It Could Happen Here Weekly 218

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

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

Speaker 3 (00:28):
This is It could happen here, a show about things
falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis this episode. I'm joined by
Mia Wong.

Speaker 4 (00:36):
Mia.

Speaker 3 (00:37):
I have some upsetting news.

Speaker 5 (00:39):
Oh no, I.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
Which is frankly one of the best ways to start
this episode and one of the best ways to start
the show. So I'm pretty sure that I found this
account called Let's see at Hill Hitler, and I think
he's posting some things that is a little bit fascist.

Speaker 5 (00:58):
Oh wow.

Speaker 3 (00:59):
I have decoded some of at Hell Hitler's communications and
I have uncovered a secret a secret Nazi code.

Speaker 5 (01:09):
Wow.

Speaker 6 (01:09):
This is this is an incredibly unexpected revelation from Hail Hitler.

Speaker 3 (01:13):
He has posted some pictures in like what I would
assume is some kind of military uniform that looks like
I don't know, it's it's some kind of like h
like Germanic military uniform. But I've noticed that there are
some runes on this uniform, oh, that look very similar
to the Odal rune. So I'm thinking because of the rune,
this guy might be a Nazi.

Speaker 6 (01:33):
Thank you for your work, Harrison. We could never have
determined this.

Speaker 3 (01:36):
That's right, I am. You can find me at osent
to Defender online and Defender No. That doesn't for us today,
and it could happen here now. So this episode, we're
gonna talk about something that's been slowly frustrating me the
past few weeks, and that is the misapplication of dog whistles.

(01:57):
And let's just get right into it. People have been
noticing patterns, noticing trends in official communications from the dhs
gov online accounts, which now is the main way the
government sends out communications, unfortunately, especially on X the Everything app.

(02:19):
But this, this extends outside of X the Everything after,
this extends outside of Blue Sky the Internet in general.
This is about how we understand the messaging of fascists
and understand how rhetoric and anti fascist like education works
and ways that I think it's currently being misapplied. So

(02:40):
bear with me. This is going to be kind of
an odd episode, but I think I think it's worth
it because I don't want us falling into the same
traps that we maybe fell into eight years ago. So
let's let's let's start by talking about some communications posted
on the internet by at dhs gov a picture of

(03:02):
a painting titled American Progress by John Gast captioned a
heritage to be proud of, comma a homeland worth defending.
So on the surface, you know, maybe a slightly hashtag
problematic sentiment here with a hashtag problematic painting, or at

(03:22):
the very least of painting depicting the genocide of Native
Americans and Indigenous people specifically with like a white supremacist outlook,
with this enlarged white woman bathed in a white cloak,
bringing forth that the tide of quote unquote progress as
Indigenous people are are forced to flee from the edge

(03:45):
of the painting.

Speaker 6 (03:47):
It's fun because this is a painting we literally when
they had to explain manifest destiny like colonialism.

Speaker 4 (03:54):
Good.

Speaker 6 (03:54):
This is the painting that was in my textbook in
high school.

Speaker 5 (03:58):
Is three class like it is like.

Speaker 6 (04:00):
The the er colonialism good genocide, good painting.

Speaker 3 (04:04):
Genocide good that that's what the painting is. But what
I have found through some hashtag research there might be
a hidden code in this. In this communication from the
DHSO already an agency that only has the best interests
of really all people who strive for human rights, the DHS. SO,

(04:25):
if you count all of the words in the tweet,
guess how many words there are in this tweet?

Speaker 5 (04:29):
MEA fifteen no.

Speaker 3 (04:31):
So close, so close, fourteen fourteen words in this tweet,
which might remind you of the fourteen words the Nazi signifier,
which I probably just to explain. Surely most people listening
to this is familiar with the fourteen words, since it
seems everybody thinks they are an armchair expert on fascist rhetoric.

(04:55):
But the fourteen words we must secure the existence of
our people and a future for white children. This became
a popular hashtag dog whistle, especially in the past. I
would say ten fifteen years, usually by implanting fourteen's and

(05:17):
usually fourteen eighty eights, with eighty eight meaning hal Hitler
because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. This
became a common Nazi tag. You'd see this in graffiti,
you see this embedded into into posts, see this in
like Nazi artwork. And going back to this DHS post,
we can not only count fourteen words in this tweet,

(05:40):
this is actually a fourteen eighty eight because two of
the h's in this in this post are capitalized unusually
and that means hal hitler wo because hc eighth letter.
Uh oh, but wait, actually looking at this post again,
there's actually other words in this tweet that are also
unusually capitalized.

Speaker 7 (06:00):
But don't worry.

Speaker 4 (06:00):
Don't worry.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
This is still a dog whistle because those other words
that are capitalized in the first sentence are the letters
A and D, which if you convert those into numbers,
are one in four. So it's actually another fourteen.

Speaker 6 (06:14):
Oh wow, we're doing numerology. We're doing jamatria, where we've.

Speaker 5 (06:19):
Become Q and on.

Speaker 3 (06:21):
We're so back. So if you cannot tell by my
my thinly veiled sarcasm in that last section, I think
this methodology is a little bit silly. What are we doing?
What are we doing here? We're converting capitalized letters in
the first half of a tweet into numbers and then
rearranging the order of those letters to get a fourteen

(06:42):
eighty eight. It's literally jermatria and then also counting the
total words in the whole suite while still disregarding the
capitalizations in the last four words for another fourteen What
are we doing? How is this the piece of evidence
that sinks sinks the Trump administration and finally proves that
they're fascist. You can just look at all of the

(07:03):
fascist policies the Trump administration is enacting. Instead of doing
numerology on tweets, people are thinking, ha ha ha ha,
I have decoded the secret Nazi message with AHHD one
eight eight fourteen, nice trigroipers. Meanwhile, you can just look
at the actual text of the post, you can look

(07:26):
at the painting. Both of those things have an inherent
fascist quality. It's literally defending the concept of ethnic genocide
of manifest destiny. While the administration, the DHS is currently
furthering as no nationalist policies, they are doing this.

Speaker 6 (07:45):
This is homeland security, right. I don't know if people
realize that ICE is a part of homeland security, but.

Speaker 5 (07:50):
Like, this is the agency that is literally.

Speaker 8 (07:52):
Rounding people up and sending them to camps. We have
camps in multiple countries now, but I say they're being
round up and sent to camps. It's genuinely unclear whether
what I'm talking about is the fucking concentration.

Speaker 3 (08:03):
Camp in Florida, seacot in nol Salvador.

Speaker 6 (08:06):
Yeah, I mean I think I think people have now escaped,
so I can't technically call the Honduras one a death camp.
But like again, there's any people in south'su Dan They're
like they're just doing this, like what are.

Speaker 9 (08:18):
We doing here?

Speaker 3 (08:20):
So this episode I want to focus on how people
are misusing anti fascist education, or I would argue they're
misusing anti fascist education and kind of missing the forest
for a cardboard cutout of trees. Yeah, not even trees,
kind of something that could be a tree if you
look at it from one angle, but maybe isn't actually

(08:41):
a real tree. And you don't need to sound like
a da Vinci Code conspiracy theorist to point out the obvious,
like dog whistles don't matter if the regular whistle is
already fascist, if they're just saying things openly and furthermore
doing things, what purpose does a dog whistle? And this

(09:04):
is something that we're going to discuss. Are not just
saying this and closing the episode, We're going to get
into these Yeah, And I think part of what's happening
here everybody is so cooked by the paranoid style of
American politics. Everyone is so eager to decode the hidden

(09:25):
messages that we're missing what's right in front of us.
Qwanon has a total victory. Qwanon does not really exist
in the way that it did in twenty eighteen. That
the q Andon cult conspiracy theory as like a singular
cultish project is kind of no more. But q Andon
has a cultural victory over the entire United States, and

(09:47):
not just on the right wing, not just on Mega.
So much of American politics now is litigating who is
and is not a pedophile, who is and is not
trafficking children, who can notice which events are staged, who
can notice hidden codes, who can decode anonymous messages on
the Internet. And this is what like everything is. And

(10:09):
like the real turning point I think for the right
wing was probably the twenty twenty election in like a
massive fracture from reality in which they think that election
was legitimately stolen. And obviously there was many events leading
up to that which contributed to this yeah, and I
think one of the biggest fracture points for liberals was
the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, with people creating whole

(10:30):
new alternate realities that that event was staged. And because
that door is opened now, I'm seeing such a massive
flood of things that I would label as blueing on
conspiracy theories, which is kind of a nonsense term, but
it gets the point across. And gonna do a whole
piece on bluing on very soon. I've been collecting blue
and on conspiracy theories for a while, but I want
to do something specifically about this fourteen eighty eight and

(10:51):
like secret codes thing, because it's so evocative of like,
you know, Q drops, and it's evocative of, you know,
searching for Masonic codes, something that American conspiracy theorists have
been doing for generations. And we're to talk about that
more and read a little bit of an essay on
that topic after this ad break, and I will let

(11:15):
you know. There's gonna be two messages in the ad
break that if you decode, you win a special prize
at the end of the episode, So make sure you
listen to every single second of the ad in case
you miss the code. Okay, we are back speaking of

(11:39):
the paranoid style in American politics. I want to quote
a few sections to kind of frame what I'm talking
about here. This was an essay written in the sixties
by Richard version hoff Setter Hofstetter Richard Hofstetter, one of
the first like modern pieces on American conspiracy culture and politics.

(12:04):
I'm gonna I have three paragraphs here that I selected
as being relevant to the current topic at hand.

Speaker 5 (12:11):
Quote.

Speaker 3 (12:12):
There is a style of mind that is far from
new and that is not necessarily right wing. I call
it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately
evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy
that I have in mind. Nothing really prevents a sound
program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style.

(12:34):
Style has more to do with the way in which
ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of
their contact. Unquote. And I like that section specifically because
fourteen eighty eight is a real dog whistle. We can
see this used. There's aspects of people are who are
trying to search for this and trying to search for

(12:55):
patterns in the communications of unadmittedly fascistic government agency that
I find like sympathetic, like I can understand, because yeah,
that is a real dog whistle. I'm going to continue
the quote quote. The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of
conspiracy in apocalyptic terms. He traffics in the birth and
death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of

(13:18):
human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization.
He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenarianists,
he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through
the last days, and he is sometimes disposed to set
a date for the apocalypse. As a member of the
avant garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before

(13:40):
it is fully obvious to it. As of yet to
unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. Demand for
total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals,
and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure
constantly heightens the paranoid's sense of frustration. Unquote, hof Setter

(14:02):
is talking about something that that me and Robert specifically
have have have discussed a lot on this show before
how everyone in America wants to have access to secret information.

Speaker 2 (14:13):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 3 (14:15):
Everyone wants to have the exclusive piece of secret intel
that will solve everything, and like having having that like
informational exclusivity in a world of information saturation, right of
a vortex of like meaningless noise. It's it's such a
romantic idea that that I alone have the info or
the clue to pieces together and it's my duty to

(14:38):
inform the masses. It's it's a very romantic notion, and.

Speaker 6 (14:42):
It's also one that is exactly perfectly anti suited for
the moment we live in, which is actually just a
moment where everything that is happening is just so clearly literal,
like it's all out of the omen like what is
happening with the Trump administration. Okay, In twenty twenty, there
is a mas massive uprising to attempt to attempt to
fundamentally change like the structurally racist nature of the United States,

(15:07):
to deal with its fucking class inequalities, to deal with
the structural violence of the state. This was reacted to
by a massive fascist movement that spent half a decade
gaining power and then finally took power in the form
of like a bunch of pissed off petite bourgeois fucking
car dealers and like literally a billionaire real estate mogul

(15:28):
backed by the richest tech company guy in the world, right,
and they came together to build fascism. This is the
most straightforward, like if this is a conception of how
a fascist takeover works that is so thuddingly literal that
it defies narrativization because it's just there. There's no subtlety

(15:50):
to it. They're just saying it. They just want to
do it, and they're doing it. But everyone is convinced
that there's like some kind of secret hitting conspiracy and
it's like, no, they're just doing the thing that they're saying.

Speaker 3 (16:00):
Yeah, you can argue that we have a groper occupied
government not because of counting words and posts, but because
of not only who they're bringing on for Doge, but
literally Ice in DHS as of today, which I'm recording
this on Wednesday, I think, because this comes out Wednesday night,
are copying like Patriot Front style tactics of loading up

(16:21):
ICE agents in U haul style rentable trucks to hunt
down people to assault and kidnap like they're just copying
the Patriot Front playbook. Here the ICE director said that
he wants an Amazon like mass deportation system, calling it
quote unquote Amazon Prime, but with human beings. They're saying this,

(16:43):
you can listen to the actual words. I'm going to
read another quote here from the Paraoid Style of American
Politics essay quote. A final characteristic of the paranoid style
is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of
the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between
its fantasized conclusions and the almost touching concern with fectuality

(17:07):
it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to
prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can
be believed respectable. Paranoid literature not only starts from certain
moral commitments that can indeed be justified, but also carefully
and all but obsessively accumulates quote unquote evidence. The paranoid

(17:28):
seems to have little expectation for actually convincing a hostile world,
but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his
cherished convictions from it unquote. And I think that gets
into the psychological mechanisms on why people are doing this
Nazi code hunting. It's actually a form of self coping,

(17:49):
looking at the horrific state of the federal government, looking
at the brazenness in which ICE is operating, and this
is a self preservation mechanism. Someone on Blue Sky that
I was talking to this is like arguing, like, ICE
doesn't need to dog whistle, they have no reason to.

Speaker 10 (18:04):
Like.

Speaker 3 (18:04):
Dog whistling is for trying to like sneakily get racists
or fascists into power while signaling to a nationalistic base
that they are like one of them. Right, But these
guys are already in power. Yeah, and the base already
knows that they're in power. There's no point in dog whistling.
They're just using ICE to establish an ethno state. They're

(18:25):
using explicit ethno state rhetoric. In a post from this
morning which has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
eight nine ten words not fourteen ten words. Wow, DHS
said quote, serve your country, defend your culture, no undergraduate
degree required. Defend your culture. It's not about locking up

(18:47):
criminal migrants. It's about defending a culture from its destruction
through ethnic demographic shifts. They're not trying to obscure what
they're doing in the slightest No, And I want.

Speaker 6 (18:59):
To return to something else that the Hofstater said that
in that second paragraph that you read about how like
one of the central conceits is that like, you know,
there's this giant conspiracy that's being unleashed and the American
public doesn't know anything about it, and like, yeah, you can.
You know, it is distressing to a large extent, the
extent to which people just don't know what the government
is doing. But also like if you look at any

(19:21):
pulling at all, but anything the people are doing, everyone
hates it. There isn't like a secret thing that you
can say to convince people that they're that all these
people are Nazis, because it's like that's not even a
particularly useful project because everyone fucking hates them already. Like
trying to fight this in the realm of sort of
the accumulation of the evidence of conspiracy instead of in
the realm of like, hi, i'm your neighbor, you also

(19:43):
fucking hate this. Let's go fucking like do this shop
people are doing in la and like follow these fucking
ice fans around, right, That is stuff that people are doing,
but it doesn't have the kind of like instant emotional
gratification and register of yeah, trying to like accumulate hordes
of secret knowledge, so people do it less even though

(20:05):
it's less effective.

Speaker 3 (20:06):
In my discussion of this, like online on various cursed
social media sites, I've gotten a lot of pushback to
my pushback of these tactics and what I what I
see as a sort of like abuse of anti fascist education,
right because people like you know, Robert Evans, myself, you know,
Molly Conger spent the past eight years trying to actually

(20:28):
you know, educate people about like Nazi rhetoric, like in
like Nazi signals and dog whistles, right and as an
attempt to hopefully prevent them from expanding their power. And
we may have succeeded in education, but we may have
failed in the prevention, yeh, of them seizing power. And

(20:49):
that also makes me kind of question the effectiveness of
certain tactics. And it's now very odd to see things
that we you know, argued for visibility around to kind
of be used in a way is that don't really
make sense that it's it's kind of like trying to
tame a monster that you've partially created. And it's so
frustrating to me because I mean, one person who I

(21:11):
was lightly arguing about the SOD line was saying, like,
this is not numerology, and we don't have to be
just okay with a clear attempt to normalize white nationalist rhetoric.
And like, first of all, like codes aren't rhetoric. Codes
are codes, And the textual fascist sentence is the rhetoric.

(21:33):
What they're actually like saying, which has like proto fascist
or fascistic aspects, that is the rhetoric and they're doing it.
Is there somebody out there in twenty twenty five who's
gonna finally realize that DHS has an agency has fascistic
underpinnings via a chronically online Twitter user explaining that if
you count words and turn certain captize letters into numbers,

(21:56):
it makes a secret Nazi message? Is there one person
is going to become given to us? No, that's not
the purpose, And so trying to conceptionize this is like
we have to we have to make sure we call
out the use of Nazi rhetoric that doesn't apply to
this specific thing that we're talking about.

Speaker 6 (22:14):
Yeah, and also like I think you know like I
think we've sort of kind of just to some extent,
we've just failed on the normalization front because again, like
it's the president.

Speaker 5 (22:22):
Of the United States. Yeah, this is the.

Speaker 6 (22:25):
Official account of the Department of Homeland Security. It has
already become normalized because they have power. The only way
to denormalize it is not actually to do media critique.
It's to like actually oppose them. But that's scary, that's scary.

Speaker 3 (22:38):
Report Mary Meia. Do you know what's easy posting on
X the everything app.

Speaker 6 (22:42):
Yeah, this is how this kind of conspiratorial worldview actually
empowers the state, because the central conceit of the conspiratorial
worldview is that there is a nearly all powerful agency
that controls in apparatus that enables it to basically control
any events that it wants. Right, this is why stage things,
This is why I can recollection. This is why it
can like I don't know, like it can just like

(23:04):
magically like disappear anyone. It can replace them with anyone.
It can stage any protest movement it wants to. Right,
And I think you've seen this a lot in the
American case, where like I see people who are like
genuinely well meaning leftists who are convinced that if you
do anything to resist the American State, you will immediately
be killed because the American State is all powerful and irresistible.

(23:25):
And that's just fascist propaganda. Yeah, you're falling victim to
the Panoptic house. Yeah, but it's fascist propaganda that fits
into the narrative structure of conspiracy. And because the state
is dangerous, right and can hurt you, it's very very
easy to you know, accumulate structures of evidence that support
the emotional sort of core of this thing that is

(23:47):
just literally fascist propaganda. People are resisting the state every day, right,
Why is ICE fucking doing patriot prayer tactics and fucking
like hiding people in like fucking U hauls to jump
out and grab people. It's because when they tried to
fucking we stomp them, right.

Speaker 3 (24:01):
And when they drive around in their cars and you
can see them through the window, everyone follows them. People
can follow them around and alert their community members on
where ICE is.

Speaker 6 (24:10):
Like again, mother motherfuckers and fucking Lulu Levin shit are
like screaming at ICE agents where they trying to arrest people,
Like yeah, that's the actual condition we're in.

Speaker 3 (24:20):
And like we get regular people. And that's why I
find some people who would be you know, self described
as like anti fascists or self described as leftists almost
falling into this trap like more so than others. And
it's a little bit evident of something that like I've
described as like the forever twenty sixteen, how we're all
kind of stuck in the mindset of this twenty sixteen,
twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen era, and where you have this

(24:42):
unwillingness to realize that that's not the political situation on
the ground anymore. We are actually not in Charlottesville. This
is a different situation. This is twenty twenty five. And
one other like defense of this, you know, code hunting
that I've seen people say is, quote, Nazis love playing
games like this, so it's important that we call it out.

(25:04):
And another person saying, quote, this is a fun little
game for their group chats while they kill and disappear people, unquote,
and like, first of all, this is not a game.
This is actual people's lives who are being deported, who
are being sent to foreign prison camps. These are not games.
And I think that view of like anti fascist like

(25:25):
education risks repeating like the Okay symbol debacle right where
dog whistles end up being created or spread further due
to this gamified version of like easter egg anti fascism.
It's kind of like the Barber streisand effect where you
end up almost accidentally making them start doing the thing,
which Nazis always have that like frustrating impulse because they're

(25:49):
the little bitch boy ideology. I think as a rat,
Limit put it one of one of my favorite posters,
and like, I'm not saying that Nazi signposting should be ignored,
but I think we should be thought and careful of
how we do it. To recap the Okay symbol thing
that was invented as like a fake dog whistle to
try to trick leftists into convincing like the media and

(26:11):
had then having the media try to convinceate with people
that anyone who uses like the okayhand symbol is secretly
a fascist. And this scheme worked, and eventually the Oka
symbol became an actual symbol used for fascists to identify
each other through this ironic detachment because it was being
talked about in the news as a secret Nazi symbol.
Even though this whole thing was like invented as like

(26:32):
a joke online, and I'm afraid I've started to already
see a similar thing happen with the fourteen words dog whistle,
with an increased use of the fourteen words and invoking
the fourteen words among far right accounts, specifically because of
this whole debacle with the DHS gov account, and there

(26:53):
a heritage to be proud of, homeland worth defending American
Progress like ethnonationalist posting. And I truly cannot say one
way or another if that American Progress post had a
intentionally embedded fourteen words dog whistle inside, I can't tell
you that. And the point of trying to make is

(27:15):
that it kind of doesn't matter, but the way we
talk about dog whistles does matter. And as frustrating as
it is that sometimes this feels like we're just living
in the meme where the Nazi starts shaving his head
because everyone's calling him a Nazi, that is how Nazis
works sometimes, And I don't want to play into this

(27:36):
attention spectacle that they so badly want, But you know
what I do want right now?

Speaker 5 (27:41):
Is it the process and services that support this podcast.

Speaker 3 (27:43):
Another ad break. That's right, be sure to listen for
the third and fourth hidden clue in these ads. All right,
we are back.

Speaker 6 (28:03):
To briefly take a small tangent here. I think there
was something very important about like the fact that role
stuck in twenty sixteen, which was sort of like the
peak of irony right as a social affect. It has
left us really unprepared for now where everything is just
sort of like, you know, they're just doing it and
saying it right, yeah, And it's not this sort of

(28:23):
like irony pill deniability shit. They just do it and
people are just not prepared for that.

Speaker 3 (28:28):
They're able to wage this war kind of on both fronts,
and I think they are still pushing this. I'm going
to quote from a friend of the pod rat Limit
one of my favorite mutes quote prediction, the Nazi salute
will become common within two years. Right wingers will half
asset for plausible deniability, mimify the backlash, and then start

(28:50):
fully doing it quote unquote as a joke to quote
unquote troll the Libs for being hysterical enough to think
that they were doing it in the first place. Fascism
is a little bit ideology because it's too timid to
enact as cruelty until it can frame its cruelty as
retaliation against others for anticipating it. And this has been
proven right faster than I think what rat limit predicted.

(29:12):
There's this current trend on x Everything app where white
girl aspiring influencers are doing Nazi style salutes and trying
to mimify the backlash. Several posts going viral of these.
Of these like aspiring influencers either at the pool or
cooking or doing laundry or walking your dog while having

(29:35):
a your arm in a Elon Musk, my heart goes
out to you Nazi salute style fashion. Yeah, and I
think focusing media attention on someone like Musk doing a
Nazi salute makes sense, right, he is like an actual
person affiliated with the government, but making a whole media
blits about random blue check Twitter girls. Maybe not so much.

(29:56):
Maybe that doesn't have any actual value if of random
like a random Twitter poster from Missouri is trying to
garner backlash by doing a Hile Hitler salute in their
kitchen next to their instapot.

Speaker 6 (30:10):
I keep coming back to the thing that I wrote
about the original loss salute and about the ways that everyone,
you know, like one of the functions of capitalism is
that everyone has been trained to experience the world and
think in the image of action instead of like actually
existing things.

Speaker 3 (30:27):
That's what I want to talk about next.

Speaker 5 (30:29):
Yeah, Yeah, let's do this, Let's do this. Yeah, go
for go for it.

Speaker 2 (30:31):
No.

Speaker 3 (30:32):
I think part of this focus on like these hidden
codes and even just like these messages online is a
liberal opposition to the aesthetics of deportation, but not necessarily
the act itself. Yeah, it's carrying out deportations in a
mode that seems not in line with like neoliberal governing.

(30:53):
And that's I think what a bunch of the backlash
being focused on the aesthetics of the Trump administration, like
how they film like god asmr videos that they post
from the White House account of deportations and use military planes.
Those are aesthetic differences, and those differences may be important,
and they're bad, right, I'm not saying these things are good.
Those things are still bad. Yeah, But when that gets

(31:15):
focused on slightly more than just the pure acti deportation itself,
that I think is evident of being trapped in this
like capitalist realism, being trapped in this like this neoliberal.

Speaker 5 (31:26):
Yeah, the society of the spectacle exactly right.

Speaker 3 (31:29):
Let's like in June, Ice arrested thirty thousand people and
did eighteen thousand deportations. In May it was twenty four
thousand arrests in eighteen thousand deportations. Since February, the Trump
admin has averaged about fourteen thousand and seven hundred deportations
of month. The highest number of deportations ever was in
twenty thirteen under Obama, averaging thirty six thousand a month.

(31:53):
The Biden admin averaged almost thirteen thousand when the Trump
administration started using military carry planes for deportations back in January,
mainly as an aesthetic choice that triggered backlash and rejections
from Mexico and Columbia. Mexico refused to allow US military
aircraft carrying deported migrants to land in their country. Columbia

(32:15):
also barred two military planes full of migrants, but later
caved as Trump threatened unitive tariffs. And you can see
the same thing about deploying military to the border, something
that Biden also did but has a larger esthetic backlash
under Trump. Do you have something you want to say
on this like image aspect I have some quotes from Fisher,
and that's kind of all I have left.

Speaker 6 (32:35):
Yeah, I mean it is very fitting of our styles
of politics that you're going to Fisher here and I'm
going to Benjamin.

Speaker 3 (32:42):
Benjamin is quoted in these sections that Fisher is pulling
from as well.

Speaker 5 (32:46):
Yep, yep.

Speaker 11 (32:46):
So I'll go into the source of I'm not going
through the fucking cru bullshit like pop marksis buschois running doc.

Speaker 6 (32:59):
But no, like, you know, like one of the things
that that Walter Benjamin, who people genuinely really should read.
He's one of the great original theorists of fascism, and
he fucking died trying to leave the Nazis. And one
of his arguments was that, you know, one of the
cores of fascism is the replacement of politics with aesthetics. Right,

(33:20):
that aesthetics would allow you to you know, feels like,
feel representation instead of do the action. And this is
this is an analysis that has been sort of like
folded through a whole bunch of different analyzes of how
capitalism functions. Right, this is this is one of the
three lines of the society a spectacle, and it's this
real issue that we're dealing with now because again kind

(33:42):
of in a sense, what has happened to everything, right,
And you can argue to some extent that like our
channel being called cool zone media is sort of this
is that all politics from every side has been completely
reduced to aesthetics. And completely reducing it to aesthetics allows,
like allows the fascist mode of politics to simply draw

(34:03):
in a bunch of people who can sort of just
now passively experience living through these sort of through the
sort of collection of images and this emotional aesthetic. Yeah,
and it also is doing the same thing to us.
But the thing is they have the fucking state and
we don't, right, And so if you don't fucking exit,
if you don't exit the sort of mirror world of
esthetic of sort of like of fucking living in images, right,

(34:25):
and you know, go do the actual shit that the
board is talking about in the society a spectacle where
you and all your friends formed workers councils and fucking
start taking all of the shit back from all of
the people who are taking it from you. You're just
gonna live in the fascist timare forever.

Speaker 3 (34:38):
I mean, you could look at the union resistance to
iced importations, specifically in La with restaurant workers that it's
literally doing that. And like I would argue, like now,
it's not so much that fascism is politics as aesthetics,
but especially now, it is an aestheticized politics. And you
can even see that in so far as its focuses
on you know, like race and like ethnic purity, like

(34:58):
blood and soil. That's why they're posting American progress driving
out the indigenous people with the aryan white lady carrying
the torch of progress. It is an ascetis sized politics
on like a very pure level. And again, to quote
from my goat this antioat quote Mark Fisher in capitalist

(35:20):
realism quote, ultra authoritarianism and capital are by no means incompatible.
Internment camps and franchise coffee bars coexist. Neoliberals, the capitalist
realists par excellence have celebrated the destruction of public space,
but contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering
away of the state, only a stripping back of the
state to its core military and police functions. Unquote. This

(35:44):
is very similar to something that me and Mia talked
about right as Trump got elected in terms of the
state becoming more removed but hostile.

Speaker 6 (35:52):
Yeah, although although I see again, I disagree. It's fisial
here because the neo liberals understood what they were doing
to begin with. They were never trying to wither the
state away. That was just the lies they told the
fucking basses like su I mean, that's what contrary.

Speaker 5 (36:04):
To their yeah yeah, and it's like you know.

Speaker 3 (36:08):
Quote, such a blight can only be eased by an
intervention that can be no more anticipated than was the
onset of the curse in the first place. Action is pointless,
only senseless. Hope makes sense. Superstition and religion the first
resorts of the helpless proliferate unquote. This is part of
what I conceptualize as this code. Hunting is almost a

(36:30):
form of this hopeless superstition. To continue, quote, the catastrophe
is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather,
it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment
of disaster. The world doesn't end with a bang. It
winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe
to occur? Who knows its cause? Lies long in the past,

(36:52):
so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like
the caprice of a maligned being a negative miracle, a
milidation in which no penance can ameliorate. The turn from
belief to aesthetics, from engagement to spectatorship is held to
be one of the virtues of capitalist realism unquote. And yeah,
that's what me is talking about with Gidebor and society

(37:14):
of the spectacle. That's a trap that I think a
lot of people are falling into right now. And though
it's arguable that living in a liberal contradiction may be
preferable to fascist authoritarianism, that still as that mean it's
like good, right, That's not what we're arguing here. Fisher
then quotes French philosopher A Lawn Badeu quote to justify

(37:37):
their conservatism. The partisans of the established order cannot really
call it ideal or wonderful, so instead they've decided to
say that all of the rest is horrible. Sure, they say,
we may not live in a condition of perfect goodness,
but we are lucky that we don't live in a
condition of evil. Our democracy is not perfect, but it's
better than bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust, but it's not

(38:00):
criminal like stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS,
but we don't make racist nationalist declarations like Lamosovich. We
kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their
throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda. And already
parts of this are slightly outdated. Oh yeah, because we're
shit now, Like, but this is the thing is both

(38:23):
are tragedies where millions of people die, right. One of
them is through the aesthetics of neoliberalism. The other one
is through asthetics of racist nationalistic declarations, which the Trump
administration is currently playing with. That is what they decided
to do. Yeah, and so the reaction to it is
on this aesthetic note, not necessarily on this pure actual
humanistic opposition to deportations as a process that is inhumane

(38:47):
that we should not allow at all.

Speaker 5 (38:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (38:49):
I see the logic of this all the fucking time.
Talking to people, We're like, we'll be like, okay, like
no deportations, and then you get a whole bunch of
people being like, wow, but what about criminals just.

Speaker 3 (38:58):
Like some some deportation.

Speaker 5 (39:00):
This is the structural logic of the original like deportation
blitz from Trump.

Speaker 3 (39:05):
Creating a class of undesirables that you can then always
add to and press the border on, like what Karl
Schmidt talks about.

Speaker 5 (39:10):
This is the structural logic of fascism.

Speaker 6 (39:12):
But everyone thinks about deportations this way now, and they're
mad that Trump is doing it and not Biden.

Speaker 5 (39:18):
But you know, until.

Speaker 6 (39:19):
People actually break through the sort of pure opposition to
the aesthetics and actually start, you know, having a kind
of totalizing opposition to the system that is doing this,
we're just going to be stuck here.

Speaker 3 (39:32):
And this is I think one of the limits of
using anti fascism as this like aesthetic code hunting, is
because a few days ago, the THHS posted a Woody
Guthrie song, his song America the Beautiful, with the DHS
posting the promise of America is worth protecting the future
of our homeland is worth defending. Notably, everyone in this

(39:54):
video is all white people, which this sentiment is the
same thing as the fourteen words, except it has fifteen words,
so therefore not a Nazi dog whistle. We're safe, guys,
we're good. I counted the words. There's fifteen of them,
so you can disregard what the actual text is saying.
And I think that is like the prime, the prime

(40:15):
contradiction in which I am growing increasingly frustrated. So that's
most of what I have to say about the limits
of Nazi code hunting and the aesthetics of superstition and
the paranoid style in American politics. Mia, Do you have
any any final wise notes?

Speaker 6 (40:35):
The time for Nazi code hunting, if there ever was one,
has passed.

Speaker 5 (40:39):
It is now time to end the episode right here.

Speaker 3 (40:43):
That's right. It is related for a meeting. Oh and
if you were able to decode the hidden message in
the ad break, send the contents of the message via
email to your local congressman to redeem your prize.

Speaker 7 (40:57):
By bye.

Speaker 9 (41:10):
So, in case you've been living under a rock to
ring in the new year, the United States regime decided
to invade Venezuela and kidnap President Maduro and his wife
Celia Flores to put them on trial in the United States.
Thus far the time of recording, there are one hundred
reported killed by America's invasion, and Maadua's vice president, Elsa Rodriguez,

(41:31):
is now acting president of Venezuela. Amduro has been reigned
in New York. There's not a lot yet known about
how things played out precisely, so I don't plan on
Telvin too deeply into my speculations, but many have been
drawn attention to the similarities between this recent historical moment
and another notorious US invasion of a nearby Latin American country, Panama,

(41:55):
back in nineteen eighty nine. Hello and welcome. Take it
up in here. I'm Addressage and I'm here with.

Speaker 4 (42:02):
Speak James, a person who's been to Panama. I'm excited
about this one. I saw some good museums when I
was in Panama.

Speaker 9 (42:10):
I haven't been to any museums. I did visit Panama
at one point, nice and years ago. Yeah, this is
before I was politically conscious.

Speaker 4 (42:17):
Yeah, okay, Yeah, I was even more politically conscious after
spending some time at Panama.

Speaker 9 (42:24):
Yeah. I can imagine after reading about what happened. Yeah,
I could see why you would be.

Speaker 4 (42:30):
Yeah, right, like I obviously people we will inform people
that they're not aware of the history of the US
and Panama of two episodes, but having just come from
watching people who across the Darian Gap being detained, imprisoned,
and deported from Panama with US funding, and then going

(42:50):
and seeing the museum with all this history the idea
that they'd come back to full circle to like the
US effectively using Panama as externalization of its own border,
like the US said its Homeland Security secretary to the
inauguration of the current Panamanian president, Like it was really just,

(43:11):
i know, not great, Like it didn't make me happy.

Speaker 9 (43:14):
Yeah, I mean there's a long history of that kind
of collaboration between those governments. Yeah, for that and for worse.
And so that's really what we're going to look into today,
you know, the history of US intervention in Panama, so
we can hopefully understand why comparisons are being drawn to
the US invasion of Venezuela here in turn twenty six. Yeah,

(43:36):
So in case you did know to some basic facts
about Panama, it's a country on the Isthmus connecting Central
America to South America border in Costa Rica and Columbia.
That's a population of just over four million people, and
it is best known, of course for its canal, which
is a real feat of human engineering with an unfortunate
tragedy behind it, that links the Pacific Ocean to the

(43:59):
Atlantic and via the Caribbean Sea. This canal is one
of the principal reasons why the US has so long
been invested in the fate of this still Spanish speaking country.
So you see, if they go all the way back
to eighteen twenty one, where as a member of the
newly minted Republic of Grand Columbia, the country gained independence

(44:21):
from the crumbling Spanish Empire. But after that Republic of
Grand Columbia dissolved in eighteen thirty one, Panama remained part
of Columbia until, with US back in, it seceded in
nineteen oh three. Now, Panama had actually tried to gain
its independence from Columbia before then, in eighteen thirty, eighteen
thirty one, and eighteen forty, but among many other reasons,

(44:44):
despite being part of Columbia, it didn't have any roads
connecting it to the rest of Columbia due to the
Darian Gap. Can you tell me a bit more about
that part of the world, because I know you have
a lot of intimate knowledge of it.

Speaker 4 (44:57):
Yeah. Absolutely, I'd still no road to go through the Darienage.
It's extremely mountainous and extremely jungly, and it has some
very large and powerful rivers. Right. You know, I spent
time in the Darien myself. When you talk to indigenous
people who lived in Daddy and now. But I remember
speaking to a guy, Senor Bonniell was his name, and
he said to me, like, how could we be unkind

(45:19):
to immigrants. Many of us are migrants too. We go
to Panama for education, I mean center from the Panamanian border.
Patrol slash military are there in small numbers, but like,
essentially you are outside of the state in this area right.
Certainly in terms of provision of services, it's very little,
and that's because largely it is geographically very difficult to access.

(45:41):
To get there. Just to sort of paint people a picture,
I took a plane. Then I drove all the way
to the paved road till that ended. And then I
hitched a ride on a truck all the way on
the unpaved road until that ended. And then I hitched
a ride in a dugout canoe that was literally a
log that someone hollowed out, and I took that for
about five hours, and then I walk for a while,

(46:02):
and that was how I got to where I stayed.
It's still extremely difficult for people to cross, and I guess,
like you know, I like to read James Scott. I
think about the way he thought about the art of
not being governed, right, and it's still one of those
areas that it's hard for the state to extract tribute from.

Speaker 9 (46:19):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean it's impressive to me that
despite these challenges, thousands of people managed to traverse through
the Daring Gap every year. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (46:29):
I mean, people wouldn't do it if they didn't think
that what they were going to leave behind was worse.
But it is one of the most harrowing journeys, one
of the most difficult journeys a person can make. Like
you're shimming along cliff edges on you know, a few
inches of rock, and if you fall, you will die.
You're crossing a river, a river that was chest high
for me, I'm six foot three, and people are carrying toddlers, babies.

(46:54):
Someone gave birth in the jungle while I was there.
It's unimaginable. People die every day. I saw that myself.
It's incredibly dangerous and difficult journey, but people take it
because they want a better chance at life.

Speaker 9 (47:10):
Right, Yeah, yeah, And so you could imagine if it's
so difficult differs even now, how much more difficult it
would have been back then, with even less infrastructure between
the regions of Panama and Columbia. Yeah, so at that
point in time, Panama was mainly conducting trade, which was

(47:33):
a state at the time was mean in conducting trade
with its Caribbean neighbors rather than Columbia's capital. You know,
they were very geographically isolated from the rest of Columbia.
But despite that fact, Panama only succeeded in gain its
independence with the help of the US as American ambitions
and local elite ambitions aligned for development of the canal. Now,

(47:57):
all this and what follows was recommented in Emperors and Jungle,
The Hidden History of the US and Panama by John
Lindsay Poland, which I picked up my library and it
was really a fantastic book that served as my main
resource for this research. In NCA Poland's words, Panama was
a longstanding laboratory of US imperial power and some of

(48:20):
the things I found out about in this book I
never heard of anywhere, and it really shook me that
these kinds of things were happening, you know, at this
crossroads of continents.

Speaker 4 (48:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (48:33):
So I've been saying the US involvement in the country
even preceded its independence, with eleven American interventions taking place
in just the pre independent state of Panama between eighteen
fifty six and nineteen oh two, and irrationale for bringing
in the military usually involved, you know, claims of protecting
American interests, particularly during insurrectionary or revolutionary activity in the country.

(48:58):
And of course, because it's a mara, they always had
a heavily racialized approach to the region. You know, they
saw the Colombian army as ignorant mongrels, and they saw
the Panama Isma's civilians as savage and animal like, especially
as Americans and American capital were involved in the construction

(49:18):
of the Panama Canal railway, which was built between eighteen
fifty and eighteen fifty five to facility the Californian gold Rush.
You see America as iron Panama for a long time
because they saw it as an appealance side for a
trans Isthmus Canal, the next big project in international trade.
And aside from their direct interventions, they were signed in

(49:39):
treaties concerning Panama even before Panama was independent, while I
was expanding in its territory through the conquest of Mexico,
the US signed the Bidlack Treaty with Colombia in eighteen
forty six to guarantee Colombian control over Panama in exchange
for free access to any future canal. As we all know,
a MA always keeps its promises. So only four years later,

(50:06):
in eighteen fifty, the US and England assigned the Clayton
Bulward Treaty, which ensured their joint cooperation in any future canal.
You know, not, as I said, the US and England
signed that treaty. Yeah, because Columbia was not involved at all.

Speaker 4 (50:24):
Yeah. Are you familiar with the Scottish attempt to colonize
the Dadian?

Speaker 9 (50:29):
No, that didn't come up. I mean I've missed that.

Speaker 4 (50:31):
I think it's previous to the dates you're covering that
Scotland attempted to colonize the Daddi and in they think
called the Darien scheme. Basically, much of the Scottish bourgeoisie
pulled their capital to do this, right, the idea that
there would be a Scottish colony. Obviously, at that time,
colonialism was seen as the route to national security and

(50:56):
independence prestige. Yeah, and then you know, they wanted to
keep up with the English who were busy colonizing and
pillaging much of the world, so they attempt to set
up a colony in one of the least hospitable places
on the planet unsuccessfully. You know, people got malaria. When
I was there, I was told that every type of
malaria is present in the gap just because you have
such a global population of people, right that the Mosquitoes

(51:19):
are buying someone from East Africa, then they're buying you,
then they buying someone from West Africa, South America, Nepal.
You know that the Mosquitos is getting a global buffet.
So back then obviously still malaria.

Speaker 9 (51:31):
It's like a mosquito convention.

Speaker 4 (51:33):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like a mosquito vector. Disease got
old mine the Scottish boards was he significantly lost to
such an extent that like we can point to this
scheme of one of the reasons that Scotland continues to
be colonized by England right down. Yeah, Yeah, it's wild.

(51:53):
I think you will probably learn about it now if
you're going to school, if you're going to school in
Scotland or you've been to school in Scotland, you learned
about it. I'd love to hear from you. But yeah,
the Darien scheme was this kind of idea of a
Scottish empire that ended up completely backfiring.

Speaker 9 (52:07):
Yeah. I just looked it up as the late sixteen nineties. Yeah,
to set up a colony called New Caledonia. Yeah, I mean,
and that was their first attempt I set it up
a colony. I mean, way to pick them.

Speaker 4 (52:21):
Yeah yeah, right, like throw a dark at the map
and you couldn't land to the place, so it's less
like Scotland. It does rain a lot other than that.

Speaker 9 (52:28):
Yeah, I mean, as like trying to set up your
first colony in like Antarctica or something.

Speaker 4 (52:32):
Yeah. Yeah, Like I don't know how whether they just
felt like it looks like no one else is hanging
around there, and obviously at that point in time, they
weren't concerned with indigenous people, right, like yeah, they felt
that there was no other state projecting its force there,
or like what, I don't understand how they all because
they I think I read somewhere that there have been

(52:53):
several attempts to build a canal through the day in
I think it's it's actually slightly narrower there. So whether
they were early in that and just sor right, well,
we'll establish ourselves here and then as we'll build a
canal a bit later.

Speaker 9 (53:05):
Yeah, well, of course it didn't quite work out.

Speaker 4 (53:07):
Yeah, it didn't go that way for them, sadly.

Speaker 9 (53:20):
So the US and England they signed the Treaty to
Ensure Joint Cooperation in the Future Canal. And then during
the American Civil War, President Iram Lincoln advanced the proposal
to establish a colony of emancipated and deported black Americans
in southwestern Panama because you know, he didn't believe black

(53:40):
and white people could live together, right.

Speaker 4 (53:42):
Yeah, this proposal was.

Speaker 9 (53:44):
Scrapped due to Colombian, Central American and Black American opposition.
But it's interesting to think about there being almost a
Liberia in the western hemisphere, you know, because the Liberian
project was an attempt are doing similarly.

Speaker 4 (54:01):
Yeah, that's wild to think about.

Speaker 9 (54:04):
And so after quite a few of their pre Panamanian
independence military interventions, it's quite a mouthful, thank you, past Andrew.
The US was hitching to build the canal that they
always wanted. They were feeding for a gateway to the Pacific,
and they did not like that when France tried to

(54:24):
build their own canal through Panama from eighteen seventy nine,
to eighteen eighty nine, but they didn't have, you know,
enough of us saying it, because why the hell is
France in America's backyard as far as they're considered. Yeah, right,
The Monero doctrine was established in eighteen twenty three, so
it had to be activated then and there. And of
course they didn't just want a canal for mercantile or

(54:46):
geopolitical reasons. Remember they had just conquered several states in
Mexico and reached the Pacific Sea to shine and sea,
as they like to say. Unluckily for them, they were
still quite a lot of Native Americans and Mexicans still
living in the western plains and West coast. Plus you
had a lot of Asian immigration to the West coast

(55:09):
as well, and the leaders of Americas didn't exactly appreciate that.
You know, they wanted northern European stock to populate the
western coast, unpolluted by having to share a railroad with
black and brown Panamanians. Yea, So they have to get
a canal so the whites don't have to step foot

(55:30):
off their boats and mingle with the locals, you know,
because then they could stay on their boats, they could
go through they never have to breathe the same air
as the local inhabitants of Panama. And so after wrapping
up their war with Spain, having newly minted colonies in
the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii, they really really wanted a
maritime shortcut to continue their great empire building ambihops because

(55:55):
they see having to spend sixty seven days to reach
from San Francisco to Cuba. They didn't like that, you know,
going all the way around the Patagonian hu and all that.
That's not fun. So the US created an opportunity for itself.
After Columbia Civil War between the Liberals and the Conservatives
that you know raged between eighteen ninety nine to nineteen two.

(56:18):
Here's what happened. In Panama City. Most of the white
elites tried to stay out to the conflict, but in
the rural interior there was a different story as the
liberals found support among the mestizo peasants. In Panama, the
civil war was less focused on parties whether you're a
liberal or conservative. It started off like that, but became

(56:40):
a mass uprising against the distant conservative government in Bogota.
So after several major battles, liberal forces had taken control
of almost all of Panama's interior, and that's when the
US society started in. They used the bid Lactreaty of
eighteen forty six as justification to bring in their military
to protect and said across Panama, in particular the real Way. Thus,

(57:04):
the liberals were unable to finish their victory and had
to sign a peace agreement. And in the following months,
liberal forces regrouped and once again took control of nearly
all of Panama except Cologne and Panama City, and once
again the US got involved and blocked Liberal entry into
those cities. The US made it impossible for the liberals
to win, so they surrendered and signed one last peachtreat

(57:27):
in November nineteen o two. And in the civil war
and all that for what? Because more than sixty eight
percent of Panama's cattle was wiped out, agriculture had collapsed.
The armies on both sides committieder atrocities. You know, thousands
of civilians fled into the mountains. Entire towns were emptied

(57:48):
as people were escaping conscription and violence. Have you ever
read the book One Hundred Years of Solitude?

Speaker 4 (57:56):
When I was like in just out of high school.
Did Yeah, Okay, I read it.

Speaker 9 (58:02):
Last year, so when I was doing this research, it
was like top of my mind. Yeah, because you know,
part of that book covers that Columbia and Civil War.

Speaker 4 (58:09):
I should read it again.

Speaker 9 (58:11):
It was pretty good. I had some very weird stuff.

Speaker 4 (58:13):
It was pretty good, right, yeah, Yeah, it's good to
I'm trying to read more fiction right now. It helps me.

Speaker 9 (58:21):
Yeah. Even though it was fiction, I think it pains
a really grim picture of that Civil war.

Speaker 4 (58:27):
Yep.

Speaker 9 (58:27):
And so I could have in reading this, I could
have pictured what was taking place because the book was
over it. Yeah, you know, rural Panama was absolutely devastated,
and yet the transit zone was of course untouched, the
railroad and the port. The commerce captain going and with
the liberal peasantry defeated, but the conservatives in the US,

(58:48):
the conservative elites in Panama City were best positioned and
negotiate for their own ambitions. With the war over, President
Roosevelt was looking to finally negotiate for Panama canal rights.
And if you couldn't get a deal with the French
canal company there was ready to sell or the governments
of Colombia. He had permission from Congress to pursue a

(59:10):
canal in Nicaragua instead. Interesting the French company was definitely
ready to offload their investment, because you know, there were
multiple attempts to set up a canal. The French had
their attempt and they were ready to get it off
of their hands, right. But the Colombian government rejected America's
hey Hran Treaty, which offered what they considered an inadequate

(59:33):
ten million dollars in exchange for sweeping canal rights. So
America made them an offer they couldn't refuse. What happened
next was that Roosevelt and a French share holder named
Philippe Punao Veria struck up a little side deal of
their own, and the US Navy got orders to prevent

(59:53):
Colombia from crushing any uprising on the Isthmus. Would their
circumstances being what they were on the ground in Panama
without Columbia intervention due to the US blockade, it didn't
take long for Panamanian forces to declare independence. Finally, in
nineteen oh three. The Big Black Treaty the US had
signed with Columbia was supposed to protect Columbia's control over

(01:00:14):
Panama and ensure free transit throughout the Isthmus and the
US did basically the complete opposite. You know, that's what
makes them such an excellent partner on the global stage.
You can always count on them to uphold, you know,
the highest standards of moral and and diplomatic decency. So

(01:00:35):
before you know it, America was recognizing a newly independent
Panama and drafting up a treaty with bunal Veria, who
the new Panama government had given permission to negotiate a deal.
But I'm thinking that they may not have known that
bunal Veria had already practically signed them away. They didn't
like the fact that they would behold on to a
treaty that no Panamanian had signed. But if the US

(01:00:58):
made sure that the Panamanian government understood that if they
didn't like the treaty, the Navy could always just let
the Columbian Army come in to lift their independence in
the bud. You know, it's like, oh, you don't like,
who's going at us? Well, you know, it'd be a
real shame if the Columbia Navy came back in to
the picture. So the New Canal Treaty gave the US

(01:01:20):
far more than they had even expected to get from
the deal. They claimed permanent control over a ten mile
wide canal zone, inherited the French canal works and the railroad,
and secured the right to seize land anywhere in Panama
if they deemed it necessary for the canal's defense, operation

(01:01:40):
or sanitation and trust and believe they would use that
privilege to seize land at nineteen different times between nineteen
o eight and nineteen thirty one, cumulatively hundreds of square
miles thousands of acres, often without notice or compensation, and
always justified as necessary for canal defense. The canal's zone

(01:02:01):
was removed from Panamanian courts all together, and the US
was authorized to police Panama City and Cologne and build
military garrisons. Panama's new constitution made it an effective US protectorate.
Article one hundred and thirty six explicitly allowed the United
States to intervene militarily anywhere in Panama to restore public

(01:02:23):
peace and constitutional order. Civilization, as Roosevelt argued, was the
urgent mandate for all these actions toward building the Canal.
Jesus construction officially began in nineteen oh four in a
Panama exhausted by civil war, quanted by the French failure,
and politically dependent on Washington. So he said, you had

(01:02:45):
been to the canal zone and the museums and stuff,
Can you tell me a bit about what you know
about the canal's construction.

Speaker 4 (01:02:55):
They were very good at this part. I remember this
part of very well. They had accounts from the workers,
you know, the people who were in some cases like
essentially forced labor. Right, they had accounts of what their
lives were like. They had like sort of the ephemera
of their lives, which is always in like you know,
like in museums. It helps to create a picture.

Speaker 9 (01:03:16):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:03:16):
They're like the sort of the things that they were fed,
the shitty shoes that they got, given pictures of the
sleeping situations, and accounts from doctors. Right, because a lot
of people became unwell because they were exposed to all
these conditions and diseases that they hadn't been exposed to before.
So they did a good job. I felt like painting
how horrendous life was for people who were digging out

(01:03:40):
the panamaketal. Yeah, they had a two tier system, right,
I think it was the gold ticket. Yes, Yeah, they
were explaining how life was so much more difficult the
lower down that system you found yourself.

Speaker 10 (01:03:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:03:52):
Yeah, the whole construction of this feat of engineer and
was you know rightfe would suffering Yeah, and that's suffering
often came like in a very racialized way. Yes, as
you mentioned, there was a gold role and a silver role.

Speaker 5 (01:04:06):
That's it.

Speaker 4 (01:04:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:04:07):
So even prior to canal construction, Panama is already a
very racially divided society. You had the white elites in
the capital, you had the mestizo peasants, you had poor
black and Mulatto communities, and you also the indigenous peoples
who were not even counted in official census counts.

Speaker 4 (01:04:25):
Wow.

Speaker 9 (01:04:26):
And among the canal workforce in particular, it was quite
a lot of black laborers who were either descendants of
people emancipated from slavery in eighteen fifty two or migrants
from the British Caribbean who drawned to Panama during the
railroad construction project and the French canal construction project. And
so the US took this social landscape and made it

(01:04:47):
worse by introducing racial hierarchy with the gold role in
silver rule that determined your pay, your housing, your medical care,
and even how you were buried. You know, the American workers,
the white American workers in the canalskan instruction, occupied the
gold role and the Caribbean laborers were pushed onto the
silver role. They had to perform the most dangerous work

(01:05:07):
under the worst conditions, and so during the US construction
phase alone, roughly fifty six hundred workers died from disease
and accidents, and the overwhelming majority were the Caribbean laborers. Sadly,
their deaths were treated as expendable losses. Is an engineering
project framed as a triumph of civilization. The Canal construction

(01:05:28):
finally concluded in nineteen fourteen, and so after its independence,
During the Canal construction and afterwards, Panama faced eight further
US military interventions, including the famous ninety eighty nine invasion,

(01:05:52):
which we'll get to in the next episode. But take
a guess as to what their rationale was for these interventions.

Speaker 4 (01:05:58):
They protecting a business interest, US capital.

Speaker 9 (01:06:03):
Ding ning ning, ning ning, protecting US citizens and property,
maintaining control and stability, preserving US strategic and political interests,
all that usual stuff. Yeah, particularly whenever Panamanians were struggling
for their rights against the elites. The US would get involved. Yeah,
the U s supervised elections, they oversaw the police force,

(01:06:27):
they vetoed public spending whenever it wanted, and the US
bases lined the canal with thousands of troops explicitly for
the purpose of maintaining quiet and protecting property in Panama.
Panama's whole political history in the twentieth century was basically
shaped and dictated by US interests. In nineteen oh four,

(01:06:47):
when general Isteban Whereas a threatened revolt, the US officials
pressured Panama's president to fire him and dissolve the army entirety.
In nineteen ten, when Vice President Carlos Mendoza, a liberal
mulatto married to a black woman, seemed likely to win
the presidency, the US Chief of Mission, Richard marsh threatened

(01:07:08):
occupation if he were elected, so Mendoza withdrew his candidacy.
During World War One, the garrison commander used occupation imposed
moral reforms by shutting down saloons and prostitution and publicly
denouncing Panamanian cities as dens of vice and in the countryside,
ostensibly to protect American landowners, US troops drunkenly abused, stole,

(01:07:33):
and burned homes for two whole years until they finally withdrew,
and in nineteen twenty five, the US came into Panama
City to crush a Renter strike. Panama also became a
regional launch part for the US Empire. The Marines were
stationed there, whore repeatedly deployed in Nicaragua, Mexico, and beyond.

(01:07:53):
For the US Empire, the costs could always be externalized
to Panama. Panama was an imperial laboratory for the US
to test ideas and weapons they felt were risky to
test at home. During World War Two, they tested various
chemical weapons in Panama on nature and people, with minimal
disclosure and almost no regard for long term environmental and

(01:08:15):
human consequences.

Speaker 4 (01:08:16):
Esis.

Speaker 9 (01:08:17):
They also left behind unexploded Venetians.

Speaker 4 (01:08:20):
That is horrible.

Speaker 9 (01:08:21):
Yeah, it gets worse, Okay, great. In the nineteen fifties
and sixties, US officials seriously proposed using nuclear explosions, Yeah,
to carve a new sea level canal through Panama. So
you've heard about this.

Speaker 4 (01:08:36):
Yeah, New Kingda Darien was there. One of the little
strategies that they've thought about. I think they thought about
again when the bisentennial of the United States that have
been nineteen seventy six. One of the things they wanted
to do is complete the Pan American Highway. Have it
run all the way up from the northern tip of Alaska.
I guess so, I think goes from Canada Actueen all

(01:08:58):
the way down to Argentina. I think, geta can we
can we just nuke the Darien and we'll just join
them up and they'll be fine.

Speaker 9 (01:09:05):
Yeah. Yeah, they were really gung who about nukes. Yeah,
at that point in time in history, you know.

Speaker 4 (01:09:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:09:14):
The Panama Canal In case you don't know those of
your listeners at home, the Panama Canal is not a
sea level canal. It actually it climbs a mountain LOOKI
you know. So it has several steps where it's like
the water is released and there's like a floated mechanism,
and it's it's kind of inconvenient just there's traffic backed
up of boats waiting for their chance to get into

(01:09:37):
the canal. And so the idea of sea level canal is,
you know, so much more convenient if you didn't have
to wait for all those mechanisms to you know, drain
and fill and all those different things. Yeah, but nuke
in the canal to create a new sea level canal's
really not the best idea.

Speaker 4 (01:09:53):
No, Yeah, it's wild to think about.

Speaker 5 (01:09:56):
Then.

Speaker 4 (01:09:56):
I guess they got nukes relatively recently. They were like, okay,
what can we do with these? Like yeah, yeah, what
else can we Now you'll see when you're in Panama City,
you see boats like sort of hanging out around the canal. Yeah,
it's waiting to enter those those locks.

Speaker 9 (01:10:11):
And I mean, obviously the consequences of a nuclearicate is
a canal be disastrous. Entire regions that have been irradiated,
populations would have been displaced, ecosystems de altered. And yet
these seriously, with a straight peace consider this plant. Yeah,
because you know who cares about the people outside the

(01:10:32):
Imperial center?

Speaker 4 (01:10:33):
Sure? Yeah, Like what the Embra people and the Guna
people who live down there, Like what do they matter
to them?

Speaker 9 (01:10:39):
Right?

Speaker 4 (01:10:39):
And this is after they've dropped a nuke. It's not
like they're like postulating here, like.

Speaker 9 (01:10:44):
Yeah, it's not that they don't know what nukes do.

Speaker 4 (01:10:46):
Yeah, they've seen this happen in Japan. Right, We're like
a decade since they know that it's still killing people.

Speaker 9 (01:10:54):
Yeah, there are places and canals and structures that have
been irrigated, caves style and stuff using dynamite, you know,
tn T you know, basic communitions and explosive devices. And
that's one thing, right, I don't know what it's like
more of that. It's like, let's just school as big
as we kind of go.

Speaker 4 (01:11:14):
Right, it's not understanding the fundamental difference, right, Like nuclear
blast is of an entirely different nature too.

Speaker 9 (01:11:23):
Yeah, I mean it could have very easily end up
affect in the US as well, right, Yeah, you know,
the occurrents could have carried if they fall out into
the southern US, into the West coast. You know, it's
yea into other countries in the region as well. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:11:39):
I visited one of the places that the United States
nuked after World War Two, right in the Republic of
the Marshall Islands, and they completely failed to account for
even prevailing winds, right, like the fallout directly engulfed small
Japanese fishing vessel. That was just happened to be because
I didn't tell anyone, right, and then they just dropped

(01:12:00):
a nuclear boy told some people to see they evacuated.
People are living on the island, but they dropped a
nuclear barn and then we're just like, oh, wow, it's
blown off over there. Did the result in people being
severely irradiated?

Speaker 9 (01:12:12):
You know, it's like unch of scientists, you know, then
their next and furiously scribbled on some notes.

Speaker 4 (01:12:18):
Fascinating people have attempted to get back to their island
because at one point they were told that they could
and they absolutely like it wasn't safe for them. But
like the the coconuts and the crabs and the fish
and the reefs are still irradiated, They're still not safe
for them. People still have one of the highest rates
of still birth in the world. Yeah, the stories they

(01:12:39):
tell about miscarrying pregnancies are heartbreaking. Yeah, because they didn't
know what was going on, right.

Speaker 9 (01:12:45):
The human and environmental and that it's awful.

Speaker 4 (01:12:48):
Yeah, it's terrible.

Speaker 9 (01:12:49):
And so it took resistance from Panamanians, from scientists, and
from a growing global environmental movement to put an end
to this reborsal. Now, as is the kneeature of interventions,
after a certain point, they started weighan because you know,
the intervening power has created this setup that they find preferential,

(01:13:14):
you know, so while they're setting up they may have
to intervene on repeated occasions, but once they get to
a certain point where their control over that area is crystallized,
they don't have to intervene as explicitly as often, so
direct US interventions waned as time went on, but the
tensions continue to build in Panama for independence from the US,

(01:13:34):
and these tensions flared in January nineteen sixty four, which
would get the ball rolling for a new treaty between
the countries that will replaced the previous hay Banal for
the year treaty. So, since that nineteen oh three treaty,
Panamanians want to get revisited and revised. Remember, they didn't
want to agree to it in the first place. They

(01:13:54):
were kind of coerced into its terms. Both the US's
proposal to create a new sea that canal without nukes,
which would require cooperation with the Paraminians there would be
forced to say he was Paramian demands into consideration, and
so as a concession to Panamanian nationalism, US President John F.
Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson developed a policy

(01:14:18):
that would fly the Panamanian flag alongside the American flag
ou La la in certain parts of the Canal Zone,
and then JFK was assassinated in November nineteen sixty three,
and then in January of the following year, Balboa High School,
which was an American school in the Canal Zone, refused
to fly either flag. So on January ninth, nineteen sixty four,

(01:14:42):
American students decided to raise the American flag for freedom
or whatever, and Paramanian students from Panama's National Institute marched
to the school to raise their own flag, and then
there's a scuffle, and then the Panamanian flag is torn,
and then that scuffle becomes a riot, where twenty four
Panamian civilians and four US soldiers were killed in the fighting. Yeah,

(01:15:06):
and hundreds of Pamelian civilians were injured by the American crackdown.

Speaker 4 (01:15:11):
That Panamanian flag is in the museum, the Panama cat
Now Museum.

Speaker 9 (01:15:15):
The one that got torn.

Speaker 5 (01:15:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:15:17):
Oh, that's impressive. I have to go and see that then. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:15:20):
Yeah, it's really it's a good museum.

Speaker 9 (01:15:22):
So that's a real big piece of history because that
whole riot led to everything else.

Speaker 5 (01:15:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:15:28):
No, that is like it's a pivotal like artifact of
their national history.

Speaker 9 (01:15:33):
Yeah, it's like for want of a nil the horse
was lost. It's like for want of a ripped flag. Yeah,
Panamanian independence was lost. Yeah, yeah, obviously that's an atal
allowance to that, but it's such a unique artifact of history.

Speaker 4 (01:15:46):
Yeah, it's cool to be like this pivotal moment, like
this thing was present.

Speaker 10 (01:15:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:15:51):
Sometimes when I'm in Spain, I'll kick around antiques markets
and find like, like a newspaper to see that this
newspaper was on the street the same day, right that
the Spanish military was defeated in Barcelona. You can see
sometimes people like sheltering behind newspaper stands, right, it's a
exchange fire with the soldiers and things like, oh, this
thing was present at this pivotal moment.

Speaker 9 (01:16:13):
Yeah, yeah, it was there for that piece of history
that more months in time. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:16:17):
I like to acquire those things when I when I can.

Speaker 9 (01:16:20):
Something I would like to acquire though, is a bit
of rubble or something from one of the other actions
that day. The protesters also burned several American buildings, including
entire plans, airlines, and the US Information Agency. I'm wondering
if that piece of history is also in the museum.

Speaker 4 (01:16:39):
Yeah, I think those buildings are still around, like some
or some of those canals, some of the Canal company
buildings are still around because you can you can see
them when you're driving around.

Speaker 9 (01:16:49):
And so, in response to that whole riot situation, the
Panamanian President Robert docci Abi cut diplomatic relations with the
US and demanded a renegotiation of the treaty. A few
months later, in April nineteen sixty four, diplomatic ties were
re established in an effort to resolve the conflict between
the countries. These negotiations would be ongoing for years afterwards.

(01:17:13):
In fact, one of the reasons the idea of the
nuclear excavation was considered in the first place was that
it didn't require as much Paramanian labor cooperation as a
typical canal project would, and because tensions were so tense
that Panama, they were like, let's circumvent them and just
just opening up ourselves. But when the nuclear canal project collapsed,

(01:17:35):
and with mountain pressure from the Paramanians, the stage was
set for the US to pull back its more direct
and open medland in the country, at least for the while.
JFK's vice president Lyndon Johnson won the presidency in November
nineteen sixty four, and as the annalyustry of the riots approached,
he resolved to figure out that new treaty, explore c
level canal preparations, and settle things with the contingency of

(01:17:58):
Americans in office sought to preserve America's perpetual ownership of
the canals, including the famous white supremacist art conservative Strom Trummer.
If you know anything about trum Thum, and you know
that like fok found in kitchen, you know the fact
that this guy was against Panaminians having control over the canal.
It's not surprised. And this is the guy who set

(01:18:19):
a country record for philibustering against the Civil Rights Act.

Speaker 4 (01:18:23):
Yeah. Yeah, I think it was beaten recently by Corey Booker,
who set a world record for filibustering about not very much.

Speaker 9 (01:18:31):
Yeah, I think I could about that.

Speaker 12 (01:18:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:18:33):
He talked about Don Trump for a while and then
he finished up and went and voted for a bunch
of Trump appointees.

Speaker 9 (01:18:38):
It's like the Democratic Party response is like, you stop that,
you meani, and then they just do whatever. Yeah, whatever
Trump wants anyway.

Speaker 4 (01:18:48):
Yeah, you're not allowed to do you know, you're not
allowed to do that.

Speaker 9 (01:18:52):
That's against the rules.

Speaker 4 (01:18:54):
Yeah, they summoned the Reddit moderators, is the democratic response.
But yeah, if there was a cause during the time
he was in office and it would have made the
world better, you can probably count on Strom being against it.

Speaker 9 (01:19:06):
Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

Speaker 4 (01:19:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:19:10):
And so the Americans they managed to script together a
treaty in nineteen sixty seven, but the Panamanians didn't ratify it,
and in the following year, nineteen sixty eight, Panama is
overtaken by a military who don't dun't dun So if
you want to know what will happen with the treaty,
with Panama's political future and how all of this does

(01:19:32):
or does not relate to current commissions in Venezuela, because
I know I have that threat still dangling. Yeah, stay
tuned for the next episode this has When it can
happen here, I'm andrews Age. I'm here with James Stout
and as always, all power to all the people. This

(01:20:02):
The year was nineteen sixty eight, and the military coup
had just rocked the Isthmian country of Panama. Welcome to
it could happen here. I'm Andrew Sage, joined again by.

Speaker 4 (01:20:14):
James, it's me again. I'm excited to talk about Panama.

Speaker 9 (01:20:18):
Nearly, mister Q.

Speaker 5 (01:20:20):
Yeah I did.

Speaker 4 (01:20:22):
I was forgot who I was for a second.

Speaker 9 (01:20:24):
And this is the follow up to the last episode
on the history of US involvement in Panama. So you
can go back and give that one. Listen if he
happens already, But in these times of Trump ro doctrine,
I want to take us back to this particular moment
in Iama's first history to highlight the parallels with today.
In short, what we talked about last time was how

(01:20:46):
Panama became a testing ground for US Empire. Long before, during,
and after the construction of the Panama Canal, the US
had repeated military interventions justified as protecting transit or American
and wrists, and Washington ultimately backed Panama's break from Columbia
nineteen oh three secure canal rights on Washington students. This

(01:21:10):
independence came with a cost A caveat, a lopsided treaty
that turned Panama into US protectorate and granted the US
permanent control over the canal zone and the rest of
the country. Effectively, the canal's construction itself was an insurance
feat built on racial hierarchy, and throughout the rest of

(01:21:30):
the twentieth century, the US continued to demonstrate its control
over Panama's politics, the attempts of its people to exercise
their autonomy, to exercise their their rights, and the US
of course engaged in the testing of chemical weapons in
the season of land and the use of the country
as a regional military launch pad. And yet Pamelians continue

(01:21:53):
to resist, continue to challenge US control, and continue to
demand treaty reform. And so following the nineteenth sixty four riots,
there was an opportunity to negotiate a new treaty, but
after the first attempt was rejected by Panama nineteen sixty seven,
a military coup would rock the country in nineteen sixty eight.
A feast to get this timeline thanks to my main
resource for these episodes, Emperors in the Jungle The Hidden

(01:22:16):
History of the US in Panama by John Lindsay Poland,
but he doesn't go into too much depth on the
military coup specifically, but that I had to look to
an EPSCO knowledge advantage article by Carl Henry Marco titled
Omar Torrijos ousts Arias in Panama. What I learned from
that was there was a coalition of National Guard officers

(01:22:39):
that ousted President Arnulfo Arias, who was himself trying to
consolidate control over the military so they would support his
future elections by removing those officers he thought he could control.
So there were apparently racial tensions mixed into the school,
as officers in the National Guard had increasingly come from
Mestizo backgrounds as opposed to white backgrounds, which had traditionally

(01:23:03):
supported the civilian predominantly white oligarchy. So a coalitionive officers
tried to change this. At first, they were led by
a guy named Major Boris Martinez, who seized power and
ousted areas before anyone thought for a moment the things
were finally going to radically change in the country. Within months,

(01:23:23):
student protests were crushed by the National Guard with arrests
and beatens, making it clear that the military rule and
not democracy, was there to stay. Not long after Martinez
took control, he was himself ousted by a lieutenant colonel
and the junta's chief of staff in nineteen sixty nine.
That man was Omar Torrijos Herrera, a Mestizo officer with

(01:23:47):
middle class roots. Who sought to challenge the oligarchy. Somewhat
fun fact, though, Lindsay Poland mentions that Torrijos sued as
a spy for the US military intelligence from nineteen fifty
five to nineteen sixty nine, informing the Americans about everything
from labor unrest and student activities to political issues and
the Soviet Chinese penetration. Tori Host was one of the

(01:24:09):
soldiers who helped suppress the unrest in nineteen sixty four.
In fact, oh well, but in power. Publicly, he styled
his military rule as reformist. He pushed through land reforms
that opened up estates long when applies by elites, and
promised change for rural Panama. But although these reforms were popular,
very few poor Panamanians actually benefited. Meanwhile, he overhauled the

(01:24:34):
bank n doors in the country, such as Panama quickly
became a hub for offshore banking and money laundering. But
it can't be said that he didn't do anything positive
for the country because he was the one whom ased
to establish a new treaty with the US. The US
was facing international pressure this point for the continued ownership
of the canal, especially thanks to a nineteen seventy three

(01:24:56):
United Nations Security Council session hosted by Torrijo's in Panama City.
In nineteen seventy seven, Tory Host negotiated Jimmy Carter and
secured the treaties that promised the Canal's return to Panamanian control.
The Tory Host Carter Treaties which agreed to transfer the
canal from the United States to Panama on December thirty first,
nineteen ninety nine, with the surrounding territory of the canal

(01:25:19):
so And returned first in nineteen seventy nine, and the
US military being allowed to remain the country until nineteen
ninety nine. But despite this major win, torri Host knew
his rule was under pressure, so he announced a controlled
return to civilian government. He created a political party dominated
by the National Guard. He stepped back from the presidency.

(01:25:40):
He installed a civilian figurehead named Aristateius Royo, and he
promised elections by nineteen eighty four. But then his private
plane crashed in nineteen eighty one. Which it was funny
how frequently that happened back in those days. You know, yeah,
small aircraft doesn't randomly. These political leaders are constantly dying
and blamed crashes very sad, and so the democratic reforms

(01:26:04):
didn't happen. Instead, Torijos's intelligence chief emerged as the new
military dictator of Panama. His name was Manuel Noriega. Now,
as Lindsay Poland talks about in the book, Noriega was
another informant for the US in the mid nineteen fifties,
but his career in the military wasn't going anywhere because

(01:26:27):
he had a history of alcoholism and beaten women until
Torijo's hand picked him as his intelligence chief. Manuel Noriega
came up inside a Panamanian National Guard that had been shaped, trained,
and closely supervised by the US during the Cold War.
He was educated at Peru's National Military Academy, trained at

(01:26:49):
the School of the Americas, took courses in intelligence and
conter intelligence in nineteen sixty seven, and trained in psychological
warfare at Fort Benning. By the late nineteen sixties he
had also become a regular informant for US intelligence. You know,
he took more than just a few courses. He was
very much embedded with the Americans and so totally hosts dead.

(01:27:12):
Noriega seized the opportunity to take power. Initially the US
was pretty much okay with this. No Diego had previously
been a CIA asset, providing intelligence and governments and militaries
across the region, including Cuba. He had helped suppress leftist movements,
facilitated US regional operations, and maintain stability around the Canal,

(01:27:33):
and for that he was well compensated more than one
million dollars from the cie WOW, plus at least another
one hundred and sixty two thousand dollars from the U.
S Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency. By the early
nineteen seventies, US agencies already knew that no Diego was
deeply involved in drug trafficking. In nineteen seventy two, the

(01:27:55):
Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs even considered assassinating him.
But he's just too useful for him to go so soon.

Speaker 4 (01:28:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:28:04):
So, throughout the Carter years, evidence of his criminal activity
was building up and was also suppressed because Washington needed
Paname and cooperation to secure ratification of the Canal treateams.
But under Reagan the evidence became impossible to ignore, as
intelligence reports from nineteen eighty three and nineteen eighty five
documented meetings between nor Diega and Cartail figures permissions to

(01:28:27):
manufacture cocaine in Panama and offers to mediate disputes between
the traffickers.

Speaker 4 (01:28:34):
I love the mediation, but the best Yeah.

Speaker 13 (01:28:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:28:37):
He was like, hey, guys, this isn't you. It's come on,
let's let's have us sit down and talk.

Speaker 4 (01:28:45):
He was committed to like a non cast, real solution.
You know. It's great to see.

Speaker 9 (01:28:53):
Yeah, And and they continue to protect them even with
that smoking gun. They were like, yeah, Noriega is still
our guy. They had hoped that he would cooperate with
contra operations against Nicaragua's Sandinista government THO, but in what
was I suppose his first strike, he refused to cooperate

(01:29:13):
with them on that operation. He also maintained relations with
both Nicaragua and Cuba, and meanwhile, under his leadership, the
Panamanian Defense Forces expanded their role in both arms and
drug smuggling networks, much of it feeding directly into the
US drug market. So Noriega and the US had to
break up in the mid to late eighties. And this

(01:29:35):
is also thanks to US domestic politics. You see, in
nineteen eighty six, the Iran contra scandals saw a key
figures who had shielded Noyeka previously be removed from their positions.
At the same time, the crack co key and panic
took over US politics again a very racialized situation. Congress

(01:29:58):
had passed sweeping anti drug laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and
the media was freeing this whole drug problem as a foreign,
racial black threat. Yeah, Noriego, being a Panamdian dictator, ended
up being a very useful prop villain of sorts for
the burgeoning war on drugs. So in February nineteen eighty eight,

(01:30:22):
US Grand Juries in Miami and Tampa indicted Noriega for
drug trafficking linked to activities from nineteen eighty two to
nineteen eighty four. Sanctions followed within weeks, supposedly to force amount,
but they didn't. The sanctions called shortages. You can only
collapse and suffering among ordinary Panamanians. Yet Noriega stayed in

(01:30:43):
power used the crisis to justify emergency measures and nationalist rhetoric,
as is usually the response. I realize with US inflicted
sanctions they end up creating almost a support base right
for the administration and power, because you know you're trying
to make the people suffer and it said people end

(01:31:05):
up standing with their government even if they have critiques
of that government.

Speaker 4 (01:31:09):
Yeah, right, because they don't want to become another like
vassal state. And especially in Panama, right, like they've they've
already been there once or like look at what's happening
right now in Iran, right, like yeah, HARMANI it's literally
like he's literally tweeting that the people protesting and Donald
Trump's supporters.

Speaker 9 (01:31:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:31:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:31:25):
And the thing is that they're always going to be
all types of people in any protests, And I wish
why people realize that. Yeah, you know, people tend to
take like one or two figures or one of two
pictures in any particular protest and see, oh look they
are doing this. That means the entire protests like this.
It's like no. Protests tend to I think, invite a
variety of positions, perspectives, actors into the free.

Speaker 6 (01:31:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:31:49):
By their nature, they're large gatherings of people, right, Like,
they're not going to be a monolith. People will always
seek to either represent protests in one way or represent
themselves as controlling a protest when they have not done so.
But for the most part, they're very heterogeneous.

Speaker 9 (01:32:03):
Yeah, the monolithizing of protests, including in this case with Iran.
I think it's a very clear example of how useful
that is for every side of a conflict. Yes, because
you know, the protests can be treated as a monolith
by communee and by the Iranian government, you know, to
say there and say these are enemies from within, you know,

(01:32:23):
these are these are Zionists backed and the thing. And
then of course the Israelis could also try and stake
a claim on this and say, yeah, this is all people.
And you know, I'm sure they're probably MASAD agents on
the ground, as they are in most protest situations, not
necessarily massadity agents, but intelligence service agents in general, from

(01:32:44):
agencies around the world.

Speaker 5 (01:32:45):
Sure.

Speaker 9 (01:32:45):
Yeah, but you know, you could always pick and choose
and create your own framen based on which aspects of
the truth you want to focus on. But that's why
I think our solidarity has streaming in with people and
not with states.

Speaker 4 (01:33:00):
Yes, yeah, it seems to be a fundamental issue affecting
much of the Internet left in the United States, so
their solidarity appeased to only be to states and not
to people. Right. We see that in Iran or Venezuela,
or Russia or any anywhere else really like this sort
of internet tanky leftism likes to talk about.

Speaker 14 (01:33:21):
Yeah, so we.

Speaker 9 (01:33:33):
Saw that kind of upswing of nationalistic further following those
US sanctions, and the political situation in Panama was deteriorating rapidly.
No Dieger annulled the results of the May nineteen Ellion
ninety elections after his chosen candidates were decisively defeated. Protests
followed the Panamine and defense forces crushed them, and the

(01:33:54):
images of his opposition figures being beaten by his military
saturated US to the visions to reinforce the racialized image
of the savage Panamania because many of the soldiers that
were doing the beating were black and brown, and the
opposition figure in question was white, So they were able
to clip that and you know, create a whole narrative

(01:34:16):
around it that served their interests. Now, in October nineteen
eighty nine, a coup attempt by Panamanian officers failed and
the officers were executed in the US. Meanwhile, criticism of
President George H. W. Bush had intensified, with editorials and
senators accusing him of weakness for his failure to act

(01:34:36):
decisively against Noriaca, and oh boy, call a man. We
to go on and improve his prove his manhood, you know.
So further motivation for what came next was Noriacer's nomination
of Thomas Duquet as the first Panamian administrator of the
Panama Canal Commission. Bush did not like that pick, and

(01:34:58):
if the US invaded, then they could pick who they preferred,
So there was another motivation. The invasion was also motivated
by a desire to showcase the Pentagon's post Cold War mission.
You know, the Cold War was weiganing at that point,
particularly with the fall of the Berlin Wall mayor months before,
and so a new threat, a new boogeyman was needed

(01:35:19):
to justify US military action in Latin America, this time
in the form of the drug war story. And then
on December sixteenth, a U. S. Marine Intelligence udit ran
a roadblock near Pameian military headquarters. Parmanian soldiers opened fire,
killing Lieutenant Robert Pass. Another U. S. Soldier and his
wife were detained, and while the soldier was beaten, the

(01:35:42):
wife was threatened with the rape. Within twenty four hours,
Bush ordered a full scale invasion on December twenty or
nineteen eighty nine, the United States launched its twentieth military
intervention in Panama since eighteen fifty six, and by far
the most violent. It was the worst destruction Panama had
seen since Columbia's Thousand Days War. Eighteen thousand people lost

(01:36:06):
their homes. At least five hundred and sixteen Panamanians were
killed by official Pentagon counts until Army estimates, however, but
civilian deaths closer to one thousand jeez, and many believed
that the true number was even higher. Entire neighborhoods were destroyed.
El Toro Rillo, a poor, mostly black and Mestizo community

(01:36:28):
built originally for canal workers, was bombed and burned to
the ground. San Miguelitos also hit and across the country.
Thousands were detained in prison camps. Damage exceeded one billion
dollars on top of losses for nearly two years of samshuns.
The US used overwhelming force, including stealth bombers, the bonnassaults,

(01:36:50):
and heavy firepower in densely populated areas, against a Panamanian
force of only about three thousand trained soldiers. Noriego was
jared flew into the United States, tried and imprisoned, and
as Lindsay Poland writes, quote, the names of the twenty
five US soldiers killed during the invasion ruled across TV

(01:37:11):
screens around the world. He had a register of Panamanians
killed during the invasion has never been published even in
Latin America. End quote.

Speaker 4 (01:37:22):
Jeez, when no Diega like sought refuge in the Vatican
embassy for a while, I understand that they played like
You Two music NonStop to force him to capitulate the
PID what Yeah, yeah, yeah, they used YouTube and from
other stuff too, But.

Speaker 9 (01:37:42):
I'm pretty sure my age here that just before my time,
this was the band that was forced onto all the
iPods and stuff, right.

Speaker 4 (01:37:49):
Yes, that's right, yeah, yeah, this was yeah, and prepped
a parallel operation. Maybe again they would maybe that was
a CIA of Yeah Bonner, the guy who talked to
me a game and then never pays his taxes in
Ireland also part of the invasion of Panama.

Speaker 9 (01:38:06):
He had a critical role in US intervention.

Speaker 4 (01:38:09):
Yeah wait until I find it. I bet there was
some band I like as well, but You Two is
the one that sticks in my mind.

Speaker 9 (01:38:15):
The humanity if there has to be a walker. Yeah,
so in all seriousness. Though Noriego was not a good
guy by any stretch of the imagination. And I don't
know why people feel this, this compulsion to try and
rehability figures that have been targeted by US imperial suggression.

(01:38:38):
You know, you can condemn US superior suggression without carrying
water for their image, right. Yeah, Now, Noriego was not
a good guy, but he was not unusual. I think,
if anything, you can point out the hypocrisy of the
United States in this you know, selective outreach. Yeah, because

(01:38:59):
at the very same moment, our wills atrocities were being
inflicted by leaders across the region, carried out by regimes
firmly integrated in Washington's could races. In Guatemala, for example,
security forces kidnapped, tortured, and raped Diana Ortiz, an American
nune before she managed to escape. But there's no evidence

(01:39:21):
that this triggered outrage in Washington or cares for military intervention.
And then in El Salvador, Gorilla forces launched an offensive
on San Salvador, and the army responded by murdering six
Jesuit priests. The same forces went on to arrest, torture,
and intimidate international aid workers and church prisnel, but none
of this was treated as grounds for invasion. Regime she

(01:39:44):
enjoy emergency action. The US only removed Noriega because he
wasn't convenient to their ends anymore, and the aftermath of
that invasion was utter devastation. Panama was left without a
function government until the US military stepped in to fill
the vacuum after two or three days. American forces formerly

(01:40:05):
took over the administration of the country under the Pentagon
Plan called Operation Blind Logic. U S officers were a
signed to supervise twenty two Panamian ministries and state agencies
effectively run in the country for months. At the same time,
the military crippled what remained of Parama's civilian administration by
season roughly fifteen thousand boxes of government documents. The invasion

(01:40:31):
permanently resheeted Panama's political reality, dividing it between those absorbed
into Noriega's nationalist rhetoric and those who had welcomed foreign intervenure.
It also sent a clear message to every political actor
that Panama's sovereignty was conditional on their cooperation with the US. Meanwhile,
in the US, there was baillium murmur against the government's

(01:40:53):
claimed right to invade Panama, removed its government, dismantle its military,
and infect costs on Panama's poor, black and Mestizo communities.
The US kind of moved on from Panama after the vision.
I mean, they continued to meddle, intervene, but they've basically
gotten what they wanted at that point, which was the
removal of someone who was not going to cooperate with

(01:41:14):
them anymore. Unless you believe that they disrupted the drug
trade with the arrest of Doriego, Panama continued to function
as a transit point for cocaine and a center for
money laundering at basically the same scale as before. So finally,

(01:41:39):
what exactly is the connection with Venezuela. If any James
you want to.

Speaker 4 (01:41:43):
Go first, I mean, there's a very obvious parallel in
that they have deposed a leader that you don't need
to go carry water for the guy they'd deposed. You
could say something is bad without like the person who
happened to does not therefore become a perfect angel. Things
cannot be binary, that's so. But like it is wild
that we look to what happened in Panama and We're like,

(01:42:06):
you know what we could do better than that. We
don't even have to declare a war. We don't even
have to do an invasion, right, we can just just
kidnap a guy.

Speaker 9 (01:42:15):
I mean, they did do an invasion. They kind of
bombed a bunch of people and stuff too.

Speaker 4 (01:42:19):
Yes they did. Yeah, they did an air Yeah they did,
like an airborne invasion, I guess would be the way
to describe it. Like and in a sense, right, like
I'm happy that they didn't sort of go through the
streets of Caracas with bombs and artillery and mortars.

Speaker 9 (01:42:35):
Yeah, the then do squashed earth yeah this time.

Speaker 4 (01:42:38):
But at the same time, like we have now, like
I've literally have spoken to several people in Bends Wear
in the last twenty four hours, right, and they are
in that situation now of not knowing, right, like who
is the relevant authority the US in this case. It
doesn't seem to have replaced the regime. They've just in
again a parallel to what we saw in Panama, just
installed another person, right.

Speaker 9 (01:42:59):
Not even already install on the person, because I mean.

Speaker 4 (01:43:03):
Let it trickle down and see how it rides.

Speaker 9 (01:43:06):
Rodriguez was already in power.

Speaker 4 (01:43:08):
Yeah, like I guess maybe they looked to Rodriguez and
were like, because she's previously worked with Like I guess
the analogy would be the Chamber of Commerce maybe something
like that, like Venezuelan business interests. Maybe they would just like, yeah, well,
maybe we can force her to be compliant with what
we want. Like the only shit getting liberated is the
oil in Venezuela, right, and it's actually not very good oil. Yeah,

(01:43:29):
the same happened in Panama. Right, the US didn't go
to liberate people, that went to liberate the canal. It's
so disappointing to see people still look at foreign policy
and binary terms. And like you said before, I think
one of the things that the Venezuelan people I'm speaking
to express deep, deep frustration with is that when they
take a risk right and go online and share their

(01:43:52):
frustrations with both Chavismoon and with the United States invading
their country, they are told by Western leftists that they
must be either THA agents or pretend Venezuelans like Americans
posing as Venezuelans.

Speaker 9 (01:44:08):
Yeah, or like Gusanos or whatever.

Speaker 4 (01:44:11):
Yeah, Like there is this, I mean the case of Venezuela. Raight,
I have you thought it was great. You could have gone,
you had two decades to go. I went when I
was an undergraduate, right to see it, to study it,
to understand it. It was formative in the way that
my politics are now, which is politics. It doesn't see
human liberation coming from the state.

Speaker 9 (01:44:32):
It's not to say that there's nothing positive happening in
Venezuela in terms of experiments with you know, communal initiatives
and you know, cooperative economic projects, despite the us anctions,
despite what they are, endurant as we young people have
you know, managed to innovate and manage to create you know,

(01:44:52):
these kinds of projects where they can exercise their autonomy,
exercise their voice and their self determination.

Speaker 4 (01:45:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:45:02):
I think, of course that there's a level of i
think co optation or attempts by the government of Venezuela
to use those projects and to integrate those projects into
their apparatus or to gain legitimacy to reals projects. Yeah,
but that's always the situation on the ground is very complex,

(01:45:24):
and people are going to have different perspectives and feelings
on the levels of government's involvement in their communes and whatnot.
I think the best outcome for Venezuelan's would have been,
of course, primarily the lifting of US sanctions. Yeah, and
you know, secondarily their own self directed liberation from the

(01:45:48):
imposition of the government on their projects. But you know,
there are those who have those projects who support the
government's involvement, who get received funding and that kind of thing.

Speaker 4 (01:45:58):
So it's like, like you say, right, that these things
aren't binaries. It's not like always good, always bad. But
as you said, right, like our slodargy should be with
the Venezuelan people. They should be the ones who get
to decide who rules Venezuela.

Speaker 9 (01:46:13):
Yeah, I mean, even if I disagree with that, Yeah,
I still think ours be up to them.

Speaker 4 (01:46:18):
We should want a world in which should get they
can choose, even if they don't choose what we want.
Otherwise it's just another kind of colonial project, right, and
I think that colonial impulse. And let's also be honest,
there is a racialized component to the way that the
American left talks to people in the global South, right,
and I think we should not overlook that that they

(01:46:38):
think that people aren't capable of either they don't know
what's best for them and they need to be told
by someone else. Or that they're not capable of understanding.
Like people in Venezuela are extremely aware for the consequences
of US intervention. I lived with people who were tortured
in Chile. When I lived in Venezuela, many people came
from fleeting Pinochet to Venezuela. It was a place that

(01:47:01):
previously accepted migrants. Before migrants I ended up leaving in
large numbers as they have now. People are extremely aware
of what US intervention means. You know, they're much better
educated than most Americans on affairs in South and Central America. Yeah,
they know the game that is being played here, and
I would just like to see people afford them the

(01:47:23):
same humanity that they afford people in this country. Shouldn't
be that difficult, but it genuinely seems to be.

Speaker 9 (01:47:29):
Yeah, I think too, there's an element where you know
them with their knowledge, we make calculations, We make decisions
that you with that same knowledge wouldn't make. You know,
because there's internal disagreement too the people who have the
same knowledge, and they come to different conclusions about that,

(01:47:50):
about the best course of action, about the best trade
offs that they should be making, about how they navigate
the conditions they've been placed in. Yeah, and I think
there's room for those conversations we had without you know,
erasing that ipe. We see your perspectives and favor of
that simple binary that keep coming back to.

Speaker 4 (01:48:12):
Yeah, definitely, like there's no need for their condescension if
we can give criticisms from a place of solidarity. One
of the things that I learned when I was in
ra Java, like, not everything that happens there is something
that I think is perfect or good, right, And there
are a lot of people there, including internationalists, right, Like
there's an anarchist group Techoschin Analysis, who are an anarchist

(01:48:34):
group within the revolution, and like the revolution itself is
not purely anarchist, right that they exist to give criticism
from a place of solidarity, and both groups wanting the
other group to get better, right to have what they
want to succeed, which is how our relations with these
other Like I guess liberation struggles in Venezuela would be

(01:48:55):
a reasonable term to use, right, Like, our relationships with
them should be that like we care about you, We
hopefully both care about these things right about human liberation,
about people being able to live with dignity and respect,
and we could disagree, but we're ultimately disagreeing from a
place of solidarity and support, not of condescension, which is

(01:49:16):
what I see far too much. I think when I'm
on the internet.

Speaker 9 (01:49:20):
Exactly exactly, so you know, Noriego and when we're all
are not interchangeable. Parama nineteen eighty nine is not to
Venezuela and twenty twenty six. The political systems, reachional dynamics,
and global context are different, but the stories tooled to
justify US and a venture ah pretty familiar. In Panama,

(01:49:44):
the inviasion was framed as a moral necessity to stop drugs,
restore democracy, and defend American lives. And this is in
spite of the fact that US collaborated with that very
same regime for years beforehanded Interestingly, in Venezuela's case, the
justifications we also pretty similar. At first, stopping drugs, restoring democracy,

(01:50:04):
defending American lives, and just like with Panama, they faced sanctions,
diplomatic isolation, and economic pressure. But after the invasion of Venezuela,
Trump just dropped the pretense entirely, just came out and
said it, Yeah, we want their oil. So what what
is the international community going to do? About it. The

(01:50:25):
laws do not apply to us. In fact, we are
going to withdraw from all of those international agreements that
you know, threaten not interest. You could look this up
that the US literally put this into.

Speaker 4 (01:50:40):
What was it, It's an executive order, right, leg as
executive order, right, Yeah, they withdrawing from all of these
international agreements that don't align with what they want.

Speaker 9 (01:50:50):
And so in both the case of Panama and the
case of Venezuela, American interests supersede all else. American laws
somehow apply to the entire world, while the world's laws
never apply to America, and the actual people on the
ground in both cases don't matter at all. And also
another parallel, the domestic American narrative of racialized fail and

(01:51:12):
drug war hysteria can be found in both invasions. And
just like Panama left the media consciousness after the invasion
as though the problems were solved, I wouldn't be surprised
if we see a similar situation play out after they
get what they want out of Venezuela. Suddenly all the
issues of Venezuela have would no longer be in the

(01:51:32):
picture because America got what they wanted. Courses development story
so it remains to be seen. That's all I have
for today. History does not repeat, but it's good to
know because I find it often rhymes or power to
all the people.

Speaker 14 (01:51:50):
Peace.

Speaker 2 (01:52:03):
Hey everyone, Robert here. The episode you're about to listen
to is a keynote speech I gave at a symposium
on combating Authoritarianism and Preserving Democracy for the Japanese American
National Museum in Los Angeles, California. So you'll get to
hear the speech that I gave them about what's necessary
in order to deal with this new authoritarian way of

(01:52:25):
overtaking the country. And then there's a Q and A
with me afterwards, where I sit down with Anne Burrows,
who's the President and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum.
She's also an internationally recognized leader in human rights and
social justice. She's a chair on the board of directors
for Amnesty International. She was jailed as a political prisoner
for fighting apartheid in her native South Africa. She's a

(01:52:48):
pretty cool person. So that is the episode you're about
to listen to.

Speaker 15 (01:52:56):
All next keynote is getting to ask us some difficult truths. Authoritarianism,
as has so often been said rarely announces itself all
at once. It takes root quietly in policies that silence dissent,
in narratives that divide, and in systems that normalize repression

(01:53:20):
until it feels ordinary. And when we get to that
ordinary point, it's complicity. So I know that our next
keynote is going to challenge us. We can trust that
he will be provocative. We can trust that he will

(01:53:43):
say some very strong things and it will be fantastic. So,
without blabbering anymore, I am going to welcome Robert Evans,
who is a journalist and author and the host of
the enormously popular and influential podcasts Behind the Bastards and

(01:54:06):
It Couldn't happen here. He's also the author of A
Brief History of Vice and After the Revolution. He has
that rare ability to connect history, power and lived experience,
and he will certainly talk to you about his lived
experience in the trenches of Portland, and he'll do it
in a way that's unsettling. As I've said, he's going

(01:54:28):
to challenge us, He's going to be provocative. But that's
why we've asked him to provide this keynote. So Robert
please come on up, it's your moment.

Speaker 2 (01:54:44):
Thank you so much for that, and thank you all
for being here. I'm going to try to follow that
up as best I can once the telepromter's ready here.
So a couple of days before I sat down to
write the speech that I'm delivering now, a friend came
to me and asked if I had advice on which
kind of gas mask she should purchase for her four

(01:55:04):
year old daughter. As was noted earlier, we live in Portland, Oregon,
and while my friend wasn't planning to attend any protests,
certainly not with her daughter in tow, she was keeping
up with developments in Minnesota, where ice officers had just
shot a man they described as Venezuelan in the leg
and then tear gassed a neighborhood. One resident tried to

(01:55:25):
get his family, which included small children and a newborn,
out of the area, but they were gassed in their car,
and then for good measure, ice officers hurled flash bangs
into the vehicle. His six month old infants stopped breeding,
and he had to beg repeatedly before officers would let
an ambulance in to resuscitate his baby. The child was fine, now,

(01:55:47):
so my friend was right to fear that her little
girl might get gassed for nothing more than existing in
the wrong neighborhood. Questions like this aren't theoretical to thousands
of American parents right now, and they aren't theoretical to me.
I was tear gassed more than one hundred times in
twenty twenty, and I spent a fair amount of time
pulling children and other civilians out of cars that had

(01:56:07):
the bad luck to exist on the same city block
as a man with a badge and a grenade launcher.
And so it bugs me just a little when I
see Governor Walls tell protesters to stay peaceful and not
take the bait. In fact, I'm left asking what do
we think the bait is here? As best as I

(01:56:27):
can figure it, armed and armored police officers blind firing
chemical weapons that civilians is bait, while any response from
those civilians beyond packing up and going home is taking
said bait. Throwing back tear gas containers or anything else
is somehow an escalation. So is standing against a riot
line with a gas mask and a homemade shield to

(01:56:48):
stop your neighbor from getting deported. Any act of resistance
big or small is all the justification federal agents need
to deploy more of the violence they were already using.
It's a neat little rhetorical game that liberals have let
themselves become trapped inside. Playing that game lets them avoid
answering one supremely ugly question. If your enemy controls the

(01:57:12):
police and the military, and they've promised to destroy you,
what does fighting back even mean? Up until the present moment,
the answer given by prominent liberals has generally been you
fight by voting, or by making your voice heard, or
something similar. I have a good friend who tried to
make her voice heard in twenty twenty. She is now

(01:57:34):
an early menopause in her twenties after being rendered sterile
by chronic tear gas exposure. None of the officers who
poisoned her, or thousands of other Portlanders ever saw a
day behind bars.

Speaker 4 (01:57:45):
That would be wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:57:46):
They enjoy qualified immunity. They're doing an important job one
every person can agree needs to be done. The year
my friend was gassed repeatedly, the highest paid Portland police
officer was a man who had been caught and briefly
punished for maintaining a shrine to the dead men of
the waffen Ss on city property. The Portland Police Union,

(01:58:07):
the first police union in the country, sued for him
to be reinstated and to ensure that he faced no
punishment for this, and was brought back with full pay
and benefits. So when you hear stories of Homeland Security
hiding Nazi songs and their recruiting ads for ICE, remember
it's not just an ICE problem. And yet some liberals

(01:58:28):
and progresses will tell me state and local police aren't
the enemy. ICE is just an aberin agency, and surely
there's some democratic cheat code we can use to get
the good guys in blue to help us take them down.
So much of the unchecked authoritarian nightmare currently rampaging through
our streets is the product of a system that views

(01:58:50):
policing as sacred, officers as infallible, and protest as inherently
suspicious and dangerous. This is the standard line, even within
the halls of power or in the Democratic Party, and
it is part of why regular young people in this
country hate elected democrats. The people out, thank you, the

(01:59:12):
people out in Minneapolis battling riot lines and sub zero weather. No,
there's no help coming. The cavalry does not exist, and
so They've had to build their own architecture of resistance
off and on the fly, since immigrants and other people
being targeted by ICE can't safely shop. Local businesses like
Rectangle spelled like wreck is in a car Wreck Pizza

(01:59:34):
have raised tens of thousands of dollars to buy and
distribute food and other necessities. Gathering and handing out donated
groceries feel safe, peaceful, and legal, but that's not how
ICE treats it. Rectangle's fundraising campaign earned them a visit
from armed ICE agents, who, for the account of co
owner Brianna Evans no relation, stormed up on our door

(01:59:56):
to try to get in. Thankfully, members of the neighborhood
had been standing guard. They were able to raise a
significant force of locals to swarm and chase off ICE,
who tried to gas the neighborhood as they were leaving,
only to have their munitions kicked back at them. This
is one small example of the kind of networks of
aid and resistance that are evolving on the ground right
now as I speak. Another example that arose in the

(02:00:18):
wake of renee Goods murder is ice Watch, an informally
organized network that activates members of the community when ICE
shows up in their area. The logic behind ICE watch
is that these federal agents will be less likely to
engage in extreme acts of violence while surrounded by crowds
of citizens following them and trying to wear them down
with shame. This is a good tactic, and we here

(02:00:40):
might rightly consider it a non violent tactic. But the
federal government does not remember Renee Good was shot and
killed for participating in exactly this kind of activism. Through
mouthpieces like Stephen Miller, the Trump administration has made their
stance very clear. Anyone impeding the actions of lawelaw enforcement

(02:01:00):
is a terrorist. Waving a sign or filming an ICE
agent makes you just as much a terrorist as someone
who breaks a window or throws a rock. You cannot
be so well behaved and appropriate in your resistance that
this government will not consider you a valid target. And
yet again and again I see no spine or backbone

(02:01:21):
from the men setting themselves up as the future of
resistance to Trump. Gavin Newsom can't even stick to his
own guns in his own podcast on whether or not
ICE is terrorizing Americans. Senator Corey Booker's big recent suggestion
was more training for ice agents, as if the men
brutalizing our neighbors aren't doing exactly what they trained to do.

(02:01:43):
About a year after Joe Biden's inauguration, I found myself
up in the woods of rural Washington, an hour or
so outside of Seattle, doing firearm training with a group
of leftist side met during the twenty twenty protest. And
I know that kind of thing makes a lot of
people here uncomfortable, and a number of things about our
shared future might make you uncomfortable. During a break in

(02:02:05):
the activity, I sat down for a smoke with a
guy who'd spent the last several years teaching himself to
be an armor or someone who repairs and maintains firearms.
As he'd gained skill with this, he'd started to take
his grade school aged daughter out shooting. He didn't like that,
he felt like he had to do this, but as
he informed me, I don't know that she won't have
to fight for her right to be treated like a

(02:02:25):
human being. Hearing that, I thought back to a woman
i'd met a few years earlier in the bad lands
of rural Syria. She'd been held as a slave by
ISIS militants for two years forced into the kind of
life that I hope is unimaginable to anyone sitting in
this room. One night, as the Kurdish dominated militias of
the SDF advanced on Isa's positions, she managed to escape.

(02:02:47):
After a harrowing journey on foot, she found her way
to the sdf's lines, where the first person she saw
was a fighter from an all female unit holding an
AK forty seven. She made the decision to join up
herself that very moment. She wanted training and a gun
of her own, because then, she informed me, no man
could ever own her again. Now, politics isn't supposed to

(02:03:08):
work that way in the United States. People should not
need to use weapons to defend their most basic civil rights.
But can you look at the mobs of armed men
breaking into homes and businesses in Minneapolis and elsewhere, many
sporting Nazi tattoos to go along with their badges, and
tell me definitively that we're going to get through this

(02:03:29):
without a fight. At the end of the Second World War,
as the dead were counted to cries of never again,
an attempt was made to create a rules based international
order built around the bones of the last failed attempt
to do so at the end of the First World War,
and as we stand here in twenty twenty six, potentially
looking at a US invasion of Greenland, watching military helicopters

(02:03:51):
circle American cities while secret police snatch victims from their
families and haul them off to camps and defortation facilities,
we must admit that this second attempt to create a
rules based international order is failing as well. We and
our predecessors failed at building and maintaining a system that
would stop all of this from happening again. There are

(02:04:13):
many answers to the question of how this happened. The
fact that the United States from the jump refused to
be bound by the same rules we hoped lesser nations
would follow was certainly part of the reason why our
insistence that no foreign court ever judge American politicians or
American soldiers was as narcissistic as it was insane. The
creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the ongoing militarization

(02:04:37):
of the border and border patrol, the granting of qualified
immunity the police across the country, these were all further
steps on our national road to perdition citizens United. Our
refusal to punish Facebook executives over the cabridge, Analytica Scannal,
and our failure to charge the people responsible for January
sixth with treason are all further steps on that road.

(02:04:57):
I could talk about what led us hear for hours,
but all that matters is this. We the United States
are not special. Our long democratic traditions, great wealth, and
high opinion of ourselves have not protected us. The enemy
is that the gates.

Speaker 9 (02:05:23):
Now.

Speaker 2 (02:05:23):
I don't mean to act as if all is lost,
or as if the only path forward is bloody, internesting war,
because I don't believe that the cause of rationality, of
basic human decency still has a lot going for it.
The vast majority of Americans hate this president, just as
they despise the Republican Party and the vicious, cruel and
soulless monster. The Conservative project has proved to be. Poll

(02:05:46):
after poll shows this. We also see it in videos
of grandfathers kicking tear gas cans back at ICE agents
in Minneapolis. The bad guys are outnumbered. We can't forget this,
and they certainly won't.

Speaker 4 (02:05:59):
But the bad.

Speaker 2 (02:06:00):
Guys also have guns and the legal right to use
them however they want, whenever they want.

Speaker 4 (02:06:05):
On whoever they want.

Speaker 2 (02:06:07):
Just because they might lose an election doesn't mean they're
handing in their badges or their weapons. So how do
you plan to make them? One thing that gives me
a sense of hope as I look around the country
is that increasing numbers of liberals and progressives seem to
be waking up to the idea that this is an
existential fight.

Speaker 4 (02:06:25):
Perhaps the most hopeful thing I've.

Speaker 2 (02:06:27):
Seen recently is that in Minneapolis, a coalition of labor
unions and community organizations have come together to call for
a limited general strike that just so happens to be today,
January twenty third, twenty twenty six.

Speaker 4 (02:06:40):
That's right, for a single day. There will be no work,
no school, no shopping.

Speaker 2 (02:06:46):
Now, this is a demonstrative act when you might compare
to the flexing of a muscle. No one involved thinks
that one day of striking is going to be enough,
But nothing less than a general strike has the potential
to force concessions, even capitulation, from the regime, and you
have to start somewhere. This is another example of an active,
peaceful protest that will be considered anything but peaceful as

(02:07:10):
soon as the regime feels threatened and people on the
ground in Minneapolis know this. Whenever I talk to activists,
whether they live in Los Angeles and Portland at Land
of Minneapolis, Philadelphia, I see the same thing I saw
in people in twenty twenty, a grim but very accurate
assessment of what this fight is going to cost them.
They are going to lose eyes and maybe limbs to

(02:07:32):
riot munitions. They and their friends will be arrested, beaten,
possibly tortured, and imprisoned. All of these things are happening
right now to regular people who have done nothing more
than speak up in lend aid and comfort to their
afflicted neighbors. They are willing to risk their lives because
they know the hour is late. I have not seen

(02:07:52):
anything that approaches this level of commitment from the liberal intelligencia,
from most elected Democratic officials, or from the party itself.

Speaker 1 (02:08:00):
JB.

Speaker 2 (02:08:00):
Pritzker calls out accurately our present situation as being like
the early years of the Third Reich, and yet, like
every Democrat in power, he falls short of elucidating absolution
beyond peaceful protest. And if I can get only one
point across to you, let it be this, as far
as the regime is concerned, there is no such thing.

(02:08:21):
All dissent is violent. You attending the symposium as an
act of terrorism, and they will punish you for it
once they get through the people they see as more
immediate threats. There's a book I come back to again
and again when trying to puzzle out my own path
forward in these unsettling times. It's titled They Thought They
Were Free, and the author was a Jewish American progressive

(02:08:42):
journalist and educator named Milton Meyer. Not long after World
War Two, in the early nineteen fifties, he moved to
a small German village to get and know and interview
a number of ordinary citizens about their involvement with the
Nazi Party. Meyer called these men and women the little
Nazis to contrast them from the big Nazis like Himmler and.

Speaker 4 (02:09:02):
Heidrich and Gerring.

Speaker 2 (02:09:04):
These were not people who had been movers and shakers
in the party, nor had most of them been particularly
active or early members. They were regular people who had
latched onto Nazism late, but supported it enthusiastically because of
the benefits it gave them. They Thought they Were Free
is a chilling read for a number of reasons. But
there's no competition for the most frightening passage in the

(02:09:26):
whole work. For Meyer didn't only interview little Nazis. He
sat down with people we might call little anti fascists.
These were Germans who never bought into Nazism. They hated
it from the jump. They even fought it for a time,
but they were never central organizers or members of the resistance.
And when it became clear that the Third Reich had
taken power, they faded into the woodwork to try and

(02:09:48):
stay alive. Meyer sat down with one of these people,
a friend of his who worked as a chemical engineer,
and asked him, one day, tell me, now, how was
the world lost. Here's how his re spont started. The
world was lost one day in nineteen thirty five here
in Germany. It was I who lost it. And I
will tell you how. I was employed in a defense plant,

(02:10:10):
a war plant, of course, but they were always called
defense plants. That was the year of the National Defense Law,
the law of total conscription. Under the law, I was
required to take an oath of fidelity. I said I
would not. I opposed it in conscience. I was given
twenty four hours to think it over. In those twenty
four hours, I lost the world now, This man, this

(02:10:30):
friend of Myers, knew that refusing to give the oath
wouldn't cost him his freedom, but it would cost him
his job and make it impossible for him to get another.
No one would hire a Bolshevik, and although he'd never
been a Bolshevik, once the fascists take over, everyone who
isn't a fascist becomes the worst thing they ever called
their enemies. Today, I guess it would be far left
extremists or antifa terrorists. Anyway, Meyer's friend explained that he

(02:10:55):
thought he couldn't risk being tarred with that brush. Not
because he wanted to escape with his fan and get
a job elsewhere, but because he genuinely wanted to stay
in Germany and fight the good fight. He had many
German Jewish colleagues and other dissident friends he wanted to
be able to help, and he calculated, quote if I
took the oath and held my job, I might be
of help somehow as things went on. If I refused

(02:11:17):
to take the oath, I would certainly be useless to
my friends. Even if I remained in the country, I
myself would be in their situation. And so he decided
to take the pledge, making a decision I think many
of us would have made, telling himself simply that by
saying the words I swear to God, he was ensuring
no human being or government could override his conscience, and
he was as good as his word. Through the war years,

(02:11:38):
Meyer's friend helped save many lives, using his apartment as
a safe house for people fleeing the Third Reich. That's
incredibly admirable. I think we can all agree. But Meyer's
friend felt nothing but shame for his actions. He said
later of the day he took the oath. That day
the world was lost, and it was I who lost it. Now,

(02:11:59):
Meyer was confused by this, saying what I'd imagine most
of us would say in his position, Well, by taking
the oath, you were able to save many lives. You
were just one man, and the Third Reich was already
in power. What more could you have done? Here was
his friend's response. Of course, I must explain. First of all,
there is the problem of the lesser evil. Taking the
oath was not so evil as being unable to help

(02:12:20):
my friends later on.

Speaker 4 (02:12:20):
Would have been.

Speaker 2 (02:12:21):
But the evil of the oath was certain and immediate,
and the helping of my friends, was in the future
and therefore uncertain. I had to commit a positive evil
there and then in the hope of a possible good
later on. The good outweighed the evil, but the good
was only a hope, the evil a fact.

Speaker 4 (02:12:39):
He went on to insist.

Speaker 2 (02:12:40):
That if he had refused to take the oath of fidelity,
he could have saved the people later killed by the
Nazi regime. And Meyer responded, logically, you don't truly believe
that your lone refusal could have overthrown the Reich in
nineteen thirty five, and his friend said, no, of course not,
but then went on to elaborate, there I was in
nineteen thirty five a p example if the kind of

(02:13:01):
person who, with all his advantages in birth and education
and imposition rules or might easily rule in any country.
If I had refused to take the oath in nineteen
thirty five, it would have meant that thousands and thousands
like me all over Germany were refusing to take it.
Their refusal would have heartened millions. Thus the regime would
have been overthrown, or indeed would never have come to
power in the first place. The fact that I was

(02:13:23):
not prepared to resist in nineteen thirty five meant that
all the thousands, hundreds of thousands like me in Germany
were also unprepared. Each one of these hundreds of thousands
was like me, a man of great influence or of
great potential influence. Thus the world was lost. Now Meyer
still doesn't believe his friend because he's bogged down in
the historical details, the nitty gritty of the rise of fascism.

(02:13:45):
His friend, who lived through that, is instead focused on
the greater moral and historic truths behind it. These hundred
lives I saved, he told Meyer, or a thousand or ten,
as you will. What do they represent? A little something
out of the whole terrible evil? And if my faith
had been strong enough in nineteen thirty five, I could
have prevented the whole evil. Now, the faith he's expressing

(02:14:07):
isn't a religious belief per se, but rather faith that
right and wrong exist, and that when people step into
our communities hell bent on harming others, they should be
stopped by any means necessary. So Meyer asks him, can
you imagine anything your society might have done to sustain
your faith, to ensure you and other Germans like you
would have been prepared to resist. Meyer's friend realizes he's

(02:14:28):
speaking about education, the very American idea that ideologies like
fascism thrive in ignorance and can be banished by the light.
He insisted, Meyer was barking up the wrong tree. My
education did not help me, he said, And I had
a broader and better education than most men have or
ever will have. All it did, in the end was
enable me to rationalize my failure of faith more easily

(02:14:50):
that I might have done if I had been ignorant.

Speaker 4 (02:14:53):
And so it was.

Speaker 2 (02:14:53):
I think among educated men generally in that time in Germany,
their resistance was no greater than other men's. And that's
my challenge today to everyone at this symposium, and in
fact to myself. We all have the benefit of an
education where all the kind of people who sit down
in nice rooms to discuss the issues. It is incumbent
on us to look out at the people struggling in

(02:15:14):
Chicago and Minneapolis and Los Angeles and Portland and Philadelphia
and everywhere else and ask ourselves, how can I support them,
and how can I go further? The answer to that
question is going to be a little different for everyone here,
but none of us can afford to hold on to
our old ideas of what counts as acceptable and unacceptable protest.
We're all going to have to become more comfortable with

(02:15:36):
taking on risk, because the boundaries between what is legal
and illegal are going to change on a daily basis
as we prepare for what comes next. We could all
do a lot worse than to take the advice of
New Hampshire Episcopal Bishop Rob Hirschfeldt, who, during a vigil
for renee Good, told his clergy get your affairs in order,
make sure you have your wills written, because it may

(02:15:56):
be that now is no longer the time for statements,
but for us, with our bodies, to stand between the
powers of this world and the most vulnerable.

Speaker 9 (02:16:05):
I got.

Speaker 15 (02:16:18):
Thank you, Robert for that amazing speech, inspiring, sobering, challenging,
confronting all of those things. It sort of almost feels
I didn't want to describe it because in describing it,
I feel that it may reduce it to anecdote. It
was so powerful, but you know, I was so struck

(02:16:39):
by your reference to Milton Mayer's account of the man
who took the oath and who later said that day
the world was lost and it was I who lost it.
And I think that when liberals today, all of us,
you know, we tell ourselves that we're choosing a less evil,
we're staying quiet, or we're sort of staying within the

(02:17:03):
bounds of you.

Speaker 4 (02:17:04):
Know, a particular reaction.

Speaker 15 (02:17:06):
I often ask myself the question, you know, what are
we giving away in the process? You know, what compels
people to cross from accommodation into moral risk? And is
there a moment ahead where mass refusal could alter that
trajectory or has that window already begun to close? You know,
I think of my own, my own experience. You know,

(02:17:27):
some people in the room know that I was a
political prisoner in South Africa, and you know, I made
a very conscious decision at a certain point, and it
was a moral decision to get involved in the Antipotheid struggle,
knowing what the costs were. But I would love to
hear from you about what it is you think that
compels people, as I said earlier on, to cross from

(02:17:50):
accommodation into moral risk.

Speaker 2 (02:17:52):
I think that's a fascinating and an incredibly important question,
and it's it's one I don't have a perfect answer
to because there's a degree of mystery I've been a
number of times with a crowd who you've seen it
kind of come across their eyes and like confrontations with
local police or with federal ass that we have the
Mount numbered, and sometimes we have them Mount numbered and
their AMMO just ran dry, and you see everybody in

(02:18:15):
the crowd make a decision in that moment to kind
of stay where they are, to not see what could
come next, right, to not take a step forward, because
they all have lives, because we have a functional enough society,
because people have kids to get back to and jobs
to get back to, and nobody wants to play act
at an October revolution in between the middle of their

(02:18:36):
work week. And one of the things that is a
potential moment of change is when that the certainty of well,
I have a life, right, and my friends have lives,
and we all have something to get back to. When
you have a large enough chunk of the populace who
doesn't feel that way, who feels like, well, they've taken
what I would go back to, They've taken any sense
of security I have. There's no longer a point in

(02:18:58):
me holding back because this is not holding back, and
I don't have anything to go back to that's one
of the things that causes mass and sudden flips. And
you asked a little earlier, do I think the window
is closing? And I think, kind of somewhat paradoxically, the
window starts closing as soon as it opens, but it

(02:19:18):
can never close all the way because there's not a
lot of them. This is true in every country, with
every state police force compared to the size of the populace.
And so there's always a potential when enough people get
angry and enough people get radicalized, that a system, even
with the amount of violence behind it that ours has,
can be toppled. That said, the longer we let this

(02:19:41):
go on, the more they have wrapped their fingers around
every aspect of policing injustice in this country, the more
ability they have given their officers to utilize violence, to
utilize advanced weaponry, to utilize drones and things like stingrays
and whatnot against protesters. And so in that way, the

(02:20:02):
window within which people can react and feel like they
have a decent chance of getting away or of succeeding
closes because the force deployed against them gets larger, which
makes it a lot scarier and makes people less likely
to take those risks.

Speaker 15 (02:20:17):
So so what does fighting back actually mean?

Speaker 5 (02:20:20):
I mean that that's.

Speaker 15 (02:20:21):
Really yeah, you know, that's a really I think that
that's a really important question because you know, as you
spoke about in your you know, in your remarks, and
we know so well that you know, when the government
or whatever controls the police, they control the military, you know,
and if that has identified you as being you know,
quote unquote to terrorist, regardless of you know, what the

(02:20:41):
circumstances might be, what does fighting back actually mean? You know,
what what is that resistance en compass? And we know
that it can take many many forms. So I sort
of want to push you a little bit more, you know,
what does fighting back actually mean? But what for you
feels morally defensible and what genuinely troubles you?

Speaker 2 (02:21:04):
Yeah, I guess to start with if the question is
what does fighting back look like in terms of what
is an escalation from the ways in which we're currently
fighting back that is still within the bounds of what
most people on our side of the aisle would call
like peaceful and morally justified if it's not legal, right, Well,
one thing that comes to mind as a general strike,
and in fact, the only thing that comes to mind

(02:21:25):
that I think actually has serious weight. The weight to
uproot a security state as powerful and established as ours is.
The way to uproot a regime that says entrenched dis
ours is a general strike. It's almost the only leverage
that we have, which is why I'm happy to see
them starting to explore doing it, and as a real thing.
In Minneapolis, you get this thing online and Twitter, on

(02:21:47):
Blue Sky whatever, where people will periodically be like, we're
doing a general strike next week, Nobody go to workers shop.

Speaker 4 (02:21:53):
It's like, that's not how it works.

Speaker 2 (02:21:54):
You've got to you have to have the backing of unions,
You have to have you have to have a lot
of infrastructure set up to try and figure out how
are we going to feed people, How are we going
to keep people's lights on as much as possible, How
are we going to provide people with the necessities during
what will probably be an extended period of time out
of work, and a time in which, if you're talking
about a real general strike, a lot of the pillars

(02:22:16):
that uphold daily life and our daily comforts will start
to fail if it's an actual, functional general strike, And
so you have to have systems built up for that,
and it's one of the things people don't often think
about when they're hearing these kind of big hitch ideas
for resistance campaigns. One of my favorite examples of this
just in terms of like the difference between here's the

(02:22:39):
idea and here's the things we have to do to
execute it. In Liberia, kind of at the end of
the last really big period they had of like these
kind of warring warlords, there was a massive protest campaign
by women in Liberia that was I mean, it was
basically pulled right out of Lizistrata. It was we are
not going to have sex with our husbands, like, we're
not going to do it. It was a mass resistance campaign.

(02:23:01):
This has been written about. I know it sounds like Lizistrata,
but it's a real thing that happened. And when they
were considering how are we going to actually do this,
they had to consider some really ugly realities, including the
reality of rape, and so a factor behind the scenes
and figuring out how to organize this was how are
we going to create networks to smuggle women out of
dangerous homes and keep them safe for the length of

(02:23:23):
this protest campaign? Right and when you're talking about what's
going to be necessary for a general strike, it's a
ton of illegalism, right, you know, everything from people shoplifting
food to stop people from starving, but to the very
fact that carrying out and participating in a general strike,
if one gains any momentum, will be declared illegal by
the regime. They will try to crack down, They will

(02:23:44):
arrest ring leaders, they will put people in black sites.
These are realities that have to be accounted for in
the underlying planning, and I'm hopeful about the potential for
something like that in twenty twenty eight. Now, when it
comes to the stuff that really scares me, one of
the things that scares me is what happens if we
cross the point into which there is no longer any

(02:24:07):
hope or talk of peaceful resistance, right. And you have
to consider this when you have a large number of
armed men saying we just need to kill all of
the people who are on the other side of this
thing which we have in this country right now. There's
a lot of them, They have weapons, many of them
are in the police, some of them are in the military.
These are realities of our present situation, and that's scary

(02:24:29):
to me because when you cross that line, there's no
longer any question of like right or wrong. It's just
a matter of like what can survive the onslaught, And
that's I think the thing to try to avoid at
all costs, because any sort of mass internescing conflict in
the United States among the Americans, it'll kill is many
people outside of the country because global food systems and

(02:24:50):
global medicines to supply systems will collapse. Right, So we're
talking about having governors call out the National Guard against
federal police forces. I think about both the necessity of that,
because you have to try to resist and you have
to try to make it clear is there anyone backing
up the people from this federal agency? Is there anyone

(02:25:10):
at a state level? Is there any kind of resistance
that the state is going to respect? You have to
ask that question, but some of the answers to it
can take us to really terrifying places. And I don't
think we can avoid asking the question anymore. I don't
think we're going to avoid a point at which some
governor tries something like that, because Ice is going to
continue grabbing, right, They're going to continue pushing what they

(02:25:32):
can do in blue cities. They're not going to This
is not the extent of the shit they're going to try.

Speaker 15 (02:25:37):
Sorry, no, you know, and I think it's also particularly
terrifying we think of what the budgets are behind, you
know that enables this, and you know, the budgets that
are now about to be voted. I mean we're not
just we're talking about billions and billions, eh, and it's
just extraordinary. So you know, I mean again going back

(02:25:57):
to my experience in South Africa and you know, this
idea of a general strike, you know, what was ultimately
the most effective weapon against the apartheid regime was mass mobilizing,
mass organizing across the country, mass marches that actually that
quite literally made it was a specific campaign to make
the country ungovernable. And it was on every level. It

(02:26:20):
was consumer boycotts, it was mass marches, it was you know,
marches specifically targeted at the aparthe eight laws that broke
the back of the apartheight laws. And it was that
aided by incredible pressure from outside, from outside sanctions.

Speaker 5 (02:26:34):
Of course, things are very different now.

Speaker 15 (02:26:36):
But you know, this does take me to another question
something that I've thought a lot about is you know,
after this whole crisis, after this is over, you know,
what are the consequences? What about accountability? You know, when
we get to the other side of this, which we will,
we will get to the other side of this. You know,
what should that accountability look like? Is it an American

(02:26:57):
truth and reconciliation campaign? You know, we had a truth
and reconciliation campaign in South Africa and it was extraordinarily healing,
but there was no restitution and at the end of
the day, there was no justice. So what was the
sort of transformational societal transformational aspect of that should we
think about an American truth and reconciliation campaign? Is it

(02:27:20):
something closer to Nuremberg? You know, who gain to be
seen as the architects of this authoritarian movement? Who going
to be seen as the architects of this anti authoritarian movement?
You know, how do we as a democratic country or
a democratic society, how willing are we to go to
pursue those consequences? I mean, we've just seen how hollow

(02:27:42):
that can be. You know, after January sixth, you know
how Trump has pardoned the insurrectionists. I'd love to hear
your thoughts on that, and I know we've only got
three minutes left before I get hold off the stage.

Speaker 2 (02:27:56):
Well, I mean, I guess I have two answers to that.
The first would be what do I think is likely
to happen? And then what should happen? In terms of
what's likely to happen, I guess the likeliest thing is
that if we have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it's
something that we kind of half ass and it falls
way too short, and there's not any kind of criminal
restitution for the people who are breaking laws and hurting
and killing people right now. I would say that's a

(02:28:19):
likely possibility, just given the way in which this country
has handled similar things in the past and the ways
in which other countries have handled similar things in the past.
Let's not forget the Nuremberg. For all of the things
about it that were good, was also a failure in
a lot of ways. Right The vast majority of the
Nazis who participated directly physically in the Holocaust did not
see any kind of criminal consequences. So when it comes

(02:28:41):
to what I think we should have, I think we
do need something along the lines of in Nuremberg. And
I think that if you want to talk about the
people politically who are committing crimes right now and who
should be on trial, I think we can all come
up with a lot of very similar names.

Speaker 4 (02:28:57):
And I'm very.

Speaker 2 (02:28:58):
Supportive of trying and bringing this regime to justice for
its current illegal behavior and past illegal behavior. That said,
I think it's going to be also a failure if
we do not extend any attempt at criminal consequences, at
retribution at justice.

Speaker 4 (02:29:14):
I guess would be.

Speaker 2 (02:29:15):
The better term to a group of people who have
underlined all of the negative societal changes that are happening
right now, which is the people who run all of
the major social media corporations in the world, all of
whom are deeply complicit and not just our authoritarian slide,
but in direct violence. Facebook knew for a fact that
the military of me Amar was using their website to
spread propaganda to help further in ethnic cleansing, and they

(02:29:39):
made the choice basically to sit with that because it
made the money, you know, And that sort of thing
should be seen as just as illegal as a bunch
of ice agents without a warrant busting into somebody's house
with guns, you know.

Speaker 4 (02:29:50):
So that's where I stand.

Speaker 2 (02:29:52):
I'm on a we didn't go nearly far enough after
the Civil War either kind of kick right now, but
without need to go into that.

Speaker 15 (02:30:00):
We've come to the end of our time. Unfortunately, you
know I could continue. I've got, you know, seven seven
questions that I would have loved to have asked you,
but we don't have time. But you know, Robert, I
can't thank you enough for coming, for being with us,
for sharing your thoughts, and you know, traveling all the

(02:30:21):
way from Portland, and you know, I'm so sorry about
the hundred times that you've been to your guest. You know,
I've been to your guest many many times in my life,
but it's definitely not one hundred.

Speaker 2 (02:30:31):
There's a lot of people got to your guests more
than me, and Bortlands.

Speaker 4 (02:30:35):
Well and elsewhere.

Speaker 15 (02:30:36):
Thank you, Thank you so much, and thank you all
for bearing with us.

Speaker 3 (02:30:55):
This is it could happen here at Executive Disorder, our
weekly newscast covering what's happening the White House, the crumbling world,
and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis Dame,
joined by James Stout, Robert Evans and maybe Sophie Lichterman. Yeah,
this episode we are covering the week of January twenty
eighth to February fourth. Very exciting events happening this weekend,

(02:31:17):
as we know, the super Bowl and even more importantly,
the Turning Point USA halftime Show streaming on Daily Wire Plus,
America's Real Voice, National News Desk and TBN. I don't
know what that is.

Speaker 1 (02:31:30):
Way pause, pause, it's behind a payroll.

Speaker 3 (02:31:33):
Uh you know, unclear? Well, but probably not because it's
gonna be Also it's also gonna be on YouTube x
Everything app and Rumble.

Speaker 4 (02:31:41):
But I was going to ask it was on Rumble.

Speaker 3 (02:31:43):
It's gonna be Oh, don't worry, James that there are
one step ahead of you and we can we can
see all of our favorite acts. We have kid Rock,
Bradley Gilbert, Lee Brice, and Gabby Barrett, all of my
favorite performers.

Speaker 2 (02:31:55):
Garrett, I haven't seen kid Rock since you and I
watched Kid Rock together at the RNC.

Speaker 3 (02:32:00):
It's been too long. It's been too long.

Speaker 4 (02:32:02):
It's been way too long.

Speaker 3 (02:32:04):
It's been too long. I'm I'm excited for Lee Bryce
obviously as a as as the biggest Bryce head on
the pod. Rice is gonna be huge. Yeabby Beart will
be a nice you know, a nice little spice on top.

Speaker 4 (02:32:16):
Yeah, and this guy's name is it's not Bradley, It's
it's Brandley.

Speaker 3 (02:32:20):
Sorry, Brandy Gilbert. My my apologies, my apologies all the
big Brandley fans out there by bad name obviously the
most literally.

Speaker 4 (02:32:31):
Brand that's not a real name. That's just not a
real name. Yeah, it isn't spelt with L E I
g H. So we do have to give him that.

Speaker 2 (02:32:42):
If it was Brandt Leigh, I would be doing some
terrorism right.

Speaker 4 (02:32:46):
Right, gun in my hand. Yeah, I would be unable
to stop myself.

Speaker 12 (02:32:51):
You guys, I just googled Lee Brice and the first
picture that pops up is incredible and I'm gonna put
it in the chat.

Speaker 4 (02:32:57):
Please do is it in the work chat?

Speaker 1 (02:32:59):
It's zoomed. That's the first picture that pops up. It's incredible.

Speaker 3 (02:33:03):
Oh he looks tough.

Speaker 4 (02:33:04):
Wow is he in band of brothers?

Speaker 3 (02:33:06):
His jaw is fantastic.

Speaker 1 (02:33:08):
Oh my god, an incredible first photo.

Speaker 4 (02:33:11):
Yeah, his expression isn't though. He's really letting himself down
with the face.

Speaker 1 (02:33:14):
Yeah, his face says I really am racist.

Speaker 4 (02:33:17):
It just doesn't look happy to be there.

Speaker 3 (02:33:19):
So obviously, after about six months of planning, Turning Point
was able to put together just the finest, the finest
acts in all the show business for their for their
all Americans, all the big names, really whatever flits, everyone's
it to listen. They could not even get Nicki Minaje,
which is like so humiliating, Like, come on, guys.

Speaker 4 (02:33:38):
Yeah, didn't she do a dance with the Treasury Secretary
yesterday or something?

Speaker 3 (02:33:43):
Yes?

Speaker 12 (02:33:44):
Who is that guy or those two people that were
at the R and C that they kept showing doing
that rap video?

Speaker 1 (02:33:50):
I like kind of blocked it down.

Speaker 3 (02:33:52):
Yeah, those conservative rap guys.

Speaker 2 (02:33:55):
Yeah, for Gattio Blow is it forget for Gatio Blow
is one of the conservative rap guys.

Speaker 4 (02:34:00):
Yes, yeah, I will admit I don't have a deep
knowledge in this area.

Speaker 2 (02:34:04):
I I saw him at the R n C. I
was walking behind him on my way to the beer store.

Speaker 4 (02:34:09):
He's incredible. He's an amazing looking man. Yeah, that's a
unique dude. That's a that's your risky goople of the day.

Speaker 2 (02:34:18):
God really broke the mold with him.

Speaker 3 (02:34:24):
So we will we will report on how the Turning
Point halftime show went next week for the next d
D because you you know that I'm going to be
turned into rumble to watch this.

Speaker 2 (02:34:35):
Yeah, it's gonna be We're need a minute by minute
breakdown of this bad Boy.

Speaker 3 (02:34:40):
I'll be taking extensive notes.

Speaker 4 (02:34:44):
I feel'll be able to record in watch it again
later for posterity. I feel like it's gonna go down
like live aid. You know, it's the greatest moment in
live music.

Speaker 3 (02:34:53):
It is interesting that they are showing it on national
news desk. Fox News did not do not decide to
air air the all of Eric at halftime show, so
instead you have to tune into TBN whatever that is
in a national news desk. So let's get us some
actual news though.

Speaker 2 (02:35:09):
Sure, real news, Okay. So Portland, Oregon has been the
site of some recent noteworthy ice protests. On Saturday, the
thirty first of January, there was a large union march
on the Ice building on McAdams Street in Portland, Oregon.
This was like basically every union in Portland. It was

(02:35:32):
the largest union march that we've had here in like
twenty years. Somewhere along those lines, about five to ten
thousand people showed up. Wow, when I heard it was
ten k because I wound up there. I hadn't even
planning to go, but I showed up with a friend
and as we were kind of watching the crowd pass,
a buddy of ours came up who knows one of
the people who organized the march, and was like, yeah,
they're expecting like ten thousand people and I was like,

(02:35:54):
there's no way they're going to get ten that fucking
people out here. And then as the crowd went past
me for like twenty straight minutes, and I was like, yeah,
that might be ten thousand people. That really is quite
a lot of motherfucking people. It was an extremely diverse crowd,
which I mean in the age sense primarily it's Portlands,
so not in the in any other sense of the word.

Speaker 12 (02:36:14):
Yeah, those protests tend to have you know, older folks, teenagers, families, teachers.

Speaker 2 (02:36:21):
A lot of older folks, a lot of little kids,
kids who were like eight to twelve years old. Because
it was just suppose people were like the basic rout
of march was doing a circle around the ice facility,
and then there was like sound equipment and music set
up on a nearby park. So I think I don't
believe the plan was an extended confrontation with Ice, which

(02:36:44):
is what made what came next so surprising, which is
that we start walking towards where the route of march
is heading. We're kind of in like the middle of
the crowd probably, and we see a cloud and it's
like three point thirty in the afternoon. So the people
I'm with, who have all been through their share of
Portland protests, are like, that can't be tear gas. It's

(02:37:05):
not even four pm and this is the Liberal March.
There's no way they've gassed it already. Like I saw
the front of the march. It was a bunch of
people in their fifties. Like, they're not forcing the issue
with Ice, I don't think, but apparently pray the claims
made by Ice. When the crowd reached the Ice building,
people began throwing water bottles. So obviously that's a situation

(02:37:28):
that can't be allowed to continue. So they gas the
absolute fuck out of the march, and they gased it
so much that the cloud of gas spread to cover
pretty much the entire march, including the people who were
nowhere near.

Speaker 4 (02:37:43):
The front of the march.

Speaker 9 (02:37:44):
Yet.

Speaker 2 (02:37:45):
So as we're walking towards it, we've become aware about
halfway towards getting to it that like, okay, that's not
smoke that is in fact gas. Some of us had masks.
I did not, so I'm like, well, I'm going to
have a bad time. This is straight up not going
to be fun album with It was because of where
they gassed us.

Speaker 4 (02:38:02):
There were kind of two streets.

Speaker 2 (02:38:03):
Of buildings on either side, so you basically got you're
in like a valley almost. You've got steep canyon walls
kind of on either side of you. And there was
no wind that day, so you've just got this thick
cloud of gas smoke and ten thousand people crammed in
between two pillars of buildings. So it was a very

(02:38:25):
bad time. A lot of kids got gassed. I saw
a number of children in significant distress, like little kids.
A lot of old people wound up in significant distress.
It was straight up a bad time and it continued
for the next day. There was another march the next
day that started at city Hall. This kind of galvanized
people in Portland to specifically take up the charge of

(02:38:47):
protesting for the city to basically not renew or cancel
ICE's contract to use the building that they're based out of.

Speaker 4 (02:38:56):
So there was a large march on Sunday. I showed
up as the march.

Speaker 2 (02:39:00):
Which reached the Ice area because.

Speaker 4 (02:39:02):
I didn't want to walk across town.

Speaker 2 (02:39:05):
And sure enough we get there and maybe an hour
or so after the crowd arrives, there's like a thousand
or so people and it's still a very young crowd.
This is not mostly people who have been doing the
protest thing in Portland for a long time.

Speaker 4 (02:39:18):
Like I saw a lot of.

Speaker 2 (02:39:19):
Girls who couldn't have been older than sixteen or seventeen
out on Sunday and they gassed again. And I couldn't
tell you. They were letting people like right up to
the front of the Ice building, which they had gassed
folks for throwing water bottles kind of near the day before.
So there's never any consistency with these sort of things.
And eventually they just decided to gas the shit out
of everybody again to come and snatch people. And that's

(02:39:41):
kind of the story is people in Portland are really
pissed again because they gassed the big Lib march. All
of the unions are really angry, all of the nurses
are really angry, The city government's angry. The Mayor of Portland,
Keith Wilson, made a statement that all of the I
say should quit their jobs should resign. I don't know that.
I think that they're actually going to kick I out
of its building now. To be fair, I don't think

(02:40:02):
that ICE is really getting much done in that building
because it's locked down completely. They are using facilities up
in Washington for the actual immigration stuff for the most part,
so it's become I think it's largely a symbol. Yeah,
a symbolic kind of dill. So we'll see. I don't
know what's going to happen next, but yeah, that's the

(02:40:23):
update from here.

Speaker 1 (02:40:24):
The tear gas air is spicy and bad for our.

Speaker 2 (02:40:28):
Health, yeah, I mean, it always bums me out to
see really young people like kids get tear gased, especially
like teenage girls. Because there's data, and not nearly as
much as there should because the government really doesn't like
studying this on how tear gas affects, particularly like reproductive health,
and it's bad. There's evidence from places like Gaza that

(02:40:51):
it can cause miscarriages. There's documentation and miscarriages and at
least three different countries as a result of tear gas use,
although again it's not the kind of documentation you'd want
for a medical thing because you can't really isolate out
other factors that may have been happening at the same time,
because you're trying to figure out what this and other
things are doing to people's bodies in a place like
Gaza where you have no kind of like clinical control.

(02:41:14):
But outside of that, there's evidence of missed periods that
it can like delay or cause unusually painful periods.

Speaker 1 (02:41:20):
Send people into early menopause.

Speaker 5 (02:41:22):
Jeez.

Speaker 4 (02:41:22):
Yeah, there's some evidence for that.

Speaker 2 (02:41:24):
It's kind of a When I brought this up online,
someone got very angry at me because they're like, well,
it's not proven. I think there's enough data to tell people,
especially if you've got a uterus wear a mask when
you go protest.

Speaker 4 (02:41:36):
Yeah, I think also, how are we going to obtain
proof in this scenario?

Speaker 6 (02:41:41):
Right?

Speaker 4 (02:41:41):
What are they going to do? Yeah, it's not very
easy for us to do. We can't really do it
just a double blind trial, right.

Speaker 7 (02:41:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:41:47):
Somebody brought up like, if it was bad for reproductive health,
then all of the women in the military, because you
get tear gassed as part of military training, then that
would have shown up before and it hasn't. And I
immediately found in about three second it's the largest study
done so far on the effect of tear gas that
specifically noted. Yeah, they did some studies on here tear
gas affects people in the sixties. They didn't look at women,

(02:42:10):
weren't interested, they didn't care, not at.

Speaker 4 (02:42:13):
All a priority. Yeah, completely ignored it. Shocked, shocked to
hear this.

Speaker 2 (02:42:18):
So anyway, just like we're a respirator, A half faced respirator,
you know, is cheaper. I would recommend a full face
because tear gas sucks on your eyes. They're not crazy expensive.
You don't have to get a nice gas mask. Just
get a respirator. It's better than nothing.

Speaker 4 (02:42:33):
Yeah, I like my respirator.

Speaker 1 (02:42:37):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (02:42:38):
So firstly, just a couple of small things that we
wanted to note that we might come back to covering later. First,
the US has now admitted that it had a small
contingent of troops on the ground in Nigeria. I wrote
on my newsletter about US drone strikes in Nigeria, what
they're doing there and who they're targeting with those drone strikes,

(02:42:58):
alongside the the long running issues with civilian casualties with
airborne raids in Nigeria. On my news letters of people
want to read that they can and secondly, I wanted
to mention that Judge Anna Reyes has stated Secretary Nomes
decision that would have rendered three hundred and fifty thousand
Haitians without legal status when she was going to let
the temporary protected status expire. I have explained TPS several

(02:43:23):
times on ED and in my first Darien series, so
I'm not going to go into detail about it here,
but if you'd like to listen to those, you can
find out more about it.

Speaker 3 (02:43:32):
Last thing before our first ad break, Bill and Hillary
Clinton have agreed to testify before Congress is a part
of the Epstein investigation. A vote to hold the Clintons
and criminal contempt of Congress was scheduled for this week
before they finally agreed to be deposed at two hearings
in late February, and the Clintons have now called for

(02:43:52):
these hearings to be public. This follows a slew of
new Epstein documents that are released by the DOJ last week,
which Robert You'll be you'll be covering on behind the
Bastards soon.

Speaker 2 (02:44:05):
Yes, yes, we will be talking about the things revealed
in the new Epstein file releases. The three million or
so documents that just came out. Yes, we'll be talking
about that on Behind the Bastards.

Speaker 1 (02:44:15):
Not next week but the week after.

Speaker 2 (02:44:17):
Yeah, probably like the week after something like that. There's
a lot of good stuff in there, a lot of
Brock Pierce in this set of releases. If you've been
curious as to what the guy who invented tether, the
cryptocurrency tether, was up to, with Jeffrey Epstein as a spoiler,
it was molesting people, Jesus Christ. Yeah, well allegedly, we

(02:44:41):
don't know. We don't know that it was molesting. They
were described as girls, repeatedly described as girls in the
emails between Brock Pierce, the Mighty Ducks guy, and Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah,
but that could mean anything, you know, that could mean anything.

Speaker 3 (02:44:55):
You'd be talking about the Elon Mosk emails in there.

Speaker 2 (02:44:58):
There's some Elon stuff in there. It's nothing definitive. The
downside of it is Elon has a leg to stand
on when he's like I never went to the island
that said. You can interpret the emails one of two ways.
Because I saw an Elon Musk fans, I'd be like, see,
he was clearly just trying to blow him off. That's
not how I interpret Elon's emails to Epstein. I think
he really wanted to go to that fuck island.

Speaker 4 (02:45:21):
What night will the wildest posse be or something?

Speaker 2 (02:45:24):
Yeah, he was like I want to know where that
But he was also talking about like the whole island
area right, like where the wildest parties are that he wanted,
So he does have some plausible deniability, But he was
lying about not being in touch with Epstein and also
JK Rowling in touch with Epstein. Oh shit, save yes,

(02:45:44):
saved him seats for the opening of her play. Oh
of the Harry Potter play on Broadway, got Jeffrey Epstein
a seat.

Speaker 4 (02:45:54):
God, just when you thaw she gonna be a worse
fucking person.

Speaker 1 (02:45:57):
Incredible.

Speaker 4 (02:45:58):
Yeah, what ad What a disgrace to national Yeah, I
mean we have lots of those, I guess, but yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:46:03):
I can't believe this one person has ruined the reputation
of Britain, the.

Speaker 4 (02:46:08):
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, previously unblemished
in santis of history Jesus Christ till the tough Wizard
Lady came alone. Yeah, the first bed English person anyway.

Speaker 3 (02:46:20):
So yeah, on February twenty sixth, Hillary will be testifying
and on the twenty seventh Bill will be testifying in
hearings that should be televised live to the public.

Speaker 12 (02:46:32):
Interesting, okay, let's go on, brit all right, we're back,
and I have a fantastic news. Look what I found.

Speaker 1 (02:46:52):
Look what I found, you guys, deep in my archives
of misery.

Speaker 3 (02:46:55):
Luckily, podcasting is a visual medium.

Speaker 1 (02:47:00):
Oh no, it's audio.

Speaker 4 (02:47:02):
Okay, what are we imagine?

Speaker 10 (02:47:04):
Oh god, all right, I think I think we get
forgot you.

Speaker 5 (02:47:16):
Wow?

Speaker 4 (02:47:16):
Do we need anymore?

Speaker 12 (02:47:18):
No?

Speaker 10 (02:47:20):
No, we don't.

Speaker 3 (02:47:20):
Okay, all right, sorry?

Speaker 5 (02:47:23):
Oh god.

Speaker 4 (02:47:24):
The fact that video is playing on the background of
a large police badge.

Speaker 1 (02:47:28):
We're voting Donald Trump baby so.

Speaker 3 (02:47:32):
Bad, so bad. I cannot tell you how disappointed I
am that I will not be hearing them perform on
Super Bowl Sunday. You can see just the disappointment in
my face right now.

Speaker 4 (02:47:43):
M M.

Speaker 3 (02:47:44):
This Wednesday morning, February fourth, Tom Homan announced that they're
pulling seven hundred federal agents out of Minneapolis, though two
thousand will remain in this city.

Speaker 1 (02:47:57):
That's so many agents.

Speaker 4 (02:48:00):
Yeah, that's so that much.

Speaker 1 (02:48:02):
Seven hundred sounded like there's.

Speaker 3 (02:48:05):
Still a lot of ICE and Border patrol on the ground.

Speaker 4 (02:48:07):
Wow, two thousand was a search that they did earlier
this year. That that was when they really kind of
flooded it with ICE agents. So two thousand is still
two thousands is still a massive amount of ICE is
overall capacity that these aren't all ICE agents, right, like
they deputize atf and marshals and other things.

Speaker 3 (02:48:27):
But a lot of Border patrol guys here.

Speaker 4 (02:48:29):
Yeah, I don't know if that's who the seven hundred
who there was drawing are.

Speaker 3 (02:48:34):
It's a mix, it's not. I don't think they're from
just one agency.

Speaker 4 (02:48:37):
Okay, Yeah, there are a lot of Border patrol you
see that a lot, right, Like, the border patrol agents
clearly love this, right, They're they're getting per DM, they're
getting travel pay, they make more money than they do
in the border, and they don't have to like drive
around in the middle of nowhere. They call it going
on Safari. Homan has cited an increase in cooperation by

(02:48:59):
Minnesota authorities. He was talking about handing over detained people
who would be deportable, I think, but I have not
seen a similar statement from state authorities in Minnesota, at
least at a time so like take that with a
pinch of salt. Right, A lot of what we see
coming out of drum DHS just straight up isn't true.

Speaker 3 (02:49:18):
They have been talking about trying to like increase the
cooperation with ICE detainers in the local prisons and jails.

Speaker 4 (02:49:27):
Yeah, and I think that would be what this cooperation
would be. It would be like either cooperating with ICE
detainers or even alerting ICE if they thought someone was deportable.

Speaker 3 (02:49:37):
An interesting thing of note, as well as earlier this week,
the military troops that were placed on standby have been
unplaced on standby, So not looking like those guys in
Alaska or North Carolina will be deploying to Minneapolis. In
some other Minneapolis related news, Don Lemon, front of the Park,

(02:50:00):
was arrested Thursday, January twenty nine, and now faces civil
rights charges for allegedly violating Face Act, which prohibits interfering
with reproductive health services or people exercising religious freedom at
a place of worship. On January eighteenth, Lemon reported on
a protest at City's church in Saint Paul, where one
of the pastors is also the head of the local

(02:50:21):
ICE field office. A magistrate, judge and an appeals court
previously dismissed the charges against Lemon before the case was
brought before a grand jury in Minnesota. Six activists and
one other journalists are also facing charges. We reported on
this protest after it happened, and yeah, the DOJ has
been trying to pin pin Lemon on this for the

(02:50:44):
past few weeks. Yeah, probably not a great sign just
for you know, general general first Amendment activity.

Speaker 4 (02:50:50):
No, no, that's a pretty pretty bleak side actually.

Speaker 3 (02:50:53):
As frustrating as as it is to start waiving the
Jimmy Kimmel Don Lemon flag. You know that, that is
the situation we're in.

Speaker 4 (02:51:01):
Yeah, it's not good. The journalists they arrested was the
head of the National Association of Black Journalists.

Speaker 9 (02:51:06):
What's' she?

Speaker 4 (02:51:07):
Georgia fort is her name? Yes, yes, I do want
to say actually that like when we talk about protections
for journalists, like journalists, yes, can often be the people
who were first targeted for like things that violate freedom
of speech. Right, Like when governments are going to violate
freedom of speech, they can go after journalists first. But
like when someone is recording ice operations, they are doing

(02:51:31):
citizen journalism, they are protected by exactly the same rights
that we have as journalists who are doing this as
our full time job. There isn't a special first Amendment
for us. And so when the border patrol agents killed
Alex Pretty, they killed someone who is at that time
engaged to journalism too. And like, I'm happy to see
journalistic bodies standing up, not just for people who employed

(02:51:54):
this full time journalists have put all of our rights
to document and record.

Speaker 3 (02:51:57):
Yeah, all of the legal observers who are film ICE
as well that are being targeted with intimidation, being pulled over.

Speaker 4 (02:52:04):
Having guns pointed at them, etc.

Speaker 9 (02:52:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:52:06):
Do you want to talk about the Senate funding for ICE? Oh?

Speaker 9 (02:52:10):
Do I?

Speaker 3 (02:52:10):
So the partial government shut down, which did start last
week was ended on Tuesday after the DJs bill was
stripped out of the now one point two trillion dollar
annual funding package. DHS's funding will lapse on Friday the thirteenth,
and negotiation.

Speaker 4 (02:52:33):
Why not.

Speaker 3 (02:52:35):
While negotiations continue on a DHS funding bill, Congressional Democrats
are pushing for agency reforms like judicial warrants and no
masked agents, while Republicans are signaling minor concessions like having
a border patrol and ICE wear body cameras Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:52:52):
Should we talk a little bit more about body cameras.

Speaker 3 (02:52:54):
You know what, my favorite topic. Let's talk about body
cameras again.

Speaker 4 (02:52:58):
I love to talk about a body worn camera.

Speaker 3 (02:53:01):
Time was a flat circle.

Speaker 4 (02:53:03):
Yeah, okay, So Christie Nome this week announced that ICE
agents in Minnesota were going to where body worn cameras
going forward. And I've been kind of disappointed a lot
of the reporting on this. What is I think missing
is that that, like, there was a twenty twenty two
executive order right signed by Biden the ordered federal law

(02:53:23):
enforcement to use body worn cameras. Funding for them was
included in the twenty twenty one for SCOOL year appropriations built.
Nome has said they will grow the program as funds
become available, but those funds have been available for some time.
Right In twenty twenty four document ICE document that talked
about their pilot program study, they said, quote full implementation

(02:53:44):
is expected by September thirtieth, twenty twenty five. Eagle eared
listers will notice that it's in the past. However, in
twenty twenty five, ICE began and rolling this back. They
issued a directive which continued only implementing the body worn
camera program in the certain pilot programs cities. The Trump administration,
in its second term, has called Congress to cut funding

(02:54:05):
for body worn cameras by seventy five percent and reduce
the staffing of the body worn camera program from twenty
two people to just three. They have also cut oversight
offices within DHS like oh IDO. O IDEO is like
the nichest level of DHS. Understand that when you know
of o IDEO, I think Biden created it. I actually

(02:54:25):
I've seen them once. It's the Office of the Immigration
Detention ombardsmen. They came to the outdoor detention sites in
hercumber which seems to be something of a concession that
by the administration at the time denied people were detained
in those sites. It had one hundred plus employees at
start of the Trump administration. It also has three now

(02:54:46):
according to Reuters. This most recent bill, as Garrison said,
does include funding and a mandate for their use. A
federal judge in Chicago had already ordered agents there to
wear cameras in November of last year. I should note
that I also looked up the ice body warm camera
policy and theoretically now in so far of any of
these policies are being followed right, prohibits them for using

(02:55:07):
body warm cameras for the quote sole purpose of recording
people engaged in First Amendment protected activities. So they can
just use their phones for that. I guess that's what
they've been doing.

Speaker 3 (02:55:18):
I mean, yeah, this is like part of the frustration
around this bill is you do have humor pushing for
certain things like like not wearing masks and not doing
the rolling raids. Will also emphasizing you know, you want
the masks off and the cameras on, as if that's
going to affect the behavior of agents on the ground. Meanwhile,
during the killing of Renee Good, the officer that shot

(02:55:39):
and killed her was filming the whole thing on his phone.
He was filming on his own cell phone, so obvious. Obviously. Yeah,
having a camera on the agent is not going to
prevent them from killing someone.

Speaker 2 (02:55:53):
Because they think it's good what they're doing. Yeah, they
don't think it's bad.

Speaker 4 (02:55:57):
You have to understand that agents who shot Alex pretty
actually had body worn cameras and they're actually CBP agents.
So CBP or BP, I should say, right, customs are Border.

Speaker 3 (02:56:09):
Protection, one of them is CPP. One of them's PP.

Speaker 4 (02:56:12):
That's correct. Yeah, that's they're they're both CBP agents, but
within CBP you have BP and OFO. Okay, they get
really mad if you get this wrong. Literally, I've got
an email once for a subject line. Come on, man.
So they were both Customs and Border Protection agents generally
border patrol. Border Patrol is part of Customs and Border Protection,

(02:56:34):
right the other part of the Office of Field Operations.
Border Patrol ceased using their cameras early in the Trump administration,
citing an issue with the bluetooth used by the cameras
that could make them detectable. This is a thing that
can happen. It is possible. There's a GitHub script for this.
Whether they're justifiers stopping using them is an entirely different question.

(02:56:55):
Both the agents in the pretty shooting were wearing body
can but we have not seen footage. The two agents
have been identified by Pro Publica as Border Patrol agent
Jizus jesse Or Choa and Customs and Border Protection Officer
Field Operations Officer Raimundo Gutierrez. A Choa joined twenty eighteen.
Gutierrez joined in twenty fourteen. Gutierrez is part of the

(02:57:19):
Officer Field Operations Special Response team that is generally a
team with training in weapons and tactics who would serve
high risk warrants do raids.

Speaker 5 (02:57:30):
I guess swat style.

Speaker 4 (02:57:32):
Yeah, it's another word for swat. I think because what
became somewhat you know, they decided they wanted a different
word for it. Sure, pro Publica I got an interview
with the choa's ex wife who said, quote, by the
time the couple split in twenty twenty one, he had
become a gun enthusiast, with about twenty five rifles, pistols
and shotguns. In so much as that matters, I guess
that was the only interview they could get about them.

(02:57:54):
Both of the men are from South Texas.

Speaker 3 (02:57:57):
To circle back to the funding bill for DHS and
these potential reforms being pushed for at you know, multiple
levels of the Democratic establishment, you know, with Schumer being
a little bit lighter and obviously people like AOC and
to leave pushing for more extreme measures like abolishing the
agency advice, which is unlikely to happen in this funding

(02:58:19):
bill as the Republicans control Congress. But still there is
a spectrum of beliefs among the party at the moment.
And to get a look at what average regular registered
Democrats believe. There's a new poll from you gov that
came out this week based on data from late January
early February that have seventy nine percent of Democrats saying

(02:58:42):
they support abolishing ICE. Abolishing ICE is also up eight
points with Independence and more people overall support abolishing ICE
at forty six percent to forty four percent opposing.

Speaker 4 (02:58:56):
So, just to finish up on our immigration coveray to
the week, we also saw Judge Cobb with the DC
District Court grant a tentative restraining order that prevents DHS
from denying Congress people the right to inspect immigration attention
facilities without notice. Previously, DHS had been asserting that they
had a seven day period of notice that they had
to give before they could inspect attention facilities. The judges

(02:59:19):
found that that's not justified. Another eight attorneys have left
or announced intentions to leave the US Attorney's office in Minnesota.
They are now operating at less than half the capacity
of assistant USA attorneys that they had in the early
Biden administration. They've also lost several non attorney staff, and
the Star Tribune reports that this is due to concerns

(02:59:40):
about selective prosecution. And the exclusion of state and local
investigators from the good and pretty cases. In court yesterday,
one federal prosecutor said, and I'm quoting from the transcript here,
this system sucks. This job sucks. Another quotation. I am
here just trying to make sure that the agency understand
how important it is to comply with all the court orders,
which they have not done in the past or currently.

(03:00:03):
I'm here as a bridge and a liaison between the
one that in jail, because if I walk out sometimes
I wish you would just hold me in contempt your honor,
so that they could have a full twenty four hours
of sleep. Yikes, it's just a person on the ragged edge. Yeah,
that is someone who is breaking. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (03:00:20):
I mean.

Speaker 4 (03:00:22):
You could look up her caseload and it is legitimately insane. Yeah,
and it has only got bigger since the start of
the year. You can see why people are are quitting
this job, even if they like don't have a moral
issue with it, because it's an inhumane amount of work.

Speaker 2 (03:00:37):
And again, like, I'm not coming at this from a
point of a lot of sympathy, but it's not funny.

Speaker 4 (03:00:42):
Yeah, yeah, it's funny. It's just funny. It's funny to
see them so obviously frustrated that their agencies are just
not complying with what they asked them do. That she
I was reading the transcript today is judging the case.
Was like, look, you can tell me the agencies are
not complying, But like, if I have a problem in
the restaurant, I don't walk in there and try and
find the exact person who's baking the bread. I talk
to the restauran, and the restaurant sorted out you are
part of the executive branch. Yeah, this is on you.

(03:01:04):
Like it was a good, little little core exchange. And
then finally NBC has obtained a leaked email from Greg
Bovino showing tensions between himself and Todd Lyons. Lions is
the acting director of Immigration and custom to Enforcement. Lions
attempted to prevent Baveno from engaging in widespread sweeps in
which agents kind of ran around check papers on anyone

(03:01:24):
they think might not be a citizen, and he encouraged
him to do targeted operations instead. And then mister Bovino
said in the email quote, mister Lyons said he was
in charge, and I corrected him, saying, I report to
Corey Lewandowski, Garrison has just made a face for those.

Speaker 12 (03:01:42):
Yeah, and if you want to hear more about our
dear buddy, Greg, Robert and I recorded an episode with
Jack O'Brien from Behind the Bastards that's dropping next Thursday.

Speaker 1 (03:01:51):
Oh, sick all about Greg Bavino.

Speaker 3 (03:01:55):
Greg's been on a bit of a tour on his
way back to California.

Speaker 4 (03:01:59):
Yeah, he wrote, But he went to Mount Rushmore to
record like a moto video and then he was spotted
drinking a glass of red wine in Las Vegas. Yeah,
it seems like they made him road trip.

Speaker 2 (03:02:11):
Like a weirdo who's drinking. You're drinking the house wine
at a casino in Vegas. Come the fuck on, Greg Upreg, Yeah,
have a fucking cocktail.

Speaker 4 (03:02:22):
Jesus Christ. I think he's back in Imperial now. But
it was. It seems that they made him take a
road trip home. They didn't fly him back, wouldn't spring
for the plane trip. Yeah, he's quite.

Speaker 3 (03:02:34):
Remarkable, incredible, gestapo, unbelievable. All right, we are back. Last Wednesday,
January twenty eighth, the FBI executed a raid on the

(03:02:57):
Fulton County election office outside of Atlanta, Georgia as a
part of an investigation into Trump's claim that the twenty
twenty election was rigged against him. The special Agent in
charge of the FBI Atlanta Field Office resigned a week
before the warrant was served. This search warrant was signed
by a United States Magistrate judge and instructed investigators to

(03:03:17):
seize quote all records relating to violations of Title fifty
two US Code two zero seven zero one and two
oh five one one, with these violations occurring quote after
October twelfth, twenty twenty unquote. The former statute here two
seven one relates to retaining and preserving election records for

(03:03:41):
twenty two months after an election, and the latter two
five one one relates to voter fraud or threats, intimidation,
and coersion against voters. The records that were to be
seized are listed on the warrant as quote all physical
ballots from the twenty twenty general election in Fulton County,

(03:04:02):
all tabulator tapes for every voting machine, all ballot images
produced during the original ballot count, All voter roles from
the twenty twenty general election in Fulton County from absentee,
early and in person voting and any electronically stored information
relevant to those items above. The Fulton County Commissioner mount
Ivory said that federal officials took seven hundred boxes of ballots,

(03:04:27):
and curiously, Director of National Intelligence Tulci Gabbert appeared at
the side of the search and had a phone call
with Trump. After the raid concluded, Gabert sent a letter
to Congress on Monday, claiming, quote, my presence was requested
by the President and executed under my broad statutory authority

(03:04:48):
to coordinate, integrate, and analyze intelligence relating to election security,
including counter intelligence, foreign and other malign influences, and cybersecurity unquote.
She also wrote on x the everything app quote the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence has and will
continue to take action under my statutory authorities to secure
our nation ensure the integrity of our elections. I will

(03:05:13):
include here that four days before January sixth, twenty twenty one,
Trump told George's top election official to quote unquote find
enough votes to overturn the election. Here's a recording of
that phone call.

Speaker 13 (03:05:28):
All I want to do is this. I just want
to find.

Speaker 8 (03:05:33):
Eleven thousand, seven hundred and eighty votes.

Speaker 3 (03:05:38):
The Trump administration has made multiple unsuccessful attempts to gain
access to the twenty twenty Georgia ballots through civil suits.
Now they have just turned to executing search warrant through
the FBI. On February first, Mike Johnson was asked to
vote potential election medaling in Georgia. Here is this exchange
from NBC News.

Speaker 16 (03:06:00):
What do you say to that allegation that President Trump
is going to meddle in the twenty twenty six midterm elections,
that that's what he's doing in Georgia.

Speaker 13 (03:06:08):
I find it comical that one of the senators from
Georgia is talking about schemes in elections. Remember, Georgia was
example a of that. In the twenty twenty election.

Speaker 16 (03:06:18):
There were two statewide recounts in Georgia.

Speaker 5 (03:06:20):
They see the mail out balance to everyone.

Speaker 13 (03:06:22):
Everyone knows all of the problems that occurred in Georgia.
It was very controversially and remains so to this day
because of all the things that happened there. Again, we're
not going to relitigate that. But what we have to
focus on is going forward to ensure that there are
not questions about the elections. And that's why Republicans are
working at the federal and the state levels to clean
those things up and clean up voter rolls to make

(03:06:43):
sure illegals are not voting, for example. That's what the
Save Act is about, and we have to continue that
and the President is keeping a proper focus on it.
This investigation is to ensure that all the questions that
about the elections in Fulton County are investigated properly so
that people have confidence in this system.

Speaker 5 (03:07:00):
A kah, that's very important.

Speaker 16 (03:07:01):
But there are really no questions about election in Tigry
from twenty twenty that have not been asked and answered.
Even the Republican note, the Republican led governor has pointed out,
it's been years and no one has ever come forward
under oath with evidence of fraud in Georgia.

Speaker 3 (03:07:17):
But let me ask you, pretty absurd stuff.

Speaker 12 (03:07:20):
Yeah, yeah, we're not going to relitigate it as we
rel litigate it.

Speaker 4 (03:07:24):
Yeah yeah, and just giving no evidence, just being like, oh,
it's very controversial, everyone knows, like.

Speaker 1 (03:07:30):
Such a weasly answer.

Speaker 4 (03:07:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:07:33):
Republican Governor Brian Camp has been very clear that there
was absolutely no fraud happening in Georgia during twenty twenty
and if there was any attempt to meddle with the election.
It is this phone call that Trump made to the
Georgia Secretary of State, Yeah, asking to find a certain
number of votes that itself should have resulted in Trump
going to prison like South Korea style, like you're done,

(03:07:55):
You're finished. You can't do that.

Speaker 4 (03:07:57):
Yeah, that is like the most transparent election interference.

Speaker 3 (03:08:01):
The way that Trump's court case in Fulton County related
to his attempts to meddle into twenty twenty election is
just a complete disaster due to coruption within the Fulton
County courses tom itself. One of the worst things to
happen during this like Biden era, is the mishandling of
the court cases around Trump's attempts to overturn the election. Yeah,
and especially like looking at at what South Cura did

(03:08:24):
after their president tried to take over the country a
year or two ago, is like, oh, yeah, that's very
clearly what we should have done with this guy.

Speaker 4 (03:08:31):
Yeah, people could have done better.

Speaker 3 (03:08:33):
And Mike Johnson just keeps making really concerning statements on
the news about quote unquote nationalizing elections.

Speaker 4 (03:08:41):
I follow up on elections.

Speaker 2 (03:08:42):
The president says that he wants Republicans.

Speaker 5 (03:08:44):
To nationalize elections.

Speaker 2 (03:08:45):
Do you agree with him and do you have confidence
in how elections are conducted?

Speaker 5 (03:08:50):
Right now heading into the midterm.

Speaker 13 (03:08:52):
We have thoughtfuled debate about our election system every election cycle,
and sometimes in between. We know it's in our system.
The states have been in charge of a minister in
their life elections. What you're hearing from the President is
his frustration about the lack of some of the Blue states, frankly,
of enforcing these things.

Speaker 3 (03:09:07):
Make Johnson goes on to discuss possible fraud in California specifically,
though admits that he has no evidence of said fraud.
One more clip.

Speaker 13 (03:09:17):
In some of the states, like in California, for example,
I mean, they hold the elections open for weeks after
election day. That's just one thing that bothers so many people.
We had three House Republican candidates who are ahead on
election day in the last election cycle, and every time
a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically
whittled away until their.

Speaker 5 (03:09:35):
Leads were lost.

Speaker 13 (03:09:36):
And no series of ballots that were counted after election
day were our candidates ahead on any of those counts.
It looks on its face to be fraudulent. Can I
prove that, No, because it happened so far upstream. But
we need more confidence in the American people in the
election system.

Speaker 3 (03:09:55):
Absurd.

Speaker 4 (03:09:56):
Yeah, completely, bonks, sir.

Speaker 12 (03:09:58):
I fear that more ballots have been counted and results
have changed.

Speaker 4 (03:10:03):
Yeah, that's what elections are.

Speaker 3 (03:10:05):
You cannot place a vote in California after election day. No,
but they do count mail in ballots that have been
postmarked on or before election day, which is what he's referencing.
But he's yeah, miss, he's purposely misconstruting it to make
it sound way more, way more nefarious than what it
actually is. If you've placed a mail in vote on
or before election day in California, that vote will be counted.

Speaker 4 (03:10:27):
That is.

Speaker 3 (03:10:27):
That is how the elections in California work. Not this
magically keeping keeping the election open for for weeks afterwards
people can continue to vote. That's that's not that's not true.

Speaker 12 (03:10:38):
It's giving like a very specific sports reference where that
the announcers like and the.

Speaker 1 (03:10:42):
Team with the most points won the game. That's literally
what he's doing.

Speaker 12 (03:10:48):
He's like, as as the votes were counted, the results changed.

Speaker 3 (03:10:54):
They changed and someone won. Who is not what I
wanted to happen.

Speaker 4 (03:10:58):
Uh, yeah, shock, horror.

Speaker 3 (03:11:00):
Can I prove there's fraud? No, but well I continue
to say there's fraud, yes, Mike Johnson.

Speaker 4 (03:11:06):
It had been reported that they were trying to leverage
the ice raids in Minnesota against getting electoral role information
from Minnesota as well. Yes, so like this is this
is not just his fascination with with Georgia. Like this
is all deeply concerning as we go into like midterm year.
But we will find out soon.

Speaker 3 (03:11:26):
Oh yeah, especially as Congress is the entity that is
supposed to be there to help to ensure that states
run the elections fairly and that we do not have
a nationalized voting system.

Speaker 4 (03:11:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:11:35):
And the fact that the Speaker of the House seems
to be unaware siding siding with the executive branch with
this idea of nationalizing elections or at least trying to
like manufacture consent for Trump's Trump's claim there very very worrying.
I now want to update a story we talked about

(03:11:56):
almost a year ago, based on some new information that
has come out. In January, a judge has unsealed a
State Department memo from March twenty twenty five that confirms
that Ramesa Osturk's visa was revoked and the government sought
to deport her on the basis of oz Turk co

(03:12:18):
authoring an op ed in the student newspaper at Tufts University.
This memo admits that DHS could not provide any evidence
that oz Turk ever engaged in any eighties Semitic activity,
was involved in Students for Justice in Palestine, or has
ever expressed support for terrorism as claimed by government officials.

(03:12:40):
Last year, Churchill McLoughlin told CNN at the time of
oz Turk's arrest that DHS and ICE investigations had found
that oz Turk had quote engaged in activities in support
of hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing
of Americans unquote. On the contrary, this newly unsealed memo

(03:13:01):
from the State Department reads, quote, while os Turk has
been involved with actions protesting Tuft's relationship with Israel, DHS,
ICE or Homeland Security investigations has not, however, provided any
evidence showing that oz Turk has engaged in any anti
Smithy activity or made any public statements indicating support for
a terrorist organization or anti Semitism. Generally, unquote. The memo

(03:13:24):
goes on to state that though a previous DHS report
quote implies a connection between oz Turk and the now
banned Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine, the report presents
no evidence other than os Turk's membership in Graduate Students
for Palestine, which supported proposals to Tufts which were also
supported by Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine. Nor has

(03:13:46):
DHS ICE or HSI shown any evidence that oz Turk
was involved in any of the activities which resulted in
Students for Justice in Palestine being suspended from Tufts unquote.
The Bureau of Consular Affairs VISA office and ANAD no
reporting specific to oz Turk on US government interagency databases.
According to this memo, and interagency vetting partners do not

(03:14:08):
provide any response to oz Turk's twenty twenty four VISA
application quote indicating the existence of derogatory terrorism related information.
I'll read the final quote here from this memo quote,
DHS did not identify any alternative grounds for removability that
would be applicable to oz Turk, including the ground for

(03:14:29):
removability for aliens who have provided material support to a
foreign terrorist organization. Or terrorist activity, and has not indicated
whether it plans to consider termination of oz Turk's CIVIS registration,
Although information provided by DHS, Homeland Security Investigations and ICE
does not establish any potential ineligibility for oz Turk, you may,

(03:14:49):
in your discretion and in accordance with Department policy in
nine FAM four three point one point one DAH five
b A, I prove revocation of her F one visa
effect immediately based on the totality of the circumstances presented,
indicating that revocation may be warranted unquote. The only evidence

(03:15:12):
held against her in the memo is that she wrote
an op ed. You still can revoke her visa if
you want to.

Speaker 4 (03:15:19):
Yeah, yeah, And that is pretty much the way student
visas especially work, right, leg You did just here at
the pleasure of US politics.

Speaker 3 (03:15:29):
Essentially, the fact that this memo openly says they do
not have evidence to support the claims that she's involved
in anti Smithy activity on campus supports Hamas in any way.
The fact that you have the government saying that in
these internal documents, while externally, people like Christian McLoughlin and
Rubio say otherwise, it's such a naked display of the

(03:15:51):
sort of rhetoric that these people are using. Secretary Rubio
claimed at a press conference on March twenty seven, twenty
twenty five. Quote, we revoked her visa. It's an F
one visa. I believe we revoked it. And here's why.
If you apply for a visa to enter the United
States and be a student, and you tell us that
the reason why you're coming to the United States is
not just because you want to write op eds, but

(03:16:11):
because you want to participate in movements that are involved
in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings,
creating a ruckus. We're not going to give you a visa.
If you lie to us and get a visa and
then enter the United States and with that visa participate
in that sort of activity, We're going to take away
your visa. Unquote.

Speaker 4 (03:16:30):
Yeah, I mean, she didn't tell them that she was
engaged to that kind of activity. She wasn't.

Speaker 3 (03:16:35):
That's just not what happened. Yeah, And DHS admits itself
that she was not involved in the activity. The protest
activity that resulted in students Justice in Palestine being banned
from campus, which included vandalism, but DJA says that they
do not have evidence that she was involved in that
in any way, nor had any direct association with that group.
In December, a federal judge allowed oz Turk to continue

(03:16:58):
her research and teach at Tuft University on the basis
that she is likely to succeed on the claim that
her visa termination was quote arbitrary and capricious, contrary to
law and in violation of the First Amendment. The court
case related to her removal proceedings will still continue.

Speaker 4 (03:17:16):
Yeah, pretty bleak.

Speaker 1 (03:17:17):
That was That was Yeah wow, I.

Speaker 4 (03:17:21):
Guess talking of bleak. Should I finish up with a
summary of the situation in Syria?

Speaker 1 (03:17:25):
Yeah, give us a Syria date.

Speaker 4 (03:17:27):
Yeah, okay. So the an e S has reached a
settlement with the STG. The aa n e S the
Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria aka ro Java,
and the STG being the Syrian Transitional government that will
result in the withdrawal of troops from the points of contact,
as well as the withdrawal of SDF troops from Commichelo

(03:17:48):
and Hesseka and the entry of the Syrian Ministry of
the Interior. They're about ninety Ministry of Interior people going
into Commishlo one hundred and hessecas. These are essentially like Syrian,
so I guess right. Integration of the SDF will occur
as brigades of the Syrian Army deployed Derik. If you're
looking at a map, it's probably going to say al Malakaya,

(03:18:10):
Delhi being the Kurdish name, Comichelo, Hesseka and Kabani. These
forces will be largely Kurdish, but they will also include
Assyrian and Arab elements, as the SDF always has. I
imagine they will probably be Armenians as well. There then,
nearly always are sending in the sdfs in the beginning
there have been. The agreement also included the integration of
the Shaish into the Syrian Ministry of the Interior, the

(03:18:33):
government takeover of oil fields and borders, and a recognition
of Kurdish education credential across the country. The A and
E S will appoint a governor in Hesseka and the
security chief will be appointed by Damascus. The SDF will
also appoint a deputy Defense Minister in Damascus. The STG
appointed Marwan Ala Ali Debac security He previously did this

(03:18:55):
for HDS in Idlib Hyactoria al Sham Right, that's the
group that formally listed as a Foreigntarist organization in the
US that has gone on to take over Syria and
become the government in Damascus, and he sort of oversaw
their purge of rasal Din, which is like an al
Qaeda associated group in Idlib. Shortly after the deal was

(03:19:16):
signed to Syrian traditional government began accusing journalists who entered
via Samalka, as I have done and Robert has done,
of having entered Syria illegally, which great I guess. Turkey
has continued to prevent aid coming to Kabani, where water
and power remain cut off. Pretty bleak situation in Rosjaba.

(03:19:37):
I'm glad that there is not more killing and not
more dying, but also sad to see some of the
things that so many people for and died for being lost,
especially this idea of brotherhood of peoples, which I think
was integral to the Asjaba revolution and the women's revolution,
which it will be very hard to sustain in the
context of the estate led by HTS. Pretty upsetting. I

(03:20:00):
know that they can still use your support. Sorry, we'll
put a fundraising link for heavusaw at the bottom of
this Yeah. Good time to be alive. Yeah, great, great
stuff happening in the world. Yeah, if you would like
to email us, you can email us using a proton
mail address. To email our proton mail address, which is
cool Zone Tips at proton dot me.

Speaker 12 (03:20:24):
Yeah's not here, but she would say put a trans
girl on your couch. Uh, so I'll say it for
put a transgirl on your couch.

Speaker 3 (03:20:32):
We reported the news.

Speaker 4 (03:20:33):
See the news. We reported the news.

Speaker 2 (03:20:42):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 17 (03:20:48):
It could happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Speaker 1 (03:21:04):
Thanks for listening.

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