with drug related charges and tries to re enter
the country, officers will take proper action unquote. But essentially
they like tortured, black bagged this person who's had a
green card for like almost two decades for a dismissed

(02:43:35):
marijuana charge like ten years ago. This is like, you know,
like a very white man like Fabian Schmidt, like this
is this is super freaky stuff.

Speaker 3 (02:43:46):
Yeah, we should say that a lot of that stuff
is not particularly unusual and nice attention lights being totally
time not being given bettying, but like being shoved into
a cold.

Speaker 8 (02:43:55):
Chowerities that was at the airport, they say, like like
being being interrogated at the airport.

Speaker 3 (02:44:01):
This is a new one, and like being forced to.

Speaker 8 (02:44:03):
Like forcibly, like give up your green card during this
like interrogation session at that very same airport. Like I
think just maybe like a day or so later. A
Lebanese doctor and professor at Brown University, Russia, Alweya, was
deported this weekend after traveling to Beirut to visit family
and attend the public funeral of Hassan Nashraala. Upon a

(02:44:27):
return to the United States, she was detained at the
Boston Airport, had her H one B visa revoked, and
was deported on a plane to France on Friday, March fourteenth,
before she could attend her in person hearing that following Monday.
According to court documents, her deportation was prompted by deleted
pictures on her phone of like Shia Muslim figures like

(02:44:48):
Neshraala and the Ayatola, another very very frightening incident. In
those documents, it's unclear how Customs and Border Protection was
viewing deleted photos on her phone or like like like
like open of her phone, right, because like, if you
recently deleted a photo, it is still contained in your
recently deleted folder, assuming you have like an iPhone or equivalent.
But it's unknown how they like got into her phone,

(02:45:11):
if she like let them look through it, or if
they used one of like a many.

Speaker 3 (02:45:16):
Like phone breakaway see or whatever.

Speaker 8 (02:45:19):
Yeah, but I think it is interesting that this is
at the same airport to you know, slightly related incidents.

Speaker 3 (02:45:26):
But yeah, we've seen that a lot with like in
the similar cases people crossing the land border's Sandy Sidro
both I think a Canadian and German citizen were both detained,
which is said San Diego County. If it's not familiar,
it seems like there's some kind of policy at certain
border crossings or maybe like the person in chides, Yeah,
I was saying, do this, you know, detain people at

(02:45:48):
there's anything on their record at all.

Speaker 7 (02:45:50):
Well so so, and there's another case of this that's
similar where a French researcher who to best of my
knowledge is unnamed so far, I was randomly pulled aside
for a stop at George Bush International Airport in Houston,
which is sort of fitting for all of this George
Bush has got to be fucking creaming his pants thinking
about all this.

Speaker 3 (02:46:07):
Black bag and shit.

Speaker 7 (02:46:08):
But yeah, I was randomly pulled over and they found
anti Trump texts on his phone and immediately deported him.
This is a guy who was visiting the US, like
I think, to go to a conference, and the border
patrol is arguing that anti Trump texts are considered terrorism,
which is great, or the text that they found are
like could be like the anti Trump ness of it
can be considered terroristic, so that's bad. There was yet

(02:46:32):
another case, which is a slightly different one, which is
Buttercon Surrey, who is a postoc at Georgetown who was
detained and sent to an immigration facility, who's here teaching.
He's a postdoc at Georgetown on a student visa who
has been sent to an immigration facility based on basically
a right wing panic about his wife, his wife's father

(02:46:53):
being Hamas and because of this, he's been black bagged
in a way very similar to Mak mckhalil. Yeah, now
Georgetown is backing him on this, but this is you
know this, this this is another one of these fucking
blackpackings that they're just doing now with someone who is
here on a student visa who has committed no crime,
who Georgetown was like, has committed no crime. And again

(02:47:14):
also if even if you've committed a crime, this is
fucking horseship. But yeah, all of these things are just
continuing to ramp up, and they're getting boulder and boulder.

Speaker 3 (02:47:23):
Thanks, Robert.

Speaker 8 (02:47:24):
Do you want to do you want to read a
select paragraph or two from a from Khalil's first like
public statement.

Speaker 2 (02:47:31):
Yeah, so he put out a letter a couple of
days before we recorded this, and you should really read
the whole thing if you just google Mahmood Khalil letter.
I mean, I think the exact title is my name
is Mahmood Khalil and I am a political prisoner, which
is the first sentence of the letter. But I want
to read this little bit of him talking about his

(02:47:54):
arrest on March eighth, I was taken by DHS agents
who refused to provide a warrant and accosted my wife
and me as we returned from dinner. By now, the
footage of that night has been made public. Before I
knew it was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into
an unmarked car. At that moment, My only concern was
for Newer's safety. I had no idea if she would
be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest

(02:48:16):
her for not leaving my side. DHS would not tell
me anything for hours. I did not know the cause
of my arrest or if I was facing immediate deportation.
At twenty six Federal Plaza, I slept on the cold
floor in the early morning hours. Agents transported me to
another facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, I slept on
the ground and was refused a blanket despite my request.

(02:48:36):
My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right
to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine
and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed
in full force Monday night with January ceasefire. Now broken,
parents in Gaza are once again cradling two small shrouds,
and families are forced to waste starvation and displacement against bombs.
It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle

(02:48:57):
for their complete freedom. And again I really recommend reading
the whole thing. It's it's very good, but yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:49:06):
I get so particularly upset that Trump's admin uses like this,
like vague anti semitism justification for for for some of
these actions, at least because the head of Trump's anti
Semitism task force just last week retweeted Patrick Casey, who

(02:49:26):
is from the American Identity Movement, a leading alt right
figure who was at Charlottesville, to quote Shane Burley. This
tweet that was reposted by the head of this anti
semitism task force claimed that quote, Trump has the ability
to revoke someone's Jew card.

Speaker 3 (02:49:42):
Yeah, it's absolutely horrible.

Speaker 8 (02:49:44):
Are a serious here, It's unbelievable, unbelievable amounts of anti
semitism spread by the person who leads the federal task
force to combat anti Semitism.

Speaker 3 (02:49:56):
Great.

Speaker 7 (02:49:57):
Yeah, And going going back to Columbia for a second.
One of the other things that has been happening is
that Trump threatened Columbia with the loss of four hundred
million dollars in government contracts unless they give in to
a bunch of Trump's demands. So Trump wants them to
ban masks on campuses, allow campus cops to do more
violence against student protesters, and expel like protesters who occupy buildings.
The president is supposed to get control of all discipline

(02:50:18):
and can expel and suspend students, and they want to
crack down student groups. They want and this is also
a tie into the other thing. They want the IHR
definition of antisemitism and like specifically, the Trump's like letter
to them specifically says like classifying anti Zionism as antisemitism.
And they want to put the Middle East, South Asian
and African studies departments in academic receivership, which means stripping

(02:50:40):
away power from the faculty and giving it to someone
outside the Yeah, Columbia is about to give into these demands.
It seems like they want to try to find another
word other than academic receivership, but they're going to fucking
do it. So and Trump have the legal authority to
do this, No, obviously not. But you know, does he
have the moral authority to do this? No obviously not,
like this guy is, but.

Speaker 2 (02:50:57):
None of those are important. He as guys with guns.
That's what it always comes down to. And the any
one who forgets that is only hurting themselves.

Speaker 7 (02:51:06):
Like yeah, and so he's also doing this thing of
like attempting basically to dismantle a bunch of the higher
education institutions in this country unless they become just pure
right wing sort of laboratories. And another example of this
is as the news stories about Columbia, we're coming out
like Columbia trying to take the deal.

Speaker 3 (02:51:21):
We're coming out.

Speaker 7 (02:51:22):
The University of Pennsylvania is good about to lose one
hundred and seventy five million dollars of funding for allowing
Leah Thomas, a trans swimmer, to swim for their college.
So this is just going to be a giant sort
of battering ram that Trump is going to use to
just basically obliterate the education system and impose whatever unhinged

(02:51:42):
right wing thing that he wants to impose.

Speaker 8 (02:51:45):
And we will talk more about his efforts to destroy
the education system next week on our next episode of ED,
as says he is continuing to prep an executive order
to abolish the Department of Education. And there's plenty of
other news, including the federal judge confrontations, that we will
also report on next week. But before we leave today,

(02:52:07):
Mia has a brief note on the bird flu.

Speaker 6 (02:52:10):
With Flitch.

Speaker 8 (02:52:11):
I'm sure will be fine. Frankly, I'm still eating eggs,
but uh Mia.

Speaker 7 (02:52:15):
Yes, so as people there with the boyd flu. So
the thing the thing about chickens is that they're dying
from bird flu right now. This has killed an enormous
number of chickens. This is part of why egg prices
are so high. Now, this is a problem that a
lot of countries have dealt with. China has dealt with
this by just fucking vaccinating their chickens. The Biden administration
refused to vaccinate chickens because it would cost money and

(02:52:35):
because it might make it harder for us to export
their chickens.

Speaker 3 (02:52:39):
So that was bad.

Speaker 7 (02:52:40):
RFK Junior literally just wants to let the bird flu
rip and kill all the birds and thinks that the
healthy birds will survive. And those healthy birds, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:52:49):
He thinks immunity.

Speaker 7 (02:52:52):
He has a heard immediity guy for COVID because he's
a human eugenesis he's also a chicken eu genesist. Now,
I'm specifically doing this because I read multiple viral just
reading about this or writing about this. I talked to virologists,
and the virologists all basically said, if you were trying
to design a way to make the bird flu like
move like a mutate in such a way that it

(02:53:13):
moves from birds to humans, this is what you would do.

Speaker 2 (02:53:15):
Yeah, great, so and again cool, the death rate of
this thing is in a completely different category from fucking COVID.
It makes COVID look like having a mild case of allergies,
like staggeringly lethal and like it cannot overstate how disastrous

(02:53:36):
this would be.

Speaker 3 (02:53:37):
Yeah, and COVID code more than a million Americans, like
fifteen case people have memory?

Speaker 2 (02:53:41):
Hold that yeah, right now, current rates when it has
reached humans as about a fifty percent fatality rate. They
thought initially that they were missing a lot of cases
and that it was much lower, but like the current
research points to the suggests that that is not the case,
that it is actually somewhere in that range of lethality.

Speaker 8 (02:54:01):
Yes, I'm still eating my chicken tartar. I don't know
why everyone's so worried about it.

Speaker 3 (02:54:07):
And again, we.

Speaker 2 (02:54:09):
Don't know that like the version that actually is able
to jump from human to human after jumping from bird
to human would be that lethal because that doesn't exist
quite yet.

Speaker 3 (02:54:19):
Probably, Yeah, but this is how we find out, but
we really don't want to find out.

Speaker 7 (02:54:26):
Yeah, I look, if you don't want to find out,
we have to find a way to get our k
junior out of that fucking office.

Speaker 2 (02:54:31):
Like again, I think if we we really need to
have a lot of different farmers set up photo ops
with him where he is just covered in birds. We
need to have that man in constant physical contact with chicken.
It would do it and the problem will eventually solve it.
We could convince him to eat raw chicken. We could
definitely do it. Sure, yes, absolutely, raw would eat them,

(02:54:53):
cuddle them, sleep with them at night, just kind of
stand on a pile of their corpses.

Speaker 3 (02:54:58):
All right, all right, I'm if you are a chicken,
or you know a chicken, or you have anything else
you would like to share with us, you can do
so well, not anything else. You should be related to
the news and things that we can report on. You
can send it to cool Zone tips at proton dot
me and that's only encrypted if you also use encryption
to send the message then to end. Yeah, it's a

(02:55:21):
proton manaddress. That means, yeah, you have to send from
encrypted to encrypted. It still doesn't mean it's it's perfectly safe.
It just means it's encrypted. So send what do you
think you can send over an email? That is that way?

Speaker 6 (02:55:35):
We reported the news. We reported the news.

Speaker 2 (02:55:42):
Hey, we'll be back Monday, with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 10 (02:55:48):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com or check us out. From the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts,
you can now find sources for It Could Happen Here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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