It Could Happen Here Weekly 224

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

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

Speaker 3 (00:28):
Hi everyone, and welcome to it could happen here. It's
me James today and I am very lucky to join
by Garrison. Iige. Hello, Hi Garrison. I've summoned you here
today to talk about boats, a topic that white men love.
But we're not going to talk about like going out
on the lake and looking for bass today. I've only

(00:49):
done bass fishing ones. It's not for me.

Speaker 4 (00:51):
Do you hold up the fish for the picture? Do
you do the picture?

Speaker 3 (00:54):
I wasn't blessed with a bass on that trip, but
I did get to It was very interesting because a
guy had like a purple boat with gold flex in it.
It didn't represent who I thought he was as a person.
Turned out, actually he had a boat sponsorship and he
was going to sell it. But ah, it was a
cool boat. I got to drive that boat pretty fast
through some doughnuts and stuff. So that's another thing that

(01:15):
calls to a part of my soul. I want to
talk about private maritime security today. The reason why, of course,
is that Iran is currently attacking boats in the Strait
of Horn Moves and elsewhere.

Speaker 5 (01:29):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
There's some boats were attacked in portant Basara yesterday. We're
recording this on Thursday. At the time of recording, they
have attacked six boats. It's more likely than not that
there will be more boats attacked by the time you
are listening to this. It's been a really bad week
for boat guys.

Speaker 4 (01:47):
It's been a bad year for boats in general.

Speaker 3 (01:50):
Oh, Venezuela, Yeah, yeah, let's talk about private maritime security.
So like, when these boats are transmitting the Strait of
Horn Moves, right, the United States has offered and then
rescinded the offer to escort them through the straight up
hor Moos. It's very unlikely that the United States is
going to be able to sufficiently escort every boat that

(02:11):
goes through the State of hormor Moves. And this is
a longstanding issue, right, I think probably lots of listeners
won't be aware of the long history of private security
on ships. Right, I'm only going to talk about this
in the context of the twenty first century, but this
goes a lot further back. It's largely a consequence of

(02:31):
the way the law governs the ocean. It's actually the
same Wow. Sorry, yah, daddy long legs. I don't know
if it's an American word for that that. I don't know,
Daddy long legs. That's okay, Yeah, absolute unit has just
entered my office space. A world LM be the reason
that we can have private security contractors, often with machine guns, etc.

(02:53):
On boats. It's the same reason that horrific labor abuses
are perpetrated on boats on a daily basis. Right, Perhaps
the most well documented are among the most well documented
are the ones off Thailand on fishing ships, which often
involve Burmese refugees or people fleeing Mianma. Right there, essentially
enslaved on these boats or in sort of indentured servitude

(03:15):
of trying to quote unquote pay off their trip out
of the country they were fleeing. Right, I'm not talking
about labor abuses today. I want to talk more about
private security. Most of security provided two boats in the
world in general is not provided by states. It is
provided by private military contractors. Right earlier on in the

(03:36):
twentieth century, the typical profile of one of these people
would have been that they'd left the military and a
state in the global north. They had found let's say,
life for employment in the civilian world to be difficult
for them. And I've met a number of these people
in a number of places. Many of them went to
parts of Africa thinking that they were going to work

(03:56):
protecting wildlife and then ending up protecting large container ships instead,
or attempting to work for a company that would one
day let them protect wildlife or something similar. Generally, the
companies they end up working for are generally referred to
as private maritime security companies pmsc's, as opposed to PMC
private military contractor, although it is a version of the

(04:19):
same thing. Generally, these companies offer a shipping company a
sort of package, and it's not just armed. Security also
include stuff like intelligence, crisis response, and potential intervention. I
spoke to someone, for instance, who had worked for a
shipping company and his major job was to deal with
when people were kidnapped off the boats. He would then

(04:39):
either go and rescue the people or negotiate with the
people who would kidnapped them.

Speaker 4 (04:44):
These are like cargo ships, oil tankers, like what kind of.

Speaker 3 (04:49):
Yeah, so mostly there are on large commercial vessels, right,
cargo ships, oil tankers, things with an expensive cargo, although
it is not unheard of. For pms. For instance, you
may have a maritime security company to secure your large
mega yacht, sure right, or another boat that you're worried about.

Speaker 4 (05:08):
Did these happen on my cruise ships? Sometimes?

Speaker 3 (05:10):
Yes, there was. There was a shootout in the early
two thousand so I shoot out, it's probably private security
characters on it. I think it was an Italian cruise
ship fired at pirates who are attempting to board the
cruise ship. Huh. It's a lot less uncommon than you
would think.

Speaker 4 (05:28):
So when we're planning the twenty twenty eight Cool Zone
Media Cruise all all access included, we're going to have
to contact with one of these companies.

Speaker 3 (05:37):
I think we can probably bring that in house. I
think that that would be the goal at that point.
Right within the Greater iHeart Ecosystem Garrison, we have so
many automatic weapons you don't listen to the like a
Belfed machine Gun podcast, the iHeart Militia, it's US and

(05:59):
Ted cruise and where we haven't really agreed on very
much other than gun ownership, maybe we should talk about
when the real reason like PMSCs took off in the
twenty first century was the rise in piracy off Somalia.
Right before this, piracy had existed mostly in Southeast Asia.
On piracy has guested for as long as people going

(06:19):
on boats has existed, right but specifically paracy off Southeast
Asia had before this been more of a like a
smash and grab kind of situation, like turn up, take
what you can leave. What was distinct in this piracy
that we began to see from like two thousand and
eight onwards was that pirates were either trying to see

(06:40):
the entire cargo of a vessel the vessel itself, or
to kidnap people from the vessel and hold them for ransom.
I guess the most high profile case was called the Mayerscalabama.
Are you familiar with this one?

Speaker 4 (06:56):
No?

Speaker 3 (06:57):
Okay? This is that's good because you get to hear
a story. I don't keep up with piratenews dot org. Really,
I can see you being like pirate curious, No, you're
not interested in.

Speaker 4 (07:08):
I've always had kind of a love hate relationship with pirates, Okay,
you know, undeniably cool in some way, also a little
bit messy.

Speaker 3 (07:15):
They can be messy. Yeah, yeah, lots of lots of
overlap between pirates and anarchism. I'm sure you've this is true.

Speaker 4 (07:21):
Yeah, some of my same critiques there for you both sides.

Speaker 3 (07:25):
Yeah, yeah, I can also be messy.

Speaker 4 (07:27):
As soon as the pirates all start wearing matching black suits,
then we can talk.

Speaker 3 (07:30):
And I think that's inherently like the piracy isn't about that.
Piracy is about self expression. That's the thing, got it?

Speaker 4 (07:36):
Yeah, I see, Well.

Speaker 3 (07:38):
Yeah, great, disagree. I like I like a diverse pirate
outfit personally, in this case, a small vessel, right. I
think they had four or five pirates. They had like
pretty basic weaponry, write like kalashnikovs. I think they boarded
the mess Galabama. The boat had a pirate alarm, and

(07:58):
they sounded the pirate alarm. In this you have to
struggle to repress your like eighteenth century like mind palast right. Yeah, yeah,
the crew sheltered in. They had like a safe room. Yeah,
they went in this safe room. Well, they captured the
captain of the ship pretty quickly. The ship didn't have

(08:19):
any means of defending itself other than it tried to
like I'm not a massive boat, understander, It tried to
use its rudder to swamp the pirate ship as it
was coming up, so like kind of flick it that
that didn't work. Yeah, And one member of the ship's
crew who hid himself with a knife and successfully subdued

(08:42):
and captured the leader of the pirates, and the crew
then attempted to trade this person for their captain. They
tied up the pirate who they had captured, attempted to
trade him for their captain. The pirates took the leader
of the pirates that then never gave the crew their
captain and then made off in a lifeboat with a

(09:05):
large amount of cash and the captain. This resulted in
a standoff. Now, the Meskalabama was I believe a US
flagged ship. It may have been a US Dutch ship,
but it was flagged to like a nation in the
major in the global north right. This would become relevant later.
The United States sent two boats which proceeded to engage

(09:27):
in a standoff with the lifeboat for several days, where
they first attempted to drop a SAT phone and a
mobile phone to the pirates in the lifeboat. The pirates
through those in the ocean because they thought that they
were using them to communicate with the captain of the ship.
At one point, the captain, who they'd held hostage, ended
up in the ocean, but then he got back into
the lifeboat. The situation was resolved eventually by the Navy

(09:51):
seals shooting all the pirates. They were based on one
of the US ships, and they used sniper rifles to
shoot the pirates. Really yep, they shot them all off
the lifeboat while the captain of the ship was also
in the lifeboat. WHOA yeah, no, then I would be
shocked if that's not a film about this, or I
know the captain of the ship has written a book

(10:11):
about his time being captured. But obviously, like this kind
of rattled the world, right, It scared a lot of people,
specifically in the shipping industry, because this is a scary
thing to happen, and specifically this change in the nature
of piracy from taking stuff to potentially capturing people. And
I believe the goal of the pirates here was to

(10:32):
get the captain ashore where they could hide him more easily,
right in Somalia. And then it becomes entirely different issue
when you're trying to get US troops into a completely
different country to rescue someone a different land mass. Yeah. Yeah,
And I think it's really important to talk about like
the jurisdictional issues here because they are what gives the

(10:54):
PMSCs so much leeway. I think we'll take a little
break talking about jurisdiction and we will come back. All right,
we're back. So to understand private maritime security companies, you've

(11:16):
got to understand the world of flags of convenience. First.
Are you familiar with flags the convenience garrison? No?

Speaker 5 (11:22):
No?

Speaker 3 (11:22):
Okay, this is this is good. This is James gets
to download shit that he reads at for no reason
at like eleven o'clock at night. There are nations in
the world states that allow vessels to register under their
flag even if the owner of the vessel is not
a citizen of that country. It's called an open registry.

(11:43):
So if you hang out in the port, spend time
looking at boats, look at the flags of the boats.
You will often see flags of a few countries. The
most common ones are Liberia, Panama, and the Republic of
the Marshall Islands. The reason that boat own might choose
let's say you Garrison have a boat right there, you

(12:04):
shipping company Garrison Davis Boats Incorporated, and you don't want
to register them in Canada or the United States. Might
be to avoid tax liability. Might be to avoid like
what you consider to be burdens and safety regulations, okay.
Might be to avoid the frustrating constraints of Canadian labor law.

(12:27):
Or it might be to avoid some ecological constraints on
your boats which your flag nation might impose. And generally
flags of convenience have very little in the way of
taxation and regulation, right and so people might choose to
flag their vessel in Liberia, Panama, Publican Marshall Islands, Hong
Kong instead to avoid some of those issues. Right now,

(12:51):
The issue comes when you read say you register your
boat in Liberia and your boat is off on its
way delivering things, and then some pirates seize your boat.

Speaker 4 (13:01):
I'm guessing Liberia is not going to be of much assistance.

Speaker 3 (13:04):
Yeah, they're not coming, yeah, yeah, the Liberian Navy is
not available to help you in that instance, right now,
because there tend to be very little constraint on flags
of convenience, there's also very little constraint on what can
happen on those boats, right So you could hire a
private maritime security company and they could protect your boat,

(13:26):
and the chances are the flagger convenience country would not
regulate anything that they did on your boat or the
weaponry they held on your boat. Ah, the rmiders the
Marshall Islands does just regulate somewhat the weaponry that the
Marshal Islands flagged boats could have. I think the reason
there are so many boats flagged in the Marshall Islands,

(13:47):
at least in part, is because half the world's tuna
is caught in Marshall Islands waters. So a lot of
those vessels will probably have they'll choose to have the
Marshal Islands flag because it allows them to fish in
territorial waters. Would be my guess. I've met some some
contractors on Marshal Lea's boat, so I'm not a guy
who was a helicopter pilot for a tuna fishing boat

(14:08):
in a bar once. I guess they fly the helicopter
to look for the fish and then the boat comes
and catches the fish. Huh yeah, fascinating world. I don't
think it's a highly enjoyable job, but I think it's
people do it to get their flight hours up so
they can do other things. So because of this legal

(14:28):
it's not really a legal gray area, just the fact
that these people are not regulated in any way. Right,
people can carry weapons on ships. Now. In the case
of piracy off Somalia specifically, the United Nations did authorize
military action against Somali pirates and between twenty and forty
boats were there at any given time in the next
four years trying to police piracy. But that's not enough

(14:53):
boats because every boat that is moving through that area
is at risk for piracy. And pirates can use very
small boats to board very big boats, right, And unless
that very big boat is somehow able to defend itself,
all they need is a few weapons and the ability
to get on board, and they're hard to trut.

Speaker 5 (15:12):
Right.

Speaker 3 (15:13):
I've heard from people who did contracting in the pre
two thousand and eight era that basically that they put
barbed wire on the edge of the boat to stop
people getting on and then they had the l rad
like they was that long range. The sound weapon, Yeah,
the sound weapon, and I'm not sure that it was
there as a weapon. I think it was there to
notify other ships like get out the way, but that
it could be weaponized. And then after that it was

(15:35):
like big sticks and harsh words, I guess. So like
when you have the guys who took over the MESK
Galabama coming in with a few kalashnikov they have the
balance of force on their side, right, That is no
longer the case anymore. Initially in two thousand and nine,
groups like Blackwater tried to get in all this, and
they did it actually by more or less, I guess,

(15:57):
like copying the privateer model that we'd seen in the
nineteenth century. They refitted commercial boats with weapons and offered
them like for higher as like a rental, like as
an accompaniment.

Speaker 4 (16:11):
They would like escort another ship.

Speaker 3 (16:14):
Yeah, they'd escort you through this dangerous area and then
turn around and escort someone who was going the other way.
Or that was the idea. Sure it didn't really work
a because it was expensive right to run these vessels,
and b because you'd need so many of them, and
so what they ended up doing instead was actually stationing
people on the vessels. So like these security contractors will

(16:37):
now live on the oil tanker or the container ship,
either for its all journey or for the duration of
the time which it's considered danger well.

Speaker 4 (16:47):
And also, I mean if pirates try to get onto
the big ship and all of the military guys are
on a different ship a little bit behind, you have
to get those guys onto the other ship, right, and then.

Speaker 3 (16:58):
Then now you're shooting at the ship that you're supposed
to be protecting. And I can see that.

Speaker 4 (17:02):
That does just make it a little bit more complicated.

Speaker 3 (17:04):
Yeah, yeah, Unfortunately, the way, according to reports I've read,
I should say, the way they have got around this
issue is by preemptively shooting at vessels that they consider
to be a threat. Sure, and there are plenty of
allegations of that will get onto the lack of really
any means of legal accountability at some point. What they

(17:25):
do instead is they allow contractors to go on the ships,
and these contractors then have to be armed. Right. The
way they tend to be armed is depending on the
flag of the ship and what regulations it has. Right generally,
if they're entering into an area where they can't be armed,
they have what are called floating armories. Those are what
they sound like. You don't understand how long in my

(17:47):
freelance career I spent trying to get onto one of
these particular boats. It was a long time.

Speaker 4 (17:54):
So is this just like a tiny boat on a
string with whole winter of guns on it? Like what
it could be?

Speaker 3 (17:59):
It could be an oil platform, could be a little boat,
it could be a big boat sometimes the contractors themselves
or like that's where the contractors will meet the big boat,
right and they'll get on it there, so they have
like an area they can hang out, like it has
living facilities. Huh. I've spoken to a few people in
this world, but you know, if you happen to be

(18:20):
listening and you're a boat security guy, I know. This
is continues to fascinate me as an area where like
the state doesn't exist and we have this like post
state private militarization.

Speaker 4 (18:31):
It's like anarcho capitalism.

Speaker 3 (18:33):
Yeah yeah, yes, yeah, yeah exactly is it is a
vision of the ancap future that I don't love. That
is very interesting, Right, there were states that offered to
have like vessel detachments. The Dutch did this. I believe
they would be like we will send you. I'm not
familiar with the Dutch military. Sorry, Dutch listeners, Dutch marines, I imagine, right,

(18:53):
and you can have a few of them on your boat.
But even Dutch companies or Dutch flag vessels weren't using
it because it was so much paperwork and the government
couldn't keep up with their demands. They right, now, we'll
just get some guys, what's pay them? Be fine? Yeah.
The state has more or less completely removed itself from
the sphere and removed itself from doing anything approaching accountability,

(19:17):
and so it is extremely hard for these people to
be held accountable for things that they do in international waters. Right.
There are like industry standards in the industry itself sets
in the same way that there are standards for cops
at the cops themselves set, and those have generally not

(19:40):
been the best means of accountability. Right in the theory,
anytime they engage someone, certainly, if they kill someone, the
ship's authorities should report that. Yeah hopefully, yeah cool, I'm
sure they will. I'm sure they love to do the paperwork.
But then who would they report it to, right, do
they report it to the country? They suspect the peace
people they are shooting at their country. Do they report

(20:04):
it to the flag of convenience country? Do they report
it to the company they work for? Like I'm sure
there is some jurisdiction of maritime law which would give
us an answer to that, But in practice there appears
to be very little mechanism for accountability in the same
way that there is very little mechanism for accountability for

(20:25):
labor law violations at sea. I would recommend if people
haven't listened as a podcast called Outlaw Ocean. It's probably
five or six years old at this point. I think
it was in New York Times Investigation along with someone else.
It was a good podcast about labor violations at sea,
and they specifically looked at some of these fishing vessels

(20:45):
and the fact that they use people who are essentially
an indentured servitude. But they also touched on private maritime security.
These days, we see a lot less piracy off Somalia
right like it has reached its peak. This little little
chunk in an article I was ringing on jastore this
morning that I thought was interesting quote maritime security companies

(21:07):
have been consulted on greenpeace activists attempt to climb onto
a gas prom off your platform in September twenty thirteen
to protest ruling in the Arctic and attacks against oil
and gas installations by the Movement for the Emancipation is
a niche a delta. So I guess these people have
a wide remit in which they operate. As I say,

(21:28):
they's somewhat different from like land based PMCs because land
brace private military contractors are generally operating either with backup
from a state or as back up to a state,
and so there is like an accountability mechanism somewhat there.
We saw in the Global War on Terror that that

(21:49):
we still lack accountability mechanisms for private military contractors on land,
but that certainly remains the case on the ocean. Right. Yeah,
So another thing we should consider here is a historical parallels, right,
And the obvious historical parallel would be looked to nineteen
eighty seven and the what's generally referred to as the
tanker War. Right, what the United States attempted to do

(22:12):
was to open up a channel. The straightform moves is
very narrow. As I said, it's narrowest point, it's just
twenty one miles. There are two channels because obviously not
the entire twenty one miles is deep enough ships to
go through. There are two channels that are each about
two miles wide, and think they're three kilometers wide. It's
still not very great at that conversion. So the United
States attempted is to open one channel and then run

(22:32):
a convoy system. Right. Think about when you have roadworks
and you know the cars go one way and then
the cars go the other way, and someone goes in
front of you and they have it like a flashing
light till you'd follow them or what have you. And
the United States attempted to escort convoys of mostly reflagged
Kuwaiti oil tankers through the straight Horn moves right. The
very first escort mission involved a Kuwaiti oil tanker that

(22:55):
had reflagged as an American tanker had become the Bridgeton.
It was the Bridgiton that struck an underwater mine on
that very first mission. I didn't cause any casualties, it
did cause damage to the ship. During that same operation
in a United States ship also struck a mine. It
was called the United States Samuel Roberts Samuel B. Roberts.

(23:17):
I believe it struck a mine while transiting international waters.
It just goes to show that when there are minds
in this area, in any area, it's very hard to
know when they've all been removed, and it's very hard
to know where they all are right now. During that
same operation, a United States warship mistakenly shot down an

(23:38):
Aralian civilian flight, killing all two hundred and ninety people
on board. This goes to show how crowded the space
is around the straight offore moves, and it goes to
show how I mean, even in a relatively modern war,
the possibility for mistakes is very high. And that's before

(23:59):
you even considered the fact that the Trump administration is
willing to accept, even among administrations as the United States,
they are willing to accept a very high number of
innocent deaths. I also want to talk about, because this
is such a small straight to crowded straight right, the
possibility of attack is not just limited to naval attack

(24:21):
right to boats. We know that US destroyed most of
Iran's navy, and we're going to speak about how the
IRGC navy is not the same as Iran's regular flag navy.
Right when we talk about the Iranian navy, big gray boats. Yes,
the US has destroyed many of those with the IGC.
We're looking at much smaller, fast attack vessels, right, sometimes

(24:42):
civilian vessels with a machine gun mounted to them. Those
have not all been destroyed, and it will be very
hard for United States to destroy those all from the air,
as it will be for the United States to destroy
the ground attack capability that Iran has. Right. They have
jrnmus missiles, they have Shahed drones. They can use regular

(25:04):
unguided rockets. A Shahed drone from anywhere in the country
of Iran, given its range, could hit a boat in
the Strait of Hormos. These horn Moose class missiles. They're
called Hormos missiles, so they're launched from vehicles. Right. It
looks like a lorry and it comes out and it
pops up its back. It lifts up the miss island

(25:25):
launches it. These are very easy to hide, right. Lots
of entities in this region use tunnels and caves to
hide things. I'm sure the Iranian state does too, But
you could hide one of these missile launches anywhere in
a city in a cave and a tunnel. It only
needs to pop out, deliver its missile and then it
can be abandoned, right, or it can go back into

(25:46):
its cave whatever it wants. But the Iranians don't need
to destroy every ship that transits the Strait of Hormoos
to close the Straight of Hormoos. First of all, there
are only two three kilometer channels.

Speaker 5 (25:57):
Right.

Speaker 3 (25:57):
If there is a wrecked ship in one of those channels,
channel get smaller and smaller, and therefore your chance of
hitting the minds that are there gets higher and higher. Right,
because there's less way to go around them. The Iranians
only have to make transiting the Strait of Hormus uninsurable
to succeed, right. So what has happened with private maritime

(26:20):
security contractors so far is that their presence has made
transiting high risk areas areas at high risk for piracy
an insurable effort. Because frequently you will hear that a
ship with armed security has never been taken by pirates.
That's really hard for us to confirm, right, like, there's

(26:43):
no independent data on that, but certainly it it likely
reduces a chance so then being taken by pirates, and
that has made them insurable. The Iranians knocking out one
or two tankers will make the Straight of hormones an
uninsurable passage, or it will make the insurance so costly
that commercial entities will not be willing to undertake that journey.

(27:05):
Right now, Donald Trump is said the United States will
act as the insurer. I know, man like it will
be a lot of tankers for us to buy the
if the Iranians keep you know, they've knocked out two
large vessels overnight, it seems unlikely. Donal Trump has said
a lot of things right, not all of them are true.
Very well, even in the last few weeks, Donal Trump

(27:26):
said a lot of things about the straight of Horror
moves that were not true. So we will see that
I wanted to explain some of those threats. Let's have
a talk about the specific naval threat now that IGC
Navy all right, So let's move on to discussing what

(27:49):
exactly this means in the current era. Right when the
United States is saying the straight of Horror moves is
open except for Iran shooting at ships, and Iran is
radioing ships right now and telling them they're not allowed
to enter the straight of horm moves, and they're obviously
threatening them if they do. So, what we will see
right now in the straight of hornor moves is this

(28:10):
situation where Iran has a few mechanisms for attacking these
these ships. Right, the one that's being talked about the
most are minds, and the mindset it ran has to
my understanding of just straight up World War two leg
s minds. Have you ever played mind sweeper Garrison?

Speaker 6 (28:28):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (28:28):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So they look like that, right. They
have these big contact fuses on them, that is what
they are, right the way the current works in a
straight of hornor moves, if they can kind of circulate around, okay,
which will make them you know, you can't be like,
okay that this area is mine, that we're just going
to avoid the minds. Yeah, right, like this whole strait
is mine now. And as we covered in ed on Friday,

(28:48):
the US doesn't have a great capacity to remove those minds.
But the thing which has been less discussed is that
the IGC has tons, and if they don't have, if
they run out, it's very easy to make more right
of like civilian fast boats. Think of a little boat
with a motor on the back and a belt fed

(29:10):
machine gun in the front, right, Like, very easy to
take those boats and swarm a large vessel, right, Like,
even if that vessel has private security on board, the
straightforard moves is twenty one miles across. Like, you could
harass people if you had a jet ski.

Speaker 4 (29:27):
Yeah, have a little jet ski technical I just tell you, yeah, yeah,
with an RPG on the back.

Speaker 3 (29:31):
Yeah yeah yeah. And then most dudes rock vessel that
has ever taken to the seas. Yeah. I might have
to hand it to that LGC if they did that.

Speaker 7 (29:39):
But.

Speaker 3 (29:42):
Under very few circumsts. I don't know circumstances. Yeah, do
you have to hand it to the Yeah, the Iranian
state in any capacity. Now I'm shitting around, like I
think the state of irun is terrible, misogynist, violent and
oppressive entity and shouldn't exist just to be like super dupicle.
They also have what are called uncrewed surface vessels. I'm

(30:06):
sure they use like the gender neutral framing, but they
are think of a large think of a boat that
doesn't have anyone driving it, right, And it was uncrewed
surface vessels that they used last night at the time
of recording to explode a tanker in the port in Barcera, Right, Okay,
very hard for the United States to stop these uncrewed

(30:31):
surface vessels. Right, they are like the Shihi drone of
the ocean. This boat's not coming home. It's designed to
eliminate another boat. But it can be It could be steered, right,
It's not just like a torpedo. So what exactly are
the options I guess for the United States? Trump has
offered to secure shipping through the straight ofform moose, right,

(30:53):
he offered to accompany ships. The Navy doesn't have the
capacity to do that. To accompany the amount of the
world shipping that goes through the straight ofform moves would
require masses of ships to accompany them, right, They'd have
to travel at the same speed as these ships. Some
of these ships are flagged to countries all over the world, right,

(31:14):
including countries the US doesn't have the best relationship with,
especially right now. The companies could hire more private maritime security,
and I'm sure they will, but also like, part of
the role of private maritime security companies is to be like,
don't do that, it's too dangerous. And going through a
straightform moods right now is probably too dangerous, right, sure,

(31:35):
So I don't know how you would quickly equip a
ship in a way that you could be like cast
iron secure that it will be able to fend off
like a little swarm of little boats trying to attack it. Right,
I don't think an RPG could sink one of these ships,
but it could really fucking give it a bad day.
Oh you know, Like there's not a good situation when

(31:57):
there's a hole in your boat from what I understand. So,
like the other option would be for the US to
put personnel on these ships, which would be problematic from
a number of approaches. Right, it is a Liberian flagship,
and now you're asking what US marines to risk their
lives to defend the Liberian flagship so everyone can get

(32:18):
their TIMU purchases. And like we can not slow down
global trade. There is not a good option here. Like
the state the States of the world couldn't find a
good option when we were dealing with piracy in two
thousand and nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Right, they felt better
outsourcing the accountability for that to private companies. The States

(32:42):
didn't want to have to wear the reputation damage for
like this boat once again opened up with a belt
fed on what turned out to be a fishing vessel,
or they felt like that liability was too much for them, right,
so they didn't want to do it and they would
much rather have private companies do it. I don't really

(33:02):
see an option here that makes the shipping safe going
through this area.

Speaker 4 (33:08):
You could not start a war with Iran.

Speaker 3 (33:11):
Yeah, yeah, that is a really good option, actually one
that one that sadly that ship has sailed as they say, Garrizon,
But yeah, it is. This industry is already problematic, Like
even before the United States started bombing Venezuela and the
Colombian fishing vessels or vessels that it accused of being
drug traffickers, there has been a long history of a

(33:33):
lack of accountability for people being killed at sea and
for people being abused at sea through labor violations. I
don't really see a way we come out of this
without more damage to innocent lives, right, Like, either the
United States just decides that it's going to go like

(33:54):
scorched Earth on any boat its seas in the straight
of Horn moves isn't like a big tanker. And then
these these vessels, they're not all US flagged, right, the
US doesn't have a means to be like, Okay, you
can go now you can't go now the straightforward moves
is not in the United States. It doesn't control that water,
and so I don't really see a solution for this now.

(34:17):
Like one thing that the world of private maritime security
shows us is that neoliberal globalism is willing to look
the other way a great deal and allow a great
deal of violence on behalf of corporations, not on behalf
of the state. Right Like when people are getting engaged
by these vessels, it is to protect property. Granted, sometimes

(34:39):
it is also to protect life, right like these pirates
have killed people and kidnap people in search. But the
state has been willing to see its monopoly on violence
at the high seas because it could find a good
solution to this, and it's been willing to overlook a
lot of loss of life. And I just don't see
a way that this doesn't lead to more loss of life.

(35:00):
That is probably what we have to look forward to.
It may have already begun happening in the straight of
horn Moves between when we record this and when you
hear it, but it is deeply concerning and pretty shit,
given that there are so many people just trying to
make their way and live their lives in that area. Yeah,
it's a happy one. Shout out to Greenpeace also for

(35:22):
also patronizing these companies.

Speaker 4 (35:24):
Yeah, you told me this was going to be a
recording about pirates.

Speaker 3 (35:27):
There were pirates in it. That was a yeah. But
I know, if you're a pirate and you're listening, I
would love to hear it from more pirates.

Speaker 4 (35:36):
Between the pirates, the private maritime contractors, and the governments,
it's like everyone here has their own issues. Yeah, and
all these issues are getting massively intensified by the conflict
in Aran obviously.

Speaker 3 (35:51):
Yeah, before we even talk about the ecological crisis that
we will see in the Gulf, right, Like you start
putting holes in oil tankers, that is going to be
absolute horrific for the environment. Again in an area where
people are ready to struggling to make it by, I mean.

Speaker 4 (36:05):
Why don't they just pull a pull of Fitzgernaldo. Why
don't they just pull those ships up? Oh God, avoid
them straight altogether.

Speaker 3 (36:14):
Maybe people haven't seen this, and this surface is like
every three days right now on Twitter, like why don't
they just go across land? It turns out that mountains,
big mountains, hard water doesn't like going uphill, quite a
challenging terrain to transit. I think maybe people don't realize
that eighty percent think believe it's eighty percent of global
trade still travels by boat. Yeah, like it is still

(36:37):
the way that most things get to most places. And
I think we are about to find out that the
boat ignorers are about to find out. If this continues
for weeks or months, then it will be incredibly detrimental.

Speaker 4 (36:51):
Is this a good or a bad time to enter
the private mirror time contracting business?

Speaker 3 (36:57):
How much are you enjoying your life decently? Well, okay, yeah,
probably stay out of it if I with you.

Speaker 4 (37:04):
Because they got to be getting a lot of money.
But also they're in the one of the most highest
positions they've probably ever been in.

Speaker 3 (37:10):
So yeah, this was already an area of military contracting
that people looked to get into and get out of.
I would say, like the bulk of these folks now
will be the ones I've met have been Colombians. The
Colombians provide a lot of military contractors around the world. Now,
the people who are able to get out of it

(37:30):
will do business in other areas, right, Like they'll do
the private close protection and stuff like that there are
protective details for journalists I know in who are operating
in Iraq right now. Sure, yeah, these people will be
making a lot of money, I think, especially like probably
consulting right now with global shipping. I was reading about
the East India Company this morning. I was learning, for instance,
that the value of a t ship leave in China

(37:53):
was a billion dollars in twenty twenty four money, which
is how like these private maritime security companies in another
age were able to develop right because it was worth
boat jacking, that boat pirrating, whatever that's called, because of
the value of tea at that time. So it's not
a new problem. But there was a relatively short period

(38:13):
of time in global trade history in which the state
attempted to advance any form of hegemony over the high seas,
and it is completely retreated from that in the twenty
first century. But it will be very difficult for any
state to try and regain that now, Like I don't
see even the United States doesn't really have the capacity
to do that. Garrison looks ponderous.

Speaker 4 (38:37):
Yeah, well, I guess I'll cancel my TIMU orders.

Speaker 3 (38:41):
They'll come someone someone right now is strapping a belt
fed machine gun to a boat to make sure that
you get your team orders. It is like, really kind
of fucked that we're asking people to run a mine field, right,
Like an understand global trade. It's not just temu orders,
but certainly a lot of stuff is consumed when the
global author doesn't need to be consumed. And it is

(39:03):
wild that right now, the solution of the global shipping
industry seems to be some of these people will die,
but we will keep the oil moving and the treats moving.
But that has been, as I hope I've illustrated here right, like,
some people will die, but we will keep the treats moving,
has been pretty much the status of the shipping industry
for most of the twenty first century.

Speaker 8 (39:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (39:21):
Yeah, that's the status of the entire world at this point. Yeah, yeah,
that is the capitalist logic, right. It's just it's like
particularly I think particularly naked here. Yeah. I highly recommend
the Outlaw Ocean podcast if you're interested in learning more
about this. I will link to some of the jastore
deep dive that I went on this morning if you

(39:42):
are able to get past the jay Store paywall and
would like to read that. I think that's about all
we got anything else you want to say about boats.
Garrison now is the age of pirates. Yeah, our flag
means a complete lack of accountability.

Speaker 4 (40:08):
Hello everyone, a welcome to it could happen here. My
name is Dad Al Kern.

Speaker 9 (40:12):
I'm an associate professor of political science, a senior non
resident fell at the Arab Center Washington, and I specialize
in Palestinian and Arab politics. Although Gaza has sort of
leaked off the headlines with everything going on domestically, there's
still obviously a lot happening on the issue of Palestine.
I feel like I've started the last few episodes like this,
but it's worth repeating. So here's an update on what's

(40:34):
been happening in Gaza specifically, despite the ceasefire agreement, reports
indicate ongoing demolition of homes in Gaza City and restricted
entry of food, medical, and humanitarian aid. Again, since the
ceasefire started, more than six hundred Palestinians have been killed
by Israeli fire, with one hundreds more injured. For some reason,
these don't count as ceasefire violations, and according to the

(40:54):
Gaza Government Media Office, there's been over sixteen hundred violations
by Israeli forces, including air attacks, shelling, and direct shooting.
Of the past one hundred and thirty some days of
the ceasefire, Analsis shows attacks on one hundred and eleven
of them, at least in a previous episode, I also
talked about what the yellow line was, which was this
kind of unilaterally imposed military boundary inside Gaza to make

(41:18):
sure that Palestinians are sequestered into smaller spaces, and Israeli
forces have continued to target individuals and structures across this
yellow line, claiming that these actions are necessary to stop
militants and now JA zero reports, however, that Israeli backed
gangs armed gangs are operating back and forth across the
yellow line, so they're allowed now. Rapach Crossing, which is

(41:40):
at the southern tip of Gaza, has officially opened but
is operating under intense Israeli security with some monitoring by
the Palestinian authority and EU officials, but reports indicate that
only about fifty to one hundred and fifty people are
allowed to cross daily, which is far below the demand
for the estimated twenty thousand plus sick or wounded Palstinians

(42:01):
needing evacuation. And since it's opened, its face closures. There's
been a lot of confusion about policy, with many reporting
harsh treatment, invasive searches, and restrictions on personal belongings for
those passing through, and that crossing is not functioning for
commercial or humanitarian aid, which must go through other Israeli
controlled crossings. At the Munich Security Conference that was held

(42:24):
February thirteenth, the top US appointed diplomat overseeing the ceasefire,
Bulgarian diplomat Nicolaim Ladanov said, quote continued violations of the
agreement pose major obstacles to the Pastinian committee expected to
oversee post war governance and reconstruction end quote, and he
was specifically talking about Hamas basically violating the agreement by

(42:46):
not laying down its weapons not disarming, and the Paladian
Foreign Minister Varsen Shaheen, speaking at the same panel, focused
on this idea that Gaza must not be severed from
the West Bank and that the Palsidian authority, meaning the
government in the West Bank that she represents, will need
to take control of governance at some point in Gaza
so that Pastinians could maybe have a state in the future.

(43:07):
Something of course, the Israeli government has rejected outright, which
brings us to this issue of disarming Hamas. Now, this
has been a condition of the US and its representatives
on the Board of Peace. Here's Trump on this a
few days after the ceasefire was announced.

Speaker 1 (43:22):
Will it take Hamas to disarm and can you guarantee
that is.

Speaker 4 (43:25):
Going to happen?

Speaker 7 (43:26):
Well, I'm going to disarm and because they said they
were going to disarm, and if they don't disarm, we
will disarm them.

Speaker 1 (43:32):
How you do that, I don't have to explain that
to you.

Speaker 7 (43:35):
But if they don't disarm, we will disarm them. They
know I'm not playing games, okay.

Speaker 9 (43:40):
On February fifteenth, he announced on social media his Truth
Social that he had gotten five billion dollars pledged by
members of his quote unquote Board of Peace. As one
article noted, reconstruction of Gaza is expected to cost seven
hundred billion dollars according to the United Nations, World Bank,
and European Union est, especially after more than two years

(44:02):
of war. Trump has also claimed that countries had committed
a bunch of troops to the International Security Force that's
supposed to go into Gaza, secure Gaza and disarm Hamas.
He didn't name which of these countries had committed troops,
but Indonesia did confirm that it will send eight thousand troops.
And in that same truth social post, Trump again reiterated
that quote very importantly, HAMAS must uphold its commitment to

(44:26):
full and immediate demilitarization end quote so. Back in December,
in an interview with Israel's Channel twelve, as reported by
drop site News, US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz,
said that the International Security Force was intended to disarm
Hamas one way or the other. Specifically, he said, quote
by all means necessary, and that quote obviously it'll be

(44:49):
a conversation with each country. Those rules of engagement are ongoing.
I'll tell you this. President Trump has repeatedly said HAMAS
will disarm one way or another, the easy way or
the hard way. Now. Hamas, for its part, claims it
never agreed to disarm. In an interview with drop site
News in December twenty twenty five, senior HAMAS leader had
Ad Micheald said that while HAMAS is open to quote

(45:11):
freezing or storing its defensive weapons, it wouldn't disarm unless
it was in the quote context of establishing a Palestinian
army or security force capable of defending itself from Israeli aggression.
Hamas has claimed that it only has a mandate to
negotiate a ceasefire at exchange of captives, and that every
other issue needs to be handled through some sort of
consensus process involving the other Palestinian political factions. And in

(45:34):
that same interview, Michild rejected the idea of an international
security force disarming them, saying that quote we accept them
on the borders as separation forces between the Palestinian side
and the Israeli side, not as forces deployed inside Gaza
as was intended for them, and as Nittanyaja wants for
them to clash with Palestinians and disarm them end quote.

Speaker 5 (45:54):
So.

Speaker 9 (45:54):
Speaking at an Al Jazera forum on February eighth, the
same person, hadath Micheald reiterated this argument, saying that the
calls for Hamas's disarmament is not an international demand but
and Israeli dictate being pushed onto Washington.

Speaker 4 (46:07):
He also said that calls to.

Speaker 9 (46:09):
Disarm Palstinians while the occupation continues would quote leave Gaza
defenseless against Israel's overwhelming military power and exterminationist agenda. As
job site News reported on their social media quote, mitchad
acknowledged the need for pragmatic post war framework to enable
reconstruction and prevent a return to fighting, but explained that

(46:29):
it could not be built on total disarmament. So with
that as an introduction, I wanted to take this episode
to talk about what Palestinians think of disarmament and broadly
and more generally arm tactics. And when I say Palestinians,
I hope it's clear I don't just mean Hemas. I
know that comes as a shock to some, but Pastinians
aren't monolithic. And there has been a great deal of

(46:52):
debate since the Octu over seventh attacks by hems on
the role of arm tactics armed groups, especially in the
absence of national institutions or functioning national liberation movements. In
December of last year, twenty twenty five, the New Arab
hosted a very interesting debate between different Pastinian representatives of
Hamas Fateh, the party of the Pasidian Authority, and a

(47:15):
human rights activist and writer. And they hosted this in Gaza,
literally on the grounds of the bombed out of Shippe hospital,
and they've debated some key questions, for example, who has
the right to decide or in peace for Palestinians, How
can Pastinians understand October seventh, does Hamas need to disarm?
Who should govern Gaza? And you know what, this may

(47:37):
come as a shock to both the American left and
the American right, but the Pasadian speakers at this interview
did not all agree with each other. So I'm going
to give a brief rountdown of what this panel discussed.
The main Hamas spokesperson hasn't caused him basically argued that
decisions on war and peace should be made through national
consensus within a unified Pastinian institution, not unilatterally by any faction,

(48:01):
but that in the absence of functioning institutions, then Hamas
is a part of the Palastinian body politic has a
right to engage in violence and defend Palestinians. He also
argued that it wasn't Hamas's fault that there wasn't national
consensus or functioning national institutions. His narrative was that Hamas
consistently sought unity first by entering into elections in two

(48:21):
thousand and six and supporting election attempts that President Mahmad
Abbas of the Party and the Paladian Authority ended up canceling.
He also reiterated that Hamas doesn't mind handing over governance
in Gaza to a technocratic body, which proves from his perspective,
that they aren't trying to govern alone. And on the
question of disarmament, he said Hamas would commit to cease fire,

(48:43):
they would commit to maybe storing their weapons, but they
wouldn't disarm entirely, and they maintained that armed tactics are
illegitimate right. He also emphasized that Israel alone was responsible
for the destruction of Gaza and that no one could
have anticipated the level of brutality Israel would unleash now.

(49:10):
The Faateehespauk's person Munder Hayek understandably disagreed with many of
these points. He represents the opposing party, and from his perspective,
the October seventh attacks were launched without national consensus and
that Concessus could only operate through the Past Time Liberation
Organization the PLO, which is the internationally recognized representative of
the Palestinian people. Hayak also made the reasonable argument that

(49:33):
even if everyone agrees armed resistance is a right that
those engaging in that tactic should consider the regional and
international context, as well as the impact of these kinds
of tactics and the likelihood of their success, and in
his view, because these things were not considered October seventh
led to very negative results for Palestinians and a lack

(49:53):
of meaningful international support. He also admonished Hamas leadership for
making what he thinks this is a political decision of
not negotiating a ceasefire earlier, accusing them of having been
able to stop the war in the first six months
and limit the bloodshed. And finally, he criticized Hamas for
prolonging negotiations and refusing to put the PA in charge
of Gaza. And he landed on the argument that there

(50:16):
could be no future for Hamas from his perspective, as
part of a national liberation movement unless it accepted the PLO,
it disarmed, it renounced violence, and understood that the PA,
the Palsenian Authority, was the only legitimate authority that could
control both territories, the West Bank and Gaza. And the
way to quote unify Palstinen geography is through the Palsenian

(50:38):
authority and doing that would be the only way to
get back to the state building project. I'm just summarizing
here to be clear, his words, not mine.

Speaker 4 (50:47):
Now.

Speaker 9 (50:47):
The final panelist, Mustaf Ebrahim is a writer and human
rights activist in Gaza who took a critical position of
both parties. He basically said that both Hamas and Fate
share the blame for the division in the Palestinian body
politic and the fact that there was a lack of
mechanism for collective Pastenian decision making and no functioning national institutions.

(51:08):
He blamed both sides, and he accused both sides of
not actually being serious about any of the dialogue sessions
that were held between the two parties in the past
in Cairo, Beirut, and Beijing. But he agreed with the
fatehpokesperson that October seventh has not been allowed to be
assessed properly and that Palestinians never got to decide if

(51:28):
the consequences justified whatever October semath was trying to do,
and he blamed Hamas for that, so, agreeing with the
other panelists that the rights to resist as legitimate. He
also acknowledged that disarmament was an internationally demanded condition, so
he posed the question how would Palestinians navigate this, and
from his perspective, Hamas should be more flexible on the

(51:50):
weapons and disarmament issue, especially given the degree of people's
suffering and the need for reconstruction in Gaza. I summarize
all of this for you, because this debate held in
Gaza among people who had directly lived through the last
two years of genocide, should demonstrate that there is no
national consensus, and that it's not because Postinians don't know

(52:11):
how to resolve these issues, it's because they haven't been
given the space to do so. There has been a
lot of discussion about how to unify these different parties,
about reviving the Pastaine Liberation Organization, making it more inclusive
and democratic and therefore more legitimate as an actor, so
that it could make decisions the Pastinian people would accept,

(52:32):
and so that not one faction can do what at
once can engage in tactics without considering the consequences. But
none of these attempts, and there have been plenty, like
the Palstinian National Conference, have really been incorporated into discussions
of post conflict processes or management by the international community.
Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised when the idea we're going

(52:52):
with is the quote Board of Peace basically functioning as
a colonial oversight board and a club for authoritarian regimes.

Speaker 4 (52:58):
But I digress.

Speaker 3 (53:00):
I think it's also important.

Speaker 4 (53:01):
To make two points here.

Speaker 9 (53:03):
First, that polling of the Palestinian people by the Palstinian
Center for Policy and Survey Research shows that most Palestinians
are not supportive of either party, neither Fetah or Hamas.
There is a degree of malaise and cynicism where both
parties are seen as a part of an unacceptable status quo.
For example, when asked about whether they would support a
Hamas candidate or a Fete candidate if elections were held

(53:26):
for the presidency, thirty four percent of Palestinians say they
would vote for a Fute candidate, twenty four percent would
say a Hamas candidate, nine percent would say they would
keep president Mahammad Abbass, and a whopping thirty two percent
would say they wouldn't even vote, And this non voting
percentage goes up to forty seven percent if the elections

(53:46):
are just between Mahmud Abass and a Hamas candidate. And
they also ask about direct support of political parties, so
there's a more direct question. In the latest poll from
October twenty twenty five, again it shows twenty four percent
support FATEH, hardly a majority, thirty five percent support MS,
again hardly a majority, nine percent support third parties, and

(54:07):
thirty two percent either say they don't know or refuse
to answer. So this is not a situation where either
of these parties have im mandate, and it's clear that
neither party is representing the Pasenian people right now, nor
do their actions have majority support. Now, some might wonder
is this debate emerging because of the sheer level of
destruction in Gaza. We are talking over seventy thousand people

(54:30):
killed in Gaza that we can even confirm so far.
Is it that, in this context, this context of severe
consequences from Israel, what prompted this debate and self reflection?

Speaker 4 (54:41):
Well, the short answer is no.

Speaker 9 (54:43):
Pastenians have always debated these issues, and in the absence
of a functioning national liberation movement with all of its institutions,
they haven't been able to hold any particular party accountable
for its actions. I could point to a lot in
Paustenian history to demonstrate this, but I'll point out an
essay by a Pastinian intellectual, Asmibshada, that he wrote and

(55:04):
released within a month of October seventh. This essay, titled
Moral Matters and Hard Times, again demonstrates the Palestinians have
never shied away from this discussion and indeed made criticisms
of these political parties very quickly following the attacks. Now,
of course, Bashada lays the blame for civilian deaths on Israel,
given that it targets Palestinian civilians as he argues out

(55:25):
of racism, and as he argues to try to turn
the population against armed tactics and armed resistance, and he
quotes Israeli leaders directly here. So he talks about President
Herzog saying there are no innocence in Gaza and Israeli
Defense Minister you Off Gallant at the time calling people
in Gaza human animals. And he also points out that

(55:45):
Israeli society at the time was overwhelmingly supportive of cutting
off food, water, and medicine to Gaza. So, although Bashada
rejects this kind of absolute evil framing of the attacks
and says we need to understand the context of a
seventeen year see John Gaza settlement expansion, incursions on the
al Axamosk and prisoner mistreatment. He also plainly argues that

(56:08):
immoral acts committed during October seventh So to him, documented
instances of harm to civilians, theft, mistreatment, et cetera, are
not acts of resistance, and in fact, from his perspective,
they harm legitimate resistance, and he argues again a month
within the attacks, that the leadership of the quote unquote

(56:29):
resistance have a duty to clarify what happened and condemn
those immoral acts. He says, quote having recognized a people's
right to resist occupation, can it be concluded that we
are not permitted to judge the morality of acts of
resistance to occupation. My answer is that, on the contrary,
it is not only permissible, but perhaps necessary end quote.

(56:51):
So he argues that the right to resist does not
exempt these movements from moral judgment, and distinguishing between legitimate
military operations and a moral acts against civilians is essential
to maintaining the justice of the Pastinian cause. Even as
we can acknowledge and emphasize the quote moral depravity of
the Israeli response end quote. Now, whether you agree with

(57:13):
him or not, whether you side with one of the
panelists I mentioned from the interview or the other, what
I want people to take away from this episode is
that all of this clearly shows Palestinians have been taking
seriously the strategic and moral implications of all of these
tactics arm tactics included, and that there isn't any one
party that speaks for what Postinians want right now. The
only way to get national consensus is to allow the

(57:34):
Palestinians to create or revive the institutions necessary for that
to take place. Disempowering Palestinians, ignoring their aspirations and ignoring
the need for their input, or blocking them from undergoing
this essential process will only prolong the conflict and prolong
the suffering. That's it for me today, Thanks for listening.

Speaker 1 (58:07):
Welcome to It Could Happened Here, a podcast frequently about
the horrifying tech gouls and in this case, venture capital
gouls who are plotting to take over the United States
and have already made your lives significantly worse. I am
your host, Mia Wong, and with me today, I'm very,
very excited about this to talk about the forces of

(58:28):
venture capital and how they're ruining our lives. Is Shaneley,
who is one of the people who puts together the
website VC Infodocs, which I really cannot recommend enough. It
is the most comprehensive, compile source of information on these
venture capital firms and the network state and all the
things that I've been talking about that I've ever encountered.
It was a very significant source for the episodes that

(58:50):
I did about Abundance. Shanley, Welcome to the show.

Speaker 8 (58:54):
Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 5 (58:56):
This is actually the first podcast I've ever done, so
thank you.

Speaker 10 (59:04):
I feel very special.

Speaker 8 (59:06):
So it's great, It's it's good to be here with you.

Speaker 5 (59:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:09):
Do you want to talk a little bit about your
work and about your time confronting the sort of Leviathan
of venture capital.

Speaker 10 (59:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (59:17):
Absolutely, So. I actually used to work in the tech industry.
It feels like a lifetime ago, but I remember when
I first started encountering venture capital, like I knew in
my body and my heart and my soul that something
was terribly wrong with this situation.

Speaker 8 (59:37):
And so I started following that down, you know, over.

Speaker 5 (59:41):
The course of years, and now I've been doing it
for about thirteen years. At different times, I've been more
of an activist. I ran a tech critical magazine at
one point, and now I really do a bunch of
research and work with other researchers around the world to
try to bring as much much serious and material information

(01:00:02):
about venture capital and what we're facing as possible and
put it in people's hands who can do something about it.

Speaker 1 (01:00:09):
Yeah, and those hands are amazingly You the listener, You,
dear listener, can be one of the people who helps
end these people's reign over the world. Absolutely so, all right,
I think the place that we should start is I
think when people think about and it's something that you have
talked about, when people think about sort of venture capital

(01:00:32):
and tech and the wave that they're trying to take
over the country, there is this myopic focus on Peter
Thiel and Jarvin Curtis because they are these sort of
almost semi mythological at this point figures who have a
bunch of really really unhinged beliefs and love talking about
them constantly.

Speaker 5 (01:00:52):
Yes, one hundred percent. It almost turns into a circus.
Look at these freaks, get these like three freaks that
then get sort of obsessively focused on and Sam Altman
and one is one of those. Peter Tiela's one of those.
Curtis Jarvin is one of those. And it kind of

(01:01:13):
ends up being people are looking at this through the
lens of individuals, through the lens of sort of these
cults of personalities that are being created. They're relating to
this issue through sort of like individual players in the environment,
and that's actually very limiting when we're talking about a

(01:01:34):
system that consists of trillions of dollars, hundreds of venture
capital firms, thousands and thousands and thousands of startups, and
all of the financial structures that are around them. So
it has this effect of almost minimizing what's happening, yeah,
and also kind of diverting something so serious into something

(01:01:58):
that is kind of like, well, we can just make
fun of them and that's gonna do something, and that's activism.

Speaker 8 (01:02:05):
The reality is they.

Speaker 5 (01:02:07):
Think that we are labrats. Yeah, they do not care
what we think about them. So having this very like
we're gonna call them stupid, we're gonna call them dumb,
we're gonna make fun of them, we're gonna do whatever,
that becomes the dominant form of critique and that takes
us way off course of what's actually happening.

Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
Yeah, it's like it's a kind of like Great Man
theory a venture capital yes, yeah, And this isn't a
situation where it's like, you know, you're looking at like
Napoleon history on horseback stuff and you're you're debating whether
or okay, to what extent is just like the Great
Man and to what extent this is like the structural
forces of history. This is a situation where like we're
looking at a structural force and everyone is like looking

(01:02:50):
at the clown they've stuck on top of the structural force.
It's like, no, no, no, no, no, we got to understand
the actual structures here, which I think you've done maybe
the best job I've ever seen, and actually looking at
what we're dealing with, which is these networks of hundreds
of venture capital firms and startups and yeah, this entire

(01:03:13):
sort of ecosystem that has become a sort of force
of history.

Speaker 5 (01:03:19):
Yes, one hundred person And that's where the conversation needs
to go is towards like what are we actually dealing with,
Like what are we actually facing and what are the
causes of that So I always like to start with
sort of talking about you know, what are some of
the core dynamics that are.

Speaker 8 (01:03:41):
Happening within venture capital.

Speaker 5 (01:03:44):
One of them is that venture capitalists act as a
central coordinator of this giant machinery of startups and technological
development and infrastructure. So one thing I often see, like
you might be looking at like fifteen different startups and
that's all the same thing. Yeah, you're even looking at

(01:04:07):
five different VC firms. That is all the same thing.

Speaker 8 (01:04:11):
It is our.

Speaker 5 (01:04:12):
Cartel that it has a central financial backbone that is
generating companies at an incredible speed with incredible efficiency. They
are machines for turning out these startups which they're then
able to orchestrate to work together, and that becomes just

(01:04:34):
a profound force and a very efficient force in changing
the world, in interacting with the world, and as we
increasingly see, you know, impacting geopolitics.

Speaker 1 (01:04:47):
So for people like me who are fortunate enough to
not sort of live inside one of these people's center
of power, which is you know, like places like the
Bay or like these these places where these concentrations of
tech capital have fundamentally reshaped the world to the extent
that it feels just being in one of these places
feels so different than being in a place that's not

(01:05:09):
like a tech capital center. For those of us who
like aren't living as much under the eye of the panopticon.
Can you explain a little bit about what venture capital
is dex and then what the effect on sort of
the tech sector that it's had has been.

Speaker 8 (01:05:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:05:25):
Absolutely, So, you know, venture capital essentially what it does.
It takes in capital from around the world. And one
of the interesting things about venture capital is like we
do not have a lot of visibility into where their
money is coming from. We know some things about them,

(01:05:46):
but we do not get a list of like here's
everyone who's giving us money.

Speaker 8 (01:05:51):
So we have all this money coming in, and then
on the.

Speaker 5 (01:05:55):
Outside of that, weapons companies are coming out, Yeah, crypto
companies are coming out, and you know, derne companies coming out,
nuclear energy companies are coming out. So you sort of
have this like it's almost like a black box where
unknown money goes in. Yeah, and then all of this

(01:06:16):
shit comes out the other side.

Speaker 8 (01:06:18):
And that becomes really.

Speaker 5 (01:06:19):
Scary when you start to look at things like we
know that Israel is funding many venture capital firms in
the US, and those venture capital firms are turning out
dozens and dozens of weapons companies, and then those weapons
companies are going to Israel and being used in the genocide.

Speaker 8 (01:06:40):
So you have these very sort of.

Speaker 5 (01:06:41):
Complex relationships going on between like the investors, between other
nations and what venture capital is doing.

Speaker 1 (01:06:51):
One of the things that this reminds me of is
this is something we've talked about on this show to
some extent, but one of the major forces that kind
of reshaped the latter half of the twentieth century was
after the sort of oil shocks, where you know, you
have all of these countries, like you have like countries

(01:07:12):
like Saudi Arabia, like the golf monarchies who are like
very intimately tied to all of these All of these
venture capital firms are certainly just flush with oil money,
and they have this problem, which is that, Okay, we
have all of these piles of money, but this money
is capital, right, and capital wants to be turned into
more and increasing amounts of capital. But how do you

(01:07:32):
do that, Like where do you actually put this money
in an economy where you know, like this is the
context of the seventies, where like output everywhere is decreasing
and like the returns are on capital are falling, and
you know the long range rate of returns collapsing, what
do you do with it? And in the seventies, the
thing that they did with it was they put it
into like third world debt. And this is like why

(01:07:54):
the term third world is a slur now when it
used to be a political movement, is that, you know,
these countries took all of these redgestable interest rate loans
and then when the interest rate went to like two
hundred percent or whatever, they got completely annihilated. And some
of that capital went to weapons, because weapons are a
thing that you can put capital into that destroys capital.

(01:08:19):
And also it let's you know it lets like Saudi
the Saudi monarchy stay in power. But it's also a
thing where like you don't find a way to make
money with that capital. You could just buy a bunch
of jet fighters from the US, which do nothing, but
you spent your money on something one hundred percent.

Speaker 5 (01:08:33):
And I think to that point, specifically Saudi Arabia, one
of the main reasons what's happening in venture capital now
is because Saudi Arabia is trying to diversify its wealth
outside of oil, and they want a globally competitive technology industry,
so they're going to turn to the people who can

(01:08:56):
give them that, and that is venture capital, and that
a tech companies in America. There's sort of this race
happening all over the world of countries trying to make
sure that they're able to compete or at least exist
on the technological plane of what's being developed. And that
makes venture capital almost like the crown jewel now that

(01:09:21):
everyone is trying to get ahold of.

Speaker 8 (01:09:24):
So now they have this huge leverage.

Speaker 5 (01:09:27):
And you hear them. They hang out with MBS. They
sing the praises of MBS, you know, to the heavens,
and they have done a lot of work to quote
unquote repair the image of MBS, particularly after the killing
of Jamal Kushogi, who is a huge major journalist, and

(01:09:49):
for a time that cooled relations between Saudi Arabia and
vendor Capital, at least on the surface. But they don't
care about that stuff, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:10:00):
Yeah, And you know, and I think I think the
other part of that campaign too, and this this is
just one of my mia on the soapbox things, is
that the other thing they were trying to get everyone
to forget about. Was the hideous, hiteous war that all
of the Golf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, but also the
UAE has a massive part in this. We're fighting in
Yemen where they we literally don't know how many people

(01:10:21):
they killed, like they tried, they tried to do a
starvation genocide of the whole country because they couldn't win
the war militarily. They were deploying Sudanese child soldiers as
mercenaries who have been taken from the Jualadid, the group
who's now like doing a genocide in Sudan. They are
also people who do the genocide and are four back
in the two thousands. Like this is like the scale

(01:10:42):
of atrocity that they're committing. You know, everyone's very focused
on walkashowgime is like yeah, it's very very bad obviously
to like kill journalists and like cut them up with
bone salt. But like these are people who were doing
airstrikes on school buses. These are people who were again
deploying Sudanese the child soldiers on battlefields. And these people

(01:11:03):
are going, no, fuck it. Not only are we going
to rehabilitate their image, we're going to take their money,
and we're going to build them fucking weapons forever.

Speaker 8 (01:11:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:11:11):
You know, when you talk about like what is a
venture capitalist, and one of the things that they really
do is they are like constructing entire markets. They're not
just they're not just creating a startup hoping it succeeds.
And then the case of the military, you know, people
focus on and Dural. They have hundreds of weapons companies
now hundreds of weapons companies, and they have the big

(01:11:35):
prime companies like and Dural that are really like the
power houses that are supposed to be like Lockheed and raytheon.
But they also have weapons part manufacturers. They have drone
companies for like all layers of earth see you know,
air everything like that. They're doing hypersonic missiles, They've advocated

(01:11:58):
for a new Manhattan project. They're working on developing weapons
of mass destruction. So when venture capital is going into
these spaces like they are going into win, they are
going in with a fully envisioned picture of what the
new age military looks like with AI technologies, with autonomous technologies,

(01:12:20):
you know, with everything that they've been able to developed,
and now they have a fully featured war platform that
they have to try to get other countries to buy
because it's ready.

Speaker 8 (01:12:31):
Yeah, so they need wars.

Speaker 1 (01:12:34):
Which is extremely bad news for everyone on Earth.

Speaker 8 (01:12:38):
Everybody, Yes, everyone on Earth.

Speaker 5 (01:12:40):
And you know, they have been so deeply complicit in
the genocide of Palestinians.

Speaker 8 (01:12:49):
They are so incredibly enmeshed with Israel.

Speaker 5 (01:12:53):
Venture capitalists refer to Israel as a technocratic state and
as sort of like the ideal state and a model
for what they can be as a technocratic state because Israel,
by proportion, the share of tech GDP in Israel is

(01:13:14):
actually twice as much as in the US, and as
parts of the Israeli economy have suffered as a result
of the genocide, the tech industry is doing amazing yah,
and venture kapitalists are pouring money into it. And so
you see that one of the immediate things that has

(01:13:35):
come out of, you know, the Israel American VC relationship
is the genocide, and is the ongoing development of themselves
and of Israel's the technocratic state.

Speaker 8 (01:13:51):
It's awful.

Speaker 1 (01:13:52):
Yeah, So I think I want to zoom out a
little bit. We've we've talked a bit about you know,
what these companies do. Do you want to talk about

(01:14:15):
some of the major firms that are building all of
these things and building all of these startups that people
haven't heard about and need to know about.

Speaker 5 (01:14:22):
Yeah, one hundred percent, So people have heard about andresen Horowitz,
but not enough.

Speaker 8 (01:14:35):
Definitely not enough.

Speaker 5 (01:14:37):
If I had to put a firm that is the
most responsible for what's going on, it is definitely andresen Horowitz.
One of the things that's happening in the venture capital market.
Why this is happening is because a small number of
firms is forming a monopoly on venture capital, and andresen

(01:14:57):
Horowitz is right there. And in fact, in twenty twenty five,
dresen Horowisz raised over eighteen percent of all venture capital
dollars just that one firm. Okay, so now you start
adding that up the other firms that they work most
closely with and are working on the exact same things
and fund the exact same startups. Founder's fund, Peter Thiel's

(01:15:21):
firm is one of those. General Catalysts is another one
that's very very important. And General Catalyst looks a lot
like andresen Horowitz.

Speaker 8 (01:15:32):
They are very close.

Speaker 5 (01:15:33):
And you see this throughout like you're like you have
different names on your offices but y'all are the same thing.
Sequoia is another big one. They were one of the
early venture capital firms. They did not make their first
devents investment until twenty twenty three, but they were founded

(01:15:53):
in nineteen seventy two. So this is an example of
how a giant VC firm has really been yoked to
an agenda that started in sort of these other younger
upstart players and Andres and Horoz has talked about how
ultimately venter capital will consist of four or five major

(01:16:17):
firms and then basically no mid size firms and then
some sort of boutique firms that are a little bit
more specialized. So in that that kind of category, we
have firms like lux Capital. Lex Capital is one of
the most bloodthirsty, sociopathic, zionist, weird biotech shit, weird weapon shit,

(01:16:44):
out and out bloodthirsty extremists, like just openly maybe one
of the most in that sense. They're incredibly Zionist, and
they are a relatively small firm, but they're able to
be in the mix because they have this sociopathy, this

(01:17:05):
blood lust that you actually see across all of these
firms is that like there's sort of like outright sadistic
at a certain point. You know, Andresen Horowitz actually hired
Daniel Penny too killed jordan' neely, who was a thirty

(01:17:28):
year old, you know, black homeless man. And this guy
was not a venture capitalist and Mark Andresen hired him.
There's a degradation in morality, and there's sort of this
like welling up in the venture capital space of this

(01:17:50):
like extremely depraved like anti morality where they hired this murder. Yeah,
you know, someone who killed a black man and and
made press releases about it and they talk about what
a great VC he is, and so they're immersed in
this like this like culture of sort of of of

(01:18:13):
war and like genocide and like killing them so super disserting, So.

Speaker 1 (01:18:19):
Any any great things happening here the most powerful people
in the world.

Speaker 8 (01:18:26):
Yeah, really bad.

Speaker 5 (01:18:28):
It's it's a moral free fall for sure. So so yeah,
you have that type of stuff going on. But you
know Lux Capital we talked about that. You have Eric Schmidt,
who's the Google CEO. He runs a number of sort
of smaller scale venture capital firms, and then you have
some of the major crypto firms like Ribbit Capital, Paradigm

(01:18:52):
Blockchain Capital, and actually Blockchain Capital, which runs a crypto cartel,
is an investor in Blue Sky.

Speaker 8 (01:19:00):
He thinks great.

Speaker 5 (01:19:01):
So everyone who's thinking that, you know, blue Sky is
this wonderful alternative, Like Blue Sky is owned by a
venture capitalists who are running a crypto cartel.

Speaker 8 (01:19:13):
So those are some of those firms.

Speaker 5 (01:19:16):
And you know, you have y Combinator, which is a
smaller firm feeding in.

Speaker 8 (01:19:21):
Then you have some other kind of pieces outside that.

Speaker 5 (01:19:24):
One that's super important is and this is always tough
for me to talk about because people look at you
like you're conspiracy theorists if you say anything about the CIA. Yeah,
if it's one hundred percent true. But the CIA made
a venture capital firm many many years ago, and that

(01:19:45):
venture capital firm is called inq tel and they have
funded over eight hundred startups.

Speaker 1 (01:19:51):
It's amazing, incredible stuff. Also, the fact that they called
it in q tel.

Speaker 10 (01:19:56):
Is just like incredible. Come on, So, yeah, we're gonna.

Speaker 1 (01:20:02):
Put intail in the name of it, but we're gonna
put it in qtel because fuck you god, it's like
qt spy bullshit.

Speaker 8 (01:20:11):
Yes, it's totally mild. And I always tell this story.

Speaker 5 (01:20:16):
You know, I worked at startups and sliconbl I worked
in database startups, Internet infrastructure APIs, like you know, infrastructure
service stuff like that. I went to a big data
conference in like maybe like twenty twelve or something like that.
I won't say, I don't know for sure which one

(01:20:37):
it was, but it was in New York. There was
all all these companies there. One of the keynote speakers
was the Chief Technology Officer of the.

Speaker 10 (01:20:46):
CIA, J's Christ.

Speaker 8 (01:20:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:20:50):
So none of this has been a secret to people
in the industry.

Speaker 8 (01:20:55):
The CAA operates.

Speaker 5 (01:20:57):
Openly in the industry and invests openly in thery.

Speaker 8 (01:21:01):
But he got on.

Speaker 5 (01:21:02):
Stage and he said, our goal is to collect all
of the data in the world and save it forever.

Speaker 8 (01:21:13):
And I looked around me.

Speaker 5 (01:21:14):
To see if anyone else was And this was months
before the soda and revelations. Yeah, so the CIA was
openly admitted into all all of this stuff anyways. But
point being, you know, and in q Tel has been
so key to this because they have brought all of

(01:21:35):
the venture capital startups into the government, into intelligence and
into defense. From the CIA's perspective, this has also given
them a revenue source and a way to operate outside
of just the government budget. And we can go back
to this when we're talking about the network state, because

(01:21:58):
what the CIA is really good at is cooing and
other countries. And now you see the network state down
in Latin America trying to keep governments down there. So
there's been in there's been an incredible fusion of the
CIA with venture capital that has has transformed both of them.

Speaker 8 (01:22:19):
They are both changed by this.

Speaker 1 (01:22:21):
Yeah, it's like it's like tech is the new like
running opium out of like Vietnam or whatever. It's like,
I guess we've replaced. We've replaced doing like really overt
drug running shit to fuel our operations with uh oh, hey,
we can just get on stage and like talk to
all of these venture capital gouls and get a bunch
of money that way for a like whatever weird shit

(01:22:44):
we want to be up to.

Speaker 8 (01:22:45):
Yeah, it's it's wild. So you have that.

Speaker 5 (01:22:50):
And then another piece of it is that venture capital
has formed this incredibly close relationship with black Rock and Blackstone,
so they have a trigal finance backing.

Speaker 1 (01:23:02):
Can you explain for people who are not familiar what
Blackrock and Blackstone are and that I can tell my
completely deranged Blackstone story.

Speaker 5 (01:23:12):
Okay, so, yes, Blackrock is a giant, you know, financial beast,
a monster monstrosity. Yeah. I don't have the most up
to date numbers on how much money that they manage,
but as of twenty twenty five, it was over twelve

(01:23:34):
trillion dollars in assets under management. Christ So you are
talking about a absolutely, you.

Speaker 8 (01:23:42):
Know, huge, huge financial entity.

Speaker 5 (01:23:46):
So they have been one of the first to really
back venture capital in the traditional finance world in crypto.

Speaker 8 (01:23:56):
So they are the ones that started bringing.

Speaker 5 (01:23:58):
To market the ETFs that made it easy to invest
in in bitcoin. They have ETFs that are trading. They
also have one for ethereum.

Speaker 1 (01:24:11):
Can you explain what an ETF is.

Speaker 5 (01:24:13):
Yes, what an ETF is, It's basically, you know, what
it does for crypto is, instead of having to buy
and manage your own crypto assets, the financial institution basically
takes on the administration and management of those underlying assets. So,

(01:24:35):
you know, for investors who don't want to be on coinbase,
you know, buying from these like sketchy companies, these were
ways to make these assets available to the investment market
and crypto really needed that and Blackrock came in to

(01:24:58):
do that, and the they partnered with Coinbase, and they
partnered with other you know, venture capital things, so they
did the.

Speaker 8 (01:25:07):
VC is a big solid there.

Speaker 5 (01:25:09):
And then to our point, like they are very invested
with this, Saudi is as well partnered with the Saudi
Sovereign Wealth Fund, you know, the leading to weapons deals.
They are also doing a bunch of data centers in
the UK and they've been operating in Israel for a

(01:25:32):
really long time, so that you know, this was a
very natural partner, I would say for venture capital.

Speaker 8 (01:25:40):
But it also gives venture capital.

Speaker 10 (01:25:45):
A lot.

Speaker 5 (01:25:46):
The Chicapo has gotten a lot out of this deal.
So you have that start to happen. And one question
I've always asked is, like to crypto people who have
said like this is the way around the banks and
blah blah blah, Well, why is Wall Street getting crypto
before you?

Speaker 10 (01:26:03):
Yeah? It really truly not. It does not really seemed
to be doing that. It's not.

Speaker 8 (01:26:08):
It's just the math is not math in here.

Speaker 1 (01:26:23):
One of the things I think is interesting about what
you've done is talking about what the relationship between crypto
and these venture capital firms is and what purpose crypto
serves for them.

Speaker 3 (01:26:32):
Yes, can you get into that.

Speaker 5 (01:26:34):
Yeah, So crypto one of my absolute favorite topics to
talk about. There are a lot of ways of looking
at this. One of the ones that I find most
interesting is when the first sort of dot com bubble
happened and when they first started making absolute fucked tons

(01:26:57):
of money. So they have tons of money coming and
they're making tons of money, and they are putting that
money in banks they don't own and financial infrastructure they
don't own, and they're paying a lot of.

Speaker 8 (01:27:11):
Taxes on it. So it's some point the decision.

Speaker 5 (01:27:15):
Is made by them, like why would you want to
make so much money and then have that money going
right out the door to a bunch of bankers who
are going to take all your money. So at some
point it occurs to them, all of this money that's
transacting not just through us, but over the internet overall

(01:27:36):
is something we can make a ton of money on.
And one of Mark Andresen's first things was trying to
get internet credit card payments working over the browser, and
then you have PayPal, So at the point that they
sort of were like, we're going to do our.

Speaker 8 (01:27:55):
Own financial infrastructure.

Speaker 5 (01:27:58):
Okay, Now they have a financial infrastructure that is literally
in competition with the sovereign financial system of the United
States of America. And this, more than anything else, might
be the source of the rupture between the American government
and between venture capital because as soon as you start

(01:28:20):
developing this ecosystem and people think that crypto is just
like bitcoin and like doge coin and like ethereum, no, no, no, no.
These people have a whole bunch of banks. They have banks,
They are developing stock markets and stock exchanges. They have
point of sales systems, they have betting markets.

Speaker 1 (01:28:42):
Oh god, crypto betting markets.

Speaker 3 (01:28:45):
Oh yeah, they.

Speaker 5 (01:28:46):
Have gotment, they have you know, they have loans programs,
they have savings, they have.

Speaker 8 (01:28:52):
Blah blah blah.

Speaker 5 (01:28:53):
Like crypto is really a very fully featured financial system,
and they need to get is much money out of
the existing financial system moved into their financial system. So
they are in this war essentially over that. And that's

(01:29:16):
what we're looking at, is the global financial system being
replaced with a financial system that is owned and controlled
by venture capitalists. And that's a profound thing that has
profound implications. We're going to talk about the network state more.
But another reason why the network stay has happened is

(01:29:36):
because as the crypto market really kind of started to
take off, they decided, we don't want to pay taxes
on this. We did this all by ourselves. And one
of the things the network state is it is a
series of global tax shelters and tax evasion zones all
over the world because they knew that they were striking

(01:29:59):
goal and they wanted to make sure they get it
out of having to pay it to the irs and
having to pay it to the people in this country
and other countries.

Speaker 1 (01:30:10):
Yeah, and then you know, like the more control you
can get over like what there is of the American state,
the more you can just be like, hey, look, we're
just gonna not ever look into the fact that there's
all this tax evation shit going on. You can just
like use our control of like vant and you know,
like our control of the levers of the state to
make sure that like we're just allowed to do this.

Speaker 8 (01:30:31):
M yeah, one hundred percent. You know.

Speaker 5 (01:30:34):
It also goes back to like what are the roots
sort of causes of tech fascism or whatever you would
like to call them. And one of the big reasons
for that is because as venture capital itself is diversified
and it's moving into finance, and it's moving into medicine,
and it's moving into land, and it's moving into energy.

(01:30:56):
There are existing monopolies in every single part.

Speaker 8 (01:31:00):
Of those markets that they have to.

Speaker 5 (01:31:02):
Fight in order to get into them, and they've openly
talked about this. So when they're entering these markets, they're
going to war with existing monopolies in order to create
their own monopolies. And that's forced them to these really
like sort of extreme and perverse strategies like we're going
to cure the US government, like God, and they've been

(01:31:30):
really successful at that. So they work hard. Everyone's like
they're lazy, they don't do anything, they're not smart, blah
blah blah. I'm like Mark and Dresen works like the devil.
He does not take a day off.

Speaker 10 (01:31:41):
He is.

Speaker 3 (01:31:43):
Unfortunately.

Speaker 1 (01:31:47):
So the story here, I think is one of these
companies getting you know, heavily invested into the defense sector,
heavily invested into building their own sort of financial system,
like to some accept building links with the major financial
powers that already exists, and to some extent, you know,
like combating the powers that they want that are like

(01:32:09):
monopolizing the places where they want to expand into. But
there's also a global strategy here that's all kind of
like a part of this larger plan, and I was
wondering if you could talk a little bit about that
before we go much deeper into a next episode.

Speaker 5 (01:32:26):
Yes, absolutely, so, you know, I think what we have
talked about so far as we'really looking at like kind
of root causes, dynamics, new markets they're going into, and
the next sort of stage of thinking about that is.

Speaker 8 (01:32:41):
Like what what demands.

Speaker 5 (01:32:43):
And what global program and strategy comes out of sort
of their needs for capital, for returns, for expansion, for
fighting monopolies, for tax evasion, everything like that. And what
they've come up with what we can already see, is
really like a global playbook.

Speaker 8 (01:33:03):
For how they're going to do that. And this is about.

Speaker 5 (01:33:07):
Running everything in the world as venture capital firms and
their startups and including the government. So what is happening
in America is the venture capitalists are trying to replace
the government with venture capital firms and their startups who
are operating the state that can be done everywhere. They

(01:33:28):
want global deregulation, they want global suspension of taxes all
over the world. They're going to bolster techno fascists align
right wing politicians. We already see this with Bukele, with Malay.
They're going to do the interference in elections, the lobby
and the bribery, social medium manipulation, everything that they need

(01:33:49):
to do to make sure they get politicians all over
the place who are going to take their orders. As
we discuss replacing the global economic system with the crypto
financial system, and then these megaprojects, the data centers, the
new cities in order to feed all of their data
centers and all of their new factories and their new manufacturing.

(01:34:12):
We're headed for a new age of resource extraction where
they're literally already going all over the world with AI
mining companies to find li the uranium and cobalt. They
need to re arm all of Europe, they need to
recolonize Latin American Africa. They need to suppress leftism and
communism globally. And you know, ultimately this all unfolds within

(01:34:39):
a war with China, because that's what's waiting for them
at the end of this thing. And once you have
all these things in place, you're looking at the rise
of the techno fascist civilization, which is the network.

Speaker 8 (01:34:55):
State, which we are going to talk about in our
next episode. It sounds u.

Speaker 10 (01:35:02):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (01:35:06):
So you could look forward to.

Speaker 1 (01:35:09):
God the global systemic tech fashion state.

Speaker 3 (01:35:15):
Tomorrow. Oh God, Okay, Chayley.

Speaker 1 (01:35:20):
Where can people find your work and more information about this?

Speaker 5 (01:35:24):
Yes, please check out the research site. It's a vc
infodox dot com and like, please help us get this
information out there because people all over the world need
to know stuff and to know what's hitting them. Particularly
this affects other countries, and you know, we really need

(01:35:45):
people who can activate around this information and make sure
when we show up and we build our resistance that
like that resistance is not designed to take down Curtis Yarvin. Yeah,
it is designed to take down a capitalist system.

Speaker 1 (01:36:17):
Welcome to it could happen here the podcast where it's
happening both here and everywhere else. I am your host
Fo Wong, and today we're talking about the it being
the fascist network state that the all of these ventured
capital tech ghouls are trying to set up.

Speaker 3 (01:36:34):
And with you.

Speaker 1 (01:36:35):
Once again to talk about this is Shaneley, who is
one of the contributors and people behind vc infodox, which
is one of the best resources about these bloodthirsty tyrants.

Speaker 10 (01:36:47):
Shy Welcome to the show.

Speaker 8 (01:36:50):
Thank you, thank you for having me again.

Speaker 1 (01:36:53):
I constantly have these moments where it's like, oh great,
I'm talking to people who are really cool, and I
really wish I was talking to them about literally anything else,
because oh my god, this stuff sucks. Like please, please
cause the end of this system, so I could talk
to people about things that are good instead.

Speaker 10 (01:37:08):
Of things that are imers.

Speaker 5 (01:37:10):
Yes, my dream is to not wake up every single
morning and the first thing I think about is Winter Capital.

Speaker 8 (01:37:18):
I think about it every second of.

Speaker 5 (01:37:19):
Every day, and then that's when I go to sleep
thinking about and then that is also sometimes what I
dream about, which is unfortunate.

Speaker 10 (01:37:29):
You know, we've all been there.

Speaker 8 (01:37:32):
We've all been there.

Speaker 1 (01:37:33):
Oh god, So speaking of things all being in places, Look,
they pay me the mediocre bucks if you have a
better transitions more. But you know, let's get into what
the network state actually is, because I think it's something
that is not understood particularly well.

Speaker 8 (01:37:55):
Yeah, one hundred percent.

Speaker 5 (01:37:57):
So again this kind of comes in what we're talking
about last episode, that kind of people's ideas about what
these projects are not necessarily like fully fully formed. And
I think a lot of people think that the network
state is just kind of like them going to do
weird shit, which yes, that's that's part of it. But

(01:38:22):
I think something that you know, people don't really see
is how how many purposes that the network state sites
have for them. You know, the network state is basically
creating zones around the world where they can execute their projects.
So you know, some of these are more of the

(01:38:45):
like ideological projects like maybe like practice or something like that.
But you also see network state sites that are very
focused on being like industrial centers, manufacturing centers, you know,
biotech and start development where they can get away from
regulations where they can sort of benefit from like co

(01:39:07):
development on a campus. You know, you have sort of
new city ideas like California Forever. You have network state
sites that the only thing they're doing right now is
they're registering startups to operate in different countries and favorable terms.
You have a whole sort of bunch of different versions

(01:39:32):
of this, so it's a very like extensible concept for them.
I think some other you know, interesting properties of the
network state is that it can become like a point
of sort of negotiation with the with the host country.
Like one of the points of the network state is
to open up a country to the cryptocurrency markets, to

(01:39:56):
mining markets.

Speaker 8 (01:39:58):
To you know, just the different for biotech markets.

Speaker 5 (01:40:01):
This is a way of them getting into a country
like kind of on their own terms.

Speaker 8 (01:40:08):
Which I think is a big, big function of it.

Speaker 5 (01:40:12):
A lot of it has to do with crypto adoption,
because if they're going to make cryptocurrency work, they need
it to be adopted.

Speaker 8 (01:40:21):
Around the world.

Speaker 5 (01:40:22):
And this is why coinbase is making such extreme investments
in the network state, because this is a way to
also you know, get crypto into all of these markets,
start entering into trade with other nation states where the
points of negotiation are around regulation, are around taxation, around

(01:40:46):
access to land and minerals.

Speaker 1 (01:40:49):
So can you describe kind of what does it look
like inside one of these zones, like for example, like
how do these compare to say, like a special economic zone,
which is the kind of models of this that we've
had traditionally.

Speaker 5 (01:41:02):
Yeah. Absolutely, And you know, the network state is built
using special economic zones, so it's really not functionally different
on a lot of different levels. It's more about like
who is using this special economic zone and what do
they want to do with it? Yea, and medical experimentation

(01:41:24):
is actually a huge goal here because you know, again
when we're talking about them getting into medical development, developing
all of these biotech startups, they're facing existing monopolies in
the US.

Speaker 8 (01:41:38):
They're also facing the FDA.

Speaker 5 (01:41:41):
The Network State book by Belaji shrina Vasan, who's an
andresen Horowitz like guy for life like he's andresen Horowitz.
One of the main motivations for the Network State is
getting to a place where you can't have any medical regulations,
and so in hanjurists they've been doing that. They've been

(01:42:02):
doing unregulated clinical trials. The doctors in Honduras have been
organizing to try to shut this down and they haven't
been able to and they're gonna have way worse problems
now because Trump just installed a new president, install the
president there who is in support and is taking the

(01:42:27):
steps to you know, support this a special economic zone
called their ZA. But that's that's one of the big
reasons that they're doing it. Their medical offering is profound.
They're doing clinical trials, drug developments, activating clinical research sites.

(01:42:48):
They're also involved in like insurance software, insurance marketplaces, IVF, longevity,
anti aging, like the whole you know thing. And this
goes back. It's like when venture capital is entering a
new market now, like they come like locked and loaded
with a full platform and getting more accelerated clinical trials

(01:43:13):
is something that is going to move their project forward significantly.
Network state is is a way to accomplish that.

Speaker 1 (01:43:22):
So these these sort of nodes that they're setting up
of these networks stix sites are places where you know,
they've been able to sort of carve out special economic
zone status that means that like the traditional sort of
regulatory structure of the country simply does not apply. Yes, yeah,
which is very which is in a lot of ways,
and this is like a special economics zone thing in general.

(01:43:42):
It's like very sort of like fascist state of exception
where like oh yeah, no, we've just you know, there's
like a crisis in the crisis is that we can't
do like human experimentation, and so we've now created this
zone where just none of.

Speaker 10 (01:43:55):
The laws apply.

Speaker 1 (01:43:56):
It's like the kind of like evil Mirror World Universe
version of like temporary autonomous zones, except it's like what
if we had a permanent zone of fascism where all
the laws didn't apply, if we could just do whatever
we wanted.

Speaker 8 (01:44:10):
One hundred percent.

Speaker 5 (01:44:11):
It's also deeply concerning because the obsession with accelerating clinical innovation,
drug innovation, like whatever that is, like at some point
there is a like what makes that stuff move the fastest,
and it's human trials and human experiments and the more

(01:44:32):
people that you can shove, the faster you can shove
through medical development.

Speaker 8 (01:44:38):
And that's very concerning.

Speaker 5 (01:44:40):
So to me, I see this as like a recipe
for large scale medical abuse and disaster.

Speaker 8 (01:44:46):
Oh yeah, so yeah when you when you.

Speaker 5 (01:44:49):
Look at them doing is unregulated and unethical medical experiments
and trials in Honduras, and then you see and this
other part of the world in different countries in Africa
that the network site is also targeting that you know.
Recently news came out about a very controversial and very

(01:45:11):
unethical experiment in Guinea Buso to test the vaccine timing
of eppetitis B on fourteen thousand infants, and the acting
director of the CDC at the time that this was
approved is Jim o'nill. And Jim o'nill is from Peter

(01:45:33):
Thiel's Vendor Capital from myth Roles and he was also
on the board of the C studying Institute, which is
where a lot of this sort of network state stuff
does come from. So this is a recipe for like
mass scale medical abuse. And even if you look at

(01:45:54):
like what world coin, which is Sam Altman's like eyeball
scanning thing like that is a biotech thing like that
starts to get into the the realm of like medicine
and stuff like that. So you see these sort of
forces starting to converge in these areas, like these aren't

(01:46:16):
infants that they are doing these babies that they're doing
these on. And at the same time, in that same country,
an extremely well established executive in the network state is
looking to build a network state city.

Speaker 8 (01:46:33):
So you know, getting these sites.

Speaker 5 (01:46:36):
In there into different countries in Africa, they can go
after the precious minerals. They have a labor source there.
They're already exploiting people there for the AI content moration
and tagging and like all of that with disastrous effects.
You also have the really concerning factor of like so
many people in the top of the venture capital apparatus

(01:47:01):
are South Africans, and when you just start to put
all those pieces together, it's extremely worrying. One of the
venture capital mining startups because now they have multiple mining startups.
Discovered the largest discovery of copper in ten years from

(01:47:21):
computers in Berkeley, and then they showed up in Zambia,
Oh God, to start extracting the copper. So, you know,
the network state opens up these countries to like this
new era of like exploited labor, mineral harvesting, medical experiments,

(01:47:44):
and the network state gives them a way to get
into a country and start exploiting the fuck out of it.

Speaker 1 (01:47:52):
Yeah, it's corporate colonization.

Speaker 8 (01:47:53):
Yeah, period.

Speaker 1 (01:47:55):
You know, it's a bunch of these people going like, oh,
the problem with the East India company was that they
actually had to like run the country, which is really expensive.
So what if instead of that, we just took over
like the nodes that we wanted to use and then
use that to push everything sort of further instead of
like building a giant army and marching through India one.

Speaker 5 (01:48:15):
Hundred percent and you know, the labor exploitation that is
like developing some of this stuff that we're starting to
see where like you know, Venture Capital has a very
close relationship with bou kell and al Salvador. Yeah, bou
Kelly is sitting on a prison full of people that
haven't had due process and he's now using them for

(01:48:40):
free labor.

Speaker 8 (01:48:42):
Slave labor.

Speaker 1 (01:48:44):
This is the Seacot person that you might remember, like
Trump had been deporting people here, and this place is
just unbelievably hideous abuses. Yeah, it's an entire facility that
is just dedicated to inflicting violence and suffering and humiliation
on these people who have no trials, have no access
to rights through legal system, and it's just this like

(01:49:08):
nightmare black hole.

Speaker 5 (01:49:10):
Yes, you know, there's always lots of factors involved when
I talk about stuff like I'm talking about the venture
capital aspect, and there are other players involved, but one

(01:49:31):
of the big things is like what happens when venture
capital starts interacting with another country. Yeah, and what we
see in Latin America is that they make contact with Hunterists,
they set up a colony, they start terrorizing the people

(01:49:52):
on the island, They become material actors in installing an
illegitimate president with Trump's.

Speaker 8 (01:50:01):
Help, and then you know.

Speaker 5 (01:50:02):
They make contact with El Salvador and El Salvador becomes
quote unquote bitcoin country, and l Salvador becomes a prison
state and like a slave labor state in Argentina, same
things the venture capitalists back to Malay to the absolute
health Malay is now gutted to government, deregulated everything. He

(01:50:26):
is putting these terrible labor abuse policies through.

Speaker 8 (01:50:31):
So when when.

Speaker 5 (01:50:33):
Venture capital contacts these countries, it is transforming them, is
changing them, it's changing their politicians, it's changing their policies,
it's changing their land, it's changing their financial system.

Speaker 8 (01:50:45):
And that is really concerning.

Speaker 5 (01:50:47):
And you know, one of the things about the venture
capital model, this goes back to even just the fact
that like they have operated global IT systems, so they
have servers everywhere in the world, and all of the
servers are exactly the same. And so when you look
at what the network stata is going to look like,
it's going.

Speaker 8 (01:51:08):
To be very similar.

Speaker 5 (01:51:09):
It's going to be the same thing everywhere, and those
will be basically commanding control nodes.

Speaker 1 (01:51:15):
Yeah, and it seems like they've done a very very
good job of kind of either subverting or like allying
with factions of the traditional sort of like right wing
elite and then you know, propelling them to power and
then using their power and influence and the fact that
they were able to get these people into power in
the first place to sort of set up zones of

(01:51:38):
extraction for them and increase their power inside of these states.

Speaker 8 (01:51:41):
One thousand percent.

Speaker 5 (01:51:43):
And you know, if you look at how much they've
been able to compromise the American government.

Speaker 8 (01:51:50):
Yeah, and then these.

Speaker 5 (01:51:52):
Countries do not have the wealth, the infrastructure of that,
you know, anything like that, they're so vulnerable to this
type of attack. So if in order to get its
global projects done, venture capital needs to install favorable politicians
all over the world. They're offering packages to all of

(01:52:14):
those politicians. They're offering the money, the social media attention
and platform that they can give them. They're giving them
an economic policy that they can go forward and say,
we're going to turn this country into like a technology
industry and we're going to bring all this foreign investment

(01:52:34):
blah blah blah. You know, they can really just like
hand pick politicians and pretty easily like set them up
with a guaranteed win and over time, that's like a
global tech fascist access.

Speaker 3 (01:52:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:52:50):
And one of the things that we know about sort
of the way that fascist stay construction works is that
if you're constructing, you've constructed a bunch of these nodes
of the sort of this fascist network state. But fascist
states always need to sort of create an enemy for themselves,
and the enemy has been China. So do you want
to talk about the way that they've been seeing Belton

(01:53:12):
Road and how they've turned this into a civilizational conflict?

Speaker 8 (01:53:17):
One hundred percent? You know, if you listen to what
venture capitalists say about who.

Speaker 5 (01:53:24):
The enemy is, like, it is China. They talk literally
constantly about China. Almost all of their startups in every
single sector talk about China all of the time, but
particularly in the weapons part of that and the premise
of their military build out. What they say is that

(01:53:47):
this is about China, and this is about fighting China, and.

Speaker 8 (01:53:51):
This is very serious to them.

Speaker 5 (01:53:52):
And the fundamental cause is like their technology competing with
China's technology, And actually venture capitalists would admit that China
has better technology than us and that they're ahead of us,
so this is a crisis for them.

Speaker 1 (01:54:06):
This is all, in some sets, very silly to me.
The girl the girl who saydies China a lot, because
it's like all the Tinese tech people you're competing against,
like believe like ninety five percent of the same shit
you do, All of you could simply work together and
make money forever.

Speaker 10 (01:54:20):
But instead you've decided to do this like.

Speaker 1 (01:54:23):
Oh god, this like unhinged genocidal military build up because
like you needed a great enemy in order to like
keep doing yourking fascist bullshit.

Speaker 3 (01:54:35):
Oh god yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:54:38):
And like via absolute worst case scenario for the world
would probably be like the top technocratic elite from China
and the top technocratic elite from the US deciding they
were gonna work together and just fucking literally everyone else
in the world.

Speaker 1 (01:54:53):
Like yeah, it's like they were like on the road
to doing that.

Speaker 10 (01:54:57):
It was like like this is like China wto integration.
This was a thing.

Speaker 1 (01:55:01):
This this was like a version of history they could
have had where it's like, yeah, congratulations, you've created like
prominent technocratic rule, but like no, no, eat shit, we
want to fight each other for obscure and nebulous ideological
reasons is to generate the sort of fear necessary to
do their projects. It's just like, oh.

Speaker 5 (01:55:18):
My god, yeah, one thousand percent.

Speaker 8 (01:55:24):
It's very it's very strange.

Speaker 5 (01:55:27):
But you know, like Palmer Lucky, who you know, and
Palmer Lucky, like people make fun of a lot of
the tech people for being dumb, and like Palmer Lucky
is absolutely not dumb, Like he is a very very
smart person and he's spending every single moment of every
single day figuring out how to defeat China. And then

(01:55:48):
that's the case for his entire company. But this, this
is an issue for them. It's shapying sort of the dialectic.
And so within this the net where is the network
staying well? China's Belt and Road initiative is creating infrastructure
projects and nation state alliances across Latin America and across

(01:56:09):
Africa for China, and you see the network state really
investing in Latin America and Africas. While so certainly, one
way to conceptualize this is as the network state is
a counter to Belt and Road and it is part
of their cold war with China which is playing out

(01:56:33):
across all of these regions.

Speaker 1 (01:56:36):
Yeah, it's another thing where it's just like I have
seen how how both of these groups treat the workers
in Africa that they're employing. Like both of you two
believe the same shit. You're both fucking racist doing colonialism,
but like you've decided to drag the entire fucking world
into your Like oh god, okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna

(01:56:57):
tell one China racism story here, because we've be getting
in a normal am out of American racism, like like
this is this is a country where like, like China's
the country where like you get soapbads, where like you
have a black person and they like rub their skin
with soap and they like turn white. This is like
the kind of racism you're dealing with. One of the
big ecological moments in China was there's a documentary called

(01:57:17):
Under the Dome. So we're gonna get a little bit
far field here, but this I think matters a lot
in terms of why this is happening. The CCP allowed
this woman who'd been a state broadcaster like a television
personality like broadcaster for a long time. She had a kid,
so she was taking time off. This is like the
early twenty tens, like the height of like air pollution
in China, and she does this like giant documentary about

(01:57:39):
air pollution. It's allowed to stay on the Internet for
like a couple of days before it's taken down. And
one of the big points of this is that part
of the reason that pollution is so bad is that
there are all of these cars in China that don't
meet Chinese emission standards for being sold to the Chinese market,
And the reason they're producing these cars is that they
specifically have an entire class of cars that are like way,
way way more pollutant and shittier that they specifically designed

(01:58:03):
to sell to Africa. Like it's like that kind of
like structure of racism, right, and it's like, you know,
it's just like the sort of horror show of like
watching these two just like different versions of this sort
of like nightmare colonialism entity where you know, like China
is trying to find a way to reproduce its own
capital as its growth rate like slows, and the networks

(01:58:24):
that people, you know, I have also had this project
of like we want to sort of install our own
version of fascism here, and they're just sort of like
building these like parallel networks against each other just like
I don't know, it makes me so miserable that so
many people are getting fucked by just like the global
capital of superpowers and the way that like venture capital

(01:58:44):
money has become a political force that can do their
own unbelievably like probably more hideously fucked versions of what
Chinese capital has been able to do.

Speaker 5 (01:58:54):
Yeah, I think you know, at the end of the day,
that's where where we need to come back to, is
like this is about capitalism, Like this is about colonialism,
it's about like imperialism, and like, yeah, we fight this
at that level, at the level of structural analysis, of
historical analysis, of like full analysis, of unflinching analysis, and

(01:59:19):
that that is the only way to get out of
this situation that we're in.

Speaker 1 (01:59:26):
Yeah, is to understand what is actually happening at a
structural level and understand the actual forces that are operating
instead of the big, flashy name people who the spotlight
has been on.

Speaker 5 (01:59:41):
Yeah. That is one of the few things that makes
me excited about venture capital because like, here is a
lens where we can actually see capitalism in a live
movie and active, dynamic, destructive, very much visible. You can
see this, you can see it happening, and that is

(02:00:04):
like such an opportunity to wrap up the network state stuff. So,
you know, a lot a lot is sort of said
about this being their own state, which it absolutely is.

(02:00:25):
It leads to that, but once you add up these
pieces of them having land and them having cities, and
then they're racism. So they think that they're better than everyone,
and they're like misogyny and like their wealth and them
being sort of in their own kind of category which

(02:00:47):
also has all of the different sort of pieces of civilization.
Like out of that they derive both an identity and
like a drive for civilization building. And so one thing
that people talk about a lot is eugenics, and like
eugenics beliefs sort of in the tech class, but we

(02:01:10):
are so far beyond that and into an actual eugenics
project where venture capitalists are encouraging the tech class to
create more and more babies. They are creating a dizzying
number of fertility startups, IVF, genetic screening, you know, engineering

(02:01:33):
of the genome, like all of these different areas. And
they see Israel as the example of that because the
Israeli fertility rate is really high despite it being a technocratic.

Speaker 8 (02:01:48):
This is there where it's not mine. Yeah, yeah, just
to be clear, this is what they say.

Speaker 5 (02:01:53):
They say Israel is aspirational because it's the technocratic state
where they have a really high birth rate, and that
that is what they want to emulate, you know, through
the network state, and they want to you know, selectively
breed and they want to use these technologies to breed
and hyperbreed. And one of the tech philosophers that should

(02:02:15):
actually get way more intention than Curtis Yarvin but doesn't
is Nick Land.

Speaker 8 (02:02:20):
And nick Land.

Speaker 5 (02:02:21):
Basically yeah, but nick Land's one of his main thing
is that a small elite will use eugenics technology to
rapidly outpace the rest of the world to such an
extent that it creates basically like a new species in

(02:02:42):
that sense, I see, you know, ideology being something that
emerges out of all of this other things that they're doing.

Speaker 8 (02:02:51):
They do all of this crazy shit.

Speaker 5 (02:02:53):
They have all this economic stuff going on, you know,
they have all this medical stuff going on, and then
what comes out of that is this is our civilization.
We are going to breed to populate this civilization, and
we are going to surpass the rest of humanity which
we lolls and which we see as lab rats and

(02:03:14):
guinea pigs and vermin and scum.

Speaker 1 (02:03:18):
Yeah, And it's the situation where like, like this is
like a thing that a lot of the worst right
wingers have believed for a long time. But these people
control vast sections of the global economy, and because they
do that, whatever, like unhinged like racist eugenic breeding project
thing they want to do, they could just do it
because they have the capital to like actually create these things.

(02:03:41):
It's like, well, like obviously they're not going to be
able to successfully like create a super race or whatever,
because like that's just digenics doesn't work, right, Like but
like it's you know, but like it doesn't matter. They
have achieved a level of power and a level of capital.
Where like the actual quote behind the reality based community thing,
where for the Push administration, we're like the thing that

(02:04:01):
got into like the media was like calling their roles
the reality based community. The actual quote is about how
liberals observe reality and conservatives create it, and so they're
trying to sort of just hammer reality into their preferred
shape through this combination of wealth and violence. And because
of that, yeah, they can just fucking do this, all

(02:04:23):
of this like eugenic shit that people just talk about.

Speaker 3 (02:04:26):
They can just attempt to do it.

Speaker 8 (02:04:29):
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 5 (02:04:30):
It's they're telling their workers to have more children. They're
doing their own school programs, elite schools for these kids.
They've talked about having their children being able to work
at a startup by the age of.

Speaker 8 (02:04:48):
Fifteen Jesus Christ.

Speaker 5 (02:04:50):
Ah, Yeah, it's really wild. This is very much a reality.
It's something that is allready happening now. And so one
of the main messages that I have for peoples, like
they are so much more advanced in these projects than
anyone has awareness of, Like things are way beyond the
emergency moment, and we need global response, and we need

(02:05:16):
global emergency response, and we need resistance. When venture capitalists
show up to these areas, the people there don't know
what's hitting them.

Speaker 8 (02:05:27):
And that's even.

Speaker 5 (02:05:27):
True in the US, where these venture capitalists came from,
people did not know that they were about to take
the presidency. In other countries, they definitely don't know. We
need global defense from this. Everywhere they fucking go. They
should be met not only by people there who have
been told and have the access to the information, but

(02:05:49):
also to a global coalition that's ready to stand by.
These are invasions of countries, These are invasions of sovereign
nations and of communities, and that's what we need to
fight back. And I think my research and other researchers
and what's on vcmfhodox like leads to that conclusion of
like that is how we're going to have to fight this.

Speaker 1 (02:06:10):
Yeah, and I think that's something that right now feels unimaginable.
But also unless you are really really young, you have
lived in a period where something like that existed, you know,
to a large extent. This is what the global justice
movement was. There's a bunch of different names, but like
the original anti globalization movements, like the one that was

(02:06:32):
born out of the nineties, the one that was born
out of the Zapatista's rebellion against NAFTA, Like the Zapatista
is brought together hundreds and hundreds of groups from all
over the world, like to these giant convergencies, and they
planned like an international strategy to presist these sort of
these like free trade proposals. And you know, were they

(02:06:53):
able to like defeat capitalism and like retake the globe. No,
but they were successful in killing basically all new free
trade agreements like in the period after. And this is
where you get like the Battle of Seattle and like
the whole Giant, like all the protests at all of
the summits, and like Genoa, and this is the process
that built the modern left right, like the modern American

(02:07:15):
left comes out of occupy, which is a bunch of
the veterans of that movement by doing this. Yeah, and
like you all, like everyone listening to this, unless you
were born in like the twenty tens, have lived in
a world where people did this.

Speaker 3 (02:07:30):
It's kind of a parallel movement.

Speaker 1 (02:07:31):
But one of the things that happens in this period
in your lifetimes almost certainly, is that a bunch of
people like took the city of Wahaka in like two
thousand and six, we have taken major North American cities
from them in your lifetime. We can do this. We
just have to be willing to work together and fight.

Speaker 5 (02:07:53):
Yes, one hundred percent. And as much as I like
live in this issue and look at this, and I'm like,
what the fuck are we gonna do?

Speaker 8 (02:08:01):
Like it's over, it's over.

Speaker 5 (02:08:02):
Like I also am like, this is a chance because
what's having a mentor capital It's one of the fastest
moving parts of capitalism, one of the most dynamic, one
of the most powerful, one of them that has the
most infrastructure. Like, yeah, what if we got all the
computers back? Yeah, what if we could use the computers

(02:08:23):
for you know, this is a chance. And I think
there's a possibility, and I hope to build a global
resistance around this. And that's why I'm here, and that's
why I stay in this because this fucking sucks and
there's not a lot of community support. It's isolating, da
da da. But I think this is I think this

(02:08:44):
is a fight we can win if we're all willing
to get on board about what is happening and do
the work of building that. So I am I'm excited
for that. I think I think it can happen.

Speaker 1 (02:08:56):
So yeah, And I think this is something that it's
really really easy to look into the world and despair,
and I think one of the things that helps with
that is remembering that people have faced odds that were
so much worse than this, right, Like if you look
at like the origin of Pan Africanism, right, and like
you look at like C. L. R. James and a

(02:09:17):
bunch of like his friends are like meeting in these
rooms in like London, and you know, they're looking out
at it across entire continents that are colonized and fifteen
to twenty years later, literally like the people who are
his friends who are there have liberated Africa, right, Like
you know, we're talking about like this this what looked

(02:09:38):
like a just a group of just like random people
facing within a completely impossible project of defeating colonialism. Suddenly
you know again, like twenty years later, it's like Julius
de Reira is like running Tanzania, right, And the odds
that they faced are so much longer than the odds
that we faced, and were they able to create exactly

(02:10:02):
the world that they wanted to know. But the world
that they left after them was one where entire continents
were no longer It's literally directly ruled by colonizers. Yes,
and yeah, like that is probably the kind of response
that this requires, but I don't know, people have done

(02:10:24):
it before, and it can be done again.

Speaker 5 (02:10:26):
It can be done again, and you know, if you
people who are interested in that reach out and like,
let's get a movie in because this is like, this
is a chance, This is a chance, and we need
to take it because if we just let this go
and like, today is our best chance of stopping it.

Speaker 8 (02:10:49):
You know, today is our best chance.

Speaker 5 (02:10:51):
So if we can hop on this and be professional
in the sense of like being a professional resist in
anti colonialists and anti fascists and take this as not
just an ideological thing, but this is a tactical situation.
We need to be figuring out strategies and tactics to

(02:11:14):
take this down.

Speaker 3 (02:11:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:11:16):
And I think on that note, where can people go
to find your work and find more information about this
and start this process?

Speaker 4 (02:11:24):
Yeah?

Speaker 8 (02:11:25):
Absolutely.

Speaker 5 (02:11:26):
Vcinfodox is at www dot vcinfodox dot com. There's a
contact email address on that page. Would love to hear
from you. We give presentations also, or happy to just
talk to any other organizers. And I am on social media.

(02:11:47):
I'm a Blue Sky and Twitter and I have a
blog at.

Speaker 8 (02:11:51):
Shanlee dot com, so any.

Speaker 5 (02:11:53):
Of those, but definitely want to hear from people who
are serious about building a movement around this. And thank
you so much. Thank you so much for having me,
Thank you for being my first podcast.

Speaker 3 (02:12:08):
Thank you so much for doing this.

Speaker 1 (02:12:09):
And I don't know, I hope we can help contribute
to the start of something that changes the state of things.

Speaker 2 (02:12:31):
Welcome to Executive Dysphonia, a podcast about people who are
in executive positions but can't hear well. Right, isn't that
what the show we're doing is?

Speaker 4 (02:12:42):
This is it could happen here? Executive disorder.

Speaker 2 (02:12:44):
Oh, I guess I have Executive Dysphonia.

Speaker 4 (02:12:47):
Our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House,
the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm
Garrison Davis. That was Robert Evans, also joined by James Stout,
with a segment later on by Mia Wong said, we
are covering the week of March eleventh to March eighteenth.

Speaker 2 (02:13:04):
And I was wrong about dysphonia. That's just horseness.

Speaker 3 (02:13:07):
Okay, well, yeah, they probably are people in the executive
branch who a horse.

Speaker 2 (02:13:11):
Yeah, yeah, horse and wearing shoes too big for their feet.

Speaker 4 (02:13:14):
We have to start by issuing an apology, that's right,
a serious apology. We have both failed you, the audience
and ourselves as an outlet by neglecting to cover a
story the way that it deserves to. Last week we
reported on the buffalo wild wings Espresso Proteini, that's right,

(02:13:39):
and promised an in depth report on the drink upon
delivery this past weekend, which was National E Spresso Martini Day.
And there I was Sunday, March fifteenth, on my phone
googling to find the closest buffalo wild wings when I
discovered that these us at Bertini was in fact, only

(02:14:01):
to be served in five cities. Yeah, in Tennessee, Illinois, Georgia, Texas,
and the Sea World location in Orlando, Florida. And I
failed myself and you by not traveling specifically to the
Sea World location to try the Espresso Proteini, which would
have been the correct choice.

Speaker 2 (02:14:22):
That would have been the right move to.

Speaker 4 (02:14:24):
Deliver the sort of coverage that you expect out of
us and deserve. It's going to take a while to
win your trust back, and we understand this, and we
are hoping to be able to demonstrate that to you
in the coming in the coming weeks.

Speaker 2 (02:14:38):
Gary, this isn't all your fault, you know, I knew
years ago that we should have moved the entire production
team to the Buffalo Wild Wings at SeaWorld. This was
a foreseeable mistake, you know. Sophie and I are to
blame for this as well, is all I'm saying. And
we apologize then.

Speaker 3 (02:14:55):
Obviously, as a British person, the Sea World location in Orlando,
Florida is house spiritual home, so that really should have
been at the very center of my be.

Speaker 2 (02:15:05):
Just imagine how much more sunburnt you could be every
single day we record this podcast, James.

Speaker 3 (02:15:10):
You could be I'm wearing a red shirt right now
for this. You could probably never tell if I lived
in Orlando, Florida, if I was wearing a red shirt
or just had extensive sunburns. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:15:20):
So yeah, let's go for some small news items. Meta
is shutting down. It's VR Metaverse Worlds.

Speaker 2 (02:15:30):
On June fifteenth, it stuck being named Metahu.

Speaker 4 (02:15:36):
It's the Horizon. Worlds continued to exist as a mobile
phone only application. The metaverse portion is going to be sunseted.
Like I said on the fifteenth of June.

Speaker 3 (02:15:48):
I'll be on there in June fourteenth, throat up till midnight.
Just it's enjoying my final moments of beauty. Is there
a SeaWorld Orlando that I can visit in the Metaverse?
I bet there was too soon, James, too soon.

Speaker 4 (02:16:03):
In the United District of Illinois, Evanston mayor Daniel Biss
beat Kat Abagazzali and Laura Fine this one over thirty
five thousand votes. Kat won over thirty one thousand votes
and find the Apac back to candidate to got twenty
four thousand.

Speaker 3 (02:16:19):
Yeah, you know it.

Speaker 2 (02:16:21):
It was a really impressive first campaign from Kat who's
a friend of the show. We're proud of her and
her whole team. And yeah that's politics. Baby, onto the
next thing, I guess.

Speaker 4 (02:16:35):
Columbia student Lka Cordella was released from ice custody after
over a year in detention after government lawyers declined to
appeal a judge's third release order. Her name was one
of the four on the list that Marmon Donnie gave
to Trump during their last meeting.

Speaker 3 (02:16:54):
Cuba is facing another blackout makes its aging infrastructure in
a United States enforced BLOCKERID on the country. It has
been running largely on thermoelectric, solar, and natural gas sources
of electricity as imports from Venezuela have ceased. The United
States has threatened to tariff anybody sending oil to Cuba,

(02:17:14):
but on Sunday, Claudio Scheinenbaum, president of Mexico, did say
that Mexico would continue to send aid to the Caribbean nation.
Also checking in on the Shield of the Americas, which
we mentioned last week, Gustavo Petro, president of Columbia, has
responded to what appears to be an Ecuadorian bomb falling
on Colombia. So we are a couple of weeks into

(02:17:35):
this and Ecuador's already bombed the wrong country. Oh good,
not great. It was in an area very close to
the border. But Petro posted today on egg dot com,
the everything website, I'm blighted by the fact that groc
thinks it can speak Spanish better than meat. So I'm
just going to read whatever this shitty translation is. I
suppose it has been confirmed that the bomb in Colombian

(02:17:57):
territory belongs to the Ecuadorian Army. The investigat continues and
a diplomatic protest note will be sent. So yeah, that's
Ecuador playing with fire there. Yeah. Finally, PBS is reporting
today that an offer is on the table from the
White House to end the shutdown. I'm just going to

(02:18:17):
read I guess the terms that have been offered by
the White House. So the first one would be the
expansion in the use of body worn cameras by DHS
law enforcement, and they will increase congressional oversight by requiring
retention of body worn camera footage. The next one, they

(02:18:37):
would limit civil immigration enforcement at certain sensitive locations. They
go on to say sensitive locations include places like hospitals
and schools, which is current practice. There were other places
that were considered sensitive locations previously not to be churches, right,
But that's not a definitive list, and I don't does

(02:18:58):
it mean they will return to the old sensitive his doctrine.
It's a little unclear. Yeah, they talk again about increasing
congressional oversight, particularly by creating mandatory review and compliance reporting
from the Spectro General of the HS. They talk about
visible officer identification and the administration would require officers to

(02:19:19):
clearly verbalize their agency and identification upon request when engaging
in official duties. And then finally they will adhere to
existing practices of law and practice of not deporting US citizens.
And then they go and say they only detain them
of a crime has taken place. Some of these appear
like concessions, but they kind of only matter in so

(02:19:39):
much as you trust them. They've always got like even
the sensitive places has an exemption for like a terrorist threat,
given that, for instance, it was suggested very shortly after
Alex Pretty was killed that he was a terrorist attempting
to kill officers, etc. Yeah, none of this matters, and
like it's still going to be this is we are
pleasing ourselves, right, Perhaps we should move on talking of DHS.

(02:20:04):
Let's talk about Friend of the Podcast, Gregory Bovino.

Speaker 2 (02:20:10):
Oh, Greg, Oh, Greg Gregy b.

Speaker 3 (02:20:14):
Yeah, he's been a frequent, frequent cool Zone all across
the cool Zone universe.

Speaker 2 (02:20:20):
Yeah, friend of the Pod. But no, nothing gold can stay,
you know.

Speaker 3 (02:20:24):
Nope, And sadly Greg cannot stay at his job.

Speaker 2 (02:20:29):
Yeah, it'd be fair. Even before Trump took office, he
was talking about retiring in like two years, Like he's
been talking about that for a while. So yeah, it's
not this is not like super weird, but the timing
of it is earlier than he'd previously talked about wanting
to do. And I think pretty undeniably connected to you know,
him being made the sacrificial bond of the regime.

Speaker 3 (02:20:52):
Yeah, and the fact that he he for instance, said
shortly after Alex Pretty was killed by CBP agents, Pretty
was planning to quote ATTACA agents. We have seen no
evidence that that is true.

Speaker 5 (02:21:04):
Right.

Speaker 3 (02:21:05):
He's currently the chief patrol agent of the El Centro sector. Previously,
he was CBP's commander at large of its interior enforcement operations.
That he was removed from that job in late January.
He gave an exclusive interview to bright Bart News Bright
but I have a former Border Patrol agent who writes
to him. So I'm guessink that's why saying quote, watching

(02:21:27):
these agents out there giving it there all in some
of the most dangerous of environments we have ever faced,
was humbling. Cool. He will be retiring just a few
days after his fifty sixth birthday. The agency's mandatory requirement
ages fifty seven, and I've seen a lot of places
citing that that applies to offices hired after the middle

(02:21:47):
of two thousand and eight. Bavino was hired in nineteen
ninety six, but at fifty five, with thirty years of service,
he would be eligible for optional retirement under the FERS.
He hasn't reached a minimum retirement age, so I think
that would impact the amount of retirement he gets. Oh interesting, Oh.

Speaker 2 (02:22:06):
Yeah, yeah, he usually does, unless they make a special
exception for him or something.

Speaker 3 (02:22:10):
Yeah, because previously, right, like previously, Border patrol agents were
essentially hired. It's like federal employees or civil servants. It
was only after two thousand and eight that they're hiring,
I guess came slightly more in line with people in
the armed services, for instance, or police, and so like
under first you'd have to do the thirty years plus

(02:22:31):
reach the minimum retirement age, versus under the newer system
when they have a mandatory retirement of fifty seven. I
do feel like this, plus Gnome, plus the stuff that
you've mentioned up top Garrison, it suggests that the tides
are perhaps turning. Plus this, we've seen Republican sheriffs in
Florida opposing mass deportations this week, right, we've seen Republican

(02:22:55):
congress people making public statements about this. We are probably
really beginning to see the beginning of the end of
the Right being in lockstep behind mass deportations. I don't
think that means with it going to see the end
of ice raids. I don't think that means we're going
to see the end, no, of massive detention and of

(02:23:19):
massive deportation. But it's clearly, as we are looking towards
the midterms, something that some parts of the Republican Party
want to distance themselves from. And there's movement on this,
and it shows that these forces are fluid in can
actually be changed through taking like agency, like through through

(02:23:39):
through imparting yourself upon the world, like what's happened in
Minneapolis for those for those weeks to to you know,
months showed that the world actually can be changed through
through mass action. Yeah, like like Border Patrol and Ice
went to Minneapolis to fight, and it seems like they

(02:24:00):
came off worse, right, Like they were not able to
subdue the city in a meaningful way and it has
resulted in most of their leadership being removed. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:24:11):
Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about something
that's happened this week that I kind of I felt
a deep sense of foreboding reading this article. It's going
to sound like this is another piece of kind of
Israel Palestine reporting, but it's really not. I mean, that's
where this particular story is set. But we're we're talking
about something that's going to be an increasing factor in

(02:24:32):
the lives of everyone gathering news and everybody consuming it,
which is poly market our gamble on everything happening in
the world. App that apparently the world needed for some reason.
So on Tuesday, March tenth, twenty twenty six, as you know,
hostilities continued between Iran and Israel, ballistic missile got past

(02:24:54):
Israel's defense systems and landed in near the city of
bait Schemesh, just outside of j Rusalem. It did not
land near anything, but it looks like trees, you can see.
There was video captured of the explosion and posted by
a journalist named Immanubal Fabian Oh yeah, who wrote with
his post, no injuries are reported in Iran's latest ballistic

(02:25:15):
missile attack on Israel. The fourth to day one missile
struck an open area just outside beit Chamesh first responder say,
and footage shows, and the footage does indeed show a
ballistic missile impacting. There is an explosion. This does not
look like fragments of a missile that were taken down.
You know, based on what I know of ballistic missiles,
and based on what people who I know no more
than me know about ballistic missiles, this was an intact

(02:25:38):
ballistic missile hitting. It didn't hit a target that was valuable,
It didn't hurt anybody as far as we're aware, but
it got through the missile shield and a hit in
Israeli territory. Normally you would wonder like, why does this this?
I mean, this matters, you know if you're a local reporter, obviously,
but why would anyone else care?

Speaker 3 (02:25:56):
Well?

Speaker 2 (02:25:57):
The day after, Manny Fabian posted this and this brief
bit of reporting. He started receiving emails, weird emails, mostly
in Hebrew, and like, here's one example from Times of
Israel piece that he wrote, sorry for reaching out without
a prior introduction, but I assume we will get to
know each other.

Speaker 3 (02:26:14):
Well.

Speaker 2 (02:26:14):
I have an urgent request regarding the accuracy of your
report on the missile attack on March tenth. I would
really appreciate a response if possible. There is an inaccurate
report from you about the missile attack on March tenth,
and it's causing a chain of errors. If you could
reply to me tonight, you would be helping me many
others and of course the State of Israel, and along
the way you would gain a good source.

Speaker 3 (02:26:32):
So that's really weird.

Speaker 2 (02:26:34):
Yeah, the fuck is going if you're this guy. All
you did was post, oh, hey, a rocket hit but
it didn't hit anything. Yeah, like not a big deal.
Give him the state of the war. And he starts
getting spammed with a bunch of similar emails like this,
And in addition to that, he's got people like on
Twitter responding saying like hey, One person responded to one
of his posts saying there are people saying they've received

(02:26:55):
word from you that the missile strike in bite Schamesh
on March tenth was in fact intercepted. Is this true
or did no such interaction occur? So people start posting
and sharing in other places that oh, I reached out
to this guy and he said the missile was actually
intercepted and it was just a piece that fell, and
he reported it wrong, which is not at all what
this guy had reported. So he's really confused. He has like,

(02:27:16):
why are all these people bugging me about this very
minor story and why are they spreading disinformation claiming that
I debunked my own story when I didn't.

Speaker 3 (02:27:25):
Well.

Speaker 2 (02:27:26):
The obvious reason why is that people that day on
polymarket on March tenth were gambling on when Iran would
strike Israel. There were fourteen million dollars waged that there
would be a strike on March tenth. The rules of
the bet per polymarket stated, this market will resolve to
yes if Iran initiates a drone, missile or airstrike on

(02:27:47):
Israel soil on the listed date in Israel time gmt
plus two. Otherwise, this market will resolve. No missiles or
drones that are intercepted will not be sufficient for a
yes resolution. Right, So that's why fourteen million dollars was
in the air.

Speaker 4 (02:28:04):
It's people who had a lot of money on this event. Yeah, yes, specifically.
And these people don't care if anyone was right. They
don't care that a missile was fired. All they care
about is whether or not the missile made it through
the defense network intact, right, because these were people who
I guess had bet against that because they didn't want
that to be the case.

Speaker 3 (02:28:22):
Right, right.

Speaker 2 (02:28:23):
He initially ignores these weird emails, and they start getting
more and more aggressive, and people are like, when you're
gonna update the article, Daniel, Daniel, update the article. You
have to update the article. You know you were wrong.

Speaker 3 (02:28:33):
And after the.

Speaker 2 (02:28:34):
Weekend he starts getting messages like you have exactly half
an hour to correct your attempted influence, despite the fact
that you receive countless inquiries, you insist on leaving it
this way. If you do not correct this by one
am is reel time today, March fifteenth, you are bringing
upon yourself damage you have never imagined you would suffer.

Speaker 3 (02:28:52):
That's already easer if I've ever seen one.

Speaker 2 (02:28:55):
Like, there's a bunch of shit like this. Someone said
after you make a lose nine hundred thousand dollars, we
will invest no less than that to finish you. This
is insane, but it's inevitable if you think about how
polymarket works, right that once people are putting fortunes on

(02:29:15):
the line around stupid shit, you know, like betting whether
or not, oh the missile make it through or not
on this That is dumb, right, missiles and stuff that's
very serious to a lot of people who live in
the region, But betting on it this way is fundamentally stupid.
But it's all Polymarket's all stupid bets like this, and
they are going to increase only come after people once
they realize, hey, maybe I can actually change and get

(02:29:37):
a winning resolution or whatever if I harass the journalist
on the ground. There's a vested financial interest in going
after people over stuff like this. So this is this
particular story is happening in Israel, involves the reporting of
an Israeli journalist. This isn't gonna stay limited to that
conflict or to that region of the world. This is
going to be thing that journalists all over the world

(02:29:58):
increasingly deal with. This isn't important story and one that
I think says some pretty bleak shit about the immediate
future of news gathering in this country.

Speaker 3 (02:30:07):
Yeah, so that's cool.

Speaker 2 (02:30:09):
On the upside, Polymarket is about to open a splashy
new bar in Washington, DC called the Situation Room, and
I found Polymarket made a post on their substack in
which they announced this, saying, the world's first bar dedicated
to monitoring the situation. Imagine a sports bar, but just
for situation monitoring live X feeds, flight radar, Bloomberg terminals,

(02:30:32):
and Polymarket screens. Grand opening this Friday. Imagine the first response.

Speaker 4 (02:30:38):
This is every bar in Washington, d C.

Speaker 2 (02:30:40):
First response is just someone saying, drink your way through
World War three, which just also every bar in Washington DC.
Someone else says, this seems awful, but I guess that
perfectly aligns with your company in general.

Speaker 3 (02:30:55):
Get uh cool?

Speaker 2 (02:30:58):
Yeah, so I love poly Market. It's good that this
is what we've turned society into.

Speaker 3 (02:31:04):
No notes.

Speaker 4 (02:31:05):
Yeah, I'll just add this to the list of things
that prediction markets will destabilize geopolitically. Yeah great, not just
the insider trading problems of people with you know, before
had knowledge of military strikes or certain world events, but
trying to influence the reporting of events to sway polymarket
or Calshi's decision on whether whether the market was correctly fulfilled.

Speaker 3 (02:31:27):
Yeah, yeah, that's interesting.

Speaker 2 (02:31:30):
Yep, interesting and yeah foreboding.

Speaker 3 (02:31:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:31:34):
Anyway, so yeah, here's some Ads. You built the animals.
We're back. Here's some James. You built the animals.

Speaker 3 (02:31:54):
Yeah, lucky you. First, I want to talk about the
Supreme Court, and then I'm going to throw it to
Garrison talk about some other court stuff. This is our
court segment. The Supreme Court has schedule cases for the TPS.
That's a temporary protected status pretending to Syria and Haiti
for April, meaning these statuses will remain in effect, likely

(02:32:14):
until the end of June or July. The justices didn't
alter the position of the New York and DC judges
who indefinitely postpone the termination of the TPS. The Trump
administration has hustled really hard to get this to the
Supreme Court. They first tried to get the Supreme Court
to let them remove people while it waited to weigh
in on the case, and then they tried to get
the Supreme Court to take the case before the Second

(02:32:36):
Circuit had a chance to weigh in This is called
thirty or right before judgment. It's how the case got
to the Supreme Court. This, I should note it's different
from the Venezuela case where the TPS was terminated because
the numbers are much smaller, and therefore it's going to
be harder for the US government to show harm. Right,
it pertains to thirty forty thousand people ever had to

(02:32:58):
guess by con trust. It's very easy for people to
show potential harm in Haiti or Syria. Right, just to
give an example of Syria that has been folenced directed
against Alavites, Drew's people and Kurds largely unimpeded by the
government since a sad fell last year, and Syria remains

(02:33:20):
on the State Departments do not travel list. Yeah, you
had some stuff about prairie Land. Do you want to
share in it?

Speaker 4 (02:33:26):
Yes, let's talk about the prairie Land trial. Yeah, we're
going to be doing a more in depth episode next
week the start of next week on prairie Land. It's
about double the length of today's summary, But I do
want to go over some essential information about the trial
that concluded last week. So last week the Trump administration

(02:33:50):
got their first conviction in an antifat heroism case. On Friday,
March thirteenth, eight people were convicted by a federal grand
jury on charge of riot, conspiracy to use and carry
an explosive, and providing material support to terrorists. One of
the defendants was convicted of attempted murder of a police officer,
and another person was convicted on two accounts of concealing documents,

(02:34:14):
bringing the total number of federal defendants to nine. This
case stemmed from what the defense argued was a noise
demonstration protest outside of an ICE attention facility in Prairie Land, Texas,
last summer on the night of July fourth. After protesters
through fireworks and vandalized property, DHS personnel called local police

(02:34:35):
for assistance. One officer arrived, drew his handgun, and yelled
stop at a person in all black clothes who was
running away. One of the defendants, named Benjamin's Song, then
yelled get to the rifles, before firing toward the officer
with an air of fifteen, hitting him in the neck.
A week into the trial, US District Court Judge Mark
Pittman ruled at defense attorneys could not argue that the

(02:34:59):
defendants include the accused shooter were acting in self defense
or the defense of others against unlawful force just because
the officer had already drawn and pointed his handgun before
Song fired. Prosecutors compared this to Waco. Judge Pittman ruled
that the officer drawing and pointing his handgun at a
fleeing suspect is not quote unquote excessive as a matter

(02:35:22):
of law because the officer did not actually use deadly
force or shoot first, and he listed three federal precedents
for this. Let's get into this action and the role
of Antifa in the court case. This action was originally
planned on the encrypted messaging app Signal and via an
in person quote unquote gear check meeting. The day before

(02:35:45):
the action. Benjamin Song advertised the action in a larger
group chat of dozens of quote unquote trusted individuals. When
asked about bringing firearms during action planning, Song repeatedly stated,
I'm not going back to prison, I'm not getting arrested.

Speaker 3 (02:36:01):
I'm bringing guns. Quote.

Speaker 4 (02:36:03):
So the trial, Song was characterized as the de facto
leader of the Antifa cell or affinity group, but he
did not have a close relationship with all fellow defendants.
At the gear Check meeting on July third, Song proposed
to free detainees using quote unquote suppressive fire, but this
idea was shot down by other meeting attendees.

Speaker 3 (02:36:25):
Some of the.

Speaker 4 (02:36:25):
Defendants attended a daytime protest outside the ICE facility earlier
that day, on July fourth, after which they reported back
to fellow defendants details regarding the facility security prior to
the nighttime action. Two defendants were neither in these planning
chats nor attended the gear check meeting, but all of
defendants that attended the protest carpooled in two vehicles, bringing

(02:36:49):
a total of eleven firearms, body armor, eye facts, and
all war Black Bloc which were all presented as government
evidence exhibits. The government argued that the defendants were members
of a quote unquote North Texas Antifa cell. The indictment
describes Antifa as a quote militant enterprise made up of

(02:37:10):
networks of individuals and small groups, primarily ascribing to a revolutionary,
anarchist or autonomous Marxist ideology which explicitly calls for the
overthrow of the United States government, law enforcement authorities, and
the system of law. Prosecution argued that this cell was
linked through a triple ven diagram of the Socialist Rifle Association,

(02:37:31):
the John Brown Gun Club, and the Emma Goldman Book Club,
which is a local Zene Destro group that also put
on community events. Prosecution said that this ven diagram converged
on quote unquote direct militant action. The government called on
David Kyle Sheeter as an expert witness to testify about Antifa.

(02:37:53):
Cheter's a member of the Center for Security Policy, an
SPLC designated hate group. Defense tried to object to this
witness's expertise, but the judge informed the defense that they
missed the deadline for such objections, which would have been
in a pre trial motion. Much of this case was

(02:38:15):
spent arguing over whether the defendants were quote unquote Antifa,
what that even means, and if it's relevant to the charges.
According to Prairie Land Support Committee court notes, Judge Pittman
asked the prosecution, quote is it necessary to prove this
stuff about Antifa? The prosecution responded that Antifa ideology, particularly

(02:38:40):
black block, was how the group operated. The judge pressed,
whether it's Antifa or the Methodist Women's Auxiliary, why does
it matter? The prosecution argued, they took direct action against
the ice facility. The prosecution argued black Block and Antifa
ideology were central to how the alleged attack was carried out.

Speaker 3 (02:39:00):
Quote.

Speaker 4 (02:39:01):
The government described black block for the purposes of this
case as quote dark clothing with head and face coverings
that concealed their identities, designed to hide each individual's identity,
but also aid in a bet those members engaged in
illegal acts by making members indistinguishable from one another to
law enforcement. Now, all of this raises the question whether

(02:39:24):
this prosecution is against the defendant's political ideology or the
specific criminal acts of throwing fireworks or shooting at a
police officer, rather than being convicted of being members of
Antifa the terrorist group, something that still doesn't really have
legal precedent. Prosecutors argued that the Antifa ideology, left wing

(02:39:48):
anti authoritarianism played a role in inspiring defendants, formed the
basis of political affinity that brought the collection of individuals together,
and relates to a collection of security practices, subcultural practices,
and associated tactics which were employed before, during, and after
the criminal acts related to the Noise Demo protest. There's

(02:40:08):
been a lot of reporting on people being convicted for
possessing zines. These are short political pamphlets, usually with some
kind of radical political ideology. There's a lot of anarchist
zines out there now. Zines did play a role in
this trial, a two part role. Prosecution argued that the
presence of insurrectionary zines is indicative of an alignment with Antifa,

(02:40:32):
even if possession of these zines itself is not a crime.
The other relevancy of zines to this case relates to
the concealing documents charges against Daniel Ronaldo Sanchez Estrada and
his wife Marcela Rueda, based on transporting a box of
political zines from his wife's house to a friend's house

(02:40:52):
in dent In, Texas. The government claimed that Rieda called
Sanchez Estrada from jail on July seven, instructing him to
conceal evidence by telling her husband to tow her vehicle,
which was at the action staging site. Quote toe it.
My phone is in the back. Do what you got

(02:41:12):
to do. Just toe it unquote. The defense claimed that
she was worried about her car being repoed. Centisstrada never
got to the car or the phone, but Raeda also
said quote move whatever you need to move in the
house unquote. Saniasstrada mentioned already being at the house and replied,

(02:41:34):
we're good quote unquote in reference to moving stuff from
the house. Prosecution argued this meant moving evidence. Defense noted
that Raeda was talking about her pets at the time.
According to support committee notes, Sanchisstrada and his wife Rida
were found guilty of conspiracy to conceal documents and other

(02:41:56):
objects that would implicate Reeda in the riot and shooting
at the Prairie Land Facility. Now nine of the counts
count one, two, four, and five through ten cited Pinkerton versus.
United States, nineteen forty six. The judge explained to the

(02:42:17):
jury that a defendant can be criminally liable for the
offenses committed by another co conspirator if the offense was
quote reasonably foreseeable and committed in furtherance of the conspiracy unquote.
From very early on in the trial, prosecution argued that
song firing on the officers was quote unquote reasonably foreseeable

(02:42:41):
based on the planning of the protest and previous statements
made by Song. The jury found all defendants charged guilty
of counts one two, three and four that's riot material sport, terrorists,
and explosive charges, but did not find other defendants besides
Song guilty of attempted murder or discharging a firearm using

(02:43:03):
this Pinkerton co conspirator liability. Lastly, let's discuss two charges
which now could carry worrying potential to be used against
protesters in the future based on this case's precedent. First
conspiracy to use and carry an explosive and using and
carrying an explosive during a riot. The only explosives used

(02:43:27):
were fireworks, and even the judge confirmed in this case
that it was established that the fireworks caused no damage
to the ice facility. Yet Stephen Brenneman and ats explosives
a special agent, testified that fireworks still meet the statutory
definition of explosives under eighteen usc. Section eight four four
IJ because they contain gunpowder as defined in the statute.

(02:43:54):
Me and Robert have been to and reported on a
fourth of July protest also in from of a government
building back in twenty twenty, where people launched a lot
of fireworks up at that Federal courthouse.

Speaker 2 (02:44:07):
A lot of fireworks and other places.

Speaker 4 (02:44:11):
And this was a very similar event with the launching
of fireworks at federal property, which now under this president,
could be charged as a crime. Finally, let's talk about
providing material support to terrorists. That's eighteen Usc. Two three
three nine. This statute has two sections. One relates to

(02:44:33):
material support provided to a designated foreign terrorist organization. This
is not what the defendants were charged under. They're not
saying that Antifa qualifies as one of these designated foreign
terrorist organizations. That's not what's being argued here. The defendants
were charged under Section A, alleging they provided and attempted
to provide material support and resources, including property that can

(02:44:57):
be money, services, training, communic pations, equipment like walkie talkies, weapons, explosives,
personnel including themselves, and transportation, knowing and intending that they
were to be used in preparation for and in carrying
out an offence identified as a federal crime of terrorism,

(02:45:17):
or in carrying out the concealment of an escape from
set offense. The statute lists at least twenty eight possible
terrorism offenses. Relevant to this case are three eighteen Usc.
Eight four to four F. It's maliciously attempting to damage
government property by means of fire or an explosive fireworks
count eighteen USC. One three sixty one, willful depredation against

(02:45:42):
any property of the United States exceeding one thousand dollars.
This is property damaged by other means exceeding that one
thousand dollars threshold. And eighteen USC one one four killing
or attempting to kill any officer or employee of the
United States. Government accused the defendants of providing material support
to terrorists in these three different ways, but to convict,

(02:46:05):
the jury only had to decide there was proof beyond
reasonable doubt on one of these ways. They didn't need
all three. To quote the jury instructions, Quote, if a
defendant's speech, expression, or associations were made with intent to
knowingly provide material support or resources to be used to
prepare for or carry out a violation of federal law,

(02:46:27):
or to carry out the concealment of an escape from
such violation, then the First Amendment would not provide a
defense to that conduct.

Speaker 3 (02:46:35):
Unquote.

Speaker 4 (02:46:36):
Benjamin's Song now faces a minimum penalty of twenty years
and a maximum of life imprisonment. Other defendants at Prairie
Land face sentences ranging from a minimum of ten years
to up to sixty years in federal prison, and the
husband convicted of concealing documents faces up to forty years
in federal prison.

Speaker 2 (02:46:55):
Yeah, this is a very bleak case and I don't
really have much to add.

Speaker 4 (02:46:59):
It's very sad m Yeah, no, and it's worth understanding
the specific way they're using this material support statute. Yeah,
just establishing someone is a member of quote unquote Antifa
is not really what they're going after. But they're using
Antifa as this way to link the defendants through this
ideological unity to show that there's a conspiracy, some kind

(02:47:21):
of like political conspiracy that then could be tied to
offenses that are terrorism, like damaging government property with the
intent to influence or intimidate government policy. Right, that's the
sort of framing that was used in the guilty please
for some other former defendants of this case, And that's
what the government is trying to argue here. We're gonna

(02:47:43):
go on a break and return for one final segment
touching on the economy and Iroan. Sorry lacking.

Speaker 3 (02:48:07):
Locking jazz bob, locking jazz bot, Sorry lacking locking jazz bo,
locking jazz bo.

Speaker 1 (02:48:20):
Let's check in with the strait of ramuse where things
are going extremely poorly for the US, Israel and every
country in the world that relies on oil and liquefied
natural gas, as well as helium fertilizer at a whole bunch
of other exports. All attempts to actually open the Strait
have failed. Now, Iran has still been shipping a decent

(02:48:43):
amount of oil out to some extent, They've been able
to send their own tankers through and the US and
Israel have not attacked them thus far. Now there has
been some developments in terms of attempts to open the Strait.
Israel claimed they would help reopen the Strait. We also
got a report in Reuters that Britain, France, Germany, Italy,

(02:49:05):
the Netherlands and Japan have agreed to help open the Strait.
This is a kind of weird group of countries. It
is the G seven, which is the Good Group of Seven,
which is a very sort of influential group of American allies.
But it's the G seven minus Canada with the Netherlands
in its place, which is sort of odd. Now, this

(02:49:27):
is not going to do anything to actually open the Straits.
There are two reasons for this. One is that none
of these countries have actually committed to do anything other
than quote to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe
passages through the Strait and start quote preparatory planning, which
means absolutely nothing. And the second reason is that if

(02:49:50):
all of these countries, you know, put every single naval
asset at the disposal for some reason, to put all
of them in the street and four news, it wouldn't
do anything to actually open them straight. There's a good
piece and defector about this called Trump to World, Please
help Me Unshoot my own leg off, where the author
Albert Burneco points out, and I think this is a

(02:50:13):
very useful way of understanding the problem here that these
oil tankers are.

Speaker 10 (02:50:17):
The size of skyscrapers.

Speaker 1 (02:50:19):
They're not They're not getting oil takers do the straight
as long as.

Speaker 10 (02:50:22):
The run on do this. Every week I say this,
and every week.

Speaker 1 (02:50:26):
A bunch of people go, oh, they're gonna open the
straight Ooh do There's all these pre cycles, and like
the stock market, oil prices go down and the stock
market goes up, and then everyone collectively realizes it's not true,
and then the herd animals go back to raising the
stock prices. So this leaves us in the same situation
we were before, except everything has gotten significantly worse because

(02:50:49):
on Wednesday, Israel hit the largest natural gas field in
the world when they attack the Runs South Pars gas field. Now,
as political points out, these are the fields that few
Iran's domestic energy grade, which means any hit to them
is extremely painful because it means that people lose like
heat and power. Now, Trump did very quickly make an

(02:51:11):
extremely funny post that is sadly too long to read
here begging Iran not to attack Cotter, saying the US
didn't know anything about it and that Cotter didn't have
anything to do with the strike. There's been a bunch
of contradictory information. Netanyahu has claimed publicly now that the
US didn't know anything about the strike in Israel, you know. Laterally,
there's also been reports of the US knew it was

(02:51:31):
going to happen this whole The US didn't know anything
about it. Please don't hit Cotter seems to be a
kind of pr strategy on their parts. It didn't work.
Iran ignored it and retaliated on Thursday by hitting Cotter's
massive liquid natural gas processing facility. This is one of
the largest facilities in the world for liquid natural gas,
of which Cotter is one of the world's largest suppliers.

(02:51:54):
I think they're the second largest of liquid natural gas.
I'm going to read this from Reuter's because this is
what the straight laced analysts are saying now.

Speaker 10 (02:52:00):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (02:52:01):
We are now well on the road to the doomsday
gas crisis scenario, said Saul Kavona, can energy analyst at
MST Financial. Even once the war ends, the disruption to
liquord natural gas supply could last for months or even years.
Writers got some statements from Carter State natural gas firm
saying that they had lost seventeen percent of their total

(02:52:22):
export capacity and that that was destroyed for three to
five years. That is catastrophic for significant parts of the
economy worldwide. As we are going to talk about in
a second. All of this is also happening in the
context of Trump's threats to destroy carg Island, which is
where ninety percent of Iran's oil imports flow through, which
would likewise be absolutely catastrophic for the Iranian economy because

(02:52:47):
it would take a significant amount of time to repair. However, Comma,
these are all kind of empty threats. Well, when I
say empty threats. They don't mean that the US or
Israel won't do it. I mean that it doesn't solve
the problem, because the problem with any threat you can
make against Iran is like you already killed the Iya Toola,
Like what else are you going to do? Right, you
can completely destroy Iran's economic capacity for a significant period

(02:53:09):
of time, But if you do that, then the Iranian
government is still just going to not open the strait. Right,
the more you attack them, the more incentive they have
to continue to retaliate. And that's what's going to happen
if you continue this campaign, which it seems like the
US and Israel determined to do. They're just holding all
this talk about like revenger to do phase of the war,
and the war is going to now last like several

(02:53:30):
months longer. And again, the problem here is that the
more that you attack critical infrastructure inside Iran, the more
that the Iranian government gives less of a shit about
again destroying significant portions of the world's natural gas supply,
or hitting more oil facilities or you know, and this
is the one that I really haven't seen any talk about,
but is a thing that Iran could do if they

(02:53:50):
decided that you know, this is like the end for
our people is starting to hit desalinization plants in places
like the UAE and Cotter, which are i mean, infrastructure
that will make the country's uninhabitable. And right now there
haven't been any attacks on them because that's a really
hideous thing to do, and it's also the sort of
absolute last resort. But it's a thing that like, you know,

(02:54:13):
if you keep hitting them, they're going to keep hitting
more and more targets that are going to significantly impact
the lives of everyone in the region and around the world. Now,
on the sort of economics end, we've been kind of
in this little bouncing up and down Stace's lock, A
little bit of this has been broken because of again

(02:54:34):
we're now seeing instead of just the already very very
bad damage of nothing can get to the strait, we're
now starting to see permanent damage to oil infrastructure. Right
and by the way, it's us as are worth noting
Royer's reports that the estimated damage i think both from
revenue lost and from to actually repair the facility that
Carter State run gas company is talking about, they're talking

(02:54:56):
about twenty billion dollars of damage. This has fine caused
a sort of tank in the Asian markets, which are
down like around three percent. In a lot of places,
we're seeing like somewhere between two to three percent for
things like the DK in Japan. We're seeing like one
percent down in Shanghai. And you know this is because

(02:55:17):
a lot of these countries, particularly in Asia, use a
large quantity of not just oil but also natural gas
from the Gulf, which means that these are the countries
that are on the front lines of this crisis. Now,
the Brink Crude Index, which is your sort of basemark
for oil prices, is over one hundred dollars. Now it's
staying over one hundred dollars. Experts are saying it's only

(02:55:38):
going to increase, which yes, no shit, of course, it's
only going to increase. It's just going to be continued
to be more tax I have seen some reporting saying
that like, worst case scenario, we could see it at
two hundred dollars. Two hundred dollars is like a nightmare,
like the nine dollars gasoline. Unbelievable, hideous nightmare. I'm not
going to weigh in on whether we're going to get

(02:55:58):
to that point before Trump, like Baiales out of this war,
but it's going to continue to go up as both
the actual global oil supply is reduced and also as
the capacity for a rebound once if this war ends,
is decreased by the continued destruction of oil infrastructure. So

(02:56:20):
all in all, things continue to be extremely bad, and
the outlook for the global economy is very bad. The
outlook for the people of Iran is very bad. The
outlook for people across the world is not good.

Speaker 3 (02:56:34):
Thank you, miya. And for a final segment, I'm going
to talk about the ongoing war against Iran, Yeah, which
I guess we're still deciding if it's a war or not.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump denied the existence of uncrewed
surface vessels, something Garrison and I talked about in the
podcast that came out earlier this week. I'm just going

(02:56:54):
to pay you the clip.

Speaker 6 (02:56:57):
So they put out phone and furnish during the Mkazi boats.
The comic Kazi boats don't exist. They're fake and you
can almost see that when you look at them. You
look sam, yeah, because if they did exist, we'd hit
them just like we hit other boats all over the place.
But they don't exist. In fact, some of the people
say where are the boats? Well, how come nobody see

(02:57:18):
the boats?

Speaker 10 (02:57:19):
You know why? Because it's AI generated.

Speaker 6 (02:57:21):
It's fake and I found it, realized this before they
we started. But Iran is known for a lot of
fake news, and they deal with our fake news. And
I actually think it's pretty criminal because our media companies,
who have no credibility whatsoever, are putting out information that they.

Speaker 3 (02:57:42):
Know is foll Yeah. So uncrewed safesce vessels are real.

Speaker 8 (02:57:47):
Yes, they sure are.

Speaker 2 (02:57:48):
They've been used massively in Ukraine among other places.

Speaker 3 (02:57:52):
Yeah. In fact, rob it would you like to hear
about Saint com Commander Admiral Brad Cooper talking about uncrewed
his vessels.

Speaker 2 (02:58:00):
I will always listen to someone named Brad James. You
know that about me?

Speaker 3 (02:58:04):
Okay? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:58:05):
Here you see a photo from March first of a
naval drone storage facility located near the Strait of Hoar.

Speaker 3 (02:58:10):
Moves, so as you can see naval drones uncrewed surface vessels.
This is going to be an issue in this conflict
and many others going forward. People are going to deny
any reality that they don't want to engage with by
saying that it is AI yep, and that's deeply troubling.

(02:58:30):
So let's talk about what has been happening since we
last spoke. Hag Island and no, only did the Persian
Gulf that is replete with oil infrastructure and storage facilities,
it's the island throughach a large amount of Iran's oil
exports ravel.

Speaker 2 (02:58:47):
Yeah, there's a basically, so the most of the coast
of Iran is too shallow for the huge vessels that
are necessary to actually move crude oil and carg Island
is like a very rare deep on port basically, so
it's kind of the hub.

Speaker 3 (02:59:03):
Yeah, I was struck by the United States last weekend
of raid the plane that the raid only hit oil
infrastructure on Kyleg Island. It's very hard to get any
independent information from Iran currently because of blackouts, because of
the lack of connectivity, and because of ratiome oppression. Right,
So we just it's quite possible that what the US

(02:59:24):
is saying is not true. It's also quite possible what
the Iranian state is saying is not true. We can
confirm that there were strikes there using all kinds of
information by satellite imagery, open source flight threatening, et cetera.
That strikes definitely happened. Strikes this week by the IDF
also killed Ali Larijani and basiege unit Commada Hola Moreza Solemoni.

(02:59:46):
Shortly after these claims first surfaced, a note was published
in Lara Johanni's handwriting. But it is fairly certain now
that he is dead. Larijani's assassination, I guess or killing
one of your call it by the IDF is notable
because he's one of the people who would have had
the sway in the regime to negotiate with the United States.

(03:00:11):
You could make a case that the IDF killing him
is a way for a negotiated piece to be even harder,
for this conflict to continue even more. He is also
a person who is responsible for massive crimes against the
citizens of Iran, right including the violent, murderous clampdown on

(03:00:33):
protests that we saw in January of this year. The
United States is also deploying the thirty first Marine Expeditionary
Unit to the Middle East as part of an amphibious
response group that includes the USS Tripoly. In fact, it's
approximately twenty five hundred marines who will be deployed. This

(03:00:54):
is the closest we've seen twenty official communication of United
States boots on the ground in the region. There's a
number of things that a marine expedition unit could do.
One of them is to do search and rescue or
provide evacuations for people on vessels in the straight of
horn moves that are struck right. Another of them is

(03:01:15):
to assault or take islands where Iran may have based
its military infrastructure, so to do things that are either
not possible or not easy with air strikes. Another one
is to add more air power that's closer to the
region that the Tripoli can carry their thirty five lightnings,

(03:01:36):
So it could be that. Another one is for these
two thy five hundred marines to invade Iran, right and
to begin a land war to attempt to They could
also be training Iranian opposition groups, right that that's possible.
It wouldn't. It's not like a core Marine Corps mission,
but there's a Special Forces mission. But there's a number

(03:01:59):
of things it can be doing. There are also a
number of more marine expeditionary units and other forces that
could be moved to the region. It's interesting to see
this just a few months after we saw that National
Security strategy which focused heavily on the Western hemisphere. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, right,
the US isn't going to involve its OLM Forever Wars
in the release anymore.

Speaker 4 (03:02:19):
I can't believe it.

Speaker 3 (03:02:20):
Yeah shocking.

Speaker 4 (03:02:22):
What's the status of these marines right now?

Speaker 3 (03:02:24):
I believe they are motoring who the region? Right? So
TRIPLEY is a big boat. It's called an amphibious assault boat.
But that makes it sound like it's like a Higgins boat.
Yeah yeah, like if this is not the boat that
you see in the d DA movement. Okay, in fact,
I don't think it can actually have this particular one
if I understand correctly, doesn't carry those kinds of boats,

(03:02:45):
Like it's not set up for doing like a beach
landing and Amphoebius assault. But these marine expeditioning units are
like the like the first response, I guess, like they
have their own air power, they have helicopters. Yeah, obviously
they come on a boat. They can move quite quickly.
They have the marine so capable of doing infantry stuff.
So like it makes sense that this would be what

(03:03:06):
they would sayd talking of US forces in the region.
A US case one pint thirty five aircraft crashed over
Iraq last week. This is not a combat aircraft, right,
it's not another a fighter bomber. But to my knowledge,
the only way out of these planes is bailing, and
all six crew members on board are confirmed to have died.

(03:03:26):
The United States SAT Consas has flown over six thousand
sorties since OEF began.

Speaker 4 (03:03:33):
Oh, yes, there's Operation Epic Fury.

Speaker 3 (03:03:36):
Yeah it's great because Operation During Freedom had the same acronym,
and I'm sure it's not a mistake. But yeah, this
is Operation Epic Fury. It's a very high tempo, right,
and it's a very crowded airspace. The six thousand sorties yeap, Yeah,
that's a lot. Yeah, accidents like this will happen, right,
Not everybody who dies in warfare dies in combat. And thirdly,

(03:03:56):
this means that another six people are coming home from
Iraqi coffins as they have been since before. Many of
our listeners who were born and of course a lot
of people in Iraq who have no quarrel with anyone
that will also be innocent victims of this. I don't mean,
by any means to suggest it's only US service people
who are the victims. Here. I want to talk about

(03:04:18):
the conflict between the United States and Hashda Shabi. The
US has carried out a series of air strikes against
PMF groups, so these are popular mobilization forces for Shia
groups in Iran for the Islamic State. A strike on
a house in Baghdad killed the leader of Katib Hasbola
in a Raq. The strike was confirmed on Sabrine News.

(03:04:41):
Sabrine News is like their telegram outlet. It's like an
aligned telegram news outlet for the group. Yeah, for the PMF,
and they made the statement quote, we announced you the
martyrdom of hajj Abu Ali al Askari. In the days
since he's killing, we have I've seen many attacks on

(03:05:02):
United States facilities in it Rut. The embassy's cram CRAM
is counter rocket artillery and mortar. When you see videos
of drones being shot down, when you see like a
you hear like a runt and then you see a
burst of like tracer fire and the drone explodes, it's
normally the c RAM, So the embassy cram egaz and

(03:05:23):
is destroyed drone. But other footage posted online shows an
FPV drone that's the first person view drone FPV drone.
It looks like you're flying as opposed to like you're
looking directly down flying over the embassy compound for almost
two minutes. I'm guessing it was a fiber optic controlled drone, right,

(03:05:46):
so there's no means of like jamming the signal, but
this is still a monumental failure for security. Right. At
the same time, we saw two drones at least enter
and explode in the Victory Base, which is near Baghdad Airport.
The videos from those are bizarre. It seems like the
drone gets into the base and then it's just like whoa,

(03:06:08):
what the hell, Like it didn't seem like they had
a clear target. It kind of flies around and like
seems so shocked that it was able to penetrate this
supposedly impenetrable area.

Speaker 4 (03:06:17):
How much of these security systems are designed to counter
drones versus originally designed to counter older types of like
aerial threats.

Speaker 3 (03:06:26):
Yeah, drones is a broad category, I guess. So you
have like your Shahed drone, which kind of blurs the
line between a drone and a missile, right, It's like
a missile that can take a more varied flight path. Yeah, yeah,
it doesn't just don't go in the arc like ballistically.
In those cases there are things that there are things
that you can do to shoot them down. Right, you
can have your Patriot missiles, you can use of see RAM,

(03:06:48):
you can shoot them down with various weapon systems on
an aircraft. But if we group FPV and like drop
A drones as commercial office shelf drones, this is the thing, right,
you know, the United States has been supporting Ukraine since
twenty one, since before twenty twenty two, but it's including
since twenty twenty two with the false galvation. It has

(03:07:10):
not been supporting the revolution in the Ammar. But clearly
they have not learned enough from those two conflicts, right
in terms of the use of these small commercial off
the shelf drones, And this is now showing up as
a weakness in their defense strategy. Like this is a
serious thing for the US government for someone to be

(03:07:34):
and for them to just fly a recondrone over the embassy,
obviously they now know where everything is, and for them
to publish that footage is like a public somewhat like humiliation, right,
the sort of security infrastructure. So finally, I guess a
couple more things. Iran is now militarizing the area of

(03:07:55):
Kurdistan between the Iranian and Iraqi states. So that's the
Iran Iraq border in kurdis Dan. Right, it seems to
have issued orders preventing people moving around the region as
they habitually. Would people move around because they've always moved around.
People move around with their animals, right. The Iranian government

(03:08:16):
appears to have ordered its troops to shoot people who
perceived to be moving around without permission. People often gather
near the border with a ruck to access cell signal,
and the government forces appear to have left their bases
in the region in favor of occupying the mountains as
well as local educational institutions and sports facilities. Right, So
that means that people in town are now its threat,

(03:08:39):
and Hengar has some incidents where people have been shot
by security forces in that region. Finally, then I want
to talk about the resignation of the director of the
National Countess Terrorism Center, Joe Kent. Kent resigned this week saying, quote,
Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation. It does

(03:09:01):
seem that that is where a lot of people stopped
reading anything. Kent said, Yeah, are people who did not
know who Joe Kent is, right, and don't have access
to Google for reasons that I don't understand. Yeah, yeah,
some really incredibly shitty reporting on this. Kent went on
in his note to among other things, talk about the

(03:09:24):
death of his wife, which is genuinely tragic. Kent has
some disgusting views, right, Like, but it does seem that
the death of his wife was kind of a I guess,
a turning point. It's a fair to say, yeah, like
you've looked at Kent a lot, like in his politics.

Speaker 4 (03:09:39):
He talks about it a lot. Yeah, Yeah, it's it's
very load bearing for him.

Speaker 3 (03:09:43):
Yeah, So it's just with people aren't aware. His wife, Shannon,
was a cryptologist and linguist attacked to the ISA intelligence
support activity sometimes called Task Force Orange. She was in
Mambies in Syria when she was killed by in Islamic
State suicide bomber. She was in the buffer zone that
that was like the buffer that Turkey had forced to exist.

(03:10:05):
He calls that in his resignation statement quote a war
manufactured by Israel, and he also seems to suggest that
Trump was conned by Israel into starting the war with Iran.
Far too much reporting has missed this context, so he's
essentially using what, on the face of it is an
anti submit like saying, I mean, yeah he.

Speaker 4 (03:10:25):
He like is he is like an anti Semitic fascist, Yes.

Speaker 3 (03:10:29):
His reason for retiring is like explicitally anti Semitic.

Speaker 4 (03:10:32):
This like yeah, this is the same justification that someone
like Nick Quentes uses to oppose the war in Iran.
Not out of you know, principled solidarity. These people don't
care about civilians dying in Iran. No, And it's not
actually about any sort of like notion of anti imperialism.

Speaker 3 (03:10:50):
No, it's anti Semitism.

Speaker 4 (03:10:52):
They believe that this is a Zionist occupied government in
the zog meaning of the term, like there's like a
literally literally like a total Jewish control over all state operations,
not linked to actual lobbying groups that lobby for Israel
within the United States, but conspiratorial framework invoking anti Semitic

(03:11:16):
tropes and stereotypes. This is the sort of it army
that Joe Kent comes out of. As we are recording this,
Joe Kent has an interview dropping with Tucker Carlson, Yes,
where he's going to expound on this. Carlson has similarly
voiced these sorts of objections based on if any intelligent
person you know reads into it based on anti Semitism,

(03:11:38):
not actually based on again principled solidarity with oppressed people's
or anti imperialism.

Speaker 3 (03:11:46):
Yeah, and I think if you're reading new sources like
oh wow, Trump is beginning to lose people and they
have mention any of this, really consider if you want
to be reading those news sources. I'll just say that,
I guess. Caroline Levitt responded with a post on X quote.
The Commander in chief determines what does and does not
constitute a threat because he is the only one constitutionally
empowered to do so, and because the American people went

(03:12:08):
to the ballot box and it trusted him and him
alone to make such final judgments. That is a remarkable
statement for those of us who lived through the whole
Iraq has WNDS era. But the United States has long
history of involvement in the Middle East, and yes, the
extent to which we are partnering with Israel is often
in support of our other objectives in the Middle East

(03:12:29):
and our ability to use Israel as like a proxy state.
That's why the Unitedate government has such a large interest
in Israel. Is we have other reasons for wanting to
be active and control parts of the region or influence
the region. Yeah, often the priorities of Israel not always right,
like in the first time the United States invaded the

(03:12:51):
Persian Gulf. That often they are fighting alongside each other
because they have similar interest not because of any nefarious
Jewish conspiracy. Yeah, yep, which.

Speaker 4 (03:13:02):
Very frustrating that continues to be something that needs to
be reiterated.

Speaker 3 (03:13:05):
Yeah, even on the left, but it does.

Speaker 2 (03:13:07):
And the first time I started seeing people who had
previously been doing other campus ships start using the phrase zog,
I was like, Okay, we've come, We've come full circle.
Everything's where it was always going to be beautiful.

Speaker 4 (03:13:21):
The normalization of zog and like goy across parts of
the online left.

Speaker 2 (03:13:27):
Is from anarchistparian of the new Turks, the Young Turks
whatever the fuck the ty t they.

Speaker 3 (03:13:32):
Call them, the young has fallen. Yeah, well let's yeah,
let let's be honest. Choosing that name didn't predispose them
to the anti genocide.

Speaker 2 (03:13:41):
She has always been like that, she's sucked for a while,
but just seeing her use the fray the word GOI
like that was like.

Speaker 3 (03:13:48):
Whoa wow, Yeah, I haven't seen it, Okay.

Speaker 2 (03:13:50):
I used to have to go to Telegram to see
people boasting ship like that.

Speaker 3 (03:13:54):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, that's sort of shit. You would
hear like ham radio, Like it's just like old school racism. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:14:00):
No, there is this interesting emergence of like a red
brown alliance specifically targeting like Israel or people's notions of
Israel's global influence.

Speaker 3 (03:14:12):
Yeah yeah no, great, no, great stuff a tool.

Speaker 2 (03:14:16):
Yeah, So we should just say, since this is going
to be one of the big news stories this week
and coming into next week, the New York Times has
published a in article with very extensive sourcing, including from
people very close to Cesser Chavez, who reported that he
sexually assaulted, raped, molested an abused mix of girls and women,

(03:14:41):
including a lot of girls preteen girls, started grooming them
as young as eight or nine. In some cases, there's
evidence of molestation of girls as young as like twelve thirteen.
And then Deloresuerta, who was very famously one of his
organizing partners for quite a long time, came out and
said that he's sexually assault to her on at least
raped her on at least two occasions, which led to pregnancies.

(03:15:05):
So that is all coming out now and it's all
pretty horrific. But yeah, I like, there's not much more
to say. You can read the article, yeah, and should Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:15:16):
I will link to finish shure it. If you'd like
to email us, you can send a message to cool
Zone Tips at proton dot me.

Speaker 4 (03:15:25):
That's for tips, that's for news gathering tips.

Speaker 3 (03:15:28):
Yes, it is for It is not for you to
pitch your boss to come on Robert's podcast. It is
not for you to tell us about your new book.
It is not for you to share how much you
enjoy a podcast. So that's very sweet. If you want
to send that kind of stuff, you can do it

(03:15:50):
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Speaker 2 (03:16:00):
I will find you.

Speaker 3 (03:16:01):
Yeah, I'm not believe me, buddy. We're gonna if people
keep trying this ship, we're gonna have a list and
we're gonna read it at the end of everybody, and
I will give them your remail address.

Speaker 2 (03:16:13):
I will do anti advertising. I will accuse your boss
that you want to go on my podcast of various crimes.
And thanks to my understanding of libel laws in the
United States. I should be fine. Yeah, where's that slander?
I always yeah, well I'll do both. It'll be fine.

Speaker 3 (03:16:30):
Yeah, we're right, it will say, we'll post it.

Speaker 4 (03:16:33):
We we reported the news.

Speaker 3 (03:16:37):
Mm hm, we reported the news.

Speaker 2 (03:16:44):
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 11 (03:16:50):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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