It Could Happen Here Weekly 81

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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. Ah, it's it could

(00:28):
happen here a podcast about things falling apart, and today
I'm I'm happy that we're we're recording this right now,
James and Garrison, because we all just got a historic
example of something falling apart Elon Musk's Big Silly rocket.
We're recording this about a day or so after it

(00:49):
exploded in mid air for the Gulf Coast, showering a
turtle sanctuary with toxic waste. It's such a such a
fun news that's comically perfect. Is really it is pretty cool?

Speaker 2 (01:01):
Perfect unless it crashed landed in a kitten farm. That
couldn't really be.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
Yeah, perfect, No, I mean it. What's nice is that
it's given me. It's made me feel young again because
when I was a wee lad. I was attending a
speech to debate rally in Cooper, Texas when the last
Space shuttle to explode exploded directly over us, blowing out
a bunch of the windows in the building and raining. Yeah, yeah,

(01:27):
it was, it was. It was. Yeah. So I whenever
whenever a space shuttle explodes over of some sort, explodes
over Texas, I get powerful nostalgia.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Well, they they slipped the surly bonds of Verse to
blow out the windows in a high school in Cooper, Texas.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah, that's that's how the line goes. It makes me
think of all the other things I was doing that day,
which was namely playing Lord of the Rings risk in
a high school gym. As we as we were wont
to do great game, one of the better, one of
the better risk covers. What are we talking about today,
friendo buddies.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Wells, Yeah, we're talking.

Speaker 3 (02:05):
About talking about one one man having having a fun
time on Discord dot com.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
Yeah, doing the human equivalent of being a spaceship that
explodes in the sky.

Speaker 3 (02:22):
I suppose Discord is not really a dot com. It's
it's more, it's more it's more of a more of
an application now. But yes, it is what.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
Good discord and that I'm permanently banned from LEA again,
what did you do to discord?

Speaker 1 (02:40):
Discord should a video?

Speaker 4 (02:42):
Who's on discord right? Like the worst people, all of
the worst people. You know.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
We tried to start a discord for the fundraising live show,
and I tried with several emails and every time it
came back with ban evasion.

Speaker 3 (02:54):
That is extremely funny, Jims.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yeah, I posted the chickens and it has never forgiven me.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Wow. Well, I mean, you know, those chickens didn't consent
and they were technically naked, so I think it does
count as revenge points are always close. Chicken peck, Oh yeah,
you're one of the pansies. There's a big conflict in
chicken owners and James has taken aside. So we're talking
this week about the discord leaks, and this is one

(03:22):
of those things we came into this kind of debating
how much detail to go into. But when we brought
this up, like this is something that gare James and
I is like a major thing in our bubble for
the last like week, so we've all been following it.
But when we brought this up in the work chat.
Daniel had no idea that this had gone on. So
we're going to start with a pretty basic overview of

(03:43):
what people are calling the largest leak of top secret
US military and defense data since you know Snowden. So
we're we're going to go over all of that right now.
I think I want to start by talking about out
an MMO RPG called war Thunder.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
This is a can you break down MMO RPG for
those of us.

Speaker 1 (04:07):
It's it's a it's like World of Warcraft. It's a
big video game that is play that you play online
with a bunch of strangers. It's a free game. You
use like modern military weapons to like fight other players.
And it's kind of well known for having extremely realistic
renderings and sort of depictions of the functionality of modern

(04:27):
tanks and armored transports and fighter planes and naval vessels.
Right so, and it's it's it's like it's it's a
game for war nerds, right Like there's you you utilize
like radar in a way that's broadly realistic, Like if
you shoot, you know, if one tank shoots in another,
the tank's weaponry works the way it's supposed to in

(04:48):
the real world. The armor is vulnerable where it's vulnerable
in the real world. And this is like the appeal
to the kind of nerds who play this game, and
as you might guess, from a bunch of people who
really want to, like, in the most realistic way possible,
render and fight each other with modern military vehicles. A
significant number of these dudes are members of various different

(05:11):
like defense departments right, or at least are employed in
some degree of various different national military forces several different
As a result, like when arguments happen, you know, with
any MMLRPG, if you're playing like World of Warcraft, right,
and like something gets nerved or something isn't working as
well as it's opposed to, you'll get these like massive

(05:32):
threads in the forums where people are like arguing about
how something needs to be changed or changed back, or
how there's a glitch or whatever. And because war Thunder
is so based in realism, when you have these arguments online,
it's often like, well, you know, the F fifteen shouldn't
work this way, it should work this way, and people
will get into arguments about that, and then someone will

(05:53):
as happened like a couple of weeks ago, I think
someone will post sensitive and information about the F fifteen
Strike Eagle in order to prove that it would function
the way that they are arguing it should function in
this forum debate. That happened earlier this year, and I
think with the F fifteen, it wasn't technically top secret information.

(06:17):
It was information that US citizens were allowed to have
but not allowed to post online because that's a violation
of something called ITAR, which is a thing that governs
the export, essentially of military information and technology. But on
another situation, I think, like a year or so ago,

(06:38):
information of it, I believe the F twenty two was
posted that was extremely sensitive. It was like top secret.
And these are again like some dude who's got some
sort of military job and has a clearance and thinks
that the right way to use it is arguing about
the video game war Thunder. These are not just Americans.
I want to be clear about that. In July of

(06:59):
twenty twenty one, there was a player arguing about a
Challenger two tank who claimed to have been a former
tank commander with the British Army, and he shared information
from the Army Equipment Support publication. The information had been
labeled unclassified, but it was actually classified, and other lakes

(07:19):
has been a little more galling. A French Army soldier
leaked information on the Clerk main battle tank that was
top secret, and a Chinese user leaked capabilities at the
Chinese Army's DTC ten one hundred and twenty five millimeters
anti tank round that should not have been leaked. So
thisat shit keeps happening in war Thunder. It's like a joke,

(07:40):
like the war Thunder account when these discord leaks happened
a week or so ago, like joked about it. But
like the thing that the game is known for, Yeah,
is these like different people in different national defense apparati
can't stop themselves from like leaking stop secret info about vehicles.

Speaker 5 (07:58):
It's very funny.

Speaker 2 (07:59):
I guess the only reason I know why War th
Under exists. I think it's the only reason why we
know a decent amount of what like what by we
here and meaning that could like I guess, uh, like
Western militaries no, which of course we are all members of.
No about like Russian main battle tanks is from war
under leaks.

Speaker 4 (08:16):
Yeah, very funny.

Speaker 1 (08:18):
Yeah, and you have to assume I would be surprised
if no one had tried just like having you know,
an agent from a national security agency in uh oh
for sure, but they're trying to like be like trying
to like provoke arguments about Chinese tanks or whatever. I'd
be shocked if that hasn't happened.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yeah, like the overlap between like people who might play
warth Under anyway and people who might work for a
national security agency, Like those Van diagrams are a circle.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
Yeah, exactly. So it's one of those things where this
happens a bunch on war th Under. But it's just
kind of something people joke about because these leaks like
they're meaningful. I guess to like militaries care about them.
But like you sitting at home, you hear like, oh, hey,
details of like the couple of construction of the new
Abrams like models as leaked. That's not like the same

(09:10):
as I don't know, Chelsea Manning leaking information about like
war crimes by the US military in Iraq, or Edward
Snowden leaking info about like the NSA. Like it's a
little less relevant to most people. What we started seeing
a couple of weeks ago is documents top secret label documents,
like actual pictures of straight up, unredacted, top secret US

(09:35):
Defense Department documents just kind of filtering out over various discords,
and they were kind of appearing in random little bits.
You'd see one that was like an update on the
war in Ukraine that was kind of showing concerns that
the US military had about the ability of the Ukrainian
military to carry out the counter offensive that everybody's expecting
in the near future. You have like casualty estimates from

(09:58):
the US military. Another document that was leak had like
a bunch of information inside the Russian General Staff. So
these are number one, very serious leaks, right you're talking about,
especially with the leaks from inside Putin's kind of inner circle.
You're talking about leaks that could potentially expose a major
US source inside the Russian government. And you're also talking

(10:21):
about leaks that just kind of revealed the degree to
which the CIA has an enormous amount of information apparently
at least about what's happening inside the Kremlin.

Speaker 4 (10:32):
You know.

Speaker 1 (10:32):
So these are very significant leaks, but they didn't appear.
They weren't being like you know, kind of filtered out
and released by an agency like Wiki leaks. They weren't
being sent to journalists. They were just kind of showing
up in these you know, Discord is basically a series
of chat rooms, and they were just kind of showing
up in different discords. So this is, you know, a mystery,

(10:56):
and it's the kind of mystery that, like a certain
kind of person who is extremely online is not going
to be able to get out of their head and
is going to kind of try to trace back to
its origin. And in the case of this specific mystery,
the nerd who could not get it out of their
head and decided to trace it back to its origin
was my former boss at Bellingcat, Eric Tohler. Eric is

(11:19):
a very nice guy, probably the most talented and skilled
researcher that I've ever met in my life. And you know,
Eric started seeing these, like everyone else, these top secret documents,
and was like, where the fuck are these coming from?
And this is one of those things we'll talk about.
It's become extremely controversial among a certain set of people

(11:39):
in the day since. But when this kind of started,
Number one, you can't really deny there was an intense
public interest in figuring out what the origin point of
these was because that was the only way to figure
out are the these actual leaks. When you see something
that's just like listed as a top secret document randomly
on the internet, if you call up the US government

(12:00):
and you say, hey, is this real top secret impot,
They're not gonna say yes, right like, you don't get
that response from them, I mean.

Speaker 3 (12:09):
And especially right now with all of like the AI
chat generation tools, Generating fake documents is one of the
main things people are doing for disinfo, generating like fake sources,
fake documents. Of course, you can like edit things further
to like make them seem more realistic, but yes, you
have someone who is extremely curious is going to wonder

(12:33):
if this is actually like a real thing or if
this is just some like bullshit prank or something.

Speaker 1 (12:37):
And there were edits of these documents did also go violin.
In fact, Kucker Carlson one of the one of the
original documents shows kind of US estimates for killed in
action on Ukraine's on the Ukrainian side and on the
Russian side in the war. Obviously, it showed more Russian
casualties than Ukrainian casualties, which is consistent with all previous reporting,

(13:00):
but the edit of it showed something like many times
as many Ukrainian dead as Russian dead, which is something
that was valuable for the people who are trying to
argue that this war is unwinnable on behalf of the Ukrainians.
Guys like Tucker Carlson who covered the leaks on his
show and knowingly used the fake edit of the leak,

(13:22):
I can't imagine. I have to assume it was knowingly
because he had been very well exposed by that point,
so there's really no other explanation, I think. But anyway,
the fact that there were edits of these documents that
were not legitimate going around, it's just kind of part
of why there was a legitimate public interest in trying
to figure out where the fuck are these things coming from.

(13:43):
Eric is again an extremely good researcher, and through a
mix of open source intelligence and eventually just kind of
like calling up people and talking to them, he found
what appeared to be the source of these leaks, which
was an invitation only clubhouse on scored of like thirty
ish people, most of whom were teenagers. Over time, it

(14:06):
kind of became clear that this group was a bunch
of kind of young people who had gotten together during
the pandemic to talk about you know, games. These guys
are all gamers. Most of them were like kids in
high school, they kind of were cut off from their friends,
so they wanted a place to be social. They would
share memes, including like extremely racist, you know, borderline Nazi shit.

(14:31):
They would like watch movies over and like chat over
kind of the voice app. They were all what you
call tradcats, which is like basically weirdo Catholic fundamentalists, like
I think a lot of them deny Vatican two, that
sort of shit. It's like a whole thing. A lot
of them were that at least, so there was a

(14:51):
lot of like praying and anyway, a bunch of weirdos.
And the head of this group of weirdos was the
oldest of them, a guy who was known on like
in the discord as og and Og. He's a was
you know, in the Land of the Teenagers, the person
in the early twenties who can buy an AR fifteen

(15:14):
is king. And so this this guy is in his
early twenties. He's in the military, which he talks about.
He posts videos of himself like shooting guns and like
you know, saying racial slurs and like signposting to these
like you know, weird memes and stuff that they're all into,
which to them like makes him seem extremely cool.

Speaker 6 (15:33):
Right.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
It's one of those things when you kind of read
the different coverage of this, it's there's a little bit
of like weird culty stuff going on. I don't know
if i'd say that it was a cult in more
than just like in.

Speaker 3 (15:48):
Every discord server is a cult exactly.

Speaker 1 (15:51):
The insular online communities like this very often reproduce aspects
of cult dynamics. Right, Yeah, Hey, everybody, Robert here. We
had a lot audio error obviously in the recording. I
wanted to clarify this section because it was kind of garbled.
The name of the discord server they were in was
thug Shaker Central, which is potentially a reference to one

(16:12):
of a couple of things. You'll find some disagreement about
this online, but it's not really relevant. That's the discord
name that they've worked under. You get, like the overall
point of this, it's a bunch of like kids who
are fans of games. They're fans of like this YouTuber Oxide.
It's like a little group of dudes who got together

(16:33):
via fandom and the pandemic and over the course of
years developed like a shared culture, and part of the
shared culture is this guy og who's the older one
of them, you know, trying to keep them aware of
what he thought was important about kind of global politics,
and that particularly included aspects of battlefield conditions in Ukraine,

(16:55):
information about North Korean ballistic missiles, all of this kind
of stuf ugh that he had access to because spoilers
he was in an Air National Guard wing as an
intelligence and like it was in the intelligence sector of
like an Air National Guard ring, and he had a
security classification, right, And once this all got revealed, people

(17:16):
are like, why the fuck is a twenty one year
old because that's this guy's age have access to top
secret data, And everyone who knows anything about the way
our government classifies information was like most of the people
have access are like twenty Yeah, it fits our wars
fifty year olds.

Speaker 2 (17:36):
Yeah, I think it just genuinely, like you know, like
if we've been around war and conflict of the people
who do it quite long, I think most people would
be genuinely burn away that most people doing it are children.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
Yeah, And this has caused like obviously some problems before
for the Defense Department, but it's also like it's kind
of a thorny problem because like most of your workforce
are always going to be young kids. These are spoiler's
shitty jobs often and that's the only one who will
do a lot of them. And also just like if
you're fighting a war, most of the people you have

(18:09):
that are going to be tasked the field intelligence are
going to be in this age. And see, it's not
at all weird that this guy had access to this shit.
What is weird is that so he starts off kind
of like arguing, you know, sometimes he'll bring up stuff
that he knows that's from classified documents while he's arguing,
you know, about the war in Ukraine or whatever with
these friends online, and then he starts doing like a

(18:31):
series of regular updates where he'll basically he'll type out
details from like a bunch of different top secret documents
and he's massive, long and apparently kind of hard to
read posts, and he'll just like post them into the
chat to kind of keep his friends abreast of what
he thinks is you know, important, But he gets frustrated
over time that like they're not reading this shit because

(18:53):
it's really boring and like kind of weird to just
info up top secret info, and they don't. These kids
don't again, like these other folks are like in high school.
They don't really realize where he's getting the info or
what he has, but they do. The folks who do
pay attention recognize over time that like stuff will happen
in the real world that corresponds to something he posted
a couple of weeks ago, and they're like, wow, he
seems to have like actually really good information. Eventually, Og

(19:19):
gets frustrated because he's not no one's paying attention to
his posts, so he starts taking photos of just the
top secret documents themselves and posting them in the discord day.

Speaker 2 (19:31):
Amazing.

Speaker 1 (19:33):
Now this is unbelievably illegal.

Speaker 2 (19:36):
Yeah, he really crosed a line there. I just don't
believe it'd be dumb.

Speaker 1 (19:41):
By the way. It was illegal before, but this is
really illegal.

Speaker 2 (19:44):
In terms of like allowing yourself making it so much
easier for the consequences you're fucking around to find you
like that. He crushed the rubicon right there.

Speaker 3 (19:56):
Yeah, so, and now we have to face the hard
question is this guy an illegalist king or is he
more problematic? And this is this is the question that
we have to actually focus on now stop because it is.
It is, on one hand, pretty funny. It's exceedmely funny.

Speaker 1 (20:16):
There's zero argument there among people who aren't ship heads.
It's very funny.

Speaker 2 (20:20):
Yeah, it's very funny that like he could be doing
an illegalism without with zero intention of doing so.

Speaker 1 (20:27):
Now, I do think there's a some people have kind
of errantly called him a whistleblower. I just not.

Speaker 3 (20:34):
That's not active. That is, that is not what he's doing.
He's a Nazi who's posting top secret information to impress
children online.

Speaker 1 (20:43):
That's right, Garrison. I do think we have to. I
think we have to. Let's let's dig into that a
little bit, because a whistleblower is somebody who exposes information
from inside of an organization for some sort of purpose. Right,
they believe that what's going on is wrong. They think that, like,
they believe there's some sort of public interest in information

(21:06):
that is being kind of siloed inside of an organization
that they're a part of, and they release that organization. Right, fundamentally,
that's what a whistleblower is. This guy was telling his
friends and this thirty person discord, do not post these
anywhere else. This is not stuff that you're allowed to share.
This is just for your eyes because we're friends, right.
He does not intend for this to get out. But

(21:29):
here's the thing. All of his friends in this group
are like dumb kids, and just like those people on
war Thunder, they start getting into arguments with people outside
of the discords yet and other discords discords. One of
them is a fan discord for some other YouTuber, one
of them is the discord is a Minecraft discord, and
they get into arguments with random other users about like

(21:52):
the war in Ukraine and stuff. And when they're having
those arguments, they'll hear someone make a point and they'll
think back to a top secret document that OGPO and
they'll be like, well, I know you're wrong because I've
seen like some CIA like satellite footage that like shows
that this isn't accurate. And rather than being like, well,
I guess I can't prove this person wrong on the

(22:12):
internet without exposing my friend in our private discord to
being imprisoned for the decade, they just grab top secret
documents that he posted and they post them in these
other discords. And that's how this shit breaks containment. Right now,
It's one of those things I do want to note that, like,

(22:35):
these are not generally speaking, super pleasant people. OG is
the kind of guy who, like one of his big
arguments that he tries to like make to these kids,
he like claims that based on the top secret info
he has, which he posts, nothing that proves this, the
mass shooting in Buffalo, New York by that Nazi at
that majority you know, black frequented grocery store, that that

(23:00):
was like a government plot to institute gun control, and shit,
it was a false flag. So he's not just posting good.
He's like lying here too, because obviously there's no intelligence
to post backing that up. He just he's just kind
of trying to It's a mix of he's trying to
like prove that, you know, he's trying to make arguments
about like what's happening, you know, in various overseas conflicts

(23:20):
using at US intel, but he's also just like spreading
different kind of conspiracy theories that he has to these
kids who are by and large looking up to him.
There's a couple like the Washington Post has done some
really deep reporting where they talk to some of these
kids who they're like, yeah, man, we loved him, Like
when he realized this shit had broken containment, he like

(23:41):
called us and we were all crying because we knew
he was going to go to prison. Like there they
seem legitimately distraught. Yeah, there's like lines like he said
something had happened, and he prayed to God that this
event would not happen, but now it's in God's hands.
Like these are like weirdo ashy. I hesitate to like

(24:02):
condemn like the literal children too much because they're very vulnerable.
This guy is like by This guy is a bad
person who is deeply like in a very fucked up way,
influencing this group of like thirty ish teenagers on the
internet in his like weird politics. It's not great. Now
that's separate from the question of like is there a

(24:24):
value to these leagues, which we can talk about in
a little bit. But so as we've talked about Eric
Tohler tracks down where this is happening, tracks down like
the name Og publishes a piece on Belling Cat. It's
sort of ripped off by like I don't know it
does like every other newspaper in the world, and then
additional reporting is done Belling Cat and The New York

(24:46):
Times team up and they eventually like track down and
publish an article on who this guy is, an airman
named Jack Tik Sarah, And they publish an article about
that about a day before this guy gets arrested by
the FBI. And it's one of those things, one of

(25:07):
the if you if you look at the FBI Affid David,
it kind of makes clear how the FBI cracked this
guy down and found him because they did so, you know,
using the resources they had before the Times did online.
People have been going after The Times and Eric for
like revealing this guy to the government, which is not
the case. Basically, once it became clear what had gotten leaked,

(25:30):
the FBI, because they had access to you know, the
systems by which people utilize and get access to sensitive
compartmented information, found out who had most recently like on
the days that kind of corresponded to the leaks, pulled
up information about that and narrowed it down to this
guy Jack. They like it, and they were they had

(25:53):
access to Like one of the things they did is
they called Discord and talked to Discord, and Discord helped
them track down where the leaks were originating. From. And
then because they could see that the account that had
posted you know, the top secret data originally was a
paid account, they were able to like provide the FBI
with this guy's home address and the shit. This is
exactly what you'd expect for the f.

Speaker 3 (26:14):
Yeah, I mean, the FBI has a lot of non
open source means to do this type of investigation.

Speaker 1 (26:20):
Yeah, they are not doing what Eric is doing and
just kind of like clicking through shit for hours and
hours and hours until they figure out where it's come from.
Like they have they are the FBI, they have access
to other things, and.

Speaker 2 (26:32):
It's what you'd expect from Discord too, right, Like they
will comply with whatever they absolutely these are top secret
that like if they don't have a legal choice here,
they're a gigantic company, they're going to comply.

Speaker 1 (26:45):
So this is the kind of thing where like one
of the there's this big argument I don't even even
though it's big, but there's definitely like a weird chunk
of the left that has like leaned on because the
right has immediately started calling this guy a whistleblower. Fucking
Marjorie Taylor Green was like he's a Christian and he's
a leaker trying to expose crucial details about our government,

(27:07):
and no he wasn't. He was like trying to fucking
groom some teenagers and they posted it without his permission.

Speaker 3 (27:14):
And a lot of a lot of the more conspiracy
type stuff is like trying to call out like you know,
it's a lot of the more conspiracy related stuff is
related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and making it
seem like the US is doing things that are wrong
and secretly helping the Ukrainians too much, and it kind

(27:35):
of it it plays into this weird, weird thing that
people have against the way Biden's been handling the geopolitics
around the Russian invasion, and it's like it it plays
into a whole bunch of right wing talking points we've
seen around Russia. You know, We've seen this type of
stuff get talked about by Tucker Carlson quite often. There's
there's a there's a whole bunch of like little nodes

(27:57):
that this that that this touches on, and we even
we even see stuff like that among like you know,
people who are authoritarian communists, right who are who are
still pro Russia despite Russia not being a communist country,
but still like being like, oh, there, you know, this
is something he's trying to expose the things that are

(28:19):
people are doing wrong to Russia, and it's like okay,
all right.

Speaker 1 (28:22):
Yeah, yeah, and to me it's one of them. And
there's also you've gotten among some chunks of this attitude
that like, well, you know, I don't care why he
did it or like what he is in his personal life.
Any leak you know of the US military machine is
good and should be you know, protected. And it's like,
for one thing, this guy like nobody knew where these
things were coming from. There was a vested need in

(28:44):
sort of figuring out what the origin point was to
figure out if they were accurate. But for like another thing,
I don't know, man, you can argue about like what
point you know, the digging, whether or not, like the
it's ethical to dig this shit back to its source.
I would argue that like people also have a right
to know if there's some sort of fucking like like

(29:06):
if the documents were fake or altered in some way,
there was a reason to be trying to figure out
the providence of this shit. But more to the point,
like I think it's good to have access to like
data from inside of our military. I think that's that's
broadly positive. And when I look at these data, or
when I look at what's been leaked, I don't think
most of it's you know, one of the concerns that's

(29:27):
always that always exist when you're talking about a leak
of data is like, is this going to expose like
potentially innocent people to any kind of arm And there
is a potential for that with some of this, because
some of it dealt with Ukrainian military readiness for the
upcoming offensive, and like, well, like I don't really care
if some guy inside the Kremlin who's like a member

(29:49):
of the Russian General Staff and a double I don't
care if that guy, like something bad happens to him.
He's probably not a great dude. But but I do
care about like a bunch of random Ukrainian soldier potentially
getting harmed. Now, I will say, from what I can
tell from this, I think the odds of that are
pretty low. It looks like this has impacted kind of
the timetable for the counter offensive, but I don't know

(30:11):
that it's I haven't seen any evidence that it's exposed
things in a way that's like going to cause loss
of life, although it's a little bit unclear as to
whether that not that might happen. But also, while I
think it's accurate to say, I'm not saying evidence that
like a lot of people's safety have been harmed by
these leaks, it's also not you know, what we're It's

(30:32):
not anything like what Snowden did or what Manning did.
Right again, Manning revealed, you know, videos like the collateral
murder video, evidence of like breakdowns of order and things
that I think are accurate to call war crimes that
were being kind of hidden by our government, whereas Snowden
revealed intense details about an n Essay spying program. All

(30:53):
of that's extremely relevant to the average American. Most of
this is just kind of like wonky inside base fall
military stuff, which again I'm not like sad that it's
gotten out, but it's also not It really does seem
like a bunch of shit that like a guy pulled
out based on his own kind of like weird interests.

(31:14):
It's not there's not like a strong unifying theme around them.
And again, most of it's most of it's shit that's
not going to be interesting to the average person. One
of the documents I just read an article about, because like,
we don't entirely know everything that was leaked right now,
right there's been there's like the Post in the time
seem to have a pretty complete archive of what was leaked,
but they haven't published anything because you know, they're reading

(31:36):
through it and you know, actually reporting it out. One
of the articles that just came out was about the
fact that the Ukrainians made some overtures to the Kurdish
led self administration in in northern northeast Syria, to Rojava,
to the SDF in order to talk about the potential
for them attacking Russian assets in elsewhere in Syria. When

(32:00):
and this has kind of gotten out over like Twitter,
it's often been like described as, oh, the Ukrainians were
going to team up with the Courage to attacked Russia
in Syria, like like this was an actual, like serious plan.
Would you actually see the document? It seems a lot
less inciting than that. Basically, what happened was some folks
on the Ukrainian General staff or whatever were like looking

(32:23):
into the possibility, Hey, you know, is there any way
that we could kind of anything we could pay the
Kurds over in Syria to carry out an attack on
the Russians, and apparently they had access to somebody who
claimed to be in the SDF at least, and that
person was like, we might be able to do something
if you can get us some anti air defenses, right,
which I don't know how Ukraine could possibly ship meaningful

(32:45):
anti air defenses to northeast Syria. It's kind of bordered
on all sides. There is some stuff if you're a
walk in the region. There's some interesting stuff about this,
which is that the SDF basically responded, like we could
potentially do this, we couldn't attack Russian assets that are
within the borders of the self administration. Russians are acting
as peacekeepers there between Turkey and you know, it's kind

(33:08):
of desire to invade the entire region. They're not great
as peacekeepers. The Armenians will tell you that Russian soldiers
are not great, great givers. But the SDF didn't want
to like ship where they were eating, right, so there
was some like debate about where they might be able
to attack. One of the things that is really interesting
about this week is that apparently Ukraine like talk to

(33:28):
Turkey about this because obviously the Turks consider the core
of the SDF the YPG to be a terrorist organization.
But when Ukraine was talking to them, they're like, hey,
we might basically bribe these people to carry out an
attack on Russian assets elsewhere in Syria. Turkey was like, okay,
well don't do it here here here, because that's kind
of close to some our guys might like that. That

(33:49):
party is interesting. But again, none of this matters all
that much because nothing happened as far as we know.
In December, Zelenski was like, no, don't proceed with looking
into this. This is the kind of thing like the
US military has, like plans for what happens if you
have to fight Canada. This is the kind of thing
defense departments do. And as far as I can tell,

(34:11):
there's no evidence that went much for them, like a
series of phone calls right which, by the way, the
SDF denies ever happened. I don't know what exactly occurred.
I don't know if it's hard for me to tell.
Did the Ukrainians were they talking to someone who was
actually a representative of the sdf's like military hierarchy, or
was this like some guy that they thought was because
maybe Ukraine doesn't have great context into the air like

(34:33):
or did the US, And it's it's not kind of clear.
Did the US maybe like hook them up with somebody,
but it doesn't like at the at the end of
the day, you can argue, as someone who follows the region,
I find this kind of interesting. It's not exactly like groundbreaking,
you know, in its importance, because nothing happened, no one
did anything. This is like some guys in Ukraine thought

(34:55):
about doing a thing and then decided not to, which
is you know, potentially interesting context. But we're not talking
about the manning or the snowed in lakes here.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
Yeah, yeah, it's yeah, it's that particular document I think
is kind of clearly they have access to people who
have formally fought in Syria with the YPG right there.
There are probably dozens of them now fighting in Ukraine
without a volunteer units. Like it's it's not hard to
see how this thought came up. But like you said,
nothing really happened. It was just some people like spitbolling.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
So I don't know. There's some other like bits and
stuff in here that are kind of interesting. One of
them was there was a document in there about how
the US had kind of like interfered in peace negotiations
in Yemen due to like kind of concerns that they
had about the fact that China was kind of brokering
a degree of peace between the Houthi rebels in between

(35:50):
the Saudi government. There's definitely some like slightly some somewhat
shady shit from the US and there, but at the
end of the day, it didn't derail the peace negotiations.
It's just like, yeah, they were like like like and
a lot of it's like that where it's kind of
like this is useful context. I'm glad historians or journalists
reporting it out will have that. But at the end
of the day, like the fact that like, oh hey,

(36:12):
at one point in these peace negotiations the US was like,
you know, being being kind of a kind of a
dick isn't exactly like shocking. You know, It's not going
to like change your overall concept of what's happening over there.
It's not stuff that like is most of it's not
stuff that's like massively important important. It is really interesting

(36:34):
that the detail that are our defense establishment apparently has
from within the Russian government I do think it's worth
noting because we're talking like when we talk about sort
of the the provenance of these and the reliability of
these leaks. As they regard the war in Ukraine, there's
been a lot of talk about like, oh, this reveals

(36:55):
that like the Ukraine doesn't have the capacity to carry
out a counter offensive, or that the war has gone
much worse for them than they think. It is kind
of worth noting that, like, prior to the expanded Russian invasion,
all US military intelligence suggested that the Ukrainian government was
going to fold in a matter of days. So even

(37:16):
though a lot of this is top secret info, that
doesn't mean it's like one hundred percent accurate. Right Like
our guys, like think back to the Iraq War. Our
dudes get shipped right und constantly. It is. Again, this
is all really interesting, And I will say two things.
I think it's very funny that this this guy nuked

(37:36):
his entire life basically to impress children on a discord.
I think it's extremely funny. I have laughed many a
time at this. I also think it's like, like, as
someone who is interested in this stuff, interesting that and
good that we have this context. I don't think any
of this is like massively surprising or shocking. Like the

(37:57):
shit that's in that defense industry or intelligence agency analysis
of the Ukrainian position right now is like stuff that
you would know if you were paying attention to the
good ocent aggregators who have been covering the war, and
if you've been like just reading good reporting on what's
going on over there. I'll read a little bit of
a summary from an article that's kind of going over

(38:20):
some of the other stuff that appears to have been leaked.
One details information apparently obtained through US eavesdropping on Russia's
Foreign intelligence service and suggests that China approved the provision
of lethal aid to Russia and its war in Ukraine
early this year and planned to disguise its military equipment
as civilian items. Another includes details of a test conducted
by Beijing on one of its advanced experimental missiles, the

(38:41):
DF twenty seven Hypersonic light vehicle, on February twenty fifth.
It says the vehicle flew for twelve minutes across thirteen
hundred miles and that it possessed a high probability of
penetrating US ballistic missile defense systems. The documents contain new
details about a Chinese spy balloon dubbed Killeen twenty three
by US intelligence agencies, that earlier this year flew over
the UNI United States. They detail sophisticated surveillance equipment. US

(39:03):
intelligence agencies were aware of up to four additional Chinese
by balloons. The documents a and another previously unreported revelation,
and so let's kind of break that down. One thing
we have here is basically an argument through from the
US that based on their intercepts, they believe that China
has approved provisioning weaponry, selling weaponry to Russia and disguising

(39:26):
it as civilian items. That doesn't mean they have done this.
It means that, like there's sigent that someone in our
government has that says that they were. That could be
disinformation from them. It could be out of date. It
could be something like with this Ukraine and Syria thing
that they talked about doing and then didn't do. It's interesting,

(39:47):
I would say, if you are a defense industry reporter,
it's something that woul could should definitely spur you to
further reporting, because like that's really relevant if that's occurring.
But it's not the final word on the matter. Meanwhile,
you've got this thing on like, Yeah, this hypersonic missile
the Chinese had is good at shoot and shit. Theoretically,

(40:08):
this is you know, the kind of thing that's interesting
and I think is probably more accurate than you know,
talking about the China providing lethal aid because you can
kind of you know, theoretically you're looking at actual like
data on how the missile has performed. It just seems
like it's something that you've got more fidelity on. But
this is again to kind of contrast it with like

(40:30):
the snowed and Manning leaks. Well, what do you do
if like the NSSAY is spying on people? Well, you
could at least attempt to pass laws that restrict their
ability to do that. Right, What do you do if
there have been like war crimes committed by your military
that were then cover it up, Well, you can at
least attempt to prosecute people. What do you do if
some other countries got a better missile? Well, there's not

(40:53):
a whole lot for you to do sitting at home
and like New York City or you know, fucking Austin, Texas, Right, Like, like,
what are we to do about China's hyper I don't know.
My assumption, generally speaking, not that this is an interesting
but my assumption generally speaking is that when you're talking
about Russia, China, the United States, we can all murder
each other if we wanted to write, like we've all

(41:15):
got real nice missiles at this point. And it's this,
you know, the Chinese by balloon stuff is like interesting.
I don't think anyone's surprised by this. Like we knew
there was a spy balloon. I assumed it had sophisticated
surveillance technique. It's again, it's interesting that there were four
other spy balloons in the area. But we simply know
from older reporting that this happened like three or four

(41:36):
times while Trump was in office too, So like, yeah,
this is something we've known about. There's been reporting about.
This is corroboration. That's interesting. Again, none of this is
really like a sea change in our understanding of any
of these conflicts. It is interesting context. Some of it's
being blown up, you know, into stuff that it isn't.
There's reporting and like the number of US servicemen in

(41:57):
Ukraine that's being like spun is like we've got boots
on the ground there, and it's like, well, they're like
embassy guards and stuff. There's like twenty nine dudes that
this like confirmed. Michael, Yeah, yeah, this confirms there's not
a lot of US guys on the ground there.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
You send a lot of people when we're doing wars.
But yeah, like every embassy in the world has a
contingent of marines who make sure that it doesn't just
get Yeah. I don't want to say bang ghazied, but yeah, yeah,
you know big Ghazi. Yeah, that's fine. And this is
not new news to anyone who's been paying attention. But
if you are Michael Tracy, this is brain melting shit.

Speaker 1 (42:34):
Michael Tracy's a weirdo quasi left journalist who like early
on in the war he didn't want to go into
Ukraine very much, but he like hung out in Poland
and took pictures of like US soldiers and like a
facility that they were had been in for years and
was like, look, you know, this is evidence of the
secret US support. And it's like, guys, I mean, for

(42:56):
one thing, like look at this, Look at how much
shit just leaked out because some kid wanted to impress children.
If there were like like secret massive formations of US
troops or even large like forces of US specops guys
carrying out operations in Ukraine. How good do you think
they'd be at keeping that shit secret? Right? For one thing?

(43:17):
Like Special Forces guys get killed all the fucking time,
Like they get killed, they get overrun, like like's it's
a terrible risk for US to just like send Seal
Team six in to fight the Russians when spoilers, the
Ukrainians have really good Special Forces guys every bit as
good as ours actually with in a lot of cases
more experience fighting this kind of war. And we're given

(43:39):
And it's like, if you want to talk about US involvement,
we're giving them their weapons. Like we're involved fucking plenty.
There's just not much of a point in US like
sending the green fucking Berets into Bakamut, right, Like why
that doesn't That doesn't help us at all, That doesn't
like help our government. That's not like good for the military.

(44:00):
It would be stupid anyway, whatever, anything else to talk
about here?

Speaker 2 (44:06):
Do we want to talk about the Israel one?

Speaker 1 (44:09):
Oh yeah, no, this is one of the interest although
it's not again basically one of the things that leaked.
Is like the US is spying on all of its allies,
which this leaks every couple of years. We're always spying
on our allies, including Israel. Israel has spied on US
a bunch. That's why they have nuclear weapons. Yeah, James,
you want to talk about this.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yeah, So this is a document that basically what it
alleges is that what has been alleged, perhaps incorrectly, is
that it was encouraging Mossad staff to attend protests against
net Yahoo when he was attempting his liketo golpe like
his coup from within, what do you want to call that? Right,

(44:50):
he was attempting to centralize power, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Now it's a LEAQD. Like you said, it's a document.
It says that I'm quoting from it, or I'm quoting
from reporting on it. At least senior leaders of the
Mossad spy Service advocated for Mossad officials and Israeli citizens
to protest the new Israeli governments, proposed judicial reforms, including

(45:13):
several explicit calls to action that decried the Israeli government.
According to Singet Signals Intelligence, the Infamy, So actually Netanyahu
himself has been asked about this, and it's worth he
appointed the Mossad director, a guy called David I think
it's Baynya, and he has also he's on the record

(45:37):
previously in news media before this saying that he had
clarified to Mosad personnel who could attend protests and who
could not attend, like because at a certain point in
any of these things, that you're not allowed to be
explicitly political, right folks, even at a very low point
in the US military, Like you're not supposed to say

(45:58):
and do certain things. So there was a petition that
went out earlier, and again this has already been reported.
They that were sent by intelligence offices basically saying like,
we'll go on strike. And there had been again like
widely reported instances other Israeli military people saying that they

(46:21):
would go on strike or not shot up for work
if these judicial reforms went ahead. So I think again
it's been kind of we've really stretched. What was interesting
I thought was that it had a Feiser label on
FI series to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and if people

(46:42):
aren't familiar, basically it allows US intelligence to wire tap things,
which they can do it without warrant if it doesn't
include a US person. So a US person is not
just a citizen, but also maybe a permanent resident something
like that, right, like like a person who has more

(47:03):
rights than others in the United States. But in this
case they seem to have got a fis a warrant,
which it's very easy to get, right. It's like a
closed courtroom procedure where they go to a judge and
like it's not like an adversarial argument. Now there's no
one who argues that you should get the warrant, and
so in practice they nearly always get these warrants. But

(47:26):
what it showed they have to just prove it its
intelligence asset of a foreign power. And so it showed
that at some point they went for a judge and said, like, hey,
you know, we need to wiretap some kind of some
kind of communications or I'm using wiretap in the broad
sense or specific sense. But it's interesting I think that

(47:47):
that they have some intelligence asset in the United States
and said, hey, we know this an Israeli intelligence asset.
And to be clear that this could just be shits
going in and out of the embassy that they've decided
that they needed to wyattap that and keep an eye
on that now, given given that like it's Rael's foreign

(48:08):
policies has been talking terrible for decades, but net and
Yahoo is a new degree of crazy. Uh it is.
It's unsurprising that like anyone concerned with I guess international
relations would would want to know more about what is
going on.

Speaker 1 (48:24):
And again like that's it's interesting context. As you noted,
a lot of this had been reported out previously, So yeah,
we're it's it's just like it's it's it's all interesting again.
I'm my, my, my, My attitude here is like I'm
glad this information is out and I don't really care
what happens to Jack tech Sierra. Like yeah, in my

(48:47):
in my ideal world, the policing infrastructure that's come down
on this kid would not exist. But he made this
decision knowing full well what happened when you leak top secretly,
Like it's one of those things where it's like just
just within the context of shit that's fucked up in
our country. The thing I'm going to be upset about

(49:08):
is not a kid leaking top secret info to win
an online argument and then having it blow up on him, right, Like,
especially not a kid who's a fucking Nazi. At the
end of the day, he did something that was obviously done.
It's like if some guy hops on Twitter under his
real name and starts posting pictures of heroin and saying, hey, guys,

(49:29):
this is my name and address. I'm selling hella heroin.
Here's photos of a felony quantity of heroin and guns. Well,
I think heroin should be legal, but I'm not gonna, like,
I'm not gonna like make a crusade out of that
guy's arrest because that's stupid. Like, like, you know what
happens if you post, hey, here is my at home
address and name. Here is all of the heroin I'm selling. Yeah,

(49:51):
you'll probably get in trouble because you have posted online
a serious crime. Obviously that could be a problem for you.
That's not my primary concern in the world when people
do really stupid shit and it blows up on them
and it's like again, leakers, you look at the way
Manning proceeded, You look at the way Snowden proceeded. They

(50:12):
were aware of the danger of what they were doing.
I mean, you know, Chelsea did years in fucking prison.
Snowden fled the country. That's because because they were whistleblowers,
they under they under they understood this is a serious
like this is very illegal, and I have to try
to take steps to protect myself because the government's going

(50:33):
to come after me. The thing about Jack is like
just the level of like arrogance that like I can
post this shit all day long and nothing will happen.
It was like, well, for one thing, this is never
going like it's information you're posting online, Like I don't care.
There's no way to keep stuff completely contained within a
thirty person discord. It's going to leak out, and when

(50:53):
it is, the government's gonna want to know who the
fuck is leaking this ship. And you took like took
pictures of this shit inside his home, Like it's just dumb.
I'm not gonna like I don't at the end of
the day, I have no room in my sympathy for
like a fucking fascy kid who committed the dumbest crime
possible and got in trouble, Like I don't know. There's

(51:14):
there's people who I don't know. For example, we're camping
in a forest and are getting charged with terrorism and
facing longer penalties, Right, Jack might do fifteen years at
the most, which is like fucked up, I guess. But
you know, there's people facing a lot worse for a
lot less, and I just, you know, whatever, I don't

(51:35):
care what happens to this kid. He seems like he sucks.
I think the leaks are interesting. There's nothing in here
that's like fundamentally changed my understanding of geopolitics though. Yeah,
that's where I am.

Speaker 2 (51:48):
I would agree. It is a useful reminder to keep
your crime offline.

Speaker 1 (51:52):
Yeah, don't continue, continue to not post crimes on the internet.
If you're selling heroin, don't post on Twitter. Here is
my name and home address. Anyone want to buy some
fucking China white, that's not a great idea.

Speaker 3 (52:09):
If anyone has any top secret documents, you can find
me on the Star Wars the Old Republic forums. Just
just post, just post them there. Yeah, I am part
of the Jedi Initiative program, So just locate that and
it'll be I'm sure, I'm sure I'll see it.

Speaker 1 (52:25):
Yeah, I am on the the the Nozdormo server on
World of Warcraft. You can just hit me up under
my U my given name. Just dm me and we'll
figure it out. You can send that ship to me
over AOL instant messenger. That's how I take all of
my leaks. The most secure platform.

Speaker 2 (52:44):
You can find me in a Mountain Project comment section
where any good things happen.

Speaker 1 (52:47):
So we're all on war Thunder too, so you can
get there too for work reasons. Yeah, I'll be shipped talking.

Speaker 2 (52:55):
Your your grading on a problem, but also accepting national
security two weeks.

Speaker 1 (53:01):
Yeah, we do, We do it all, all right, everybody.
That's an episode, Hello podcast Enjoys.

Speaker 2 (53:21):
It's me James today and I am joined again by mo.
They are an educator, attorney, abolitionist, and they serve overlapping
communities of activists, queer people, and prisoners. And we've heard
from them before. We have from them about June eleventh,
but today we're talking about something a little different. We're
talking about redistributing power in the attorney client relationship. How

(53:44):
are you.

Speaker 7 (53:46):
I'm doing okay. How are you, James?

Speaker 2 (53:49):
I'm existing, I'm fine, I'm thriving. So, yeah, you wanted
to talk today? He reached out to talk about this.
I think it's a really interesting topic and one that,
like I've become increasingly more aware of in my coverage
of some sort of different stuff. That's various prosecutions, I

(54:10):
guess in the US, and so I was very interested
in this. Can you preps like start out by explaining
what it is exactly that you want you wanted to
discuss within the attorney client relationship.

Speaker 7 (54:24):
Yeah, sure. I wanted to talk about building a trusting
relationship with your attorney where you feel heard and respected
and understand what you have a right to expect from
your attorney and feel empowered to push for it. And
this actually I want to address this both from the

(54:46):
side of the client, particularly for people who are accused
of criminal offenses, and I also want to speak a
little bit to the people who may be representing folks
who are accused criminal offenses. For people accused of criminal offenses,
I want to make sure that anyone in that position

(55:07):
really understands what you have a right to expect from
that relationship and to feel really confident asking for it.
For people who are representing individuals who are politically radical
or people who are facing politically motivated prosecutions, I want
those attorneys to feel safe and ethically empowered to practice

(55:28):
criminal defense in a way that honors the goals of
clients who may define their legal interests not with respect
to only their own personal liability, but with respect to
a larger set of principles or a larger community.

Speaker 2 (55:48):
Yeah, I think, yeah, that's a very it's a good
distinction to draw, and I think a good thing for
people to be thinking about. So why is this sort
of a topic that's important right now?

Speaker 7 (56:01):
Well, so, I certainly don't want to say that participating
in protests or in social movements is dangerous, or that
it's even more dangerous than it has been in the past,
but I am concerned that we might be seeing some
arrests and charges that are a little more unhinged than

(56:23):
we've seen in a while. So this isn't new, but
it may be new to a newer generation of activists.
And I think some of the community knowledge that was
cultivated and held twenty or thirty years ago maybe outdated,
or it might be inaccessible to folks who weren't involved
back then, or maybe who weren't involved in things that

(56:44):
were like subject to this level of state repression twenty
or thirty years ago. So that includes activists, but it
also includes even very experienced criminal defense attorneys who maybe
haven't interacted with these kinds of pressingcutions, you know, for
whatever reason, because they were doing a different area of practice,

(57:05):
maybe because this what was happening to the people they
were representing in the geographic area where they practice, or
like it wasn't happening at the time that they were practicing.
So I think that people on both sides of the
attorney client relationship could benefit from considering that there are

(57:27):
some maybe important and time tested methods of working to
mount a collaborative defense in the context of a politically
motivated prosecution.

Speaker 2 (57:38):
Yeah, I think that's just to kind of piggyback off
what you said. I think it's incredibly valuable. Often, like
if you've been part of social movements, protest movements, what
if you want to call it, like for a long time.
Often we do have to learn things like the institutional
memory of movements can be quite short, and a lot

(57:59):
of people have come to the protest movement now who
were not, like in my own case, like involved in
sort of the campaign against neoliberal globalization in the early
two thousands, where we screwed up a lot and learned
a lot, and some of us are still around, and
some of us are not sadly yet because part of

(58:20):
the screw ups that that happened, and like a lot
of people understandably right have been radicalized by having their
bodily autonomy attacked by seeing the cops continue to murder
people after we all got in the streets and got
shot with robb bullets to ask them to stop murdering people.
Like all these things that have understandably made people realize
that the institutional the institutions haven't really responded to their

(58:44):
demands for basic human decency, and so yeah, they might
find themselves out in the streets and government doesn't generally
yield power willingly, and certainly government right now is doing
everything to kind of take what little liberty and autonomy
folk have slice into that. So it's very reasonable to
consider these things. So if in this attorney client relationship,

(59:09):
what would be some areas of friction or of maybe
I'm phrasing that wrong, but like places where people might
want to advocate for themselves in order to get an
outcome that they desire.

Speaker 7 (59:24):
Right, Well, so I'll certainly get more into the specifics,
but I guess you know, I want to talk about
this because I am seeing disconnects between people in these relationships,
and just from where I sit, I feel like I

(59:45):
can see what's going wrong, and I think that there
are some straightforward solutions, and I think that having compassion
each each party having compassion for the other can be
really useful here. So I think like one thing that's
happening is that attorneys are very much educated to be

(01:00:05):
confident unto the point of arrogance, and clients often either
don't feel authorized to push back on their attorney's ideas,
or they do and attorneys to then just maybe steamroll them.
And this is not entirely because attorneys are assholes. I

(01:00:27):
think it is because criminal defense attorneys are very often
taught to minimize their clients' legal liability by any means necessary, well,
by any lawful means. I guess that is what I
should say. So for criminal defense attorneys who do not
primarily work with movement aligned clients, this often means negotiating

(01:00:48):
deals with the prosecution that involve cooperating with the state's investigation,
handing over information on your confederates, putting the client in
an isolated or adversarial position with their co defendants or
co arrestees, or doing things that require a person to
renounce or disparage the people or the communities that they've

(01:01:11):
been involved with that they come from. And I think
it's true that using these kinds of tactics to minimize
your own legal risk is very often what people charged
with criminal offenses want, But that sort of approach is
often at odds with movement values, and it's often totally

(01:01:33):
inconsistent with what activists want. Activists want when they are
facing charges. So, you know, trying to minimize legal consequences is,
you know, certainly always a part of our job, and
it's often a totally valid thing for lawyers to be doing.

(01:01:53):
But the idea that an attorney's job is solely to
mitigate legal fallout is not actually entirely accurate. What lawyers
are supposed to do is work with the client to
help the client articulate their goals, and then the attorney
should use their expertise and their experience to help the

(01:02:15):
client lawfully pursue those goals. And that's what attorneys are
supposed to do in every case. But I think it
often becomes most salient when the client's goals are less
focused on minimizing legal consequences and more focused on, for example,
highlighting movement messages or acting in solidarity with other people

(01:02:37):
who are facing similar charges. So you know, again, I'm
talking about this right now in the context of explicitly
politically motivated prosecution, but frankly, the goals of the client
have to lead in all cases.

Speaker 2 (01:02:52):
Yeah, of course. So one thing that we've chatted, that
little bit that I think maybe folks in some areas
that I've looked at might not have been aware of.
It's a concept of a joint defense. Could you explain
for people who aren't familiar what that looks like.

Speaker 7 (01:03:09):
So, a joint defense is a way of approaching a
legal case where there are multiple defendants or multiple arrestees. Typically,
in a criminal case, if you have multiple defendants, there's
sort of a presumption that their interests are at odds

(01:03:30):
with each other, that you know, one of them or
one or more of them is going to get thrown
under the bus to reduce the punishment of one or
more of the others. When we're talking about something like
a mass arrest or an arrest that takes place in

(01:03:52):
the context of a social movement where there are multiple defendants,
very often those people do not see their interests at
being an odds with each other. Very often they see
their interests as being unified, and so they want to
act in solidarity with each other. And there are a
bunch of reasons for this that are legal, and they're

(01:04:17):
also political and social reasons, right, just in terms of
people you know, having carrying social relationships. They often have
commitments to each other and to community. But politically, people
often feel that their individual legal interests are less the

(01:04:41):
important thing that's at stake, and that the thing that's
at stake is actually the health and welfare of their
social movement, right, and that if they did do something
like cooperate with the state's investigation, they would actually be
undermining their larger social movement goals. Legally, and this is

(01:05:02):
really important legally, having a joint defense agreement or using
a joint defense approach allows all of those people to
work together in a privileged context, right because they share
a unity of interest, and so they and their attorneys
are able to work on legal strategy together, are able

(01:05:25):
to do things like negotiate for non cooperating plea agreements
as a block, are able to just have you know,
more eyes on the problem, more people doing legal research,
more people drafting motions, right, and so in a very
material sense, this is often a legal strategy. Working together

(01:05:56):
actually leads to better legal outcomes for every body involved.
So I want to be clear that this approach, both
you know, using joint defense agreements and using that approach,
but also just in terms of an individual attorney client relationship,
acting in a way that's more collaborative is not just cosmetic,

(01:06:19):
and it's not just something that makes you feel good
if you're someone who's committed to anti authoritarian principles. In
a material way, approaching the attorney client relationship in a
way that is calculated to more fully incorporate the goals
and expertise of the client or of many clients leads

(01:06:41):
to better legal outcomes, less punitive outcomes. It leads to
outcomes that are more closely aligned with client values, and
it leads to outcomes that are better understood by the client,
even if those outcomes are.

Speaker 2 (01:06:57):
Bad, right, yeah, yeah, least they're part of that process.
And I think a great example of joint defense that
we discussed would be the J twenty case. Right, If
I'm not mistaken, it was a group of folks who
were tried together or who amounted to joint defense I
guess against charges that were like fouled against some Trump's inauguration.

Speaker 7 (01:07:23):
It was something they were cattled in DC protesting Trump's inauguration,
and there were more than two hundred people arrested in
this mass arrest, and they had a very coordinated defense,
and they all worked together, and ultimately, I'm going to say,

(01:07:44):
in large part because they had so many eyes on
the problem, they had so many people working on it,
they were able to really go through discovery, go through
the state's evidence against them, and find prosecutorial misconduct that

(01:08:05):
led to the favorable resolution of those cases. The other
thing that they did is that they really all refused
to cooperate with the state's investigation, which limited the harm
that was done to larger social movements because it meant
that people were not just rolling over on each other

(01:08:25):
and giving the state information to which it was not entitled, right,
like you know, information about people's relationships or interpersonal conflicts,
or you know, different kinds of First Amendment protected information
that the state always wants to have about activists but

(01:08:47):
which they actually are not entitled to, but which they
often end up getting because people who are facing criminal charges.
You know, sometimes will will offer that up in exchange
for you know, what they hope will be some lenience.

Speaker 2 (01:09:11):
I think that was a really good explanation of of
how these techniques, like you say, they're not just cosmetic.
It's not posturing or an aesthetic thing. It can result
in material benefits as well as aligning with your moral desires.
Can you explain substantively then, how this looks in an
attorney client relationship, either with an individual or as a group,

(01:09:34):
Matt your joint defense.

Speaker 7 (01:09:38):
So, you know, like any other relationship that's predicated on
anti authoritarian principles and shared values of mutual aid and
self determination, it requires building trust. It requires clear expectations,
honest communication, respect for each other's expertise and consent. And

(01:10:00):
I think, you know, the piece that I think is
sometimes missing is a real understanding from both parties that
the accused is the person who has rights and liberty
on the line. The accused is the person whose goals matter.
The accused is the person who needs to be able
to make decisions about things like whether or not to

(01:10:21):
accept a plea offer, whether or not to cooperate with
the state, whether or not to go to trial and
whether or not to testify a trial. The attorney is
presumably the person who has a lot of expertise with
the law and a lot of experience with the legal system,
and that is valuable and important. But you know it,

(01:10:43):
really I want people who are facing criminal charges to
understand how much power they ought to feel comfortable exercising
in this relationship. You know, it is up to the
accused whether they want their attorney to take part in
a joint defense strategy. Now we are seeing some stuff.
I have recently seen some bond conditions imposed on people

(01:11:08):
facing criminal charges that appear to me to make it
very difficult for attorneys to engage in a joint defense
strategy because sometimes it looks like these co defendants are
being forbidden from communicating with each other, and so, you know,

(01:11:28):
that is an interesting wrinkle. But one of the things
that can mean is that it's up to the accused
whether they need their attorney to go and argue to
have that bond condition removed.

Speaker 2 (01:11:39):
Right, Yeah, I thought of that, But there are definitely
especially if you are being proscuted in a group it's
alleged to you've conspired to do something illegal, then yes,
that might be condition of your bond, and that would
make it very hard to do a joint defense. But
like you said, that's when you should feel empowered to
ask your attorney to stop that from being a thing.

Speaker 7 (01:12:01):
Right, Right, the person who's facing charges gets to make
these decisions, right, And I'm saying, well, it's your right
to decide whether to be involved in a joint defense.
It's also your right to decide not to be. You
can absolutely exercise your right to independent counsel, meaning the
right to have an attorney who is not representing anyone

(01:12:22):
else who's involved in your case, like who is not
in any way connected to a co defendant or co arrest. Now,
this is not to say that your attorney has to
do everything you want and they're just a yes man,
and that if they decline to do everything you instruct
them to do, that you should fire them. You know,
attorneys do have to operate under certain constraints, and this

(01:12:44):
ranges from things like, you know, some law is not
relevant to this case. Right. I've occasionally had clients ask
me to use the uniform commercial Code to defend their
criminal cases, which is not a thing. And you know,
I've also had clients ask me to like hold have

(01:13:06):
a hearing or vile emotion at a time when like
procedurally that's not permissible, right, So you know, you can't
just do everything that the client says. But look, typically
the attorney has control over legal strategy because you know,
as I said, presumably they have expertise with the law.

(01:13:28):
But like, even if you have decided that you're just
going to defer to your attorney entirely in matters of strategy,
or even if you have an attorney who's like not
super comfortable involving you in strategy to the degree that
like I might be, at a minimum, the attorney needs

(01:13:49):
to be able to explain their strategy to you and
justify it right. So you know, again there needs to
be mutual trust and respect for each other. So expertise,
they're not just a mouthpiece. But if you feel like
they're genuinely not listening to your goals or not helping
you to understand what's happening, or they're actively disrespectful, it's

(01:14:11):
really important for you to know you can fire your attorney.

Speaker 2 (01:14:15):
Yeah. I think the one area of at least where
I've become aware of this is somebody whose attorney was
either refusing to or somehow was incapable of gendering them
in the way that they would like to be gendered.
And in cases like that, you have the right to
ask your journey, you're your attorney, to use whatever pronouns
you prefer, and to be referred to using those pronouns.

(01:14:37):
Is that is that right?

Speaker 7 (01:14:40):
Absolutely? Absolutely. I've certainly heard horror stories, and not just
and I'll speak to this in a second. I have
heard horror stories not just about public defenders, but also
about private counsel being you know, casually race cyst being misogynist,

(01:15:03):
being transphobic, and you know, being ablest, being really disrespectful
and classist, particularly around things like transportation and childcare. So
you know, if you have an attorney who's just straight
rude or being disrespectful or like being oppressive in some way,

(01:15:25):
I would say, you know, the first step I suppose
would be to bring it to their attention, and if
they don't, if they are not responsive, you know, you
should know that you do have a right to choose
your own attorney. Now, I do understand that there are

(01:15:47):
you know, financial issues with just choosing your own attorney,
but particularly in the context of you know, movement related prosecutions.
They're often not always, but often resources available to you
where people will either work to find you someone who

(01:16:10):
can represent you pro bono or you know, will raise money.
And the other thing is that if you have a
public defender, you can almost always have appointed counsel from
another office if you have some kind of irretrievable conflict

(01:16:33):
with your attorney.

Speaker 2 (01:16:34):
So I think we should talk about public defenders a
bit because I think sometimes people can think that like
that they're sort of the worst option, or like the
bargain basement choice or what have you. Went In fact,
there are some things you can get with a public
defender you're very unlikely to get with private counsel and
absolute yea, let's talk about public defenders a little bit.

Speaker 7 (01:16:55):
Sure, I would love to. I love public defenders actually
in large cities that have what we would call institutional
public defenders as opposed to you know, everyone takes a
turn being a public defender for one week out of
the year. You know, people who want to be public

(01:17:20):
defenders do not go into public defense for the big bucks.
They go into it because they care about defending people
and keeping people out of jail, and very often, you know,
the people who are in those positions care very much

(01:17:40):
and are really really well trained, and they are not dummies,
and they will work really hard for you. And I
do want to push back against the widespread perception that
public defenders are not good attorneys. They very often are
the best available option are often in very very good hands. No,

(01:18:02):
this isn't to say that you're never going to come
across a public defender who is rude or incompetent in
some way some way, but I would really really caution
you against assuming that the public defender is not a
super qualified, committed attorney. The other thing is that the

(01:18:25):
offices of the public defender often have resources available to
them that private counsel do not. You know, they have investigators,
they have social workers, they have vouchers for public transportation,
and all of those things are resources that I think
can be very useful in supporting someone who's facing criminal charges.

(01:18:53):
So again, you know, certainly, if you're having some kind
of interpersonal problem with your defender or any attorney, I
want you to feel really really empowered to address it
and hopefully they're able to, you know, respond in a
way that's appropriate. And explain what's going on and you

(01:19:15):
know why things are happening in whatever way they are.
But I think it would be a mistake to dismiss
the public defender as a good option.

Speaker 2 (01:19:27):
Yeah, yeah, I agree. I know some public defenders, and
some of them are really great people, very very committed,
like you say, to keeping folks out of jail, which
is his goal in a lot of these cases.

Speaker 7 (01:19:38):
Some of my best friends are public defenders.

Speaker 2 (01:19:40):
No, they don't, and like I, people obviously will be.
I guess a lot of people in some who are
anti authoritarian right are going to be like less im
positively aligned with any sort of institutions or feel concerned
about interacting with people who are part of these institutions.
But like, as far as those people exist within those
institutions to keep people out of much worse institutions like jails.

Speaker 7 (01:20:06):
I think a lot of people who do public defense
really have the sense that they're you know, that their
mission is harm reduction, right, and they're prepared to operate
in the confines of what are sometimes sort of leviathan
bureaucracies in order to achieve that.

Speaker 2 (01:20:26):
Yeah, and maybe a lot of folks would have run
into I certainly know. I'm a lot of public twenties
in twenty twenty in the course of covering protest, and yeah,
it's pretty clear that those folks were largely aligned with
good things, with stopping the state doing violence to people
in all of the different ways that it does that. Well,
is there anything else that you'd like us to get

(01:20:48):
to with respect to these relationships people might have with
their attorney?

Speaker 7 (01:20:53):
Yeah, I say this a lot. Attorneys have an obligation
to give their clients their best understanding of what's going on,
what paths are available to take, and the possible or
likely outcomes of each of those paths. Right, an attorney

(01:21:13):
has an obligation to give you the best possible legal
advice based on your articulated goals, their understanding of the law,
their experience, and their clinical judgment, and their clients have
no corresponding obligation to follow that advice, which can be

(01:21:36):
frustrating from where I sit, but it is nevertheless a
critical attribute of my work that I do not get
to make big decisions for other people. They get to
make decisions that I would not make if I were
allowed to make them, But I'm not. I think that

(01:22:03):
you know, I try to be really transparent with my
clients about what my ethical commitments are, what I will
do for them, what I'm not allowed to do for them.
You know, I try to have those conversations in an
ongoing way. I don't know that that's common practice. I
think people are really busy and that's a hard practice

(01:22:25):
to maintain. But I want to encourage people who are
in an attorney client relationship to initiate those conversations, right.

Speaker 4 (01:22:37):
I guess.

Speaker 7 (01:22:37):
The only other thing I would say is, you know,
if you have concerns with your lawyer, address those concerns immediately,
because the farther into a case you are, the harder
it is to have that conversation, and the farther into
a case you are, the harder it is to fire
your lawyer. Typically, you have a right to choose your

(01:23:00):
own attorney, but if you're, you know, one week out
from going to trial, the judge may not allow you
to do it. Yeah, right, So yeah, I mean, I guess,
I just I just wanted to tell anyone who's listening

(01:23:22):
that if you are in a situation where you have
to have a relationship with an attorney, you know, it's
already probably kind of a bad situation, and you should
be in a relationship where you feel like your lawyer
is taking all of your goals seriously, which includes not
just your straightforward legal goals, but movement support and solidarity.

(01:23:48):
And if your lawyer is disrespecting your goals, or disrespecting
your identities, or disrespecting other kinds of ethical commitments you have,
you can choose to find a different attorney and are
resources available, and ultimately these decisions are yours. And then
I had some resources that I wanted to be great.

(01:24:11):
So for people who may be accused of criminal offenses,
there's a really great book called The Tilted Guide to
Being a Defendant, and if you google that you can
find a free pdf of it. I would also encourage
people to reach out to and to become non lawyer

(01:24:32):
legal workers, So people who have, you know, experience with
jail support, people who have experience with court support, and
with providing sort of community support to people who are
facing charges. If you are somebody who has an ongoing case,
having a support committee that includes at least one legal

(01:24:55):
worker can be just so critical in maintaining morale and
in feeling supported and in having the wherewithal to be
an active participant in your own defense. And we do

(01:25:15):
know that when people are active participants in their own defense,
they have better legal outcomes.

Speaker 2 (01:25:24):
Yes, I would imagine even if they don't have better
legal outcomes, they have ones that are easier for them
to understand the more satisfactory because of that.

Speaker 7 (01:25:32):
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, there are a lot of times when
there are no good options on the table. I don't
I want to be very clear, being an active participant
in your own defense or having a really great attorney
who really listens to you and respects your goals, does
not mean that you are not going to experience punishment

(01:25:54):
or state repression. It means that you are going to
have a better handle on what your options are and
why things are happening in the way that they are. So,
even if you end up in a situation that involves,
you know, for example, spending time in carceroal confinement, you

(01:26:14):
will at least understand how you got there, and you
will understand what the other possible options were. Right, you know,
somebody might choose to endure punishment rather than cooperate with
the state. And even if that is not what most

(01:26:38):
people would understand, as a better legal outcome. It is
an outcome that at least was more intentionally pursued than
the alternative.

Speaker 2 (01:26:51):
Yes, yeah, yeah, So where could people find these these
non lower legal workers if they wanted to add one,
or if they know if they wanted support from one.

Speaker 7 (01:27:04):
If people wanted to find legal workers in their own community,
I mean typically they're they're involved with movements, they might
be associated with your local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild,
they might be the people who are most active in
jail support. If you really can't find anybody, you can

(01:27:27):
call the National Lawyer's Guild Anti Repression hotline if you
are actively facing charges. That number is two one two
six seven nine two eight one one, and we can
try to connect with you with appropriate legal resources in
your community. That is one way that I would encourage

(01:27:48):
people to reach out if you are facing charges and
you're having a hard time connecting with legal resources. That
hotline is mostly for federal federal cases and for federal repression,
but if you call it, we will do our best

(01:28:10):
to connect you with appropriate resources wherever you are. And
there are also some resources for lawyers that I wanted
to hy appear, which are first of all the National
Lawyer's Guild, which is a bar association for people who
value human rights over property rights.

Speaker 2 (01:28:31):
What a dark situation that this is the subset of
human beings. Yeah, that the nalgy are great some positive
energy experiences.

Speaker 7 (01:28:41):
What a dark situation that it hadn't occurred to me.
How telling that was about lawyers as a whole.

Speaker 2 (01:28:50):
Yeah, when a subset of your the subset of my
profession is equally the dark and terrible people, we just
have to try and be bettering. Guess.

Speaker 7 (01:29:01):
The other thing that is available for attorneys who are
interested is there's a book put out by the same
people who wrote The Tilted Guide to Being a Defendant
for attorneys, and it's called Representing Radicals. And that is
I think available through ak Press.

Speaker 2 (01:29:20):
You should buy it from Akape Press directly and not
from Jeffrey Bezos in any way.

Speaker 7 (01:29:25):
Thank you. But and the other thing is there are
a lot of attorneys around the country who are more
than happy to consult, to act as mentors, to share motions,
to share legal research. The people who work in movement

(01:29:46):
spaces as lawyers, are typically always prepared to share our
experience and resources because we have a stake in other
people becoming really good at this. You know, you know,
my goal is to have fewer clients. So if anyone

(01:30:07):
is interested in helping me to achieve that goal, either
by going to law school or by taking some of
my clients or taking some of the people who might
otherwise be my clients, please I would be delighted to
shepherd you into movement defense.

Speaker 2 (01:30:30):
Yeah, that would be great. If we have any little
like budding movement defenders, how would they be able to
find you?

Speaker 7 (01:30:38):
Oh? Yes, if you would like to find me on
the internet, please don't. But I do have a website
that you can find if you google me. It is
mo at Law and I am pretty available if you
reach out to me by email and have questions. But

(01:31:00):
generally when I come on these things, the only thing
I have to plug is the concept of not talking
to cops.

Speaker 2 (01:31:07):
I want to do an episode on that. Maybe we'll
do it one day. I think we should do an
expanded how to not talk to Cops guide the.

Speaker 7 (01:31:16):
I guess it's not just the concept of not talking
to cops, it's actually the practice of not talking to cops.

Speaker 2 (01:31:21):
And certainly like it's somebody myself here that lives on
the border and has to deal with all kinds of
different jurisdictions of cops on an almost daily basis, just
in the travel I need to do to live my life.
It can be complicated and scary, and if you're not
a citizen, it becomes even more complicated and scary. So,
oh yeah, that's the thing we should discuss in detail.

Speaker 7 (01:31:41):
I would like to say that, apart from some very
very specific exceptions that involve being at borders or being
subpoenaed to a federal granchurie, you never have an obligation
to talk to cops, to answer their questions, or to

(01:32:04):
cooperate with their investigations. That doesn't mean you can obstruct
their investigations, but you absolutely have no affirmative obligation to
speak to police officers. And if they ask you, if
they are trying to interrogate you or ask you questions,
you can say I am going to remain silent and
I want to speak to a lawyer. And if the

(01:32:25):
FEDS show up at your house or call you on
the phone, or come to your office or your place
of work, you can say, I am represented by counsel.
Please leave your name at number, and my lawyer will
call you.

Speaker 2 (01:32:37):
Okay, Yeah, it's good to have scripts. I want to Yeah,
I think we should. We should break down in detail
some more socenarios. We should do it in another episode
because it'll be maybe a bit longer. Yes, and yeah,
I think folks, maybe I think everyone understands the concept.
But the practice, and there's that advice you given their
is great.

Speaker 7 (01:32:58):
Yeah. And if if you don't yet have an attorney
and you feel uncomfortable saying I'm represented by counsel, you
can just say, please leave your name and number and
my lawyer will call you. And then you can call
the National Lawyer's Skilled Anti Federal Repression Hotline at two
and two six seven nine two eight point one and
have a privileged conversation about your rights, risks and responsibilities

(01:33:22):
and we can connect you with an attorney in your area.

Speaker 5 (01:33:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:33:26):
That is excellent, actionable advice. Yeah, thank you so much
for giving us so much of your time and help. Yeah,
I really appreciate it. I'm sureveryone else does too.

Speaker 7 (01:33:38):
At all. It's my pleasure. I am always available to
come and talk to you about various the various rights
of people accused of criminal offenses. Usually I am talking
about your rights with respect to the state. But it
has become really evident that I needed to talk about

(01:34:00):
people's rights with respect to their own attorneys.

Speaker 2 (01:34:03):
It's empowering for people to hear this, So I'm glad
we talked about it too.

Speaker 1 (01:34:23):
It could happen here. It in Today's Harlance, meaning Tucker
Carlson getting fired, because that's what we're talking about today
is Today is one of our classic timely reaction episodes
to the firing of Fox News fascist and popular anti

(01:34:43):
semite Tucker Carlson. Today on the show to chat about
all of this, I've got Garrison Davis, James Stout, Mio Wong,
and Sophie Lichterman. Hi, everybody, Wow, where's the.

Speaker 5 (01:34:57):
Last time we got like the whole crew together.

Speaker 1 (01:35:01):
A long time? This? This is the bulk of us.

Speaker 2 (01:35:03):
Yeah. Yeah, And Sophie wasn't here for the com episode.

Speaker 1 (01:35:07):
No, Sophie. Sophie refused to be on for the com episode,
threatening to quit, uh sadly. Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:35:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:35:17):
But so you know, today is a couple of days
since we all got the surprising news that Tucker has
been let go at Fox. This was news that was
surprising to Tucker There's a couple of things that are
funny about the announcement itself, namely that he signed off
his last episode saying, see you guys next week. Fox

(01:35:41):
Play in the messaging they've put out was like, you know,
we both agreed that he needed to leave the network,
that this is an amicable split. The Brian Kilmead, who
replaced him the next episode with Fox News tonight, was like,
Tucker and I are still good friends. He's just decided
mutually to take a leave from the company. This is

(01:36:04):
definitely not true. We'll talk a little bit about all
of this, but the gist of I think it's kind
of worth talking about, like why this happened. As far
as we know, there's not, you know, objective kind of
confirmation about why specifically he got fired, but the broad speculation.

(01:36:28):
Some articles have like quoted a Fox News insider who
says that it was due to something either he said
in a recorded but unaired episode of the show, or
that it was something that was found in the emails
that were revealed during discovery that was profoundly anti semitic.
I've heard out like in one source at least said

(01:36:51):
that it was anti semitic enough that it might have
been legally actionable. That's obviously like what the fuck? I
would love to know what that's civically means. But what
we do know is that a former producer for The
Tucker Carlson Show who was a booking for him, is
currently suing the network both for a hostile work environment.

(01:37:14):
She claims that she was exposed to intense anti Semitism
while working there, and she alleges that she was basically
threatened into changing her deposition. So the lawsuit came alongside
her like issuing a correction to her deposition and saying
that she had basically lied in order like because she

(01:37:36):
was being threatened by people at Fox, which is like,
so there's a lot going on here. So that's kind
of the gist of what we know right now as
to like why he got shit canned. Yeah, that's that's
that's the basics.

Speaker 5 (01:37:52):
It's interesting too that he it's been like a day
now and he has said nothing. There have been multiple
people who said that he's not responding to his texts,
which is extremely funny. He I saw one report that
I don't I don't know how accurate is. I saw
one report that says he found out ten minutes before
Fox like released the statement.

Speaker 1 (01:38:11):
Yeah, he was in contract negotiations, so he was in
the middle of presumably getting Fox to agree to pay
him a shitload more money.

Speaker 2 (01:38:21):
Yeah, and now he has no money, which is very funny.

Speaker 3 (01:38:24):
Well, yeah, he'll still probably get a lot of money somehow.

Speaker 4 (01:38:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:38:27):
Yeah, i'd be interesting to see if he like pivots
to something like like o Ann or News Max. I
don't know if they have the means to pay him
what he would probably see.

Speaker 3 (01:38:37):
Yeah, No, I mean this is this is one of
the questions kind of following this and how and how
this decision is gonna affect, you know, politics going forward,
especially with twenty twenty four. Two big questions being where
is Tucker going to go and who is going to
take his place? For the next few weeks, Fox is
probably just going to be doing like a rotating selection

(01:39:00):
of hosts until they like make a final decision. So
you know, a lot of people could could end up
end up with that job. But in terms of where
he's going, there's there's a few interesting options. Now it
kind of does come down to who's going to be
willing to pay the probably pretty high price, or if
he's just going to try to stay independent. But I
think something like Newsmax isn't isn't out of the question.

(01:39:25):
I think I think this that this is this is
just like a guess, but I think there's a decent
chance that The Daily Wire is going to go after
him really hard.

Speaker 1 (01:39:34):
Yeah, he's already.

Speaker 3 (01:39:35):
Pretty friendly with a lot of the people there. They've
been willing to dishout a lot of money for someone
like Stephen Crowder. Now Tucker will be undoubtedly more, but
also he's going to be more of a pull, and
that that is something that's entirely possible. I mean, the
Daily Wire already produces like usually two of the most
popular podcasts in the world, like in the top ten.

(01:39:56):
They already have a lot, They have a lot of
web traffic. They don't have like cable, but they get
a lot of like other other ways to to to
spread their work.

Speaker 2 (01:40:07):
They have a paid streaming service they yes, yes, they
also have The Daily Plus.

Speaker 1 (01:40:13):
Yep, they are. I think that they're probably the only
people in the right that can offer Tucker both money
that's broadly in line with what Fox could and an
audience that's that's sizeable. Potentially even an audience that's larger.
One of the things to kind of keep in mind
is that Tucker was going to get out three and
a half million viewers a night somewhere around there, which

(01:40:36):
made him the most popular uh host on cable news,
but also is minuscule based on historical number one, minuscule
based on the kind of audiences that like you can
get on streaming platforms today, which are much larger than
cable audiences, And is minuscule based on like I mean,

(01:40:58):
it was like ten years ago that three and a
half million viewers on a night ten fifteen years ago
would have been like an unsuccessful show on ANBC, right,
uh for for some for some perspective, the most successful
TV finale of all time was the Mash finale, which
had like one hundred and five million viewers. Like cable,
cable don't or you know, television period does not get

(01:41:20):
the kind of viewership that it does anymore. And I
think when you're looking at Tucker, he is the the
main draw for him has to be the audience. He's
not and he's the heir to the Campbell or to
the Swanson, you know, dinner of Fortune. He cannot be
motivated primarily by the paycheck. Right that that that there's

(01:41:41):
he's simply like it. Just that can't be the reason
he's doing it. It has to be the the fame,
you know, And so Daily Wire I think is a
likely place for him as a result of that.

Speaker 2 (01:41:57):
Yeah, another thing that's interesting I thought it is okay
Man mentioned that he hasn't said anything yet and he's
probably taking advice from his lawyer, Brian Friedman, who incidentally
is the same dude who's representing Don Lemon who lost
his job on the same day, which is for that guy,

(01:42:19):
it is a good year for this guy. He like,
this is the guy who gets a ship ton of
money from networks when people get fired from networks, like
he has represented like Megan Kelly before. Like, when you
hear of a famous person getting let go by network,
it's probably this guy who's representing them. I thought it
was utterly hilarious that, yeah, both of them retained the

(01:42:42):
same guy on the same day having been fired. But
thinking about lawyering up, it made me think about like
Sophie mentioned it that like Carlson defames people, he lies
on an almost daily basis. Right, We recently spoke about
how he took the statistics of Russian deaths from those
league's documents, that he used the blatantly altered version of

(01:43:05):
those documents long after everyone knew they'd been altered. Right,
he needs serious legal clout to defend him from the
fact that he lies into fames people every single day.
So like going even though he has a sizable fortune,
going out on his own would be costly in the
sense of like he would almost have to be permanently
defending himself.

Speaker 5 (01:43:25):
Yeah, and I think I think this is one of
the things where, well it's not clear to me what
the impact is of the Alex Johnes trial has been,
but this is one of those things where I think
the dominion people actually just nailing Fox to the wall
is going to be a sort of big factor here
because it makes it seem easier and more plausible on
things that like lawyers are willing to risk getting in
fights about for actually going after these people, for just

(01:43:48):
like defending people. And so yeah, it'll be it'll be
interesting to see, like how how long Tucker can last
on his own before he gets into a giant court
battle with someone, and whether he is I don't know,
attempts to be slightly more careful.

Speaker 2 (01:44:05):
Yeah, like I yeah, exactly. I don't think if he's
if he goes to YouTube or something, he's not going
to be spending his his frozen dinner fortune on legal fees.
I don't think so he and he can't do what
he does without spouting shit, right, Like his whole thing
is just straight up lying and doing this sort of
credulous fool routine that he does, which which always results
in these ridiculous conclusions that he comes to. So like,

(01:44:28):
I don't know with that, maybe the daily why I
can suderstain that I don't really have a good sense
of sort of their clout if people aren't familiar. Should
we summarize the dominion case? I know you've spoken about
it on.

Speaker 1 (01:44:39):
Fast Yeah I did. I mean you can listen to
the two parter I did with Katie and Cody on
on the dominion lawsuit where he basically just go over
the entire document that Dominion prepared for that. But the
gist of it is that Tucker knowingly and knowingly. We
know that he knew because the discovery process revealed a

(01:45:00):
bunch of his text messages and emails where he talked
about knowing that the election fraud conspiracy theory was bullshit,
and he propagated it and attacks against Dominion and another company, Smartmatic,
in order to keep his audience on board, which is
a criminal you know, defamation or not criminal, but at

(01:45:21):
least like legally actionable you can sue as as Dominion
did and one like eight hundred million bucks. And I
do think that's really worth That is kind of pertinent
when we're talking about who's going to take him next,
because like, obviously the Daily Wire would want a guy
like Tucker except for the fact that he could cost
them another eight hundred million dollars, which has to be

(01:45:43):
has to be part of the calculus of any company
looking at taking him on, And I think is something
none of us, nobody really knows what's going to happen
with this, but I think there is a good chance
he is permanently marginalized in terms of audience just because
of how much like eight hundred million dollars is not
enough to sink Fox on its own, but it is

(01:46:03):
enough to make anybody looking at bringing Tucker on board.

Speaker 5 (01:46:06):
The second guest, Yeah, I sawso numbers that were I
think I think they were saying he was bringing in
the highest like amount of revenue of any like like
Kimble News anchor. But it was like it was like
seventy eight million dollars a year and he lost like
so he lost ten years of his income.

Speaker 1 (01:46:25):
He basically lost it, lost everything he'd made Fox during
the time when he was the number one Get news house.

Speaker 5 (01:46:32):
Yeah, and that has to be that has to be
a huge part of the coculus of like, Okay, you
know these are these people like as as as as
much as the right is ideological, it is also capitalist
and the risk reward on that is terrifying.

Speaker 3 (01:46:47):
Yeah, and I like, especially when it comes to the
Daily Wire, a cost like that would just probably make
their entire company fold.

Speaker 5 (01:46:54):
Because they don't have Murdock behind them.

Speaker 3 (01:46:56):
They're not They're not that big of a company, just
have a disproportionate amount of influence because their hosts are
really good at like marketing and social media manipulation.

Speaker 2 (01:47:06):
Yeah yeah, yeah, I ad revenue. That would be a
great time for us to pivot to and for some
gold coins with Reagan.

Speaker 1 (01:47:13):
Oh yeah, yeah. You can hear the ads for the
new podcasts that are our future. Colleague Tucker Carlson's gonna
be doing.

Speaker 3 (01:47:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:47:21):
Yeah, it's whay Ym and Don Lemon just.

Speaker 1 (01:47:23):
Have yeah, him and Don Lemon. We we're calling it.
H I don't know, there's there's a good there's a
good there's a good joke with their two names somewhere.
I haven't figured it out yet though, So you do
that for yourselves, audience. Ah, what a good what a
good time that we're talking about here. This is just

(01:47:43):
just just a great day, great week. Uh So, yeah,
we're looking at you know, I think kind of when
we're talking about what's possible here and Daily Wirey agree
is kind of the most likely thing. If you look
at what leaked recently during their drama with Stephen Krawt,
the contract they were offering Crowder was somewhere around thirty
million dollars, which, from everything people have said, is a

(01:48:06):
big deal for them. That's one of the biggest, bigger
offerings they're capable of doing. That is, you know, probably
the most Tucker is realistically going to be able to get.

Speaker 6 (01:48:19):
But also.

Speaker 1 (01:48:21):
One of the things that kind of is noteworthy about
the contract they were offering Crowder is that it included
clauses where like Crowder's take home could be reduced significantly
if he got kicked off of platforms and fucking Tucker
Carlson is not going to keep it a YouTube account.

Speaker 3 (01:48:41):
I mean it is. It is interesting in that sense
of like they were they all of his content was
able to be kept up when he was under Fox.
Like on YouTube you can find all of his segments,
and it'd be interesting to see how the content moderation
differs if like he starts his own channel and how
and how comparatively what things would be would be counted

(01:49:03):
as like community guideline strikes. But yeah, I mean just
I think I think, like last week Matt Walsh's show
got demonetized on YouTube, which if his contract is anything
like Crowters, means that he is gonna be suffering up
like a personal financial hit.

Speaker 1 (01:49:19):
Yeah, he's they're taking probably you know, in the millions
that he's losing.

Speaker 5 (01:49:24):
Yeah, And there's something I think this is an interesting
thing that's been happening in the last maybe like six months,
has been there's there's been sort of increasing tension between
sort of the far right that's basically sees control the
Republican Party and like the money, and they keep running

(01:49:44):
into these issues where in order to keep their base going,
they need to say stuff that like their sort of
like corporate backers are like, this is either losing us
money or is so far out there that like it's
you know, it's it's either directly losing us money from lawsuits,
or or it's losing us elections, or it's losing us
like business. And now I'm never gonna claim that like

(01:50:06):
Murdoch is not the far right, because he is. But
it's interesting that we've gotten to a point where people
like Murdoch are getting more gun shy about what they
can put on air because it's finally like the money
is finally starting to see actual consequences, and they're starting
to pull back from the stuff a little bit.

Speaker 1 (01:50:27):
Well, see, that's part of what I'm questioning is I'm
sure that that is something that's entering his calculus more
now since the settlement, but it's at least the earlier
reporting suggests that's not really why, or at least not
most of the reason why Tucker got shit canned. It's
a bunch of shit like stuff that is not revealed

(01:50:48):
yet in the deposition that he was saying an email.
I mean, one of the things came out that woman
who is accusing him of creating a sexist and anti
semitic work environment. Is that he like when she got hired,
he clustered swimsuit photos of Nancy Pelosi over her office,
And that's what we've heard, like the ship that Like,

(01:51:09):
I think it's possible, uh that what actually got Murdoch
to make the call to can him is that he
Murdoch himself found out through discovery that he was saying
shit in emails that would sink the company, Like if
he's saying full on Nazi shit. Yeah, and there's there's

(01:51:30):
documentation of that, which I don't think is unlikely he
had on it, like yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:51:36):
There's no there's there's there's no there's no limit at
that point.

Speaker 2 (01:51:38):
Like yeah, no, the like clearly that ship aligns with
his views, and he's made a concerted effort to mainstream
more and more outright fascist New Genesis white supremacist talking
points every year he's had that show, so it would know,
especially when they got his text messages, Like he might
be smart enough not to like maybe use his work email,
but I think that the fact that he's there were

(01:52:00):
some things in his text messages and yeah, that wouldn't
surprise me. It's either that or he said something personal
about one of the Murdochs, and.

Speaker 1 (01:52:09):
Well he did. He did talk shit about Fox executives,
which some people have suggested as like part of why
they made the decision. It can him that he actually
just pissed off the moneymen too, and this was kind
of an excuse to take more action. Again, like it's

(01:52:30):
it's it's kind of unclear exactly what happened. I think
it's probably worth talking about in the last portion of
this what impact, because it is likely that whatever happens,
he's he's going to have less reach and at least
less reach in like a practical way, because if Tucker
starts a podcast, even if the podcast has kind of
more you know, through Daily Wire or whatever, even if

(01:52:52):
it's got on paper more listeners than Fox, I think
there's something about cable news where you're reaching an audience
that's that's different with the ideas that he was When
he was on Fox, he was hitting people who would
never have encountered some of this like fascist shit, this

(01:53:13):
great replacement stuff, whereas if he's saying the same thing
on a Daily Wire podcast, he's probably talking more to
people who are already pilled, so to speak. So I
do think there's a good chance that overall this kind
of tanks his ability to.

Speaker 3 (01:53:32):
Actually like influence culture inful way.

Speaker 2 (01:53:35):
Radicalized boomers like everyone listening can probably think of a
person who they know or is in their sort of
greatest circle of people who their friends know, who is
an older person who is very much offline and has
encountered these great replacement ideas through Tucker Carlson and become
a significantly worse person because of Tucker Carlson's program.

Speaker 3 (01:53:54):
Yeah, I mean, and you can you can see how
all of the Daily Wire guys like like Wall and Mike,
Michael Noles and even someone like Andy No, they they
suck up to Carlson so much and have been for
the past few years because they realized that that actually
gives them cultural access to be on his show on
that platform in a way that they're much more like

(01:54:14):
Peterson too, Pete Peterson. Sure, I think Peterson's broken into
the mainstream.

Speaker 5 (01:54:18):
I think a bit more.

Speaker 3 (01:54:19):
But like all of these other guys like like Andy No,
Walsh Knowles, they're all heavily like Internet people, and they
influence like Internet shit, and sometimes that can start crossing over.
But in general, the cable news platform kind of reiffies
things into broader culture in a way that someone like

(01:54:39):
Walsh just doesn't because he like, most people don't know
who walshes, but most people do know who Tucker is.

Speaker 1 (01:54:49):
And that is my interesting is lifelong Republican voter. And
when I talked to him complaining about shit Matt Walsh
is doing, Like the first thing he said was like,
I've never heard of this guy. Yeah, And it's like, yeah,
because he's a fucking internet weirdo. And my dad doesn't
you know, he knows Ben Shapiro because Ben breaks through
to the mainstream, but he knows Ben Shapiro from like

(01:55:09):
catching clips of him randomly being shared on Facebook by
other people in his age group, as opposed to like
seeking this shit out. And that's kind of the power
of Tucker. And I think one of the things you've
seen Gear that you were kind of talking at, which
is the thing that is maybe most hopeful to me,
is how scared people like Andy know Glenn Greenwald flipped

(01:55:32):
the fuck out when this gun announced because they see
this is a major threat to their reach into their
earning potential. Yeah, Tucker can't host them anymore. That's potentially
disastrous for them, and the fact that that's happening right
as we're gearing up for twenty twenty four is something
I'm hopeful about. At least I'll say.

Speaker 3 (01:55:52):
It is a massive like rejection of that platform to yeah,
people like that like this type of like rhetoric Tucker
is doing. Having this be like publicly rejected in this
way will make all these people that are more on
the fringes probably make it harder for them to break
through in little ways like they used to try to
by being on Tucker as a show.

Speaker 1 (01:56:14):
Speaking of reifying things into the broader culture. Buy these
products and we're back.

Speaker 5 (01:56:24):
Okay. So there's one other thing that I We've could
have been touching on it, but I think it's really
interesting is that Tucker. Tucker basically has this sort of
media ecosystem that revolves around him, and you know, there's
a very established pathway for how you can become a
sort of like a successful and profitable right wing grifter
which goes through you know, you sort of go viral

(01:56:44):
on Twitter, you go viral on TikTok, and then you
go on a Tucker and you know, and like like
people like lives a TikTok, right, Like, I think I
think there's there's a certific kind of media campaign that
even with whoever, like whatever absolute asshole that like Fox
puts in that slot after Tucker's you know, when whatever
they sort of figure out who that's going to be, Like,

(01:57:05):
there's still I think going to be sort of a
hole there. Yeah, where I think it gets harder to
run the kinds the very the very very specific kinds
of campaigns like liber tich talk, like the sort of
mods for liberty shit that that's been just making the
country unfathomably awful for the past few years.

Speaker 2 (01:57:23):
With like that. I've been kind of working on writing
something scripted about this trans panic that happened in a
town very near me in Santi right, which like was
an extremely clear like like that was the goal, right,
like like do to speech, go go viral, go on
Tucker create, you know, then go on the speaking circuit,

(01:57:44):
make money. Like to me, at least, it seems very
clear that that was that was the goal.

Speaker 1 (01:57:47):
And I yeah, he's he's a weapons system that they
they have learned, like has become kind of the center
of right wing strategy really is like get on Tucker
cause you know moral panic culture warship yep.

Speaker 5 (01:58:02):
Yeah, and and you know, and like obviously like other
Fox shows do this stuff, it doesn't work anywhere anywhere
near as well.

Speaker 3 (01:58:07):
And now I think it's the person the person that
gets the closest is probably Laura Ingram, but I think
she she kind of suffers from the glass ceiling problems.

Speaker 5 (01:58:16):
Yeah, she actually cannot be Yeah, I mean, but.

Speaker 2 (01:58:21):
I've Brad Masogy. I stand with Laura.

Speaker 3 (01:58:26):
Ingram rub Big specifically viewing Tucker as this thing that
was like a targeted weapon. I think it's a really
good way to look at this, and specifically now that
that weapon no longer can like actually aim correctly because.

Speaker 1 (01:58:40):
Or at least may not be able to write. I mean,
maybe he'll come back and we're wrong, but I I
am optimistic. I think it all said, Yeah, it.

Speaker 2 (01:58:50):
Puts a spanner in the works of the hate machine
that that he built and the folks built, and that's
a good thing.

Speaker 3 (01:58:56):
But Mia, you were saying before I rudely interrupted.

Speaker 1 (01:58:58):
You, you asked, all you.

Speaker 5 (01:59:02):
Cannot remember what what I was gonna say.

Speaker 3 (01:59:05):
You're talking about how how how other other hosts kind
of do the thing but.

Speaker 6 (01:59:09):
Not the Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:59:11):
Well, I mean part of it also is just you know,
part of the power of Tucker is just the time
slot that he's in, Yeah, which is you know that
that that's the one where like all of the people
who've gotten off of work, who are like turning on
the television at night get to But yeah, like Tuck,
Tucker was I think was really in in the entirety
of the sort of TV and media sphere, was uniquely

(01:59:32):
good at that stuff and no one else, no one
else can do it like that, and you know, like
the like if the Fox people will create someone else,
but until they fill that spot, A, there's a gap,
and B it really remains to be seen whether seeing
whether they're going to sort of pick someone who is
as embedded in like that part of the sort of

(01:59:53):
fascists right as Tucker is, or if they're going to
find someone who's like, i mean still really really right
wing and sucks but isn't like having ye on.

Speaker 1 (02:00:03):
Yeah, yeah, And it's I mean, I am kind of
curious slash worried about who's going to follow him into
that time slot. Folks, real old heads will know Tucker
got his job after Bill O'Reilly, who was the Fox
News fascist of my childhood, got shit canned for sexual
harassment on an industrial scale. Uh, and so that's that's

(02:00:26):
why Tucker is in. And obviously as bad as Bill was,
Tucker was worse, and maybe the person who follows Tucker
will be worse than Tucker. I do have trouble imagining
what that could be, because my god, he really he went.
He went right up to the edge of putting on
a fucking swastik arm band.

Speaker 5 (02:00:43):
Yeah. Yeah, I will say about the Bill Orilelly people,
people have been like, oh, like, Tucker's going to disappear
in the way Bill o'reiley did. I don't. I don't
think that's I think he's going to be a bigger
like But assuming he winds up somewhere, I think he'll
still be a bigger influence than like Bill O'Reilly was
after he got but.

Speaker 1 (02:01:00):
Yeah, I mean Bill was also a lot older, right, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:01:04):
No, I think that is that is an accurate assessment.
Mm hmm. Well excited, excited to get my new Rumble
subscriptions so I can watch Oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:01:18):
It's going to be uh glorious to see him finally
pair up with Tim Poole, the two, the two of
them carrying AK forty seven, so doing field journalism in
twenty twenty four.

Speaker 2 (02:01:29):
Yeah, yeah, Tucker casting, for those are not familiar, carried
a gun when reporting in a rock, which for many
reasons it's a fucking terrible idea, including putting f one
else doing your changer.

Speaker 1 (02:01:41):
But it is really funny. It's very I will, I
will say that it is funny.

Speaker 5 (02:01:45):
I I genuine like part of me doesn't, but part
of me does. Hope he decides to do a thing
where he's like, I'm gonna go do field journalism in
Ukraine and just.

Speaker 1 (02:01:53):
Seemed so I will, it's fucking marked by God, damn
like happens, No, no, no, you know what happens.

Speaker 3 (02:02:02):
He he imbeds with the aesoff battalion. Yeah, and they
all get taken out.

Speaker 2 (02:02:11):
God willing kindness.

Speaker 3 (02:02:13):
But I think one thing I was serfinally thinking about,
like the past few years, less less so that this
this like past year specifically, but for a while it
was a quite frightening prospect to think about what if
Tucker was going to run for president? And I don't
think he is. He is not going to do that
in twenty twenty four. Absolutely, that's that's that's not happening.

(02:02:35):
But I mean it's still possible he could in the future.
Twenty twenty eight is likely, uh if, if he wants.
But I think the loss of this position at this
point in time will probably affect that decision because it's
something he's certainly been thinking about, considering he's one of
the most influential conservative people on the Yeah, like on
the planet.

Speaker 2 (02:02:56):
He determines policy or did if.

Speaker 3 (02:02:59):
He did, yeah, and and and now it's interesting with him,
with him leaving his job in this way, it'll be
interesting to see if how that how that affects any
kind of potential of prospect for him for him, yeah,
running for office.

Speaker 1 (02:03:14):
My big question around all that, and this is kind
of unanswerable, is like, does Tucker have any appeal outside
of the right wing base. Three and a half million
cable news viewers is not evidence of the kind of
broad based appeal that can draw an independence and win
an election. And Tucker has never you know, the one
the closest thing he's been to a political candidate is

(02:03:34):
when he went up against John Stewart, and that didn't
go great for him. No, he and he moved aft
after John Stewart kind of destroyed his Crossfire career. He
moved to a situation where he was he had unprecedented
control over his show. It was almost entirely recorded and
stuff out of a studio in Maine that he set up.
He built everything he was doing around being able to

(02:03:57):
totally control how he was seen, what was shown, what
of his was like put out to the public. And
you simply can't do that as a presidential candidate. You
have to accept and be able to make work for
you the fact that every eye is on you and
you do not have total control over what about you
is put out and published, among other things. You're going

(02:04:19):
to be repeatedly questioned in situations where you can't edit
the footage or stop things from going out afterwards. And
I don't know that Tucker has what it takes to
succeed in that kind of environment.

Speaker 5 (02:04:32):
Yeah, Enchilade, he fucking never succeeds again and we never
have to hear about him.

Speaker 2 (02:04:38):
Yeah, we should shout out this lady kat Abazzale, that
the person who had to watch Tucker Carlson for years
and years and years and then explain it to people.
She works at Media Matters for America. But she is
taking the biggest victory lap that anyone has ever taken
right now. And it's kind of glorious.

Speaker 3 (02:04:56):
To watch doing the lord's work. Truly.

Speaker 2 (02:04:59):
Yeah, taking on trauma for all of her stuff was
quite good. Like she she did a good job explaining
how toxic Tucker was to people who might not have
been aware of it.

Speaker 1 (02:05:11):
Yeah. Anyway, in conclusion, Tucker, we would love to have
you on at Cool Zone. Totally welcome to come host
your own podcast. We'll bring you on to it could
happen here. You can do a bastard's guest appearance, jam,
he can right into the jungle.

Speaker 2 (02:05:33):
Directly.

Speaker 1 (02:05:33):
Come on, come on, Tucker. We'd love to have you anyway.
I think that's I think that's a soode.

Speaker 5 (02:05:56):
It's been four months since French President Emanuel Macron effect
declared war on French society. Euphemistically called pension reforms, Macron's
proposal would increase the retirement age from sixty two to
sixty four, effectively robbing the working class of two years
of their lives. In January, French unions filled the streets
of Paris with trash now French workers build brick and

(02:06:19):
mortar barricades on highways and set branches on fire on
train tracks. Welcome to it could happen here. The escalation
from protest to uprising is in part a product of
how Macron forced the retirement age increase through a national
assembly he no longer controls without the ability to win

(02:06:40):
a vote. Macron's Prime Minister, Elizabeth Bourne, suddenly invoked Article
forty nine of the French Constitution, which allows the ruling
government to force a bill into law without a vote.
Macron argues that because circumventing Parliament to force legislation through
is legal, the move is democratic across France. Disagree. We

(02:07:02):
spoke to two French protesters, Mael, a student in Leone,
and a Gat, a union railway worker at a state
owned rail company, about the movement. The two met through
a struggle committee designed to bring people from different backgrounds
and movements together to fight against mccron's reforms and four,
as Mael put it, victories for our class. A Gat

(02:07:24):
had this to say about Macron's anti democratic sleight of hand.

Speaker 4 (02:07:28):
What they are using right now is a rhetorical trap
which consists of confusing democracy and constitutionalism. I don't know
if I'm using the right word, but for instance, you

(02:07:49):
know that they maybe you know that to impose this reform,
they have been using an article, which this article forty
nine points three of our constitution and they say that, well,
this article is in the constitution, we are in a democracy,

(02:08:10):
and therefore this article is democratic, which is absolutely false.
It's a fallacious reasoning. It is not true. It's the
forty nine point three is an anti constitution. It is
an anti democratic article of the constitution. And this is

(02:08:32):
what they have been trying to do lately, to say
to make us believe that everything that's been happening is
absolutely normal and implies with the democratic standards of France,
which is not true. Also, what they are trying to
do to disqualify any opposition from the left wing is

(02:08:56):
to say that the left wing party is actually an
extreme left hardly, which it is not. And it's kind
of they are trying to induce the kind of history
in all this and to radicalize what is not. What

(02:09:18):
we are asking for is simply for them to to
listen to what we for once can call the people. Generally,
when you have a protest, it's only a part of
the population that disagrees with the policy of the government.
But this time, honestly, uh, there are seven seven people

(02:09:41):
out of ten who are who disagree with this and uh,
nine workers out of ten who disagree with this reform. Honestly,
I think we can call ourselves the people.

Speaker 8 (02:09:52):
And in a democracy, well what you do is listen
to the people, not that representatives and not the members
of the government, but the people in the fucking streets.

Speaker 4 (02:10:03):
I'm sorry. Uh. And and because they do not want
to do that, they try to say that we are
radicals and that we are supported by radical political parties.
It's not true.

Speaker 6 (02:10:20):
Yeah, it's it's very radious situation.

Speaker 4 (02:10:23):
Yeah, this is what I wanted to say about what
they're at their current strategy, aside from the repression of
which we are going to talk in a few minutes,
this is what their strategy is.

Speaker 6 (02:10:35):
Yeah, Like basically they confuse all of the forces on
the left together. They say that Melanchia is funding the
black Block, you know, so it's things like that, the
CGTS and a fee, all of them, it's on the

(02:10:57):
same and they all want the destruction of civilization. And
I don't know that's the discourse on the far right.

Speaker 5 (02:11:07):
Yeah, babies, Yeah, that sounds like you're American, right too.

Speaker 6 (02:11:14):
Yeah, and this is kind of linked to police violence,
this discourse when you were talking about how they're saying
that the constitution is democratic and there's nothing you can
say even though well, the point of the constitution is
to bypass the parliament. I don't know that democratic. But yeah,

(02:11:37):
So when it comes to police violence as a reaction
is to say that the state holds the legitimate monopoly
of violence, so therefore they can repress us however they want.
That's literally what they're saying right now, which is kind
of worrying.

Speaker 5 (02:11:57):
The French police have been incredibly violent in their campaign
to suppress the protests. At an ecological action in San
Seline on March twenty fifth, tens of thousands of activists
were met with helicopters, armored vehicles, and six thousand grenades,
many of which were the French police's new and incredibly
dangerous military grade GM two l cs gas grenades. One

(02:12:19):
protester was shot in the head with a tear gas
grenade fired by a grenade launcher mounted on an armored vehicle.
He remained in a coma fighting for his life for
an entire month. Earlier today, his parents' release a statement
saying that he has begun to wake up, but is
not fully conscious and his life remains in danger. The
day before, a special police motorcycle unit called Brav M,

(02:12:43):
created in twenty nineteen to suppress the Genejean with the
yellow vest protests, was recorded threatening a group of random
people that had arrested for sitting in front of a
building from The Washington Post. The cop says, quote, You're
lucky to be sitting there, and now that we've arrested you,
I swear I'd have broken your leg literally. I can
tell you We've broken elbows and faces, but you I'd

(02:13:04):
have broken your legs, one officer says. In the recording.
Limone reported two slapping sounds can be heard, the report says,
along with an officer saying, wipe that smile off your face.
Later in the clip, a police officer warns the young
people they have detained. Quote, next time we come, you
won't be getting in the car to go to the
police station. You'll be getting in another thing called an

(02:13:24):
ambulance to go to the hospital. Paris Police chief Laurette
Nuez said on Friday he was quote very shocked by
the audio clip Mayel and a gat We're less shocked.

Speaker 4 (02:13:36):
This is not really a surprise, unfortunately, because well, our
lease is not as h I don't know, it's problematic,
but maybe not as problematic as in the US. I'm
sorry if I'm wrong about that. But we also follow

(02:13:58):
sometimes what happens on the other side of the ocean.
And uh, but I must say that we we have
had issues of police murders on the street like and
police violence, wanting violence, and unfortunately that now it's not

(02:14:24):
new and there is a newspaper media parts who managed
to to find a excerpt of I think it's a
group on WhatsApp or whatever of policemen talking about race,
war and uh and all these kinds of things. And

(02:14:48):
unfortunately we know that there are such people in our police.

Speaker 6 (02:14:53):
So so police are there's a kind of basically fascists,
all of them. Like they have like one of their
unions which called Alliance and for the politics for the
presidential elections, they invited the right wing party, who are

(02:15:13):
basically only people who talg with all about genocide. And
then the classic marine Lapin and the more the far
right who's openly calling for a civilizational war with Muslims.

(02:15:34):
So that's the police unions. And for a little bit
of history on the police, we have, for example, one
of the very violent units that you see arresting people
all over friends, which are called brigadotic Huminality or back

(02:15:54):
for fort. And these people come from some sort of
colonial units who were in Algeria during the war and
when there was a need to repress populations who previously

(02:16:20):
lived in colonies and then moved to France to the
main country, they created a lot of very violent units
and recruited through people who were in the Algerian War
to basically break down people's house things like this, beat
them up.

Speaker 4 (02:16:40):
You know.

Speaker 6 (02:16:41):
It was really colonial practices and all of this kind
of state with the repression of poor and non white
areas of town where they tried to always have a
strong police presents and catch people. They say in the act,

(02:17:03):
but they're really making up reasons to arrest people. Police
violence is not new at all, And yeah, basically it's
easier need to train all year long against poor, non
white people, and then during protests they come against people

(02:17:24):
who have come to protests which are generally different people,
but not entirely different people.

Speaker 5 (02:17:34):
Of course, the police response to protests, again says, has
gotten more violence as the Jiljan protests in twenty nineteen,
but instead of clearing the streets as Macron had hoped,
the increase in violence is just narrowing the traditional gap
between more moderate trade union protesters and the more radical
protesters found in black blocks.

Speaker 6 (02:17:53):
I've seen people.

Speaker 9 (02:17:55):
In America in England saying that the movement is dying
down because the inter union protests are more and more
away from each other. But in the actual protest people
are much much more radical. And what happens is that
the people who are in the front of the protests
before the union and who may potentially fight with the

(02:18:18):
cops that the union will never do, they're more and
more numerous, like four times bigger than the protests months ago,
and so the cops cannot charge us. Every time they charge,
people get around them, and there are rocks which happen
to hit their heads.

Speaker 5 (02:18:37):
I don't know how, yeah, cry. I ask about that
a bit, specifically about the dynamic of there being a
sort of I don't know, I kind of divide between
the sort of more biltant people who are fighting the
cops and the sort of more moderate like trade union
like protesters. I wanted to ask, I guess, like how

(02:18:58):
firm has that separation been and what I guess have
the unions been doing here? Have they been trying to
contain things? Have they been trying to push forward?

Speaker 6 (02:19:12):
Well? Yes, I think it's a very some phenomenon kind
of especially the way it's taken from now, because it's
basically a mix of a black block and some Dill
June and some random already called people, yeah, yellow vests.

(02:19:34):
But so the black block it started really in twenty sixteen.
Before this, there was no real black block all the
time at protests, And the attitude of the unions is
that they hate the black block. It's pretty simple. I mean,
not of course, as everyone who's in a union, but

(02:19:57):
the unions who organize the protest, they don't want anyone
in front of them. They want people to go behind
them and follow whatever they want to do. So they've
been really aggressive. But even if there are conflicts right now,
I would say the fact that the people in front

(02:20:17):
of the union are more and more numerous, I think
there's somewhat less tensions the unions. I don't think they
feel like they can really push against even the black
bloc or radicals who break stuff.

Speaker 4 (02:20:34):
If I may add in something, Indeed, there is a
difference between the attitude of the union directions, let's say,
and people like me, the simple unionized workers. And what

(02:20:57):
Miles said is absolutely true about the the hate, the Yeah,
they really don't want any black blocks, especially in front
of them. But what I observed in these over the
last few demonstrations is that what we call the cortege,

(02:21:19):
which is really the very head of the demonstration, even
in front of the unions, the official union group, where
there are the black blocks and the yellow vests, there

(02:21:39):
are more and more people I was I was like,
I was going to say, like me, but I'm a
bit of a still a bit cowardly, and I'm still
afraid of of getting in this kind of place. But
there are more and more unionized workers who mingle with

(02:22:01):
the black blogs and et cetera. And I you know,
we also have what we call manifestations sauvage the wild
and and not organized protests that are not organized by
unions but are kind of spontaneous.

Speaker 6 (02:22:23):
They opened after Macro forced the reform through Parliament without
a vote, and people just went in the streets without
the union and they burned. There were images in Paris
of everything burning. It was that day, and that's what
we call a wild protests.

Speaker 4 (02:22:44):
Yeah, and for the first time I saw unionized workers
joining in. That is crazy because they were feeling that
what the unions were proposing within the legal and pacifists

(02:23:04):
and nice frame was not enough because really our president
was really just making fun of us and we couldn't
have it, and what we usually do was not longer
enough for us. And this is really something new.

Speaker 5 (02:23:27):
I asked about the appearance of the Chile Jean in
the current protest and what you thought of them, Mael.
The student was somewhat dismissive, but the impact that Chile
Jean had on a GAT and the railway workers was
very different.

Speaker 6 (02:23:40):
Yeah, I can say a little bit, but I don't
know much about the yellow vests. For what I saw
of the Yellow vests were a lot of blockages and
people against taxes on gas, and it radicalized was towards

(02:24:03):
some form of radical democracy, but maybe not so radical
because they wanted the mass movement seemed to end on
the demand for referendums. Basically, they wanted to be able
to call their own referendums, and the demands were not

(02:24:26):
directly linked to economics. And as I saw them many
very often, and when we saw them in protests in Lyon,
they were kind of weird. But I don't know them
very well. What I saw was that the government repressed

(02:24:50):
them really, really hard, much harder than the usual protests
that we do, because they were really scared of them.

Speaker 4 (02:24:56):
Yeah, because I took part to the Yellow lest movement
and I tend to disagree a bit with your analysis
on this problem. No, no, no, no, it's just a I'm
just saying and it's not an attack at all. At first,
I must say I hated this movement because well, just

(02:25:19):
long story short, it began in twenty eighteen, and in
twenty eighteen there was a big movement in the SENCF
where I work in the Railway Public Company because the
current it's very funny because it's the current Prime Minister
who was the Transport Minister at the time.

Speaker 6 (02:25:45):
They just moved them around.

Speaker 4 (02:25:47):
We keep seeing this. It's absolutely I can't stand that anyway.
I have a personal vendetta with this woman, and we
had been fed trying to fight off the well, they
kind of started to kill off our company. It's only

(02:26:09):
now dying of its slow death. But this is where
it really well, this is where the end really began
in twenty eighteen for us.

Speaker 6 (02:26:18):
You mean by privatization, they're killing the contents.

Speaker 4 (02:26:21):
Yeah, we are not private yet, but the door has
been opened on that idea. And so it's been a
really really hard protest for us, and we in the
end we lost. It was really hard, and after that

(02:26:45):
we've been I've seen these people the yellow vest stand
up and take on our songs to make them their own.
The famous only lap. It started with in the railway world,
and it really started in Lyons. I was there and

(02:27:06):
suddenly these people whom I did not see by our
side a few months before, started to invade the streets
and sing our songs. I was really outraged. I was furious,
and then I fortunately I spent time with the people

(02:27:27):
who are more intelligent than me and who said that
it was worth going to see these people and see
what was on their minds and what they were thinking,
especially because there were people who had never before protested.
They had never been on the street to demonstrate about anything,

(02:27:48):
and they were right to do that. And it all
started with the price of oil and of gasolina. And
I found that really really insignificant, and in fact it
really opened my mind about the reality of other people,

(02:28:10):
because I do not have a car, but some people
have a car, and they needed to live together, to
make a live in And not only that, but the
motives of the protest. They roaded and roaded these people.
They got politicized at such a speed, a high speed.

(02:28:33):
This is incredible because quite rapidly what they were demanding
was not simply the lowering of the oil price. It
was also more democracy, it was more social justice. It
was against the cancelation of attacks, unfortune, of the great

(02:28:58):
fortune of people, on break wealth, and and on climate.
Also it merged with the with a lot of climate demonstrations,
and it broad it really it was about really a
social model and what world we want to live in tomorrow.
And so this is why I say this, This movement

(02:29:21):
was really incredible. It was also incredible because it was
taking place without the unions. It depends on the regions.
In France. In Lyons, for example, there there is no
love lost between the Yellow Vest and the unions, the
direction of the unions. But in other regions, like in
southern France or in the north, it's very different. And

(02:29:44):
soon they began to protest together and the Yellow Vest
they they they gave us a new a fresh new breath.
It was really a fresher breath of fresh air. There
was such spontaneous, they were so spontaneous and so angry. Also,

(02:30:07):
you know, they remind they reminded us what it was
to be angry and to have the right to be
angry and not to be helpless in front of an
unjust policy. And it really changed changes. And as just

(02:30:28):
like I said that earlier that in this very movement,
the movement we live in now, there are there are
unionized workers who mingle with the black dog for example,
well there were a lot of us unionized workers in
the Yellow vese two and so yeah, it influenced us

(02:30:51):
a lot.

Speaker 6 (02:30:52):
I think we can say that if twenty sixteen and
that's a black block to the protests. Now with the
Yellow Vest, it changed completely the way we protest as well.
All the blockages are like much more regular and the
way we're people fear less, you know, to demand things

(02:31:14):
and to organize without unions. I think we can say
that it definitely changed things. Also personally, I think that
if I say wrong things about the yellow vests, why
I don't know the importug is because yes, the concerns

(02:31:35):
about oil gas price was not what of Pine because
I live in the city and I don't have a car,
So I think it affected more the country, the countryside
of friends, which is more concerned with gas prices, yeah,

(02:31:56):
than big cities. Also because we already have have lots
of political movements here, so like it's it's kinven different.

Speaker 7 (02:32:10):
I don't know.

Speaker 6 (02:32:11):
I don't know this sport very well, to be honest,
maybe I should just show up.

Speaker 1 (02:32:17):
No, I mean, it's it's interesting to me because I
remember when the uh the g le John's protests started up,
there was a lot of debate outside of France and
kind of like Westerners observing the protests to are these
guys is this something that's like a positive movement? Are
they all right wing? And it's interesting that the way

(02:32:40):
in which kind of all of these different sort of
eras of protest movements in France have melded together for
this this most recent kind of uprising like you've got
you know, the the the You've got these trade unions,
you've got le Jon's, you've got the Black Bloc, all
sort of working as different pieces of this uprising, you know,

(02:33:05):
based on kind of the different tactics of their eras.
That's fascinating to me.

Speaker 6 (02:33:09):
I was discussing and saying that it's kind of a
feature of movements about pensions, even if they can be
very different, that they tend to attract a lot of people.
And at first the protests were not very radical at
all compared to protests we could have with similar sizes.

(02:33:34):
But gradually the movement is radicalizing a lot, it seems
to me, the people who are in it, and the
fact that it tends to mobilize everyone at first, even
if it's not very radical, when it created this sort
of mingling of everybody, the Yellow ass the Union, the

(02:33:55):
Black Block, everybody except the political party there useless books.

Speaker 5 (02:34:02):
Alongside the radicalization of protesters from all walks of life
inside France, there's been a surprisingly strong international reaction from
other European workers and activists.

Speaker 1 (02:34:12):
You know, I'm wondering, you know, during the Black Lives
Matter protests in the US and twenty twenty. International attention
was significant, and it was to some extent useful in
terms of helping to raise money and stuff for different
bail funds. People from all around the world helped to
that extent. But I'm wondering is the is the degree

(02:34:33):
of international attention by other countries left wings, you know,
movements on what's happening in France right now. Is it
having an impact directly or is it just sort of
like noise.

Speaker 6 (02:34:48):
Well on my port, it seems to be a lot
of noise, yes, because a lot of people seem to
misunderstand completely the situation. And yeah, they just give their
opinion and that's fine, I guess. But I think there

(02:35:10):
may be actual solidarity with some militants. I mean, I
know among anarchists that there are an archists who come
from Italy, Switzerland, Germany and other countries who try to
help actions and protests. And I'm pretty sure that among

(02:35:32):
unions there is international solidarity as well. But maybe I
got you U should say something about this.

Speaker 4 (02:35:40):
Yes, there is international solidarity. Honestly, this is not something
I was expecting. But for instance, last week in Belgium,
there are workers from a total plant that actually blocked
the freaking port and to prevent them from sending product

(02:36:07):
to substitute it from to the product that was blocked
by protesters in France. And that was this is for me,
This is absolutely wonderful and yes, so yes, there there
are international solidarities. We have been in our inter professional assembly,

(02:36:31):
because we have a local inter professional assembly, and we
have been expressing our gratitude to the people in Greece,
in Argentina, in Spain, in Germany who expressed their support

(02:36:51):
openly and personally. I was really surprised to see how
many people actually were being attention to what was happening
in our country. And it gives us, well, it gave
strength to many people, and it also gives hope because

(02:37:15):
I realized that, well, you know, the main leverage we
have on our liliticians is the economical beverage. And so
when when the bosses of big companies and investors and
everything start to say, well, guy, your reform of pensions

(02:37:38):
in France is starting to make a mess in Germany,
in Spain, in Greece, please stop your madness, Well this
is a leverage I was not expecting. We are trying
to use the leverage of the big wealth and UH

(02:37:59):
and the big companies in France, which is already something
quite hard to move, and that was really an unexpected
support and we really hope that it's going to have
because Macaron is very He's a narcissistic guy and he

(02:38:21):
loves his own image. So if his image is starting
to suffer internationally, I think this is going to be
a big problem for him, and his image at the
time is really a catastrophe.

Speaker 5 (02:38:39):
Belgium, of course, is not the only place for blockades
are happening. They've become a staple of the uprising in
France as well.

Speaker 6 (02:38:46):
I'm very interesting talking about the blockages of the highways
around the Bond because many cities are trying to do this.
There is a which is in Brotain which manages to
block the highways very often, and so they started in

(02:39:10):
Lyon and we tried once a few weeks ago. It
was a call by the unions with a few points
to block in the morning and people then militants from
all over join the points at like six am or
seven am, I don't remember. But when people arrived there

(02:39:30):
were cups everywhere and they were pushed away and circulation
and capitalism could work normally and everything was fine. So
we were very frustrated. So reorganized completely and through the
Struggle Committee, we assembled people from general assemblies all over

(02:39:54):
the city and also various groups, and we managed to
organize is a blockade last Thursday and it worked pretty well.
It was not exceptional, but for first trip. People were
very happy about it, and it led to many people

(02:40:16):
from all over in the movement working together on a
project and meeting together in assembly and then being together
on blockages. And I think it's moments like this which
are very important for the movement to develop. I'm not

(02:40:37):
sure if the blockage in itself is the most interesting
action in terms of economic damage, especially if we don't
stay very long, but the different social relations it can create,
and I think it can have a lot of influence
in the movement, especially when we're thinking about the unions

(02:41:04):
and sort of leaders of the unions who don't want
to mobilize too much, we don't want to go too far.
What can we do outside of that. Well, I think
that's part of the answer, at least.

Speaker 4 (02:41:20):
I agree.

Speaker 5 (02:41:21):
Yeah, I think I think that's something that was interesting
to me because I think the roadblocks and barricades like
that as a sort of social site is like a
really it's a thing you see a lot in the past,
like twenty twenty five years of protest movements like I.
This was a big deal in I like Hawk in

(02:41:42):
twosand and six. There's a lot of similar stuff in
Tehran during the uprising there. It's interesting to see it
sort of like re entering the repertoire of stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:41:53):
Yeah, the kind of the different species of social interactions
that are made possible by these kind of zones of
autonomy that are creating.

Speaker 6 (02:42:04):
And they ask a lot of new questions for militants,
how to hold a barricade against scarps and against cars.
It's a lot of different questions which I think they
can radicalize people. At least two demand more things, so

(02:42:24):
it's not clear what they want to demand for now. Yeah,
I just wanted to say that I'm really really happy
to see people from different parts of society really coming
together and accepting to work together, like so many things impossible.
Now as a student, I've met basically Lisians from all

(02:42:45):
universities in my town. I now have free access to
all publications in French and I'll never pay for anything
it's really really great in terms of blockage. There is
just south of Leon there is an oil refinery which
is not on strike. It's among the only ones. So

(02:43:12):
it's really important because in France there's a special system
because they wanted to stay independent from old producers, so
they import the oil and then they refine it in France.
So basically, if we stop all the refinery, there is
no more gas for cars. And right down it's becoming

(02:43:32):
a real problem because of the strikes, and this one
stays open, and so people have started to try and
block the entry. So right now there's like something like
fifty union workers and like fifty radical militants who come
there every morning. Well not this week, but last week

(02:43:55):
they were doing it because this week we haven't said,
but everyone is on holiday kind of somewhat. The students
are on holiday, so many people take their paid leave
right now as well. It's kind of a special time.

(02:44:17):
But next week probably the blockages are going to start again.
And it's great to see union workers meeting with more
radical people to try and get an action together. And
I think when there is story diarity exists, great things
can happen.

Speaker 4 (02:44:37):
If I may add something about mockages and everything. What
works pretty well and it's quite satisfying. There are big
days of mobilization, and what has happened several times now

(02:44:57):
is that on the very same day, very same time,
there are several appointments a little everywhere in the in
the town and to block something, to block a highway,
to block a factory, to block a school or whatever.
And this allows, uh, it allows us to dispatch and

(02:45:25):
stretch the forces of the police, and so they are
never enough everywhere to to to stop us. And that
makes that can make that can make the day a
real success because you have a lot of things happening
at the very same time, but there is only so

(02:45:45):
many cops. So yeah, it works pretty well.

Speaker 5 (02:45:50):
This is interestingly the same analysis the US police came
to in twenty twenty. It's easy to stop one large action,
but several smaller actions split police forces and prevent them
from just kettling one large block of protesters. I guess
I think I was interested in is that I think
one of the things that happens in the US a
lot is you'll get a national day of action, but
all of the actions, like there'll just be one giant

(02:46:12):
action in a city and you don't get the kind
of like diffusion that's been helpful with spreading out cop numbers.
And I was wondering, like, is this something like the
unions are specifically planning to have multiple events all over
the place or is that something that's been happening like
outside that.

Speaker 6 (02:46:27):
Or no, no, no, the unions only plan once. They
plan for a strike and for the protests.

Speaker 4 (02:46:38):
There are also actions, but only one action and the
others are organized by I mean regular people.

Speaker 6 (02:46:48):
Or no, but like you mean, the actions on the
days are not organized by the national union, its local
unions which do the actions, right, that's what you're talking about. Yes, absolutely, yeah,
so there are local unions because in friends, unions are

(02:47:09):
very federal somewhat this we can talk about it. It's
a bit of a problem. But like you know, the Segete,
it started out as an archist union, so they were
like very into federalism and all of this. So there
is local autonomy. And what happens is workers in very

(02:47:33):
mobilized sectors like the railways, the energy workers, they were
organized through their union actions on that day, for example.
And on top of this, for example, you have students
in a certain high school or a certain university who

(02:47:54):
decide to block something and for example, they need support. Recently,
there was a notably right wing campus who was blocked
by students, and so a lot of us came to
help them because we've had never seen this campus blocked ever.

(02:48:16):
And of course what happened was some fascists attacked them,
but we were much much more numerous than them, so
it was no problem. But the next time they had
a blockage planned at this campus, they ended up not
having enough numbers, so they canceled, but the fascists didn't

(02:48:38):
know that it was canceled, and so they all came
really armed with metal bars and all of that. You know.

Speaker 5 (02:48:46):
Still, despite the threat of fascist streak gangs, and they're
better armed and morey legitimate counterparts in the police, the
protests continue. They continue to block roads, they continue to
occupy universities, They continued to strike, they continued to fight police.
They continue to find new forms of resistance, new forms
of solidarity, new worlds composed of people who in ordinary

(02:49:08):
times would never have met, and in the process they
continue to find new ways of being free. Beneath the cobblestones,
the beach sat another generation of French protesters in May
of nineteen sixty eight. All you have to do is
pick it up and throw it. Welcome to Dick It

(02:49:44):
Happened Here a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes
about how to put them back together again. I'm your host,
Via Wong. This is a We are once again talking
about Wizards of the Coast. Now this time is not
about Dungeon Gent Daggs. It is about their other property,
Magic the Gathering, which if you don't know, is Wizards
of the Coasts trading card game. That's at the forefront

(02:50:07):
of some truly wild stuff right now. Now, you could
ask Mia, why are we even talking about this about
Magic the Gathering on this show, And you know, there's
multiple answers. One of them is that as industrial profit
rates have been decreasing in the last half a century,
capital has increasingly turned towards entertainment as a way to
make money. Magic is now a billion dollar brand, partnering

(02:50:31):
with everything from Fortnite to The Walking Dead to and
this is not a joke, being in the process of
releasing an entire set of Lord of the Rings cards.
As capital is flooded into the entertainment industry and Magic
in particular, our silly little hobbies are suddenly the front
lines of class struggle. Workers at TCG Player this year,
given the job of sorting through literally tens of thousands

(02:50:53):
of cards that TCG player processes, finally won their second
attempt to form a union after two devastating union busting campaigns.
And this is where things get very very weird. Now
bear with me here, dear listeners. We have to talk
about a little bit of magic minutia to understand what
has happened in this incident, and then we will get

(02:51:13):
back to what the show is usually about, which is
corporations killing enormous numbers of people. So a few days ago,
Dan Cannon, a man who runs a very small Magic
YouTube channel called Old School EMPTG, bought what he thought
were cards in the latest Magic the Gathering set called
March of the Machine. Now Magic releases new cards periodically

(02:51:34):
and what are called sets. These sets have plots and characters,
they have written stories. They are enormous sort of lower events,
They have enormous hype behind them. And March of the
Machine story wise, is basically the version of an Avengers
movie giant apocalyptic threats. All the heroes crossing over people,
hopping through, multi versus, etc.

Speaker 7 (02:51:54):
Etc.

Speaker 5 (02:51:54):
Et cetera. Now, okay, this has happened before. You know,
Wizards does big sets. It wasn't that weird. But Wizard
decided to do something very very weird, which is they printed,
for the first time ever, a mini set called March
of the Machines March of the Machine Aftermath. Now, the

(02:52:15):
regular March of the Machine set has three hundred and
eighty seven cards in it, Aftermath has fifty. Now, I
don't know why they decided to do this. They've never
done anything like this if they've never printed just a
tiny set they release a bit after the regular set before.
And you know, the names are very very confusing, right,
one is called March of the Machine and the other
one is Marching the Machine Aftermath. How is a regular

(02:52:37):
person supposed to keep track of this? The mind boggles,
et cetera, et cetera. Either way, So Dan Cannon tries
to buy cards from the regular March of the Machine
set when he gets in sent instead are by accident
March of the Machine Aftermath cards. Now these cards are
still secret. They have not been revealed yet. No no one,

(02:52:59):
no one knows what they are. No one's supposed to
know what they are before every set. There's an incredibly
elaborate process where Wizards gives cards to influencers to you know,
reveal them to the public. And on a certain date,
everyone reveals, you know, your influencer reveals what their card is,
and there's this whole hype cycle on Reddit, and everyone
argues about how good the cards are, and i'll call
the art is and what it means for the story.

(02:53:20):
It's sort of it's sort of similar to the the
sort of hype cycles that would happen around trailers from
Marvel movies, where people would be analyzing every detail of it,
et cetera, et cetera. And these are these spoiler seasons,
as they're called, are a huge deal for Wizards. Date
Wizards tries to heavily control the entire process, but sometimes
cards leak out. Now, Dan Cannon suddenly has been handed

(02:53:44):
a bunch of cards no one has ever seen before,
so he does what, you know, every person who just
suddenly has magic cards that haven't been revealed yet do
and have been doing for years and years and years.
He makes a video showing off the cards. Now, importantly,
this is not a lead. I need to stress this
because of what's going to happen, what is going to
happen next, You know, it's it's it's very very easy

(02:54:09):
to look at the at the sort of severity of
what's going to happen to this guy and assume that
he broke a law. But no, he did not. He
did not break a law. Nothing he has done he's illegal. Literally,
what he's done is he bought some magic cards from
someone who screwed up and accidentally broke the street date
for selling cards because he confused March of the Machine
with March of the Machine. Aftermath, Wow, how can anyone

(02:54:30):
make that mistake? Right? The genius of Wizards of the
Coast marketing is unmatched. Everything they do is incredibly clear,
et cetera, et cetera. Now, in the process, because of
how many cards he bought and how small the set is,
he reveals most of the cars that are in the set,
and then the Pinkertons show up to his house, forced

(02:54:52):
their way through his door, make his wife cry, threaten
to arrest him, and threaten to put him in prison
for ten years with two hundred thousand do finds for
copyright infringement on the grounds of him having stolen material.
The Pinkertons also harass his elderly neighbors. Literally, just today,
as I'm recording this, a story broken gizmoto that revealed

(02:55:14):
that Wizards of the Coast have used the Pinkertons before
to go after stolen goods. Now, some of you may
be asking who are the Pinkertons, And you know, I
think some of you probably know in very broad outlines
who the Pinkertons are. But in order to really get
at the core of what this organization is and why

(02:55:35):
they look the way they do today as compared to
how they've looked in the past, we need to ask
another question, which is how has the balance of military
power between the state and corporations changed over time? And
this seems like a very weird question, but the Pinkertons
emerge in a very weird period of time in this balance.

(02:55:56):
They are what fills in the gap between corporations directly
having army East could concre nations and modern corporations who,
instead of having their own personal armies, have intelligence, you know,
vast intelligence agencies, but also rely on the police and
the governments as the people who do violence for them.
So let's go back and tell the story from the
beginning by taking a look a brief look at the

(02:56:17):
most infamous corporate army of them all, the army of
the East India Trading Company. The East India Trading Company
was formed in sixteen hundred and it was given a
vast state monopoly over trade in what they called East India,
which is an area we would broadly call Southeast Asia
and the South Pacific today. And at the start, these

(02:56:37):
guys are optimistically they are half trading group, half pirate.
The level of piracy is really high, especially in the
early days. They you know, trade for spices. They steal
a lot of other people's spices from places like Java
and they bring them back to England. They make a
lot of money now over the course of theirs. And

(02:57:00):
again it is worth noting that these people are kind
of the descendants of the British privateers, people like Thomas Drake,
who'd been you know, just pirates who have been hired
by the government to only go after like Spanish ships
instead of English ships. So they are you know, from
the beginning, the East India Company has this sort of
DNA of army in it and over the course of

(02:57:23):
about two centuries, they are going to conquer with their
own army most of what is now India and Pakistan,
and that territory is either going to indirectly or directly
come under the rule of the East India Company. And
the East India Company is fighting wars everywhere again. They
seize India and Pakistan by force. They are fighting wars
in Afghanistan. They kill unfathomable numbers of people. The worst

(02:57:48):
of these events is the Great bengalf Femin'. There's a
Behind the Bastard's episode about this that you can listen
to if you want a really sort of long thing
about the East India Company and the famine. But I
want to talk about the famine a little bit because
so the Great Bengal Famine of seventeen seventy kills ten

(02:58:09):
million people. And I knew this intellectually, right, I studied
a bit in college. But what I had never actually
looked up somehow, what I'd never seen was the percentage
of the population of this famine kills. And this famine
is directly the fault of the East India Company. This
is something that all historians who have look at this
agree is that this is directly the fault of these

(02:58:30):
India Company and the combination of their agricultural policies and
their tax extraction. This sort of put into perspective how
bad this gets. The highest serious estimates for the number
of people who die in the Great Leap Forward stands
at about thirty million dead. This is an unfathomable atrocity.
It is a scale of death at which the human
mind breaks down and loses the ability to process. Some

(02:58:51):
of my family lived through it. It is horrific in
ways that are difficult to even begin to was to describe.
The Great killed about five percent of China's population. The
Great Bengal Famine killed thirty percent of the population of
India that the East India Trading Company controlled thirty percent.

(02:59:12):
That's not just sort of small populations statistics either. Right,
It's not like they killed thirty percent of a country
with thirty people in it, right, They killed ten million people.
This isn't you know? This is an unbelievable force of
human evil. Are they are capable of killing people in
numbers that defy comprehension. They're able to do this because

(02:59:33):
they have an army that is the size of a
great power nation state. The East India Trading Company's army
in eighteen hundred had two hundred thousand soldiers. That is
a massive army. Today, that is like the size of
the Act of Ukrainian Army in twenty twenty two. It
is more than twice the size of the British army
eighteen hundred. And you know, in eighteen hundred it's not

(02:59:56):
like the British aren't fighting wars, right they are in
eighteen hundred are fighting the war the Second Coalition, so.

Speaker 1 (03:00:02):
They are there.

Speaker 5 (03:00:03):
They are fighting Napoleon, right, So this isn't a sort
of you know, completely half assed like peacetime British army.
This is a you know, this is a serious military force.
And even even once they like fully build up their
army at the peak of the Napoleonic Wars thirteen years later,
the entire size of the British army is about two

(03:00:25):
hundred fifty thousand troops and that's not much larger than
the East India Company's army. At the same time and
at the height of the East India Trading Company there
are army swells to again two hundred and fifty thousand,
which is again the size of the regular British Army
at in the most desperate war that the British had
fought to that point. The trading company is a full

(03:00:47):
on military great power. Right But and this is this
is this is something that is going to shape an
enormous amount of the sort of arc of the relationship
between corporate and Billie story power. It is unbelievably expensive
to maintain an army like this, the the the British

(03:01:07):
Stadia Company, even though they're they you know, they are
looting entire nations, right they have they have there there
are entire states where they fully taken over the tax services.
They're just walking into temples and taking stuff. But even
with all of that profit, right they you know, they
have the ability to mint their own coins in a
lot of these areas, but they still lose money. And

(03:01:29):
they still lose money again because they're maintaining this two
hundred and fifty thousand strong army. And you know, so
you have this problem, right, which is that you have
this item on your balance sheet that is unfathomably expensive.
And then you have a second problem, which is that
if you have an army, there's always a danger. But
the army goes into revolts, and that's what happens. In

(03:01:50):
eighteen fifty seven, the British managed to piss off their
own army, which is almost all composed of Indian troops,
and they fight an incredibly bloody worn. It is either
the boy mutiny to suppoy uprising and the British win,
and they after victory they strap a bunch of prisoners
bodies to canons and shoot them so they can't be

(03:02:11):
properly buried. But the consequence of this sort of horrifying war,
and particularly the sort of fear it invokes in the
minds of you know, the British populace of like, oh
my god, these non white people can actually fight us,
is that they directly seize control of India from the

(03:02:33):
East India Trading Company. And for all your nationalization fans
out there, the British assuming direct control of India was
actually a nationalization. It's not actually inherently socialist, guys. You
have to be a bit smarter than this, But that aside, right,
this marks an enormous shift in the sort of political
economy of violence. What is happening here is that states
are assuming direct military control over their colonies. Instead of

(03:02:55):
operating through corporations. And this means that what you see
is a shift from direct corporate armies to corporations using
the state to do violence for them. And this doesn't
mean that corporations don't use force directly today, and it
also doesn't mean that the governments you know, weren't acting
as the armies of corporations and like the eighteen hundreds,

(03:03:16):
but what's happening here, and specifically the direct seizure of
India from the East India, the direct seizure of India
from the East India Company, marks a dramatic shift in
the balance of forces away from corporations with armies doing
violence towards states doing violence on their behalf. And this

(03:03:38):
is one of the things, alongside sort of slave catchers
in the US, that leads to the formation of the police.
You see this but both both both in Britain and
in sort of France, right, you start to get police
agencies that are you know, largely tasked with putting down
their own working class. And this is one of the things,
one of the sort of inexorable marches that happens over

(03:03:58):
the course of the twentieth century. And it's also happening
in nineteenth century too. There is a sort of mass
centralization of state and police power, and particularly that's an
expansion of the bureaucracy. Right the Orican state in eighteen
forty is barely a functional state by today's standards, right, Like,
they have an incredibly difficult time even figuring out how

(03:04:19):
many people there are in the country, that their provisioning
of services as a joke, nobody has like geek cars,
Like people don't even have birth certificates for the most part.
And that's something, you know, and that's something that changes
right over the course of sort of the eighteen and
nineteen hundreds, is that you get a massive bureaucracy. The

(03:04:39):
bureaucracy is built on the model of the police, and
they get bigger and more powerful, and by the time
you're you know, you're halfway through the twentieth century, get
you get a modern standing army. And that's something that
is very, very weird. The Founders, who you know, suck
ass in enormous numbers of ways, are also fundamentally and
deeply opposed to standing armies because you know, they are
students of Roman history and they know that standing armies

(03:05:01):
have this you know, this sort of way of seizing power,
but we've lented in a situation where you know, they
don't really need to.

Speaker 1 (03:05:09):
Right.

Speaker 5 (03:05:09):
The US Army is kept in check by the fact
that it has it basically a limited budget that increases
every year, so you can't even like talk about cutting
it without getting accused of treason. But it didn't used
to be like that. In the eighteen hundreds, right after
a war would end, you know, entire parts of the
like they like, you all the US cavalry, for example,
sometimes which just get disbanded. Right, there'd be these massive
reductions in troop size in between wars. And you know

(03:05:32):
that doesn't happen anymore, right, But the product of this
was that, you know, there weren't that many like armed
agents of the state running around with guns. And that's
the thing that is completely and utterly ubiquitous in modern
American life. I mean, modern American life has reached a
point where people literally you can't even imagine what it

(03:05:54):
would be like if there weren't cops literally everywhere, and
if you didn't have the ability to call the police
about anything. And that was just the sort of the
state of affairs for a lot of the eighteen hundreds
in the US. Is that just you know, they're really
weren't police. And you know, there's kind of midpoints in
the level of sort of bureaucratic development and the level

(03:06:15):
of sort of the bureaucracy of violence, that is the
police happens after a bit after the Civil War, where
there are not enough police to develop the kind of
sort of to deploy against the kind of violence that
companies need to stop unions informing. And you know there's

(03:06:36):
a secondary problem, right, which is okay, so you know
there are armed troops in a state, but the armed
troops are the militia. And you know a lot of
the times the militia can be relied upon to choose
striking workers and break them, but there's always a chance
that you ordered the militia in and the militia are
people from the towns where you know where the striking

(03:06:57):
workers are from. And this is a real problem with
sheriffs too, is that in this period, you get it,
you get a lot of sheriffs who just won't prosecute
workers because the entire town and the sheriff are all
pro union. And this is where we come to the
Pinkertons but first, and this is something that the Pinkertons
would have approved of. Some ads, and we're back. So

(03:07:22):
who are the Pinkertons. The Pinkertons are founded by a
guy named Alan Pinkerton. Alan Pinkerton's an interesting guy. He's
he's kind of a radical when he's young, he's like
he's a hardcore abolitionist who like funds John Brown. Right,
there's a whole debate about the extent to which she
was involved in a sort of British workers reform movement

(03:07:44):
called the chartlists. Every source I've read disagrees about how
much he was involved in it. It's I mean, one's
disagreements are basically penning the radiology. I don't know if
I ever get to get a good answer about how
involved in it he is. But Pinkerton briefly and kind
of by accident, becomes a bounty hunter. But he just
like walks across it, just runs into a camp of

(03:08:07):
people who seem to clearly be counterfeitters. And he eventually
becomes a detective around Michigan and then in Chicago, and
then he becomes a postal cop. And in the process
of being a postal cop, he figures out something that
is more lucrative. He figured out a more lucrative way
to de detective work than just working for the state,

(03:08:28):
which is working for the railways. So by eighteen fifty
he has a full detective agency going that he renames
the Pinkertons. Now, you know this is the eighteen fifties, right,
you are rapidly coproaching the Civil War. Durating the Civil War.
He is hired by George McClellan, just the worst union general.

(03:08:48):
He runs a spy network in the Confederacy that absolutely sucks,
Like all the spies get caught. His intelligence being awful.
It's one of the things that leads McClellan to suspect,
you know, that there's like secret way more Confederate troops
that there actually are. So he just never does anything
for the entire worlds Like he's like the worst union
general until he gets replaced. Yeah, when McClellan is asked,
Pinkerton is also out, but you know the agency is

(03:09:12):
still around and the detectives are initially known as Sidered
as cinder Dicks for complicated railroading reasons. I yeah, I
don't know about that one, but it's very funny and
what they sort of do, right is in this early phases,
they have this massive network of sort of informants and
spies that they sell to the highest bidder. They're not

(03:09:35):
sort of when you know, they are detectives, right and sometimes,
but they're not detectives in the Sherlock sense where you
have a guy who sees a bunch of evidence and
then uses logic and uses investigation to deduce like who
did the crime. Pinkerton detectives are operatives. They do infiltrations.
This is basically their one trick, right is they send
a guy under cover and then he gets people to

(03:09:58):
talk to him, and then they catch the guy because
someone talked. Right now. The other thing that the Pinkertons
are really really good at is spinning mythology around them.
Pinkerton claims that he saved Lincoln from an assassination plot,
and you know, he successfully convinces Lincoln to flee a
building in a disguise.

Speaker 4 (03:10:19):
Right.

Speaker 5 (03:10:20):
The problem is that you know, as early as like
the next day after this supposed plot happens, assassinating assassination
plot happens, people were already claiming that there wasn't one.
And you know, I think the evidence for their not
being one is bolstered by the fact that no one
was ever like, not only was no one ever tried
for this, no one was ever even arrested for again,

(03:10:40):
a plot to assassinate the president of the United States.
So I am inclined to suspect that this was fake.
So sorians disagree about this, but he's able to milk
this for incredible pr right, He's you know, he's like,
I'm the guy who saved the president, and he does
this whole sort of like.

Speaker 10 (03:10:56):
Ah, if I had been there when if I if
I had only been there when Lincoln was being gunned
down by John wielks Booth, ah would have saved him.

Speaker 5 (03:11:06):
And you know, this makes him very famous. They also
start doing you know, it's sort of word noting, right,
the kind of crime that they're doing, these guys are,
they're they're basically a corporate anti crime group.

Speaker 2 (03:11:20):
Right.

Speaker 5 (03:11:21):
They solve crimes, but the crimes that they solve are
people stealing from corporations. So, for example, they do a
lot of solving bank robberies. They do a lot of
security to stop train robbers, they do counterfeitting. These are
all kinds of crimes that affect rich people and you know,
and so the Ppiccotians are slowly starting to gain this

(03:11:43):
reputation to sort of like the hired hands of capital.
Now they're also sort of doing like frontier outlaws stuff.
There's a gang of people who there is a gang
that sort of bandits who they very successfully break up,
but they also go after Jesse James. Okay, we need
to tell the story of Jesse James briefly here because

(03:12:05):
it's it's an important thing to get an understanding of
what the sort of conflict that's going on in the
West is at this point. And the thing that's incredibly
important to understand about the story of Jesse James versus
the Pinkerton's is that there are no heroes here. Every
single person involved in all sides is just an absolutely
terrible person. So Jesse James is an ex Confederate terrorists

(03:12:26):
who somehow managed to make robbing trains uncool by doing
it dress and a KKK rope with the aim of
like restoring the honor of the Confederacy. So this sucks.
And this is where part of the sort of like
rebel flag like that part of the sort of like
lost cause myth those comes from right there are you know,
there are these sort of frontier outlaws who are like

(03:12:48):
ex Confederates whose thing is like, yeah, we're like against
the man and like the maand is like you know,
the north Right. But these people suck right. These are
these are these are these are people who fought and
died for slavery. I Jesse James in particular, like again,
he's in this group of like gorillas who are fighting
in Kansas and Missouri. They they do things that are

(03:13:11):
genuinely unspeakable. So these people suck right. But the problem
is the people going after them are the Pinkertons. And
we're gonna learn a lot about the Pinkertons by what
they managed to accomplish by going after again ex Confederate
terrorists who are like some of the worst people who've
ever lived. So the Pinkertons take this case in eighteen
seventy one. He sends in a bunch of agents try

(03:13:31):
to infiltrate the gang, and Jesse James like smokes them all. So,
in a very sort of modern cop move, the Pinkertons
do a raid on Jesse James's house. So they throw
in this weird pseudo it's a very weird kind of
explosive device thing that I don't know. They claim that

(03:13:55):
they were just trying to scare like the family out
of the house so they could arrest them. But the
family sees this thing that looks like a bomb and
they throw it into their fireplace and it blows up,
and instead of smoking the family out, they have now
blown up Jesse James's nine year old step brother and
maimed a mom. So the Piggertons absolutely suck right like

(03:14:17):
so far in there at the catch Jesse James, they
have managed to blow up a child.

Speaker 1 (03:14:21):
And name a woman.

Speaker 5 (03:14:23):
Now you can ask the question, right, Okay, so they
have killed a child, they have maimed a woman. Do
they get Jesse James. No, No, they don't. They never
get him, because that's what happens when you know, you
have an ex Confederate in places where with a bunch
of ex Confederates, with a bunch of people who support
the Confederacy right, they won't turn over their own people,

(03:14:44):
and you know, and when the people they're going up
against are the Piggertons, who are like the hired guns
of Northern Capital, a bunch of people, you know, what
happens is a bunch of grand people end up dead.
And yeah, but both sides of this are incredibly deeply evil.
Jesse James is later shot by one of his own men,
and yeah, that is the famous story of Jesse James

(03:15:06):
versus the Pinkertons, which I think is useful in establishing that,
like God, like, the South are obviously the bad guys
in the Civil War, but a lot of the people
in the Union are sort of genuinely awful hired gun
for capital people. And you know that's not so much

(03:15:26):
of a big deal dreamed the war, but after the war,
you know, you got these battles just like, oh God,
everyone here is like everyone here should simply die now.
Ellen Pinkerton dies in eighteen eighty six, and he is
replaced by his even worse sons. And at this point
the Pinkertons cease even sort of the pretense of being

(03:15:48):
a detective agency, and they devote themselves full time to
being strike breakers. Now they have spies everywhere. They have
you know, over a thousand of them at their peak,
spread across the dozens and dozens and dozens of Union,
and they are spying on meetings or appointed with the pinkertons.
And this allows corporations. For example, if you know who's
in a union meeting, right, you can just fire all

(03:16:08):
of them. And this is especially easy. And you know
in this sort of pre nineteen thirties period where like
there is no protected right to strike, right, like you
if you stop working, that is illegal. The other thing
they do is provide quote unquote security for corporations training strikes.

(03:16:29):
What this looks like in practice is shooting people. And
you know, sometimes those people are striking workers, like the
three strikers they killed in the Pennsylvania close strike of
eighteen ninety. Sometimes they just shoot random bystanders, like the
random guy they shot in eighteen sixty six, while providing security.
And you know, again when you're shooting in random bysanta,
you have to ask.

Speaker 1 (03:16:50):
Like security for who, like who is.

Speaker 5 (03:16:55):
The security you're providing for when you're just shooting random people?
You know, anominally it's for the alo doing a dock strike.
And sometimes, like in eighteen seventy seven, they shoot children
where they shot and killed a fifteen year old you
a Jersey coal wharf strike, you know, and they do
stuff like this all the time. Right, there's a famous
incident in Chicago where a bunch of people are yelling

(03:17:15):
at them, because again the thinker does have a really
bad reputation among workers at this point. And you know
there's a point where they're they're going by on a
train and people yelled the train and the Pinkertons just
bomb by, taking out the rifles and shooting four people
out the window. So you know these are good people, TM, right.
The other thing they do is they start getting into

(03:17:35):
breaking strikes by being a company you can hire to
import scabs, and this culminates in the Homestead strike. Again,
there's another thing. There's like a giant Bastard's episode on,
but we'll do we'll do a short version of the
Homestead strike. So the Homestet strike is this giant confrontation
between steel workers and the forces of Andrew Carnagie and

(03:17:56):
Henry Frick. Carnagian Frick like locked the union out of
the factory and they call a Pinkerton army to seize
control of the town of Homestead. This is from the
book Inventing the Pinkertons quote. By the end of June,
he had built around the mills of protective twelve foot
fence that included rifle holes, waterman's capable of blasting strikers
with boiling water, and wires attached to a generator which

(03:18:18):
could be electrified. In response, workers dubbed the mills Fort Frick.
Now striking steel workers and other residents of Homestead. Here
the Pinkertons are coming and they, you know, they the
Pinkertons are trying to land on these like invasion barges
that they've modified, and so the homestead people go try
to stop the barges, and the Pinkertons start shooting at them.

(03:18:40):
And this is the thing that's very interesting about this
whole story is that, Okay, every account at the time
agrees that the first person the people who started shooting
first with pinkertons. Later accounts suddenly, like mysteriously later on
it suddenly start to claim it like, well, nobody really
knows she started the shooting in these fights, like maybe
it was a worker, but like again everyone at the

(03:19:03):
time cause it was the pinkertons. So I and give,
given what we know about the track record of pinkertons
are shooting children and shooting random people yelling at them
outside of a train of shooting, just literally random people
on the streets. We can be pretty sure that Pinkertons
started this, and but you know, the workers in Homestead
are heavily armed, and this starts a massive gun battle.

(03:19:26):
I'm gonna read from inventing the Pinkertons again. This serious
battle would last the next fourteen hours. After an initial shurge,
the Pinkertons were pinned down in their barges. After several hours,
the crowd attempted to sink the barges by cannon fire.
Residents borrowed the cannon that had been that the city
used for commemorations and by the way, that that's a
Civil war cannon that they're using it in eighteen ninety to

(03:19:47):
try to sink these boats. The crowd also set burning
railcars rolling towards the barges and sprayed oil lunch the
river was they attempted a light on fire in hopes
of burning the Pinkertons out of their barges. The lubricating
oil thrown onto the water proved impossible to set a flame.
So the Pickertons like try to surrender, But by this

(03:20:07):
one people hate them so much that every they threw
this four times, and each time someone will hold up
a white flag and a sniper will shoot the flag
and refuse to let them surrender. On try five, the
Pickertons are finally allowed to surrender and the Pickersons are crushed,
but unfortunately, the state militia is brought in to sort
of break the strike and the union movement in Pennsylvania
is essentially destroyed. But pr White this is terrible from

(03:20:32):
the Pinkertons, and they start trying to do like a
giant pr OP to sort of recover the reputation, and
a lot of what the sort of popular image of
the Pinkertons right comes from the pr op the agency does,
like after the Homes District that gets reproduced by like
TV producers later on. So fast forwarding a little bit
to some other stuff that they were involved in. In

(03:20:52):
late nineteen oh five, someone blew up the notoriously anti
union governor of Idaho who'd sent troops to kill striking
workers a few years ago. Now Idaho hires a Pinkerton
detective to just torture a guy into confessing to the
murder and then also claiming that like basically every instance
of violence in the last five years in in in

(03:21:14):
that part of the US was committed by the i
w W, who are the WW are a very very
radical union whose thing basically was that society should be
run by like confederations of direct democratic unions like run
you know, in all all of society, all the production
should be run by workers in these in you know,
in in in the form of like one giant direct

(03:21:36):
democratic union. And people hate this, and by people, I
mean like bosses absolutely hate this EW. Very IWW very
popular with workers. Bosses are going to spend the next
rest of theirs just murdering them, you know. But having
having tortured this guy into saying into fingering the industrial
workers of the world in this conspiracy, they get Big

(03:21:58):
Bill Haywood, who is one of the most famous and
like successful organizers of the AWW, and several other IWW
leaders kidnapped and taken into Idaho to stand trial for murder,
which again they had nothing to do with. Haywood is
defended by Clarence Darrow of the infamous Scopes Monkey trial,
and Haywood gets off, but the case the serious damage

(03:22:19):
to the WW. If you want to learn more about
this whole story, go listen to Cool People Who Did
Cool Stuff there's two episodes about the IWW in this
period called the IWW and the Hoboes. You saved free speech.
It's good stuff, you know. I should also briefly mention, right,
another thing that the Pinkertons do is Okay, so if

(03:22:40):
someone someone's wanted in one state, right, instead of having
to like make you know, the government having to like
the state government have to making requests, have to be
having to make request to another state in order to
get them to extradite someone, they would just have the
Pingertions kidnap them. This is this is one of the
sort of big services they provide. They also seemed it's
very unclear. I don't know, this historical record is a

(03:23:01):
bit muddled. They seem also to have been people you
could hire if so if like your spouse was trying
to divorce you, which sucks. Is deeply evil.

Speaker 1 (03:23:13):
They do sort of lots.

Speaker 5 (03:23:16):
More deeply evil stuff, which we will get into after
these ads. All right, we're back, So speaking of deeply
evil stuff, they also send one hundred detectives to break
a strike of the mostly black Brotherhood of Timber Workers,
which is an IWW affiliate in Louisiana. Now they break this.
They try to break this union by walking into a
union meeting shooting forty four people and killing four of them.

(03:23:40):
There are like forty more stories of a guy with
the Pinkerton walks in and shoots a bunch of people
that I could put here. I had to find the
limit at some point to how many stories about Pinkerton's
murdering people that I could I could sort of put
But you know, there's an interesting shift that starts to
happen in the in sort of as the nineteen hundred,

(03:24:00):
you know, the nineteen hundreds turned into nineteen tens. The
Pinkertons start to figure out that it's more effective to
form mobs of vigilantes than it is to fight unions directly.
And there's a few benefits here, right, There's less danger
to detectives themselves. It's easier to deploy large numbers of people.
Instead of having to sort of like pay an enormous
amount of money for a bunch of like eight hundred

(03:24:21):
detectives and weapons and logistics, you can just sort of
whip up a mob and get them to do the shooting, right.
The Pinkertons also get plausible deniability, which is very helpful.
For their reputation, and you know, the Pinkertons are are
very much ahead of the curve here. The government, you know,
who is going to displace the Pinkertons is sort of
the main force opposing the IWW in later sort of
like cio union organizing that you know, turn into the

(03:24:44):
two Red Scares. They're going to start taking pages from
the Pinkerton's book, and eventually they are going to you know,
instead of like sending the US Army to invade Nicarago,
which is what they would have done in the eighteen hundreds,
by you know, by the time you gets to the
nineteen eighties, right, they are sending people to train Nicaraguan
desk squads. And so we can track the shift here.

(03:25:06):
Right as the nineteenth century comes to a close and
we get to sort of the October Revolution of the
height of the Red Scare, we're in a place where
they're starting to be enough cops and enough federal agents
to do the job the Pinkertons had done in previous generations.
And you know, there's sort of robust arguments in the
the sort of historiography about to what extent j Edgar

(03:25:29):
Hoover and the FBI were influenced by the Pinkertons. I
think there's decent evidence that they that they were influenced
by them. But the FBI kind of turns into what
the Pinkertons are. You know, they're the people who suddenly
are like showing up and shooting people, showing up and
arresting union organizers, deporting union organizers from the country. But

(03:25:49):
this puts the Pinkertons in kind of a weird spot
right there. The Pinkerton name has become synonymous with sort
of this this kind of like they're called sort of
like feudal retainers, right, these sort of lawless private armies
that are you know, not supposed to exist in a democracy.
And so you know in the nineteen thirties when the

(03:26:10):
Wagnerak like makes strikes legal, right. I talked about the
Wagner Acts a long time ago, an episode called The
Eden Makes Its Strong. But after this they tried Robert
Pinkerton the second who's the new sort of owner of
the Pinkerton tries to do a rebrand and he has
this great quote. That's quote he's talking about union busting.
That is a phase of our business that we are

(03:26:31):
not particularly delighted or proud of and we're out of it. However,
there was nothing illegal about it at the time. Now, okay,
you could say a lot about what was or wasn't
illegal in a period when you know, you could order
a drink that was cocaine mixed with wine and you know,
you could just get like opium prescribed to your baby,
But torturing and murdering people was still legal back then. Now,

(03:26:53):
I guess if you're you know, if you really wanted
to have fun, you can get into an argument that like,
nowhere in the constitution is murdered specifically banned, but like,
you know, how fun with that. But FDR and the
New Dealers go after the Pinkerton's very hard. And this
is a lot of interesting effects. What it means is,
on the one hand, you can't have some guy with
a detective badge who works for a corporation walked into
a union meeting and start the killing. But it also

(03:27:15):
means that when you need someone to smash a union
by force, it's going to be the state doing it.
And the aposteosis of this sort of one of the
internal contradictions that destroys a new Deal is that it's
reliance on the state to contain the worst exis of
capitalism means that you know, they have in turn directly
enormously empowered the state and the state's military capacity. And

(03:27:36):
this means that in the nineteen eighties unions are going
to be destroyed by the state that the New Deal
had built. The Pickertons are replaced by Hoover and the
g Men, and the g Men are eventually sort of
become known as the dreaded modern fat who you know,
lurks at every doorstep eating babies and is the terror
of every sort of political movement in the US.

Speaker 4 (03:27:59):
Now.

Speaker 5 (03:28:00):
The Pinkertons, for for their part, right with union busting
now technically illegal, and when I say union busting like
I mean walking in, shooting people stop and performing a union,
they start working basically as regular security guards. And then
they move on to selling surveillance equipment and trainings for
government organizations. And this reflects a kind of larger shift

(03:28:22):
in what kinds of military operations the corporations run, which
is that instead of directly running armies or hiring groups
like the Pinkertons to do violence for them, now what
they're in the business office intelligence operations. And this changes
the way that corporations kill people enormously. You know, when
Coca Cola now needs to kill union organizers, right, they

(03:28:45):
have paramilitaries for this. Now, some of these guys are contractors,
some of them are paid under the table, some of
them are in it for ideology, some of it for money.

Speaker 1 (03:28:51):
But it's not you.

Speaker 5 (03:28:52):
Know, it's not quite like Coca Cola has its own
military force like it would have been in the eighteen hundreds,
and they're hundreds. It's also not there is just like
a private but there's not like it's not they're not.
They're not also not like hiring a specific private military contractor. Right,
the way they do, way they do it tends to
be they you know, sort of semi clandestinely arm paramilitary. Now,

(03:29:17):
there are limited exceptions where sort of like oil companies
will have private armies and places where civil wars are
going on, but that's usually a thing that happens when
they're in a place that doesn't have state capacity. When
they're in a place that does have state capacity, like
for example, Nigeria, you get a very very different story.
So Nigeria is a major oil producer, and this has

(03:29:39):
a number of consequences on the places where that oil
is extracted. A huge amount of it comes from the
Niger Delta, where the government faces an almost perennial insurgency.
So okay, why is there an insurgency there?

Speaker 1 (03:29:50):
Right?

Speaker 5 (03:29:50):
Part of the reason is that there is an indescribable
amount of wealth coming out of the oil and Niger Delta,
and that money goes mostly to I mean, might I
say mostly ninety percent of it right, go to Nigerian
elites and corrupt for oil for in oil companies. And
you know. Another part of the reason this turns into
an insurgency is that people try nonviolence with disobedience in

(03:30:11):
the Niger Delta to protest the sort of horrific environmental
consequences of companies like Shell doing oil extraction, you know.
And they have these marches that will draw out three
hundred thousand people in places where this is half of
the population, half the total population of the ethnic group
being affected. The Nigerian government responds by publicly executing one

(03:30:32):
of the movement's leaders, the famous activist Ken Sarrowewa, by
hanging him and then dissolving his body and limes we
couldn't be buried, which is a real British Empire. Shit
And okay, so at this point you've come to the
sort of crossroad of a nonviolent movement, right where the
government's answer to non violence we will publicly hang you
and you get you get to this question do you
take up arms? And the answer is yeah, a lot

(03:30:53):
of people do.

Speaker 1 (03:30:54):
Right.

Speaker 5 (03:30:54):
This is this is this is a very complicated insurgency
in a lot of ways that you know, we can't
do justice here too. But I want to read something
from this interview from a guy for the Movement for
the Emancipation of the Niger Delta Men, which is one
of the many, many, many, many many like Milton groups
that appear in the Delta over the last twenty five years. Quote,

(03:31:15):
this is our territory. The soldiers dare not come here.
Now they came, and we defeat them. He says. We
are civilized people, educated people, and we do not want
our children to be deprived as we have been deprived
so other people can get rich from what is under
our feet. The oil companies have had many years to
treat us rights. They have never done that. Now we

(03:31:35):
are making them think. Now if this is you know
eighteen twenty right, and shell is dealing with people taking
up arms and cutting off their ability to sort of
like extract profits of oil. They would form an army
of semi literate Belgian and British barbarians, arm they with
cannons and conquer the region and place the entire area
under direct corporate rule. You know, if this was say,

(03:31:57):
like the eighteen nineties, right, they would hire the pinker
Chance and the Pinkertons, nego shoot these people before them.
But this is the nineteen nineties, in the two thousands,
so instead, what Shell does is literally pay the salaries
of Nigerian cops who go slaughter protesters in the streets,
and eventually they move to spending hundreds of millions of
dollars just just between two thousand and seven two thousand

(03:32:18):
and nine alone directly funding equipping an army, the Nigerian Army,
and a special like war crimes task force called the
Joint Task Force the JFT, which is this like it's
this sort of incredible thing where the army, the navy
and the police do a fusion dance to massacre civilians.

(03:32:39):
And you know, I say this hundreds of millions of dollars, right,
that's an underestimate that's just three years. That's just what
we know about. The actual total that they sunk into
sort of like literally funding the Nigerian Army is enormous. Now,
what's interesting here is that Shell does have its own
security guards, but the ratio of what they spend in
the Nigerian Army versus what they spend on their own

(03:32:59):
security guards just two to one. And this goes to
demonstrate the point that I've sort of been making this episode, right,
which is that there's been a shift in you know,
if you are a company like Shell, right who has
a need, you know, who are horrifically exploiting a bunch
of people to the point where you need to shoot
them in order to keep them in line. Instead of

(03:33:21):
going to like a private detective agency or having your
own army, they are increasingly simply funding the state. And
you know this means that right again again, instead of
the Pinkertons, the actual trigger pullers are cops. They are
the police, There are the military, they're weird special forces groups.
And you know where that sort of leaves space for

(03:33:46):
groups like the Pinkertons now is the area that's left
for them is in corporate intelligence. And this seems to
be most of what the Pinkertons have been up to recently.
Amazon hired them in the last few years to work
and to work with their intelligence division, the Global Security
Operations Center, which they use to try to stomp out

(03:34:06):
union organizing in their warehouses. And Amazon isn't just sort
of spying on union organizers. 're spying on basically every
social roupment they can get their hands on. Here's from WECE.
In twenty nineteen, Amazon monitored the yellowfst movement known as
the jele Jean, a grassroots uprising for economic justice spread
across France, and solidarity movements in Vienna and protest against
state repression in Iran. They've been deployed deployed against strikes

(03:34:30):
of communication workers in West Virginia, Google and Facebook deploys
them against their own employees to redout leakers. Now, this
is all in line with the pivot of sort of
corporate repression towards mass surveillance. Interestingly, the Pikersons have been
planting stories in the press about going back to their
roots as mercenaries, pitching themselves as you know, the force

(03:34:50):
that could stop climate chaos with ex military forces. The
company claims to have been deployed by corporations in Puerto
Rico after the hurricane and after Hurricane ria antoin seventeen.
I don't know if that's true. This is possible, but
again it's something that they have to be very careful
with the Pinkertons is that they are very, very brand obsessed,

(03:35:12):
even though they're now owned by a different sort of
Swedish security company, and they lie constantly, so it's very
difficult to sort up sort of the myth from the
fact when myth making has been such a vital part
of their branding from the beginning. For another example, here's
from a New York Times magazine. Among their most popular
news services is the Pinkerton Dedicated Professional, in which agents

(03:35:35):
join a client's company like any other new hire, allowing
them to provide intel employees. By twenty eighteen, the agency
said it could count among its clients about eighty percent
of Fortune one thousand companies. Are these numbers correct? Who knows?
They absolutely could be lying right. On the other hand,

(03:35:55):
here's Gizmoto talking about the current reach of the Pinkertons
in matchic together ring. There are other connections between Wizards
of the Coast and the Pinkerton Agency. Robert M. Klemmick,
who has been the director of Security Risk Management at Hasbro, Inc.
Which is the parent company Wizards of the Coast for
twelve years, was previously the director of supply chain Security
Practice at Pinkerton Consulting in Investigations. The current manager of

(03:36:19):
Global Investigations is also a form of Pinkerton Agents. So
what we saw in the fact that you know, Wizards
of the Coast said the Pinkertons after a guy who
made a YouTube video showing some cards that he bought
from someone else, is you know, you can see in
that the arc of the arc of of what the

(03:36:39):
Pinkers are trying to do. Right, You have, on the
one hand, the Pinkertons falling back into their sort of
intelligence role. You also have them specifically trading on their
reputation to intimidate people. And you know, the reputation they
acquired by killing unfathomable numbers of people between the eighteen hundreds,
which they used the sort of intimidate people by just

(03:37:02):
sort of the power of the reputation. You can see
something very interesting, which is that the Pinkertons don't arrest
Dan Cannon directly, right, they're able to leave with the
sort of goods. But what they threatened Dan Cannon with
is the regular police. And that is I think a
very important aspect of what the story actually is, which
is it's a story about the modern division of labor,

(03:37:25):
of violence against people who corporations don't like, and that
division of labor runs through security. You know, you have
your major, you have a major corporation. That corporation has
its own security division. That security division is connected to
the Pinkertons. They use the Pinkertons as an intelligence network,
and they have done several times now and then you know,

(03:37:46):
when it comes time to you know, you can use
the Pinkertons as like the people will stop you booth.
But when it comes time to actually do violence against someone,
when it comes time to arrest someone, that's the state's job.
And that, I think is the thing that's that you know,
that that's very important to understand about the way all
of this stuff works is that the thing that is

(03:38:08):
true now about the year twenty twenty three that was
not true about the year like eighteen seventy three, is
that the the sort of primary driver of corporate violence
in you know, in in in the US and abroad
is not necessarily private security companies. It is the state,

(03:38:30):
and it is the police. And yeah, this has been naked.
Happened here. The police suck acab get rid of them.

Speaker 1 (03:38:42):
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the Universe. It
Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 3 (03:38:50):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources.

Speaker 7 (03:39:04):
Thanks for listening.