Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 104

Episode Date: October 28, 2023

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Calls on media. 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.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. This is Shrine, and I am so excited to be joined by author and journalist Sim Kern. Their latest novel, The Free People's Village, is available now. So go to your local bookstore and order it. And support a voice that I believe we all need an hour's-night guist right now. So welcome Sim. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me.

For those of you who don't know, Sim has been making videos recently about the genocide in Gaza from a queer Jewish anti-Zionist perspective. And this is one that I think a lot of people need to be exposed to and to listen to. I mentioned this to you before the recording, but a Jewish friend of mine told me how much she connected with your voice and how much she's learned from you and how your videos have been helping her approach really awkward and difficult conversations with her peers. So I appreciate you very much. Happy to do whatever I can. When you decided to start making like the first video that got a lot of attention, like were you seeing something they want to like make sure you

correct in the zeitgeist, like what words do you perspective as a Jewish person? Well, the first video that I made was encouraging people to read books by Palestinian authors, just to learn about the Palestinian perspective, which is so often censored and not really allowed in our media, and also what you really have to go seek out in publishing. And this isn't the first time I've done this since I think 2017 or something was the first time I created Read for Palestine Challenge on YouTube. And just creating this Read for Palestine Challenge was enough to get me put on the Canary Mission website and like outed as a as a anti-Samite by this very Zionist website that keeps a block list of mostly students who organize with like students for

Justice and Palestine and really anyone who speaks out publicly against Israeli apartheid. So simply like encouraging people to read these books I think is really powerful and I know for me growing up Jewish in the United States, I was just inundated with a lot of Zionist propaganda from my more conservative family. My more liberal family would take the line of like it's just very complicated. Both sides hate each other. Who can say who's right? And it was only by reading Palestinian voices that I really developed an anti-Zionist perspective. That's awesome that you did the Read for Palestine challenge, but also not surprising

by the Canary Mission thing, unfortunately. But I'm glad that that didn't stop you or discourage you. When you started to learn more about Palestine, how did you approach conversations with your friends and family? Again, I guess initially, it's different talking to friends and family than it is talking to the internet. Honestly, it's much easier. I think sometimes it connects with the internet because it's not that personal connection. I think I've made more headway and had a much greater impact online than I have with certain friends and family members. But, you know, I do think that everyone having those conversations, putting your beliefs out there,

whether it's one-on-one and face-to-face conversations, or whether it is doing it online, where like, certainly your friends and family are going to see the things that you're posting and the things that you care about. It has a great impact. I'm like, I've definitely noticed friends of mine over time, who maybe a few intense bombing campaigns ago were very checked out on this issue are now very active and are speaking out themselves. And so that's, I guess that would be my message to other anti-Zionist Jews, is even if the first time you're putting stuff out there about Palestine, it feels like no one's listening. It feels like you're not making a difference. Over time, you're planting the seeds of questioning

the Western media's pro-Israeli perspective over time. Yeah, that's a really, really good point. But my friend also mentioned she would never have been exposed to your voice. If I didn't share it, people were not sharing it. So I think people really underestimate the value of social media sometimes or speaking up on social media. They're just like, oh, people are already talking about it or whatever, but everyone has a community they can reach that no one else can reach. So I think

that's important to remember. You made some points in some videos that you made that I would love for you to not like regurgitate, but maybe just like cover for people that haven't watched your videos or are just unaware in general. I think a really important point you made was how suffering is not monopolized or exclusive or any worse or better than other people suffering with regardless of what identity they are. Can you get into that a little bit? Yeah, so I made a video that was actually responding to a comment by someone saying like, how dare you compare the suffering of Palestinians to the suffering of Jews?

How dare you compare genocides that that's disgusting and that cheapens the Holocaust? And that was, again, I think, responding to a video where I was saying, like, read about other genocides besides the Holocaust because I think it just, again, as a Jewish American, I grew up steeped in Holocaust literature. I read every book I could about it. You know, I think a lot of Jewish kids by the time we're adolescents,

we have like this PhD level knowledge of the Holocaust. I think that our peers who are non-Jewish, maybe don't have quite as much exposure and understanding of the Holocaust, but that is often the only genocide that is taught in US schools. And so there's a narrative that the suffering of the Jews and the persecution of Jews is uniquely specific. And that it was all about the religion. It's something about Judaism itself is why we've been persecuted. Well, as an author, I'm currently writing a book on Jews in the 17th century, and I've just done a ton of research on medieval and early modern Jewish history. And of course, there was religious hate, but it was motivated by, and I contended in this

video, that all genocides are motivated by land and wealth and power. And the hate is manufactured by people in power to justify taking people's land and wealth and to solidify their own power as rulers. And the Christian Church used this against Jews in the medieval and early modern period. And in our times, there's no one religion that has a monopoly on committing genocide. There's no one religion that has a monopoly on committing genocide. There's no one state, and because really it's states that are committing genocide, that it's not directed to one people. So I've encouraged people to read books about here in the United States.

Obviously, the genocide of the Native peoples, the Congolese genocide. I just recommended a couple different titles. the genocide of the Native peoples, the Congolese genocide. I just recommended a couple different titles, the Rwandan genocide for a more recent example. And I reject the framework that you can't make comparisons between genocides. I think that keeps us ignorant. I keep that keeps us from being in solidarity

with one another. And understanding the mechanisms of power and control and wealth accumulation that underlie all of these genocides. And I do believe what is happening in Palestine right now is a genocide being committed by the Israeli state. Yeah. And also a really good point about justifying it by creating all of people in Palestine as barbarians or terrorists or this rhetoric that becomes really dangerous and harmful. And as we've seen, like, people can die, 60-year-old can die from this rhetoric. Right, Nenya, who just said, this is a struggle between children who light and children

of darkness. Like that is that it's genocidal. I cannot believe that tweet. And I mean, he deleted it, but I mean, the internet is forever. I just can't believe that is so normal for him to tweet. Just confidently. Even at one point, just to say that out loud, I think that's absurd.

And also just like to see how Yov Galant has been saying like human animals or referring to Palestinians in such a dehumanizing way. You mentioned something really important that I think I appreciated about how maintaining the dehumanization of the Palestinians is vital to maintain the white supremacist imperialistic thing that is Israel. Can you get into that a little bit? imperialistic thing that is Israel. Can you get into that a little bit? Yeah, well, I think that was me trying, that came out of me trying to understand why there was such backlash when I first, when I first years ago started recommending people read Palestinian

books is because when you read a book by a Palestinian author, it is going to humanize the Palestinian people for you. And that is incredibly threatening. And Palestinian authors face a ton of discrimination within publishing. I mean, look at what was it earlier this week, the Frankfurt Book Festival pulled or canceled a ceremony for a Palestinian author, Adania Shibli, and then has made more time for Israeli voices,

and Israeli-specific panels at that book festival. And simply because she's a Palestinian, she writes books dealing with real, factual Palestinian history, and her books are critical of Israel, but the silencing of Palestinian voices is a global project. It is across all media industries.

You see it in, you know, traditional book publishing as well as journalism. Another, an author friend of mine, Hanin Oricot has had the hardest time. She's been on sub with her book and she's been told by multiple editors to change the main character from a Palestinian character to just a generic Arabic character because being Palestinian is seen as inherently too controversial to publish.

Yeah, I read that. That's just, I mean, again, not completely surprised, but just so shameful that that is something that is still happening in these modern times. I think another thing to remember is a lot of people get confused between the differences between being non-white and white in the scope of like this world. I guess it just seems so obvious that colorism and racism both exist in today's world.

And I really liked what you mentioned about the difference between colorism and racism. Can you talk about that for a little bit? Yeah, so I was explaining that in the Western media, Israelis are treated as white and Palestinians are treated as non-white. And it really is regardless of the color of your skin. So a lot of people giving me pushback on that comment and say, oh, but there's black and brown and white Israelis. Yes, and in the racist apartheid state that is Israel, people of different skin tones are treated very differently within Israel, seen there was forced sterilization of African Jews immigrating to Israel. But when

it comes to the Western media, our view of the conflict is not as nuanced as recognizing those differences. And so I was explaining that colorism is, discrimination based on the color of your skin. Racism is a racial construct, it's about social, economic, and legal discrimination. And while colorism is often used to determine racism, that's not always 100% the case. And in the case of Israel, when you're talking about the Western media looking

at Israel, they report on Israelis as people, as people who are to be mourned, as people who are, whose deaths are important, as people whose lives are valuable. And they report on people in Gaza, Palestinians, as human shields is the most sympathetic way we hear them talked about. Their deaths are not deemed important. They are not humanized within the media. If they're killed, they're either combatants, or they were a human shield. They were someone being used by combatants

and their deaths are, you know, maybe lip services paid to those deaths being regrettable, but they're seen as necessary and not unconscionable in the way that deaths in Israel are reported on. Yeah. I think you bring a really good point about the media and how important semantics are. I think something that we've been seeing time and time again is how deep

the dehumanization goes. Like Israelis have been killed versus Palestinians have died. The Gaza Strip is being referred to as an enclave. Oh my God. You know, an enclave. Oh my god. You know an enclave where we're terrorists lurk. So yeah, the words used to describe the city of Gaza, the words used to describe people as combatants, the words like, you know, Palestinians die in a clash. When that clash was racist Jewish settlers with machine guns coming after them. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah. Passively does a lot of work.

It does, it does. I mean, we've seen it just recently with the hospital bombing, how the New York Times changed their headline like three times from strike and then to blast, I believe, was what they landed on blast, which I just find honestly comical when I really think about it too hard. Yeah, Elizabeth Warren came out and condemned blasts.

Like that is just so, just the passive voice is so dangerous because it really off-use case the truth, which is that Palestinian people are dying of genocide, even calling it a war or a conflict does not do what's happening justice because it still implies there are two equal sides that are fighting against each other versus an occupier and oppressor versus the occupied the oppressed. So, I think semantics are so important for us to keep in mind, even when we're talking

about it with our peers, to make sure that we talk about it in the correct way, because I feel like unconsciously becomes ingrained in us, even if we don't realize it when we keep talking about certain things, the way the media wants us to talk about them as a conflict or as a clash or whatever it is. And something else that I've really tuned into is really being careful not to pit this as a struggle between Muslims and Jews. Any framing like that is both islamophobic and anti-Semitic and incredibly inaccurate. This is about an ethno state, a nation state, and apartheid state, which is Israel, targeting

its captive population. And there are Palestinians who are of all different faiths, who are discriminated against because they are Palestinians within occupied Palestine. So, for example, it just came to my attention that there are some in the, I'm a book talker. My book talk channel is, my bookstagram is mostly what I do is just, you know, share about books for folks to read and share about the books I'm working on. And the sum of my fellow book talkers have been recommending people read books by both Palestinian and Jewish authors so they can show both sides. A Palestinian author, Hannah Mooshabag just wrote a great letter to sort of call in our

community and explain, this is very anti-Semitic to conflate Judaism with Israel, the policies of Israel. You know, yesterday we saw 500 Jewish activists get arrested in the capital building here in D.C. in protests and demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. So there are many, many anti-Zionist Jews, Judaism and Zionism are not the same thing, but conflating them gives Israel more power and gives it a stronger moral foothold to say, oh, we're representing all Jews, not just this state. So that's something also to be really careful about is to not pit this as a Muslim versus Jewish fight because it's not, it's about Israel, the state versus Palestinian people.

Yeah, that's vital to remember. Let's take our first break right here and we'll be right back. And we are back. You were just talking about how this is just 100% not a religious issue. And I think talking about semantics again, I framing it as a religious issue is another way for people to stop talking about it, to be too afraid to get into this complicated, ancient battle of all time, this archaic thing that we can't even get into because we can't understand it. I think the Zionist narrative wants us to believe

it's about religion. So people can ignore what's actually going on and be too scared to speak out. It's like time and time again, something that I want to remind people is that it's not Muslim versus Jewish, which is what it gets framed by most of the time. But speaking of Zionism, and how it's not equated to the Jewish religion at all, if anything, Zionism is anti-Semitic in and of itself. I believe that, hold on to me. I believe Zionism makes all Jews so much more unsafe.

Yeah, it's also rooted in a lot of anti-Semitism. Even the way the state of Israel was created was Europeans being like, hey, Jesus, can you go here? It wasn't this gift to the Jewish people. It was also about to be in Africa, which I find fascinating. And also, I think people always forget the majority of Zionists in the United States are evangelical

Christians. That is 100% accurate. That's why they support Zionism. And it's because they want all the Jews to go to Israel for the rapture to happen. It is the most like comic book idea I've ever heard and everyone just goes along with it. Yeah. That brings me to another thing that you brought up in your videos about needing a homeland. I think what you discussed is really important

because of this narrative that a lot of Zionist teach to Jewish people about how they're constantly being persecuted. I think people are led to believe that Israel is their safe haven. Like, if all else fails, I have Israel to go back to that as my home, even like American Jews that have no connection to Israel, really. Why, in your opinion, do the Jewish people not necessarily need a homeland? Right. Well, I made that video speaking to other like other leftists. I was addressing other leftists.

So I think if you agree with me on the premise that everyone should have a safe place to live and everyone should have equal rights, which I think are two pretty basic tenants of being a leftist, then you just can't have anybody having a Theocratic ethno state, which is what Israel is. DeFi, I mean, they say they're not, but that is how they act and how that is how that country is run. And so, you know, a lot of people misinterpreted that videos as, you know, we're trying to kind of try to argue with me saying, but there's other Theocratic ethno states.

Yeah, but I'm saying, yeah, if you're a leftist, you should think that's bad everywhere. Because the Theocratic ethno state is an inherently fascist construct, it's an inherently saying, one religion and or one ethnicity in the case of the way Israel interprets Judaism. These people are more valuable and are more citizens here and have more rights here than everybody else.

And that is just incompatible with leftist values, I think. And so the point of that video is nobody should have a Theocratic ethno state. And this is a line that I've heard even some leftist Jews saying, well, oh, we, you know, this is a complicated issue because Jews need a homeland. Well, I'm sorry, our world is just too heterogeneous, too diverse. You know, migrations have been going on for tens of thousands of years all over the place. There's no one plot of land on earth anymore that you can carve out and say, okay, just this one type of people are going to get to live here and be citizens here and have rights here.

Now, I'm an anarchist personally, so when I say no theocratic ethnostates, I'm also like in a bigger picture way, saying like no states would be the ideal for me, but certainly theocratic ethno-states are even worse within that framework compared to liberal democracies or something. So yeah, that was a video that was intended to be an in-group conversation, and then it got a million views. My following has really exploded over the last week So I wasn't expecting it to go so far and so for people who idealize Ethno states like japan or sweeten

They were really having a hard time with me with me saying that and thinking it was really anti-Semitic for me to say Oh, I don't think Jews should have the Acritic Ethnostate. But no, I think nobody should have the Acritic Ethnostate. That's a really good point to make. It's, I mean, it goes back to the idea of Jewish suffering being more valuable in some way than other suffering. I think it continues this hierarchy of sorts.

And everything you described about people not being treated the same and not having enough rights, that's all partied. I think people forget, like Israel is committing definition of a partied and has been against the Palestinian people. And I find it weird that, I mean, Amy Schumer posted this crazy video proving in her words that it's not on atheid stay actually and how people have all the rights in the world. When in reality it's shameful. It's like the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch are all saying this is an apartheid state but okay Amy Schumer, yeah it's not actually that complicated. It's really not. I've been really appreciating Amanda Seals. She did like a reaction video to what Amy Schumer posted and like laid out all the racist reasons

why actually apartheid is what you would call that. I think something that has bothered me within the both sides thing is, this is not a term that I hear often anymore but like the progressive except Palestine. I think the that idea has been really damaging because it makes it seem like you can still be so liberal and progressive and still not really recognize that Palestinians are being genocided for almost a century. Yeah and this is just so frustrating because again, what you're seeing in Palestine, it's so stark,

the violence is so obvious, and it's so egregious, and there's all these social justice, you know, organizations and accounts that I follow. There's like queer Jewish liberation accounts who've said nothing about Palestine. There's also non-Jewish, just queer, you know, all sorts of queer liberation, queer activists out there, which is like a whole nother network that I'm tapped into. And many of them are staying silent on this genocide, and it's like we are all fighting the same evils, the same type of oppression. And if you want people to stand with you, when your rights are being taken away, you got to stand with everybody else.

That's the only way intersectionality is the only way that we can overcome these enormous forces of oppression in the world. So yeah, it's been very frustrating to see just how many, you know, So yeah, it's been very frustrating to see just how many, you know, anti-racist organizations, queer liberation organizations are just staying completely silent on Palestine. Yeah, I have been really frustrated about that as well because it encourages this sort of selective outrage that is reserved for certain kind of people that are deemed as human versus the people that are not. I really believe one of the most powerful voices in the fight for Palestinian liberation

are Jewish anti-Zionist because they can speak to what people deem is the source of that problem from a different place. But I hope you realize how important your voice is just in general, especially now. And yeah, I just really thank you for what you've been doing. Because it's kind of scary, too, I'm sure, to suddenly have a big platform and have all these people analyzing everything you're saying and trying to find little holes in your arguments. But I appreciate that you're not backing down. Yeah, so I went from 6000 to 180,000 followers on Instagram in like a week.

I didn't realize that you started at 6000. I was wondering about that. That is a crazy jump. Yeah, it happened really, really fast and on TikTok too. I had 50,000 on TikTok just from my like book talk, author talk account, which I've been growing over the course of two years. And then it went, now it's like at 150,000. So like triple dawn TikTok. But yeah, it's definitely made me more careful about what I say. Like again, I had that one video that was sort of like an

in group comment to leftist, because I'm used to being on like the leftist side of TikTok and then realizing oh crap like everything I say is gonna go out to like absolutely every single kind of audience. So I need to like really think about the context of what I say and um that it yeah so it's a it's a lot it's a lot yeah I mean it sounds really overwhelming and even navigating it well. I don't know, I really appreciate you. Before we wrap this up, I would love for you to talk about your work a little bit, maybe your book, where people can find it, where they can support you in your work. The platform is all yours. Yeah, so I actually had a book come out about a month ago called The Free People's Village.

And it is relevant to this topic. It's a very leftist book. It's about a punk band organizing to save their warehouse from demolition to make room for a new electromagnetic hyper way in an alternate timeline where Al Gore won the 2000 election and declared a war on climate change instead of a war on terror. But it's a book that's really critical of neoliberal politics. So this solar punk utopia that's been created this world has really only impacted wealthy white neighborhoods while leaving everybody else behind.

So it's a book about centering racial justice within climate organizing. And the final scene of the book actually takes place at a free Palestine protest. And so that's definitely like a presence throughout the book. And based on experiences, I've had organizing with the incredible students for justice in Palestine and Palestinian youth movement organizers that we have here in Houston. So for people who are listeners of this podcast, I do think they would enjoy the Free People's Village. And you can get it, the best place to get it

is always your local indie bookstore, of course. You can also support your local indie bookstore by shopping at bookshop.org, which allows you all the convenience of ordering online, but you get to pick your favorite indie bookstore to benefit. And then of course you can get it also from all of the big corporate retailers. And it's available in Hardcover and ebook and audiobook. And if you search SimCern, it's at Sim Books to Grams Badly on Instagram, but if you just search SimCern, I'll pop up on Instagram. And that is S-I-N-K-E-R-N for people that don't know. Yes. Just to

leave us with something that we can take away from this. Do you have any advice for people that are trying to open up these discussions with their peers and how should they approach them and I don't know, I think these conversations are essential to humanizing Palestinians again. So do you have any advice before we sign off? You know, the same advice was the first piece I gave, which was just to read a lot and learn a lot and seek out those Palestinian voices. Also, Jewish voice for peace, if you go to their JVP.org website, they have a ton of like great tools and kits for learning

how to talk about Palestine. And so I would say, you know, always be learning and reading. If you feel like you don't have the language yet to have these conversations, like you said, it's really powerful to repost things by, you know, commentators that you respect. Journalists on the ground in Gaza right now who are doing amazing, courageous work, just letting people know what is happening and putting something out that disrupts an imperialist narrative can be really, really powerful. Thank you for saying all of that because it's really needed. And I will put in the description all the info to where you can follow Sim and their work. And maybe I can put some recommendations for Palestinian books as well. And yeah, that's the episode. Thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me. Free pals, Dine. What is this place? Wait, why my handcuffed? What am I doing here? 13 days of Halloween, Penance. Season 4 of the award-winning horror fiction podcast presented in immersive 3D audio. Where am I?

Why, this is the Pendleton. All residents, please return to your habitations. Like stuff on your feet! You're new here, so I'll say it once. No talking. Starring Natalie Morales of Parks and Recreation and Dead To Me. Am I under arrest? We don't like to use that word.

Can I leave of my own free will? Not at this time. So this is a prison then? No, it's a rehabilitation center. Premiering October 19th, ending Halloween. I'm gonna get out. And how may I ask, or are you going to do that? Escape. Listen to 13 days of Halloween on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a place beyond this place, a middle ground between the light and the darkness, the nature and the zenith. For some is a bridge between the living and the dead, yet for others is something else entirely. It's the place where our nightmares dwell. Each one of us has touched the other side and felt the presence of something beyond this world Welcome to hip-hop horror stories

I'm your host Belly and each week we're gonna take you to the limits of your imagination as we explore the reality of Paranormal experiences. I believe in the shift for real and the stories you're about to hear might make you believe too Everywhere I look I saw something and I look closer I believe in the shift for real and the stories you're about to hear might make you believe too. Everywhere I look, I slow something. And I looked closer and noticed there was a footage figure. And whatever it is, it's like it became reality. Listen to hip-hop horror stories on the High Heart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Penelope Sphereas. I'm a film director. I want to tell you a story about a friend of mine. Back in the 70s, Peter Ivers moved to LA to start his music career. He scored Ron Howard's directorial debut. I didn't know one thing about Peter Ivers. I just said, okay, Peter Ivers, I just said, okay, let's meet him. And even hosted a late night cable TV show. It showcased LA punk bands in all their glory. The crowd started getting bigger and bigger, and then there was Beverly Danzelow. There was John Baloozy.

But then it all went to hell. Peter was murdered. Peter Ivers was murdered on March 3rd, 1983, and it raised a question that 40 years later, we still don't know the answer to. Who killed Peter Ivers? Listen to Peter and the Acid King on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Greetings podcast into the asset.

It's me James a man who has commenced his one man war against Carter Airlines, who detained me against my will for most of the last two days in a very small part of a very big plane. See, there's a, you know, airlines from Middle Eastern countries are usually like the best airlines are like Royal Jordanian and air Emirates. If it's owned by a king, it's usually a safe bet. But cutter airways. That's what they say about England.

They say about England breaks that mold. Proudly breaks that mold. Yeah. Yeah, fuck me. One of the less pleasant experiences available to a human being doesn't end in death. It's a 36 hour trip from Christ to California, which I have just enjoyed. I always enjoyed those trips back from air Emirates because when you're on the air Emirates flight,

if you ask the the the steward or whatever to to if you if you tell him, hey, I would like eight shots of vodka and four glasses of orange juice. Who just give it to you? Like not even a question, not even a question. And so have I vomited on a couple of air ember? It's flights. Yes. Is it always a good time? Probably.

You don't remember. No, no. Yeah. See, I was at the point of frustration where like, and I'm, I'm, as an English man, if I've become frustrated and drunk, then my instinct is to fight everyone or throw bottles, and I thought that would probably result in further detention. So decided against, decided against becoming bladded or it could have started singing, I guess, that's the other option available to me that fits my culture.

Yeah, so we're not here to talk about things that I like to do in my free time as much as I would love that. But we are here to talk about things that I have been seeing in my work time when I was traveling to Kurdistan last couple of weeks. Kurdistan, for people who are not familiar is a big area. The area where Kurdish people live and it spans several countries. The areas I went were in a rock and in Syria or in, it's not really in I guess Syrian regime territory, but if you look

on the map. Northeastern Syria, known as Rojava. The other two parts that are generally considered part of Kurdistan are a chunk of, big chunk of southern Iran and also a big chunk of southern Turkey. Yeah, um, so Rojava just means west, I think Roger that is east, east and Kurdistan. Um, so yeah, I've spent the last several uh, last week and change in that area. And while I was there, last week and change in that area. And while I was there, the Turkish state began a massive drone bombing campaign, which is what we are gathered here today to discuss. So for people who are not familiar, it's four years, almost to this drone bombing campaign started almost four years to the day since Turkey's invasion of what they call the M4 strip. So that's the area around Serkania and Tel-Abiad.

We've talked about that before in the podcast, so if you want to know more about that, you can go back and listen to it. It's the area along the border, one of the areas along the border between Turkey and Syria. And as people will know, Syria is a country that has had a long and terrible civil war, which they've heard about in lots of episodes. We're not talking about that today, so much as we're talking about the Turkish states' use of drones to bomb what people generally in this country will know is Rajava, right? So just to give some statistics off the top, this is the fourth year in a row of aggression at this time of year, right? So there have been two land attacks, I think Operation Olive Branch,

and Operation, this is the one called Peace Spring, and then two years, the last two years, there have been drone strikes at this time of year, wait this time of year. It seems very hard not to conclude that these are attempts to destroy civilian infrastructure and make it very hard for people in the cold months of the year. So right now around two million people in northeast Syria are going to be without power and without water. And I experienced something that when I was there and the places I stayed were run off generators. And so

you'd have like intermittent power, or you'd have power for a bit, and then they'd put some petrol in the generator and the power will go down, or the generator would have a little tantrum and the power will go down. But generally, I had a lot better access to power. There's some people had a lot better access to power. Some people had a lot better access to water. So as I was traveling around, I noticed some people didn't have access to running water, right? You can't turn on the tap and get water.

Obviously, that's a massive problem. It's something, I think, as people are listening to this, Israel is also bombing the shit out of Gaza, the whole of the Gaza strip. And the US recently intervened to ensure that people there have access to water. And they have done very little in the case of protecting people in North-Eli's Syria, right? So across this drone campaign, 48 people have died, and the worst, I guess, the highest casualty of reducing strike was one that happened while I was

there, 29 S.I.E.I.I. S.I.I.I.I. are like internal security forces. Sometimes you'll see it translated as police, but I don't think that's quite accurate, but they don't do cops shit. Like they're not there to, you know, like a rescue for parking in the wrong place or and then you do the things that cops do. They're there largely as like internal security

due to the various non-state armed groups that are in the area and state armed groups, I guess, that are operating in the area that would make things dangerous for people living there. So these particular SAEs were anti-narcotics SAEs. And again, why I'm grounding this and what they do, is because they're not the people who like send you to jail for the rest of your life for like having an ounce of weed. They're the people whose job is to prevent the trading cap to gone.

Will people know what cap to gone is? Absolutely not. Yeah, it's one of the drug. I mean, it's that when you hear about drug interdiction like like police in Rojava, they're going after Capagon. It's a big chunk of both what kept ISIS. It's the pervitan, you know, the the method Nazis took that for ISIS, right? Yeah. And it was also a big chunk of how they got their funding was was moving. The Assad regime also gets a piece of a lot of the Capagon trade. It continues to fund these like, like, these like, it's the misting surging groups, right, in the area, because it's small and it's high value. And like, we're necessarily giving it to their fighters. It's this is very common,

like around the world, we, we discuss this in Myanmar too, right, that the military there take something else called Yaba, but these, these kind of meth derivatives are very common, and they're very commonly sold. That's how a load of these non-state armed groups get money to buy stuff, right? So when we're talking about drug interdiction, it's not done in a vacuum. It's not done because they think that necessarily the drugs are bad or that there's some kind of moral failure that comes from the use of these substances. It's because it allows funding for groups that are trying to kill people on the ground.

So like, into digging the drugs, it's part of an anti-terrorism operation that allows people to live safely, which is what they deserve after 10 plus years of war in that area. So 29 people is a lot of people, right? 29, anti-narcotics, I say, issues, is a lot of people, right? 29, anti narcotics, I say, issues, it's a lot of the people who do that job. It's going to make it significantly harder for them to continue doing that job, which means it's going to make it significantly easier for those armed groups to get funding, right? It's also, so while I was there, there was massive funeral for these people, right? Every town, every settlement across, And Rajava has lost somebody in that strike rate,

so in Kambishlou, in Kabani, in Alhasaka, like all these places had big funerals because three or four or 10 people came from that town. And like, I saw a little girl going to her dad's funeral, like a little girl holding a picture of her dad and it's pretty fucked up. Like it's hard for that not to affect you. Especially is like,

these people weren't fighting anyone. They weren't attacking anyone, right? They were just, they were taking a training. They were taking an anti-narcotics training at night and a 60 of them were gathered. And it was building, 29 were killed, 28 were injured. And it's in the sort of furthest North East part of North East Syria, but around a town called Derek, which is on the board of the Al Malakai.

A derrick, yeah, buddy. My pronunciation is asked. Al Malakai might say on the map if you're looking at Google maps, if you're trying to work out where it is. And lots of these places, the reason they will have two names is code addition and Arabic, right? So like, under the previous, a side regime, like Arabic was the sort of language

that people were enforced to speak and use. And now under the self-administration, people tend to use Kurdish and they tend to use a Latin script, as opposed to an Arabic script, right? And so that's why you'll see two names very often if you're looking on a map. But like 29 is, there's 19 other people, mostly civilians, who were killed, and two million people are now living without power, without water, without these basic services, which in turn will result in more death, right? More people

will die because they don't have access to those things, which are life-sustaining, right? All people, young people, sick people. Those things are the very basics of sustaining human life. And so without them, things are going to get a lot harder. And I want to talk a little bit about like where these drone strikes happened, because largely aside from the one of the SAH, they weren't at large groups of people or buildings. Instead, they were deliberately targeting infrastructure. So of the ones that I saw and the ones that I read about, they targeted electricity substation in one case, they targeted a lot of water facilities, water pumping stations, etc.

I love people to get water, a cooking gas plant, which it's pretty obvious what that does, it allows people to get bottles of gas to cook their food, and a lot of oil is just structure. So I saw a few of those, and they're called like donkeys. You know, the things that go up and down. Yeah. Yeah. My using your, I don't know the word, but the little crane things. Yeah. Yeah. The, like the, the things you can see if you drive through Bakersfield. I'm sure there's a name. Yeah. Are they oiled Derrick's? Yeah. There's a name. Yeah. Are they oiled Derek's? Yeah.

Someone Google the name of the nodding dog. A pump jack. Is that no? No. Yeah. Wait, that's the first thing I could want. That's like a dude who goes to the gym a lot. Yeah, bro, I'm pumped jacked.

I mean, it is called the an oil donkey as well. So you were a wrong one. Okay. Yeah. nodding donkey pumps. Yeah, it's really the way nodding as well. So you were not nodding donkey pumps. Yeah, it's really thought they were nodding donkeys. Okay. Yeah. That's a phrase we're going with. So you could see a lot of these that were like knocked over on their side, right? They had been throwing struck. And then you could see others that were just knocked out because the power to them had been knocked out. So obviously that's not only a major revenue source, but also like that is how people in a region get fuel, right? So like it's going to be higher for

them to get a diesel, it's going to be higher for them to drive around. People already don't drive around a lot because a lot of the drone strikes on people in the Yepa-Ga Yepa-J, so that the people's defense forces and women's defense forces, lots of drone strikes have happened when those people are driving their cars or when they get in a car. So it can be quite hairy driving. And so like, a lot of people were driving too,

like I drove around, but that's one of the areas of risk for people, right? Of the people killed, 35 W where I say 11 were civilians and two SCFs. So most of these were either internal security or civilians. And I think Robert, you are, Robert and I spoke while I was there. Robert made a good point about how this like enables these non-state armed groups like either ISIS or, yeah, like, HTS. Yeah, that was my, my main concern for you while you were there was not that you would get hit in an air strike. But it was that because of the damage done to the security forces as a result of the

the Turkish air strikes, you would it would it would there's there's always been ISIS cells there right that they're they've never gotten rid of all of them. And periods where the AANES self-administration is under attack are the periods in which it's most dangerous because it provides there's less security forces, you know, watching everything. People in general are out less, which provides cover for for some of these groups that may want to do like a kidnapping. Yeah, yeah, and it's not a place where a lot of, I guess, folks who look like me. I'm sorry, good.

That was a concern for us. And like, it's a concern for these people too, right? They still do car bombs in Derrero, not, you know, they think still kill civilians. Yeah, they roll up ISIS people on a probably weekly basis. If people are interested in getting more information both about the drone strikes and about what they call sleeper cells,

the Rejava Information Center, very nice people. They have a good website. It's Rejava Information Center.org they produce monthly reports on both things. So that will give more information on those things. Now I'll be a good time to pivot to Advert, but I've got a fuck all that is. Do you know who else provides great services? I don't think we can reasonably make that claim. The products and services that support this

podcast. Here they are. We're back and we are discussing drone strikes on Northeasternia. I guess not just Northeasternia. These also happen up around Slamani. Slamani, if you're looking on the map, depends again on the language, right? Those have happened again against KCK, which is like the Kurdistan Communities Council. So that would be the, I guess the, the that if you look at like Syria, Iran, Turkey, and Iraq as different countries, all of which have some administrative control over the nation of Kurdish people, right? Kurdish people live in all four countries. And they live in other countries too, of course.

Then the movements in each of those countries are subsidiary to the KCK. And so some of those KCK folks are up in Salimani, so like they will be drone strikes there. And that's far inside Iraqi Kurdistan, right? You're a long way from the border there. And that's what these drone strikes, I guess the drone strikes allow

Turkish intelligence and the Turkish military to target people much, much further inside with very little consequence or risk on their own, right? These drones are largely not being targeted because certainly in AANES, the autonomous administration in Northeastern Syria, they don't have the means to target them, right? The United States haven't supplied them with the weapons that they would need to shoot down those drones, which I think brings me on to the role of the US in this. And I guess more broadly, the

role of the coalition, in this case coalition, is a coalition to the fee ISIS, right? It's made up dozens of countries, the UK, the US, Germany, lots of other western, I guess, countries broadly, and countries in that part of the world too. I think Iraq is part of it. Certainly, Iraqi Kurdistan has done their own operations against ISIS sleeper cells, and like everywhere you go, right, you'll go through Peshmerga checkpoints, like I was going through an area where they had arrested an ISIS member the day before. So like, they'll be getting you out of the car, you know, going through your bags, looking through your stuff.

So that's all piloted, the same operation. But the US has a base in a place called Alhasuka. And again, you can look up on the map, right? It's a little west, trying to line up my compass here, a little west of Kamishlo, which is a capital of the region. And the US, pretty much US troops, don't do a great amount of leaving that base. It's fair to say they'll come out in helicopters.

They were going out like sort of supporting SDF patrols in the Ahaska region, but they were supporting them from the air. They generally aren't going out and about like with people on the ground talking to people unless it's a specific mission which they do sometimes. You can if people are interested in like the US presence it's called Operation Inherent Resolve and they have a Twitter account, well they'll sometimes post themselves doing things. But what they don't do is protect that like and so the US and the Autonomous Administration are allies in this fight against ISIS, right? But they are only

allies in this fight against ISIS. The US is not supporting them in defending themselves from drone strikes or like ensuring that a civilian population is protected from those attacks. So the US has the capacity to shoot down these drones and they prove that by shooting one down last week or the week before I'm a little bit jet lag so okay, bangled on time but I think it was last week. The US shut down a Turkish drone. So that'd be about two weeks ago for when this is airing? Yes, yeah sure, good point. So yeah, two weeks ago the United States shut down an F-16 shut down a Turkish drone. States shut down, an F-16 shut down a Turkish drone. So specifically was a drone called an Akinji,

which is a newer variant of the Bayraktar drone. We've spoken about these drones before, right? They're the drones that people, like, I know you can go on Etsy and buy a stuffy version of these drones, which, that's concerning. Yeah, it's really dystopian and crazy. I don't like it.

Yeah, I do not like it either. I think it illustrates the way the war in Ukraine has become like a football match for some people. Yeah. Yes. Or like a film where like I just want to reinforce it. It's turned into like fandom. Yeah.

Yes, yes. I think that's an excellent way of putting it, Gary. I said like it's not cool when anyone gets fucking drone struck. It's not cool when, like, everyone in an area spends every night worrying if death is going to come from the sky at some point, right? Like, the effects of these drone strikes isn't just on the people killed or the people in injured or even the infrastructure. The effect is on every single person worrying what's going to happen tonight, right? Like, I can speak to a tiny part of that experience, right? Nothing compared to what people are living there have gone through at all. But

it's a concern. Every time it gets dark, you know, well, it's tonight, especially for the rural folks who might be living in a rural area, but near to a substation or near to one of those nodding donkeys or other infrastructure, which been targeted or they're a cooking gas plant. Those things I can imagine explode with quite some force. They can't leave, they can't just up and not live near any infrastructure. Infrastructures will allow the place to be survival for civilians, so they just have to live with this constant fear. And it's very odd to see that, and then simultaneously see this sort of, I don't know, dayification of drone strikes that are happening in Ukraine, and like, this, you know, people with dog dressed as Napoleon, Twitter

avatars, cheering someone's kid dying. Yeah, I mean, throughout all of the kind of new conflicts we've had the past five years, like the, and especially the past like two, three years, like the idea of like politics as fandom has reduced some of the like most, like inhumane, gross aspects of how people have been consuming social media. And just this year, it's like people forget that this is like thousands of people's actual like human lives that they're like, yes, meaming about. And it just, it just becomes just, they talk about it in the same way they talk about like a Marvel movie or like a star sport. Yeah, it's, yeah, we're sports. Like it's, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it allows you to, to,

approach these things from just a, from a very separate perspective when you're, when you're viewing it from like this, fandom angle, think, but politics is fandom in general, I think it's gotten a whole lot worse since the Trump era, Politics is fandom in general, I think, has gotten a whole lot worse since the Trump era. You had, you know, like, that's where we had like resistance lives that were, like, copying off some of the stuff from the new Star Wars trilogy, which is kind of the inspiration for a lot of their stuff. We got Nazis doing a whole bunch of politics as fandom as well. It just create like, it's, it's like this team sports, like fandom thing that is just pervade.

It's, it's, it's, it's, it's seeped into like almost every single aspect of like not just politics, but now like conflict and like geopolitics. It's like whoever has the best branding is the one that's has the best chance. Yeah. And it's I don't know. It's it's it's disturbing to watch. I don't know how to like counter counter, because it feels like the more you engage, the further sucked into the abyss you become.

But it also doesn't feel good to just ignore it as well. Because it's just, it feels like this kind of endless trap that is just a part of existing in this weird post-modern internet world. Yeah, I don't know. I think like, one would hope that the internet in some ways could help us see that like at the end of a redroin strike is a little fucking child most of the time or like like I spent some time last week with the family who almost exactly one year ago

lost their 15 year old son in a drone strike and like it that like I understand people die in these things, like on an intellectual level and even on a personal level, like having spent time in these places, you know, for a decent amount of my adult life. But fuck me. It's just like it destroyed you, like seeing a mum very her son cry for her little boy, it did fucking heartbreaking. And like I got to live that for one morning and those people live that every single day. And every time, like, and I don't, I don't know. It makes me want to shout at people when I see this. I don't actually think it's, I don't mean to be a doomer here. I don't think it's a solvable problem. Yeah. This is, we are talking

about it within the language of fandom because that is kind of the defining public social relationship of our time. Yeah. But like this is always what people have done to war. Sure. One way or the other. Right. Yeah. It's faster now and and and more commercial. Right. Like one thing for whatever reason, I think just because we're acculturated to it. hearing people talk about, you know, doing what they do in times of war because of patriotism, because of nationalism, because of belief in the founding principles of their country, seems a little bit less coarse than like doing it because you fell in with a bunch ofmemors who use little dog avatars and shit. But like, I don't know, it's not like less logical than being right or die because like,

you happen to be born under, you know, so and so the king. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like that dehumanization, I think the difference, like to me is like, dehumanization. I think the difference like to me is like, so like Robert and I have both experiences right to to in order to kill somebody, you have to dehumanize them to kill people on mass, you have to do that on mass, right? If you're fighting a war, it doesn't be who viewed to think it sound like we're killing people, Jay. Well, that's a thing that we do on the podcast, Robert. Yeah, we kill people in mass. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. You're going to have to school a zone is where we talk about the kill people in man. Yeah, yeah, sure. You're going to have to school a zone is where we talk about the killings. If people want to subscribe, that's what

we do instead of adverts is we list the people we've killed. Yeah, James, as the quote on your blue sky account says, one death as a tragedy, one million is a statistic. James That's right. And it's every day I strive to get my number up. So far I've let everyone down. That's not true. And to my knowledge, not of us, if killed anyone. But to your knowledge. To my knowledge. Sureens probably got some bodies in the class.

Jesus Christ. It's just that kind of. Yeah. So what I wanted to say is that like, when, yeah, like if you're in the military, you probably know this, right? Like, like this sort of blood makes a grass grow shit. Fine. Whatever. Like, that's how wars work.

War is undesirable. It's horrible. You have to be horrible. You have to, you have to dehumanize people to kill them. You don't have to fucking do that if you're on Twitter.com, but like people, you know, people with the silly dog advertised chiefly, but other people to have, have begun to see themselves as like participants in conflict in a way that they maybe didn't, uh, maybe they did.

And I just wasn't around in the second world. Yeah. No, I think, I think that does tie into part of how the fandom things works. Cause a part of participating in fandom is fandom is being in these kind of very very alienating online spaces because any type of like engagement on the internet in this way is is fueled with a process of alienation. But when that kind of starts applying to to politics, you feel like either the act of consuming or, or like, you know, joining in on conversation is itself like a form of activism, by just like, just through like a consuming or sharing

content. You feel like you're actually participating in the thing itself. Yeah. And I think some of it's this almost narcissistic need to not let the world pass you by because it's there because there's something deeply uncomfortable about just like watching massive things happen and realizing like there's nothing I can do about this. Yeah. Yeah. To feel like you might turn,

there isn't a lot of the time, right? Like your take, you know, the instant, a hospital gets attacked in Gaza, your take on that is not particularly helpful or necessary. Yeah. Unless you're, I don't know, Joe Biden, right? But yeah, which is not, I don't think his take was helpful, but right? It was like, it had an impact because he's the president.

But like most of us, we're just kind of part of the churn. And there's almost, there's like a degree of emotional need to it, especially when you see these horrible footage of bodies piled high, right? You feel like I'm a bad person if I don't do something. And the only thing I can do is tweet or whatever your social media geurus is. I feel like I just simply devils advocate for a hot sec. I think it's a little different when there's so much conflicting information, especially I mean, like the Gaza thing is a great example because the electricity's out.

They don't want them to share anything. So I think when it comes to stuff, something like that, it's more about like spreading awareness versus like having a take in my opinion. It's more just like, hey, the news might say this, but this is from the actual person on the ground telling you what's happening. So I think there's a little bit of nuance

because I also think the only reason that, like just for Palestine, for example, just we don't have to go into it too much. But a huge reason why there's so much more support for the Palestinian movement is because of social media. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. People see people in Gaza as people now, not as statistics or just through the lens of Hamas or whatever.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it depends on how you do it. And like, I mean, it is, it is accurate to say that to a significant extent, the ultimate outcome of these conflicts are determined in large part due to public sympathy, right? Like that's going to be probably true of however things that ultimately shake out in Gaza and it's certainly been true of the conflict in Ukraine, right?

Like the degree to which weapons keep flowing to that country is going to be heavily based on the degree to which sympathy for that cause remains among US taxpayers and taxpayers in other countries that are sending them those weapons. That's going to have an impact on the presidential election, maybe. I mean, that is the other thing, right, that like everyone who is engaging with this stuff, via social media, there's a tendency to get caught up in a bubble in terms of just thinking about how much this is on the mind of like American voters. Maybe it'll be different this election, but generally,

like again, my feelings on this are kind of muddled, but like very often, no matter how big a deal a story is, online and stuff, American voters rarely vote based on foreign policy concerns. Yeah, tends to be elections. I want to say, I'm not saying that's what matters more. No, I'm just talking about, yeah, you're totally correct. Yeah, and it's actually in terms of your ability to influence something.

It doesn't matter how much you care if other people don't have an election time. I want to maybe finish up. I have just knocked over a bottle of Ossip Proko alcohols. So my office is rapidly becoming the dentist. Like, gast yourself. That's why I went to turn on the fan and open the door. Good times. So maybe I want to finish up before I evacuate by saying that it's something you can do and like it's to give your time and money. I know that doesn't feel as good as like, you know, trying to do amateur osin to unread it,

but you can help actually, like and you can make a meaningful difference with a few bucks. And I know I sound like an MPR advert now, but like the Raja River Information Center has some good resources and like they have, I'm not going to read them out because it's quite complicated. It's bank transfer information.

But if you feel helpless, you can do a lot with a little, you can raise money, you can help to organize donations. These things make a difference. If someone who doesn't have water now gets a pallet of bottled water, that makes a difference. If someone gets a heater for their home, that makes a difference. If someone who doesn't have water now gets a pallet of bottled water, that makes a difference. If someone gets a heater for their home, that makes a difference. Even if it's someone whose kid has died, making their life a little less painful in a physical sense, helping them be warm at night, that does make a difference. You can do that. If you want to make a difference, I would really encourage you to do whatever it is. It doesn't have to be here, right?

There's an ethnic cleansing happening in Azerbaijan. There is an ethnic cleansing happening in Gaza, right? These are places where you can show meaningful solidarity and support with a little bit of a donation or a fundraiser. It's happening at a fucking border, right? Someone died at our border since our life recording. Someone else got run over by some child in a truck. But like, you can make a difference

in a meaningful way with actions. And it's really easy to get sucked into, like, just posting into the void and feeling helpless, but like, there are helpful things you can do. So yeah. Yeah, great. And you don't have to just, you don't have to be like rich or have a lot of disposable income to do this.

There's a lot of like traditionally anarchist communities have put on benefit shows to run to fundraise from an entire community. So that's not just you trying to, you know, put like your few pennies aside. There's ways to do this that just involve, you actually like getting involved with your like local culture. And part of that is like, it's not politics as fandom. It is metapolitics.

It's where you actually put your politics into your actual everyday life. And it influences the friends you have, the communities you have. So whether that's a whole bunch of trans musicians doing a benefit show to get donations to send over to Rojava or send over to Gaza or a lot of other sorts of things, that is a way of actually having part of your politics be not just like consumption, it's not just like Twitter accounts with flags in your avatar, it's actually like living your life in a way that matches the things that you believe.

And I think that that like, so having spoken to people in Rajava in the Yepige and the Yepige and these other organizations, like one of the things that makes them distinct from other militaries is that they are building the world they want to see while they're fighting against the thing that's killing it. This is destroying it. A lot of times we'll see leftist militaries not exactly doing the equality that leftism is about one hopes. You can participate in that, as Garrison said, by doing the mutual aid, by doing the benefit show, by doing the mutual aid, by doing the benefit show, by doing the fundraiser, you are making a world in which this shit will happen less when you do

things to stop it happening or to ease the pain about happening now. And you're building communities, right? And strong communities are more resilient to this shit. And things are getting pretty bleak, and we're only going to get through them by helping each other. And for building a network that continue, like, if I think about how much better the mutual aid response has been this time to what's happened at the border compared to what it was in May, that's because people built networks didn't go away. And it was good in May, in part,

because we built networks that help to make Bing and House in San Diego feel be survivable. works that help to make Bing and House in San Diego feel be survivable. Right? And like those networks are resilient and they're flexible, but they help us mentally process all the horrible shit and also physically help people. So yeah, you have that within your means too. You have signal on your telephone, you can organize things. I don't have to feel helpless. on your telephone, like you can organize things. I don't have to feel hopeless. But I feel dizzy due to the iceberg, but alcohol that I have spilled. So that's a wonderful time to end the podcast.

All right, everyone. James is going to hallucinate in his office. And you, I hope, are going to hallucinate whatever you happen to be right now. Mm-hmm, enjoy. Illucinate a better world. Illucinate a better world. It might be the only way to be right now. Enjoy. The hallucinate a better world. Hallucinate a better world. It might be the only way to live through one.

What a wonderful podcast to garrison Davises everyone. Hi, it's me, James. You thought I'd died, but I have not. I survived the I Superb or alcohol fumes. I wouldn't advise doing that to yourself, very unpleasant. But I'm back just to update you. We recorded that last week, and I am recording this today before this goes out.

So I'm recording this on the afternoon of Monday, the 23rd of October. I just wanted to update everyone. As Robert mentioned in the show, the weakening of the SAE Schrin and the fact that people are not able to be out and about because of these drone strikes combined with the events in Israel and Palestine in the last couple of weeks have resulted in a significant uptake in violence in the area. So I wanted to update you on that, especially as I've seen a decent amount of misinformation, which will

be shocking to many of you on Twitter.com. So there have been a series of rocket and UAV, UAV and manned aerial vehicle drones, drone attacks on US bases across the north of Iraq and across Syria. So some of those happened at Al-Tant, which is further south, some of them happened at Al-Hasuka, some of them also happened to oil pipelines. And I would be very wary of people posting pictures of big fires and claiming that there are attacks at the US bases. Every time I've seen that,

it's actually been an attacker on an oil pipeline. And either the person doesn't know that that's not a US base or they are willfully being this, leading to try and get more clicks. People get paid on Twitter for engagement now. So I quite cynical about people's reasons for doing that, but they definitely have been attacks, but they have not resulted in much loss of life.

One contractor, I believe, did lose their lives. Judo, cardiac incident that happened when they were sheltering from a, what turned out to be a false alarm of a drone attack, but no one has been directly killed by their drone munitions. There have been a number of people killed in increasing conflict in the area. Both one person was killed in Camicholo, very, very close to where I stayed, actually, you can probably see it from my auditorium in a car bomb, which is not a normal thing to happen

in the middle of a city, a car bomb going off. So that's obviously caused for concern for some people. In Derazure, SDF and coalition forces have conducted a number of operations against ISIS sleeper cells who are still there arrested, detained a number of suspected ISIS members. They've also been fighting against Iranian-backed militias across the Euphrates. We've also seen fighting between the Peshmerga, so that those are the military forces of the Kurdistan-reachable government in that area of Iraq and the Iraqi army around the Macamore refugee camp, which is a refugee camp for Kurdish people who have fled from Turkey. And of course, we've seen a lot of threats, a lot of even fighting inside Iran, but it's generally been Iranian

back from the issues attacking US bases so far across that whole area. So I just wanted to update you on those things. Obviously we'll keep updating you on them and also to just suggest once again that people verify the sources of information because I have seen, especially about this area where I think literacy is very low among the general US population. So, outrageous claims being made by people who either don't know what they're talking

about or are willfully misleading people. So, I wanted to cancel people to be concerned about that. We don't have exact, I don't have exact numbers of the numbers of drone attacks. I'm looking at a Pentagon press conference to happen 39 minutes ago and then they're not giving them out there. So I have asked them for comment on a couple of things. So didn't email me back. Very sad ghosting me. But yeah, that's the latest information on that. I wanted to make sure that we have the latest update for you. What is this place? Wait, why my handcuffed? What am I doing here?

13 days of Halloween, Penance. Season 4 of the award-winning horror fiction podcast presented in immersive 3D audio. Where am I? Why, this is the Pendleton. All residents, please return to your habitations. Like stuff! On your feet! You're new here, so I'll say it once.

No talking! Starring Natalie Morales of Parks and Recreation and Dead to Me. Am I under arrest? We don't like to use that word. Can I leave of my own free will? Not at this time. So this is a prison then? No, it's a rehabilitation center.

Premiering October 19th, ending Halloween. I'm gonna get out. And how may I ask for you going to do that? Escape. Listen to 13 days of Halloween on the IHART radio app, Apple podcasts, over ever you get your podcasts. Apple podcasts over ever you get your podcasts. There's a place beyond this place.

A middle ground between the light and the darkness, the nature and the zenith. For some it's a bridge between the living and the dead, yet for others it's something else entirely. It's the place where our nightmares dwell. Each one of us has touched the other side and felt the presence of something beyond this world. Welcome to Hip Hop Horror Stories. I'm your host, Belly. And each week we're going to take you to the limits of your imagination as we explore

the reality of paranormal experiences. I believe in the shift for real and the stories you're about to hear might make you believe too. Everywhere I look, I slow something. And I looked closer and noticed there was a footage figure. And whatever it is, it's like it became reality. Listen to hip-hop horror stories on the High Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hello, hello, Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionist History, we're going to the heart

of America's gun violence crisis. Six episodes. Some weird, some whimsical, some heartbreaking, some angry. Because so much of what we believe about guns and assault rifles and mass shootings, is actually wrong. We're going to talk about TV Westerns about a crime in a little town in rural Alabama, about the nuttiness of the Supreme Court, about the world of trauma surgeons, and wonder what would have happened had Bobby Kennedy been shot today, and not 50 years ago. Join me and the revisionist history team for our six-part chaotic ride to America's gun

problem. It's our biggest series ever and one you won't want to miss. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Welcome back to it could happen here. I am Robert Evans and this is a podcast about things falling apart Sometimes it's about how to make things not fall apart and other times it's more about It's about how to make things not fall apart. And other times, it's more about enduring it. Today is more on the endurance side of things. And we're talking about a subject that we get a lot of requests about here. We've discussed this a year or so ago with one of our guests, the great Carl Pissarda.

We're talking about security culture. And particularly, the aspect of security culture that involves digital devices. And how to communicate with your friends, affinity groups, whomever via your phone, essentially, or your computer. This is a thing where there's a huge amount of disinformation as to which apps are safe. What does it actually mean to say that an app is encrypted? How far does encryption get you? What sort of cultural things come alongside the actual like physical reality of the security of the device in order to kind of make a comprehensive

security profile. We're going to be talking about all that today and hopefully giving you some good advice on what you can trust because I am the furthest thing in the world from a technical expert. We have two actual experts with us today. Carolyn Sanders and Cooper Quentin have both recently published a paper alongside several other authors, Leila Wagner, Tim Bernard, Amimeh Metta, and Justin Hendrix, called What Is Secure, an Analysis of Popular Messaging Apps. And it's basically going over what is the actual level of security with a number of things like telegram, you know,

telegrams, private messaging system, Facebook messenger, Apple message, or I message, I guess it's called, and obviously signal and kind of as a spoiler, signal is your best bet. But that also isn't where you should end, right? I think we want to also talk about kind of like why and to what extent that's the case. But anyway, I'm going to turn things over to Carolyn and Cooper now because I have talked enough about this. Hey guys, welcome to the show. Hey, Robert, thanks so much for having us on. Yeah.

Yeah, thank you so much, big fan of the podcast. So always lovely, really lovely to be here. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's really lovely to be here. Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's really lovely to have you both. Again, listeners, if you want to take a look at this, their paper, if you just Google what is secure and analysis of popular messaging apps,

you'll find the tech policy press has a summary of it that's pretty quick. The full paper is 86 pages or so. I also recommend reading that. But if you wanted to give this, you know, the summary of skin before you continue, that might help. But I kind of wanted to start by asking you guys, what is it that makes signal a good option for people, right?

Because I think most folks, you describe it as sort of security folklore, right? This, the stuff that you hear about security from your friends, and if you're not a technical person, you kind of just like trust what the folks around you were saying, and that was sort of how I got into signal, right? you're not a technical person, you kind of just like trust what the folks around you were saying. And that was sort of how I got into signal, right? I'm not a technical person,

but people I knew and trusted who were were like, this is your best option. Yeah, thank you so much. That's such a good question. And I think Cooper and I probably have similar, but also like very different answers to it. Cooper, I can go first if you want. One of the things I love about signal

is it's just really easy to use. It's in and encrypted, it's a messaging app. There's not a lot of stuff on it, but you can do a lot with it. You can do video calls, you can send actually pretty large files like PDFs, you can have drag and drop stuff. It's such a low threshold for use for users because it is a messaging app, but it does some of the different kinds of things. But then related to that, it's also actually quite minimal.

So the paper which everyone should read and we'll probably end to this later, different apps like Telegram or Facebook's Messenger app, for example, have this thing we've been calling feature bloat. They are messaging services that actually feel a bit more like social networks. If you look at the amount of stuff that's on there and by stuff, I don't just mean like stickers. I mean, if you look at, there's all these sort of specific and strange settings, you can use to have all different kinds of messages and all different kinds of privacy settings. And while privacy settings are really, really great, because telegram and

Facebook Messenger are not encrypted by default. Actually, some of those settings can make you feel more secure when you're not. So, the beauty of Signal is that, out of the box, it's incredibly secure. It's an in-encrypted. They're not holding any data about you. I believe the only day they hold is like when a phone number or a profile has downloaded signal, like when you've signed up. But again, it's incredibly easy to use.

And another thing is if this was a few years ago, we'd been looking at wire, for example, when the nice thing's about signal, and this might be controversial to some designers, is that it does follow modern design patterns and standards. So if you're using an iOS or Android version, like there are buttons and places where you expect them to be. Signal is not perfectly designed, but it is quite usable.

So for me, that's kind of what I think makes it really wonderful. Yeah, it's definitely as much as I love it. It's my standard messaging app. I do every now and then run into the thing where my friends will call me through signal, which is great if you need a call to be secure, but it's not nearly as good, like it drops a lot more often than a regular phone call.

And I'm like, we're just trying to meet at the movie theater. It's okay if the NSA knows. Right, like, I'm like with friends where I'm like, I'm like, yeah, like we're just calling to talk about like your dog. It's probably fine. The FBI can have this stuff. Yeah, please send, please send dog picks through all messaging apps. You know, but on that note, it's writing's writing usable software that is also secure. It's really hard, right? And like as a, like as cryptographer, I'm not a cryptographer, but like as somebody cryptographer adjacent, we got that wrong for a long time, right? Like before signal, the

problem, you know, there were the, the, the sort of most used encryption methods were probably, uh, PGP email, which is a method for encrypting email and off the record chats. And both of those, none of those ever got to the sort of level of user base that signal and, and, and certainly not what's app have, right? And, and that's largely because they were pretty much unusable. Like, PTP almost entirely unusable, even by cryptography professionals, right?

Even by computer security professionals like ourselves. OTR-chat, total pain in the butt, right? Like just a real nightmare to use. So like, single, there are still some rough edges and we talked about some of those in our paper. But overall, I think that the big, the big innovation they've had is just remembering that what people want to do on a chat app is not encrypt things. But people want to do on a chat at is they want to, they want to chat, right? And the second that that that the security sort of gets in the way of that, people will stop using it and go find something that's more usable.

And it seems like that's been signals sort of guiding star. And it's doing the most secure thing that you can while still being fun and usable to actually just chat on, right? And I think that that has served them quite well. Yeah, I think it's so important. One of, I think one of the things that contributes to good overall security is setting yourself up for success, which means setting yourself up for a system that can function well if you're

lazy, which is one of the nice things that, you know, with signal, you don't have to worry about like opting in and out and like selecting a bunch of stuff. It's pretty safe, especially for a normal person's uses right out of the box, which is huge. And kind of in the same line as that is the fact that because signal doesn't store metadata, you're not relying upon them being like committed, you know, anti-state actors or whatever, like because they don't have access to the thing that for example, Facebook will hand over to the cops if the cops just like breathe in their direction. Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's that is that is the other really cool thing about

signal. You know, we as Carolyn said, the only data that signal gives over in response to a subpoena is the time that the phone number signed up for signal account and the last time it connected to the signal server. And the reason we know that is because signal publishes transparency reports with the full text and full response of any subpoena that they get. So like we can actually just see in the responses that all they've given over is these two pieces

of information because that's all they have. And they've done some pretty clever things to make that be the case. Right. And that's actually so different than how other companies are, I think, reporting on either subpoenas or any kind of weight that law enforcement puts on them. So for our report, I don't remember how much it's mentioned in the report actually, but we did go through and look at Apple, Meta, and I think Google, like in their own transparency reports, to try to get a sense of how that would stack up in comparison to signals. I think in some cases it's saying like they received some kind of like notification, but like no, nothing really clear or specific on like what they received from law enforcement or government, but rather just that they received one.

And so that's also the really great thing about signal as you are getting all of this information that you're not getting from other companies or platforms. Yeah. that you're not getting from other companies or platforms. Yeah. I wanted to kind of, in this same subject, and going back to, we kind of opened this by introducing the concept that Y'all introduced me to. I guess I was aware of this, but not the terminology, security folklore. I wanted to chat a little bit about kind of the most recent example of this.

A lot of folks have probably been wondering about since we started talking about signal, which is that roughly a week before Y'all and I sat down to talk about this, a kind of viral infome meme started coming through that was like signal has a zero day exploit, which is basically a hole that a hacker found in an app or program that can expose you, you have to turn off link previews, right, which is that when someone sends you like a link to an article in signal, you get a little preview, not dissimilar to how you used to get. And I think to be fair, just based on my very limited knowledge, that is when I think about like what are potential holes in signal. I don't think it's unreasonable to be concerned about that specific feature.

But that warning was not what it kind of seemed to be based it or not as accurate as I think a lot of people took it as being. I'll turn it over to you guys. I think that's the next thing I want to talk about. I'll turn it over to Cooper who had, I think you had a, you have a bit, a lot of feels about that. I have so many feelings about this. I was working on this all weekend. So this, yeah, so this copy pasta, I'm calling this like the signal copy pasta, yeah, which is a term from, you know, 4chan

and other horrible internet places. But it's, it feels like the most of media audiences probably internet enough. Yeah it feels like the full zone media audience is probably internet enough. Yeah, I'm gonna guess a good half of the people listening at least got that message. Yeah, yeah. And it's like, first of all, this is not,

if you had a zero day in signal, which is an exploit for signal that has been unpatched, that has not been passed by the vendors, so you can actually exploit it. There are no people in the world who would choose to quietly leak this over vague signal text. There are two types of people. One, people like us that would bring this to signal immediately and get them to patch it to protect the millions of high riskrisk users that use signal or to the

type of people that would go sell this exploit to some horrible company that would use it, you know, sell it to Saudi Arabia or something and use it to kill activists, right? Like there is, and there's no in between, there's nobody that is going to quietly leak this for, you know, just for fun with vague details, right? So this message set up red flags immediately. And like it's because I really do not like little previews. And in our paper, we discussed some of the issues that we have with link previews.

You know, we think that they can, they can leak some information about your chats to the owner of the website. We think it's a large attack service. It's not super necessary. Would you mind explaining to actually the audience to a little bit about what we found when looking at link previews? Yeah. The way that link previews work is when you the way that they work on signal and on WhatsApp is that when you send a link to somebody, the signal app or WhatsApp, goes and like fetches the web page that that you know for that link, right? It goes and downloads you know downloads the content of that link and gets a, there are some, there's some special HTML tags

that describe, you know, sort of what the page is about, what the title of the page is, and like an image for the page. And it gets those tags and it puts them all together in this little package and then sends that all as part of the signal message. So when you put a link in signal, your phone actually goes out and gets that web page and it gets that web page with a, you put a link in signal, your phone actually goes out and gets that web page and it gets that web page with a what's called the user agent, which is like a piece of text that's attached to the request that uniquely that that identifies it as being a request from signal and from like from signal and from your IP address, right. So when you put a link in, the owner of that website, whoever has the logs for that website can know that somebody at your IP address is using signal

and sending this link over signal. What our concern is is that if that link is unique, then anybody else who visits that link can be inferred to be somebody that you are talking with over signal. And so this can be a good, an interesting, a source of intelligence for website owners, especially for big websites that can easily generate unique links with like tracking parameters at the end of them, right? Like when you share a Instagram post and like at the end it's like question mark i g s i d equals, you know, a long string of numbers and letters, right? Or a Twitter post where you know t equals a long string of letters and numbers, right? That makes a unique link and then anybody who visits that same link can be determined to be somebody that you're speaking with over-signal. And also WhatsApp. And also WhatsApp. And so for that reason, we

think that signal and WhatsApp should turn link previews off by default because we think that that's an unnecessary information link. Signal and WhatsApp's pushback on that is that link previews are a core feature that people demand. And if they were to turn off link previews by default, there were that people would leave the platform for less secure platforms like Telegram. So yeah, I mean, I don't want to tell them their business because I'm sure they have data on this. But I've never thought about link previews

as being a thing that I needed. It's like, yeah. I think it's one of those things. And we haven't necessarily done extensive, general design research in this, right? We haven't surveyed 3,000 people in the US. We have another Pew Research Survey across countries and be like, what are your thoughts on link previews?

But I would probably argue because it is included in so much of modern messaging apps that we now assume it's like a core feature. One thing I will give signal that I think is amazing that other apps don't do and this is true of WhatsApp is pretty much every feature except for encryption. You can, there's something you can toggle or turn off, right? So like, link preview already was available for people to turn off on signal.

WhatsApp does not allow that and seems like they're making no moves to allow that feature to be optional to turn on or off. But that is I will say one of the things that's really lovely about signal that is so different from modern design and modern big tech platforms and just platforms in general is that a lot of features are optional whereas what's happened that a stance on design is that a lot of things are not optional. Those are things users would want. Why would we make foundational elements like link previews optional and you're just like starting like gesturing wildly. But like, you know, it's like, well, you know, people won. And I mean, what's the harm in turning off some of these things, right? You know, like maybe, maybe people don't want to receive gifts.

I don't know. Maybe they don't want to receive stickers. Why don't you let them have that option? What's the harm that could happen? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. Yeah. Two things I want to say on that. One is, one is that, and couldn't agree more. Yeah, two things I want to say on that one is one is that and first we should acknowledge that this it turns out that there was no zero day. There was no vulnerability. Yeah, this was absolutely just something that that spread Virally out of nowhere. I'd be really interested to find out what the origin of this Was but I haven't been able to but it's I'm curious about that as well coffee pasta was, but I haven't been able to, but it's. I'm curious about that as well, because I was in another group thread that was like, we

really need outside auditors to look at these. And I was like, we have a whole report that we wrote that didn't look at this. Speaking of outside auditors, I got to pause you guys just a second because it is time for an ad break. So please spend your money and then come back to learn more. Ah, and we're back. Okay, sorry about that, Cooper, Carolyn, you may continue as you were. The other thing I was going to say, the idea that anybody would leave WhatsApp because they stopped having link previews is completely

preposterous to me. It's clownish. It's fucking clownish. It has over two billion users. They are the, you know, in a position to set the standard for what people expect from a messaging app. And so like they could do things like turn on disappearing messages by default and change that culture.

They could do things like turn off and previews by default and change that culture. They could do these things and they would not lose enough users to even notice or care about. Yes, they are the only people in the position, in the world in the position to decide what the culture should be. And this is what they've decided the culture should be. Totally. I hate to break it to you, but if WhatsApp just got rid of Ling previews, I'm just throwing my whole phone into the garbage. Carbj can't get rid of that.

Just tossing it up. Going back to a land line. Yeah, I'm just going to eat it into a river. Feel like, I don't need this anymore. Actually, I'm going back to carrier pigeon. Yeah. It's how far back I'm going to go. I mean, that does kind of lead into the next thing I wanted to talk about, which is sort of the other wing from the security folklore,

which is security nihilism. And yeah, this is kind of, you introduce this when talking about sort of, if you do try to engage somewhat with the technology, or if you wind up just kind of in the position and I think most lay people are, where maybe you have some friends who know more, or maybe you have some friends who think they know more,

and you get all these conflicting things about like, this is safe, no, it's not. You can't trust Signal, the Feds could be running Signal, all this kind of stuff. And to be fair, the Feds have run security-based services before, it's not. You can't trust signal. The feds could be running signal, all this kind of stuff. And to be fair, the feds have run security-based services before. It's not like, I don't believe that's happening with signal, but it's not like the, I understand where paranoia like that can enter into people's calculus, especially if you're not technically knowledgeable. And that can lead to this sort of state of security nihilism where you're just like,

you can't communicate it all online. There's no way to do it securely. Um, and obviously there's no perfect, right? You never have it. But you don't have a hundred percent with like, talking in person to somebody, right? There are individuals in prison right now who, you know, somebody they loved and trusted, ratted on them. There's no, no 100% in this world. But that doesn't mean nihilism is the right response to like trying to figure out how to set up

your communication standards with people, right? Totally. I mean, I think the approach we take in, because throughout this report, we were also teaching workshops to reproductive justice activists across the US and states where abortion is banned. I'm from Louisiana.

I live half the year there. The abortion is banned there. And we were also working with journalists in India. So a big thing for us was also teaching threat modeling and different kinds of what Matt Mitchell, a security trainer and expert calls digital hygiene. And so a lot of this was recognizing that there was certain practices we were picking up on, particularly with folks we were working with.

So like a lot of reproductive justice activists, we were working with our new security, their new technology. They don't have background in tech. And generally, you know, the American South, the American deep South is super overlooked in terms of tech policy, in terms of just, I think, a general focus when people are talking about tech, or tech literacy, or tech activism. And that is like leaving really massive gaps in knowledge for people.

And so, you know, when we were working on this security, folklore, and security, and nihilism were both actually very, almost like a pendulum, but they were very connected. So some of that was people hearing things like, oh, I should put my phone in a microwave when I'm having a very sensitive conversation. So that's where some of that security folklore is coming in. It is something that is technically safe, but it's not the thing you necessarily totally need to do in that moment. With security and nihilism, what it came down to, and this is stuff we've seen with other

groups and other circumstances, a great example, are Palestinian activists and journalists, let's say, who are facing the threat of all different kinds of governmental censorship and surveillance, of saying when there's this large threat sort of hanging on us and There's also physical surveillance and this is true for a lot of journalists in other countries like India as well, for example you know Like should everything go through signal or does it really matter? Like does it really matter? And this is also something again. We saw with some Sub reproductive justice activists as well where it's like if everything is being monitored, what's safe?

Can I send stuff? Can I even use Google? And part of this was by teaching privacy and security workshops, by teaching things like threat modeling, which is a framework for just assessing what are threats, what are all the potential threats you could face and kind of mapping them from like the most minor to like the most major. And what you can do about that, that's a way to try to combat security nihilism. But I think an approach Cooper and I are also really fond of is thinking of this like safe or sex. There's all different kinds of things you can do that are mitigations are actually incredibly helpful. And we can't look at it as a binary of safe or not safe.

It's actually like much more of a gradient. But you know, the folklore and the nihilism, I think, come from a very similar place, which is we're asking people, like societies kind of asking or demanding that people be experts in something that's really hard. I am like a fairly technical person and even there are some things that I find hard to serve at my head around, and I've been working in privacy and security for like quite a while. And I think, you know, it's also really hard

when you think about these apps as like a brand new person. So like one of the things that popped up a lot in our research is like, why should we trust signal? And that's actually a great question. Like what about signal in its interface and its design would cause you to trust it? Some people were like, it's a nonprofit, that's great, but I don't know what that means.

I'm like, that's actually a fantastic question. What does that mean? Why should you trust this? You've heard through the great find that you should. And I think these were all the things that people are dealing with because if you take a step back and just look at software or any were kind of all the things that people are dealing with because if you sort of take a step back and just look at software Or any different kind of software generally why should you trust that it's safe and secure when there have been so many different kinds of leaks or breaches or things breaking right yeah like

so These are I think really really closely tied, but I think a big thing for us is trying to combat that security nihilism, like whenever, whenever we can, like there is things you can do. I don't want to say like no matter how great the threat, but I believe like no matter how great the threat there is stuff, there is stuff you can do. No matter how great the threat is, there's stuff that you can do to make it more difficult and more expensive for that person to attack you, right? Like we all lock the doors to our house, or for the most part,

or we all do things to protect ourselves like that. That art foolproof, right? Somebody can always break a window to get into your house, so you can find other ways to get into your house. But locking the door makes it so that somebody has to do the noisy thing of breaking a window, right? It makes it so that somebody has to do the noisy thing of breaking wind. Right. It makes it so that, you know, somebody has to spend more time and effort and more risk of getting caught in getting into your house.

Right. And that's, and that's like we layer, when you layer these protections, right. The idea, you know, is that you're, you're, you're, you're making it harder. You're making there be more friction, right, to piercing your security. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And the concept of friction, this is something I've talked about, not that these are exactly the same things,

but although there's not wildly different, when it comes to how insurgents win insurgencies, right? It's not by carrying out these sort of like great battlefield victories that sweep the enemy from the field. It's it's by friction, right? Which wears down both the the culture and the the kind of readiness of the opponent until they they simply bounce, which is a pretty durable and effective strategy. You can keep it up. It's this matter of like there's no, there's no like sweeping sudden like 90 minute,

three act win here. It's more a matter of the more difficult, the more expensive you make it, the more you hold on to. And the more all of us hold on to, right? That's the other benefit is like even if you're not, even if you are the most law abiding person in the world, like myself, having the security measures in place means that you're kind of contributing to the overall immune system of a kind of community of people who don't

want the NSA listening to this shit. Yeah, exactly, exactly. The friction thing is also exactly what signal does, right? Like by the threat model for signal is stopping the NSA or other global adversaries from listening to all communications as they travel over the internet, right? And that's when you can do that, like when you can listen to everybody's conversations as they travel over the internet, it's really cheap to spy on anybody, right?

When you're encrypting that communication, then the NSA or whatever other global adversary has to go actually hack your phone, right? They have to they have to target you specifically, they have to burn resources and, you know, burn weapons, right? Zero days to get access to your phone. And that's a lot more costly. It's a lot more noisy. It's a much higher risk of them getting caught. So it's introduced a huge friction in that area. And that's...

Go ahead. Okay, go ahead, go ahead. I was gonna say, and I think your asymmetric, the sort of comparison to asymmetric warfare is exactly spot on because none of us are ever going to have the money that the NSA or Masada is. None of us are ever going to have the total technical acumen that the NSA or Masada has, right? But like those, the, you know, so we have to kind of fight a, you know, in terms of corruption,

in terms of encryption, a guerrilla war, right? And we have to make things so expensive and so annoying for them that it's not worth it. Totally. And just to sort of build on that, one of the things I love about Signal is, while they're creating friction for our adversaries, it's actually so frictionless to use as a user. And I think that's one of the things I find just continually impressive about the app. I don't want this to turn into like

the like raw hymbeos for signal except we probably are. But because like that's one of the things as a research, like Kubernetes times have to be like, we are not paid by a signal at all. Like but this is in fact like one of the best things you can use.

But again, one of the things I think is amazing is that it is so easy to use. And it really is designed for, and I'm using the term usability as a design term, meaning that they're thinking about a common user, including those with lower digital literacy, or those that have never used any kind of security tool. And so they're hitting a specific threshold of usability for things to be understandable. And again, that's incredibly hard to do well. And they are doing it quite well. It's very easy and seamless for people to make a jump from WhatsApp or if you're on Google

or Android using like Google messages, sorry, if you're on Android or an iPhone, from like I messages to Google messages to signal. Like it doesn't, it might look slightly different. I feel a lot more blue. I feel a lot more black depending upon how yours is constructed. But for the most part, a lot of the features are kind

of where you expect them to be. And it's not, it's not at all difficult to get it up and running, which is not something against Cooper said earlier, we could say about things like PGP. Yeah. I wanted to kind of move on to talking about other apps and their security or lack of it.

And I think we should start probably by talking about telegram because that's probably close to top of the list of things people use for secure communications that is not nearly as secure as they think. So yeah, I wanted to kind of chat with you about like why that is. And I specifically, I wanted to talk one of the things that is frustrating about telegram is they kind of have, they have like a secret chat or private chat, like they have a couple of different options that don't necessarily mean what they sound like they mean to most people. Yeah, so that's actually one thing our report found. So private chat and secret chat are in fact

the same thing. They're just called slightly different things in the app, which for again for those listening that don't have a background in design, that's bad design. That's actually not that's not professional. That's a that is a mistake. There's no reason for a feature to have like two different names inside of inside of your software. And so I don't know if that's an oversight on their part. I'm assuming so. But those two things correlate to the same feature. And so they should actually be called the same thing.

But then even further that being said, what does private mean to a user? What does secret mean? Facebook Messenger, they call their encrypted message secure, or no, they also call it secret, sorry, they also call it secret. But like does that mean security, does that mean encrypted? And so that's like one of the, one of the weird things where it's like, you know, I think by using a very sort of like normalized or culturally almost like emotional name like private, it makes something seem like

it's actually quite safe when in fact, it's not, and there's a variety of reasons as why like Telegram is not a very secure app that I will let Cooper talk about more. Yeah, I would never advise anybody to have a chat over Telegram if they are concerned about the privacy of that. So we were talking about friction.

And the fact that end-to-end encrypted chats are not the defaults in telegram creates a friction for users to have an actually secure chat, right? You have to remember to turn it on. And you can only turn it on, turn it on individually per message. It's not like an overall feature on telegram or a Facebook messenger. Like you have to go select a specific, like the specific conversation, per conversation, which is, and then

I think our pockets into is how also those chats don't look very different. They look almost identical to a normal chat. So for low vision users or anyone with any kind of disability, especially a vision related disability, it's almost impossible to, it's like nearly impossible to recognize which chat you're using. If you're looking at the chat logs. Yeah. Outside of that, like if people, in terms of like things that may not be options right now, I think basically everyone listening signal

is a perfectly viable option, but it's not impossible that for example, you might wind up in a country where, even if there's not a specific law against it, there is a precedent to establish that if you have signal on your phone, it can be at least use as a justification for charges that you were planning to use. Like with Lanna, people are getting charges because they had a lawyer's name written on

their arm, right? And so the state saying, well, that's evidence they were planning to commit a crime. That doesn't mean that convictions will go through on that kind of thing, but it may be a reason why signal might not be an option or say, you know, that doesn't mean that convictions will go through on that kind of thing, but it may be a reason why signal might not be an option. Or say, you know, something comes out about it that makes it seem less secure. What are other good or or acceptable options? And I know when we're talking about this, these are often options that require more input and work from the user in order to maximize their potential security. But I do think it's good to like let people kind of know what else is out there. Yeah.

So when signal is in an option, what's app is actually not a bad option? So what's app it is owned by Meta, which is not ideal. But what's app actually uses the same encryption protocol as signal. So, like, under the hood, the way that the, you know, the way that the math works to hide your messages from the NSA is exactly the same, right? And they've implemented it well. You know, there are a few more steps, you know, a few more precautions that you need to take with WhatsApp, like, making sure that your chats aren't backed up, being the main one. But WhatsApp

is certainly good enough, right? If your chat networks aren't using signal, if you're in a country where you can't use signal, right? WhatsApp has 2 billion users. You can use WhatsApp almost anywhere in the world. And it's ubiquitous enough that it's not going to mark you as, you know, somebody with something to hide, right? And like, and I don't want to, I don't want to discount WhatsApp, right? Getting to billion people to have end and encrypted messaging by default overnight, basically was a major coup. Like that, that was world changing, right?

And like they, they really, that was world changing. And like they, they really do deserve applause for that. Obviously, you know, I think partly because of their scale, partly because they're on my mida, right? They haven't taken all of these same steps, like they do have more metadata on their servers than, than signal does, right? But if that's your option, that is a fine option.

Yeah, I think that's really good to know, particularly since options are always more secure than not having any kind of a backup plan. Totally. And if people are even slightly nervous about WhatsApp, a great thing is they do have disappearing messages. The downside is the fastest disappearing message is only 24 hours, but that's something that, again, you

still have. And that's like that is an amazing feature. Yeah. And that kind of gets into also what kind of stuff you can do in order to maximize the value of features like that. Like for example, if you're coming back into the country or a country and your phone gets confiscated by customs or whatever, because security services have some sort of lie on you for whatever reason. If you've got, you know, thumbprint, a login or a face login, they're going to get into that phone, right? And your 24 hour delete thing may not have gotten

taken care of everything. If you've got a complicated eight-digit password and no biometrics enabled, maybe depending on where you are and whatnot, that'll keep your phone locked long enough for those messages to get deleted, right? Like it's all about kind of maximizing the chances that something like that helps. Yeah, exactly.

We definitely recommend that people turn on disappearing messages. I think that that's just a good sense of both default to have. Also definitely recommend that if you're going to be in a situation where you think you're going to be, you know, there's a higher likelihood of you interacting with law enforcement if you're crossing a border, if you're going to a protest, turn off the biometric unlock on your phone. Certainly, especially in the US, the case law isn't settled, but there's a lot of state courts that have decided that police can force you to unlock your phone with your biometrics, and that that's totally fine. So in the US context, it's a good idea. In any context,

I think it's a good idea if you're at heightened risk to turn off. Totally. Totally. Dr. Conlocks. I mean, one thing we're also big fan of is figuring out too. And this is again, worth retmodeling is so key, is this circumstance where you need your phone? Or another thing that you can always do if you are nervous about traveling across a border, is you can delete signal and reinstall it and everything is gone. You can delete WhatsApp temporarily while you're crossing a border so it's not on your phone. You know, there are things like that. You can do if you feel comfortable wiping your phone.

That's something also you can do. These are different things and I think this is one of the things our report, I don't remember how too much we get into it, but at least we've been thinking about Cooper and I run a little lab called Convocation. And one of the things we've been thinking about there is just also how do we instill better holistic practices where we understand that a phone is just one component of our safety.

And so like secure messaging and encrypted messaging is one component of that safety. So like, what are other things we can do? And some of that can be wiping your phone of traveling. If that makes sense for you, or if that's something that makes you feel safer, or removing certain apps, and then reinstalling them, reinstalling them later. Yeah. Yeah. And it really is holistic, right? Like, I think that a thing that people need to keep in mind is that, you know, disappearing messages can't stop an untrustworthy conversation partner. Right. Right. If my conversation partner is untrustworthy, they can take screenshots of the messages, right?

They can go, they can go snitch to law enforcement about what I've told them, right? Encrypted messaging, disagreeing messages, these are not panes, Fias, right? You still have to keep all of your other aspects of security as well, right? Sure. So, don't entirely rely on these technologies to save you, right?

You have to also trust the people you're working with and build these layers of security. It's true. I mean, Cooper, you could like all of my secrets right now in this podcast. Yeah. And you just have not to. What a gentleman. And that is the other thing, right? Where when it comes to like what is secure, one thing to remember is that signal for all the

good things about it, nothing, nothing at all about that app stops the recipient of a message from you from taking a screen grab or just handing their phone over to a to their friendly local federal agent, right? Which is always, you know, we don't want to be, I'm not trying to be a security nihilist here. I think, you know, there's no replacing communication over phones in many situations. But if you are for example, going to be transferring a bunch of plan B pills in an area where that is prosecutable. That probably shouldn't go on your phone in that language, right? Perhaps, you know, you could come up with a clever code word or whatever, but don't, don't, you know, security is like you said, holistic. You know, you should not be looking at it as

just like, well, the app is secure. So that's enough. I mean, one thing I also want people sort of think about too, because that's a really great point Robert is like we do all different kinds of things every day in our lives that could, you know, in dangerous like I think a lot of the work I do is I work a lot with people facing all different kinds of online harassment. So like falling in love, for example, is a dangerous thing to do. You could have your heart broken or that person could hurt you, learning how to trust people, crossing the street, deciding to jaywalk, right? All different things we do, for every day, actually, can expose us to harm. And so one thing I think for people listening to keep in mind is that's the same when we have conversations. And I think a way to avoid nihilism is just to remember that that every day we are sort of going out there and actually being incredibly brave just by living our everyday lives by deciding to be in community and have friendships and have relationships. And in my case, I love Jay walking and no one around me does. And that's my choice.

And I have not yet gotten hit by a car, Jay walking. I think it's good to look at this the same way. There's a concept that the military has sort of developed when talking about how not to die, when you're in a gunfight or something. It's called the survivability onion, right? And I think it's extremely useful both if you're talking about like, well, I'm going to a protest and there will be violence there, you know, should I wear armor, etc. But it's also just really, it's really useful with any kind of security and and the onion,

it's, it's, it's envisioned as an onion because like the largest outside chunk of it is don't be seen, don't be acquired, which means somebody actually getting you in their headsights, don't be hit, which means being behind cover or something. And then the very internal part of it is like have some sort of armor in case you are shot. But if you, if the armor is useful, the majority of the onion has already failed, right? If encryption is useful, that is not a dissimilar sort of situation, right? So there's a degree of cany-ness is super helpful in thinking about like, what is visible about me, if I'm doing something that I know that I have to be extra concerned about the state seeing, what is visible about me from the outside.

Totally. I think that's an amazing thing to think about. Where are you sending a text message? Are you in a place in which someone can lean over? I'm the nosiest motherfucker in all the time. I'm constantly looking around, being like, what's that person watching on an airplane or like, if someone is sitting next to me scrolling?

So you wouldn't want to send if someone is sitting next to me scrolling. So like, you wouldn't want to like send a sensitive text message like next week, because I'd be like, that's, that's interesting, Potter. Let's come to, so we have Texas to Cooper later. Um, you know, and so I think it's important to think about that. Like, the who's around you is this, is like, how are you describing something? Do you know the person in your messaging? If you're in a group message message do you know everybody there? Like do you trust all of them?

You know, and if you're ever nervous, there are, this is, I guess the upside also, to in-person conversations, you can have, you know, a phone call or an in-person conversation with someone, right? If you're really not sure, or you don't feel comfortable even sending something over a signal, that might be the time to be like,

hey, do you wanna meet up and get a coffee? And then try to find a discreet place to have a conversation. Yeah. Yeah, I do wanna roll to ads real quick one second, then I think Cooper had something to say, and we'll continue. But first, products. Ah, we're back.

Cooper, you look like you had something to add on that. Nothing particularly serious just that I think that that's really good advice from the military and absolutely justifies the $900 billion. Yeah, I'm glad they put together a fucking graphic. I wonder how many billions of dollars that did. Yes. I could make a graphic for hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah.

If anybody wants to fund us for hundreds of millions, we will do it. Let's know. A year hundreds of millions. We have so many good t-shirt ideas and sticker ideas, y'all. So many good ones, so many unhinged ones that the world needs to see. Yeah, I, I mean, I do, I guess just because of the amount of time I've spent thinking about this stuff from my, my old job, there are a couple of concepts from a military planning

I think about in this context. And one of them that I also think is relevant to what we're talking about with friction is, is the concept of an odoloup, right, which is how do you win and combat against an opponent? And it's by disrupting this thing called the odoloup. And the odoloup is how an adversary carries out actions in a conflict like this, right? And the steps you have to go for are observe, orient, decide, and act. And if you can disrupt any stage of that, you can stop them from taking actions, right,

which just stops them from being able to harm you. And the good security is going to impact all three of those things, right? It's going to stop them from being able to see you sometimes. If they can see you, stuff like, you know, we were just talking, we were just talking earlier about link previews, right? And how that can kind of expose maybe

who you're in communication with potentially. Well, that could allow the state to orient themselves to you and to your friends, right? And obviously stuff like locking down your devices, not having unnecessarily info online can stop them being able to decide what you're doing and how they should respond to that. I think that's also good. If you're thinking, if you're not just somebody who is concerned about your security, most people are, because it's good to have some security, if you're actually dealing with the state or a corporation as an adversary in some way, it can be useful to think about your security culture in those terms.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's absolutely right. And I think that it's, you know, it points to like we should, we should understand what the, you know, mode of thinking of our adversaries is, right? Like we, you know, we should, if your adversary is the NSA, right? Which is like, probably actually not most people in the US, like for most US activists, the NSA is not actually your biggest adversary, right?

Like your biggest adversary is gonna be local police, right? Your biggest adversary is gonna be, you know, the, you know, somebody like your abusive partner, right? And you to, and this is why threat modeling is important because you need to, to really, to really think about, you know, think through like, you know, well, okay, wait, am I actually worried about protecting myself from the NSA or am I more worried about, you know, the racist police officer that drives down my street every day, right? And yeah, probably it's the latter. And so you can, you can take a lot

more useful actions, right? And you know, you can, you can, you know, break that O to loop for him. Once you know, actually what it is, right? Yeah, if you're defending yourself against the NSA, you're going to leave yourself wide open to the actual threat. Yeah, it's totally, I think a great example and I don't mean to be like, quote unquote, sub-tweeting somebody here, but I've known a couple of folks like this.

It's like if you have, if you're super paranoid, you're not putting anything online, you're only talking with your close friends, you use a dumb phone, you have burners, but you also drive around with a shitload of weed in your car in a state where that's illegal. Well, it's like, well, like, your threat modeling is not great in that situation, right?

Or like, I do all that, but I carry in a legal handgun with me wherever I go. It's like, well, that may be more of a threat than your phone. My partner the other day was like, what if I got a dumb phone? I was like, what if I divorced you? Like, what if they were like, what do you mean? And I was like, well, I'm going to be the one using all the maps for both of us. And having to Google all the dumb shit you want to Google that doesn't make I'm now your weakest link, like go fuck yourself.

But also, I was like, I'm absolutely not going to be your your Maps bitch, like I'm not doing that. But I think also to both of you all's points to get serious again for a second. I mean, my threat model, for example, might be similar or slightly different, maybe slightly less serious than Cooper's. But some of the journalists in India, we are working with have quite a high threat model, right? Like, the Indian police force are very much

like the NSA. They're very talented. They have a lot of money and tech at their disposal. And that might be different for some of the activists we're working with, let's say, in like Louisiana or Texas, right? But the difference is like, we're still talking about, I would argue, two brutal police forces that just have different means of disposal at their hands. So like, Louisiana police are groups you should totally be worried about, they might not be able to hack your phone, but maybe eventually they could.

But there are other, there are obviously other things to worry about them. But, you know, in the context of like, what some of the folks we were working with, in the South, like reproductive justice activists, some of the things are probably much more serious in terms of your threat model would be like a nurse for someone who, let's say, is miscarrying or has sought an abortion.

I think this is something Kate Bertosh from the Digital Defense Fund, a friend of ours has talked about, where the people that are supposed to take care of you might be the ones that are actually your biggest threat, the ones that have heard you say something or you've confided in, for example. And that is kind of a horrifying thing to think about, but that is a thing you have to threat model, right? Is it, can I trust this person? How am I describing,

you know, what's happening? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, did y'all have anything else you wanted to make sure to get into in this conversation? There's so much more in your, in the great paper, you helped co-author. What is secure and analysis of popular messaging apps on the tech policy press? But, yes, they're anything else. Y'all wanted to really make sure you hit before we roll out. Yeah, please don't use telegram for a variety of reasons, but also like, it's very unclear how they respond to any law enforcement or government. They don't say anything, and it's kind of impossible to reach anyone that works there.

Please don't use Facebook Messenger other than maybe sending memes. There is a lot of really gross surveillance capitalism inside of Facebook Messenger that the paper gets into, but effectively meta-s building this weird, sprawling infrastructure inside of Facebook Messenger, try to link Facebook and Instagram. And one of the things we noticed is that,

if you've blocked someone on Instagram or muted them, but you haven't blocked or muted them on Facebook, but your stories, all those stories are still coming across in Messenger. So you can still see content from someone because it's linking both of those profiles. So you can see how we're taking like an online harassment lens, like why that's why that's really bad, why that's really harmful and could be potentially,

you know, upsetting and triggering for folks. Yeah, I'll add that, I think the major thing I want people to think about is that encryption really does work and it works really well. And we can see that because a lot of countries right now are trying to pass laws that either weaken or ban encryption, right? And in fact, the UK did just pass such a law, the online safety bill in the UK. And so it's really important that we push back against these laws and fight back against

these laws and whatever we can, right? And I'm not coming at this as somebody who's a big believer in incrementalism and working with governments, but I still think that it's really important to educate folks and push back against these laws and try to not let these pass because these will be really bad for all of us. Totally. And not to defend the online safety bill because I would never do that.

I'll go to my grave not speaking highly of it, only speaking critically. At least like the push back from encryption experts and encryption supporters like Maris Whitaker, President of Signal did lead to lawmakers in the UK, for example, admitting that there's no sort of feasible safe way to build a back door, right? And that is I think also a win. Because of so much pushback, because of so much research, because of so much criticism that security and privacy folks gave people that are pro encryption. Like that, we, you know, we were

able to walk back that part. And I do think that's a big deal, even even if there are other issues with that bill, because I think it also sends a signal pun intended to other governments as well. And I think that that's incredibly important. But yeah, I would also say just use signal whenever you can. But yeah. Yeah. Well, all right, folks, that is going to be it for us here at it could happen here. Yeah, thank you all for listening and thank you Cooper and Carolyn for coming on. Thank you for having us. Yeah. Thank you for having us. You can find us on social media for now, I guess, until it all lights on fire. Yeah, whichever one you want to trust. Yeah, I'm Cooper Q on most social media is Blue Sky,

Massachusetts on shitter. Yeah, I'm Caroline Sanders, my first name, last name. Our lab is convocation research and design, record labs on Twitter at the moment. Hopefully we'll get to get to Blue Sky very soon. Yeah, yeah, I'll probably get back on there more now. Twitter has gotten remarkably worse, yeah, I'll probably get back on there more now. Twitter has gotten remarkably worse, which, you know, we had a back on back in the day on the old something awful forums. There was

a thread in one of the debate forums about this very right wing site called Free Republic, which was like one of the earliest reservoirs of what became Trumpism. And the tagline for the thread just kind of watching these people was, there is always more and it is always worse. And boy, goddamn, if that hasn't been a continually accurate statement about the whole, the whole of social media right now. Isn't it kind of amazing to watch someone just light

$40 billion on fire? Yeah. Totally just. There is a beauty to it. Yeah. It's like the nihilist in me being like, wow. Comrad Musk really taking some hits to capitalism here. Go.

Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go.

Go. Go. What is this place? Wait, why my handcuffed? What am I doing here? 13 Days of Halloween, Penance. Season 4 of the award-winning horror fiction podcast presented in immersive 3D audio. Where am I?

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you get your podcast. Hello, hello Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionist History, we're going to the heart of America's gun violence crisis. Six episodes. Some weird, some whimsical, some heartbreaking, some angry. Because so much of what we believe about guns and assault rifles and mass shootings, is actually wrong. We're going to talk about TV Westerns about a crime in a little town in rural Alabama, believe about guns and assault rifles and mass shootings, he's actually wrong.

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for our six-part chaotic ride to America's gun problem. It's our biggest series ever and the one you won't want to miss. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. get your podcast. Hello everyone, it's me James today. I am back from my trip to Kurdistan and I'm talking today with Rania Hayat, a name that I've probably just butchered. But Rania is the communications officer for the Palestinian journalist syndicate and we're very, very lucky to have René talking to us. Welcome, René. Thank you, James. Thank you for contacting me and letting me be with you. Yeah, of course. You're very welcome. So I think René, it's been a really hard time to consume news. Like for the first week of what's happening, I was in mostly Sierra LeRocchi,

Kurdistan and I wasn't maybe consuming as much news. So I normally do because I was trying to write news instead. And then I got back, just the barrage, information and disinformation has been very hard for people to sort of wade through. And I wonder, I think one of the things I'd like us to focus on first and foremost is the impact of Israel's bombing campaign on journalists specifically working in Gaza. I know like friends with Mayan are journalists in Gaza, we've featured on this podcast before, the people of Parkour Gaza,

and I know that many journalists have lost their lives covering what's been happening. So can you explain a little bit about like what's been happening and maybe bring us up today on the amount of every loss is a tragedy, but like the amount of people who have lost their lives covering this? of every loss is a tragedy, but like the amount of people who have lost their lives covering this.

Yes, James. Well, let's start that journalists in Gaza are civilians who are people who travel, they work, usually they should travel, but they work, they do their job, they try to cover the news with very hard conditions, with the daily life of Gaza. Since the beginning of the war against Gaza on the 7th of October, you know how the war started targeting everything in Gaza, not even all the people,

more than the people, you know, the buildings, the children, even the animals, the plants, you know, just bombing and bombing and bombing a strikes the whole time. At the beginning we tried to, we have some our contacts with John Alessingazza, we have our generous secretary of member and so on. We tried to get information from them. At the beginning, yeah, it was not easy, but it was okay to get some information about what's going on. But by the time now we reached a place that when I called them, they always tell dozens of, we don't know, we are disconnected. I'm homeless now. I am not able to get any news. I can't tell you about my friend or my neighbor next to me, but I'm not able to tell you about further than this.

I will just give some statistics up to now. We have 18 killed journalists. We have been either killed while while trying covering others were killed in their homes, being through else's rights with their families and so on. We have also many, many journalists who have those and of them have been injured. I'm really sorry I sorry I wanted to have some you know accurate statistics but I can't give you until now we are now trying to develop like a tool to get some statistics but until now it's not working well. We have many journalists who lost their homes, homes because it was bombed or yeah, airstrike. Others they were, this place, yeah, and many of them moves from their homes either because their homes was bombed or other because they were threatened to stay

at their home safely so they go to other like schools, hospitals and so on. The most tragic is the journalists who are losing their families. When you call a journalist, ask him about anything, they tell you, okay, I lost my son, I lost my wife, I lost all my family, I lost my mother now. They are completely broken, you can't talk to them. It's a really very tragic situation. Yeah, it's literally unimaginable. I've attended wars, I've lost friends, but nothing, I can't imagine what it's like on this scale, and it's heartbreaking to even think about it. And I think some of what you said,

obviously part of the situation this creates is that it's very hard to do reporting on the ground. It's always been hard to do reporting on the ground at Gaza. Like I have made plans to go to Gaza, which probably won't work out now. But like it's hard for foreign press. And of course, there are many very capable journalists within Gaza. We don't need, you know, for our press to go then, necessarily.

But could you explain a little bit of how, when this war started, it didn't just like affect these people in terms of killing them, killing their families, displacing them, destroying their homes. But also, every day this war goes on, it gets harder for us to see the impact of this war on civilians living in Gaza because of a damage to infrastructure. Is that fair to say? Yes, this is what's going on. Yes, reporting is getting more and more complicated. Because, as also, you know, there is no electricity.

Communication is very, very difficult. When sometimes through phone call, I call them just to get something. They tell me, okay, wait until I get some internet and I will get back to you. I wait for hours and hours, sometimes for the second day to get a little information. So you can imagine how they can even contact with each other. Yeah, and yeah, that makes it very hard. I think often we might have more interest. This is not uncommon actually. Like you have more information sitting somewhere with a broadband connection and access to Twitter than you do

on the ground, right? Like they may not know everything that's happening. Yes. I don't know. If I can talk about this, but you know, about the restrictions that But you know, our restrictions that on all social media applications, the restrictions on the Palestinian conflict, content on the social media, were facing a big massive wave against our content. I was against our news through Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, all those applications. So we are not able even to reach. Many people are banned, many people are hacked.

And we are just hearing about the banning of many accounts of Palestinians, the very limited reach, the very limited, and there are sometimes, many times, they are blocked or yeah, blocked or from posting and so on. So even also this is another problem that we are facing to reach out. Yeah, I think this in a sense, obviously, it's in terms of specifically getting information about it because I think that is important. I think

if people could understand what it's like to see someone lose their baby, and then I think very few people would be able to in good conscious support that. And the fact that this has come at a time when I think generally, certainly for the US, reporting on things outside the US is an all timetime low. Like, it's atrocious. And so people lack the context to understand, not through any fault of their own, right, but they've just been fed terrible opinion pieces for the last few years.

They lack the context to understand why what's happening is happening. And I think obviously Elon Musk has bought Twitter and it's a cesspool. It's terrible, it's full of false information. And as you say, often videos that I have friends who are photographers in Gaza, friends who are just people in Gaza. And videos that they post will be taken down. It's sometimes they'll say it's too graphic, it's too violent, but also that's there every day life now that's been happening for two weeks.

Graphic violence is sadly what's visited upon them every day. Yeah, yes. Believe me, what's going on in Gaza is very, you can't imagine, you can't hold it when you watch it. Even the TV channels, they try to minimize how dangerous and how violent are the scenes that we see. At the same time, I had a discussion this morning. I don't want people to cry for us. It's not, I don't want people to cry for us. It's not, I don't want people to cry for the babies killed.

And so with very hard pictures and videos, I just want the humanity. Without seeing the video, just here, there is a child, there is a child, the children, the thousands of children are losing their life or nothing, are losing their hands, their legs, their, they are now handicapped. They don't know why.

We don't need to see the video. Just know that this is going on. We don't want to make a tragedy. We don't want to, to, to, to people to cry with us when I, we cry, yes, we want, okay, some solidarity, but it's, it's not something to have the emotions. And then we sleep, and then we wake up, or that's what, or no, no, there is something going on. We don't need the sympathy, no, we need some actions, we need steps, we need humanity now. Yeah, so I think that's an excellent, really, really excellent point. It's not a film or like

something you can consume and then step away from. So what sort of solidarity actions can people take to support people in Gaza, to support journalists there, to support the greater cause of, and not having this issue where every few years thousands of Palestinian civilians get killed? Yes. Well, to be honest, we want, when we want to feel better, we turn on the TV television to see the demonstrations. When we see the demonstrations, London,

Roxelles, United States, and different cities, Arab world everywhere, when we see the demonstrations, we feel that somebody knows there is like a kind of movement. This helps us. And we need further steps after the demonstration. We need lobbying. We need the people who elect their governments, who support those massacres.

And to say, no, we give you legitimate, legitimate, to be human, stop this inhumanity. We need the people to lobby on their governments that this should not be supported. This is this is the real action that we need lobbying lobbying lobbying by the people by the power of people. Yeah, I think it's one of those things like some things will never change in America at least not by voting, but like some things yeah, if enough people change in America, at least not by voting, but like some things, yeah, if enough people, and I think more people, like I remember when I moved to America 15 years ago, when I was sort of young, as 21, and I came into America and I had a free Palestine, like a badge

on my jacket, like to sew things on my jacket, you know, and they sent me straight to this secondary, you know, like they're like where they pat you down, take all your clothes and go through your bags and stash. And like it just wasn't as big of a concern. I think more people in the 15 years since then have become aware of the tragedy in the loss of life. And certainly now I've seen more people wake up to what's happening and protest or get out and do things in a way that they

wouldn't have done 10 years ago. And I think that's really good, hopefully that demand for people to be allowed to live with dignity and safety continues. Yes, I mean, I just always want to ask anybody like to say, are you happy to pay your tax for killing others? This is the very initial very first question are you happy with this? Do you pay your tax for this or for other and anything that you like to have your tax be to be paid for? Yeah this is what we want we are facing killing We are facing assassination, bombarding and so on. And we need all what we need is humanity, nothing else. I was thinking this morning of like how,

the very obviously, right, when when Russia bombed Ukrainian cities, most people said we should help the Ukrainians send them arms, send them medical supplies, some of them went and volunteered to fight for the Ukrainians. When, and I understand that, like, this, obviously, this, this conflict began in very different circumstances than the Russia, Ukraine conflict, but nonetheless, like, little children are being killed and continue to be killed. And the response wasn't the same. And I think some of that comes from like, I'm not particularly hard to see Orientalism in the US and the US media. Also some of it

comes from the complete absence of Palestinian voices in certainly in like the English language press in America. And I wonder like, I know that there are certain organizations which have specifically worked to make it harder for Palestinian journalists, like my friend, Hussam Salem, he's an excellent photographer. You can find him on all the places where you find people on the internet. But we worked on stories together.

And I know he's lost contracts with major outlets because of this sort of campaign of accusing him of bias. I think it's hard not to be biased when you see little children die. But I wonder if you could talk about that, like how Palestinian voices are excluded or missing from even now, right? The Atlantic, since two weeks of bombing now, and I was looking this morning and they've managed to find two Palestinian voices to share, like, you know, it's, it's, it's, maybe not, and I'll have to check that after we've done,

but I was flicking through these big sort of opinion piece type outlets and it's very clear that like even now, people haven't like editors specifically or the greater press has not stopped excluding Palestinian voices. So maybe we could talk about like how that happens, what allows that to happen and what people can do to help lift up those voices. Well yes, Palestinian voices are being banned all over by different movements.

There are many times fired from their works, big news outlets and media outlets for different political reasons. And if you want to go and through the stories, you find that some people are just trying to make problems for those people to let them leave their work and stop writing or telling the news or analyzing or anything about the Palestinian cause and what's going on. We're facing this globally and we have many cases recorded and undocumented in the PGS and we can give you many examples about them. But I have to tell about something that we have, we're a member of the International Federation of

Journalists and we have also even our president of Palestinian Journalist Syndicate, his vice president of the International Federation of Journalists. He has been elected last year in the last Congress, we have sister unions. One of them, one of the best friends of us, are the National Riders Union, the American National Riders Union, which is a very big supporter to us. They even, in Harry, I got better, the General Secretary, even he visited us in Palestine a few months ago. And he is a very supporter of what's going on, of all our statements, of our renewals.

At the beginning of the war, they produced a statement about biodiversity and misleading news, and so on, how to avoid them, supporting the Palestinians, supporting our life, our right to life, and so on. So we would highly appreciate this movement. Of course, it's not the only one, many, many syndicates, many unions all over the world, sent us solidarity letters.

Some of them supported us even with some incline-cubry contribution, with some funds in addition to solidarity, in addition to demonstrations and so on, which really gave us a lot of power, of hope, so we can continue and we are not alone. power of hope so we can continue and we are not alone. Yeah, I think that's really powerful. Yeah. And if, well, I mean, it's not enough, but it's something that unions, I think people also have their members of a union can encourage their union to do that, right? Just to make a statement. Yeah.

Just to show some solidarity. I wonder, like, what, you talked about in donations, and you talked about the support you're getting from unions. I know one of the unions, which I'm a member, the industrial workers of the world, FJU, just did a fundraiser or are still doing a fundraiser for a flat vest, bullet proof vest for journalists. What kind of support can people give like in a concrete sense beyond getting in the streets and protesting and writing letters and emails and phone calls?

Is there stuff that they can do with their money? If they have some money? Well, it's not that kind of money. It's a kind of, I will tell you now, in the situation in Gaza, we can't, all what we do, we need is a seed fire to be honest. They even don't have fresh water they drink by the way, and they try to minimize that the water they drink, and they know that the water they drink is not very clean, but just to survive. So you can start with this very basic need of life and then you go further. As I already told you, the safety vests are very important, but when you are under-strikes, this will never help you. But if I want to talk about the daily life, about how is going in the West Bank and Gaza, our journalists, we all work under the same conditions of aggressive

events, covering aggressive events and so on. So we try, as PJS, to contact all the media outlets in Palestine to offer or provide safety kits for all journalists who work in the field. But for example, our free-lancers, they work on their responsibility and in very dangerous situation. We try to to tell how dangerous that what they do when you go to cover with you don't have very full safety Kets or this it's it's very dangerous for them, but they are not able to to cover it and they want to They need to wait. They need to do their job. So they do it in a very strange Sorry dangerous conditions So one of the things that we can support is yes, safety kits, which are very important.

Medical kits also are very important. What else? We try to also try to do, also we try to raise awareness to make some materials for the journalists about safety. Safety is very important for us. We try to teach them more about how to take care of themselves, how to report and so on, about their security and so on. Yeah. This is mainly what I can talk about for the needs or the in-kind contribution. As I told you in the current situation, for example, we try to support through some donations, through support that journalists

with better charging batteries because of the lack of electricity and power sources in Gaza, so just to give them connected currently. And they are very useful for them and it helps now. Yeah, yeah, I can see it. It's probably best that you just have money and then you can be flexible in getting what people need. I think that's generally the best advice when there's a crisis is to send the people nearest to it money and they can decide what they need.

I certainly have found that, I've found that in a lot of places I've worked. So you talked about the power situation. I think that sort of has gone relatively unreported. I mean, it'll still say like a power and water been cut off, but that creates a lot of other dangerous situations, right? Like, obviously, some people rely on that power if they're in firm, if they have medical devices, that kind of thing. But also, like, where there are places to charge, that results in a very high concentration of people, right? Like, my friend was telling me that their parents were in a hospital to charge their devices, right? They wanted to call their child and say, we're safe or alive,

but they're phoned and run out of batteries, so they have to go to the hospital. Yeah, can you explain a little bit of some of the things that, like, that has resulted in the loss of power for people? Yes, of course. For example, first of all, let me tell you that we already asked, they requested all our journalists in Gaza to be in the hospitals. For their safety we try. We expect that it would be a safe place, but there is no safe place in Gaza now, as you already know about the hospitals that have been targeted. But we already asked them to be in the hospitals. We try to make some press zones in the hospitals, some places where it's for press, for journalists to be there, so they can get some electricity power. And so they can all be together, try to exchange information and work together. and work together. So it will be better for them to work and safer between brackets always for them to work.

To be honest, yes, I don't know if you see the news. Now we had the sun has set. So it's completely dark and gas. You just can have some lightened spots which are the hospitals. And you know that even the solar and the, sorry, the fuel for hospitals is about to finish and in two days I think maximum. But will see, maybe we'll have some tracks or they will get something inside Gaza for fuel and so on, but I'm not sure about this. Yeah, I think every day is changing, I guess. And I wonder, like, talking about getting things into Gaza, getting things

to people in Gaza, a thing that seems to be completely, like, I don't know, it genuinely seems to be that people think people could just walk out of Gaza and go somewhere else. So I guess just to be extremely clear on that, can you explain the situation for people in Gaza with respect to their mobility and their ability to leave? Because I think it's something that

again has been like criminally overlooked in the United States discourse. Ability to leave Gaza, you mean? Yeah, like a lack thereof would be more accurate, right? Like the complete absence of that. Well, unfortunately, people in Gaza are blocked. They are all, and they are not allowed to leave gas, that would any kind of border. It's even the people who have international passports like American, European or whatever, passports they are not allowed, they aren't able to leave gas, they have to face their fate now, they are just displaced from place to another. Some people have been displaced four times

just displaced from place to another. Some people have been displaced for times in for areas, different areas. And others were displaced and bombed later. So no, they are blocked. They have they are blocked in a very limited area, which is under strikes the whole time. No place is safe. Even the Baptist hospital, they thought that it would be a Baptist hospital, a hospital related to a church and so on. It was a strike massively cruelly, more than 500 have been killed. They were old children, mothers are sitting just as have been killed. They were all children mothers are sitting just as a still thinking that it would be a shelter for them. So yes, this is the situation as there is no safe place, no hospitals. If you are in a hospital, you will be bombed. If you are in a school, you'll be bombed. If you are in a mosque, if you will be bombed. If you are in a church, you will be bombed, not safe place, unfortunately.

Yeah, it's, yeah, it's, it's an imaginable and like, I don't know, the, the, the act of bombing that we were talking about this before we started, but like, when you're being bombed, it's very different from like a small armed conflict or even like a, you know, whatever artillery mortars rockets. There isn't much you can do to be safe. It's not like there is no cover from bombs. There's no way you can hide from it. There's no shelters in Gaza. By the way, there's no underground shelters. Now they are intense, by the way, way they were in houses The houses they were falling on their heads, so they went to tents. So when the tent falls it's not Not so yeah, Jesus. Yeah, it's basically

Yeah, it's it's unimaginable like I said Yeah, just spent a week in a place that was being very Protected by the sky which is full of plans, bombing them. Yeah, and every time you look up, you wonder what that is, and is this all time, or is this so one? So, I think one thing people are really struggling with is like overload of information, missed information, right? Just some of the worst pieces I've ever seen in opinion pieces, things sent on social media, which are like, it seems that we've returned to like Pekas Lamaphobic rhetoric of like September 12, 2001, and we've learned absolutely nothing

from 20 years of killing and dying. So I wonder where you would recommend if there are members of your syndicate or other places where people can find reliable and reporting, which is fact checked, which is not overloading them. If you go on Twitter to try and find your information at the minute, you're just gonna get into an argument with someone who has the worst opinions in the world.

And it's not good. And it can diswade you from taking action in the ways that you've mentioned, which are actually useful. So is there a place you'd suggest people look for information, outlets, or individuals they could follow? Well, who wants to know that truth will be, will find it. You know, the media is always, any media outlet it has, it has it mandate and vision and so on. So I just advise everyone when you go for any outlet, media outlet just try to read about it, what's it's mandate,

who's, they are related to, who's they are related to who's they are supporting and so on. So to know from which perspective you will know the truth. I can't tell now an aims of outlets because it's not me who to decide who's who's the right one. As you know, I work in Ascendicate, which is for like a union, which is for all regionalists, with all food, all outlets. So they are all our members. So yeah, yeah. I think that's good advice so that people can take more. It's good advice that people can take more broadly. Because I think people are completely unaware. The ownership of some outlets that mandate their perceived biases. Yes. Try to read about them, not only the news itself, not the news itself, but try to see about

this outlet, about this establishment, how it's working, what's their objectives, how do they work, and what are their connections and so on. So you will know which kind of news they are covering and how do they cover it. Yes. Yes. This is what I can say for us as Palestinian journalist syndicate, we try now to report about journalists because this is our mandate, this is our work to tell about what's going for our members, to try to get any protection for them. Actually, we are disabled in this very hard condition, but we try to our, through our friends, through our relations, through our supporters, through our memberships and so on, to have some international support for them through information, through like flow of information, tilling what's going on? How many journalists have

been killed? How many journalists are displaced? How many? And so on. So we try to give data. Those data are not, as I already told you, it's really a hard job that we are doing now. It's getting more and more difficult. We are trying to cope, trying to develop new tools to cope with this hard, very hard situation. But we try our maximum to be honest, to get very real and true information, not to get any misleading information. There's a flow of misleading information, even we hear about many journalists that they are killed, but when we try to make sure that we found that they are not journalists, we don't put them in our lists.

We try to investigate as much as we can. So to put our list to be limited to journalists, to our members, to the people who work with us within our mandate and so on. So to be credible, source information. Yeah, I think it's very important. I don't know if you guys who shared it. I showed a video early on, it was when I was still in Syrian Kurdistan, but we were watching it. I have a few in a row of three journalists who have been killed. Yeah. And like someone was saying at the funeral that they were speaking, and there's someone else who will pick up his camera and like keep documenting things which really was very emotional for me and my friends. Yeah, it was really sad, but I believe you. It's just, you know, that's the thing

that I do and I see people, you know, dressed like me, people I know, and it's been very, your coverage of that has been very, I don't know, emotionally challenging for me, but it's, should be emotionally challenging, it's terrible. And, but I think people should definitely tune into it, if they can. I wonder, are there social media accounts that the PJS has that people can follow? Yes, we have Facebook page. It's on it. Also, we have our website, which is www.pjs.ps. Also, you can find some news, statements, updates and so on.

Yeah, that's great. And I encourage people to follow that, they're able to. I wonder, is there anything else you think that people, like anything that's been missing for the media narrative that you'd like people to know about the situation now in Palestine or like the situation more broadly that hasn't been reported on as much as it should be? I just want to add something about this site was going on and gas even journalists in the West Bank, even in Palestinian journalists in Israel are facing a lot of threats, facing a lot of problems. There is a massive

campaign of arrests. So up to now one thousand, in three days, one thousand persons have been arrested. We're trying to find the number of journalists, which is I'm not sure about it, but I can't give you the figure as I told you because of the big number we're trying to make sure who are the journalists, but I'll be a massive arrest campaign campaign taking place now. Also journalists are facing a lot of threats about a lot of violations while covering. Many times they are prevented from coverage, they are threatened by weapons, they are threatened sometimes, but the settlers aren't settlers even not the army while covering. Many of them also, they are subject to incitement through social media pages,

like spreading their photos or their, and so to make a kind of incitement, how to kill them, or to get rid of them and so on. So also the journalists are facing a very hard time now. Yeah, they are under threat, yeah. Damn, yeah, that's terrible. And completely unacceptable. So yeah, I'm glad you shared that. And I think it's important that people follow this

and do whatever they can to help, do whatever they can to, I don't know, to encourage people to stop bombing other people, like it's never a good situation. People are bombing children. And hopefully it comes to an end, like it, I don't know, I've never seen this much outgoing support for Palestine in the United States, but I've also, you know, this is an unprecedented act of, uh, of, yeah, I get a war crimes. Uh, so, the key is, it's very hard to see where this is going, I suppose. Yes, we believe that the voice is reaching, um, maybe a little by not that fast, not that easy because it's not easy. But we believe in every person who thinks and say, no, this is inhuman. I should not. I should be with those people who are under attack, who are under, under, under, yeah, a lot of hard life. Yeah, it's a hard life, a lot of oppression. So when we see the

eyes that hold you, when we see the demonstrations, it really gives us power. It really gives us that we have right to life. This is a minimum right that we need people to tell us, yes, you have a right to life. Yeah, I think that's, it's nice to you know it's like if you can feel that you're helping even just helping people feel like a little bit you know elevated a little bit better a little bit less despairing so I can see how it would be very easy if you're stuck in Gaza to feel like the words abandon you because I asked to a large degree read the words allow this to happen and it it's not American bombs, American planes dropping bombs on the door. Unfortunately. Yeah, so I think that's really good to hear. It's good to hear that. That has made some difference. Thank you so much for giving us some of your time.

I know it's very interesting. Thank you, James. Thank you for having me with you. I wish you all good luck. Thank you. Thank you all who listen, listeners to this podcast. I hope that I was able to give you an overview of what's going on. And let's pray that this violence will end very soon. Yes, yeah, indeed. Let's thank you very much. It was wonderful.

Thank you. What is this place? Wait, why my handcuffed? What am I doing here? 13 days of Halloween, Penance. Season 4 of the award-winning horror fiction podcast presented in immersive 3D audio. Where am I? Why, this is the Pendleton.

All residents, please return to your habitations. Light stuff on your feet! You're new here, so I'll say it once. No talking. Starring Natalie Morales of Parks and Recreation and Dead To Me. Am I under arrest? We know what can use that word. Can I leave of my own free will?

Not at this time. So this is a prison then? No. It's a rehabilitation center. Premiering October 19th, ending Halloween. I'm gonna get out. And how may I ask, or or you going to do that? Escape. Listen to 13 days of Halloween on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcasts

over ever you get your podcasts. There's a place beyond this place. A middle ground between the light and the darkness, the nature and the zenith. For some is a bridge between the living and the dead, yet for others is something else entirely. It's the place where our nightmares dwell. Each one of us has touched the other side and felt the presence of something beyond this world. Welcome to Hip Hop Horror Stories.

I'm your host, Belly. And each week we're going to take you to the limits of your imagination as we explore the reality of paranormal experiences. I believe in the shift for real and the stories you're about to hear might make you believe too. Everywhere I look, I saw something. And I looked closer and noticed there was a hooded figure. And whatever it is, it's like K-Bite,

it became reality. Listen to hip-hop horror stories on the High Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, hello, Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionist History, we're going to the heart of America's gun violence crisis. Six episodes. Some weird, some whimsical, some heartbreaking, some angry. Because so much of what we believe about guns and assault rifles and mass shootings, is actually wrong. We're going to talk about TV Westerns about a crime in a little town in rural Alabama,

about the nuttiness of the Supreme Court, about the world of trauma surgeons, and wonder what would have happened had Bobby Kennedy been shot today, and not 50 years ago. Join me and the revisionist history team for our six-part chaotic ride to America's gun problem. It's our biggest series ever, and one you won't want to miss. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It's spooky week. It's a good appetite here. It's spooky week.

The week where things are spooky. I have your host, Mia Wong, and with me is Garrison. Hello. Or is it Ann today? Hello. Fine. Whatever. I didn't.

Alright, alright. We've got the preliminary spooky out. And so today we're gonna be talking about one of the sort of key elements of Halloween and that is chocolate. And so on a very basic level, we're going to ask what is chocolate? And the answer, and it pains me to say

this as someone who really loves chocolate is really, really bleak. Yeah. But before we get into exactly how bleak it is, we're going to look at the early history of chocolate. So, most okay, there's a lot of disagreement about exactly how old chocolate is. I've seen sources that say 3000 BC. I've seen sources that say 3000 BC, I've seen sources that say 1700 BC,

the 1700 BC is the one that's pretty consistent. It seems like the Olmex had something like chocolate. That's a sort of bitter drink that they sometimes put vanilla or red pepper in. Yeah, it was like a bitter slurry that you, from what I hear, not very enjoyable, but it got you really high, not high like weed, but kind of like cocaine.

It was a massive stimulant. Yeah, yeah. From what I hear about these early gross, bitter, chocolate slurries. Yeah, and this is a thing that's, this is not a regular consumption drink. Basically, everyone who uses this, and this, and chocolate is consumed by a bunch of different civilizations like across, like most of South America, there's some, and sort of, like the mind, obviously the mind's in the Aztecs too.

There's a lot of places where this is being used and it's, everyone seems to use it for ritual purposes. Yeah, I think at some point, the, I think it was the, the all next at some point were doing these like, they were making fermented alcohol out of, so normally with chocolate, you're using like the cocoa beans, right?

But there's like a flesh in the flute flute fruit around the beans and they were making like a fermented thing out of that. And I don't know. I leave as an exercise to the reader with you account that as chocolate. But the sort of conventional story goes, okay, so like several thousand years after the Olmex, the Aztecs and the Mayans using it for ritual purposes. And the story basically is, okay, so Herman Cortez drinks chocolate with the stick king muck disuma. Cortez goes, this is bitter as shit and sucks ass, but he brings it

back to Europe anyways. And in Europe, they mix it with sugar, also with honey, but mostly with sugar. And it becomes, you know, it becomes very, very popular drinking Europe. And at some point, this is like the 1840s. So it takes about 300 years to figure out how to make cocoa powder. But once you have cocoa powder, it's easy to be bitter in the way that it sort of is naturally. Yeah. You can process it with like basic solutions, which neutralizes some of the acidic and bitter, bitter tastes, which is why you should always buy a Dutch process

cocoa powder, which is unfortunately hard to find these days, but it is, it is, it is, it is the shit. Yeah, so that's actually, yeah, so that's Dutch cocoa. And then 20 years later someone figured out how to make them to a chocolate bar or sort of a law you have chocolate. Now the conventional histories are missing something very, very important, which is something that has defined the production of chocolate since Europeans got a hold of it and continue to define it today.

And that thing is slavery. Yeah, yes. Yeah, and you know, this slavery is a very sort of important part of the history of chocolate, because slavery is what transforms the older ritual chocolate used by a bunch of different indigenous societies for several thousand years into modern chocolate.

And this is a point that I wanna make because most histories of chocolate, you know, when they're trying to find the origin of modern chocolate. And this is a point that I want to make because most, most histories of chocolate, you know, when they're trying to find the origin of modern chocolate, they go, oh, it's chocolate bar. And I think they're wrong. I think they're very wrong. I think the distinct European innovation of chocolate is to add sugar to it. Yes. And this raises the very bleak question, where does sugar come from? And the answer, of course, is slavery. Sugar is one of the primary crops of slave economies in both the colonies and the West

Indies. It is one of the key elements of the so-called triangle trade where you may have probably have learned this in school. But for people who've been out of school for a long time, so the triangle trade is Europe sends manufacturers to Africa. It trades that for enslaved people and slave people taking from Africa to the colonies and sometimes to America, sometimes to the colonies

in the West Indies. And then they take, you know, the products of slavery from plantations back to Europe and that's, you know, rice in to go to backhoe cotton molasses rum and critically sugar back to Europe and that's, you know, rice, indigo, tobacco, cotton, molasses, rum, and critically sugar back to Europe. Actually, did they teach you the triangle trade? Yeah, yes, I mean, I did learn.

My Christian home is calling curriculum, it wasn't the best, but we did cover some basic things. It's interesting, because the triangle trade as a model, like isn't that old, even though like this is the way that we all understand, like, the sort of colonial trade work, it's a kind of recent thing. Yeah, so sugar is a very, very key part of this entire thing. And there's a very, very famous, this sort of classic study of sugar and slavery is Sydney W. Mitz's sweetness and power, which is a fundamental tax and a lot of sort of,

I don't know, a lot of the sort of fields around the study of slavery. And one of his arguments is that the British industrial proletariat is fueled by slave sugar because the sugar is a stimulant that they're putting in tea, which is another stimulant, they're putting it in whatever they drink. And this is a thingant. That, you know, they're putting in tea, which is another stimulant, they're putting in whatever they drink. And this is a thing that allows them

to keep working for longer than they otherwise would have been able to. Yeah, and this also was the origin of Britain's probably largest cultural trait, bad teeth. Um. Hahahaha. Hahahaha. Yeah, and, you know, so this is the,

this is the, but many aspects of British culture have are descended from slavery. And you know, but the other important thing for our story is that sugar is what makes chocolate sort of palatable to Europeans. And this isn't a sort of interesting thing that Europeans do. You know, they do this with tobacco too. Well, you have something that you're only supposed to use in fairly small amounts for ritual purposes, right?

And the Europeans are like, okay, but what if we purify the shit out of it and they just ate it literally every day? Yeah. Have you ever tried like unsweetened 100% like chocolate liquor? It sucks. I hate it.

It's not good. You can certainly nibble. It can be a fun novelty to nibble, but you certainly wouldn't want to eat like a whole bar of it. Yeah, it's some real hope. Yeah, so like, I mean, it makes sense of the added sugar to it. But the consequence of this is that we can ask,

we can finally ask the question right now, now that it's been transformed by sugar into this object of sort of popular consumption, we can ask the question, what is chocolate? And the answer is that chocolate is colonialism plus slavery. It is a fusion of cocoa, which is an indigenous ritual drink, sees as a part of the wages of colonialism

by the European empires, and sugar a slave crop that drove the colonial orientation economy. And you might say, Mia, you're being harsh here, right? Even if we accept your argument about chocolate the 1600s. Surely, surely that's not true now. Wasn't slavery abolished in the 1800s,

and now I assume Nestle's farming practices are totally up up for it. See, and this, this is I think the interesting part of the story is, I, Gare, like our readers, is assuming a thing I'm about to launch into here is the Mars Nestle Child Slavery lawsuit. And we will, because that is a critical element of slavery and chocolate production. But there is also still slavery and sugar production. Capitalism and not only is there slavery and sugar production, there is slavery and sugar production in the exact same places there were slavery and sugar production 500 years ago.

And this is one of the sort of stunning things about, you know, the myths of capitalism, right? Which is that, okay, capitalism has had 400, you know, I'm, I'm gonna give them a bit of credit and be like, okay, I don't know, like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give capitalism a little bit of credit and give it only with being responsible for 400 years of this and not 500 years of this

because, you know, whatever complicated arguments about whether the capitalist transition is in the 1500 or 1600s, but, you know, they have had 400 years to solve the problem of slavery on his panola. Has it done that? No, it is, there is still slavery. On the island of his panola, 400 years later, was we're going to be discussing in a second.

Still, the best possible thing here is that maybe, and this is, it is arguable maybe last year, there's stopped being slaves there. Now, I don't even think that I don't think that's true and we're gonna get into that. But, you know, before we sort of launch into, you know, what, like whether or not there are still slaves on trick or limitations in the Dominican Republic, if you have had 400 years to solve

a problem and you have not solved it, you are never going to solve it. Hey, hey, let's not, let's not fidget hole ourselves here. There's a lot of things that have been around for 400 years that ought not to be That's true But if you're if you're an economic system and your economic system has been You are supposed to have you were supposed to have dealt with this at least 200 years ago But you know and we've arrived here and so this is something we've talked about before in the show at least a bit We've arrived here at one of the real weaknesses of both sort of liberal and radical accounts of how the capitalist economy works, because both sets of accounts take as their starting point. The fact that capitalism is based on free

labor, that it's free people who enter into contracts to sell their labor, and that forced labor is this sort of like holdover from older economic systems economic systems. No, I actually just saw a thing today on the dying remains of Twitter about how capitalism is the only economic system that's not based on exploitation of violence. It's based on free trade between markets. And it's like people really believe this shit. It's like I don't know, like, I don't know.

At some point, I'm gonna do an episode about there's a really good book, whose name I'm forgetting right now because I didn't look this up beforehand. But there's a really good book on these sort of dueling forced labor systems, driving the T economy in the late 1800s, so that there's one forced labor system in China and a different forced labor system in India that are both warring in each other to control the T market.

It is certainly interesting how much T has impacted like geopolitics. Oh yeah, yeah. We'll do an episode on that one day. Yeah. T's not that great, guys. I'm sorry, it's fine. Not T-Rips.

But T-Rips. I would not. We just don't have good T here. I would not do as much killing as people have done for T. Oh no, absolutely. It's not worth killing anyone over. The number of people who've been killed over it is...

Like, it really is fine on like a rainy afternoon, but come on. Yeah, it's not worth like conquering continents for. But okay, so we'll back, back, back to the sort of main plot that is not tea that is in fact chocolate. So one of the things that we can learn, that we'd learn from this is that, you know, forced laborer is not just a holdover. It's been a central part of capitalism for,

as long as capitalism has existed, and given its current track record, it will be a part of capitalism for as long as it exists. And, you know, so there's always been a racial component to this, right? And this is like trivially obvious, right? Like, there's a racial component to slavery, like holy shit, it's mostly about race. But I think, you know, we can expand this a little bit, and it gets you to a some sort of interesting things,

which is that race is one of, you know, so like obviously capitalism is supposed to be based in wage labor. But race is what mediates your access to wage labor in the first place. So if you're an American, right? White Americans have basically always been able to get access to wage labor. And as Shady is wage labor is, it's not as bad as the other things you can get forced into. But yeah, so if you're black, you get a successive forms of slavery. If you're a indigenous, they tried to enslave you

and then either sort of kept doing it or gave up and just did the genocide. Asian people who came to this continent and also sort of the West Indies largely get debt, P and engine, and then they're served to you. And you can sort of work this out so on and so forth. There's different modes of stuff better than normal,

sort of like what you by default have access to if you are X race, right? Yeah. And obviously this sort of racial access to wage labor is spread across the world. You know, your access to wage labor is dependent on sort of your subject position as colonized or colonized as well as, you know, you're sort of global and also you're like local racial hierarchies because oh boy, can

that shit be really fucked up. But the upshot of this is that many of the descendants of enslaved Haitian people are still effectively enslaved today and sugar plantations that is making her public. So we're gonna tell that story, but first word, oh God. Do you know what does, no. I cannot guarantee that our product and services are slave free. Like I wish I could, but.

Well, do you know what is also here for a spooky time, this Halloween, that's right. These products and services. Okay, we are back. I'm drinking my not mocha coffee, drinking my regular unsweetened coffees. Therefore, totally fine. No, yeah, yeah.

I'm sure there's nothing. Everything's all right. Nothing bad, nothing bad has ever happened in the history of coffee. No, I'm here. No tea, no chocolate. I'm safe. I'm good. Anyway, so unfortunately the people who are not safe is Haitians in the Dominican Republic. So we are not going to do the entire history of slavery in the Dominican Republic because Because this is a chocolate episode.

And we have so much time. Yeah, you know, for many reasons. But one of the things that happened in, so we're gonna look at sort of the modern history of this. And by modern, I'm starting in the 80s because I have to pick a place. Now, one of the things that happens in the 1980s is that the Dominican army effectively,

so goes into Haiti or just recruit Haitian people who are in the Dominican Republic and are like, hey, you're gonna, okay, we have jobs for you like come, like do this work. And so a bunch of people get in like these like army vans and then they get there and they get bar shot of the van and a bunch of guys point guns at them and go you're going to work for free or we're going to or like we're going to kill you.

So this is really bad and this is this is how a lot of like through the 80s and kind of early 90s. This is how a lot of sugar production worked in the Dominican Republic and you know it's very notable here that Dominican Republic produces a lot of sugar and it produces a lot of sugar production worked in the Dominican Republic. And, you know, it's very notable here that Dominican Republic produces a lot of sugar and it produces a lot of sugar that's specifically the US uses. Now, this is like state run slavery, right? On sort of like state run plantations.

So then we had neoliberalism. And so the state run plantations get privatized. However, comma, they still run on slave labor. So there's a very good mother Jones report about this. I'm going to read some of it here. Kakata is one of about a hundred, according to a local missionary's estimate, isolated camps scattered around central Romana, central Romana's a giant sugar plantation. Centrao Romana's 160,000 acres of sugar cane, a trapped almost as big as New York City. Most of the workers and their families live in these pateyes, rising in the morning to work the cane and the punishing heats, clearing weeds, slashing and spraying the stalks, nearly

all are men of Haitian descent. Some were trafficked back in the day of, journalists is doing this. I was the guy who basically uncovered a bunch of the original armies like the military slavery program, the 90s, and so he went back like a couple of years ago. So he's talking to some of the some of the people were trafficked back to the military slavery program. Others were born and lived stateless, and others came from Haiti more recently. Paying smugglers to sneak them across the border. For years, the government has resisted providing legal status to people of Haitian heritage in the country, even those born there.

Inestimated 200,000 people, who for generations have been to mean by race and class, are stateless. For the men in the camps, Shantra Romana is the state. Their villages are patrolled by armed company police empowered to evict. Shantra Romana owns the land where the Haitians work, the rail cars where they weigh and load the cane and stocks and the dwellings where they sleep. They are miles from the nearest

Dominican town not controlled by the company. So things going great here. Yeah. And the conditions, you know, okay, so the sort of, the capitalist reforms and neoliberalism has brought to this system are the number of child slaves has decreased dramatically because that was a big thing when the first reporting went out,

everyone was like, holy shit, there's a bunch of child slaves, this is a terrible thing. Progress. Yeah, so we have less child slaves. Progress. We did it. And so instead of the child slaves, it's now mostly adults, but the conditions here are still effectively slavery, even after this sort of child slavery stuff is driven under.

On a good day, these workers make three dollars a day and they are effectively and sometimes literally unable to leave. Now there are a lot of reasons for this. One of the big ones is that most of the workers there are most like basically all like you might find a worker somewhere who isn't stuck in this, but they're caught in these debt traps by center Ramana who these are like classic company but they're worse than like a traps by center Romana, who, and these are like classic company, but they're worse than like a, you know, the classic American company town, because at least in American company town,

you can go to another town that is not controlled by the company, whereas these people like cannot. And so they're caught in these debt traps by center Romana, which is the company that owns these plantations. And because they're so in debt, they're constantly forced to work for the company

in order to pay off their debt, but they never actually make enough money to pay the debt off, and so they have to take on more debt to survive, until largely what happens is these people will work their in debt until they die. This is classic debt pn-inch, where a sort of debt transforms people

into the effective property of the debt holder, who exacerbate the debt by denying the ability to live without taking on more debt. A very common way this happens is with medical debt, which is something I think we're familiar with the some extent here, but is egregiously worse. And the other thing that I was realizing about this is that this is actually really eerily similar to the way that Cortez and the Conquisa doors and slave

indigenous people during the genocide. Yeah, they would do the same thing of like, well, okay, now you're in debt to me and because you can't pay the debt, you have 500% interest per week. So, you know, the debt just accumulates and now you work for me for the rest of your lives. And this is, you know, this is one of the, one of the sort of ways in which the long shadow of Spanish imperialism looms over the Dominican Republic, even in what has really been about 200 years of the age

of the American Empire. And obviously, as much of his and effect as the Spanish Empire has had here, and oh God, it's not good. Today, it is the American Empire that lines the pockets of the slavers of the Dominican Republic. So, Central Romana is owned by this family called the Fun Jewel family, who are these Cuban expats who run this enormous, resort-in-shit, where they live in Florida and are handed, and this is really fun. $150 million for the American state every year in the form of price supports for sugar.

So you're like, you're an American, right? Like obviously your tax money very obviously goes to support slavery because we have prisons and so your taxes are paying to enslaved people, but your taxes are also paying for slavery in other countries. It's incredible, really, really great stuff from the American political system here.

And the way this has been maintained is through, I think in the last 20 years, Mother Jones reported they've spent, the sugar lobby has spent $220 million on campaign contributions and lobbying, and it works really well. They've been able to influence the system for a very, very long time.

The other funny thing about the Fundual Family is that they've created the perfect political trap, which is so one of, one of the brothers is like a Trump guy and the other person is a Hillary supporter, and they're both like incredibly amiss in both of the circles. So it's great. And thing things are going very good. So after so the mother Jones investigation was like in the last I think it was like last

year of the year before. and when the mother Jones investigation about the fact that like all of this shit was still happening came out, there was a giant uproar about it, and a couple of things happened. One is that, so the village of the journalists had visited some trial Romana, like they didn't even bulldoze the villages, they blew everyone's houses down with like sledge hammers

and forcibly moved them to like other villages and separated people's families. So that's great. And then, so in late 2022, under pressure from this reporting, the US government like banned imports from that specific company. And okay, it's unclear what is going to happen with it. If, you know, if they're going to get unband eventually, if it's going to stick, if they're just going

to like, I don't know, like transfer the assets to another company or something and use that instead. So as of right now, this specific set of plantations is not able to export sugar to the US. So this is, this is as much of a victory over slavery as we're going to get in this episode. And this victory is incredible. That's not a real serious. That's not. No, that's not. It's only going to get worked.

This is, this is the peak of anti-slavery stuff we're going to see here. Yeah. So, enjoy it while you can. And do you know what else you should enjoy? Oh, these products and services that support the podcast, that's good. Yes. This is the real peak of the episode, folks. All right.

I am rejuvenated by the advertised to industrial complex, I feel ready to hear other tales of great progress. Woo! Okay, so now we're gonna turn to the type of slavery that everyone I think expected this episode to mostly be about, which is the fact that Cocoa Bean production is also largely produced by slave labor.

So, okay, I'm gonna read a bit from a report by the Food Empowerment Project, which has done some very good work on... Specifically, slavery in West Africa. There are also one of the only media people I've ever seen talk about the fact that a lot of this stuff... It's not exactly the same, but a lot of the sort of slavery stuff also seems to be happening on plantations in Brazil. But there's effectively no coverage of it that's not in Portuguese. I don't know. So like eventually one day, I guess, like the fact that other places other than West Africa

have slavery will hit the Anglophone media class or whatever. But until then, I'm going to read this section. In West Africa, Cocoa is a commodity crop grown primarily for export. Cocoa is the Ivory Coast primary export and makes up about half the country's agricultural export and volume. Most Cocoa farmers earn less than $1 a day and income below the extreme poverty line. As a result, they often resort to the use of child labor to keep their prices competitive. In many cases, this is... Yeah, yeah. This is... One of the things that happens when you're reading about child slavery stuff is even people who

like are trying to draw attention to how bad this is, you get stuff like that, that's like, Jesus Christ. Yeah, so they're making sub one dollar a day. They're using child labor. In many cases, this includes what the International Labor Organization calls quote, the worst form of child labor. Okay. These are defined as practices quote,

likely to harm the health, safety, or morals of children. Approximately 2.1 million children in Ivory Coast and Ghana work on cocoa farms, most of whom are likely exposed to the worst form of child labor, which is also really good that like, we've, we've, we've, cap capitalism has finally reached the, you know, the apex of its control,

the commanding heights of the world economy, which means that we're talking about, we're trying to make tier lists of how bad child labor is. Well, yeah, I mean, a whole bunch of child labor laws just got like rolled back across many states here in this really good country. It's very exciting.

The children are very good for the minds. Yeah, it's great. So obviously a lot of the child's slavery on cocoa farms are from larger. I mean, I guess they are corporate, but from larger plantations. But also, less you think that it's better on family farms. No, family farms. I mean, I guess it is technically better

than like being kidnapped and enslaved is merely doing child labor on your family's like co-op and just being born into these, pretty, not great labor practices that you really have no say in or any agency whatsoever. Yeah. And like, you know, this is one of these things where like, the economic conditions are so bad that people are people are facing impossible choices. And I think we can say that they

make the wrong choice, which is a lot of, okay, so like there are, there are sort of different ways that children get trafficked into slavery work. A lot of them are sold by their own families who do not have enough resources to take care of them and are like, okay, we'll basically sell these people so they can go to this job. And these families don't know that like their child is about to be enslaved, right?

They're just like, okay, what they're gonna go off and do work. But the other way that this happens is that kids from like villages in other countries, but there's a lot of focus on Molly as one of the places this happens for them. But yeah, so there's a lot of these effect when it effectively raids into Molly

from the Ivory Coast to like steel children. And it also happens to be keen on fall. So, you know, and this gets to the point where, you know, I would read a quote from one of these from this report again. In one village in Bikina Faso, almost every mother in the village has had a child trafficked onto cocaine farms.

Traffickers will then sell children to cocaine farmers. So this is like the worst paranoid fantasies of every American right winger except it's you know this is just how chocolate is made. Yeah, all of all of the sound of freedom guys with all of you know the whole upper are around that movie earlier this year versus all of them. Yeah. Enjoying their little epitms and KitKat. Said, hey, I like the occasional KitKat's too.

This is a massive problem. I, I don't know, I really love chocolate. I have not eaten any chocolate since I started researching this. And I like, and it sucks because it's like, you like you can't you can't and we're gonna get into bored this in a second but like you can't like ethically consume your way out of this right like because the conditions of free trade cocoa exists oh boy yeah we're gonna get into that but yeah there's no there's no there's no actual systemic But yeah, there's no actual systemic, like there's no way that you can, like you can't change this stuff

for your individual consumption habits. And you know, that's something that's just really fucking bleak about this. Because these conditions are, I mean, as bad as you can possibly imagine, but the Food and Empowerment Project describes, like children as young as five are forced to work up to 14 hours a day, like chopping down cocoa pods and then chopping them open with machetes.

And sometimes these people get, sometimes these kids are using chainsaw, so like clear wood, like clear down like forests. Yeah, and you know, okay, so this goes exactly how you expect it to go, which is a bunch of these kids just have a bunch of fucking scars from what they've been slash by machetes. Because again, you are handing machetes to children, someone who more as young as five.

And then they have to carry a hundred pound bags of cocoa beans through the jungle. And this is a thing that's also happening in the Dominican Republic. And this happens a lot in a lot of places is that they just get, you know, when companies want to spray like their far's with pesticides, right? They don't even bother even like clearing people out, which might, you know, help like a tiny bit to make them not like die from fucking poison. But no, like these, these fucking dips,

it's just like spray them with toxic chemicals, like spray them with pesticides. Like a lot of whom are christened genes, and this is happening in the Dominican, the shurecane fields in the Dominican Republic too, and a lot of those people just fucking died because, you know, they were straight with these chemicals. There was a really terrible story of a guy who was trying to sue central Romana and just fucking died from the, like, he wasn't able to get a payout from lawsuit because he died in 2020 before the lawsuit could like finish. So here's another great quote from the Food Empowerment Project.

The far boners using child labor usually provide the children with the cheapest food available, such as corn paste or the cassava and bananas that grow in the surrounding forest. In some cases, the children sleep on wooden planks and small, winderless buildings without access to clean water as anitary bathrooms. And another key part of this, right, is like, okay, so the conditions are obviously unbearably bad, but a key part of this, like any system of slavery, is the physical violence against the enslaved people who are repeatedly and often beaten and abused and tortured in ways that are very reminiscent of sort of like older epoch of slavery if they try to escape. Now this is the companies care about this to the extent that is bad PR.

Yes. And the chocolate companies repeated like the shark companies. Okay, they they signed a thing in the year 2000 where they said we're going to eliminate child's the worst forms of child slavery by 2005. Yeah, like this is this has been a known issue for like yeah over two decades. Now, Garrison, yes, what year is it right now? The year of our Lord to us at 23. Yeah, they have been, they have been promising to end child slavery in the for the worst. The worst. That's the original. They're supposed to be ending child slavery. And then they, and then they scaled it down to the worst force. But they have been

promising to do this for longer than you have been alive. Yes, correct. Which is terrifying now. Yes, yes. And as we'll get into later, right, the number of child slaves is higher than it was when they started doing these child slave reduction efforts. So quote unquote reduction efforts, which are just sort of PR bullshit. So industry lobbying groups are also very, very powerful. And this is part of how this stuff

persists. So the University of Chicago has a center called Norak, which is like a public research center. I don't know. I went to that fucking school. I don't trust any of these motherfuckers. And neither should you because it turns out there was so okay. So they released this report on how bad child slavery is, right? But there was a leak of the original version of the report that was supposed to come out. And the original version of the report has the number of child slaves at like 2.2 million. Now, when their report actually comes out with no justification whatsoever, and using a bunch of numbers for child slavery that are from before COVID-19,

the Norac report was like, ah, there's only like 1.6 million child slaves. So, 600,000 child slaves just sort of vanished in an editorial process after they got, they came under fire from got the Cape Wonder fire from the they came under fire from the chocolate lobby. Yeah, let's uh, let's round that down. It makes it make it so easy to pal. And the other thing that it hides is that there's been a 10 to 15% increase in the number of of child slaves working in like in the co in cocoa sense COVID started because COVID's been a giant sort of, you know,

the economic damage that COVID caused forced a bunch of people into, you know, increasingly desperate things. And you know, okay, so we we we we tease this a little bit and you might be thinking, well, I can eat fair trade chocolate, right? I can pay $10 for a chocolate bar. So there's fair trade little bit. And you might be thinking, well, I can eat fair trade chocolate, right? I can pay $10 for a chocolate bar. So there's fair trade on it. And it will, and that will make sure that I'm only eating chocolate produced by free labor. Nope.

The certifications for the chocolate are fucking bullshit. You're still eating slave chocolate. The, the follow is an excerpt from a study conducted by the corporate accountability lab on the failure of initiatives in the chocolate industry like certifications. Quote, in order to understand the gap between consumer perception and farmer impact better, we brought certified chocolate bars to villages where some are all of the farmers were certified. We held up the bar with the label and explained to the farmers what consumers expected out of the label and explain to the farmers what consumers expected out of the label.

Primarily that farmers were paid a fair price earned a decent living and certain practices like child labor and deforestation were not present. We also explain the difference in retail price between fair trade and uncertified chocolate. The overwhelming response from farmers to this information was shock and outrage. One farmer pulled out his worn shirt in front of him and asked if it looked like he earned a decent living. A woman in one village said she can hardly afford to set her children to school.

So how could anyone think she earned a fair price? Our farmer consultations revealed virtually imperceptible differences between certified and uncertified farms in terms of living incomes, poverty, education, access to healthcare, farmer bargaining power, or access to information. So yeah, all the people who are telling you they're doing some fair trade shit, they're keeping your money and the places they're getting it from are as fucked as Hershey's. Yeah, so this is bad. Now, you might also think, okay, we can get out of this by buying from Cocoa Cooperatives,

except, except, and this is a wonderful thing that capitalism has wrought on the world. Most Cocoa Collectives aren't actually like workers, like aren't actually co-ops. They're just sort of like... No, I'm sure there's people's Republic of Chocolate Farmers. I'm sure they're all reciting this. Well, this is a little red book. This is something actually, this is something that China actually pioneered because there's a bunch of firms in China that are also tech, I talked about this in my, didn't have

a bachelor's episode a long time ago about this milk company that poisoned 300,000 babies. And that company was technically a co-op, but like it was a co-op in the sense that there was a small group of workers who were basically managers, who owned shares, and then they just hired a source everything out to independent contractors. So it functioned like a normal company. Yeah.

And this is a thing a lot. This, the cocoa trade stuff is actually worse because most of these things that are called co-ops aren't even co-ops at all. They're just set up by cocoa growers as like fake co-ops and they're like a very, very small number of these cocoa farms that are actually workers cooperatives, but there's no way to tell which one is which unless you spend a bunch of time like actually going and tracking the cooperatives down. So there's no sort of like ethically way out of this, right?

You're just kind of, you know, like you can't, you can't eat your way out of this problem. And of course, everything across the board, all the conditions have gotten worse since the pandemic. So, you know, it's not only is capitalism not making things better, every, like things are in fact getting worse. Now, all right, are in fact getting worse. Now, all right, I promised you the lawsuits.

We're gonna talk a bit about the lawsuits. So there were actually two big lawsuits. There were eight people from Molly who were enslaved by Cocoa plantations after being traffic from Molly sued, Nestle, Cargill, Barry, Calabar, I don't know, some French shit. Mars, Alarm, Cargill, Barry, Calibur. I don't know, some French shit. Mars, Alam, Hershey's, and Modelas to try to get conversations from the companies

by virtue of the fact that the companies sold products made by their child's slave labor. Yeah. Now, there's also a separate lawsuit against slightly different companies. So a lot of the same companies, slightly different. That's using a different set of legal arguments. Both of the lawsuits have been thrown out.

And I want to take a second to look at the reasoning here, both of which are just amazing. So I think the most famous one is the Supreme Court's 8-1 decision that said, well, so like all this stuff happened, but it happened outside the US, so you can't sue companies for it here. Which is an amazing piece of logic, which is just like, oh yeah, no, actually, like corporations, like American corporations could just go everywhere else and do crimes.

And the American legal system is specifically written in such a way that like, if an American corporation enslave you in like the ivory coast, there's nothing you can do about it in the US. And then a judge and do you see throughout the other case? Because, you know, their argument was, well, you can't prove that the company's new you were being enslaved on those farms.

There's no quote traceable connection between the people who enslaved you in the company. And so there's nothing we can do. And the reason both these arguments work is the reason for the structure of the chocolate market, right? The reason co-equivalentations in the Ivory Coast and also in Brazil can get away with this, well, the reason that those plantations

are in the Ivory Coast or Brazil or other places, the reason they're happening there and not in the US is because these are places where you can get away with that level of exploitation and corporate violence that in the US would be a lot more difficult. And this shields them from legal liability. Furthermore, instead of just, you know, jumping, instead of just writing the co-couple limitations themselves, which these companies could easily do, right?

This is a very, very large trade. They could just sort of like, they could inadvertently, vertically, not even vertically integrate. They could just actually make chocolate, like they could just sort of like they could convert it vertically and not even vertically integrate. They could just actually make chocolate like they could just run the process and they just they very specifically choose not to do it. And the reason they choose not to do it, this is a hundred billion dollar industry, right? But but instead they what they choose to do is to just buy cocoa from the chocolate market where all these sort of nebulous producer sell, which allows the chocolate companies to go, oh, well, these people don't work for us.

We just buy chocolate from the market. How are we supposed to know which of these plantations use slave labor? So it puts like a one degree of separation. Yeah. Well, it's actually two degrees. It's an additional degree of separation from the way something like Walmart works, right? Walmart has a bunch of independent contractors. This isn't even contractors.

They're just buying finished products from things they're like, they're completely unaffiliated with. And this gives them like, it gives them like two degrees of legal separation because it's not just that their contractors are doing something that they didn't know about. It's that they're just buying it, right? And this fucking sucks And you know since laws exist to protect the ruling class judges and courts can just wave their hands and go Well these companies definitely enslaved you but we have no choice but to let them completely scot free so sorry about that And I want to end today with something

that has been running through my mind every since I fucking started researching this, which is that the bourgeoisie must pay for their crimes. The state has failed, the court has failed, the NGO's have failed. And if anything is ever going to fucking happen, that forces these companies to be in any way, if there's there's to be like a single Iota of justice for the fact that all of these companies to be in any way, if there's there's to be like a single Iota of justice

for the fact that all of these companies have been fucking gorging themselves on the profits of slave labor, at all, we are going to do it or no one is. So congratulations, you, the American worker, it is unfortunately incumbent on you to deal with these fucking corporations that have been destroying the entire world. So yeah, happy spooky, we carry one. Yes, this is very scary. Yeah.

Well, thank you for that lovely, depressing presentation, Mia. I mean, I guess, is there a sort of takeaway besides there's no ethical conception to under capitalism? I mean like I mean, I mean capitalism will never abolish slavery. I know I know there is one US state where they grow chocolate, which is Hawaii, which has its own Oh, yeah, blubs of colonization. So even if you try to buy from a place that is, arguably has less chocolate slavery. It's generally better produced. It still is, you're still implicating yourself and all of the problems relating to

like the independence of that island and the US's colonization. So it's, it's, it's, it, we're really just, really just kind of trapped on all sides here is what it feels like. Yeah, I mean, this is a Halloween chocolate problem. Yeah, and, I mean, I, I think, I think the, the way to think about this right,

is that this, this is an actual systemic issue, right? This is a systemic thing capitalism has been doing for about 400 years, like census entire existence. And if you wanna end it, we have to, you have to actually, it's not even enough to destroy these companies, right? Because even if you brought down

every single one of these chocolate companies, right? There would just be another round of chocolate companies, they would be doing exactly the same shit. So you have to destroy the system of property by which these things are allowed to exist. And at that point, maybe you can start on being able to eat food that is produced by slave labor. It turns out Willy Wonka was the villain the whole time.

You know, I was trying to think about the amount of slave labor that we see from him versus the amount of slave labor in actual talk. We see a lot of slave labor probably won't go. It's a pretty, I think won't go is using more slave labor, but not by as much as it should be. I don't know. I don't know.

It's hard to say. I think it's pretty clear that won't because use of slave labor is just an accurate representation of the real life childhood industry. Yes. So yeah, go go enjoy your weekend and then go enjoy that new fucking twink Walgka movie that looks I have to say dog. Oh yeah. That terrible bad. The worst idea bad. Yeah. Anyone's had since capitalism. Twinkwanka, I'm sorry, it doesn't slap. I just... You're out of 10.

Ah, anyway, well, tune in in the next few days for two more spooky week episodes for you. We only got three this week because there's a lot of other news happening, but we at least have two other spooky week episodes that I am about to finish working on. So stay tuned for that. 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. For more podcasts from Cool

Zone Media, visit our website Cool coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here, update it monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. 13 days of Halloween, penance. Season four of the award-winning horror fiction podcast

presented in immersive 3D audio. If I am under arrest, you have to tell me what I'm charged with. starring Natalie Morales of Parks and Recreation and Dead To Me. Please, you've been some kind of mistake. I'm not supposed to be here. How do you know? I'm innocent. Are any of us truly innocent? premiering October 19th, ending Halloween.

Listen to 13 Days of Halloween on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Don't let biased algorithms, or degree screens, or exclusive professional networks, or stereotypes. Don't let anything keep you from discovering the half of the workforce who are stars. Workers skill through alternative routes, rather than a bachelor's degree. It's time to tear the paper ceiling and see the stars beyond it. Find out how you can make stars part of your talent strategy at tearthepapercealing.org brought to you by opportunity at work in the ad council.

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