The Rojava/Kurdish Genocide Episode (Why So Syria?)

 Terrible sh*t is happening in Syria. You probably heard about it on the news. Robert was there earlier this summer and he talks about it, what’s happened since, and what’s about to die forever (freedom).

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Worst Year Ever, a production of My Heart Radio.
Welcome Everything, So don't don't don't, Hey, yo, what's up?

(00:22):
Welcome back to Worst Year Ever. My name is Katy Stole.
Oh cool man Cody Johnson. Yeah, and you and I
also have a name. Yeah. You don't feel the need
to like, we're a community of equals and I don't
need to prove anything to you. I just did it.
You just told everybody's name. I did. I got impatient

(00:47):
out of you on this Now, this, this podcast, if
I'm not mistaken, is called the Worst Year Ever, and
it's supposed to be about um, but right now there's
some people in a little little corner of the world
who were having well, actually not the worst year ever
by their standards, but a pretty bad year. Yeah. Yeah,

(01:07):
So welcome to the worst Year currently. That's happening time
time the show. Welcome to Bad Times. That was an
al title pitch, but uh yeah, So we figured we'd
take a pause from going into our deep dies on
candidates to talk a little bit about what's happening with

(01:30):
the Kurds and Turkey and over in Syria. And Robert
of course has a lot of background over there, and
what better person to help us then? And Robert's gonna
bite his tongue the whole time. I've got some notes.
He's not gonna let us know when we pronounced things wrong.
We're just going to fumble through it. As per agreement

(01:54):
before this, I too have notes, but I'm just going
to light them on fire. Um, and then sit quietly
through out the rest of the episodes, Do every ad
break another page of notes? Well, it's difficult because all
of his notes are on the computer, so he won't
be connected with us anymore. Right, the first page of
notes goes up in flames, and then so does his device. Wait, no,
Skype does not work on fire, So we're going to

(02:19):
troubleshoot this on the fly. It's going to be fun
short episode. Yeah, probably so, Um yeah, this is this
is this is our our Rojava episode. I guess there's
like I have like twenty something pages of typed up
notes that I took while I was there over my
like not. I spent a week there in August of

(02:43):
earlier this year in northeast Syria. Um. And it's like
the news always refers to it as the Kurds because
I think at a certain point in the history of
the Syrian Civil War, all mainstream foreign journalists just gave
up and we're like, let's just refer to things by
the laziest possible term. Um So, the SDF is like
made up a bunch of different militias. Yeah, and they're

(03:05):
not all Kurdish. Yeah, the SDF is the Syrian Democratic
Forces and they were um So the way, I guess
a little bit of backstories. Good back. You know, there
was a Kurdish political party in northeast Syria called the
p y D that was initially like a hard line
Marxist party, and they were doing ship like killing landlords
and stuff back in the early odds, and they kind

(03:27):
of win a little bit more uh, a little bit
less extreme as time went on, and when um the
Syrians Civil War kicked off. You know, in most of
the country, the regime was battling with different rebel groups,
but in a lot of Northeast Syria they just kind
of pulled the hell out because they realized they couldn't
hold it. And so there's this big power vacuum and

(03:49):
the p y D, which again is this kind of
Kurdish leftist party, was one of the most organized groups
in the area, and they kind of wound up taking
control with a group the help of called p KK,
which is like a Turkish militant Kurdish group um that
are considered to be terrorists by the United States and
by Turkey, but not by a lot of other countries.

(04:11):
Didn't they done some big thing in the eighties and
the terrors. Tens of thousands of people have died, and
most of them have been killed by Turkey. UM. But
the p k K did a bunch of really awful
stuff too. Now, what makes the p KK complicated is
that they're also the ones who saved the z d
S when ISIS started rampaging like it was they were,

(04:33):
you know, it was the White PG and the Wye
p J, which is like the Syrian forces, but in
the in the early days of the Civil war, they
were basically just p KK. That's no longer true. But
like see, this is this is really complicated. There's a
lot of fucking acronyms and a lot of different groups. UM.
What's important to understand is that what started out as
a group of very very um ideological militants, most of

(04:55):
whom have been fighting for decades against primarily Turkey saw
the operator the eyes of Isis and the collapse of
order in their chunk of Syria as an opportunity to
number one finally control a sizeable chunk of land of
their own and not just be hiding in the mountains
of Turkey fighting as guerrillas, but number two institute some
of these radical political ideas that they had. The guy

(05:18):
who founded the pak Ak is a dude named up
de Lagelon, and he was a hard core terrorist and
he's been trapped alone on an island prison for the
last twenty years or so um, and he's published a
bunch of books by sending them out as legal briefs
to his lawyers, who then published them as works of
political theory. And he basically spent a bunch of time
in prison reading about history and became like like ancient history,

(05:42):
like like like paleolithic neolithic human history, and became convinced
that like where everything had gone wrong was the beginning
of agriculture, when men started to dominate women and we
went from being a matriarchal society to a patriarchal society.
So Ajalon's idea was that, Okay, Funckett I was you know,
I was I was wrong in the past to try
to like want to institute a Marxist state or whatever

(06:03):
we like. That's why all these revolutions in the Middle
East keep failing, as we just keep putting in new
strongman leaders who do terrible, shitty things, and instead we
should seek to reform the primary imbalance in our society,
which is the domination of women by men. So that's
like the underlying ideology that these groups who wind up
in charge in Northeast Syria have and like two isn't

(06:23):
thirteen two fourteen? Um, So they just start kind of
building a government, um, and using a lot of principles
that they cribbed from an American anarchist thinker named Murray
book Chin. It's like focused around communes, like local communes,
like every neighborhood will have, you know, everyone will get
together and vote on issues that deal with them immediately,
and then the elect representatives to represent them for like

(06:46):
you know, at the city level and so on and
so on and so forth. Um. In every elected position
they elect a man and a woman. UM. That's one
of like the core ideas behind it is you you
never have like one person elected to do a job
like that, because that's kind of a it's both the
seed of authoritarianism and it's sort of guarantees I had. UM.
Someone explained to me when I was in a meeting

(07:06):
with a couple of Kurdish military leaders, UM, the co
presidents of security for Rocca, the former capital of Islamic State.
That UM they're understanding was that if you just had
it really piste off the coalition having to deal with
like two elected leaders because coalition forces used to a
very linear sort of chain of command and it's not

(07:26):
as much with the the SDF. UM. And they were like,
but if you have one leader, just because of the
history of the region, it's going to be a man,
and then you're gonna wind up reinforcing all of these things.
So so within the SDF, you mean, there's these two
elected positions within all aspects of society. So the SDF
is the military force, UM, and it's you know, the

(07:46):
Kurds are are who's best known, and at one point
they were, you know, more than seventy percent of the
effort UM and actually a lot of Rajava. Now it's
majority Arabic fighters in the WHITEPG and the YEPG and again,
this is all so the SDF is a broad umbrella
organization and there's a number of different militias within it.
The WIEPG and the YEPG are the largest, but there's

(08:07):
you know, a lot of the fighters are Arabic. We
saw Armenian fighters, Assyrian fighters, Syric fighters, Turkmen fighters, so
it's it's a very it's basically a collection. What what
you had in Rojava was all these different minority groups
who've been traditionally oppressed in Syria and the region. UM
wound up as the only power in the area. And

(08:27):
because they were fighting Isis, the US started shipping them
huge amounts of of weaponry and military training, and they
kind of nailed it UM to the extent that it's
you talked to US soldiers about it, Special Forces guys,
you talked to or you read interviews with some of
these guys who are like colonel and higher level, and
they always seem kind of shocked at how well the

(08:48):
cooperation went. UM. There were no insider attacks, which is
something that you look in Afghanistan, right and it's it's
a constant series of US and other Western military and
political officials getting murdered. UM as a result of somebody
sneaking their way into the Afghan security apparatus and carrying
out an attack. Right, that doesn't happen UM in ra Java.

(09:09):
They're people have obviously died in suicide bombings and stuff,
but you've never had a guy in the SDF pull
out a gun and start shooting at an American general,
which has happened so often in Afghanistan. It's it's basically
a joke. UM. So it was a really good cooperation.
They fought very well, UM. And it was one of

(09:29):
those things where as I was looking reading the stories
about this place and about the evolution these political ideas
in the region, you know, from about two fourteen on, UM,
part of me was like, this sounds amazing because I'm UM.
I'm personally an anarchist. I'm personally someone who I hold
a lot of the things that they were saying they
were doing and trying to like reform about society are

(09:51):
things I very much believe in. UM. The kind of
dismantling of hierarchy and sort of reducing authoritarian impulses in
government very into the commune aspect of it. It's very
interesting because it's not what most people I think associate
with you know, what's happening over there. No, And but

(10:11):
also it's it was impossible for me to know like
how real is any of this ship? Yeah, yeah, yeah you.
One of the things that in my work in Iraq
has become very clear to me is that the way
things look on the surface, or the way they were
reported in the foreign media often has very little to
do with the actual reality on the ground. And that
was something I encountered a lot with the Iraqi Kurds.

(10:32):
The Iraqi kurdistands much better than the rest of Iraq.
It's a much more effective government, but it's unbelievably corrupt
and fucked up. And while things are better for women
there than they are in a lot of the country, um,
you still don't see them doing much like running things.
You don't see them doing a lot of important work
in the society, and not like really public facing positions.

(10:55):
There's a few. I have met a couple of women
who were in positions of like management or government. But
and like the stuff about the the Kurdish female fighters
in Iraq, they had a few that they would try
out for the cameras during the worst part of the
invasion by Isis. But once the fighting died down, those
women got pushed back and mainly we're doing photo ops.
That's not the case in Rojava. Um. And it was

(11:17):
obvious as soon as I crossed the border, just in
terms of how the women carried themselves, how they dressed,
the fact that some of the first people I met
who were like processing our passports and stuff and giving
us are our passes in order to like travel through
the country were women who were like just handling administrative jobs. Um.

(11:38):
And then we started crossing. We crossed the Tigris in
this little pontoon bridge, which was the only real way,
and it was it was real pain in the ask
getting in because we had to get approval with the
Iraqi government everything. But as soon as we crossed over, um.
You know, there's checkpoints all throughout the region and there
would just be women with machine guns at the checkpoints
doing jobs like working with men. Um. It was so

(12:01):
at first it was really kind of jarring. And there's
the suspicious part of me that was like, are they
putting on a show? Um? But you know, the guy
I was with, Jake, is a former reporter for Vice.
You were on the site called No No no, yes, yes,
Jake Tapper, Jake Tapper. We were there mainly to talk
about the time Monica Lewinsky almost sucked him. Oh he

(12:24):
did he did this close? This this this close? Yeah.
Um No. Jake Hanrahan who runs a site called Popular Front,
and then me, who makes podcasts for the Internet. Neither
of us are the kind of people you would get
hundreds of folks to stage, um a series of uh like.

(12:45):
There was a certain point at which we I had
to accept this couldn't have been staged. The pageantry wouldn't
have been for you. Yeah, nobody's nobody's getting thousands of
people to dress up and pretend they're treating women right
to like impress Robert Evans. Yeah, of the podcast with
a swear word in the name. Um, but hey, maybe

(13:08):
you know, hey man, hey, maybe that would be nice.
I would like to be important enough to be gas
lit to that extent, and that I I hope. So,
I hope it's Michigan. I would love to be by Michigan. Um.

(13:29):
So yeah. The first city we entered when we rolled
into Rojava was this place called Derek, which there's a
lot of fighting there right now. Um. The Turkish army
is like kind of pushing into the outskirts of city
of the city, and the SDF is mounting a pretty
furious defense. Um. But when we were there, Derek was
just like incredibly peaceful, very quiet town. The first thing

(13:51):
I noticed is that the way that sort of cities
are built in this part of Syria, they have you know,
you have rows of houses and there will be apartment
blocks on the top floors, and the bottom floors will
be shops. And all those shops have like little metal
grates that pulled out in front when it's time to
like close up for the night, kind of like in
a mall or something that I've seen those that yeah yeah,
yeah UM. And during the days of the Syrian regime,

(14:14):
they would all be painted with um Syrian like national
flags like the flag of Ashar al Assad Um. And
they've been repainted when we were there, UM in lavender
with green clovers on them and um our. Our fixer,
this woman named Kabat, who showed us around the country UM,
said that it had been done by the women in
town because they were like, well, the regime's gone, there's

(14:35):
no need to have these fucking flags here, Like let's
let's make it look nice. Um. And so it was
a really it was a really pretty and calming place
to drive into, and we met a lot of journalists.
There's some really neat folks who had all been working
in the region for a while, and they all had
really different opinions on what was going on in ro
Java and how revolutionary it actually was. And Um I

(14:57):
met this um cipherin photojournalist named Achilles Um who had
been in Syria dozens of times. I think, like like
constantly from the beginning of the war on and Achilles Um.
You know, it had a lot of praise for like
the fighting prowess of the YPG and the y PGJ,
but I think kind of this sense of doom about
what was going to happen to the whole project, Like

(15:18):
it was this matter of it can't it's not going
to last, like the Americans are going to pull out,
and when they do, Turkey has planes and tanks. Um
and I would say when talking to foreigners, there were
two things they all agreed on. One of them was
that the changes to women's rights in the region in
the seven or eight years since the establishment of of

(15:39):
the the Autonomous Region was was remarkable, almost unbelievable. Um.
And the second thing was that they were completely fucked
and that was that was not an uncompos One of
my friends in Iraq who drove us up to the border,
um and helped us get in. It's a very good
fixture over there. Um loves going to Rojava. Would visit
every Ramadan because they didn't have religious there, in his words,

(16:01):
and so he could get wasted. And he was like,
you know, it's great over there. I really like it.
It's very chill. But you know, they're basically like the
people in charge were dumb. They weren't willing to compromise
on any of the things they believed, and so they're
only friends are the Americans. And let me tell you,
my American friend, Americans are bad friends currently seeing all

(16:26):
over the world, but especially there. Um uh yeah, I
have a quick question. So I know that this week
there's this power vacuum that sprung up after you know,
America withdrawing. Uh. And so now the STF is teamed
up with the Charles Sad and I'm seeing reports that

(16:48):
the Syrian forces are like now seizing up territory that
they haven't had in years, and that would be Rojava. Correct,
So like this specifically hits me a little bit to
see I say, no, that was coming in sooner or later,
knowing that America can't stay there forever. But like especially
this description you're giving us of, like the shops painted

(17:09):
with these peaceful images as opposed to the nationalistic baganda.
And so that's the area that they are now reclaiming
and taking back for their own, well chunks of it.
So one of the first areas, Yeah, one of the
first things that went back to the regime's control was Rocca, again,
the former capital of the Islamic State, which was being
managed and run by the autonomous government, but was not

(17:31):
really considered to be a part of Rojava. From one
thing it was it was Yeah, it was a majority
um Arab city, and again, like what most of what
you have going on in Rojah was kind of a
coalition of different these different little like minority groups. So
Rocca was not a city they wanted and it was
not a friendly city to that extent. That was probably
always going to go back to the control of the

(17:53):
Syrian government. Um. But yeah, they are taking other areas.
It's kind of unclear to me, and I think to
everyone except maybe Bashar al Assad, what the exact extent
of UM, the absorption of Rojava into the regime is
going to be. I asked a lot of people about that.
UM that was obviously the one of the big questions

(18:13):
on my mind, because I think but al Assad is
one of, if not the very worst war criminals of
our age. And you know, one of the things that's
really controversial within sort of people who are followers of
the Syrian Civil War, and particularly people who got really
emotionally uh invested in the rebel movement is the fact
that in Rojava, the forces there didn't fight the regime.

(18:36):
They did a little bit early on, at the very
start of the civil war, that they fought alongside some
of the groups like the f s A, but that
that stopped pretty quickly. And there's a lot of reasons
for that, some of which are kind of beyond the
scope of what I want to talk about today. But
the gist of it is that the international community did
not provide any support to UM, not really to the
two And this is one thing that leftists get wrong

(18:58):
a lot when they argue about, like the West giving
weapons to Jehtas. We didn't give fucking shit to the
Syrian rebels, like they barely had bullets for their guns.
You talked to some dudes, um, like I taught when
I was talking to Achilles, because he was there from
the beginning of the war. He was friends with uh
An f s, a leader free Syrian army leader who
lost I think five of his sons um in the

(19:19):
fighting against the regime and was sending his men in
the battle with like a dozen bullets each or something
like that, like barely any ammunition, certainly not enough to
get into firefights with soldiers who were equipped. And he
wound up. This guy went up joining the Islamic state,
and he didn't do it because he was a hard
line Islamist. He didn't do it because he wanted to
establish a caliphate. He did it because he wanted bullets,
and he wanted to kill Bashar al Assad's men because

(19:41):
they killed his sons. And Achilles told me, like I
was asking, can I come back and in bed with
you guys again, And he's like, you know, I would
love to have you back, um, but you know, if
Myamir says I gotta kill you, I gotta kill you. Um.
So it was like these sort of decisions, like hard
decisions are made by people in hard circumstances. And it's

(20:02):
certainly worth criticizing the fact that the Rojava didn't really
directly fight with the regime, but they had a situation
where the regime didn't have any power over them because
of the US presence in the region, the Syrian Arab
air force, there was there was no chance that assad
or Russia was going to bomb ro Java. And if

(20:24):
they were going to bomb Rojava, and they're only option
for taking back that land would have been ground forces.
And the Syrian Arab army is not a good army,
not even today. They only ever had air support and
artillery um, and whereas the forces of the FDS SDF
are very good fighters. So um, it's a situation where
because um, they were able to have a really good

(20:46):
holding pattern, they had oil, which Bashard needed, so they
would sell him oil, and when he made demands or
did things they didn't like, they would cut off the oil.
So they had a lot of power. Was actually a
pretty good situation to be in. And I asked everyone
i could about bush Are all aside and about the
Syrian government, like how would you feel about it? Taking
back over what because that's been Assad's line the whole time,

(21:06):
is that this is going to be reabsorbed into the country,
And I didn't meet a single person who wanted that
to happen. Now. It was kind of confusing because none
of them wanted to be separate from Syria either. Um
A lot of them had family and other series cities
and stuff like. So it was very complicated. People were like,
the most common thing I heard is people saying, like,
I just kind of want things to go on the

(21:26):
way they have been. This is going pretty well because
their whole idea of how society should be and how
community should be structured lends itself to that, like, well,
we want things to be the same they are here now,
but we also want to be a part of Syria
and have these uh these relationships. Yeah, I want to
be able to visit my family in Damascus and stuff
like I don't. Yeah, so it's it's a really it

(21:48):
was really complicated, but nobody wanted to be back under
the regime's thumb. Now that said, there are factions within Rojava.
There's like like there are within any organization that includes
millions of people. Um so my, my fixer, Habbat. So,
whenever you're in a place like this um, a lot
of how you you interpret the place and experience it

(22:10):
is very heavily dependent upon your fixers, the people who
lead you around and interpret for you and introduce you
to this part of the world. That's a very critical thing,
and it really changes how you experience it. And Habbat
is she's not an ideologue in terms of she she's
not unreasonably sort of married to the y PG or
the y p J or or the p k K

(22:32):
or any of these groups. But she's a fundamentally a
believer in the Rojavan revolution um and very much a
believer in sort of this women's liberation movement. She identified
herself as an an anarchist to me and kind of
our last couple of days together. But she's so she's
in this interesting position of having really good relations with
a lot of these people, knowing how to work with
them and knowing how to get what she wanted from them,

(22:54):
but also not being like blinded um by ideology. And
one of the things she repeatedly pointed out to me
is when because I asked a bunch of different men
um what they thought about all the changes to women's
rights in the region, and I got a lot of
different answers, and whenever somebody gave a really positive, detailed answer,
she would tell me if she thought they were lying

(23:15):
or not. What makes you think they're lying? She's like, Oh,
there's a lot of these guys are just fake feminists.
A lot of them are just sort of yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah. We had a lot of conversations about that,
you say the yeah, and one of those it was
interesting because one of the guys she believed. We were
out in front of this UM, this Women's Economic Development
Headquarters UM, which was like this this or this building

(23:40):
that like women would go to if they're like, hey,
I want to I want to learn to like do something.
I've been a you know, I was married at the
age of like fourteen, and I don't have any like
job skills, and like I want to live independently, and like, okay,
well here we'll find you some training, like what are
your interests like that it was a place for that,
So we we visit, we interview one of the women there,
UM a couple of the women there, and then we
um we're coming out and there's a guard station outside

(24:02):
of it right, because we're in the city where in
Komischlow is the most dangerous city outside of Rocca. Um.
It was partly controlled still by the Syrian regime, and
so you'd see like there's would be neighborhoods that would
be but char al Assad's picture in the neighborhoods that's
the YPG. So it was a little bit of a
sketchy place. There were a decent number of ISIS attacks there.
So there were guards out inside in front of this building.

(24:24):
Two of the guards were young women, UM with you know,
a K forty seven's and uniforms and stuff. And then
one of the guards was an older man in his sixties. UM.
And I went up to him and I asked him
a couple of questions. UM. I asked him how he
felt about working, you know, as as an older man
and a man who like wouldn't have grown up with this,
how he felt seeing women with guns uh and working

(24:46):
alongside them, And he was like, I feel really good
about it. I'm very happy to see that. Um. I'm
I'm happy that they're contributing to the fight. Like we
wouldn't have been able to do this without the women. UM.
And I asked him if he considered himself a feminist UM,
And he thought about that for a second, and he said,
I don't think there's any revolution without the women, um,

(25:06):
which is a line a line from Abdulla Agelan there's
no revolution without the women, or the women are the
center of the revolution, and you can translate anything different ways,
and she believed him. There was this other guy we
met um in Rocca, one of the co presidents of
the Defense Counsel, who was I thought, very nice and
very um uh said all of the right things, was
very eloquent about his things. UM. But the way that

(25:29):
his partner looked at him during a couple of lines,
who was who was a woman and a very very
tough lady, UM Like you could just see it in
her eyes and the way that she directed people. And
then Kabat afterwards was like, oh, yeah, that guy, if
if things went back to the way they were tomorrow,
that guy wouldn't have any trouble. And essentially yeah, yeah.
And so that's one of the things that really worries

(25:51):
when we talk about the regime coming back in and
Russia coming back in, is there are a lot of
true believers within the Rojavan project. I met a bunch
of them, people who were very hard to to do
something incredible. Um. I'm sure there's also people who have
been kind of frustrated with all of those women's ship um,
and if they get an opportunity to push things in

(26:12):
the other direction and have the backing of another power,
they'll do it. Now, I don't think that's the majority
of people involved, particularly in the government, because a lot
of these people, a lot of the core of the
movement are former or current members of the p JK
who were struggling in the mountains for decades and very hard,
strong believers and a lot of this stuff. But there's
definitely factions that I think would have no issue m

(26:35):
going back to the way things. It just sounds that
it's tenuous enough that this kind of upset right now
is it's the whole thing in like great peril, the
whole idealogical experiment, not experiment, but you know what I mean,
Like this is relatively new and it doesn't have enough
roots to necessarily sustain this, survive this. Um, we take

(26:57):
a real quick break for things. Oh you know, Katie,
speaking of breaks, Yeah, you know, what will heal any
broken bones. You have what the products and services advertised
on their show. That's an FDA backed guarantee. I should
have known that's where you were going with this health
I've got so many broken bones, so I'm excited about
these products and health taps, download bones, vowels where Yeah, bones,

(27:24):
you've heard it here, folks. Whatever products you buy from
a podcast heal broken bones. So everything, don My bones
are all healed, and that's great news for me. Yeah,

(27:45):
and we're back for more talking about stuff and less
talking about bones. Yeah, there's probably still some talking of
bones to come. I'm waiting for about that. Assume that
there's more bone talk. Yeah, yeah, there there's gonna be
more owne talk. Welcome to bone Talk. Welcome to bone Talk.
So I want to talk a little bit about the
Women's Economic Development Headquarters. UM. So, this is a place

(28:09):
we went to on our second day there, and it
was really remarkable spot. Um. For one thing, it was
by far the cleanest place that we went into up
to that point, because we'd mainly been staying in like
hotels and stuff for journalists. And I don't know if
you guys know this, but journalists are filthy degenerates. Familiar. Yeah,
I've heard. Actually the hotel we stayed in and Durek

(28:31):
was lovely, but I I it was a very nice room. Yeah,
filled with filthy degenerates. Um. So the walls of this
place and the walls of most of sort of the
administrative buildings in Rojava were covered in pictures of martyrs
um the shahids, which is like a word from martyr
um and uh. In this case, it was the picture

(28:53):
of a bunch of different female martyrs, including um, a
young woman who blew herself up destroying an ISIS tank
during the battle for Kobani. So you see a lot
of the same faces UM in a lot of these walls.
And this was the faces of all a lot of
the young women who had died fighting. And it was
it was a really good constant reminder of just like
among other things, like the cost of the fighting against ISIS.

(29:15):
They lost about eleven thousand people um fight and a
lot of them were very very young. Um. You looked
at the age on the gravestones, and I think seventeen
was a pretty common age UM, and some people who
were younger. UM. So it's another picture you'll see. You
saw all over the place and I saw in the
wall this building is the picture of Abdulla Alan. They

(29:38):
call him Apo, which I think means uncle, like a
p o is kind of the nickname for him. And
there he's taken very seriously. There's a mix some people
he's revered, vered almost as like identified um, and and
there are there is some like concerning sort of like
leader worship that I saw amongst sort of segments there
and other people just what they're doing, yeah, yeah, and

(30:02):
it it kind of did strike me that they're acts.
He's accidentally in the best situation possible for them, because
I think it's it's arguable that in some situations you
do need a figurehead like that for people to rally behind,
and especially just sort of given some cultural nuances of
that area, that's very common. Every movement has their kind

(30:22):
of strong male figurehead, and they have that. But he's
also locked in an island prison thousands of miles away,
so he can't actually do anything. It was kind of
perfect yeah, um, but yeah, you would see the pictures
of him are kind of hilarious because they're all at
some point before he got arrested. This guy just had
thousands of pictures taken of him, and in some of
them it's like the normal militant thing where we have

(30:44):
like he'll be in fatigues or whatnot, directing troops. But
most of them he's wearing like Cosby sweaters and like
he's literally he's got his head in his hands like this,
and he's smiling and it looks like it looks like
your your chubby uncle in a caussted was it was
around the term of the that makes sense, that kind
of like small clamor pick. Yeah, it was, there's really weird.

(31:09):
You would see some really strange ones. It was a
lot to like keep from giggling at a couple of points. Anyway,
So we go into this room and were these pictures
all over the walls, and I sit there and I
talked to this woman who's um. She was an older lady,
the head of the Economic Development Council. And from the
mountains is the term that everyone used for the Kurds

(31:29):
who were part of the movement, who had clearly been
part of the p KK before, Like the mountains of
Turkey is what they're in Iraq or what they're referring to.
So like that was the term that would be like
whispered whenever we'd meet somebody, and they were usually the
people who would be very very stern, very hard eyes,
very taciturn and kind of less like friendly and smiley. UM,

(31:51):
and you know, someone would whisper at some point. I
think he's from the mountains. I think she's from the mountains.
It is just kind of a thing over there. So
we meet this woman, we're sitting were talking with her. Um.
She explains to us in a lot of detail about UM. Yeah,
I I'm just gonna read from my notes actually here. UM.
So she's talked to us about the struggle against patriarchy,
which she saw is much more difficult and dangerous than

(32:13):
the struggle they had fought against isis UM. One of
the lines that really stuck out to me was it
is always poor women, those with no solution who come here.
So these are the women who were like coming in
for help from this place. She told us about a
deaf woman who had come by it recently, was the
widow of a martyr. UM and her parents had wanted
to take the kids she'd had with her dead husband
because they didn't believe she could take care of them,

(32:34):
and she had no income to do so. And so
one of the things that center had done recently was
put this woman in training for a job as a seamstress,
and she had been able to get work and like
keep her children and like maintain her family. So that's
like an example of the sort of work they were doing. Yeah. Um.
One of the lines she said that really stuck out
to me was if you fall into the mentality of capitalism,
you were already a martyr. She didn't bring up Sheryl

(32:57):
Sandberg's lean in um, but that's when she was referring
to is we don't Our goal with this place isn't
to make women into like entrepreneurs that they can create
giant businesses and get rich. Our goal is to help
women who have been marginalized to the sidelines of our
society take roles in the center of our society. And
it's it's not about making money. Our goal isn't for

(33:18):
her to like create a sewing app or it's not
like more females. It's able to be like self sustainable
to live a life, and yeah, not need to be
in fear and all that. Yeah, she said. Another thing
she said was Western women, Uh, they work but receive less,
which I think she was referring to the pay gap

(33:39):
there because they work in the mentality of the men.
If I am free here, I can only be as
free as the other women here. Um. So is this
understanding that like, if our equality is based on us
acting like men, that's not real equality. That was the
attitude she expressed to me and her you know, she's
one of the people. I asked if she wanted regime
can troll of the area to to return um, and

(34:03):
she had a very hard line on that. Um. She
said that she did not want We do not want
to be a state, was her line. Um. So, she
did not want reintegration of the Syrian government. She didn't
want statehood at all. Um. The term she used and
that most people would use was autonomous. You know, we
want to remain autonomous. That's what's important to us. So, Yeah,

(34:23):
that was a really interesting interview to me, and I've
got more like one of the things. Yeah, I have
a whole long recorded interview with her that I'm in
the process of getting translated. Unfortunately, my translators are all
based in Rojava. Uh so some of them have been
getting shelled by the Turks. So it it's gonna Part

(34:44):
of why we're doing some of this today is it's
going to take a bit longer for me to get
this series out because that's not the ideal situation. So
another place we went to was jin War. Jin is
the Karmaji Kurdish word for women, UM and war means
land UM, and so women's land. It's a village and

(35:05):
all women village UM. That's located in Rojava, not that
far from Comische low Um and it was it was
pretty small when we went there. I think there were
about a dozen or so families UM, but it was
only around a year old and it was really beautiful.
For one thing, UM lavender painted walls again, which I
I I started to recognize as a bit of a theme.

(35:28):
Very orderly, spacious homes built around all very eco friendly.
So one of the things in the Rojavan constitution was
UM a focus on ecology UM because the the American
anarchist who is really influential to they're thinking, a guy
named Murray buck Chin was like one of the very
first people back in the sixties who was like, climate
change is going to be a problem. So that's a
big part of the ideology at least UM it's the

(35:51):
it's the aspect of their constitution that they made the
least progress on, because when you're fighting a war for extermination,
recycling isn't of their priorities. But this place sounds incredibly fascinating,
an interesting. Yeah, progressive in so many ways. Uh yeah,
this is this is wild to me. I mean, to

(36:12):
include ecology in your actual constitution is when something when
we're battling for people to even acknowledge that climate change
is a real thing. Yeah, we're still having like is
it just bad if we kill all the whales? I mean,
they're kind of dicks, hoard the water. Make a quote
from our constitution. It is a quote the whales are dicks. Which, Yeah,

(36:36):
Thomas Jefferson's anti whale legenda, it hasn't It does not
look good for Thomas Jefferson. Yeah, that's the one. The
one problem with Thomas Jefferson. The one problem otherwise is
hatred of whales. Yeah. Yeah, nothing nothing else. They're nothing
else going on with that guy. Okay. Um, So one

(36:58):
of the people I met in jin Are was a
German woman. Um, very German, very heavily tattooed. Um seemed
to be I think I would guess in her late
thirties early forties. UM. And she spoke what sounded to
me at least like fluent uh Cormagi Kurdish as well
as as pretty good English. UM. And she had volunteered

(37:19):
to live there and had been living there pretty much
since the beginning and was clearly like one of the
people helping to organize it. And yet looking at jin
war kind of the the cynical asshole and me wanted
to pick it apart because it was very small. You know,
it's not a big village. You're talking a couple of
dozen people with all the kids and stuff in total,
and that that's the kind of thing that you could
look at and be like, well, maybe this is just

(37:39):
like a tempkin village purely for show, and it's it
certainly doesn't seem that significant when you're talking about you know,
there's four million people in Rojava. We're talking about a
war that's killed hundreds of thousands, and you know, in
the context of a global authoritarian resurgence that's like still
threatening to to to kill us all. Um. But even
kind of with all of that in mind and like

(38:00):
looking at the small scale of it, it still felt
um remarkable to me. Um. The energing there was was
something special, and I think the audacity of what they
were going for their um was humbling. Uh. It really
impressed me. We talked to a number of women there. UM.

(38:21):
One woman who had like she had a tattoo on
her arm of flowers, which struck me because you don't
see a lot of tattoos in that part of the world.
Although as I went on through a Java actually encountered
there's a huge tattoo culture that's taken off there just
in the last couple of years. But her husband was UM.
She she noticed that her husband was an alcoholic h
and she reported him to the women's councils through the

(38:43):
women's houses, which are these buildings that they set up
in every town and city in Rojava where women can
come and get help if they need it. UM. So
she reported him to the women's councils, and they suggested
that she leave and moved to gen War Um, which
she had done with her kids. UM. And so she
was like learned they were farming. They grew a significant
amount of food, really tasty cucumbers. UM. And you hear

(39:05):
about cumbers that often. I'll say that interjection. Tasty cucumber
is not something I associate anyway, they actually did. Like
then I went to a couple of farms the agriculture.
There's really good, really like better tasting cucumbers than I've
ever had. And I don't I don't like cantaloupe, It's
garbage fruit. But their cantaloupe was fucking delicious. It was
like nothing I'd ever eaten before. And they had these

(39:27):
one of the things they were doing with these farms,
you know, one of which was small and one of
which was medium sized, I would say, like capable of
growing you know, truck fulls of food um acres and
six big hoop houses um. And it was they were
trying to do like all organic um uh, fertilizers and stuff.
Because the Rojava is traditionally it's like the Kansas of Syria.

(39:49):
It's like the breadbasket. It grows a shipload of food
um and the regime had just been pumping in fertilizers
and pesticides for years to try to maximize production. And
people there would say that like it really decreased the
quality of the food and the flavor of the food
UM and was also bad for the soil, so a
big part of what they were doing over there was
soil reclamation. That was part of what they were doing

(40:09):
in gen War, part of where they were doing at
this um. I went to another, a woman's farming commune
um that was a separate thing. So there there are
a few things like this where it's all or majority
women engaging in some large undertaking. It was really interesting
to see and uh jim War itself like consisted of
there were a couple of Kurdish women, There was obviously

(40:30):
that German lady. There were Arabs, there were Yazd's. It
was really a very polyglot sort of culture. And that
was really impressive to see, especially since, like one of
the criticisms that I repeatedly heard about Rajava before going
there was that it was really just like a Kurdish
supremacist project. And I could say pretty conclusively I didn't
see any fucking evidence of that. And I talked to

(40:50):
a lot of Arabs and Assyrians and Turkmen. Yeah, that
was gonna be my question. So it's not just I mean,
it's not just Kurdish people that are living there. This
is a mixture, but I mean, primarily the Curds were
the like start of it, the core of it, and
part of that just because the Curds are really fucking

(41:12):
good fighters, um, and they've been working, they've been wanting
a place that can be I mean, they're a land list.
They don't have any place there. Yeah there, and they're
they're they're um they've been organized politically for a long time.
So yeah, Um. It was really uh, it was really interesting.

(41:33):
One of the things as I was leaving Um, I
looked back at the gate to gen War and so
that it had the name jin War printed in um
in in English characters on the on the gate, and
one side of it said gin and one side of
it said war. Um. And I expressed to Kabbat that

(41:54):
that struck me particularly because it's kind of like a
bit of a like obviously the literal translation is women's land,
but kind of reading it in English a mix of
English and Kurdish is women's war. Um. Is what a
lot of the women they were talking to me about
is that like, we see this as a we see
this struggle for equalities essentially kind of a military undertaking, um.

(42:15):
And that's the way we're proceeding with it. Yeah, it
was really interesting to me. Um, you know, I could
go through a bunch of stuff. I it's one of
those things that's like when the full series comes out,
it will be um, probably like six to eight episodes.
This is fascinating to me. And it's just like such
a you know, I've ever said this expresses a few times.

(42:37):
It's just really challenging my conceptions of what life is
like over there. And you know, we get just these
broad stroke images and pictures of of of who these
people are and it's nothing nothing to do with this note.
It's an important portrait too, right. Do you have a

(42:57):
lot of contact with people over there? Yeah, yeah, I've
been in contact with a few of my friends over there.
It's a little bit um erratic, shall we say, just
because there's a lot going on. Um, But what I
hear is very worrying. Now, it's not like a lot
of people have died. Um, it's not a situation where

(43:19):
at this point the SDF isn't helpless against the Turkish advance. Um.
So one of the things we saw when we were there,
I was sometimes just within a couple hundred feet of
the Turkish border. There's this gigantic wall, huge Stone Wall
looming over you through huge sections of the trip there,
so it was always in everyone's mind. And there were
while we were there, are to when the President of
Turkey made numerous statements about wanting to destroy the hPG,

(43:41):
wanting to kill all the terrorists over there. So they
were like numerous days where like suddenly security would be
heightened and like we'd all walk around knowing, well, okay,
the Turks might invade today. I have a question, maybe
it's a dumb one, but we mold over it a
little bit last week on even more News, What our nations,
What our nations go? Uh No, So I understand Air
Towan having issues with Kurdish within Turkey and what's been

(44:06):
going on with terrorist organizations there which they consider to
be but versus going into Syria right now? Is it
because Rojava and the organization feels like a threat to him?
I am just curious if you could talk a little
bit about that. This is a very complicated um so
I'm going to do my best to explain it. The
the surfaced and simplest answer is that the p k

(44:28):
K are seen as and not entirely without right, a
terrorist group in Turkey, and it definitely carried out attacks
like that. I would say one of one of the
issues that we haven't discussing this is like people here
terrorists now and they think ISIS are all kind of
where like their only goal is to kill innocent people.
They're more like the I Rara was back in the day,
where there's individual actions they take that you that are

(44:49):
deplorable and horrible, and targeting of civilians is never justified.
But they're not just trying to kill people. They're fighting
a struggle for independence and they have there's a lot
of logical arguments, and they can point to a tross
Citi's by the other side. It's that sort of struggled.
So the p k K is a group that has
carried out and continues to carry out attacks on Turkey
when we were there, like the day that we landed

(45:11):
in Iraq because we had to cross over into Syria
from Iraq, um the Turkish ambassador to Kurdistan was murdered
uh in our Bill, which is normally a pretty safe city,
by a couple of p k K guys, And it
was a kind of thing like nobody knew who did it,
but also everybody knew who had it. Like there was
not not a doubt in anyone's head that it was
the PK separate from STF. It's but there, I know

(45:33):
there's ties, but there were ties. It was much more
tied earlier on. So earlier on the hPG and the
y pg J. We're basically just rebranded p KK. That's
certainly no longer the case. And for one thing, most
of the people making up those organizations have never been
to Turkey, were not alive to take part in any
of the PKK's main struggles. Um. They were Syrian civilians

(45:56):
until the revolution happened when they were fourteen or fifteen,
and then they wind up to fight Isis or whatever. Um.
So that's uh, there's it's there's not a zero connection
to them. But also, like you know, one of the
things you can point out, while the PKK has continued
their guerrilla war against the Turks, it's not like they're
firing Javelin missiles on Turkish Leopold tanks inside southern Turkey.

(46:19):
Like they've been smart about it. They haven't been just like, well,
let's take all of our U S guns and immediately
use them to go attack Turks and Turkey. Um, like
they're not idiots. UM. So Radwin's justification for the invasion
is that UM. And I think it's one that a
lot of people who don't know much about the situation
can see as understandable because it's like, oh, they're terrorists,
like isis isis bad, so Turkey should get to funk

(46:41):
with these guys. It goes back much deeper than that.
One of the bigger issues is that Turkey has a
long and horrific history of repressing the Kurdish people, including
banning the speaking of the language and the teaching of
it in school. I guess this is yeah, and there's
there's a saying in Turkey that there's no such thing
as Kurds. They're just mountain Turks who lost their language. Um,

(47:04):
I think is one of the phrases used. UM. And
there was I think in UM. There was an uprising
in southern Turkey by the Kurdish population, specifically by a
bunch of young Kurdish uh militants UM with an organization
called the y d g h yet a gahash Um
and they got massacred in the cities they were in,

(47:25):
got pounded into fucking concrete and huge. Almost no one
reported on. There were almost no reporters there, but it
was catastrophic crime. And so Urdawan sees not just the
p KK as a threat, but he sees the idea
of an organized Kurdish state based along revolutionary militant lines
as a threat that he can deal with the Iraqi

(47:46):
Kurds because they're fundamentally more mainstream, more capitalists, they're not
they're willing to work with him. The Syrian Kurds are
not well, and they've got this ideology and they're building
something there and it's to their land border, and so
that right here feels like a threat, and here's this
opportunity to go in um and Dan racism, but also

(48:11):
the political project is m yeah. Yeah. And also the
fact that you know, Turkey controlled Syria up until about
a century or so ago, so Arede is definitely I
think in kind of the same way that Vladimir Putin
there's some desire in his part to like reconstitute the
geographical like scope of the Soviet Union. I think there's
some of that with are to one as well. I
wanted to talk about about Russia. So we also have

(48:33):
been seeing reports that now uh Vladimir Putin Russia has
deploying troops to help keep the advancing the Syrian government
and the turk Ships forces Turkish forces that keep them
keep the peace. I guess kind of feeling the vacuum
again left by America one of the uh yeah, yeah, sorry, no, No,

(48:53):
I was just kind of generally lobbing that out there
to hear your thoughts, because, like, I understand that on
the service level, but I'm sure you've had a lot
more information that can help us understand it a bit more. No,
I mean, that's essentially accurate, and I think it's like
a mark of what a clusterfuck this decision has been,
outside of its immoral like connotations, outside just what a
bad idea it was. You had a situation where there

(49:16):
was not war in Rojaba, there was not fighting. There
were occasional ISIS sleeper cell attacks, but it was very safe.
I never felt, um, you know, like I was in
serious danger walking around in the cities at night or whatever.
So many places where you have felt that, Yeah, it was.
It was a very safe place. There was not active fighting,
um And the only thing that was required to maintain

(49:37):
that situation was two d U S Sports Special Forces
guys chilling out on basis and the knowledge that if
anyone bombed them, it would be a thing. And now
that that's been removed, this situation where there was not
active fighting has turned into what is essentially a war
between Russia, Turkey, the Syrian government in this autonomous region,

(49:57):
like within a week. It's an un speakable cluster fuck
with huge implications. Um. And it's just so dumb that
none of this needed to happen. And it creates a
situation where like now any any solution or anything that
we do will make it even worse. Like as opposed

(50:18):
to staying there, now that we've left, it's created all
these other tensions that getting involved and is even more complicated.
I don't know what could even be done at this point.
Like I guess I'm always in support of like a
no fly zone being established, but like now that's so
much messier of an ever we had one over ro Java,

(50:40):
Um and it worked. Um yeah, it's it's well, I mean,
now we're traders, we can't be trusted, I mean, and
his implications around the world. Uh, it just speaks to
who we are and who President Trump is and where
how reliable we are. Um. But even if we were
to undo this, like right now, they hate us, like

(51:01):
like they can't trust us. I'm not sure they never
trusted us individually. I will say they're individual Americans, individual
soldiers that um, they absolutely trusted UM, the American government.
They're not dumb people. They read history books. They know
what anybody actually right now nothing that we do. UM.

(51:23):
I don't know that I agree with that. I do
think if we could now obviously because Russia is moving in,
because the Syrian government's moving in, because there's Turkish troops, like,
I don't know how you would that it would be
very a dicey maneuver to try to reinsert American troops.
That said, I know for a fact they would prefer
to be working with US than the Russians in the
Syrian government. And there was a widespread nobody I met

(51:46):
who I felt like had a really nuanced understanding of
the international situation. None of them thought the US was
going to stay. Everyone thought Turkey was going to invade.
And we watched them building thousands of miles of tunnels
all are round the entirety of Rajaba, twenty four meters
down into the ground. Um, these these incredibly deep and

(52:07):
complicated tunnel systems where they were storing munitions and so
that they could transfer populations and fighters all around the
region without the Turks being able to bomb them, and
a lot of that, a lot of those defenses they
had to give up because one of the things that
was really fucking shitty that Trump did is um, he
got the curt here, he got the the SDF to
agree to a uh A withdrawal from some sections of

(52:31):
their line with Turkey, UM as part of an agreement
for like a safety zone, and they did with the
understanding that the U S would be staying. And then
once they'd given up their first front line defenses were like, as,
wasn't that like a month ago or something like very recently. Yeah. Also,
I've been reading a lot that there are like approximately
fifty nuclear weapons that we had stored in the area

(52:55):
and now Turkey just has them. Uh well we're oh no, no, no,
we I think it's more that we have bases in Turkey, yeah,
basically everywhere. But yeah, well I just from a couple
of people of a couple of people a couple of
places describing them now as at Wan's hostages. Well that's
sort of okay, So this is one of the big

(53:17):
reasons why, you know, one of the one of the
one of the questions that um I found myself asking
a lot and asking with my colleagues over there, was like,
why the fund does Turkey get to get away with
all this ship? And the answer is the air base
and in Serlik is a huge part of it. Um.
Now that's an American air base, UM, and it is

(53:37):
critical to our operations in the Middle East. UM. Another
reason for this is that, of course Turkey is a
NATO nation and they're kind of holding down NATO's flank.
So it's uh, I'm not saying there's nothing that could
be done. I think there's a shipload that could be
done against air to one, but nothing is being done
because everyone is scared of the implications and scared of

(53:58):
upsetting the apple cart. Even more, well, I guess all
the EU Union members are now not going to sell
arms to Turkey or whatever, even though that's great. They've
got plenty of fucking guns. Yeah, I mean, like, yeah,
that's that's what's being done, right, all the all the
sanctions and stuff. It's like they want to do this,

(54:20):
so you knew what they were going to do this.
Everybody knew that this was going to happen. I don't know.
Like it's frustrating because I think one possible. Everyone's worried
about the genocide. Obviously, I'm where like a lot of
people have died, um, and that's terrible. UM. But I
worry even more because I think it's more likely. UM.
I don't think. I don't think Turkey could possibly take

(54:43):
the whole region, or even a sizeable chunk of what
they've claimed that they want to take. For a number
of reasons. Well, the Turks have a powerful airport force
and good artillery. UM. They don't have a very good military.
It's well equipped, but it's not good fighters, um. Whereas
the STF is filled with like veteran guerillas who are
particularly expert at using a kind of weapon system called

(55:05):
an a g t m UM, a wire guided missile
UM which uh turns advanced tanks into fireworks. So I
especially when you consider like the fact that the Russians
and the Syrian Arab army and its air force are
moving in to support them, I don't think Turkey is
going to be able to actually take most of what

(55:27):
they want to take. Maybe I'll be wrong about that,
but I do think that the fact that the forces
of the Autonomous Region have had to call in back
up from that particular side means there's a good chance
it's the end of this revolutionary experiment and the start
of their absorption back into the most brutal dictatorship on
the planet. Um And I understand some of the people

(55:48):
I've talked to will say, like, look, assad's terrible, we
know that, but are to One's worse for us. You know,
are too one may not have killed as many people,
but as occurred, he's worse for us. And so because
we still are one of the dominant powers in this group,
that's who we're going to worry about the most. Um
And I can't say they're wrong. I've never had to

(56:09):
make a decision like that. Um It breaks my heart
that the decision is being made because it's so fucking unnecessary.
It is really heartbreaking. This whole thing is just so
It's going to be the worst year ever for a
lot of vulnerable people in a region of the world
where things seem to be getting better as recently as
this August, but you know where it's not going to

(56:30):
be the worst year ever, Katie, And where tell me
in the products and services that support this program? Once again,
I should have seen that coming. It's gonna be the
best year ever for them. It's going to be the yeah, Harry,
because we are going to move a lot of whatever
it is we sell products and products services. Yeah, yeah,

(56:52):
some of those, uh, some of those I don't know.
I don't, I don't, I don't. I don't have a
good joke. I was gonna I was gonna make a
condom cooke or something, but then I couldn't think of
one in time, have come up with one. There it is, Cody.
There we go, all right, well together everything, Oh my gosh,

(57:20):
I've bought them all. He sure did snap them up.
I'm excited about having bought them. Yeah, I bet you,
I bet you are put in them excited. I received
the I received the gifts. See how fast our products
and services ship? You know what? You know what I'm
excited about most is when we inevitably get to the

(57:40):
point where the entire episode is just one long ad
plug but with no ads, we just never get there.
We're trying to. We're constantly like, yeah, we're building to it. Yeah,
that's what the people want. The PIV is an ad
plug that never starts. Welcome to the ad transition, the
show that is constantly transitioning to an ad that never comes.

(58:03):
But first day, let's talk a little bit about the
Republicans here in America and what they're like. Republicans, the Republicans. Yeah,
I think I solved the political what was? What was yours? Cody?
I didn't want to steal your joke that the Republicans

(58:28):
um they're pissed. Yeah, they are. It's the first time
in recent memory where they've actually stood up kind of
a little a little bit, a little bit to the president,
although still managing to not say his name. It's very
fascinating standing up to what's happening, but not to him

(58:49):
specific Right, They're like, oh, there's a you know a
lot of tweets of like, oh there's you know, this
is cleansing. We've betrayed our allies a lot of the language,
and they never arrive at And it was that decision
was made by yeah, why is that happening? Likely by
somebody after a phone call without consulting anybody like margat

(59:13):
Rubio and Lindsay Graham. Obviously come to mind specifically, but
just so many of like, Oh, I can't believe we've
done this? Who who did it? What are you talking about?
Why don't you just say his name? Just say his
name once? But they don't want to because they know
that he's gonna attack them, hit them on Twitter. They'll like,
he'll he'll drag He'll drag him on Twitter, so they
don't they don't want to do it. But it is

(59:35):
that this is like the one time they're they're actually
not happy about something he's done and vocal about it,
because I can't imagine they're happy all the time. I mean,
they're in a real dicey situation now what with impeachment
stuff going on obviously not related to this, but like,
well they're they're constantly because I think they're like several

(59:56):
different factions of this where you have like the Republican reaction, um,
but then you also have the conservative pundit reaction, and
then you have I guess what I would call like
the grifter proto fascist reaction, like like a Jack Possobic type,

(01:00:17):
like Jack Possobic who has attacked the Kurds as supporting
Antifa exactly mainly on the strength of literally two guys
who like spray painted some some ANTIFA signs and Antiva
flag or something like that. And it's like, first of all, Jack,
you know the fuh and that is isis right, Like
that's the fa that they're they're anti and this is weird,

(01:00:39):
like like supporting isis to own the Libs mentality. Um.
But juxtaposed with before this happened, where he was very
supportive of the Kurds and has all these all these
tweets mentioned like oh the Curds are so brave and
X and y, But as soon as dear Leader does
this reversal, they switch gear. So fascinating. It's very fascinating

(01:01:02):
how that works out every single time. It's fucking shocking
to me that the bravest reaction from the right wing
uh and most direct attack on the president as a
result of this came from Pat fucking Robertson. Oh man,
yeah he named the president. Yeah I didn't see that. Yeah, yeah,
he said President Trump is has lost or is in

(01:01:24):
danger of losing the Mandate of Heaven. Was distracted by
the Mandate of Heaven part. It's it's fucking wild because
Alex Jones seized on that as evidence that Pat Robertson
is part of a Chinese communist conspiracy. So good, that
is delicious. It's one little little bit of brightness. They

(01:01:45):
can't help themselves. That's amazing. Yeah, it's incredible. Alex Jones triggered, Um, Yeah,
side note, I saw Info Wars sticker in a random
remote road in Maui yea greater mind. They're in Paradise
and there it was smacked up on a no no,

(01:02:05):
remember actually what's going on with this beautiful vista behind
it was like, damn it, try to escape that. But
it's just interesting, um that there is this it's this
weird spectrum where, yeah, you got these Grift proto fascists,
and then you've got the Republicans actually speaking out, and
then you have like a lot of the Fox News
figures not really taking a stance other than these Republicans

(01:02:28):
are caring too much about what's happening in Syria and
on the Syrian border and not enough about our own
border where we need the wall. Like they keep like
bringing it back to this like America first, build the
wall talking point, which is weird. Oh yeah, what did
the president tweet like today? Tweet something today, or maybe

(01:02:48):
it wasn't today, but it was. I'm sure he tweeted
something today. He is he a tweeted? Did he do that? Uh?
Some people want the United States to protect the seven
thousand mile away border Syria, presided over by Bischl Assad,
our enemy. At the same time, Syria and whoever they
chose to help, want naturally to protect the Kurds. I
would much rather focus on our southern border, which a

(01:03:12):
butt's either that's my typeo or his, and is part
of the United States of America, and by the way,
numbers are way down in the wall is being built.
It is ironic about that statement. Is the chunk of
the Syrian border that touched Iraq and large pieces of
Turkey was not run by a Bishar up until a

(01:03:33):
couple of days ago, right as we just discussed. Yeah, yeah,
I did not run into any Syrian Arab Army soldiers
on the border, suggesting he doesn't know what he's talking about.
I'm suggesting that because of his actions, Bashar al Assad
now controls way more border than he did before. You're
asking that earlier he tweeted, Uh, he tried to tweet
impeach the press, but he forgot the extra s, so

(01:03:56):
it says impeached the press. That was good. That was
that that that's that's one. A little bits of levity
we get careening flaming dumpster truck. Um. I think it's
uh yeah, it's just this mentality of you've seen the
seventh seven thousand miles away thing. Uh, it's the earlier

(01:04:19):
last week he was talking about how they didn't help
us in the Civil War. They didn't. That's that's fair,
the right, they weren't. They weren't normandy with us. Um,
even though like, yeah, if they were involved in World
War two, guy, yeah there were there were tons of

(01:04:40):
Kurdish soldiers who fought belongs unbelievable, but like, yeah, just
this idea of like, no, we're not going to do that,
We're not going to do this. It's America first, We're
not going to get involved. We can't do endless wars.
In the same breath as saying that, by the way,
and get this, we're gonna sell all of our mercenary
army to Saudi A and anyone else who wants to

(01:05:02):
be the highest bidder. He's like proudly announcing this um
while also saying we don't do we don't want to
do wars anymore. It's wild. We don't want to do
wars that aren't profit making in depth, right this and
this is one of the things that's like frustrating to
be about, like how how the Iraq War gets spun
with like its focus on the oil and stuff. And
it's like there was a profit motive in the Iraq War,

(01:05:24):
but it was on behalf of a lot of private corporations.
The US government didn't didn't get a lot of money
out of that, Like we we fucking spent all of
our money on that ship. Um. And that's the issue
a guy like Trump has. Trump would actually be totally
down with a war for oil because he specifically said
he thinks that Irac should have to give us their oil,
Like that was literally what it was about, was just

(01:05:46):
going in there and stealing the oil and leaving. He
would have been on board. Well, there's literally there's a there.
He used to have a vlog where he would vlog
from his office, real beautiful stuff. They've since been deleted.
I think they got deleted right before the election. Oh
I got them all. But there are a few videos
where he talks about this and uh in regards to

(01:06:09):
Libya specifically, where he says, we should go into Libya,
we should help these people for humanitarian reasons, and then
when we're done, we go to them and then we say,
give us half of your oil. So, like he's literally
said before, like years ago, just like, yeah, we're gonna
do humanitarian things with our military if we can get
paid in oil. He's like laid it out like that, right,

(01:06:33):
I like humanitarian things that require being paid with oil afterwards.
But he and he's like maybe they'll give us the
oil whatever. Um. But he's like literally laid out like
this is how he thinks. He would absolutely of course
do a war for oil. Um. And he just doesn't
want to do a war for protecting four million people, right,

(01:06:56):
But if they're willing to give us all the stuff
when after we've saved them, then he would then then
maybe he would. Maybe he definitely would until their stuff
runs out then Yeah. So just like all the all
the surprise, uh that you see from all these people,
even like Trump fans who are like I can't believe
he's doing this this. Yeah, he's talked about this for years, um.

(01:07:17):
And like obviously the Republicans are craven ghouls who know better,
and they're just playing the game of being surprised by
his actions. So what is it that we are doing.
We've been out there because we all know when this
all started. A week ago, a week and a half ago,
he sent that Banana's tweet about his great and unmatched wisdom,

(01:07:39):
blah blah blah. If they do anything that I disagree with,
I will be like he has before, so many questions
about that. But has he decimated their economy? Have they
done something that in his mind has crossed a line
so that he would be I mean, there's some pretty

(01:08:02):
shocking videos coming out of it, are I mean, did
you see I'm sure you did. Sure if uncle will
get very upset and talk to her out about it. Yeah.
Those those um, those mercenaries gunning down a bunch of
medical workers. Yeah yeah, they pulled out a bunch of
people from the cars and one of them was a
female Kurdish politician and they murdered them. Made videos. Yeah. Anyway, Um,

(01:08:29):
so we we've got some sanctions coming in, right. I
will whisper that to those corpses. I'm sure they'll be
happy they're being sanctioned. Well, the one thing like when
regimes are uh doing a genocide that they've been wanting
to do for a long time, thing, the thing that
stops them is steel tariffs. That makes them, that gives them.

(01:08:53):
Oh no, it's just like a weird like approach where
you you basically give them the green light to do
this thing, and then you're like, it'll cost you little more,
the price tag up a little more. But like that's
not that stop you know, that's guys, scraper, it's gore expensive.
You still get to do the genocide, but it's gonna
be price here. And like some of the sanctions are

(01:09:15):
about the leadership specifically because normally, like normally sanctions are
like they hurt the people of the nation and not
the people who were in charge of the nation. No,
but so they're they're targeting air to one and some
of his folks a little bit. But it's just like yeah,

(01:09:37):
you're you're letting them do it. And then you're like, well,
but well, and this is a part of a lot
of this all boils down to, like we've been very
harsh on Trump um justifiably so, because he took a
situation that was not great but I had some hope
in it and turned it into one that's just a

(01:09:58):
complete cluster fuck. But the reason all of this got
this bad, um was years of liberal politicians who did
not want to get involved in something complicated because, for
among other things, they didn't think they could sell it
to the American people. You can trace a lot of
us back to Libya. Um, a lot of people, and uh,

(01:10:20):
it's so complicated. So with Libya, the Obama administration attempted
to do something very humanitarian and brave and decent and necessary,
and they succeeded. And if you look at the amount
of people who have died fighting in Libya since two
thousand elevens about fifty or so. Compared that to the
more than half a million you've died fighting the Syrians
civil war, even if you are quite for like the

(01:10:41):
population differences, A lot less people have died in Libya
just because we stopped Kadapi from bombing the ship out
of Benghazi. Um. But you know the four people, the
four Americans who died in Benghazi that has been was
turned to a multiple years long political issue to try
to kill Hillary Clinton. And the fact that things didn't
work out perfically in Libya, and it didn't They didn't

(01:11:01):
instantly go like, all right, I guess we're a functioning
democracy like slaves now. Well, but they were before. That's
another one of like you fucking like there's plenty evidence
of it under Condafi in the nineties, um and in
fact that it peaked in the mid nineties. But like this,
it's very people who are misinformed and who and it's
a mix of sides because there's a lot of people

(01:11:23):
on the left who will like to cry Libya as
this like tragedy because we got rid of Kadafi, a
man who kept at stable and it's like, you don't
know shit about Kadafi. He killed like five thousand people
in a stadium one time, just sucking because he's a
piece of shit, Like you don't fucking know what you're
talking about. You don't know anything about the region. You
read one bullshit lefty blog that claimed Kadafi was a socialist,
and so you think that it was US imperialism, like

(01:11:44):
and so because of this, because you've got this mix
of like assholes on the right who just won't let
a democratic president have done anything good. If they do
something good, you've got to attack them for it, and
then that thing, humanitarian intervention, becomes terrible. And then you
have other people who are well, if the US did it,
it has to be bad because we're always evil. So

(01:12:04):
I have to find reasons why this is bad. And
so that one of the things that results in because
guys like Barack Obama and most of his his ideological
sympaticos and kind of the center left are fundamentally not brave. Um,
so they just stopped doing ships. So when air to
one makes a massive power grab in Turkey and starts
imprisoning his enemies after a very suspicious coup, nobody does

(01:12:27):
anything about this happening in a NATO nation. So when
Bashar al Assad starts firing chemical weapons on his own people,
nobody grounds his fucking planes. So when Russia invades Ukraine,
nobody does anything but slaps a couple of sanctions on them,
because they're scared about what might happen if they actually
take any kind of effective stances. And because people keep

(01:12:48):
not doing anything, the situation keeps getting worse. The authoritarians
keep grabbing more, and the liberty of people's around the
globe is squeezed and squeezed and choked a little bit
more every day. And there's a lot of individual authoritarian
assholes like President Trump you can blame for aspects of it,
but the fundamental reason that was allowed to happen is

(01:13:09):
a failure of courage from the educated liberal sections of
our society who just didn't have the fucking gorm to
do what needed to be done because it was scary.
Well yeah, well said, never heard the word gorn before,
but I picked it up. That's a good one. Residual
effects of like Iraq, where you know, we know that

(01:13:30):
absolutely absolutely a bunch of lies got us into a disaster.
And it's there's a little i mean afraid of the
backlash year of people getting involved, of us getting involved
in situations and not knowing how it's going to play out.
But there's this also and know what's our responsibility? Yeah,

(01:13:50):
knowing just the relationship of of America and war in
the middle military industrial complex and people that make money
from it. So intentions are always going to be questioned. Yeah,
and and you know, the fucking what what did? The
what did a lot of like the liberal mainstay politicians
who are still active and we're active in two thousands
three do. When the Iraq War came around, they voted

(01:14:13):
for it. Yeah, then some of them wished they hadn't
a few years later, a few few years later. Um, yeah,
so boomo universal bill fixed it. Um, I don't know.

(01:14:33):
By bolt cutters, um, boat cutters buy food and stuff
by food and stuff by water, because we have to
buy water. We have to buy water for water. Yeah,
you gotta pay money for water, you know, and buy
the products and services that's you know, like the one

(01:14:54):
we look for in the in the universe. Uh, to
look for life. What if we charge everybody for it?
Sounds like I can make a lot of money. Yeah,
it does. And you know that sounds like a flawless situation,
good for people. But if we package huge amounts of
that water in tiny bottles made out of a substance

(01:15:14):
that kills the ocean. Oh, I love that you've taken.
That's a brilliant idea, and you've made it even better.
This is how we do it. Spitballen ideas well. This
has been the last episode of the worst year ever.
We're off to make billions of dollars the year every year.
Republican all the time. Yeah, my opinion on the capital

(01:15:40):
gains checks tax has changed instantly. You know, I didn't
see it before, but now I do. I'm gonna go
hang out with Georgia W. Bush and a baseball. Yeah
that sounds fun. He is a good guy, he's sweet.
He paints now before you know, murder, but now painting?

(01:16:02):
What pain? He pay change coding? Okay, Um, this has
been really fascinating. I'm really glad that we did this. Yeah,
thank you for sharing, Robert. Yeah, yeah, thanks for listening,
you know, thank all of you for listening. Yeah, guys,
thank you so much. We're welcome. Mm hmm. Well that's

(01:16:22):
going to do it for all of us here at
the worst year ever until next week when we talk
about probably Andrew Yang probably will be more upbeat. That's
actually episode we recorded before this one. So I'm very
bummed out in it because my friends were getting bombed.
Now you've got context when you hear it. We report
that last week, we pushed it for next week. It's fine,

(01:16:44):
it'll keep it's fine, it'll keep you not Andrew Yang
ain't going nowhere. We got a debate tonight or like
the butt all right, it is, but I'm now we've
gotten our political commentary in good all right, guys, thanks
for listening. Thanks Robert again, and I guess thanks Cody, Oh,

(01:17:10):
you're welcome. I guess see you next week. And you
know who else we should thank the products and Products.
I should have known that, I should have seen where
you were going with that. Thanks Products and Services. Thanks
Products and Services Ever. Everything I Tried, Worst Year Ever

(01:17:38):
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